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July 2, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
54:55
RED ALERT Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1117
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Before we dive in, just a quick note.
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Coming up, I'm going to talk about my debate last night with Nick Fuentes.
It was a lively affair.
I'm also going to talk about Elon Musk's red alert about escalating national debt.
I'm going to give him a very practical way that he can improve the situation.
I'll show by Zoran Mamdani's idea for a government-owned grocery store chain is actually based on a hoax and a misunderstanding.
An author and actress, Anne-Marie Morell, joins me.
We're going to talk about the pains and, well, ultimate satisfactions of caring for a parent with Alzheimer's disease.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
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A time of confusion, division, and light.
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Coming up, I'd like to say a few words about my debate last night with Nick Fuentes.
This was a debate that was online, a long debate.
It lasted over two hours.
It was feisty.
It was interesting.
And I'd like to talk about, well, why I did it, my thoughts about how it went, and a little bit of a post-mortem.
And then I also want to talk about Red Inc.
and Elon Musk and Trump and this big, beautiful bill.
Now, the way that this debate came about is not in a normal way.
I've been kind of surfing through social media, and I noticed that there were some of these Fuentes, gripers, or whatever you call them, and they were like, you know, nobody from Con Inc., this is one of their favorite phrases, con Inc., as though there's some incorporated conservatism called Con Inc.
I don't know if there is or not.
I'm certainly not any part of it, but none of these people have any guts.
You know, Nick Fuentes is the alpha male.
And to be honest, I don't know that much about Nick Fuentes.
I had seen short videos, usually short videos, by the way, circulated by his critics about Nick Fuentes making irreverent jokes about Israel or about Jews.
And I thought, wow, this guy is, I'm not even going to say that he's, he's a smart Alec.
I think he's a guy who likes to think about what is the one thing that I'm not supposed to say, and I'm going to say it.
And so there's a little bit of, you know, juvenile aspect to all this.
And of course, Fuentes is like 26 years old.
But I also, over time, became increasingly outraged at efforts to like deplatform and turn people on the right, maybe even on the far right, into non-persons, you know, Alex Jones, Laura Loomer, Nick Fuentes.
Not only you can't hear them anywhere, they're kicked off these platforms, but then even more, you can't use a credit card, you can't go to a bank, and this is so outrageous and offensive that my sympathies actually drifted in the opposite direction.
And so when I saw this stuff about debating and stuff, I was like, well, I'm not afraid of debating Nick Valentes.
Let's do it.
And if these taboo issues, I've long held the view that some of these taboo issues gain strength by being banned in the same way that, you know, black markets developed in the Soviet Union.
You're not allowed to have a market rate of exchange.
And so people start doing it behind in the underground, so to speak.
And similarly, you ban certain ideas and people start whispering psps.
And so I'm like, let's bring it out.
Let's have it out.
And that was the point of this debate.
I was actually surprised that the debate did not take an ugly or ad hominem turn.
We stayed on the topics of the U.S., Israel, Iran.
And it was a, I think, a very interesting exchange.
In fact, it was of a quality that I didn't really quite expect.
And I got to say, and I said this in the debate itself, that Nick is for 26, I don't know a lot of 26-year-olds who would be as kind of confident, as fluid, and really quite well-informed about current issues.
Now, like I said, in the debate itself, I said, well, you know, Nick doesn't really have a very wide expanse of history.
In fact, I could see him get like visibly uncomfortable if I started talking about, you know, he'd say things like, you know, there are Americans who put Israel first.
They want to go die in Israel.
They're allegiances to another country.
And I'm like, well, there've always been Americans like that.
There are Americans who went and died in the Spanish Civil War.
They fought against Franco in the 1930s.
There are Americans who went to the Soviet Union in the early teens, in the late teens or the early 20s.
There are Americans who more recently in the Reagan era went down to Nicaragua to fight on the side of the Sandinistas.
In fact, there was a name for them.
They were called Sandalistas.
And so this, I think, was all like alien territory for Nick.
And he was like, oh, why are we talking about any of this?
So the debate had aspects where I think our kind of difference and compass of experience showed.
But you know what?
I'm glad I did it.
And I think we do need more debates in this country, not just debates between the right and the left.
In fact, debating Nick, quite honestly, was probably much harder for me than debating somebody on the left, because people on the left are so dumb.
They don't know what people like us think.
And when you make even the most obvious points, they look like you slap them in the face because they've never heard it before.
That was not the case here.
And so that's my brief take.
If you want to watch the debate, it's out there.
There are a number of posts.
I posted the debate as a whole on my locals channel.
You can get it there.
But I also have a number of shorter posts on my X page and also on my other social media.
Let me say a few words about Reddink and about the big, beautiful bill.
Here's what I think is really going on.
Elon Musk is looking at a chart.
It's a chart I've alluded to before, but it's a chart that has our revenues on one side and our expenses on the other.
And I'm looking at it now.
Total revenue.
This is, by the way, federal budget 2023, but it's fairly representative.
Total revenue, $4.47 trillion.
That's what the U.S. government is taking in.
Total spending, $6.6 trillion.
Notice the gap, $1.5 trillion.
That is a giant gap.
And that's in one year.
We're also talking about lifting the debt ceiling.
We're talking about a projected growth in the deficit that could add some $5 trillion to the debt.
So that's $37, $38 trillion plus $5.
We're already now into the close to the mid-40s.
And I think Elon Musk is like, enough is enough.
If we don't stop this now, when are we going to stop it?
You know, if not now, when?
If not us, who?
And here's a post by J.D. Vance that I think offers a different point of view.
The one thing he says that will bankrupt this country more than any other policy is flooding the country with illegal immigration and then giving those migrants benefits.
The one big beautiful bill fixes this problem and therefore it must pass.
So JD is basically saying all the other stuff, you know, the CBO scores, the minutiae of Medicaid policy, are we going to fix our entitlements?
We have to do all those things, but those pale before this problem, which is think of a country of 300 million trying to digest something like 10 million illegals that Biden has brought here, not to mention giving those people who are starting out very often at the bottom of society all these benefits.
And then JD makes a further point, which I think is decisive.
He goes, I've seen many criticisms of the bill, and most of them fail a very basic test.
Could those criticisms get 50 votes?
As the president told me today, for a good idea to become policy, it has to have the votes.
Without the votes, it's a useless idea on a piece of paper.
Now, this is where ideas and politics have to cross over the Brooklyn Bridge and become policy, become legislation, become law.
So here's my advice to Elon Musk.
You want to fix the deficit.
You want to reduce the debt.
You want to diminish the amount of red ink.
Here's the way to do it.
We need Republican supermajorities in the House and the Senate.
If we had Republican supermajorities, some of these rhinos won't matter.
If we had Republican supermajorities, the good guys would outnumber the swamp guys.
And you, Elon Musk, can help that to happen, can make it a reality.
So don't start a third party, which would be self-defeating.
Why?
Because it would pull votes away from the Republicans.
If it costs Republicans even a small number of seats in the House, a couple of seats in the Senate, the problem that you're dealing with, that you're identifying, becomes worse.
It's now even harder to try to make the cuts that you say are, and you rightly say, are necessary.
So keep an eye on how to actually achieve the goals that you seek.
And the way to do that is to put more money into campaigns and to support tough-minded, hardcore Republicans over moderate or so-called rhino Republicans.
In this way, you change not only the Republican Party, but you also change the country.
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We are just a few 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, the BRICS nations, Russia, China, India, Iran, many more, are expected to unveil their plans to circumvent the U.S. dollar, possibly cratering its value.
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The socialist Zoran Mamdani, who's running for mayor of New York, he's a Democratic candidate, is advocating government-owned and government-run grocery stores.
And here is his idea.
His idea is to spend $60 million, 6-0, to create five grocery stores spread out throughout New York City.
And so let's look at it, $12 million per store.
And Zoran Mamdani says, it's no problem.
We can do this because we have an existing city program that is spending $140 million to pay what he calls corporate grocery stores to help to encourage them to serve the kind of the poor, to create grocery stores in kind of what they call underserved or poor neighborhoods.
Many times these grocery stores don't want to go in those neighborhoods.
So basically the city has to subsidize them.
And how does it subsidize them?
Well, it gives them some tax breaks, some regulatory breaks.
It gives them some zoning relief.
And so the program here is called City Fresh.
City Fresh.
And it's been in place for a few years now.
And the way that Zoran Mamdani sees it, this program spends $140 million.
And therefore, he goes, hey, I'll just take half the money of that program, so about $60 million, and I'll start these government-run grocery stores.
I'm not costing the city any additional money.
The money is already there.
Except, and this is just so classic and so characteristic of a socialist, the money is in fact not there.
There is no such money.
This poor dummy can't even read a government website because all you have to do is read it carefully to realize that he is misunderstanding the numbers on the website itself.
Let's go into it.
There is in fact a program, like I mentioned, called CityFresh.
Does it have $140 million?
No.
Has it invested $140 million in anything?
No.
The truth of it is this program gives about $3 million in tax breaks and other types of breaks per year to the private grocery stores.
$3 million, not $140 million.
Now, because this is a program that is in effect for multiple years, a number of these private grocery stores have invested money to create new stores and to try to tap into this opportunity, if you will.
So the private grocery stores collectively, all of them, have spent $140 million, have invested $140 million into their own stores in order to make these stores, in order to take advantage of the City Fresh program, which is only obviously a part of their revenues.
So the $140 million is private investments made by private companies in their own stores.
It's not taxpayer money.
It doesn't come from the government.
The government hasn't spent that money.
The government doesn't have that money in this program.
But Zoran Mamdani, perhaps not, it's going too far to call him a low IQ individual, but this is very low IQ behavior, is he reads the website and he wrongly thinks That because these private companies have invested $140 million, that represents a New York subsidy?
No, it doesn't.
As I mentioned, the subsidy is $3 million a year.
So, where is the $60 million coming from to start these government-run grocery stores?
The simple answer is: it does not exist.
It does not exist.
Now, all of this is beautifully pointed out in an article written by Timothy Carney in the Washington Examiner.
So far as I can see, no response from Mom Dani.
I don't know if anyone has pointed out to him.
Listen, buddy, if you want to be the mayor of New York, at least learn to read a government website and correctly interpret the data that is quite lucidly pointed out on that site.
When you're dealing with socialists, you never know if they are being stupid or duplicitous.
It could be, this possibility cannot be dismissed out of hand, that Momdani and his people know this.
They are deliberately misreading the website to make it sound like they have the money.
They have no intention of actually doing any of this.
It's an election promise to give people the idea that, oh, he's going to make food more widely available.
He's going to bring down those grocery prices, just like he claims, I'm going to bring down home prices, I'm going to bring down rents, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that.
All of this is a technique, a ruse, and he full well knows.
And in fact, he can always say later, well, we're reviewing ways to get the revenue.
I'm going to set up a committee to see how this can be done.
They'll probably end up opening one grocery store, if at all.
And there will be later a lot of excuses for why this money could not be found.
But so I don't give up on the idea that this could in fact be a deliberate, misleading promise on the part of Mamdani.
But if it's not that, then these guys don't know what they're talking about.
And either way, the money that they're promising, the money that they're saying is there, actually isn't.
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Guys, I'm going to cover a different kind of topic today in my conversation.
I'm delighted to have Anne-Marie Morell, who is, well, she's worn many different hats.
She's been an actress, an author, an editor, a journalist, a political commentator, a media producer.
But we're going to talk about what happens when something makes your life take a completely different turn.
This is what happened to Anne-Marie, and I'm going to let her tell the story.
We're going to talk about her book.
It's got a beautiful title.
It's called Walking Each Other Home.
Very moving title to me because, well, partly just the idea of home and where is our real home.
By the way, you can follow Anne-Marie on X, The Anne-Marie Morell, M-U-R-R-E-L-L.
Anne-Marie, welcome and thank you for joining me.
You have written a book that is kind of a memoir, but it's a memoir that is larger than life and it's larger than even your own story.
I think it raises issues that a lot of us are thinking about or contending with or will have to contend with at some point in life.
Let's start by talking about, if I can call it your old life.
You were in Los Angeles.
You were, I won't say living it up, but you had the successful life and the fast track.
So let's start there before we talk about what happened next.
Yeah, I actually interviewed you a few times.
We did a really great phone interview.
I went to your premieres.
I actually met Debbie the first time, your wife Debbie, on July 12th, 2016.
And I know that's a big date for her coming up with the death of her mother.
So I thought that was interesting because I was trying to figure out when was the first time that I met you guys in real life.
Yeah, my political life was dynamic.
I had the life that so many people would love to have.
I had the big house on a hill overlooking, you could see downtown Los Angeles on one side.
You could see the fireworks over Universal.
It was a beautiful life and exciting on the surface.
But I had spent my entire life putting me first.
And I was broken and didn't even know.
I was lonely.
I had depression issues.
There were all kinds of things in my life that no one would have known.
And I didn't even understand them.
But when it came down to God bringing me back home to Texas, where I swear I would never go, that changed my entire life.
When I reprioritized and put God and family first, that's when my life changed.
And all the holes in my heart were filled.
Every morning that I ever had, I was grieving my father, who my biological father died when I was five.
I grieved him my entire life.
It was gone.
Everything changed in my entire life.
And that's the only reason I was able to even take care of my parents because I finally understood life.
Henry, talk about how that happened because you took a very unusual step.
There are people who make sacrifices for their family, but usually what they mean by that is my kids.
What you did was you essentially dropped your old life, moved back to Texas to take care of your ailing parents.
Talk about how were they ailing?
What was the diagnosis?
And what was the process that convinced you, I got to do this?
Yeah.
They both had Alzheimer's.
They were diagnosed almost back to back.
While I was visiting home in Texas for Christmas, it was, I had no idea because I only came home maybe once a year.
I left 18 at 18, moved to California at 20, and I didn't even really know them.
We visited at Christmas.
I went back and lived my life.
Never intended to move back to Texas.
But after my dad was diagnosed, I thought mom could take care of him.
I moved them closer to my sister in Longview, Texas.
She worked full-time, so she couldn't really take care of them, but they were in an independent facility.
I thought everything was great.
I was going to go home.
And then while I was visiting dad, my mother was at the store.
A phone call came in and the woman said, I'm so sorry, but your mother's here trying to buy groceries with her social security card.
So everything changed.
I knew what I needed to do, but I didn't want to do it.
I mean, Dinesh, this really isn't a heroic story because I only became a good daughter in the last few years of my parents' life.
And I was the prodigal son slash daughter who went away.
And so I didn't want to do it.
I didn't want to give up my life.
That night when the social security card thing happened, I got on my knees for the first time in my adult life and I prayed for guidance and discernment.
I knew that he was going to have to show me a clear sign for me to understand because I'm, you know, blonde, but I'm not even really blonde.
But anyway, that night, I was given a dream or a vision.
When I woke up, I was changed.
I was born again.
I knew what I needed to do and I knew it had to be immediate.
And that's what I did.
So it wasn't my choice.
It wasn't me.
I'm not, it wasn't me.
I was God driven to do what was right.
And Anne-Marie, what did you do?
Did you just pack up and you relocated to Texas?
I mean, you did it on your own, right?
You just, you relocated yourself.
And how long was that stay in Texas?
Talk about the process of caring for your parents after the diagnosis.
Yeah.
As soon as I got them settled, Lisa took over for a while.
I went back to California, got the necessities that I needed, drove back, and that was it.
I lived in an apartment for a while until my dad died, and then I bought a house for my mother to live there the rest of her life with my sister.
I just buckled under.
I had to learn everything.
And this is so embarrassing, but I didn't even know that I, I don't, I've already said this once.
I didn't even know how to use an ATM card.
I was completely dependent on the life I used to have.
I had to learn everything about everything.
And that's another reason I wrote the book, because I wanted people, my prayer is that they'll learn from both my mistakes and the things that I did right.
And I made mistakes.
I'm imperfect, but oh, I loved my parents so much to the very end.
And that's the most and best I could have done.
What about when you use the title, Walking Each Other Home?
I mean, it's a very moving title, I think, because to me, it conjures up the image that when we're really little, our parents take our hand.
There's a little picture of Debbie, for example.
She's about one year old.
She's with her mom on the beach, you know, and her mom is walking her, you know.
And it's Interesting how, in the latter stages of life, it's reversed, and we walk our parents home, right?
So, talk about that.
Yeah, it was very, very literal for me that Jesus walked me home.
He pushed me back to where I needed to be.
And for me, once I was strong enough and I was able, then I could walk both my parents to their ultimate home.
So Texas is home for me.
I haven't looked back once.
I used to love California.
And now I just can't imagine being anywhere, anywhere else.
And then for both mom and dad, my dad had his Alzheimer, his dementia took a really horrible turn.
It was brutal.
He ended up in a lockdown facility because he was out of his mind.
He was violent.
It was horrible.
And so mom moved in with me.
And so I experienced both of their from the very beginning of sundowning and the different changes in both of them.
And with mom at the very end, it was a lot like Benjamin Button.
She went from the terrible twos and toddler years and then at the end, changing diapers and caring for her as an infant.
And it was hard and it was a lot of times very sad, but it was the most rewarding, the most rewarding and important thing I ever experienced in my life.
I would do it again and I wish I could do it again and fix the things I didn't do right.
But, you know.
And we know, you know, I think just wonderful though that is, most people at the end of it, you know, your parents have passed away and they would be like, all right, well, you know what?
That was an ordeal.
It was a sacrifice.
It was spiritually uplifting.
Time for me to mosey back to the life I left behind.
But you didn't do that.
Why not?
Even doing this, like interviews with you right now, I almost feel guilty promoting this and using media again to talk about something that I'm ultimately selling.
I asked my church family to pray for me specifically 1 John 2, 15 through 17.
And that's all about not letting the world influence you.
Once I got my life right side up with God and family as a priority, my children moved here.
My son and daughter-in-law moved to Texas.
They weren't ever going to have children.
I've got two grandchildren now.
I mean, every single good thing that could happen to someone has happened to me.
I'm traveling.
I'm doing things that I never dreamed possible.
And I don't want ever to reprioritize something.
But when my book was supposed to launch yesterday and I was up at midnight and I was fretting about because it didn't, it's still the paperback still isn't out, which is so frustrating.
But I found myself feeling those old feelings that I used to about, oh no, it's the algorithms are going to be off.
And oh no, what's it?
And it's not supposed to be about that.
So I feel like maybe God was putting me back where I need to be.
I mean, it's almost like what you're saying is that you, I won't say became a different person, but to some degree, yes.
I mean, you yourself talked about being born again and you didn't move back in part because you didn't want to become your old self again.
Is that part of what you're saying?
100%.
Yeah.
I feel like this life for me is nothing that 10 years ago I would have ever expected that I would want or care about.
But I've become, moving back here and following God's path instead of mine made me a better daughter and sister and mother.
And now I'm just, I am a fun grandmother and friend to people.
And it's just been, it really has.
My high school friends that are, I'm still very good close friends with now, they, they don't know, they don't remember, they don't know me this way.
They were shocked, first of all, that I would come back at all.
I was the one who everyone knew was going to leave and never come back.
And here I am sitting in front of my litter box and hoping my cat's not making noise.
I wasn't sure, Anne Marie, whether to like bring this up at all, but I want to.
And here's what it is.
You know, I think many of us do have this kind of fear of Alzheimer's, right?
Because it's probably most people would say, hey, you know, I realize I'm going to get old and I realize my body is going to get weaker, but I kind of wish my mind doesn't go the same way.
I want to keep my faculties.
That's more important to me.
That's kind of the real me.
And yet you are dealing with Alzheimer's, not just as something that your parents experienced, but you have it too.
Talk about that.
Yeah.
A couple of Morgan, you know, Morgan Brittany, right?
She was my co-author, my politics business partner.
We traveled all over the country.
We talked, we spoke at different events.
And a couple of different times, things happened.
My brain just kind of shut down and I wasn't able to speak.
And she saw different things over the years.
And I have multiple sclerosis.
So I kept blaming it on that.
After mom and dad, things were really off still and things were getting a little worse.
And everyone has cognitive problems.
I'm 63.
So, you know, it's aging, MS, the drug I was taking, okravis caused, I have COPD now because it ruined my upper respiratory system, destroyed my immune system.
So, I mean, I had pneumonia last week again.
So, I realized after watching my grandmother with Alzheimer's, my mother, my stepfather, my aunt and uncle all had Alzheimer's.
I felt like it was time for me to find out if I could, if maybe that's what it was.
So, I did an in-office test for dementia with my neurologist, failed badly.
And then I went to a psycho neurologist and had a, I think it was a six-hour long test.
It was brutal with audio, visual, writing, every kind of test.
And I failed that badly.
And they considered MS, they considered past medications, they considered age, everything, and I still failed.
But the good thing is that because of this, I'm the first person in my family that's aware of it before it's too late, before it happens.
And unfortunately, the drugs for it for dementia, I can't take any of them because it affects your upper respiratory system.
My mom couldn't take it either because she had COPD.
So I'm just, I am just, I've prepared everything I need to prepare.
I have got my house is in order.
My kids will know everything they need to know.
We've already talked about everything.
And this is the first time.
So I'm setting a new precedent in my family that we're going to be as prepared as we can be.
And I may be fine.
I believe in miracles.
You never know.
I mean, Henri, this is why you wrote this book, isn't it?
It's a book that is, it's heart-wrenching, it's heroic, it's a narrative, it's a story, but it has a lot of practical wisdom where you're saying to people, look, you know, this is something that happens to people.
It can be anticipated.
There are things you need to do.
You don't need to be completely blindsided.
Maybe you are to some degree, but in reading this book, I think you learn how to think about this, how to cope with it, the power of prayer, the importance of putting this all into a, I guess it's subspecia eternitatis, right through the perspective of eternity, these things take on kind of a different light.
Guys, I've been talking to Anne-Marie Morell, author, actress, editor, now author of Walking Each Other Home.
Check it out, Anne-Marie.
I think you said it's maybe a day late coming out in paperback, but it's time, guys, to hunt this book down.
You can follow Anne-Marie on next, by the way, the Anne-Marie Morell.
Anne-Marie, thank you so much for coming on and for sharing your story.
Thank you, Dinash.
And I love you, Debbie, wherever you are.
She's right here, kind of waving from the sidelines.
Okay.
I'm in the section of my book, Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader, where I'm talking about Reagan's evil empire speech, drafted, as I mentioned yesterday by his chief speechwriter, Tony Anthony Dolan.
Now, Dolan was a buddy of mine, and we talked many years ago about this speech, and Dolan told me, he's like, I tried to put in this phrase about good and evil, the evil empire, into Reagan's speech multiple times.
And he goes, but the State Department kept taking it out.
I put it in, they took it out.
And Tony said, finally, I went to Reagan myself and I said, hey, what do you think?
And Reagan said, no, no, we're keeping it in.
And so Reagan had to weigh in and veto his State Department and say what he said in this 1983 speech to the National Association of Evangelicals.
Now, I think that this speech and the viewpoint that underlies it is important for us to understand what peace through strength means.
We these days debate peace through strength.
It's become kind of a slogan, but it is a slogan with a meaning.
And the meaning goes beyond just the kind of surface meaning of the words.
What is that underlying moral architecture of peace through strength?
Well, here was Reagan's view about the Soviet Union.
Number one, the conflict between us and them is fundamentally a moral conflict.
So it is not simply a matter of we're a great power, they're a great power, naturally we clash.
There is a kind of realism in foreign policy, a realistic view so-called, that says, hey, the reason the U.S. is fighting with the Soviet Union is the same reason that if you have two powerful male lions in a herd, they're going to clash with each other because somebody has to be the alpha male, somebody has to be top dog or top lion in this case.
And Reagan's view was, no, it's actually more than that.
That may be part of it.
But the rest of it is that the two regimes in this case are not traditional empires, let's just say the Habsburg Empire and the British Empire, jostling for position or the Persian Empire and Alexander the Great.
No, there is fundamentally a kind of moral line that divides the two.
So our system, says Reagan, despite its flaws, of which there are many, is basically good.
Their system, despite its virtues, and there are some, is basically evil.
And Reagan said, I need to start by clarifying that.
I need to say that.
And in doing this, Reagan became the first president post-Vietnam to speak in this clear way, in these ethical or moral accents, against Communism.
No other Western leader, other than maybe Winston Churchill, had so clearly enunciated the moral superiority of the West.
Now, nuclear weapons.
Reagan's view was that nuclear weapons are not the cause, they are the result of this fundamental conflict between two inherently different systems.
So, now quoting Reagan, nations do not distrust each other because they are armed.
They are armed because they distrust each other.
What comes first is the moral divide.
Once you recognize the moral divide, the good force, the evil force, both sides start arming themselves because they recognize that a certain degree of conflict is inevitable, given the nature of the two systems and ideologies.
So the Soviet Union, in Reagan's view, was kind of like a criminal gang.
The United States was more like a policeman.
Now, both are armed.
Both are willing to use force under certain circumstances, but it's for different purposes.
Reagan's objective is, I want to corral the gangster.
I want to disarm him.
I want to remove the threat that he poses.
I want to triumph over the evil empire.
And Reagan was like, look, this doesn't mean that I'm not willing to be patient.
It doesn't mean I'm not willing to negotiate.
It doesn't mean I'm not willing to do business with the adversary, but I recognize it is an adversary.
And Reagan also believed that I don't want to negotiate too soon.
I will negotiate, but I negotiate at the end instead of at the beginning.
Now, why is that?
Because Reagan believed I want to engage in a full-scale military buildup first.
I want to have such a buildup where the United States does not have to fear a Soviet attack or succumb to any kind of nuclear blackmail.
So in other words, there's a key principle here, and that is Reagan realized the Soviet Union would never give up at the conference table anything that it could possibly win on the battlefield.
The Soviets would only give up that which they could not possibly gain on the battlefield.
And so Reagan's view was, first I have to alter the balance of power between us and them.
Once I have done that, then it's time to sit down and negotiate.
So this is the true meaning of peace through strength.
Namely, we need to be stronger than our adversary first, and then we're likely to get the kind of concessions that we could have gotten anyway if it actually came to a test of strength.
Now, all of this, this whole, not just the vocabulary, but the underlying viewpoint, was utterly abominable to the mainstream media, to the columnists and the pundits, and to the left.
And so I want to start by talking about the left-wing critique of Reagan.
And I'm going to show how upside down, how wrong-headed it was.
But I'm going to also sympathetically describe it.
What is it that those people actually thought?
Then I'm going to turn, and this may be a bit of a surprise, to the right-wing critique of Reagan.
And I'm going to show that it was coming really from the other side.
It was the view that saw Reagan as too weak, too conciliatory.
What happened to Reagan?
Why did he change his spots?
We thought he was doing so well.
And I'll show the inadequacies not simply of the left-wing view, but also of the right-wing view.
Both turned out to be wrong.
But I'm going to start with the left-wing view.
And I won't get too far with it perhaps today, but I'll pick it up the next time and we'll kind of keep going on this.
So here's Anthony Lewis, who was perhaps the most influential columnist writing on the left at the New York Times.
And here are some words of Lewis describing Reagan's evil empire speech.
Simplistic, sectarian, dangerous, outrageous.
And finally, my favorite word, primitive.
Because for Anthony Lewis, this wasn't just wrong-headed.
It was like barbaric.
It was unsophisticated.
And here's Lewis.
The Soviet Union, quote, is not going to disappear because we want it to.
So this was the left-wing view.
And I mentioned Anthony Lewis because he echoes, let's call it the sentiment of the doves.
So what is the sentiment?
Let's spell it out.
This is how the doves thought about it.
The United States and the Soviet Union are both superpowers.
Their systems are different, but that doesn't make one better than the other.
They are like two scorpions in a bottle.
There's a moral equivalence between them.
Both are, to some degree, afraid.
Both are aggressive.
They're passive aggressive at times.
Both ultimately would like to be expansionist, and both have covetous eyes on the other.
So their irredentism, their designs on each other are mutually reinforcing.
And the doves say that the real problem with all this is that both of these regimes are in possession of nuclear weapons.
And this changes the game so much that we don't have to worry about the differences between the regimes.
One is capitalist, one is socialist, one believes in freedom, one believes in totalitarianism.
But who cares?
Why?
Because we're all facing nuclear annihilation.
And nuclear annihilation trumps everything else.
When your survival is at stake, you're not going to sit down and worry about, you know, that guy is a market system.
He's got private banks.
We've got state-run banks.
He's got private airlines.
We've got state-run Airlines.
No, they're going to really focus on how do we keep the human race in one piece.
And so, from the point of view of the Doves, the United States, the worst thing that we could do, and this is exactly what Reagan is doing, is trying to develop some program to, quote, roll back the Soviet Union.
You can't do that.
If the Soviet Union takes a country, well, they got it.
It's part of the Soviet Union.
It's permanent.
We can't change their system.
That's a hopeless task.
We need to avoid annoying them.
Don't do anything destabilizing.
Don't do anything, quote, provocative.
This is one of the favorite words of the Tony Lewis's of the world.
Let's make a working relationship with the Soviets.
If we are nice to them, they'll be nice to us.
So you can see right here the kind of emerging or actually fully emerged philosophy of the left and of the Democratic Party.
And as we'll see, not simply in the manner of intellectual refutation, but as we'll see from subsequent events.
See, it's always nice to have arguments that counter the other guy.
But what's even better is to play it out in the real world.
You know, it's kind of like with Trump's attack on these Iran facilities, which by the way came up in my Fuente's debate.
When Trump did that, a lot of people, not just on the left, but some of these guys and this faction of the right, they're like, oh, wait, we're now in World War III.
Iran is not going to take this lying down.
They're going to strike back.
Our bases are in danger.
There's going to be attacks on the United States.
We are going to be in a quagmire, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And you could argue with them, but the best way to refute them is to just let it play out and say, guess what?
We didn't see any Iranian attacks.
We didn't see any blowing up of our bases.
We didn't see any sleeper cells activated.
In fact, the one time Iran did counterattack, they warned us in advance, hey, Mr. Trump, listen, we plan to attack.
We're planning to do a theatrical strike like at 1 p.m.
Why don't you move everybody out of danger?
So this way we can tell our own people that we struck back even though.
So in other words, they pretend to strike back and we pretend to say, ouch, ouch, ouch.
This is what they were reduced to.
But my point here, and this is a point that could be made about Reagan and the Doves, is that we got a chance to play it out and see who turned out to be right.
And one thing we can say definitively is that the Doves turned out to be wrong and Reagan turned out to be right.
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