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July 10, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza

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VINDICATION Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1122

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	Coming up, I'll celebrate the full vindication of young Douglas Mackey, who got thrown in prison as a result of posting a humorous social media meme about Hillary Clinton.
	Author and investigative journalist Miranda Devine joins me.
	We're going to explore whether justice, which is to say prosecution, might finally be coming to Brennan and Comey.
	If you're watching on X, Rumble, or YouTube, listening on Apple or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
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	This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
	America needs its voice.
	The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
	We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
	This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
	I was just watching this morning a part of the Trump roundtable gathering with all the key members of the cabinet and the contrast between what's going on with Trump and what went on with Biden or what didn't go on with Biden.
	Biden rarely had cabinet meetings.
	In fact, it's now come out partly through the Jake Tapper Alex Thompson book, but also from other sources.
	The cabinet members couldn't even reach Biden.
	They would call into the White House.
	Their calls would be intercepted by aides.
	The aides would basically say, we'll get back to you and never would.
	Biden's unavailable.
	Or the aide himself or herself would provide the answer.
	And this was a completely dysfunctional administration.
	Dysfunctional in the sense that it didn't work as it's supposed to work.
	Now, I think that it had been set up that way by the left.
	And the people who were, from their point of view, supposed to be in charge were.
	And Biden was the figurehead.
	But nevertheless, you never had, not only never had the cabinet meetings, but there certainly wasn't what we see now with Trump, which is not just a cabinet meeting, but it's all on public display.
	And it's like Trump's going around the table, okay, Defense Department, Pete Hexa, what have you done lately?
	And then Pete Hexa comes in and goes, well, we've done this, we've done this, we've done this.
	And it's all in public scrutiny.
	The media is present.
	Trump will ask questions.
	They provide answers.
	In some cases, we'll find out, get back to you.
	But it is all, in a sense, transparent in a way that we're not used to seeing.
	And what I'm saying here is not merely that this is a needed antidote to Biden, but it hasn't been done this way by others before either.
	I mean, did you ever see George W. Bush or Obama with his full cabinet around the table?
	I'm not talking about a press conference where they all read from press releases.
	I'm talking about open discussion around the table going from one to the other, from the Education Secretary to Health and Human Services to the State Department.
	And it is a kind of fascinating inventory of all the things that are being done at a tremendous pace.
	So it's really great to see how vigorously these people are operating.
	And even though at the beginning, you remember when these people were being confirmed, people go, well, none of these people are even qualified.
	Pete Hex is a Fox News host.
	And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not a doctor.
	And Tulsi Gabber doesn't know what she's talking about.
	And on and on it goes.
	Well, it turns out that these rank amateurs, if you want to call them, really do know what they're doing.
	And we can see that for ourselves.
	This was kind of a remarkable sight.
	Here's an article on NBC News.
	And it is the kind of article that you have to read while kind of laughing because it has the opposite effect of what the article is meant to do.
	The article is meant to show how horrible conditions are at Alligator Alcatraz.
	And it basically is interviews with criminal illegals who are in Alligator Alcatraz.
	Now remember, these criminal illegals had plenty of a chance to scoot the country, to get going.
	They didn't.
	Now they're being held and they are locked up and they are in a place where they belong.
	And what I find quite amusing is the way in which Trump, you know, any other president, you go, alligator Alcatraz.
	The president's going to be, oh, no, no, no, no, no.
	We don't call it by that name.
	We call it.
	No, Trump is like, well, yeah, we like alligator Alcatraz.
	We're going to be putting up signs that say alligator alcatraz this way.
	And we're going to teach the criminal aliens that if they ever try to make an escape, I mean, think how funny this is.
	If you ever try to make an escape, we've got to show you how to outrun the alligator.
	And the zigzag running pattern, kind of the NFL style of eluding tackles Is the way that you kind of want to go.
	But in this article, which is apparently intended to stir up public sympathy, they are interviewing these criminal illegals.
	Now, they never describe their crimes.
	That's what's so funny.
	Limzi Iscadero, also known as Limzi Lafegura, a self-described Cuban urban artist.
	So you're supposed to get the idea here that, you know, the Trump administration just doesn't like these Cuban urban artists.
	But remember, this guy is not being thrown in there for urban artistry.
	He's being thrown in there for something else, right?
	But they don't want to tell you what that is.
	Instead, they want him to tell you how he's under terrible conditions.
	And here is the kind of money line from this whole article.
	The mosquitoes are, quote, the size of elephants.
	I'm like, what?
	First of all, that is laughable on his face, right?
	Why?
	For two reasons.
	One is mosquitoes are not the size of elephants.
	But leaving aside that exaggeration, are you telling me that the mosquitoes in the alligator alcatraz are bigger than the mosquitoes like elsewhere in Florida?
	Probably not, right?
	Mosquitoes are mosquitoes.
	I realize that in certain places you have larger mosquitoes than it may be anywhere else.
	But the mosquitoes biting Floridians all up and down the Florida coast are the exact same mosquitoes.
	It's not like they're farming mosquitoes and releasing them into the prison, are they?
	So all of this is just a way of trying to somehow discredit the state of Florida from very quickly constructing this institution, which by the way is completely new.
	It's kind of a brand spank and new facility.
	And when I look at how quickly it was put together, it's such a startling contrast with other cities, places like California, which have been trying to do a rail going up, you know, up the coast.
	And it's decades later, and they've spent hundreds of millions of dollars and they've laid virtually no track.
	So the incompetence of Florida, I mean, the incompetence of California as contrast with the efficiency of Ron DeSantis' Florida is itself a very telling marker.
	All right.
	Let me talk about Douglas Mackey, because I think this is a big decision.
	Let me give you some of the background.
	You probably know about Douglas Mackey.
	I'm trying to remember if I've had him on the podcast.
	Debbie and I were talking about it yesterday.
	We think we're going to have him on the podcast.
	Is he confirmed for Monday?
	Yeah, he's coming on Monday.
	So you'll hear from Doug himself.
	This is a young guy, 36 years old, a funny guy, actually known for posting satirical memes.
	Now, he got a funny idea in the 2016 election, and he posted a meme basically making fun of Hillary Clinton.
	He said Hillary Clinton's supporters are so dumb that what the meme essentially said was that you could vote for Hillary Clinton by text.
	So text your vote to so-and-so number.
	And the whole thing was done as it was posted by the Hillary campaign.
	In fact, it had the I'm with her hashtag that was used with the Hillary campaign.
	Apparently, Mackey also did a kind of Spanish version of this post.
	And again, it looked like it had the Hillary logo on it, the I'm with her hashtag.
	And it was, avoid the line, vote from home, text Hillary to 59925, vote for Hillary at the bottom and be a part of history.
	So just ingenious and a complete joke.
	And think of how moronic you would have to be to actually act on this.
	And in fact, no one did because when they prosecuted poor Doug Mackey, think of it, prosecuting a guy for a meme.
	You would think he would have a First Amendment right to say whatever he wants, but they went after him not on First Amendment grounds, not on free speech grounds, but election interference.
	Now, to make a case for election interference, you would think that you would need to bring some people forward, let's say 10 people, who say, you know, I saw that meme and I have a really low IQ.
	I'm borderline retarded.
	So I thought I actually could vote by doing, and I did in fact send that text and I didn't go and vote instead.
	So my vote didn't count because I was misled by this guy who posted the meme.
	The number of people that the federal prosecutors could produce to do this was precisely zero.
	Not one, not a single one.
	But the judge was a left-winger, Chief Judge Deborah Ann Livingston.
	And she, oh, I'm sorry, the judge's name was Ann M. Donnelly.
	And the judge basically said that Mackey was, quote, one of the leading members of a conspiracy to, quote, to do, quote, nothing short of an assault on our democracy.
	Absolutely absurd.
	Now, Doug Mackey, very interestingly decided to appeal.
	And he appealed to the High Court.
	And this is the High Court, interestingly, in New York, because we're talking about the second U.S. Court of Appeals.
	It's in Manhattan.
	So Doug Mackey did not have reason to suspect that this was going to be something of a right-wing court.
	Not so.
	In fact, the court is kind of mixed.
	Three judges, Deborah Ann Livingston, Rina Raghi, and Beth Robinson.
	And the judges are actually a bipartisan mix, both Republican and Democratic judges.
	And guess what?
	Unanimous decision in favor of Doug Mackey.
	And what the judges conclude is that there is no evidence that this guy attempted to interfere with the 2016 Election.
	The judges basically said: look, even if he put this meme to try to somehow fool people into not voting or voting in the wrong way, they go, that's not enough to show that he tried to rig the election.
	I mean, think about it.
	Let's say that he convinced the 10 people I mentioned earlier.
	Let's say the 10 people had showed up.
	Are 10 people going to swing a presidential election?
	Was this election of 2016 decided by 10 votes?
	No.
	Moreover, let's say you bring in 10 people from New York.
	Well, what was the election margin in New York?
	It was overwhelmingly for Hillary.
	So there's no chance that Trump could have won that election.
	So the idea that this is somehow tipping the balance, preposterous.
	The other thing I thought was interesting that Doug Mackey said, I'm going to ask him about this on Monday, is he said, I did not in any way either lobby for, I didn't even want a pardon.
	Why?
	Because Doug Mackey was like, I want to vindicate the First Amendment.
	I want to show that this prosecution, and by the way, Doug Mackey went to prison for this.
	I think he got a seven-month sentence.
	Yes, he was sentenced to seven months in federal prison.
	So this guy paid a heavy price.
	At the same time, Doug Mackey said, I will do my time.
	I will appeal it.
	I'm looking for complete vindication.
	And I'm delighted to say he got complete vindication.
	So, you know, I went back and looked at all the press releases from the FBI, press releases from the Eastern District of New York.
	You know, man convicted of election interference.
	They were so proud of themselves for having gotten this conviction.
	And now the conviction is completely reversed.
	This means, by the way, Doug Mackey has all his rights back.
	And essentially, he is completely in the clear.
	So a big win for him and well deserved.
	And in fact, on social media, Doug Mackey was like, well, guys, kind of advise me, you know, should I repost the meme?
	Am I going too far if I take the actual meme that I was prosecuted for and post it again?
	And I was like, come on, Doug, post it again.
	And sure enough, like seconds later, he posted it again.
	And I think this is a very important rubbing it in your face move by Doug Mackey because he is, in a sense, saying, I got punished for doing this.
	It has now been found to be that I did nothing wrong.
	And since I did nothing wrong, here you go.
	I'm posting it again.
	And he did.
	All right.
	Let's talk about what's going on in the universities.
	And there are two positive things to report here.
	The first one concerns Harvard.
	And I got to say, I've talked about this a little bit over the last several days.
	The Trump administration is encircling Harvard.
	And by encircling, I mean they are putting pressure on Harvard from multiple fronts.
	So they are attacking Harvard on the issue of racial discrimination in admissions.
	They are attacking Harvard on the front of anti-Semitism and creating an environment.
	This is the finding, by the way, by the Civil Rights Division that Harvard is in violation of Title VI, creating a milieu in which Jews feel unsafe on the campus.
	And now, another swing.
	And this is coming with the Trump administration, but operating through Congress.
	So in the big, beautiful bill that Trump signed, something that none of us have even talked about, in fact, probably many of us didn't even initially notice.
	The law raises the tax on university endowments, particularly universities that have big, the wealthy universities with huge endowments.
	And who has the biggest endowment in the country?
	You guessed it.
	Harvard.
	If I'm right, if I'm correct from memory, I'm not far off.
	Something like $53 billion endowment, Harvard University.
	So the tax that Harvard's going to have to pay on that endowment, which used to be 1.4%, think about it.
	Harvard had a kind of sweetheart deal.
	All these universities did, where they could make money on their endowments and they paid almost no taxes on it.
	Well, the tax is now up to as much as 8%.
	8% is still not a giant amount, but it's a lot higher than 1.4%.
	And I think this is just the Trump administration basically pummeling Harvard from all directions.
	And this is the right way to bring these arrogant Harvard people to their knees.
	In fact, I just saw this morning that Harvard has abolished or is in the process of abolishing a number of its DEI offices.
	So why are they doing this?
	Not because they've seen the light, not because they've realized that they've become a left-wing infestation, not because they want to raise the average IQ at Harvard, none of that.
	They're doing it because they are in backdoor negotiations with the Trump administration, and they've realized, listen, we're going to have to make some significant changes if we're going to keep our tax exempt status, if we're going to avoid further investigation,
	potentially not just findings of being in violation with the government, not just a loss of government privileges, but also criminal charges can be leveled against Harvard.
	So Harvard is now being whipped into shape, and it's a very good thing.
	Somebody else who's being whipped into shape, UPenn.
	UPenn is also being investigated by the Trump administration, and apparently they have signed a resolution agreement to resolve its Title IX violations.
	So let's go through the provisions of this agreement because they are downright awesome.
	Number one, UPenn will restore to female athletes all individual Division I swimming records, titles, or similar Recognitions which were misappropriated by male athletes allowed to compete.
	Who are we talking about?
	Leah Thomas.
	Leah Thomas is stripped of all his, I emphasize his medals that were won, by the way, in the women's division.
	And the female athletes who actually won, which is to say the number two position, will get the gold medal.
	Number two, UPenn will issue a public statement stating it will comply with Title IX.
	No more biological boys or men competing in female athletic programs.
	No more biological males in female restrooms or locker rooms.
	Next, UPenn will change all its handbooks and literature so that it has biology-based definitions for the word male and female pursuant to Title IX.
	And no more of this non-binary, you are the gender you identify with.
	All of that is essentially out.
	UPenn has to post these statements all over campus.
	And then the little coup de grace, very small but very telling.
	UPenn will send a personalized letter of apology to each impacted female swimmer.
	And this has actually been done because I noticed on social media some of these women posting, hey, I just out of the blue, I got this letter from UPenn.
	What's this all about?
	And I had to dig a little bit to find out.
	It's part of this larger package.
	Now, again, this is not UPenn doing genuine contrition.
	It is, these are agreements that these universities are reluctantly, you can be sure, kicking and screaming.
	You can be sure that whenever they step back, their faculty is in the, they're having emergency meetings and people are crying, why can you do this?
	And can't you sue?
	And UPenn is like, listen, if we lose our tax exempt status, all of you people are essentially going home.
	All of you faculty are out of a job.
	All of you students, your degrees are going to be going to be seriously imperiled.
	Some of you are going to have to transfer out of here.
	Foreign students might be losing their visas.
	So the federal government here is, look, we're used to Democrats using this kind of leverage.
	They've used it against Christian universities.
	They used it against Bob Jones University in the 1980s.
	And what the Trump administration is doing is basically saying, well, two can play at this game.
	You've been doing it for years.
	Now we're going to start.
	Let's see how you like it.
	This administration has its sleeves rolled up and streamlining some pretty monumental moves right now.
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	Guys, I'm delighted to welcome back to the podcast the one and only Miranda Devine.
	You know her.
	She's a New York Post columnist, Fox News contributor.
	She's the host of the weekly show called Pod Force One.
	She also is prominent in the Australian media.
	She's a columnist for Daily Telegraph, also a contributor for Sky News.
	Her latest book is The Big Guy, which I think you know what that's about.
	It's about the guy without a brain who still knows how to count his money.
	Miranda, pardon my description of that project, but thanks for joining me.
	I really appreciate it.
	Miranda, there's a new development on the Russia collusion front.
	So could you start maybe by just briefly recapping what was the essence of this Russia collusion business?
	I think people know that it was about an attempt to frame Trump, to make him seem like he was some sort of an asset for Vladimir Putin.
	But as I recall, this was not merely an attempt to prevent Trump from being elected in 2016, but also an attempt to torpedo his presidency.
	Is that right?
	And also tell us what the new development is.
	Yes, Dinesh, you have it in one.
	It was not just a way to try and stop him from winning the 2016 election, but it successfully sabotaged at least the first two years of his first presidency.
	It resulted in the Mueller investigation, which took two years and I think $200 plus million dollars or $100 plus million dollars, but anyway, a lot of money and completely unnecessary.
	It found in the end that there was no Russia collusion with Donald Trump, as Donald Trump had been saying from the beginning, and as was obvious to anybody with eyes to see.
	But, you know, I guess Donald Trump himself and all of us were quite innocent back in those days about the real intent and the malevolence of these deep status, particularly in the FBI, the CIA, NSA, I guess if you count people like James Clapper, certainly the intelligence community.
	And what they did back in 2016, December of 2016, after Donald Trump won the election, Barack Obama called in his intelligence people, Clapper, Comey, and of course John Brennan, head of the CIA director,
	and said to them, I want you basically to cook up an intelligence community assessment that proves that Donald Trump is colluded with Vladimir Putin to win the 2016 election so that we can delegitimize his victory.
	Now, I'm sure those weren't his exact words, but that was certainly what happened.
	And from there came John Brennan drove this assessment, which did find that Trump had colluded.
	And also, John Brennan, we now know, thanks to the now current CIA director, John Ratcliffe, who ordered a review of that bogus assessment, which just came out last week or was declassified last week.
	What that review found was that John Brennan not only drove the whole process, but he also forced the analysts and the authors of this assessment to include the Steele dossier, which was, I mean, the most farcical joke of opposition research paid for and commissioned by the Clinton campaign and the DNC.
	And it was written by a shady former British spy called Christopher Steele.
	And it contained the most just preposterous charges claiming that Donald Trump had been in Moscow frolicking with prostitutes and getting them to do golden showers in a hotel room.
	So, I mean, anybody, I mean, it's ridiculous at its face, on its face, but anybody who knows Donald Trump, including his wife, Melania Trump, told him that she knew instantly that it was a lie because he's a germaphobe.
	There is no way he would allow anybody to urinate on him.
	So, you know, I mean, anyway, the whole thing was a joke.
	It was all made up.
	We now know it was made up.
	Christopher Steele's sources said they made it up in a bar.
	They got together, got drunk and told, you know, made up the story.
	So there you go.
	And the FBI offered Christopher Steele $1 million to confirm it when they realized that it wasn't true.
	And Christopher Steele could not confirm it for $1 million.
	So John Ratcliffe, quite rightly, got the career professionals inside the CIA.
	These are not political people.
	These are, you know, the deputy director of analysis and his analyst, went through and they did a learning kind of process, which they do quite often.
	And they use that to teach, you know, mistakes, lessons learned for future CIA operatives.
	And they did that with this.
	And it was truly damning.
	And the fingers of John Brennan are in there everywhere.
	And, you know, what I think is now is going to be the most salient in terms of legal action, criminal charges potentially against John Brennan and James Comey and perhaps James Clapper, although I don't know about that, but certainly the two of them, is the lies that were told about the steel dossier, particularly by John Brennan.
	Now, John Brennan testified to Congress and also multiple times told the media, I mean, he's a paid contributor for it's either CNN or MSNBC, I forget which one, but he's constantly lied about the fact that the steel dossier, he claimed, you know, either wasn't part of the assessment or he had nothing to do with it or he didn't want it to be in the assessment.
	All of that is a lie.
	It was not just, we found out last week, I mean, it was not just an appendix to the assessment, but it was also included in the main body of the assessment.
	And this was despite analysts and the two top Russia experts in the CIA telling John Brennan, no, we can't include the dossier.
	It will discredit the entire assessment.
	And Brennan didn't care.
	And in writing, there's an email that says from John Brennan, well, I want it in anyway.
	That's my bottom line.
	So there you have it.
	He lied.
	And what's happening now is that the CIA, John Ratcliffe, was bound to refer what they had found to the FBI.
	And the FBI is now looking at it.
	I believe that they're looking at perjury, potential perjury charges against both Brennan and Comey.
	And because the statute of limitations is five years for perjury and it's run out on those original congressional testimony that I mentioned, we do know that Brennan also testified to the Durham inquiry behind closed doors and also behind closed doors to Jim Comer, his inquiry into the Biden corruption.
	So perhaps there is some closed door testimony there that conflicts with that email in which John Brennan is forcing the steel dossier to be included in that assessment.
	If he lied under oath, then he's in big trouble.
	Same with Comey.
	And it's about time.
	Miranda, there's a line in The Godfather which says, who gave the order?
	And the question I want to ask you is whether the head culprit here, I mean, I'm assuming that Brennan, even Comey were to some degree, you know, concigliaries.
	They were carrying out orders.
	They were following somebody's direction or lead.
	And for a time, I suspected that that was Hillary, that because Hillary had the most to gain in the 2016 election, she was obviously very bitter when she lost that race to Trump.
	Nobody expected it.
	So I thought that maybe Hillary was the driving force.
	And while it's quite true that they paid for and commissioned the steel dossier, it seems from your account that the real man in charge here was Obama.
	And maybe it was Obama who realized that, you know, here is Trump who is in a position now to undo all the things I have painfully done over the past eight years.
	And so Obama had a powerful vested interest to want to delegitimize the Trump presidency.
	If you had to attach some weight of responsibility, would you put the head of the snake as Hillary or Obama?
	I think Obama, because he was president, he was the one who set in train this whole Russia collusion hoax.
	And John Brennan, I mean, John Brennan is, I think Comey is just a weak person, and others have told me that.
	But John Brennan has been a malevolent force for a very long time, his entire career.
	I mean, he was a communist, a self-described, admitted communist when he was accepted into the CIA for some insane reason, I think during the Carter years, why they would hire someone like that to be a, you know, have such a sensitive role in, you know, the Premier Intelligence Agency beats me.
	But anyway, they did and he rose to the top.
	But so, but yes, certainly Obama stepped that in train.
	He ordered these people to do it and Brennan knew exactly what to do and he did it and with zeal.
	And then Hillary Clinton is culpable because, I mean, she's always very self-interested, but this was her way of trying to dirty up her opposition with this opposition research and completely unscrupulous.
	And she just then went off on this insane jag because she just couldn't believe that she'd lost the election and blamed Comey and blamed Trump, blamed everybody.
	But I think Obama's more bloodless.
	You know, he wanted to dirty up his successor and so he did.
	He's very clever though, and his fingerprints are not on a lot of things.
	He's also quite loose.
	He had a lot of influence among the people.
	He had almost a rock star status.
	So they would, you know, walk over hot coals for him and I guess sacrifice themselves.
	I don't think anyone's ever going to pin anything on Barack Obama.
	But certainly, you know, there are fingerprints here of John Brennan's.
	And I guess that the FBI under Cash Patel will be doing its best to follow those to their fullest extent.
	It seems the Clintons have stayed one step ahead of the posse for like three decades.
	Obama, like you say, is maybe the most protected man in America.
	Do you think that if there were prosecutions of, let's say, Brennan and Comey, that that would do enough to send a message that this kind of political targeting at the highest levels of the government is unacceptable?
	It seems that without some consequences, there's no reason to suspect that this won't happen again.
	And I would think that the overriding mission of the Trump Justice Department would be, look, it's not that we're trying to get retribution, but we do want to stop this dead in its tracks.
	Don't you think that some sort of prosecution is essential in order to send that message?
	Absolutely.
	And look, you know, I would have a list as long as your arm of people that ought to be investigated and brought to justice because of what they did.
	But, you know, I think two or three big scalps would suffice because there needs to be a deterrent.
	The Democratic Party and their agents inside the deep state and the media for that matter need to understand that they can't do this.
	And obviously they're trying to sabotage Trump again.
	He's more powerful.
	But then, you know, so are they.
	And so it's a very difficult dance at the moment.
	And I think that by bringing some of these people to account, you are going to put the fear of God into the rest of them.
	I mean, I saw Mark Elias on, I think it was MSNBC just yesterday or this morning.
	He looked panicked and he said, I implore the media to not treat this Brennan story seriously.
	You know, this is just a political get.
	And then hilariously, John Brennan gives a quote saying, deploring the leaks, what he calls the leaks about this CIA review and the referral to the FBI.
	Like, you know, what a hypocrite.
	As if he hasn't, you know, been very familiar with leaks his entire career.
	The media was just as damaging to Donald Trump.
	I mean, they delivered the kill shots for the deep state over and over and over again.
	And I think we're getting wiser to that.
	But also, those media organs like the New York Times, like the Washington Post, and, you know, the various CNNs and ABCs and et cetera, they are losing audiences.
	They're hemorrhaging audience because they've lost the trust of the public.
	When you demonize Donald Trump, you tell your audience that he is the devil incarnate, he is Hitler reborn, and then he wins the election, he wins the popular vote, he wins every swing state, he wins over former Democrat voters in Deep blue cities like New York and Los Angeles, those audiences are going to say, Hey, hang on, what's going on here?
	You must have been lying to me.
	So they've switched off.
	Wow.
	Guys, I've been talking to Miranda Devine, New York Post columnist.
	Follow her on X at Miranda Devine, her latest book, The Big Guy.
	New York Post, nypost.com slash Miranda Devine.
	Miranda, as always, thank you very much for joining me.
	Thanks, Dinesh.
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	Again, it's Dinesh.locals.com.
	I'm discussing Reagan and the Cold War.
	This is all drawn from my book, Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
	And when I left off, we had Reagan driving a comprehensive arms buildup.
	And one would expect that the Soviet Union would try to strike back in some way, try to thwart Reagan.
	And sure enough, the Soviets were right at it.
	They tried very hard, first of all, to put pressure on Western Europe.
	Remember, the Reagan administration had planned to install Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe, and this was to counter a Soviet invasion.
	A Soviet invasion of Europe would be very hard to stop with conventional forces alone.
	Why?
	For two reasons.
	One, the Soviets had more troops.
	And two, the even more important reason, the invasion would come right at the Soviet border.
	So their team, so to speak, was right there.
	Europe, of course, had defensive forces, but not enough.
	The United States would have to come to Europe's defense, and our forces were over here.
	So we would have to dispatch them over there.
	Now, of course, there were American troops stationed in Europe, but not enough to deter a massive Soviet invasion.
	And so the idea was Pershing and cruise missiles will substitute for the lack of conventional forces and armed personnel guarding the border, and particularly the little part of Germany called the Falda Gap, which is probably where the Soviet troops would come through.
	Now, the Soviets were not content with trying to block the Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe.
	They also wanted to generate opposition to Reagan in the United States.
	The enemies of America generally work with the Democrats.
	And, hey, we are seeing it now.
	Look at the way, for example, that countries like Iran, Qatar try to build support in the United States for peace movements.
	They never build movements that say we are openly allied with Iran or we're openly allied with the Muslims.
	No, we're fighting for human rights.
	We're fighting for peace.
	And similarly here, the Soviet Union invested tremendous resources in what was called the Peace Council, the Peace Movement.
	And the Peace Movement was a populist left-wing movement in America.
	It had intellectuals that were part of it, typically university professors, no big surprise.
	It had journalists, pundits, and then it had a lot of NGOs, organizations devoted to peace and anti-nuclear activism, notably a woman named Helen Caldecott, who was head of a group called Physicians for Social Responsibility.
	Part of this movement was the writer Jonathan Schell, who wrote a best-selling book called The Fate of the Earth.
	So the tactics of the left in this country, the peace movement, by the way, is Soviet-backed and Soviet-funded, at least to a degree, was not to apologize for or defend the Soviet Union.
	Today we'll see, for example, activists who are openly pro-Hamas, in some cases pro-Iran.
	But in the 1980s, the pro-Soviet camp was not openly pro-Soviet.
	If you read Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth, the book is, and I read it, of course, many years ago, is a vivid description of an actual nuclear bomb going off in an American city.
	And it goes into a deep analysis and description of the devastation, the aftermath, the diseases that follow, the fallout, the radiation, the medical emergencies, the impact on the economy of the country.
	So the idea here was to spread fear, and the fear was supposed to put political pressure on Reagan to get him to back off.
	I myself went in June of 1982.
	I was a student then, but I visited Central Park to witness what was described as one of the largest protest rallies in recent history.
	Half a million people yelling and screaming for an end to the arms race.
	You know, a clergyman there reading passages from the book of Revelation.
	Protesters were carrying banners that said, there are no winners in a nuclear war.
	You can't hug your kids with nuclear arms.
	This is the Hysterical mood that was mobilized against Reagan.
	Now, the left is very strong in that it doesn't just rely on the street, it also relies on the kind of elite journals of opinion.
	Four prominent former diplomats, McGeorge Bundy, George Kennan, Robert McNamara, Gerard Smith, basically wrote a declaration on how the United States should make a proclamation for what's called no first use.
	We will never be the first to use nuclear weapons.
	Now, this is something that the United States never intended to do, i.e.
	to use nuclear weapons first, but it didn't want to make that kind of a declaration either.
	Because if you're talking about deterrence and mutually assured destruction, the last thing you want to do is tie your own hands by saying things like, look, whatever happens, I'm not going to be the one to shoot first.
	You want to keep your opponent, who also has a holster and bullets in the gun.
	You want to keep him guessing about what you may or may not do.
	The deterrence is in his uncertainty about how you will react.
	And so making advanced declarations is definitely not the way to go.
	But this is the left trying to pressure the United States to take the first step in making this kind of a declaration.
	Now, there were also all kinds of nuclear freeze proposals going around.
	The basic idea of the nuclear freeze was the United States should press on both sides to freeze their level of nuclear weapons.
	So the Soviet Union had built up during the 70s.
	They had more.
	We had less.
	But the left was like, it doesn't matter because we have enough.
	So let's just agree to stop now.
	And this idea was gaining a lot of support in the country.
	And look how ingenious Reagan is.
	Reagan said, the best way to defeat these people is not to simply come out against what they're saying and say that, no, no, no, we're not going to do that.
	Why don't we sort of beat them at their own game?
	This is the political sort of shrewdness of Reagan.
	And so Reagan came up with really two ideas.
	The first was called the zero option.
	So here's the zero option.
	The Soviet Union withdraws its SS-20 missiles from being targeted on Europe, and the United States agrees not to deploy the Pershing and cruise missiles.
	So Reagan was like, tit for tat, you pull your missiles back, we won't deploy ours.
	Now, what's interesting about this is that the moment Reagan proposed this, some of his own advisors told him, well, that's asking for too much.
	And Reagan goes, why?
	If they don't have any, we don't have any.
	So that's a true level playing field.
	But Paul Nitza, who was one of Reagan's top negotiators, said, well, if we go to the Russians and tell them that, they're going to say, but we've got the SS-20s already deployed.
	You don't even have the Pershing and cruise missiles in place.
	You're asking us to pull back something real, and you're just agreeing not to do something that you haven't even done.
	And Reagan's reply was, and so Paul Nitzi was like, how am I going to tell the Russians that this is a reasonable proposal?
	And this was Reagan.
	Well, Paul, he goes, all you got to tell them is that you work for one tough son of a bitch.
	And that was the way Reagan basically said, I'm going to drive a hard bargain here and I'm not going to back down.
	The second big idea of Reagan's in the arms control discussion was that in the 1970s, there was a regime of arms control that was called SALT, Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty.
	Nixon was involved with SALT, so were other presidents.
	And the idea of SALT was to negotiate a arms limitation.
	So to create, you could call it caps.
	You can have so many, we can have so many.
	And Reagan decided, why should we put caps on our nuclear missiles?
	Why don't we go down?
	Why don't we agree to reduce the number of missiles?
	So again, this is Reagan not only coming up with a, he's outdoing the left by playing their own game, but he's playing their own game by changing the rules in a subtle way to our advantage.
	How is that?
	Reagan goes, okay, well, instead of us just freezing our missiles, you know, you keep yours, we keep ours, how about the fact that we agree to reduce, let's say, 300 and you agree to reduce 800?
	Why?
	Because you have more than us.
	So you have to agree to reduce more, but that brings us down to the same level.
	So Reagan came up, what I'm getting at is he came up with counter proposals that went further than anything that the left had even proposed.
	And this took the wind out of the nuclear freeze movement.
	It's kind of like the left coming along and saying, well, you know, you have too many bullets in your holster.
	Why don't you agree to freeze the number of bullets in the holster?
	And I go, well, actually, I can do better than you.
	How about if both sides agree to have no bullets in their holster?
	How about that?
	And then you go like, uh-uh, uh, because you don't know what to say, because what I've proposed is actually far better than anything that you've proposed.
	And so suddenly your idea is out of steam and loses its political appeal.
	And so the left at this point was forced just to say, well, that's unrealistic.
	Well, the Soviets will never go for that.
	Well, that's not the way to argue.
	That's not the way to negotiate.
	Reagan doesn't know what he's doing.
	But the truth of it is Reagan did know what he was doing.
	And he was able to, you may say, take the air out of the left's balloon.
	So even though this was a giant issue in 1982, by the time the year proceeded, it suddenly seemed like the nuclear freeze movement was starting to fizzle.
	It didn't go away, but it was losing steam.
	And it was losing steam because Reagan basically figured out: yes, the American people are in fear about this.
	Who wouldn't be?
	We're talking about nuclear incineration, but the way for me to beat the left at its own game is to propose far deeper reductions than even they had thought of.
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