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July 14, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
53:52
PAGING GHISLAINE MAXWELL Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1124
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Coming up, is it time to move on from the Jeffrey Epstein case?
I want to argue the answer is yes, but maybe not for the reason that you think.
Douglas Mackey, who was imprisoned for posting a satirical Hillary meme, joins me.
We're going to talk about his vindication.
Also, Rabbi David Wolpe joins me.
We're going to talk about the current debate about anti-Semitism on the right.
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I'm going to talk about the Epstein files, and I'm going to make the case that even though there are unanswered questions about Epstein, it is in fact time to move on.
And I'll tell you why.
Now, I think you know that this is a topic I've stayed on and been pretty not only firm, but fierce about.
And yet, I want to analyze a fairly long post by Trump, which came out a couple of days ago.
What's going on with my boys?
And in some cases, gals.
Very Trumpian.
They're all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who's doing a fantastic job.
Hmm.
Not so sure about that, but let's keep going.
We are on one team, MAGA, and I don't like what's happening.
This is key.
Trump is telegraphing here that something is amiss.
And I think what he's saying really here is that there is one MAGA, and it's the MAGA defined by Trump.
Now, there are, I know, a number of MAGA activists and influencers who think, oh, no, we are really MAGA, or somehow collectively there is some alternative MAGA.
But if there is, I don't know where it is.
Or to put it somewhat differently, if you take these influencers and go to the people that they're supposedly influencing and ask them to choose between Trump or these guys, they would overwhelmingly choose Trump.
Another way to put it is that the influence of these influencers is 100% derivative.
And moreover, the influencers themselves are not exactly a reliable group.
Whenever things don't go their way, they don't apologize or back off.
They essentially change their positions and pretend like they never had the positions they had before.
So all of this is something that anyone with eyes to see can notice.
Let's continue with Trump.
He says selfish people are trying to hurt MAGA.
And I think what he means by selfish is people who have motives of self-aggrandizement or maybe even self-importance all over a guy who never dies.
Kind of a funny formulation, Jeffrey Epstein.
For years, it's Epstein over and over again.
Why are we giving publicity to files written by Obama, crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, et cetera?
They created the Epstein files.
If there was anything all caps in there that could have hurt MAGA, why didn't they use it?
So let's stop right here.
That's the part I wanted to read.
Trump is implying that the Epstein files are not some objective reality out there.
These are files that have somehow been tampered with, concocted, manipulated by the Democrats.
And Trump is saying further, look, one thing you can be sure of is that I'm not in these files, because if I were, they would have released it.
I think that goes without saying.
That is 100% true.
But what about this business that there really aren't any Epstein files and that we need to sort of move on?
This is something that has been somehow concocted by the left.
Now, the problem here, I think, is has to do with the fact that Pam Bondi, in whom Trump has a lot of confidence, nevertheless gave the impression that there were these files.
And moreover, that the list was on her desk.
And not only that, but we've been talking now for a while, in fact, some years.
Let's remember the Epstein case here is rather old.
Most of the activities described in the Epstein files go back to the 1990s and to the early 2000s at the most.
That's when the whole thing came to the public eye.
So Epstein's crimes ended in about 2005, which is 20 years ago.
His non-prosecution agreement was in 2007.
And so if there was a blackmail ring, the blackmail ring operated before that.
It's not a blackmail ring that's operating since then.
It's a blackmail ring that precedes the public exposure of Epstein.
Now, is it possible that, because we've had a lot of these premises floating around.
There's an Epstein list.
He was running a blackmail operation.
But many of these things, now that we think about it, were relying on information to be supplied, not information that actually existed.
It's true there was an Epstein ring.
There was an Epstein island, and people were important people were around Epstein, were flown to the island.
There certainly were flight logs of those people who went to the island.
But why did they go to the island?
Is it because we had just pedophiles?
And who are these pedophiles?
Now, the names that have come out are actually remarkably few.
Prince Andrew is one of them.
Bill Gates is not, as far as I know, named in the Epstein files, but he was named weirdly by his own wife.
So when Melinda Gates was asked why she divorced Bill Gates, one of the things she said was, I divorced him because of his repeated trips to the Epstein Island.
And that, of course, raises the question, why would Bill Gates want to be going repeatedly to the Epstein Island?
Bill Gates can afford to go wherever he wants.
If he's going to the Epstein Island, he's going there to get something that he's not getting everywhere else.
There's a reason he's going to the Epstein Island.
So I think all of this is a way of saying that there's got to be more there than we are being led on to believe.
No question about it.
I also think Alan Dorshowitz is on to something when he says, I've seen names, I've seen files.
They have not been on the full up and up about this.
My case for moving on does not have to do with anything like that.
I think that right now it seems pretty clear we're not going to get more information out of the government.
They have closed the case.
Unless Gillen Maxwell, who's in prison, speaks out and she's free to speak out.
By the way, she's given a couple of interviews, but really not very informative.
One of the articles, Debbie pulled up this article about the fact that she's nicknamed Prison Princess because she has filed something like over 100 complaints in the prison.
I guess her point is I'm an aristocrat and I'm being treated like a peasant.
She complains about the food.
She complains about the fact that the pillows that she's using makes her sneeze, that there's not proper vegan options in the dining hall.
I mean, this is after all prison.
But leaving all that kind of nonsense aside, I don't think we're going to get more out of Epstein.
And the reason I think that this is, there is a case to be made for moving on has to do with something I'm going to talk about more tomorrow, but I'm just going to mention it today.
And that is this very interesting New York Times article just out this morning about Biden's fake pardons.
And I say Biden's fake pardons because the thrust of this article, again, more details to come tomorrow, is Biden did not individually approve these pardons, nor, as we suspected, did Biden sign the pardons.
All of this raises the question whether the pardons are even valid.
Biden is saying now, in effect, that he sort of generally orally approved the pardons.
And one of the things we learned from the New York Times article is that the staff just took his generic, yeah, I'm good with it, and the staff ran the pardons through the AutoPen.
So we now know the pardons were in fact signed by the Autopen.
They were put into the AutoPen, not by Biden, but by the staff.
And Biden's role was nothing more than, by the way, a generic, not an individual.
So what I'm getting at is if there are 100 pardons, Biden did not go, yeah, I pardon this guy, I pardon that guy, I pardon this guy, I pardon Liz Cheney, I pardon Fauci.
Biden just goes, yeah, I approve of the pardons.
And I think there is a very real question here whether or not these pardons have any force.
The president does have the right to do it, but he has to do it properly.
It does not seem like that was done in this case.
So I'll pick up on this.
But here's my point.
If we're so obsessed with Epstein that we're jumping up and down about Epstein and we're claiming to walk out on MAGA, oh, I'm not going to vote for Trump.
Well, who are you?
I mean, first of all, if Trump's not up for election again, but who are you going to vote for?
The Democrats?
This shows such a lack of perspective that it makes you question whether or not you have any kind of compass that's guiding you if you're starting to talk like this.
Part of being on a political team is maintaining a certain amount of maturity, recognizing you can't win them all, recognizing there are some things that are important to you that are less important to the guy that you've put in charge who is trying to focus on things right in front of him.
And so having a sense of perspective, having a sense of balance, having a sense of maturity, I think is more important even than getting to the bottom of what really happened with Jeffrey Epsom.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome back to the podcast because he's been on, although not for a while, Douglas Mackey.
You remember Doug Mackey?
He is a, well, he went to prison for a meme, and this is what we're going to talk about.
Douglas Mackey graduated from Middlebury College with an economics degree.
He became a social media influencer.
In fact, he also posted memes under the name of Ricky Vaughn.
In 2016, he posted a meme about Hillary Clinton.
That's where all the trouble began.
But he has now been completely vindicated.
And here to tell his story is indeed Doug Mackey.
By the way, follow him on X Doug at Doug MackeyCase, the website meme defensefund.com.
Doug, thanks for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
You posted a satirical meme about Hillary Clinton.
The meme was absolutely hilarious.
And it basically said you could, instead of going in to vote in person, you could text your vote to a number that you gave.
And you very cleverly used the kind of Hillary, I'm with her hashtags and so on.
So it kind of looked like it was coming from the Hillary campaign.
But for anyone with half a brain, it's very obvious this was a joke.
Now, tell us about what happened after that, in which suddenly you find yourself in the middle of a case where they're acting like, A, it's not a joke, B, you are somehow actively trying to suppress the vote, and ultimately, you're put in handcuffs and sent off to prison.
So talk about the evolution of that kind of madness.
How did that go down?
Well, it's like three felonies a day, and they can concoct a case against you based on basically anything you do if they don't like you.
And that's exactly what happened to me.
They looked at these memes that were spreading around online, and they actually thought that Russia might be behind them.
So they started investigating.
And of course, they found nothing of the sort.
And but of course, in my case, as we'll get to it later, they didn't even find any evidence that I was involved with any of this as sort of a conspirator other than a guy who just found a meme, posted it online, had his, my Twitter account was suspended.
And since 2018, I kind of moved on with my life.
And 2021, seven days after Joe Biden was inaugurated, they came and knocked on the door and they arrested me.
And here I was facing a felony charge with a punishment of up to 10 years in federal prison for posting this meme.
And my attorneys were looking at the evidence and the discovery.
I guess we said they had no direct evidence, number one, that I actually intended to trick anyone.
If there is a hypothetical victim out there, we still haven't found that person who actually believed that you could text your vote.
That person doesn't exist so far as we know.
And they didn't find that there was evidence that I was involved with a conspiracy.
They just said, well, he posted this meme, you know, he posted this hashtag and these people also posted this.
Well, that can apply to any kind of viral tweet that's going around.
So this was extremely dangerous to say, if you're in a DM group and you're posting tweets that are viral or you're participating in hashtags that are viral, we can come after you for conspiracy.
And unfortunately, the jury wrongfully came to the conclusion that I was guilty.
And the judge sentenced me to seven months and she gave me a report date of January 18th, 2024.
And one of the first breaks in the case was when this appeals court looked at the case and said, we're going to give you an appeal bond because the facts of the case, you know, the judge and the prosecutors were both acting like this was airtight, like this was just a regular conspiracy case.
And we knew it wasn't.
So the appeals court gave me the bond.
Fortunately, I never had to report to federal prison or spend a day in there.
And it took a very long time, 15 months plus for the appeals court to actually rule in my case.
They just came out with actually a judgment of acquittal, which is extremely rare for the appeals court to actually say, we're actually going to overrule the jury and order the judge to enter a judgment of acquittal.
Very rare does that ever happen.
The appeals court almost always defers to the jury on the matters of the facts of the case.
In this case, they said there were no facts.
There was no evidence that I conspired with anybody.
This was just a guy posting a meme online.
So it was 15 months in the making because they were meticulously going through the evidence to find out that, well, there really wasn't anything there.
So I'm very grateful to the Second Surrogate for their very, very, you know, very meticulous and well-done decision.
It was 3-0, including a Biden judge, by the way, who voted for me.
So very grateful that this happened.
And Doug, in the trial, let's go into the trial itself, because it is a little bit of a mystery how these convictions are obtained.
Now, you were, as I understand it, in New York.
This was a New York jury.
So we can imagine a jury that's probably somewhat politically on the left, maybe not quite as fanatical as some of the juries in D.C., but nevertheless, we're talking about a blue state and a blue state jury, I'm guessing.
You said, I believe, that they did not produce a single witness that was able to say, hey, I saw this meme.
I was completely fooled.
I never showed up to vote at all.
Instead, I voted by text.
Oh, wow.
I'm now learning that my vote never counted.
They never did any of this, did they?
No, no.
They said, well, as soon as you agree to post this meme, you've committed a crime.
Wow.
So the meme itself is the conspiracy, I guess is what you're saying, because I think you also said, and I didn't know this, but they were never able to say that these were your seven co-conspirators who were all in a huddle to do this.
You did it on your own, and supposedly this was a conspiracy of one.
My testimony all along, and by the way, it's a good thing I testified at trial because I might not have won the appeal based on these grounds at least.
We had other grounds because I testified that I found the meme on 4chan.
The government could not rebut that.
I testified that in these DM chat groups that they accused me of being in, that there were hundreds of messages per day and I'd never even bothered reading them.
They could not prove otherwise.
And the appeals court noticed that and they said, look, even if these other people over here were designing these memes and some of them did actually intend for them to fool voters, that I was never involved with any of these people.
I just found a meme that I thought was funny and shared it with my followers.
So, Doug, I mean, talk about this.
You're a young guy.
You said you, quote, went on with your life, but this has disrupted your life.
And of course, it's given you a public reputation as someone that the government went after.
Now, you said earlier they.
You used the word they three or four times, but you didn't specify who the they is.
Sometimes people wonder, well, you said it was a few days into the Biden regime, but who actually went after you?
Was it the, it wasn't the southern district of New York, right?
Was it the Eastern District of New York?
Exactly, the Eastern District of New York, which is a very concerning office.
Let me put it that way.
So the Eastern District of New York, the New York FBI, and the PIN Public Integrity Division, the same division that Jack Smith was using to go after Donald Trump, the D.C. Public Integrity Division.
So I think part of the lesson of your case, it seems to me, is the importance of cleaning out these places because they seem to be dealing.
I mean, my own experience, you may or may not know, was with the Southern District of New York.
And this was, you know, with the Clinton judge.
It was for exceeding the campaign finance laws.
But I knew that there was all kinds of damaging information to the government in my FBI file.
So I said to the judge, or at least my attorney said, can we see the FBI file?
Because we're claiming selective prosecution and the evidence is right in that file.
And he goes, no, you can't see the file.
So, I mean, this is all probably all familiar ground to you because this is how these things work.
And I think, you know, when you go through it, for people who don't go through it, I think they think, well, this is America.
This kind of thing can't happen.
We have a legal system.
And of course, outwardly, Doug, it has all the trappings of justice, right?
It's got nice wood paneling and you've got objections sustained and everybody thinks it's on the up and up.
But what they don't realize is the degree to which there is a certain type of implicit collusion, not occurring on your part, but occurring on the part of the people who are out to get you.
Well, let me put it this way.
The prosecutors, the federal prosecutors, I will speak for the EDNY, and I think the SDNY is the same way, and maybe DC.
They get away with murder.
But the reason there's a culture like that is because the judges in those districts allow it.
In my case, and in many cases, the judges are treating these prosecutors like their sons or daughters.
Let's say it's like, great job, nice job, way to go.
You know, we did this.
We all did this.
Great job.
And their son or their daughter can do no wrong.
So whenever they mislead the court, whenever they commit misconduct, these prosecutors, they're getting slaps on the wrist at most.
Usually they're like the judge in my case just blightly ignored whether or not the prosecution had misled my defense attorney in hiding evidence.
And all along, you know, it was sort of like this, it was this weird dynamic and you're very familiar with it.
And it was myself and my brilliant attorney over there, just the two of us against this whole system.
And ultimately, we prevailed.
But to be honest with you, this should have ended a long time ago.
I mean, this should have ended either pretrial with the motion to dismiss or look, the judge should have seen through it and issued a directed verdict, which we moved for many times because the evidence wasn't there.
They just said, look, you're a bad person.
You didn't like Hillary Clinton.
You said these things are nice.
And clearly, look, you wanted to mislead voters.
Well, that's not how, you know, that's not how the law should work.
And the Second Circuit saw through it.
In my own case, Doug, it ended up costing me half a million dollars.
It was expensive.
And yet I saw a very telling quote that you did in one of the articles about you recently where it said, you are very emphatic that you, in a sense, did not seek a pardon in your case because you wanted vindication.
You wanted to press it to its conclusion.
And my question is: that took a lot of bravery, it took resources on your part, but it also took a certain amount of confidence that the judicial system would come through for you in the end.
What made you confident that you would get justice at the hands of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals?
Well, I didn't know what would happen to the Second Circuit.
Of course, we had the option of Supreme Court if we had to, but we had a very strong appeal and the Second Circuit didn't even rule on three out of the four arguments that we made.
Because as you might know, these appeals courts, once they decide, let's say, on the strongest argument, they're not going to go through and say this one's right, this one's wrong.
So we had a great argument on whether the law should have even applied in my case, whether there was fair notice that this sort of conduct was illegal, even assuming what the government said was true, which wasn't.
Number two, they brought this case in Brooklyn, New York for no reason.
I was in Manhattan at the time, and none of the co-conspirators were in Brooklyn.
Of course, they found no victims, so you can't say that there was a victim in Brooklyn.
They said that, well, he said the tweet went over a wire surrounding on the waters surrounding Brooklyn and Manhattan.
Therefore, we have jurisdiction.
The Second Circuit didn't even rule on that argument.
And of course, the Second Circuit also said that, you know, the jury might have, you know, the jury obviously thought that I had the requisite intent, that I actually wanted to fool people, but they didn't even rule on that either.
So we were very confident in the opinion.
And God forbid, because of the expense, the time, the stress, we would have to go to the Supreme Court.
But let me just say that the chief judge on the Second Circuit is quite excellent.
Her name is Livingston, and she has a great reputation.
So that also, and that also gave me a little bit of confidence here.
But yeah, as great as it would have been to get, you know, a pardon with it signed by Donald Trump, which would have been amazing, this is even better vindication.
Absolutely, Doug.
Well, I just want to commend you for your really, I mean, the meme was awesome, but the fortitude, the determination, the willingness to see this through, that is truly remarkable.
As you know, a lot of people will back away from these things.
A bunch of people will often sometimes give in because they feel like it's too much effort.
They choose the lesser evil.
They choose a way out.
In my case, of course, I did get the pardon at the end, but the pardon came after I had completed my whole sentence.
You know, eight months of overnight confinement.
I paid my fine.
All I had left was some community service.
And of course, I was glad to get my rights back.
You've been completely vindicated, so congratulations.
Wonderful news.
Keep doing the great work you're doing.
Guys, I've been talking to Doug Mackey.
Follow him on X at Doug Mackey Case, the website, meme defensefund.com.
Doug, thank you for joining me.
Thank you.
Really appreciate it.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast a new guest.
It's Rabbi David Wolpe.
He is the Max Webb Emeritus Rabbi of Sinai Temple, I believe, based in Los Angeles.
He has been named one of the most influential Jewish figures in the world by the Jerusalem Post.
He's also taught at Harvard, Jewish Theological Seminary, a bunch of other places.
His articles have appeared all over the place, and he's also the author of a book.
I hope I have a moment to ask him about it.
It's called David, the Divided Heart, published by Yale University Press.
You can follow him on X at Rabbi Wolpe, W-O-L-P-E, and the website is sinitemple.org.
Rabbi Wolpe, welcome.
Thanks for joining me.
I think the last time you and I were together, we were on a podium in New York debating two-on-two.
I wasn't debating you.
We were on the same side debating.
If I remember, was it Christopher Hitchens and another guy?
It was A.C. Grayling and Matthew Chapman, I think was his name, who was Darwin's like grandson or great-grandson.
And we were debating God and religion.
Yes, and if you remember, it was a very secular and kind of a left-wing crowd.
We were up against it, but I thought we acquitted ourselves very well.
It's great to connect with you again.
Let me begin by asking you about something in the news this morning, which is the Israeli former prime minister or president, Naftali Bennett, a prime minister, I believe.
Prime Minister.
Issued a statement where he flatly and emphatically denied that this whole Jeffrey Epstein operation was somehow being manipulated or driven by Israel, by the Mossad.
This seems to be a rumor that has been taken by some people on the right as a truth, as something that is true without, as far as I know, a shred of Evidence behind it.
What are your thoughts about this Epstein business and about this denial that came out today?
So Bennett said, look, he was the prime minister.
He knew all the operations of the Mossad.
Epstein had nothing to do with the Mossad.
And it was so categorical.
I mean, I believe him.
I think that it's such the appeal of conspiracy theories is so powerful now on the right and on the left that I think in the face of evidence, it almost doesn't matter.
It's like once somebody believes that they have the, you know, the key to all mythologies, to go back to like Middlemarch, the guy who was going to write, Kausaban was going to write the key to all mythologies.
Someone who has a conspiracy theory thinks they have that.
And anything that contradicts it, they'll just say is not true.
So I'm inclined to believe him.
And it does play into the trope of whatever is going wrong in the world, somehow the Jews are behind it.
And this is an old and devastatingly awful and dangerous canard.
And so I'm happy to see that at least this one has the possibility of being debunked.
You know, I saw Megan Kelly commenting on it this morning, and Megan Kelly made some kind of a dismissive remark to the effect that, well, but I mean, you know, you'd expect intelligence agencies to lie because they're in the business of lying.
And so we can't really take what Naftali Bennett says.
And I think this is one of the problems with when you're dealing with intelligence agencies and with states in general is people's level of distrust these days is so high that almost nothing that could be said.
Trump could come out and say, listen, I can assure you from the United States point of view that this is not an Israeli operation.
And people would say, well, that's what someone would say.
Who's expecting to say?
Right.
It's not disprovable because if you doubt, I mean, doubt is like the universal acid.
It corrodes every possibility of believing anything.
So, of course, you can say that.
I can't disprove it, except that he was about as emphatic as one could be and would look pretty foolish if evidence came out to contradict him.
But more than that, we can't really say.
You know, this guy who was a prosecutor under the Democrats, a Biden prosecutor, Alex Acosta, he had made a remark saying, this is many years ago, of course, and the Epstein business goes back to much earlier in the 2000s and even back to the late 1990s.
But Alex Acosta said something to the effect of, you know, I was told by the intelligence agencies to lay off.
But of course, what Alex Acosta was referring to is not Israel or Mossad.
He was referring to U.S. intelligence agencies.
So to the degree that there is any shred of evidence here, it, as far as I can see, is not pointing to Mossad, but it's pointing to what people loosely call the deep state in the United States.
You may well be right.
And the other thing that strikes me about this is that we get gripped by these stories because they're interesting and they suggest some cover-up and so on.
And we tend to ignore the fact that there are major international dramas playing out that have real consequence that get buried because we're all talking about does Epstein have a list?
And that's human nature, but it's also unfortunate because there's a lot of stuff going on in the world that really deserves some focused attention from the public and from our governments.
Let's talk about one of those things, and that is, of course, the ongoing Israeli campaign to knock out Hamas in Gaza.
And this was an objective, I think, very clearly stated at the very beginning of this, right following the October 7 attacks.
As far as I can see, Netanyahu and the government of Israel has not wavered in it at all.
It appears to have in Israel support both from the Likud and from the Labor Party.
And yet we see voices all around the world, and including a very intelligent man or an otherwise intelligent man, John Mearsheimer, who recently said, well, I think that, you know, when you think about what Israel is doing, it's exactly like the Nazis.
I mean, and I myself was taken aback by this, by this kind of shocking analogy.
And then I saw that you commented on it.
Let's talk about Mearsheimer, why he would say something like that, and what is your response to it.
Well, I start off by saying that Walt and Mearsheimer together wrote a book basically blaming all the failures of U.S. policy on Israel.
Again, the idea that the Jews are behind everything.
An idea that you would think, by the way, would have been disproved by the fact that if they were behind everything, they would not have had a third of all of our people slaughtered in World War II.
We would have been better manipulators than that.
But I'll put that aside.
When people compare the Israelis to Nazis, my first reaction generally, other than like complete dismissal, is to think they just don't know any history.
Nazi to them means bad.
And when they see something they think is bad, they say Nazi.
And they don't really understand that Nazi was the systematic humiliation, degradation, and murder of millions and millions and millions of people in camps that were built for that purpose, which is unique in human history.
And this is a war.
And terrible things happen during a war.
No question about it.
And nobody, I think, in Israel either would say that terrible things haven't happened and that Israelis have not done terrible things, but it's a war.
And it's a war against a pretty implacable enemy that, by the way, could have ended the war by saying, okay, we give up a year ago or a year and a half ago.
But when someone like Mearsheimer, who presumably has studied history, is a professor at the University of Chicago, when he makes that analogy, you can't say it's stupidity And ignorance.
It can only be malevolence.
He wants to compare Israelis to the worst enemy of Jews in the history of many, many, many, many enemies of Jews.
And that to me is such toxic and evil kind of rhetoric that I just couldn't let it go.
I want to highlight an aspect of Nazism and have you reflect on it, because Nazism is often linked with fascism.
And of course, there was fascism in Italy.
There was Mussolini, for example, and there were fascist parties in England and Belgium and France and elsewhere.
But a key distinguishing element of Nazism was, in fact, its peculiar obsession with the Jews.
Mussolini was not obsessed with Jews.
In fact, there were Jews who were part of the early fascist movement.
Mussolini, to some degree, even helped Jews in World War II.
But the point about Hitler was even when he's losing the war, it's almost all over.
You would think that he would grab every soldier he had to send him to the front.
But no, the soldiers have got to kill some Jews before we get out of here.
And so this suggests a level of ethnic obsession with the Jews that is, as you said, singular.
It stands out because it's not even rational from the point of view of the Nazi war machine.
Do you agree with that?
It's a great point because you're right.
We shouldn't use fascism and Nazism as synonyms in this way because they diverted trains and trucks and so on to deport helpless citizens of communities all over Poland who had nothing to do with anything to the gas chambers rather than use those in the war effort.
And it defies, obviously it defies logic, but it also defies imagination that the Nazis would be so collectively obsessed with wiping out this people.
And the intention was, if they won, to wipe out Jews worldwide.
They did not want to stop at Europe.
So yes, Nazism is a uniquely evil phenomenon in the history of the world.
And really the only competitor that it had for the scope of devastation is communism in the 20th century, Soviet and Chinese communism.
Rabbi Wolpe, I've got to have you back because we have so much to talk about on this subject.
It's such a bottomlessly deep and interesting topic.
But I'm going to pivot for now because I saw the title of your latest book, which I need to get.
It's called David, the Divided Heart.
I assume you're talking about King David.
And I can't wait for you to tell us a little bit about where is the divided heart and what's this book about?
So David, it's a telling of the story of David that tries to understand his psychology because David is the most described character in the Bible.
We know more about him in the Hebrew Bible, that is the Old Testament.
We know more about him than we know about Moses, about anyone.
And his relations with his children, with his wives, with his compatriots in war and so on are really detailed.
And what you see is, and his relationship to God, obviously, which is central to David's life.
And what you see is he's really a torn figure.
And that's what makes him so fascinating.
And of course, to moderns, so much more interesting.
But in the end, he overcomes, you know, he commits a terrible sin and the prophet says to him, the prophet said to him, you committed this terrible sin.
And in that time, most kings would have said, you know, kill the prophet, because kings could do whatever they wanted.
But David doesn't.
David instead does repentance.
And that's what makes him so fascinating is we're talking about somebody who in an autocratic age, autocratic isn't even the word, in a totalitarian, in a monarchical age, was a monarch and yet understood that he was subordinate to God and serving a greater mission.
So he was torn, but in the end was the man who succeeded in uniting Israel, even though his own children sometimes rebelled against him.
So it's, for me, an endlessly fascinating story.
I don't know if you go into this, but in some ways, I think it's interesting to contrast David with Saul, isn't it?
Because on the face of it, Saul's deviations from God's will don't appear to be all that great.
God says, go do war against the Amalekites.
Well, Saul does do that.
Go defeat them.
Saul does do that.
But then God says, make sure these guys are really bad guys.
Make sure you wipe them all out.
And Saul is like, well, maybe not all of them.
And so comparing Saul to David, it appears like David's sins, which of course are not just adultery, but involve in a sense murder by sending Bathsheba's husband to the front.
David's sins are more grievous.
But I think the point you're making is that it is his willingness to acknowledge them, humble himself, put himself under God's law.
That's really what is the essence of his greatness.
And grow and grow from it.
And there is a line.
I don't know that it entirely works, but it's an interesting line that Dietrich Bonhoeffer said about the difference.
He said, Saul's sins were sins of strength and David's were sins of weakness.
And sins of weakness, God is more willing to forgive than sins of strength.
And I always thought that that was an interesting distinction.
I'm not sure that it perfectly works, but it's interesting to think about how we sin differently.
The bully is a different kind of sinner from somebody who is personally seduced.
So in any case, yes, but it's true.
The contrast with Saul, also Saul was, he was very uneven in his per today.
We would probably call him bipolar.
That's very unfair to diagnose somebody 2,000 years later.
And I'm not a psychiatrist, but he had tremendous mood swings.
And at times, he loved David.
At other times, he wanted to kill David.
And I think also he was not suitable as a leader because a leader has to have some kind of steady through line where the people don't know what's going on.
Yeah, the point that you make about strength and weakness to me is very profound.
And I was thinking exactly of what the prophet Nathan said to David, which is that he said, let's consider the case of a rich man who has a lot of different lambs, but instead of using one of his own, he takes the poor man and sacrifices his lamb.
What would you say about such a case?
And then David's anger burns, which you see right away that David's conscience and his heart are on the right side, even there.
He just had not bothered to apply that lesson to himself.
And that's what the prophet, in a sense, calls him to.
So to me, that's a very powerful.
Well, this is wonderful stuff.
Guys, I've been talking to Rabbi David Wolpi.
Follow him on exit, Rabbi Wolpe, and check out the book.
It's David the Divided Heart, Yale University Press.
Rabbi Wolpe, let's do it again.
Thank you for joining me.
Good to see you.
I'm in the section of my Reagan book, Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
We're talking about the Cold War.
And in my narrative, I'm discussing the Cold War.
And I have a chapter called Confronting the Evil Empire.
But the chapter doesn't take us to the end of the story.
Rather, it moves to the next chapter, which I'll get to.
It's called Making the World Safe for Democracy.
This is a discussion of the Reagan Doctrine, a very important discussion because of the relevance of the Reagan Doctrine today.
I want to argue that Trump is, in his own way, without saying so, a kind of practitioner of the Reagan Doctrine.
We'll explore in what sense that is true.
And then I swing back after discussing the Reagan doctrine to a chapter called And the Wall Came Tumbling Down.
So why do I do it that way?
Well, it's for the simple reason that we're kind of following Reagan forward chronologically.
So Reagan's dealing with the Soviet Empire, but of course, when you're the president, you're not dealing with one thing.
You're dealing with the Cold War, nuclear weapons, arms control.
We've been talking about all those things.
And at the same time, there are conflicts brewing around the world.
And as we'll see, there are people in Afghanistan, in Angola, in Mozambique, in Somalia, in Nicaragua, in a couple of other places mobilizing against Soviet-installed communist regimes.
And Reagan has to figure out what's my position vis-a-vis those movements.
Now, if you listen to certain elements of the MAGA right today, they'd be like, leave him alone, none of our business, don't do anything.
This was not Reagan's view at all.
So we have a Reagan view, and then, of course, later, a Bush view.
And by a Bush, I mean both George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.
The two Bushes were closer to each other than either of them was to Reagan.
And I say that because in the case of the Gulf War, which was administered or handled by George H.W. Bush, the U.S. was actively involved and committed troops to eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.
And then picking up from that, under George W. Bush, the United States commits troops in Afghanistan, commits troops in Iraq.
I'm not saying all of that was wrong, but much of it was.
And some of it was wrong because of premises and information that we were given that turned out to be false.
But Reagan's approach is worth remembering.
It should not be conflated with the approach of the two bushes.
I'm going to try today just to finish up my discussion of this chapter, Confronting the Evil Empire.
We're dealing with the fact that Reagan is making a major arms buildup.
He's also committed to deploying Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe.
Reagan's daughter, Patty Davis, tells Reagan, you've got to meet with this anti-nuclear activist named Helen Caldecott.
Reagan doesn't want to do it, but it is his kid, so he agrees to meet with her.
The meeting is a complete disaster because Caldecott is rude, condescending.
As soon as she walks out of the meeting, she has a press conference, denounces Reagan.
She says, Reagan, basically, she says, quote, everything he said to me was wrong.
He doesn't understand much of this.
Now, in reality, Reagan understood it much better than Helen Caldecott, but she was a left-wing activist.
She was head of a group called Physicians for Social Responsibility.
And in fact, being a doctor, she diagnoses Reagan as suffering from, quote, missile envy, as if Reagan only wants to build up these missiles because he's got some psychological problems.
The missiles serve no military or strategic purpose at all.
So the meeting was a mistake.
I think Reagan regretted meeting with her, but, you know, this is a case where he showed a bit of weakness on account of listening to his idiot daughter.
And by the way, he also had an idiot son, Ron Reagan Jr., both, by the way, the offspring of Nancy Reagan.
The two kids from, well, the child from Jane Wyman, Maureen Reagan, was actually fine.
Later became head of the RNC.
And then Michael Reagan is the adopted son.
He turned out to be just fine as well.
Now, the Soviet Union ramped up the pressure right before the deployment of the Persian cruise missiles.
There were massive demonstrations all over Europe and in the United States, London, Stockholm, Vienna, Paris.
More than 2 million people gathered to object, scream, yell, the kind of rallies we see today, but much bigger.
And ABC TV ran a film called The Day After, really aimed at demoralizing America and breaking down public support for Reagan.
Basically, The Day After was kind of a depiction of a nuclear blast.
And everyone, the idea was scare people into turning against Reagan.
Reagan's attitude was pretty simple.
Pay no attention, do nothing.
And By do nothing, I meant do not bend in response to these protests.
Don't make any new concessions.
The Soviet Union said: if you deploy these missiles, we're going to walk out of the arms control talks.
The left went berserk, basically saying that nuclear war is now imminent.
There was a kind of a nuclear doomsday clock, you might remember.
Their idea was the clock is now like four seconds to midnight.
By the way, it's some of the same wacko alarmism that we get today over the climate.
They were doing exactly the same thing.
In fact, they were doing more of it.
They were genuinely scaring people.
And Debbie, just commenting from the side, is like, yeah, I was actually a little scared by all of this.
But Reagan realized that this is the theatrics of the left using, by the way, the media.
And so Reagan's like, no problem, deploy the Pershing and cruise missiles.
And they were, in fact, deployed.
And by the way, the fact that you had people in Europe, the conservatives who had stood strong with Reagan, there was a kind of international alliance.
I would call it the Alliance of the Pope, which is John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl in West Germany.
Margaret Thatcher was re-elected in Great Britain.
Helmut Kohl was re-elected in Germany.
Now, in France, you had a left-wing socialist, but he was also anti-communist.
This is Mitterrand.
And the Western Alliance held strong.
This was a key aspect of the Cold War.
If Reagan had lost the Europeans at that point, I think it would have weakened the Western Alliance.
But Reagan was able to hold the alliance together.
Not just the leadership, but the leadership was able to win re-election in their own countries.
And all of this set up the great spectacular victory in the Cold War that was to come just a few years later.
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