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July 15, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
56:46
PARDON ME? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1125
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Coming up, I've got a few more things to say about the Epstein scandal.
I also want to talk about the scandal of the Biden pardons, and I want to explore whether those can be invalidated.
I want to make the case that Trump should go beyond trying to get rid of Jerome Powell.
Our broader goal should be to end the Fed.
Alex McFarlane, radio host, church director, joins me.
We're going to talk about how socialism poses a grave threat to America.
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I made the argument yesterday that as a practical matter, it makes sense to move on from the Epstein case.
And by move on, I don't even mean that we should not talk about it or not seek answers.
Move on refers to a shift of focus.
My argument is really simple, and that is that there are pressing things before the country right now, and quite honestly, they are not getting the attention that they deserve.
I'm going to talk about one of them in a minute, which is the Biden Auto Pen scandal.
Now, this is something where we can actually do something about this.
This is a trail that may not merely lead to the invalidation of the pardons, but it might lead straight to the actual people making the decisions over the Biden years, a trail that might, for example, lead to Obama.
So this is a very promising line of investigation, and it needs to be pursued.
But of course, the forces of MAGA, at least some of them, are totally focused on Epstein.
And so you're focused on something that ended in 2005 that deals with offenses that occurred in the 1990s, a subject on which, quite honestly, there's a lot of things that are not known.
And things are stated as fact that, in fact, haven't really been definitively proved.
Now, I agree, everybody was excitedly anticipating these questions being answered.
And I think a certain amount of false hope was given by Pam Bondi when she said, like, I have the list on my desk.
Now, the logical chain that is being followed here by a lot of the MAGA people is something like this.
Pam Bondi said she had it.
So she obviously had it.
And now she won't release it.
So they must be hiding something.
But guess what?
What if this is not the case?
What if Pam Bondi is another Christie gnome?
Which is to say, what if Pam Bondi is a little bit of a performance artist and a crisis actor and somebody who, when she's asked on Fox News, like, where's the list?
She jumps the gun.
I've got it right on my desk when she actually hasn't looked in those files.
And so she ends up raising expectations that now for some reason are not being fulfilled.
Now, here I think is the problem that we are dealing with with regard to Epstein.
And by the way, I say this as someone who's dealt with these problems in some ways all my adult life in politics.
Responding, by the way, to my comments yesterday on Epstein, a couple of the MAGA activist types basically said, oh, Dinesh must have gotten the call.
And the call here refers to some sort of a supposed call from Trump, maybe to tell me to lay off of Epstein.
First of all, I've received no such call.
I'm not responding to the pressure of any call.
I'm actually responding to something else, which is to say the idea that things won't get done if you focus on something where you're likely, in fact, almost certain, I think, at this point, to get nowhere.
Let me give you a second example.
I mentioned the Biden-Auto Pen scandal.
Another scandal, by the way, is the fact that the Senate has right in front of it this rescission bill that was passed by the House.
So the Senate just has to pass it and Trump sign it.
And then you're going to get all kinds of good results, including, by the way, the taking away of giant amounts of money from NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS.
Right?
So here's a practical thing.
We've been actually dreaming of doing this for decades.
It hasn't happened before.
It's on the verge of happening now.
A little bit of MAGA pressure on the Senate would certainly help.
But again, it's not happening.
Why?
Because, again, we're focused on Epstein.
What is Trump hiding?
And Trump, for anyone who's got a good idea of Trump, he is an impetuous guy.
He sometimes could say something like, I just don't care about this.
I thought it was a big deal.
I've got so much on my hands.
I don't want to waste another moment on this.
And he might have told Pam Bonnie, forget about it.
Focus on prosecuting sanctuary cities.
Trump is completely capable of this kind of a, you could call it a whimsical decision, you can call it an impetuous decision, but this is, in fact, the way that Trump functions.
Well, here's another possibility.
And this possibility, I think, is maybe the most likely, but it's not going to be one that's really satisfying because it's a possibility that frustrates, particularly in the social media age, our desire to know.
To make the point a little more clearly, I'm going to give you a theological analogy because this point I'm about to make applies in theology as it does in politics, although I'm not making a direct analogy between, let's say, God and our political system.
I'm making an analogy to help us understand a point.
So sometimes, for example, we have legitimate questions about the world.
Why is there, for example, why were all these 300,000 people killed in a tsunami?
And we don't just mean like, why did God allow that?
We also mean like, why is the world designed in such a way where we have tsunamis?
And the answer may be that we don't know.
We don't really know the full architecture of the universe.
Why?
Well, partly because we didn't make it.
We have been dropped into it.
We have limited knowledge, the human perspective.
We don't have the God's eye view.
And so it's an important question.
It's a relevant question.
And yet we don't have the answer.
And therefore, we're forced into a position of asking in the end, do we trust God?
Do we trust the architect?
Do we trust the guy who set up the system that way?
Now, here's the analogy I want to make to politics.
And it's this.
Our political system is based on representative democracy.
And representative democracy means you and I don't make day-to-day decisions about government.
We don't make decisions about taxes, about the intelligence agencies.
We don't make decisions about whether the Iranians have nuclear weapons or not.
We elect other people like Trump to make those decisions.
And I think Trump feels, rightly so, that the way our system is, he can say, I have reason to believe the Iranians have nuclear weapons.
And so, boom, I'm going to go knock them out.
You're like, well, you haven't given me the reasons.
He's like, I don't have to give you the reasons.
You've elected me to make those kinds of judgments.
It could be based on intelligence.
It could be based on surveillance.
It could be based on sources I don't want to reveal.
So I'm not telling you the process.
I'm merely telling you the conclusion.
And I think in a representative democracy, we have to say, all right, it comes down ultimately to who do we trust?
If you don't trust the guy you voted for, you shouldn't have voted for him probably, or you should have found somebody else you trust more.
And so that, I think, is the key point here, that we've got all these kind of pundits who are in the position of demanding that they be made the auditor of this kind of information.
And Trump is basically saying, well, for reasons I don't particularly want to say or I feel no desire to have to reveal, I've made the prudential judgment that this is just not something I want to want to focus on.
And so move on.
Now, what do we want to move on to?
Let me talk a little bit about this Biden story, because like I said, this is not simply a story where Biden said, all right, I'm going to review this list of people.
I know everybody who's on the list.
I want to pardon these people.
And therefore, I'm just not going to use the auto pen.
You use the auto pen, but it's with my specific authorization.
This is, in fact, not what happened.
They told Biden, the AIDS told Biden, these are certain categories of people that we want you to pardon.
And Biden only agreed to the categories.
Then the AIDS developed their own list.
And not only that, Biden did not see the final list.
The list was, in fact, apparently constantly being changed.
And not only that, there were all these outrageous cases on the list.
A Chinese supposed student who pleads guilty to having 47,000 child pornography images in his possession.
You have people who have committed the worst types of atrocities.
And these are people who are slipped onto the list.
Some of them from lists made up by groups like the ACLU.
Others appearing out of nowhere.
In other words, this is not coming from Biden.
And then Biden gives a sort of generic oral okay.
And then the aides put the auto pen to work and they sign the actual pardons.
So this is quite possibly, it's certainly unethical.
It's quite possibly invalid.
The pardons themselves are quite possibly invalid.
And moreover, on the part of the aides that organize this, they could be, and I emphasize the word could, guilty of all kinds of violations of law, obstruction of justice, misuse of government property, fraud, forgery, conspiracy to defraud the United States.
Senator Eric Schmidt has a list with all the relevant statutes laid out pretty clearly.
So this is a big deal.
And it's a big deal right in front of us.
So in other words, it is something that demands our immediate attention.
If we don't pay attention to it and let it slide, we're going to have less momentum to do Anything about it six months from now or three months from now.
The way politics is, issues heat up and there is, well, to quote Julius Caesar, a tide in the affairs of men.
You either take it when the tide is with you and go with it, or otherwise you are in the low water and find it very difficult for you to make any kind of progress.
So I think that this is a big deal, and I hope that we see some action from the Congress, which has promised to pursue it, from the administration, which has all kinds of tools available to it,
and also from the rest of us to keep our eye on the ball and perform our oversight function in making sure that the government that we elected does, in fact, carry out its bidding.
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President Trump seems determined to unseat, get rid of the head of the Federal Reserve, which is Jerome Powell.
Federal Reserve Chair, Jerome Powell, has been in office for five years.
He has one more year to go on his term, which expires next year.
And under ordinary circumstances, he would stick it out.
And then Trump would name his replacement.
But Trump seems eager to name his replacement now.
Now, Trump has a reason, or at least a pretext, to try to push Powell out, and that is the scandal over what some people have been calling the Palace of Versailles.
Now, you know, the Palace of Versailles, it's the very lavish, highly ornamental, characteristically French, over-the-top, gold-gilded palace in Versailles, outside of Paris, associated with Louis XIV, the Sun King.
Well, according to Russell Vogt, the OMB director, this is the kind of facility that the Fed has built for itself using, one would have to say, invented money.
And by invented money, I mean the Fed has the ability to print money.
It doesn't do the direct printing, but the Fed is able to create money out of thin air.
And I think they believe, hey, if we can create money out of thin air, we can spend as much money as we want.
So apparently there's somewhere between two and a half and three billion dollars being spent on this magnificent facility.
Think about this.
A billion dollars is $1,000 million.
Imagine spending that kind of money on yourself on a building.
Well, this is something that was not only done by Powell and by the Fed, but they apparently misled the Congress about it, denied that all of this was going on while it was, in fact, going on.
And so there's a sort of a scandal here.
And I've noticed a number of people in the administration, in addition to Trump, talking about it.
Trump is, of course, so is Russell Vogt.
So is the Council of Economic Advisors.
I think I just saw my friend from AEI, Kevin Hassett, talking about this.
And there has been some, I would say, reports or rumors that Powell may, in fact, get out.
Trump certainly wants him to get out.
And Trump posted recently that, well, he didn't post, he said this in a recent interview.
He says, we should have the lowest interest rates on earth, and we don't.
He just refuses to do it.
And then Trump goes on to say, in reference to this building, I don't know what he knows about building, but talk about cost overrun.
In other words, Trump is saying, as a construction guy, I can tell you they're just wasting a lot of money.
And then Trump, in a very Trumpian fashion, says, We have no inflation.
I don't need 5,000 people working for Jerome Powell to tell him what he should say once a month.
Classic.
The Federal Reserve meets, and then people ask, well, what action have you taken?
And they go, well, we have taken no action.
Then they meet the next month.
Well, what action have you taken?
Well, we've taken no action.
So you've got, I think Trump is saying here, thousands of economists all advising you, producing all this paperwork for you to, in a sense, do nothing again.
And I think Trump's view is that because of low inflation, the country should have lower interest rates, which would quite likely kick off a boom in the stock market and indeed a boom in the economy.
Why?
Because for the simple reason that when you make money easier to borrow, companies can get more loans.
Loans are better terms.
They start new projects.
Projects that were previously considered economically unviable now become viable because the cost of the interest rate is lower.
But all of this, in a way, raises a question that goes beyond Powell and goes to the heart of the Federal Reserve itself.
Because here you've got Powell saying interest rates should be where they are now, 4.5%.
Trump is saying, no, they should be at 2%.
And has it ever occurred to you that this is a very strange way to hear people talk, right?
It's kind of like someone going around saying that the price of corn should be this, or the price of a cell phone should be that, or the price of a computer should be this.
The truth of it is, nobody gets to or shouldn't be dictating the prices of anything, right?
Isn't that why we have free markets?
Don't we have a free market system?
And isn't the interest rate something that should be set by the market?
Think of it this way.
In a village, you have 100 people.
Some of them want to borrow money.
Others want to lend money.
How is the terms of that lending and borrowing settled?
Well, people sit across a table and one guy says, I'll borrow money from you.
I'm willing to pay 5%.
And the other guy says, no, I actually want 10%.
And so maybe they settle on 7.5% and that becomes the interest rate.
It emerges through a market process of negotiation between borrowers and lenders.
But you notice that we don't have that system in America now.
The Fed sets the interest rate.
And if Trump wants a different interest rate, he has to sort of browbeat or bully the Fed or try to pressure Powell to leave and bring in somebody that he likes better who will give him a more favorable interest rate.
And so what I'm pointing to here is the anomaly, and I would go further, the pathology of a free market system having interest rates that are set by this independent agency called the Federal Reserve that is frankly accountable to nobody.
It's not accountable directly to Trump.
It's not accountable to the Congress.
It's not accountable really to the American people.
It's accountable only to itself.
And so it is in the quite literal meaning of the term, a kind of rogue agency that exists ultimately for its own benefit.
And I would argue also for the benefit of the banking system.
It sits on top of this banking system.
It is, in fact, the banker of last resort.
It is the bank for the banks.
And when the Federal Reserve sets interest rates, those rates then percolate through the banks and through the economy more generally.
The Federal Reserve, in that sense, is driving the levers of our economy.
And I think that our goal, our longer-term goal, is not to get rid of Powell, but to get rid of the Fed.
Now, there are people who will find that idea almost unthinkable.
If you turn on places like MSNBC or CNBC, I'm thinking more of the financial networks like CNBC or even Fox Business.
You have all these wide-eyed analysts who sit with eager anticipation.
What's the Fed going to do?
So we've become so habituated to the Federal Reserve has decided to raise interest rates half a point, drop them half a point, decided to do nothing.
It's almost like we are waiting for some oracle to speak out of the clouds and tell us how our economy should be organized.
This is actually a radical betrayal of free market principles, which are based upon the idea that decisions in a market system are made through the price signals sent by the market itself.
And those price signals are grossly distorted when you have a Federal Reserve deciding interest rates from on high.
So Trump wants Powell to go.
I think that's probably a good idea, but I'm taking no real position on that.
My real position is broader.
That is the Fed needs to go.
We need to start thinking about this is not on the immediate political horizon.
It's not going to happen tomorrow.
The Federal Reserve was put into place in 1913, so we've had it over 100 years.
It's existed under Democratic and Republican administrations.
In some ways, the Federal Reserve gives credence to this idea of a uniparty because it benefits both parties, and that's why neither party will seriously challenge not the identity of the guy running the Fed, but the Fed itself.
My position is not end the tenure of Jerome Powell so much as it is end the Fed.
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Guys, I'm always happy to welcome back to the podcast my friend Alex McFarland.
He is a youth religion and culture expert.
He's author of, gosh, I think 20 books.
He's heard live daily on 200 stations across the U.S. on American Family Radio Network.
He's also host of the Alex McFarland Show, and he's director of Worldview for Karis Bible College.
You can follow him on X at alexmacfarland, the website alexmacfarland.com.
Alex, welcome.
Thank you for joining me.
Some notable news out of the evangelical world.
The great evangelical pastor and preacher and author, John MacArthur, just passed away.
And I thought I might begin by just asking you to reflect on his impact and influence over the years and actually decades.
Oh, well, Dinesh, thank you for having me.
It's always a privilege to speak with you.
And yes, in the Christian world, the passing of John MacArthur is very notable.
I had the privilege 20 years ago of interviewing him.
And, you know, Dinesh, I got to say for decades, John MacArthur was kind of the face of exegetical verse-by-verse teaching.
He took a courageous stand for the authority of God's word.
And really, for pastors, teachers that are equal parts shepherd and scholar, John MacArthur was the role model.
And I've got to say, Dinesh, for those that like myself believe, like our founders did, that the government has no right to intrude into the affairs of the church, John MacArthur was absolutely courageous during the quarantines, and he operated his church and ministered to people.
He was persecuted legally and financially, but the guy was fearless.
And he, like we all should, he cared about serving God rather than man.
And may God bless the memory of John MacArthur.
You mentioned, Alex, the aspect of his fearlessness.
You probably saw that the IRS recently issued a clarification that there is no reason that pastors cannot talk about politics.
There's actually no reason that pastors cannot even make direct political endorsements if they feel so led.
They are not in any way breaking the law by doing that.
But do you think that there are quite a few pastors across the country who have been fearful of taking these sorts of steps because of either the government coming after them or maybe a different kind of fear, which is that you've got some people in the pews who might disagree and this might hurt you on the collection plate.
Talk about the need for pastors to be able to speak into the culture about issues that matter now.
Well, it's vitally important.
And Dinesh, as you mentioned that, yes, last week the IRS kind of rolled back and clarified their position that clergy can speak freely about political issues.
In 1954, there was something that came to be known as the Johnson Amendment that really was an attempt to silence the pulpits, at least on political issues.
And Dinesh, you and I have never talked about this, but twice I've been audited by the IRS.
And look, I don't have the platform that so many others have, but once during Obama's second term and during Biden's term, I was audited.
And I mean thoroughly audited.
My wife and I are very transparent, but I'm an ordained minister performing sacerdotal duties on a weekly basis.
But when I was audited, the IRS under Biden went so far as to ask, they said, you went to California twice in one week.
Why?
Now, I'm on the road speaking all the time like you.
You know what I said?
Because I had been this IRS audit of my personal finances Drug on a year.
And I do speak very freely and very biblically about moral, social, and political issues.
And they said, you went to California twice in one week.
Why?
I said, to take delivery of a big load of none of your business.
Because the government has no right to intrude into the ministry and the proclamation of God's word.
I just hope that my fellow ministers will have the boldness, you know, not to bludgeon or, you know, be a polemicist to bully people, but we must proclaim truth.
And as you know, the American Revolution largely went forward because of the preaching of the colonial ministers.
In fact, the British fired on the church at Lexington, the shot heard around the world, because so many people were conscripted into Washington's Continental Army in the churches.
And really, my friend, the late Chuck Coulson, he would often say that the church is to be the conscience of the culture.
And so I hope more ministers will give their parishioners what, thus saith the Lord.
Dinesh, back in February, I interviewed George Barna, the Barna Research Group.
And George Barna says this.
This is very, I think, partly why we're where we are.
74 to 80% of parishioners want their clergy, their priest, their minister to speak about moral, social, political issues from a biblical perspective.
Okay, 75 to 80% of the parishioners want their minister to give forth what saith the Lord.
But yet only three to nine percent, at most nine percent of clergy, as far as the data shows, ever in the pulpit speak about moral, social, and political issues.
And so really our nation, our beloved America, that is really kind of in a moral freefall, we need the 500,000 ordained clergy that speak into the lives of 120 million citizens a week.
I mean, that's a third of the country.
We need the ministers to have the courage, realize their rights, and to speak forth truth on all of these salient issues of our day.
I mean, what you're saying, Alex, is that we have, in a sense, as Christians on our side, a huge megaphone that is largely silent, right?
The left uses its megaphones.
They've got a megaphone called academia.
They're using it.
They've got a megaphone called the media.
They're using it.
They've got a megaphone called public NPR and PBS.
They're using it, at least until we take away that megaphone.
They've got the music industry to a large degree.
So the left uses their megaphones.
We don't have as many megaphones, but one of them is, in fact, this vast network of churches.
And I think what you're saying is it's all the more tragic that the pastors who have the opportunity to do it, and you've got people who want to hear it, but nevertheless, they hold back.
Well, let's apply our principle of biblical boldness to a very interesting phenomenon that's emerged in New York, which is the candidate, Zoran Mamdani, who is a Muslim, who appears to be a sort of a, I don't know if you'd call him an identity politics Muslim, an Islamist.
At the same time, he is explicitly, by his own admission, a socialist.
Now, some people have called him a communist.
I think I've never heard him describe himself that way.
But let's apply a kind of lens to Mamdani.
What is your reading on this phenomenon of Zoran Mamdani having a very good chance and probably the favorite right now to become the next mayor of New York?
Well, it's shocking, Dinesh.
It really is.
And I got to tell you, for the Democrat Party, the fact that avowed socialists are getting such traction, especially among younger voters, I mean, really, if the Democrat Party has any desire whatsoever to come back to mainstream American politics,
they really need to see what they can do to ensure that he does not become the mayor of the third largest economy in America.
All right.
Just think about this.
An avowed socialist, and he says that there should be no billionaires.
Well, there are right now in metropolitan NYC, there are 103 billionaires, as far as we know, right?
Okay, the New York economy, I'm talking Metro New York, not New York State, just the greater metropolitan Manhattan and the boroughs, is somewhere between 2.1 and 2.6 trillion.
That makes it the 13th largest economy in the world.
The New York City economy is larger than the economy of Canada or France.
Many nations, the economy of Canada is 1.6, I'm sorry, 1.7 trillion, and NYC is 2.1 to 2.6 trillion.
And really, this is a guy that says there should be Medicare for all.
All student loans should be forgiven.
There should be housing.
And he has not rolled back his statement on record to the Democrat Socialists of America.
Mamdani said that the U.S. government must quote, and I quote, seize the means of production.
Well, the 2 trillion plus economy of NYC was not built on socialism or government control of market and manufacturing.
It was built on entrepreneurialism and a free market economy and capitalism.
May I say one other thing, Dinesh?
And by the way, thank you for allowing me to be on with you.
And before time runs out, I have to say I've spent my life trying to learn and grow.
I've listened to my share of speakers and I've read my share of books in the pursuit of two post-grad degrees.
And you are, Dinesh, and this is not puffery or embellishment.
You, Dinesh D'Souza, are one of the most important public intellectuals of our lifetime.
And to even converse with you is a profound honor, my friend.
Very nice of you to say, Alex.
But yeah, keep going.
You were talking about Mamdani, and I think you were talking about how ironic it is that in the very epicenter of capitalism, namely New York City, you know, that's the center of Wall Street.
If you had to identify, New York seems to have replaced London as the most important center of capitalism in the 20th century and continues to this day.
So having that place run by a socialist, wow, sends a message.
Well, it is.
And one unfortunate reality is there are a couple of generations of young people that do not know about nor remember 9-11.
Dinesh, 24 hours after 9-11, I was literally in the rubble of ground zero.
The Billy Graham Ministry, Samaritans Purse, I had been on their radio shows.
They asked me to go to New York City.
So the evening of 9-11, 2001, I was on a bus headed to New York City.
By sunrise, we were at ground zero.
And for two weeks, the immediate two weeks after 9-11, I was among a group of ministers that the Billy Graham ministry had taken to New York City.
And so many stories I could tell.
But here's the thing.
A Muslim socialist, mayor of New York, I'm like, really?
Why don't we go spit on the Ground Zero Memorial?
Because, look, we have freedom of religious conviction, freedom of expression.
But America was founded on the natural law moral code, sometimes called Judeo-Christian morality.
And Islam is absolutely incompatible with the West, certainly incompatible with Judaism and Christianity.
And I'm thinking, of all the cities, NYC bore the brunt of 9-11.
And I remember meeting with Mayor Giuliani in the aftermath of 9-11.
I spoke at Ladder Company 12.
I was at the FEMA headquarters there.
I remember Dinesh weeping at the armory.
That was kind of a place where people who had lost loved ones in the trade towers would meet.
I prayed with hundreds and hundreds of people.
The Billy Graham Ministry sent me to speak at Wall Street the day that it reopened after 9-11.
I was there in front of hundreds of people, and you could have heard a pin drop.
And Dinesh, it was my great honor at Wall Street to preach the gospel to the brokers who were coming back for day one of trading after 9-11.
And I'm thinking, come on, New York, a Muslim, Muslim, I wish them no ill.
God bless all human beings.
But I think it's especially painful to think of New York City potentially being under a mayor whose worldview was the cause of 3,000 New Yorkers dying.
Wow, very interesting, Alex.
I mean, and not to mention a point that we could discuss, but we won't have time to today, which is that also New York is to a large degree a Jewish city, right?
It's one of the largest Jewish populations outside of Israel.
And so to have somebody, and again, I would go beyond, it's not just that he's a Muslim, but he is a Muslim who subscribes to the kind of identity politics that sees Israel as the little Satan.
He subscribes to this idea that the Palestinians are in the right and Israel doesn't, you know, from the river to the sea, the demonstrators at Columbia, I mean, he is of that ilk.
And I think what you're saying is it's a particularly bitter pill to swallow if you're a Jew in New York City.
Now, ironically, there is probably not a whole lot, but there are some left-wing Jews in New York who actually want Mamdani, if you can believe it.
I know.
It is really ironic.
And Dinesh, I've got so many Jewish friends, and my wife and I have made a trip to Israel, and I'll be going back in March.
I may go to Israel in October as well.
And Mamdani, as far as we know, does not recognize Israel's right to exist.
And I find it just inexplicably ironic that Jewish Americans would vote for an anti-Semite.
Guys, I've been talking to Dr. Alex McFarland, radio host, church director.
Follow him on X at AlexMcFarland, the website alexmcfarland.com.
Alex, hey, great to have you on.
As always, and let's do it again.
Thank you, my friend.
Blessings.
I'm discussing my book, Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
And I hope you're seeing that this is not merely a look back at an earlier era.
It is interesting.
Many of us came of age in this era.
Many of you will have Lived through it, so it is interesting to recall it and look at it with some perspective of hindsight.
But I'm also trying to do more than that, and that is to illuminate some of the issues that we're dealing with as a country now and see if we can learn some things from the example of the Reagan era.
The chapter I'm going to focus on is called Making the World Safe for Democracy.
But it could also be called Making the World Safe for Liberty.
And before I even jump into the chapter, I want to frame a certain dilemma that could be called a libertarian dilemma.
Now, most libertarians are against foreign intervention.
They're against foreign involvement.
They want to keep it at home for the most part.
They don't mind engaging in diplomacy or talks.
But their idea is that we should not deploy resources, tools like foreign aid, certainly not military force, but not even supplies, military supplies to other countries, even if, and this is the libertarian dilemma, even if those countries are trying to make their way from some form of autocracy or tyranny toward freedom.
So the question I want to ask is why wouldn't a libertarian who believes in freedom, and presumably freedom here is meant in the sense of all men are created equal, all men aspiring to certain types of universal rights, life, notice the second one is liberty, which is a kind of synonym for freedom.
So why would we be concerned about freedom only at home and not everywhere?
Apply this logic to any other virtue.
I like honesty.
And so I'm going to demand honesty, let's say, of myself, and I'm going to demand honesty of my family.
But why wouldn't I want other people to be honest as well?
Why would I say honesty stops with my family?
Whether other people are honest or dishonest is no concern of mine.
And so similarly, if we think freedom is good for human beings, and by freedom here, I mean freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom of assembly, obviously freedom to vote, the kind of basic freedoms, economic freedoms, political freedoms, civil freedoms enumerated in the Constitution and really in the Bill of Rights.
Why wouldn't we want that for other people too?
Now, the libertarian could say, well, that's because it's very costly.
And here you can be right, because we all have limited resources.
We have limited resources in our own lives.
Countries have limited resources as well.
And so there's always some limit to the price you're willing to pay.
I'd like to have this result, but I'm not willing to pay a million dollars for it.
I might be willing to pay $10,000 for it.
I'd certainly be willing to pay 50 cents.
So even though these numbers I'm giving you are somewhat facetious, you understand the principle involved.
It may be that in country A, we could have freedom, but it's going to involve an expenditure of, let's say, lives.
And we go, that's not worth it.
We don't want to give up even one American life.
But it could be that in country B, we can have freedom, and it's not involving any American lives, but we have to send them some ammunitions to help the forces of freedom to prevail.
So then the question becomes, is that too costly?
Are we willing to make that kind of a sacrifice, a modest sacrifice, to achieve a result that could pay off in all kinds of ways, including, by the way, having allies that we can deal peacefully with and trade with, allies that don't have designs on our ultimate destruction, and so on.
So I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that there are two types of libertarianism, the hands-off type, which is vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy.
Hey, you only want freedom for yourself.
You don't believe in freedom as a principle.
It's kind of like the people who say, I want free speech for myself, but I'm happy to suppress the free speech of other people, or I am indifferent to it.
I don't care if you have free speech or not.
And we rightly, I think, deplore this type of hypocrisy.
For example, when it comes from the liberals, when they say things like, we like tolerance, but tolerance for us.
We have no intention of tolerating you.
We like free speech, and when our free speech is suppressed, we go nuts, but we're happy to suppress yours.
So with the libertarian, you have this hands-off libertarianism.
Let's call it libertarianism A. And then you have a libertarianism that says, and this would be closer to my own, that I prefer freedom all over the place.
I realize that I might only be able to secure my own or that of my own community or my own country.
And so there are pragmatic limits to what can be done.
But if I can achieve freedom beyond my own precinct, beyond my own borders, at a reasonable cost or at no cost at all, or at a nominal cost, I'd be willing to consider it.
This is the libertarianism of Reagan.
And I would argue this is also the libertarianism of Trump.
This is really what Trump had in mind when he said, hey, you want to borrow two of America's B-2 bombers overnight to drop a bunch of bombs on the Iranian nuclear facilities?
Well, that is an excellent use of resources.
It'll provide long-term gains, not just for Israel, but for the United States.
And so let's do it.
We'll see with Reagan, similarly a decision to deploy not troops but resources to multiple countries in order to help them secure freedom but also to help them push back the Soviet Empire.
And so this is the meaning of the title, Making the World Safe for Democracy.
The big threat to democracy is coming from the Soviet Empire.
The key word here being not just Soviet, which is a reference to the kind of communism of the Soviet, the Soviet, the word Soviet means a kind of village.
So village communism, supposedly communism at the local level, even though in reality it was a centralized form of government run by a succession of Soviet, not just individual despots, they did have that, but committees.
The Politburo ultimately was a kind of communist gang that ran the country.
All right.
So let's dive into the chapter here.
In addition to nuclear intimidation, a second challenge facing Reagan in his first term was the expansion of Soviet influence around the world.
And the point I make here is that while the United States was retreating from Asia, Africa, Latin America, by the way, the American retreat was in some ways a continuation of a great colonial retreat that had begun with the British and the French from their empires around the world.
If you look at the early part of the 20th century, you have Great Britain pulling away from places like South Africa.
India got its independence in 1947.
The Soviet Union, I'm sorry, the French pulled out of Vietnam after the Bien Phu disaster in the mid-1950s.
So the United States kind of took the place of the French in Vietnam.
And so when you look at the U.S. retreat in Vietnam, in some ways it was like a replay of what the French had already done 20 years earlier.
But the pattern is clear.
The West is pulling back, and the Soviet Union is moving forward.
When I was in Washington, D.C., one of the standing jokes of the conservatives, this is one of those black humor type of jokes because it's a joke tinged with a little bit of bitterness and irony.
It was called lose a country, gain a restaurant.
And at first, when I heard this, I thought this was just some sort of witty saying, except that when I would check out the different neighborhoods in Washington, places like Georgetown or the Capitol Hill area or Adams-Morgan, I would see these restaurants popping up.
And if you look at the restaurants, they were basically from countries that had fallen into the Soviet orbit.
So Vietnamese restaurants, no surprise.
And then you would see Cambodian restaurants, Ethiopian restaurants.
And guess what?
These are three countries that had, in a sense, pulled away or collapsed.
The West had lost its influence there, and they had now fallen into either the Chinese orbit or the Soviet orbit.
And as you know, the Soviet Union was at the time occupying Afghanistan.
And clearly, a new type of leader was needed.
The Jimmy Carter approach had failed miserably.
When I pick it up tomorrow, I'll go into the way in which Carter, who had come in on a kind of human rights platform, consistently made human rights worse.
And this itself is an interesting phenomenon to study.
How is it possible that you come in, you're dedicated to improving human rights around the world?
I think Carter was sincere about it, but you consistently make it worse.
I want to show you how that happens.
And it happened in multiple places around the world.
So this is the problem that Reagan inherited and had to do something about.
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