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July 17, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
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END THE FED Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1127
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Coming up, I'll discuss some of the fallout over the Epstein issue and particularly the destructive effect that it's having on advancing at this point the Trump agenda.
I'll discuss whether President Trump is going to fire Fed Chairman Jerome Powell and what that means for the market.
Also discuss the defunding of PBS and NPR, which we should all be celebrating.
And Congressman Marlon Stutzman of Indiana joins me.
We're going to talk about the Big Beautiful bill.
We're going to also talk about some new legislation concerning the so-called Genius Act and also an attempt at comprehensive immigration reform.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
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The fallout over Jeffrey Epstein and the Epstein files continues, and this is becoming a rather ugly scene both between Trump on the one hand and some of these MAGA influencers on the other.
I want to focus not so much on what might be in the files or the reasons for not divulging these files or disclosing any list or lists that might exist.
I want to focus on the effect, the effect of this unfortunate fracas, because I think it is a bad effect.
It is playing into the hands of the Democrats.
In fact, it's giving the Democrats a lifeline where they don't have one right now.
And so for the MAGA critics of Trump, however right you are, however, whatever the merits of your position, the consequence of what you're doing is to create division, to undermine Trump, to hurt MAGA in the end, to stymie, if not halt, an agenda that has been moving forward.
So you have to think about whether this is really somehow worth it.
What do you hope to achieve?
Are you trying to create some MAGA outside of MAGA, some non-Trumpian MAGA that you think is going to do better than what we have now?
This, it seems to me, is very delusional, very low IQ.
And as I'm going to argue, this is something the Democrats never do.
They never blow up their own side or even attempt to blow up their own side.
They've got a lot of idiots, extremists, kooks in their camp, but somehow their kooks understand the way the game is played.
Their kooks understand that there is a battle going on, and it's a battle for the future, really for the existence of the country.
The country itself is hanging in the balance.
There are really only two sides in the battle.
So it's kind of similar to the people who, right in the middle of the Civil War, were saying things like, you know, General Grant is a drunk.
General Grant bankrupted his family's store.
General Grant uses obscenities.
We don't like the way that he fights.
We demand that they give us an accounting.
And Lincoln's point is, we kind of have to win the Civil War.
We can do some auditing post-mortems later.
But we are in the middle of a highly precarious fight.
The outcome could go either way.
And this kind of navel-gazing, squabbling nonsense.
Imagine, for example, if you had some Republican critique of Reagan that was valid.
Let's take a Republican critique about Reagan, for example, on the grounds that he had suspended habeas corpus.
So the libertarians of the 1860s are like, Reagan should not have done that.
Reagan needs to explain himself.
And Reagan's like, I'm sorry, Lincoln needs to explain himself.
And Lincoln's like, I'm not explaining myself.
We are in the middle of a big fight.
I'm just going to press on.
And then they go, well, let's work to undermine you.
Let's try to create another Republican party.
Maybe we can create a civil movement that is based around the abolitionists.
All of this would, again, be hysterical, nonsensical, delusional, dumb, would never have worked.
If anything, would have undermined the war effort.
And while we're not in a civil war of the same kind, certainly not, we are in a battle for the fate, and I would say to some degree, the soul of the country.
Now, you can see people like Ted Liu, but many others on the Democratic side, all the never-Trumpers, they're just exulting in this.
They are relishing in it.
It gives them A lifeline.
They are hoping to drive a wedge basically between MAGA, or not all of MA, but a part of MAGA and Reagan.
I'm sorry, and Trump.
And look, I mean, let's just look at what's happening in the country over the past seven months.
We've sealed a border.
A deportation program, the largest in our country's history, has just been funded.
Inflation has been not stopped entirely, but stunted in its tracks.
Energy production has been unleashed.
The Trump tax cuts are now consolidated and permanent.
We're fighting with these rogue and runaway judges and winning victories one after the other at the Supreme Court.
There are strong efforts to go after sanctuary cities and end the crime epidemic in our cities.
We're modernizing our military.
Trump is protecting the dollar as the world's reserve currency.
We've canceled a lot of environmental nonsense, including the electric vehicle mandate.
Trump is going after places like Harvard.
We just defunded NPR and PBS.
I'll talk about that in a minute.
We are going after these Hamas radicals who have taken over our campuses.
So do you want all of this to like grind to a halt because of some files that really go back to like 2005?
I mean, think about it.
Trump is not president then.
It's in fact a decade before he's first elected.
This is political, well, idiocracy, right?
To refer to that film where essentially you have a society run by idiots.
Again, I'm not talking now about the merits of any of this.
I'm not talking about, I'm fully aware of the fact I would like to see the Epstein list and the Epstein files.
And I know that there are corporations.
Was it JPMorgan that made a big payout to Epstein victims?
Why would they do that if there weren't people at JPMorgan who was somehow involved with the case, involved with these victims?
Why would you pay people otherwise?
Is it just a shakedown that you ended up paying out for?
It was a fairly substantial payout.
So I'm not discussing the merits of the Epstein case here.
What I am talking about are the consequences.
Now, I was intrigued when Harry Enton, the pollster at CNN, did a segment yesterday where he was reporting on a new CNN poll.
And I'm quoting him.
This one surprised me.
You might think his approval ratings were going down with Republicans.
If anything, they're going up.
And he goes on to say, Trump's approval rating has gone up since the Epstein saga started.
He is at the apex or close to it in terms of his popularity.
Republicans who thought the top issue was Epstein, no.
The number of Republicans who said that this was a top issue for them, 1%.
1%.
Very reassuring.
I think it's important because when people talk about the MAGA base, you know, you've got some people just absolutely full of themselves and they think, we're the base.
We made Trump.
No, you didn't make Trump.
You were one vote out of his 75 million.
It's probably more accurate to say that he made you in the sense that there would be no MAGA if it wasn't really for Trump.
So I realize there has to be MAGA beyond Trump, but the way to get to MAGA beyond Trump is not around Trump, but through Trump.
And so I'm trying to keep my eye on the longer-term fate of the movement and of the country.
And it's worth noting that the base for Trump is not influencers on X. It's not these people, even if they've got large followings and they've got big TikTok accounts.
Look, the base of Trump is the mainstream of the Republican Party.
How do we know this?
Well, Trump, in order to get elected or re-elected, has to get to 51%.
He gets about 45% by doing nothing.
In other words, McCain got that 45%.
Romney did.
Bob Dole did before him.
This is the 45% that is the solid base of the Republican Party.
Now, I realize that 45% doesn't give you the presidency.
You need another six.
And so the new faces in MAGA, the Independents, the blacks who voted Democratic, that then switched over, some of the Occupy Wall Street guys that came over, the working class guys who came over.
Yeah, these are additions to the Republican base.
They're not the Republican base.
The Republican base is made up of families, evangelical Christians.
It's made up of entrepreneurs.
It's made up of veterans and patriots and people attached in some ways to the police and the firefighters and the military.
It's made up, it is a coalition, but it's a coalition that was formed going back to the 70s and 80s.
It's essentially a form of the Reagan coalition.
And again, I'm not denying the changes to that coalition, but I am trying to focus on where the mainstream of that coalition is.
And the mainstream of that coalition is the base of the GOP.
And it's not some, you know, it's not some Hispanic guy in New Mexico who voted for the first time for Trump.
That guy helps.
He adds to our numbers.
He helps us get to the finishing line.
But that is not the Republican base.
Now, let's move on to some important issues that are getting a little sidelined by Epstein, but I don't want to leave them unattended.
Trump has said recently he's thinking of firing Jerome Powell, the CEO, well, not the CEO, the chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Now, can Trump fire Jerome Powell?
Yes, but under certain conditions.
You cannot just remove a Fed chair just for being a Fed chair because you don't Like him because you don't like his monetary policies because you think that interest rates are too high, which Trump does think.
He doesn't like the monetary policy, he doesn't like the interest rate.
And probably that is his main reason for wanting to get rid of Powell, but he can't do it for that reason.
He needs another reason.
He has another reason.
And that is this scandalous palatial Versailles-style complex being built by the Fed for a giant amount of money, somewhere between $2.5 and $3 billion.
It is a billion dollars or around a billion dollars over cost, over the projected cost of it.
And Powell went before Congress and made all these statements, basically saying, there's no VIP dining room, false.
There's no new marble, false.
There are no special elevators, false.
There are no new water features, false.
There are no beehives, false.
There are no roof terrace gardens, false.
Well, this is called, or it would seem to be, lying to Congress.
And this by itself creates a reason, maybe a pretext, if you want to call it, to unload Powell.
And so it might happen.
I think Trump is wavering on it.
I don't think he's decided to do it.
I saw that he was asked about it in a different context, and he said something like, well, we're thinking about it.
Let's see.
I mean, I think Trump realizes that this would, in fact, cause a stir, a convulsion in the market, because what the markets like most of all, it's not that the markets love Jerome Powell, but the markets like stability.
They like an even keel.
They don't like the water to be churning.
And the water would churn if Trump reached into what is supposed to be an independent agency.
Now, all this independence is artificial.
Powell is, in fact, a creature of the Democratic Party.
He was actually trying to help Kamala Harris win the election.
So I think Trump recognizes what he's dealing with here.
And the non-partisanship of the Fed is somewhat fictional.
But for all that, I think Trump's, the other side of the argument is Trump's thinking to himself, listen, this guy has got like six months, little over six months left in his term.
Why don't we leave it?
We've got plenty of time, even before the midterms, to bring in somebody new.
And that would, in fact, change the economic climate.
I think Trump's expectation is if interest rates were closer to 2% rather than 4.5%, the economy would really start to roar.
And of course, that has benefits for lots of people in terms of jobs, in terms of corporate profits.
It would boost the Dow and the markets.
And it would also boost the GOP chances in the midterms.
All right.
Let's talk about the rescissions package.
By rescission, we mean pullback.
This is the Senate voting on a rescissions package to have $9 billion of Doge savings.
Very good thing.
Kind of a final, I would say modest, but nevertheless, a kind of doffing of the hat to Elon Musk, because without Elon Musk, this would not have happened.
And an additional $1 billion of cuts to NPR and PBS, basically defunding NPR and PBS.
And this, I think, is a smaller amount of money compared to the $9 billion, but it's huge because we have been trying to do this for two decades, more than two decades, without success.
And why is it that we failed in the past?
Well, the answer is really simple.
Basically, we get subjected to the dog and pony show of these public stations.
And the Republicans, or enough Republicans, fall for it that they join the Democrats in upholding funding for these groups.
This is what I call the cute panda routine.
You've got a left-wing organization that's left-wing to the core, left-wing across the board, but they've got one conservative thing or one thing that conservatives would like.
It could be like, well, recently Ken Burns, the documentary filmmaker, highly overrated documentary filmmaker, by the way, I say as someone who's in that field.
Anyway, Ken Burns was like, well, you remember that PBS had for many decades a show with William F. Buckley.
Well, this is Firing Line.
I've been on Firing Line.
I think Firing Line existed from like the mid 70s to like the mid 90s.
So he's the best example of a conservative show that Ken Byrne can give us is a show that was discontinued like 30 years ago.
And this shows you really how lopsided PBS is.
And the same thing, you know, NPR is, if anything, even worse.
NPR used to be highly left-wing, but in the Reagan era, even I was invited to come on NPR.
I was on their shows like all things considered, fresh air.
But I haven't done that in 25 years.
Why?
Because essentially NPR has moved further to the left and become essentially a place like the universities have where conservative views are shut out.
I just saw Catherine Marr, the CEO of NPR, talking a bunch of nonsense about how with the cutting of this funding, like rural stations, people are not going to get weather alerts.
And I'm thinking to myself, weather alerts?
Who gets weather alerts from NPR?
I mean, you can't get weather alerts from NPR.
First of all, now there are innumerable apps where you can get weather alerts.
You can obviously get weather alerts from the weather channel.
But if you try to get a weather alert on NPR, let's just say I go to NPR.
Wait, there's a storm brewing.
It's coming my way.
Let's say in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
I go on NPR.
Here's what you're likely to get.
On NPR today, we are going to be interviewing a 100-year-old Native American healer who's going to recall the great tornado of 1943.
This is a typical NPR show.
It's weird.
It's freaky.
It's woke.
It has nothing to do with my life or yours.
It is ultimately Nothing more than a projection of NPR's twisted identity politics.
And so it's a really good thing that we've cut these people off at the knees.
They're a menace to society.
We won't be missing them at all.
Of course, they're going to continue in their own way, but they'll continue without your tax money or mine.
Talk briefly about Coca-Cola.
Coca-Cola is something that is, well, Debbie and I can testify something that Donald Trump likes to drink.
And this may be the reason why Trump recently made a phone call to the CEO of Coke and said to him, this is very much, this is not actually a personal type of favor, but I think Trump is provoked to do it because he himself drinks Coke and Diet Coke and drinks it, by the way, out of the kind of original old-style bottles, as I recall.
But Trump tells the CEO of Coke, you got to stop using this high fructose corn sugar in Coke to sweeten the drink.
You need to use real cane sugar.
And the CEO of Coke says, okay.
So apparently, Coke is going to be making a transition to using real cane sugar instead of the bad stuff.
And I think this is something that RFK Jr. is going to be happy about.
And I think Trump, for Trump, this is not, as I say, it's not just about the Coke.
It's creating ultimately a movement in our society, in the food industry, away from the foods that produce inflammation.
They're really bad for you.
They're cheaper, which is why the food industry has pushed for them and why the food industry, using its tremendous economic and lobbying power, has not only captured the bureaucrats at the FDA,
the Food and Drug Administration, but they've also captured the votes of a number of congressmen and senators, essentially getting them to allow this stuff to continue, allow the food industry to abuse the American people and make bigger profits for itself.
This is part of the so-called Maha or the Make America Healthy Again movement.
It's making real headway now around the country, and may it continue to spread and to grow.
The Trump administration has their sleeves rolled up.
They're streamlining a bunch of monumental moves right now.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome back to the podcast Representative Marlon Stutzman.
He is Congressman for Indiana District 3.
In fact, he's in his fourth term in Congress.
Before that, he was a farmer and entrepreneur.
By the way, you can follow him on X at RepStutsman.
The website is Stutzman.house.gov.
Congressman Stutzman, thank you for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
Let me start by asking you about something I talked about earlier in the podcast, and I don't necessarily need to get into it, but I wanted to ask you if this big kind of social media and media kerfuffle over Epstein and the Epstein files, is that throwing a wrench into the workings of Congress, into the legislative process?
Or is it just noise out there and Congress is able to march ahead?
How is it affecting your work and the work of your colleagues?
Yeah, Dinesh, great to be with you again.
And, you know, we've been having conversations about the ERC files here in Color amongst other members of Congress.
And I think, you know, at the root of it, what it really comes down to, Dinesh, is it's about trust.
And what do we believe is our government giving the answers to us as American people?
And, you know, we saw that under the Biden administration where they hid things from the American people.
I mean, the auto-pen.
I mean, this is just blatantly disregarding the process and what the president's powers really do mean.
And so I think at this case, Jared with the Epstein files, we all suspected and suspect, and we keep finding little bits and leases of information as time rolls a lot.
But I think it's important for all of us as Americans to just have as much truth that can possibly be given to us.
I know there's a judicial process.
I know there's important to protect victims, but at the same time, this man committed suicide in a federal prison.
And there's just so many questions about it that I believe there should be some answers even.
And that will help build trust in what our government is doing.
All right.
Let's talk about some of the big things that are up in front of Congress right now.
First of all, there was the success over the Big Beautiful bill.
It was difficult to get it through, very narrow majority in Congress.
So kudos to you and your colleagues for hanging together, working it out.
And it looks like this is going to be a massive signature piece of legislation that has a long-term impact for the country.
Recently, I just read that there was a new kind of immigration reform bill that's being put forward.
I think Congressman Maria Salazar of Florida is behind it, a couple of other people.
And I don't know enough about the bill just yet.
In fact, I just found out about it.
I saw a few people huffing and puffing about it, saying it's got some bad elements in it.
But you know more about it.
Tell us about this new bill.
I mean, obviously, this is an issue where a lot of us would like to see some comprehensive reform, but it has to be comprehensive reform of the right kind.
Does this bill sort of fit the bill or is it a misfire?
Well, so I appreciate the question because I believe that, you know, first off, President Trump has been the strongest leader on immigration that we've ever had.
You know, I mean, go back several presidents, and we've never had a strong leader on this issue.
And for many years, we've seen people come across our border, on the southern border, freely without any regard for the law and any regard for our border patrol.
And now President Trump has come in.
And I'd always said as a member of Congress, in fact, one of my sayings is that we have to have a high wall, but a white giddies.
We have to know who's coming into this country.
We need to know who is here.
And after the Biden administration allow for millions and millions of people to come across the border, we don't know who's here.
And so I believe, and I'll always say that if we're ever going to deal with people inside the country, you have to finish the wall.
You have to secure the border.
And President Trump has done that, is doing that.
And now, you know, President Trump and the administration has announced that there have been zero illegal crossings over the past several months.
And so now that we've done that, I want to know who's here and who shouldn't be here.
And, you know, there's so many different estimates on how many people are here illegally, undocumented, whether it's a visa over stay or whether they came across the border illegally.
We don't know.
And so my belief is that you have to have a border that's controlled, a border that's secure and sealed.
Now, what do we do with those who are here illegally?
And if you're a criminal, this administration is coming after you.
And rightly so, if there is bad actors out there, you should be deported.
If you can incorporate in this bill, anybody that has not entered before December 31st of 2020, they will not be ineligible for any sort of legal documentation.
This bill does not allow for citizenship.
I don't believe that we should ever allow someone 15 year old to have a path or to citizenship.
I don't support it.
But so this is a way to identify people.
For example, I know of Yoma people who came across with their parents when they were very young.
That was not a decision that they made.
Their parents made that decision.
They fell under the DACA status.
And so there's about 500,000 people in the country who fallen or dot.
There's about another 2 million more that would be eligible for that, but they haven't raised their hand.
And again, I think that what we need to focus on is making sure we know who's here and are they here for nefarious reasons or haven't they been here for 20 years and don't know how to leave?
Because I've seen that instance happen as well, that there are people whose visas ran out and they never went through the proper channels to try to leave the country because if they leave and caught, then they're criminal, they're processed, and then they're banned from the country for 10 years.
So our immigration system has failed the American people.
I believe the federal government has failed the American people by not controlling the border and by having a wall, which is long overdue.
And so this bill fines those who raise their hand, were here illegally.
It fines them $7,000.
They're allowed to stay here legally with that fine in place.
They have to pay $1,000 over seven years.
They're allowed to work.
They're allowed to stay with documentation.
But if they've afraid of law, they're going to be deported.
And if you don't raise your hand and you're caught, you would be deported as well.
So this is a very difficult circumstance in the federal government's put us in because if there's 10 million people who are seeing already that self-deportation is not working, there's already a program in place to pay $1,000 if someone self-deports where they're planning to get back home.
If everybody was following that and doing that, we wouldn't have a problem.
But I believe that there's going to continue to be an issue of people who are here illegally and undocumented.
I also want to say this to Dinesh, I don't believe that we should have let the federal government do a round them up and shook them out.
I don't want to see the federal agents busting through yours.
If I was just in a meeting today where federal agents busted through the doors of an innocent person who they're charging with, and he is just asking for them to give him a charge of something.
And I don't want the federal government's agents to be targeting into the homes of legal people who are here as citizens, much less that, you know, we want to make sure that our country is safe and know who's actually here.
What would you say to someone who said, I mean, my wife and I are both legal immigrants.
We're very sympathetic to the idea of the country being open to people who come here for opportunity.
We also recognize, of course, that the country has its own needs and interests.
It needs certain type of workers.
It needs certain type of talent in certain fields and so on.
I think what really frustrates me, though, is that you've had this, I think, very cynical and opportunistic Biden policy that has let in millions of people into the country.
And so to simply say, well, you know what, they're already here.
Some of them are criminals.
We'll send the criminals back.
But presumably the majority are not criminals.
And yet they did come here illegally.
And they were, in a sense, you could almost say imported to perhaps change the political configuration of the country or tip the balance in the favor of the Democrats.
I mean, what can be done?
I'm not worried right now about someone who came in 1994, but I'm more worried about someone who came in the last four years.
Shouldn't there be some kind of a systematic way to eject those people and try to not merely hold the line, but reverse the bad things that were done under Biden?
Right.
No, no, that's wicked.
This bill does not allow for anyone who came here under the Biden administration to say they would all be subject to deportation.
It would only be people who can prove that they were here before the Biden administration took office.
And so, and because we know that there were federal funds, I believe it were federal funds that were given to agencies and nonprofit organizations to bring people to the United States.
Those people would be deported.
This bill does not allow for anyone who came during the Biden administration to stay here.
They wouldn't still be subject to deportation.
It would be, for example, the farms that I have in my district.
There are people that came here over a room basis.
And, you know, in fact, we just ran into this the other day.
There was a signature by the farmer who was supposed to sign off on some documentation that was missed.
And one of the people that has worked for them for 20 years all of a sudden doesn't have the proper pay to work and is subject to deportation.
You know, that farmer could sponsor that person.
That's the other thing that I wouldn't, it's not in the bill, but I want to offer amendment that would require a sponsorship of a person who has been here for many years.
So, you know, it's hard to just say, you know, there's so many different circumstances.
There's so many unique circumstances for individuals that I think once we all sit down and look at those reasonable people and say, okay, we understand why that person should have the right.
But yeah, the main priority and the main principles here are they have to be here before December of 2020.
So they could not, you know, anybody after 2021 during the Biden administration, they would not have this opportunity.
And also they would never be allowed citizenship as well, because I think that's what the Democrats always want and expect is that they're going to be made citizens so they could vote.
I don't believe they should ever have the right to vote if they came here legally and left their visa around or really came across the word illegally.
The other piece of legislation that is in front of Congress right now is the Genius Act, so-called, which appears to cover crypto stable coins.
Now, this may be an area where I frankly have to say, even some of my listeners and viewers are politically pretty savvy, but they might not know what's this all about.
Can you give a summary of what this Genius Act is?
And what is the law attempting to accomplish here?
So we're tackling two very tough issues today.
The world is moving forward.
And that's where cryptocurrency, I believe, is going to change bigger parts of the way commerce is done.
And in good ways, but also there are bad actors out there.
Just like an immigration, there are people that are going to use it for good purposes.
And there's also going to be people that use it for bad purposes.
And that's what we have been wrestling with.
In fact, in 2014, we had our first hearing on cryptocurrency at Congress.
And I remember thinking, this is never going to fly.
This is never going to stick around.
Here we are.
And Bitcoin is now around $114,000.
And what we're trying to accomplish is, first of all, we don't want the federal government involved.
In fact, you have a bill on the floor today that bans any sort of digital currency sponsored by the federal government.
So you have Bitcoin, you have Ethereum, you have XRP, you got all these others.
But the concern also is that there are no parameters.
It is still kind of the wild, wild West.
And one thing that we do know is that if we do nothing as America, China wants to overtake the crypto space.
They want to govern it globally if at all possible.
But there's an old saying, capital is cowardly.
And so capital is going to go where it's safe, where it's protected to a point.
I think the cryptocurrency can be used for so many good purposes and that these are safe transactions.
I mean, that's question.
You want to do business overseas, for example.
You have a small business.
We don't have access to exported reporting, which is a whole nother topic of its own because it's not really designed for small businesses, even though they say they are.
But this allows for transactions, let's say, particularly in Africa, where the currency there, the governments there are unstable.
If you have access to the internet, that you can get access to your cryptocurrency account, that you can actually do transactions and protect your money and do transactions all around the world.
So we're putting in some parameters in place, but what we were also trying to prohibit is for a Biden administration, which we saw happen, they tried to take over the crypto space with the government.
We don't want the government to be taking over and seeing what our transactions are, just like what we saw up in Canada with Justin Trudeau, who basically locked, closed up the accounts of the Canadian truckers who disagreed with him during the pandemic.
And so that's only the argument.
Democrats know that this is moving forward, but they're upset at us today because we're trying to keep the government out of the crypto space from controlling it.
Yeah, it's such a new area.
You know, the other day someone said to me, well, I don't like crypto.
I don't like Bitcoin because it's going to open the door to central bank digital currencies.
And of course, the point is that under the right regulatory framework, these cryptocurrencies can be an alternative to a centralized government-run central bank digital currency.
So the point is that that's where the Biden people, I think, were going.
That's where they were aiming for.
And it looks like under Trump, there's a desire to open up the crypto and the Bitcoin space, encourage all kinds of entrepreneurship under a set of fair rules.
But this is not the same as the central bank, the CBDCs that people are so concerned about.
Guys, I've been talking to Representative Marlon Stutzman, a congressman for the 3rd District in Indiana.
Follow him on X at RepStutsman.
The website is Stutzman.house.gov.
Congressman Stutzman, thank you as always for joining me.
Great to be with you today.
Thanks for having me on.
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I'm in the section of my Reagan book, Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader, where we are discussing the Reagan doctrine.
And some of the questions raised by the Reagan doctrine are, number one, is regime change ever a good idea?
And we're going to see here, not in the ultimately spectacular example that we'll come to later, which is the regime change in the Soviet Union.
Here we're going to be discussing the regime change that occurred in Grenada.
Small country, but it was U.S.-led regime change, and it turned out very well.
By the way, this came up in my debate with Nick Fuentes, where I gave him multiple examples of regime change that have turned out successfully.
The point being not that regime change is always a good idea, but that it's sometimes a good idea.
And for example, right now, I think it would be a very good idea in Iran.
If it were me, if I were Trump, I would be giving the green light to Netanyahu.
I don't think U.S. has to do anything directly.
I'm not calling for U.S. troops to be deployed.
But I am saying that if Netanyahu wants to finish the job, and he, by the way, has every legal and moral right to do this.
Iran was one of the chief, was the chief, planner, funder, and orchestrator of October 7th.
So Israel has every right to strike back.
And while we can't be sure of what would come after, we can be pretty confident that it would be better than what we have over there now.
Now, the Reagan Doctrine was a doctrine with the president's name, the Reagan Doctrine.
But before that, there had been the Truman Doctrine and the Nixon Doctrine.
And the Truman Doctrine was containment.
Containment is limiting the growth of Soviet power.
It's almost like drawing a big circle or ellipse around the arena of Soviet influence and saying, we're going to try to prevent this from getting any bigger.
We're going to try to prevent the ellipse from spreading.
The Nixon Doctrine was essentially one of supporting friendly Despots to prevent those countries from going communist.
A good example would be a guy like Pinochet in Chile.
Pinochet was a thug, a military man, a guy who didn't really read any books.
He was a, if you don't agree with me, I'll beat you up type of guy.
Essentially a cardillo, a mafia chieftain, if you will, in charge of a country.
But Nixon's view was that he also happened to be anti-communist.
He hated the communists.
And in that sense, his interests overlapped with those of the United States.
And this was the Nixon Doctrine.
We don't like these guys, but we will do business with them.
And we will support them as long as and insofar as they are opposing the spread of Soviet power and Soviet tyranny.
Now, the Reagan Doctrine was different from these two in one key respect.
Its basic principle was not to preserve freedom, but to advance it, to extend it, to make it go into countries where it wasn't there before.
So the Reagan Doctrine in a very specific way was one of reversing, or to use a phrase popular, or maybe more accurately, unpopular at the time, rolling back Soviet games.
The Reagan Doctrine was explicitly opposed to a doctrine articulated by Brezhnev, the Soviet leader.
And Brezhnev had said, once a country goes communist, it stays communist.
And in fact, prior to Reagan, there had been no examples, not one, of a communist country that had ceased to be communist.
And so the Brezhnev doctrine appeared to be not merely a kind of wishful expostulation by Brezhnev.
It was a description of contemporary reality.
Now, Reagan's view was what I, in a previous episode of this podcast, called libertarianism two or libertarianism B. So libertarianism A is the United States is free, a free country, but we don't care about other countries' freedom.
We're not willing to expend any resources, really not even one penny, to promote freedom abroad.
We are concerned exclusively with freedom at home.
There is a wing of the MAGA movement that holds this view, and it is, I think you're pretty clear by now, not my view, which is strongly libertarian, but libertarian of a different ilk.
It's the libertarianism that understands that liberty is a universal principle and that we should do what we can.
And we'll see with Reagan how he understood it.
It's not a license for preemptive war.
It's not a blank check to deploy troops.
It is merely a moral and prudential judgment that liberty is a good thing and we should, insofar as we can and insofar as is reasonable, try to promote it.
We will see.
And I had a conversation from my Reagan book with George Schultz, who was at that time the Secretary of State.
And, well, he was not the Secretary of State when I talked to him.
I was interviewing him actually in the mid-1990s.
This was after the Reagan era.
But what I mean is he was the Secretary of State under Reagan.
And Schultz said to me, he goes, hey, Dinesh, you know, Reagan's idea of supporting freedom movements around the world is not indiscriminate.
Not everybody gets support just because they're fighting the Soviets.
It's prudent.
It is based upon measuring the value of each movement to the interests of the United States.
And as we will see, Reagan supported freedom movements in some places like Afghanistan and Poland and Angola, but he did not support them in places like Cambodia and Mozambique.
There were some on the right and some of my buddies at the time, both at the Heritage Foundation and at the American Enterprise Institute, they wanted Reagan to support all these movements because after all, hey, they're all fighting the Soviets.
Let's help them all, maybe to varying degrees.
But Reagan's view was, no.
Yes, we do help them in different ways, but some of them we decide not to help at all.
And we're going to look at why.
So Poland.
Poland was inside the Soviet orbit.
Reagan recognized it's a little reckless, it's a little dangerous to support actual Polish uprisings against the Soviet Union.
Why?
Because the Soviet Union had used massive military power to crush such uprisings in the past.
Hungary, in, as I recall, 1956, there was a Hungarian leader named Janos Kadar.
He had led a Hungarian uprising.
The Soviets sent tanks.
They smashed the Hungarian uprising.
And then in the 1960s, 1968, if I recall, uprising in Czechoslovakia.
The Soviets once again used massive force, crushed it.
Reagan knew all this.
You might have forgotten.
I've almost forgotten, but that is all part of history.
And so what Reagan did was he supported unions.
He supported churches.
He made an alliance with the Pope, John Paul II, who was after all of Polish descent.
The idea of Reagan was to keep the fires of freedom burning in Poland so that if an opportunity ever arose, as it in fact did arise a little bit later, that the Poles would rally to the occasion, as in fact they did.
In Afghanistan, Reagan went all out.
He supplied small arms, artillery, grenades.
Later, he supplied satellite intelligence, rocket launchers, Stinger surface-to-air Missiles, so everything short of troops, no troops.
But Reagan did send CIA advisors.
Why?
The Soviets had just invaded Afghanistan, and Afghanistan Reagan saw it was not just a moral thing.
It wasn't just that Reagan thought, okay, well, I want the Afghans to have their own freedom.
No, Reagan also realized, hey, look, if the Soviets can be bogged down in Afghanistan, it's going to become, in Reagan's own words, their Vietnam.
And Reagan thought, guess what?
Let's make Afghanistan into something that Gorbachev would later call a bleeding wound.
And that is exactly what happened.
Over time, the Soviets found Afghanistan not to be the easy victory that they had achieved when they first rolled in.
It became increasingly painful.
Ultimately, Gorbachev was to pull out.
This is a massive success of the Reagan Doctrine.
And by the way, this is regime change, right?
Because a Soviet-installed puppet was ruling in Afghanistan, and he was thrown out when the Soviets retreated.
In Angola, the United States gave modest support to Jonas Savimbi, who was the head of a group called the MPLA, basically the Movement for the Liberation of Angola.
And they were fighting the communists in Angola.
I met Savimbi once.
He came to the Heritage Foundation to give a talk, very pro-freedom talk.
It was all about, but, you know, for many of us in the audience, we were like, well, yeah, but, you know, we're not sure if you, Savimbi, are really a Democrat or not.
We don't think he was.
We never were able to test that because Savimbi never really came to power.
But he was a very dynamic guy, and he came in military fatigues.
He was a guy who knew how to fight, and he kept the Soviet forces and Soviet allied forces bogged down in Angola.
Angola was in the middle of a civil war, and essentially the United States supported the freedom side or the anti-Soviet side of that civil war.
But in two other cases that I mentioned a moment ago, Cambodia and Mozambique, even though there were people inside and outside the Reagan administration that told Reagan, yeah, you know what, let's help the anti-communists, Reagan said no.
First of all, Cambodia was essentially an adjunct adjacent to Vietnam.
Basically, after the Vietnam War ended badly for us in 1974, Vietnam invaded Cambodia with 150,000 troops.
They established a puppet government in Cambodia.
So Reagan was like, we just were over there.
We're not going to get back into Indochina in that way.
So just a case where, again, Reagan is using his discriminatory judgment.
And finally, in Mozambique, there was a socialist regime headed by a dictator named Samora Michel, who was pro-Soviet.
And again, some conservatives wanted Reagan to support the Renamo movement, which was fighting against Michelle's Ferlimo forces.
But the problem was that the Renamo guys were extremely bloodthirsty and ruthless.
They would shoot deserters.
They would engage in torture no less than the ruling Ferlimo regime.
And I think Reagan felt like it's bad guys on both sides.
These are basically sort of barbarians from the bush.
Yes, I can choose one pair of barbarians over the other.
I'd rather pick neither one.
And so Reagan decided, listen, it's their civil war.
Let them fight it out.
I'm going to stay out of it.
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