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July 21, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
54:51
A MATTER OF SEDITION Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1129
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Coming up, I think the day is finally here to indict Barack Obama and put him in handcuffs.
I'll talk about the obstacles to doing that and why we should do it anyway.
I'll ask by Stephen Colbert, the guy the left says, speaks truth to power, why he got the boot.
And journalist Natalie Brunel joins me.
She hosts the podcast called Coin Stories.
We're going to talk about the Genius Act and the future of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
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The times are crazy, in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
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My focus in this segment is going to be Obama and the fact that I think it is time to bring out the handcuffs on Obama.
Recently, Trump posted a somewhat comical meme of he's sitting alongside Obama and then federal agents show up and lock him up.
But I think we're getting a little past meme time.
We're getting to the time of decision-making.
And Tilsi Gabbard, who has issued a new report, an intelligence report, with some rather startling and very incriminating conclusions, agrees with me.
And she has made a criminal referral on Obama and many others, many other players, people like Comey and Clapper and Brennan, but Obama is the kingpin, as we'll see in a moment.
Let me talk about a couple other things in the news.
Before I focus in on Obama, the top brass at PBS and NPR are squealing and complaining and yelling, mainly because they've got their funding cut off.
There's nothing they can do about it except whine.
And their big whine is quite amusing.
It's like, the people who are going to be most affected by it are not us.
It's going to be rural people living out there in the hinterlands who rely on NPR and PBS, especially when there are like weather emergencies.
So the implication here somehow is that the, well, first of all, that people get their information about the weather from PBS.
This is not true these days.
There's a weather channel.
There are weather apps, all kinds of other alerts.
I actually never heard of anybody going on NPR to figure out whether a hurricane is about to hit you in rural Oklahoma.
The second thing to remember is who really listens to NPR or watches PBS?
I mean, is it going to be some like redneck guy in rural Texas or Louisiana?
No.
Those kinds of people are watching MMA.
They're listening to country music.
They're listening to Joe Rogan.
They don't listen to NPR or PBS.
Who's the typical NPR audience?
As far as I can tell, it's some Nigerian guy who drives a cab in Washington, D.C. Those are the people who are the real.
Those are the times when I'm riding in a cab and I listen.
I'm like, oh, that's NPR.
And probably the guy is only playing it, by the way, to learn English.
I'm not even sure that.
Or maybe they're, yeah.
And then we turn to PBS.
To me, this is the typical audience for PBS.
It's some bored elderly couple that lives like in upstate New York.
And they're entirely bored with each other.
They can't even sustain a conversation.
So it's like, okay, honey, you know, enough of that.
Let's like learn about the planets.
And they turn on PBS.
So this is the audience that's being disrupted by this funding cut.
Now, let me turn to Jeffrey Epstein, an interesting op-ed by Alan Dershowitz about this.
And I just want to highlight a couple of the points that he makes because they're worth considering.
He says, number one, remember, this is the guy who was Epstein's lawyer.
So someone who's in the know, someone on the inside, and somebody who has got a good reputation for being outspoken and, of course, former Harvard law professor.
So Dorshowitz goes, number one, Epstein never made a client list.
He goes, the FBI did interview victims and victims in some cases named, quote, clients.
But she said most of the names of those clients have been sealed under court order.
And Epstein goes, I know some of the people on that list, but he says, I'm not saying that these accusations are true.
We don't know if they're true or not.
And he says, the courts have also sealed some negative information about some of the accusers to protect them.
So the obstacle on Epstein is not that Trump is holding back.
It's rather that some of this stuff is mired in the courts.
He says, also, many people Assume that there are these incriminating videos.
He goes, as far as I know, there are no such videos, no such videos of private, like sexual activity that Epstein took.
He says, open records show an acquaintance between Epstein and Trump many years ago, but the relationship ended when Trump banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago long before becoming president.
And he says, that's the extent of it.
He goes, I have seen nothing that would suggest anything improper, even or even questionable by Trump.
And finally, he says, I have absolutely no doubt that Epstein never worked for any intelligence agency, not U.S. intelligence and not Mossad.
Now, again, I transmit these declarations not to endorse them or say that they're all true.
I don't know, but it is significant that somebody on the inside like Dorshowitz is saying these things.
And it makes us just re-examine, you know, that there are things we've said about Epstein.
He had this, he had that, he had a client list, he is an agent of Assad.
How do you know those things are true?
What is your basis for saying that?
Is it simply because you suspect it to be true?
It could be true.
No one has proven it's not true.
Or is there some real evidentiary tie that leads you to this conclusion?
All right.
Let me come now to Obama.
This remarkable statement by Tulsi Gabbard that the whole Russia collusion thing, this is not a case of politicized intelligence.
That's been our catchphrase all along.
They weaponize the intelligence agencies.
They politicize the intelligence.
Her point is the intelligence wasn't politicized.
It was fabricated.
It was manufactured.
It was made up.
This would be the equivalent of a cop who wants to get somebody, let's say somebody high up in politics or just about anybody, and plants drugs in their locker or plants drugs in their drawer.
This is not a case.
The cop isn't politicizing.
The cop is framing you.
You didn't do anything, but you are made to look like you did because they have planted the evidence on you.
So let's look at what happened here.
What happened here is that, and this part of it is known, that the Hillary Clinton campaign paid for this bogus dossier called the Steele dossier with all these made-up allegations about Trump.
But of course, the dossier would just be out there.
Maybe Hillary could buy some campaign ads with it.
It wouldn't take on the larger dimensions that it did.
The reason it did that is because of Barack Obama.
What Obama does is he convenes in December of 2016, this is right after Trump is elected, a critical meeting in the White House.
And all the key players are there at this meeting.
Brennan, Comey, Clapper, and Susan Rice, Andrew McCabe, cabinet officials are there.
And when they're there, they are given intelligence that makes it very clear that the Russians are unable to influence the result of the election.
They are told clearly that the intelligence agencies have confirmed the Russians do not have the capacity.
They cannot manipulate the election outcome.
They don't have the ability to hack any of our machines.
There hasn't been any kind of cyber ransacking.
Not only that, they cannot change the outcome, period.
This is the result of the findings of multiple intelligence agencies.
And so what does Obama do?
He essentially takes all that information and tosses it out.
And he says, let's start again.
Let's start again and create a new report.
Now, it's already December.
Obama is going to be exiting the stage on the 20th of January.
So in the very short time that they have, they cook up a false intelligence.
They create their own new assessment.
The assessment is solely designed to wreck the Trump presidency.
They work in concert with the media.
In fact, that very day, I believe, Susan Rice is meeting with journalists and telling them, leaking, if you will, or at least putting out information saying the exact opposite of what the intelligence agencies had concluded, basically saying Russia did interfere in the election for Trump.
Russia basically put Trump in.
Trump is a Russian asset.
That was the key.
Now, the left now is backing away and saying, well, you know, there is some evidence that the Russians did, in fact, try to influence the election.
Yeah, we know the Russians try to buy some Facebook ads and the Russians had a minor part.
They weren't the only ones, by the way.
Lots of people would like to try to influence the U.S. election.
The point is the magnitude of the interference and did it make a difference?
And was Trump in the know about this?
Was he, in fact, working in coordination with the Russians?
The whole Russia collusion, the very word collusion implies that Trump was colluding with Russia.
This was the big lie.
This was the thing that Obama was putting out.
And by classifying the original intelligence, they never had to show you any original documents.
They acted like, in fact, they went to Congress and said, oh, no, we didn't rely on the steel dossier.
That was not the basis for it, even though it was.
So all of this is coming out.
And it looked like it implicates Brennan, it implicates Comey, it implicates Clapper.
But Tulsi Gabbard couldn't have been more clear in her recent statements.
The absolute head of this is Obama.
And now we have people who say, well, I don't know, Dinesh, Barack Obama.
You know, he's so protected.
Can you imagine what would happen if we were to arrest Obama?
Yeah, I can imagine what would happen.
I want to play that out for a moment.
What is going to happen?
Well, you know, the left is going to go berserk.
So?
That would be a good thing.
Let them go berserk.
Oh, there's going to be a lot of civil unrest.
Well, let's back up.
Didn't the Democrats have to worry about civil unrest when they arrested Trump?
Yeah.
Did it stop them?
No.
Why not?
Well, mainly because the left reasoned, we don't mind civil unrest.
We control the cops.
We control the military.
And so no one's above the law.
And all we're doing is enforcing the law.
And we are in exactly the same position.
They want to do civil unrest.
We control the cops.
We control the military.
We are adopting their slogan.
No one is above the law.
And so if no one truly is above the law, in fact, I have an Obama speech going back to 2020.
He says, no one, least of all the president, least of all the president, is above the law.
Well, it's time to bring that full circle.
It's time to apply that to Obama.
And it's time to put Russia collusion on trial.
And this is very important because the Republicans are big talkers.
Oh, we're investigating this.
Oh, we're issuing a subpoena.
But Tulsi Gabbard has, by and large, made it as clear as day that you have had a seditious conspiracy to destroy the result of a presidential election.
And not only that, it wasn't just an attempted destruction.
It was successful.
Trump's first term was subverted for two years at least, with the stain of it lasting more than that.
And this was concocted, cooked up by Obama and his gang.
And there needs to be serious consequences for this.
So now, again, there are some people who love saying, listen, don't bother, don't waste your time.
Obama's presidential immunity.
Well, let's see.
Maybe he does have immunity.
Maybe, you know, he's sentenced to life in prison or he's given the death penalty for treason.
And then he goes, oh, but I have immunity.
I'm immune even though I did it.
Well, we'll deal with that when we get there.
Maybe he does have immunity, but nevertheless, this is the case of the Republicans having a giant political opportunity right in front of them.
In a sense, the left created the precedent for this, right?
They can't say you can't arrest a president because they already did.
You can't make the president sit down for a mug shot.
They already did.
They have played this book out.
And now, well, it's our turn.
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Stephen Colbert, the smug, smarmy, unfunny, I put this in quote marks, comedian, has been given the boot and his show canceled.
And Colbert, in one of his typically self-serving last rants, basically says, well, it's not that I'm being removed.
The whole show is being ended.
The show is apparently losing tens of millions of dollars, which is to say that Stephen Colbert, even though the show had considerable revenues, by the way, mainly from like pharmaceutical companies and stuff that are using this as using advertising, so-called advertising as a mechanism to buy influence with the media, with networks like CBS.
But despite all this inflow of pharmaceutical cash, the show was still losing money.
Part of the reason for that is its demographic was getting older and older, and its pie was also shrinking.
Now, I saw an interesting observation by a conservative comedian, Rob Schneider, and he was talking about why the Colbert show failed.
And his answer was really simple.
He says the Colbert Show failed because it was so ideological.
It was ideological in such A predictable, unrelenting way that it immediately wrote off half the country.
So you have the country, think of the country as a pie, you write off half the pie.
And then, says Rob Schneider, you have the remaining half of the pie.
But hey, that doesn't all go to Colbert.
Why?
Because there are other late-night comedians.
There's Jimmy Kimmel, there's Jimmy Fallon.
So imagine Kimmel, Fallon, and Colbert all fighting over the other half.
And even if they all get a third, a third, and a third, but apparently Colbert was kind of the loser of that group, right?
So, I mean, to me, it's such a sorry spectacle.
You've got Fallon, who's really, again, another smarmy guy.
And you've got Kimmel.
All three are bad, but apparently Colbert was the biggest loser of the three.
And all of this really, it's hard to believe that these guys got the baton from people like Johnny Carson and then Jay Leno and then even Letterman.
Now, Letterman was weird, but he was funny in a weird sort of way.
There was a kind of unpredictability to Letterman that made it interesting.
Carson, who was, of course, the master of the genre.
And I saw an interview with Carson where Carson was asked about this.
He was asked, well, you know, have you thought about like making, endorsing a candidate?
And Carson goes, oh, I would never do that.
And he goes, why not?
And Carson says, well, it's because I am an entertainer.
And he says, I realize I have a big platform and I could use that platform for political influence.
He goes, but I regard it as the entertainer's duty or the entertainer's mission to resist that temptation, not to do that, not to succumb to that.
Now, I think for Carson, this was almost like a moral issue.
Carson wasn't worried about losing audience.
Carson dominated the late night ratings.
But Carson's point was, I don't think that's what an entertainer is.
An entertainer appeals to a wide audience.
And an entertainer is, in a sense, undiscriminating, which is to say bipartisan, open-ended in being willing to make fun of everyone and everything.
And this gives people, in fact, a high willingness.
Look, if somebody makes a joke about your particular candidate, your particular set of values, your particular set of cultural preferences, you're more tolerant of that because you recognize that he's going to make a joke about somebody else's political candidate.
He's not singling you out.
He's not denigrating your values or your lifestyle.
So Carson sort of had it figured out.
All these guys are political hacks.
Kimmel's a hack.
Fallon's a hack.
Colbert is a hack.
Maybe the biggest hack of them all.
And now the left is saying that, oh no, he's being canceled for political reasons, for his political activism, because he speaks truth to power.
Now, apart from the guy being a money loser for CBS, this to me is a good reason to fire him right here.
Why?
Because he was not hired to, quote, speak truth to power.
He was not hired as a political commentator.
He's hired in the mode of Carson as an entertainer.
He's given the late night slot on CBS.
CBS is not saying to the American people, listen, we don't really care about Republicans.
We don't want you to watch CBS.
We are the show for Democrats.
Now, in cable TV, in the political space, you do have networks that say that.
MSNBC is pretty clear.
We don't really want conservatives watching our channel, except conservatives who maybe want to see what freaks we are, conservatives like me.
They, by and large, they say, we just want people who share our point of view.
And maybe to some degree, Fox is the same on the right of center.
But Fox and MSNBC or even CNN are not the same as, say, ABC or NBC or CBS.
They are aiming, their survival depends on them appealing to the widest possible audience.
So Colbert, in a sense, has done this to himself.
He stopped being a comedian.
He became a political commentator, except he's not a very good one.
I don't know if he could have been a good comedian.
Maybe he could have, but he never tried.
He never attempted the Jay Leno Johnny Carson routine.
Had he attempted it, we could have measured whether he succeeded or failed.
He actually tried to be a kind of Keith Olbermann.
And by the way, Olbermann himself has gone down in flames.
And now Colbert, who's essentially, you know, Stephen Olberman, has, I think, very happily followed him.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast a new guest.
Her name is Natalie Brunel, and she is a speaker, a Bitcoin educator, a media commentator.
She's also host of the podcast called Coin Stories.
She went to Northwestern University where she got a master's in science journalism.
She also became a regional Emmy Award-winning TV journalist.
And now she focuses on financial issues, kind of specializing in the Bitcoin space.
You can follow her, by the way, on X at Nat Brunel, B-R-U-N-E-L-L, her website, talkingbitcoin.com.
She's also got a great book on Bitcoin that's coming out in the fall.
I'll have her talk about that a little bit.
Natalie, welcome.
Thank you for joining me.
I thought I'd begin by just asking you, you know, many people have probably heard about this genius act that is making its way through the Congress.
It appears to have at least some bipartisan support.
It looks like it's got majorities both in the House and the Senate.
So it looks like it's going to become law.
But it talks about things like stable coins.
And for someone kind of on the outside, they're probably thinking, well, what is all this about?
Like, what is a stable coin?
And why would anybody ever want to own one?
Can you tell us a little bit, give a layman's account of what the Genius Act does and why is this even significant?
Well, hi, Dinesh.
Thank you so much for having me.
The Genius Act is really a landmark piece of legislation tackling digital assets.
It establishes a framework for stablecoins, which are essentially dollar tokens.
They're pegged to the U.S. dollar.
The Genius Act actually stipulates that they have to be backed one-to-one by either cash or short-term U.S. Treasury bills.
And it's the first time that Congress has really come together in a pretty bipartisan way to pass legislation that really impacts the digital assets industry and moves us one step closer to modernizing the financial rails to the 21st century.
Now, the Genius Act is really about stable coins, though.
And one thing that I find interesting is on the surface, it looks like it's about innovation and embracing crypto.
But underneath, it's also about something very geopolitically strategic, and that is extending dollar dominance.
We need buyers for U.S. government debt.
So again, these stable coins will be backed by short-term U.S. treasuries.
And if you look at the current stablecoins out there, ones like Tether, they have been significant customers for the U.S. Treasury market.
And right now we're in a bit of a predicament.
I'm sure you've covered it on the show, $37 trillion worth of debt.
And so I think it's really interesting timing that they prioritize this stablecoin bill because we really need something to absorb the debt that we're going to need to continue to issue because we're running such big deficits.
And as Lynn Alden always says, nothing stops this trend.
So a lot to unpack there, but really stablecoins are going to be great for the digital assets industry, but also great for the US dollar.
I think part of what you're saying, Natalie, is that the world is becoming more digital.
Everybody knows that.
And that people do transact digitally now in many different ways, right?
You pay with PayPal or Venmo.
So there are many ways that you can electronically transmit money.
But if someone were to say, well, why would I ever need a stablecoin?
In other words, why can't I just transact with a credit card or using the sort of technologies that already exist?
Why would I want to own a token somehow connected to a treasure?
What does that actually do for me?
Yeah, it's a great question.
I think a lot of us take for granted what happens behind the scenes when we use electronic dollars with, say, our credit cards, for example.
Settlement actually takes a long time.
And with every credit card transaction, there are gatekeepers and people who take fees along the way.
And this actually gets worse when you think about on a global scale, transactions that are happening cross-border.
So these payments are made instantly.
They settle in the background instantly and they expand access to the dollar in countries where they have far worse debasement and inflation than we do here in the U.S., which is why stablecoins have actually been a lifeline for people in Argentina and Lebanon and Turkey, where their inflation rates are in the double digits and they're really suffering currency crises.
So they want access to dollars and the dollar is obviously far better than so many of the other fiat currencies out there.
But one reason why I think stablecoins will actually encourage Bitcoin adoption is because at the end of the day, what's wrong with fiat?
The supply constantly expands.
And that's true for our dollar as well as every currency out there.
And so I think people will start to use stablecoins as maybe a payment mechanism, but they will start to increasingly save in Bitcoin because it's the one thing that no government can print.
Natalie, let's back up a little bit.
You made a reference to fiat currency.
And fiat currency, of course, refers to currency that is, in a sense, dictated by the government, right?
They make it, they produce it.
If they want to, they can produce more.
In fact, they're constantly producing more by, so to speak, running the money printer, even though they do this in various ingenious ways.
But can you lay out, I think I heard you talking about in one of your podcasts, you know, as somebody kind of representing the millennial generation or perhaps even with Gen Z coming up, the younger generation, how the cumulative effect of the diminishing value of money has created a very precarious situation for young people where a lot of the opportunities that older generations could take for
granted just aren't there anymore.
I want people to get a sense of like what is the need for Bitcoin, what is the need for these new types of digital currencies, and how is it that they are a remedy to the problems that are being faced in the country today?
Well, this is why I'm so passionate about Bitcoin.
This is actually what my book is about.
We go through school not really learning what is money, who issues it, how does the financial system work, and why is it that things are getting more expensive every single year?
We sort of accept that as a given, right?
Our parents paid less for a home.
Our grandparents paid even less than that.
But we really aren't taught what is inflation and why is it really the bedrock of our entire system?
Why do our dollars consistently lose value?
And it's really happening at a faster and faster rate.
And that's really what Bitcoin shined a spotlight on.
It was the fact that our money is centralized.
It has an issuer.
That is the government, the central bank, and they control the supply.
And in the background, even though they're telling you that inflation is somewhere around 2%, actually they're expanding the money supply by about 6% to 7% per year.
Now, I've never had a job where I got like a 7% raise in a given year, right?
Most people don't.
And they're struggling to keep up because if the money supply is expanding at 7%, you're getting a 2% raise.
You're 5% behind.
And a lot of the new money that's printed, there's a cantalon effect.
It goes to assets.
It goes to the real estate market.
It goes into stocks.
And there's a great disparity over who owns those assets.
And so we see a wealth concentration build up that naturally breeds a sense of frustration because so many people, you know, 10 years down the road are saying, I've worked so hard, but yet I've fallen behind.
Why is that?
And now you have a young generation who's done everything, played by the rules, gone to school, gotten their degrees, they're working hard, and they can't afford the house that their parents once could.
So they're starting to ask the question, well, why is this happening?
And for me, I feel like a lot of people are turning to politics.
They're getting very polarized.
You know, the populism is natural, but I wish people would question the system more.
They actually question the money, who issues it?
Why is the supply getting constantly diluted and who benefits from that?
And then the natural solution that I've come to is, well, what solves this through technology?
And I think Bitcoin is the best solution out there.
Would it be accurate to say, Natalie, that while you have political differences and that they're not unimportant, nevertheless, what you're saying is that there is a kind of hidden element that people don't pay attention to.
And part of the reason they don't pay attention to it is it is administered by a seemingly neutral agency called the Fed, which seems to have the approval By and large, of both parties.
I mean, Trump has been talking about, let's, you know, eject Powell, but Trump isn't saying let's eject the Fed, let's get rid of the money printer.
What Trump is saying is, I want my guy in there to be administering the Fed.
And I think what you're saying is that, and you know, there are some people in the populist movement who think about, well, the politics is really a uniparty.
And to some degree, I think you're saying that is true, because what you're saying is that you've got this government agency that serves the purposes of the government.
Now, maybe to a lesser degree, the purposes of the banks, but the purposes that this agency is not serving is yours and mine.
In other words, they are rather, I don't know if they're indifferent to, but they are certainly tolerant of the fact that the money that we work hard to earn is nevertheless constantly losing value and they're responsible for it.
They're always pointing to prices going up, but it's not so much that prices are going up.
Money is really going down.
Isn't that when people say my house is going up in value, what they really mean is my money buys less, doesn't it?
Isn't that really what's going on?
Yes, our purchasing power is getting destroyed because they're diluting the money supply, constantly having to issue new units to pay off the old ones.
We're basically using a visa to pay off our MasterCard on the government level.
And you're right.
I mean, we've sort of ping-ponged back and forth over the past two decades from red to blue to red to blue.
And what is the one thing that's true?
The cost of living has increased.
The standard of living in many ways has decreased for the average person.
And we've gone further into debt.
So that's why I think a lot of people have really lost hope in both sides of the political spectrum, because we just go further into debt and people have lost a lot of hope in the future.
I think in the last election and the last two, actually, we see a lot of people kind of coming together saying this has to change, but we can't agree on what that change is.
And I wish that we would focus less on the symptoms of broken money and on broken money itself, because to your point, money has become political.
And if someone controls it, you know, the best humans, we're fallible, we're corruptible.
And when you have a money printer, show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome.
And I think that's why we have this cancel on effect and broken system and populism and wealth concentration that we do, because ultimately our money has been corrupted.
That's why I think we need to move to something neutral.
That is what Bitcoin offers and promises.
It's something that's completely decentralized.
It has no CEO.
There's no president.
There's no single point of failure.
And it's something that offers us a chance to save in a piece of technology and in an asset that no one can debase or confiscate, that is censorship resistant, that really allows us the financial freedom to save for the future.
Because in all of my work that I've done in Bitcoin, the conclusion I've come to is that what the world needs most is for more people, more average people, to feel economically empowered and to regain their sense of hope for the future.
Natalie, mention, if you will, the name of your book, because I noticed I went and pre-ordered it myself.
It's out in November, but this way people can go on Amazon at Barnes Noble and get it.
But in doing so, also, if you can answer this question, I found in talking to people, they're very habituated to thinking of money as a thing, right?
In other words, money is gold, and I can touch it, I can feel it, there are gold bars.
A dollar bill, I can take it out of my wallet and buy a Starbucks with it.
Bitcoin seems to have this somewhat ethereal, almost imaginary quality, like it's a, it's an entry in a digital ledger.
And I think for a lot of people, it's a little hard to believe that something like that, not to mention something that is not under the control of the government, something that was invented 15 years ago by an anonymous guy named Satoshi Nakamoto, how can that actually be money?
So can you go to the heart of the matter and talk a little bit about what is Bitcoin?
Not its features, like it's decentralized, it's this or that, but what is it and what makes it good enough to be money?
Sure.
Well, my book is called Bitcoin is for everyone.
It actually covers these topics.
And I appreciate the question because when I first learned about Bitcoin, I asked the very same thing.
I was skeptical, I was dismissive, and we see that a lot with new technologies that emerge.
We saw that with the airplane, with the car, with electricity.
I think it's actually natural and wise to be a little bit resistant to new technologies and ask the right questions.
But Bitcoin is valuable in the same way that math is valuable, but you can't really touch math or the algorithms that we're now so familiar with in a world of software and digital communications.
Bitcoin is like the internet of money.
We can't really touch the internet, but we interact with it every single day.
And in the same way as the internet is decentralized, Bitcoin is a network that has no one in control and is verified by all of us by consensus.
So any one of us can essentially go online, download the public ledger.
This is a public ledger that anyone has access to and verify it for themselves and see the source code.
It's an open source protocol.
And that's really empowering because to your earlier point, we really live in a digital age now, the information age.
Things are moving faster.
We're communicating in a way that none of us probably anticipated just a few decades ago, right?
Everything online, all the emails, texts, smartphones, buying everything on Amazon.
This is money for the information age.
And it's a form of money that no one can debase, that no one can manipulate.
And so I feel very inspired by this piece of technology and really the inflection point that we're at as a society, again, kind of fighting over where to go next because so many of us have lost hope and empowerment in terms of our economic situation.
And I've put my heart into the book because my family lost everything in the great financial crisis after being first generation immigrants who came here in pursuit of the American dream.
And for so long, I was like so many people.
I thought one politician will fix it over another.
Maybe we should tax the rich.
I didn't realize that I just didn't understand economics and I didn't understand the money.
And once my eyes were open to it, I realized what the problem really was, what a solution could be.
And when I studied Bitcoin, I realized it is the best solution out there.
Guys, I've been talking to Natalie Brunel, author, podcaster, and host of the widely acclaimed Coin Stories podcast.
Follow her on X at Nat Brunel.
The website is talkingbitcoin.com.
Natalie, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you, Dinesh, for having me.
I appreciate it.
I am discussing the Reagan doctrine in the context of my book, Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
And as of last time, I described several kind of liberation movements around the world in places like Mozambique and Cambodia, Angola, Nicaragua, and Poland.
And I talked about the Reagan administration's discriminatory approach, which is to say getting actively involved in some places but not others.
And this is governed not by just a general principle, I get involved or I don't, but is involved prudentially.
Where does it make sense to get involved?
Let's do kind of a cost-benefit analysis in each case.
Let's look at the proximity of these places, not just geographically to the U.S., but to U.S. interests.
Now, today I'm going to focus on the issue of regime change, because this has become a little bit of a mantra and a negative mantra, because regime change is thought by many people to be a kind of bad idea and a bad objective for U.S. foreign policy.
Trump, to some degree, seems to agree.
He certainly hasn't pursued regime change in Iran.
And not only that, but he has in some ways held Israel back from on its own going after regime change in Iran.
Now, this allergic reaction to regime change comes largely from a single example.
Well, maybe two examples.
Iraq and Afghanistan.
Even these examples are ambiguous in my view, because while in Iraq, the regime change turned out badly, it turned out badly not because of the regime change.
It turned out badly because of a misguided effort over a decade to try to manage, supervise, oversee the way that government was carried out in Iraq.
So those are two separate things.
You can achieve regime change and get out and not be the caretaker, the nanny of some other country.
So that's the first point.
The second point is that while I think regime change in Afghanistan was deserved and fully justified because Afghanistan played a direct role, unlike Iraq, a direct Role in 9-11.
9-11 would not have occurred had it not had a staging ground, namely Afghanistan, and a staging regime, namely the Taliban.
So, we're going to look at two examples with Reagan.
The first one, a small example, Grenada, and the second, a bigger example, but still not a huge example, Nicaragua.
And in both cases, Reagan actively pursued regime change.
In both cases, he got it.
And in both cases, the result was very positive.
Now, nothing lasts forever.
And even in Nicaragua, the Sandinistas, which was the communist regime of Nicaragua, was ejected.
Many, many years later, they came back to power.
And Nicaragua today is under a leftist, socialist regime connected with those Sandinistas.
So it's a little bit of a replay of what happened with the Taliban.
It shows you that victories in politics are not permanent.
And typically, if you're able to make things better and keep them better for a while, then you've at least achieved a short to medium term objective.
And then your successors have to deal with new problems that might brew further down the road.
Now, Grenada had become a kind of playground for Cuba and for a communist takeover of this little island, this tiny island called Grenada, which is a Caribbean island.
And this place was the host to a U.S. school in Grenada.
And the U.S. citizens in Grenada were endangered by this communist takeover of Grenada.
And so Reagan, coming to learn about this, begins to think about what should be done.
And he considers and approves a plan by 2,000 U.S. troops in 1983 to storm the island of Grenada, to eject the communist government, and to create over there a self-governing democracy.
So think about this.
This is active intervention using U.S. troops, admittedly on a small island.
It's not a case where it's going to take very long.
It's not a case where the United States can really lose.
But nevertheless, the left was up in arms.
And when I say the left, even people like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was a senator from New York, not a far-left senator by any means, more centrist.
Nevertheless, he denounces Reagan.
He says that this shows that America is acting just like the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union creates these satellite states.
We're doing the same thing.
The UN, no surprise, votes to condemn the U.S. action.
But guess what?
The action is completely successful.
The communist government collapses.
The US medical students return to the U.S. They arrive in Charleston, South Carolina.
And the first thing they do is they get off the airplane, they kiss the ground of the United States.
And the moment that happens, and that's on national TV and everybody sees it, essentially a debate over the Grenada invasion is over because the very American citizens who lived on the island were like, wow, our lives have been saved.
Thank you, President Reagan.
And sure enough, in the cleanup of Grenada, the new government discovers all these stashes of weapons and military equipment and thousands of pages of document that show this elaborate Marxist scheme to overtake Grenada and use it as a base for Soviet-directed military activities in other countries as well.
Grenada has free elections.
Notice here, Reagan went in, Reagan got out.
And once Grenada has free elections, the United States has not intervened since.
We're not trying to tell Grenada what to do.
Grenada runs its own country.
But even though this was a really tiny example, the reason it was so significant is because this is the first time, believe it or not, in human history, that a country fell into the Soviet orbit.
It became communist, and then it ceased to be communist.
There was no previous example of a country doing that before Grenada.
Remember the Brezhnev Doctrine.
Once a country goes communist, it stays communist.
And Grenada proved that the Brezhnev Doctrine had been refuted.
The Brezhnev Doctrine was, in effect, dead.
And now we turn to Nicaragua, which was a bigger deal.
And here you had a big clash of viewpoints between the left and the right.
Basically, the right said Nicaragua is basically another Cuba.
And the left said Nicaragua will become, if we get involved, another Vietnam.
So you can see here that both sides are using a sort of a model.
We can't put up with another Cuba.
One Cuba is bad enough.
This was Reagan's view.
And the left's view is we don't need another Vietnam.
Vietnam was bad enough.
We don't need to be caught in one of the favorite words from the 1980s, a quagmire.
We don't want to be caught in a quagmire.
Now, what was going on in Nicaragua?
I will just give some background and then pick it up tomorrow as we get further into the story of the Sandinistas and a rebel movement that mobilized against them called the Contras.
Well, Nicaragua originally met Kirkpatrick's, Gene Kirkpatrick's definition of a traditional autocracy.
It was run by a big, fat, stereotypically mustached Latin American dictator.
His name was Anastasio Somoza.
His Father had been the ruler of Nicaragua.
His name was also Anastasio Somoza.
So it was Somoza and then the younger Somoza.
And the father, in fact, was a big despot, but nevertheless, he was allied with the U.S., he was a pro-American dictator.
And at one point, FDR, of all people, had said of Somoza, he's a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch.
And right here, you see how FDR was, despite his many, many flaws, he had a basic kind of understanding of foreign policy, which is foreign policy is essentially divided between allies and adversaries.
Now, the Card administration, true to form, decided, let's oppose the Somoza dictatorship.
And there was, in fact, a movement against Somoza.
There was a revolution in Nicaragua, very similar to the revolution in Iran.
Obviously, it didn't have the same Islamic accent.
But nevertheless, Somoza is overthrown.
And the replacement, again, turns out not to be some pleasant alternative, but something that is in many ways worse.
And that is the Sandinistas.
Notice that when Gene Kirkpatrick made a distinction between autocratic regimes or authoritarian regimes and totalitarian regimes, Somoza fit the description of the authoritarian regime, and the Sandinistas fit the description of the totalitarian regime.
Why?
Because by and large, Somoza's main goal was, I just want to stay in power.
What you do with your life, whether you become a peasant or a poet, I don't care what religion you practice.
Most of the Nicaraguans, of course, are Catholic.
Somoza was go to mass periodically.
So he wasn't interested in interfering with people's religious beliefs, their social customs, their diet, the way they lived, any of that.
He was quite willing to run this agrarian economy with him at the top of it.
But the Sandinistas are very different.
They wanted to take over the farms and collectivize farming.
They wanted to take over the media, the radio and TV.
They shut down the radio station, took it over.
They put censorship on the largest newspaper in Nicaragua.
It was called La Prensa.
The Catholic Church was restricted and curtailed.
They began to relocate people to other parts of the country, very much in the old kind of Stalinist or Soviet fashion.
Neighborhood committees are established to report on people who are disloyal to socialism or to the regime.
So all of this is going on, and the Sandinistas are also building up a military.
And so Reagan's view is, listen, we do not want one more country, let alone in our backyard, to be joining the Soviet orbit.
We need a strategy to stop the Sandinistas in their tracks.
And then Reagan learned that there was, in fact, a movement inside of Nicaragua to get rid of the Sandinistas.
It was the Contras.
And in the Contras, what Reagan saw was an opportunity.
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