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July 22, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
59:34
A QUESTION OF TREASON Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1130
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Before we dive in, just a quick note.
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Coming up, I'll talk about this big question about whether Obama should be charged with seditious conspiracy or treason.
I'll also explore what District Judge Bozberg told Chief Justice Roberts at a small luncheon about President Trump.
And Steve Cortez, former senior advisor to Trump and J.D. Vance, joins me.
We're going to talk about his new short documentary on Barack Obama and his legacy in Chicago.
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It seems like the late night hosts are up in arms about the firing of Stephen Colbert and the shutting down of his late night show.
And I was thinking to myself, you know, these comedians are supposed to be in competition with each other.
Kimmel and Fallon and Colbert.
It certainly was the case that there used to be competition in the earlier eras between, let's say, Letterman on the one side and Leno.
And so what happened that suddenly all these guys have become buddies with each other?
And as it turns out, they aren't really buddies.
They are rivals.
They do compete.
In fact, as I mentioned yesterday, they compete for a fairly narrow slice of the pie because they've all, since they all have dug in on the left, they've alienated half the country.
So they're competing for the remaining half between the bunch of them.
And I think the reason that they're all rallying to Colbert is not because they like him.
They're probably actually happy that his show by itself is canceled.
But why is a show canceled?
Because it's an ideological rant, not really comedy, and it loses a lot of money.
Well, as it turns out, that doesn't just describe Colbert.
It describes all these guys.
It describes Fallon.
It describes Kimmel.
So all of these guys want these networks to keep these shows on the air, even though, A, they're not really funny.
They're not really doing comedy.
They're not even really attempting it.
And second, they are getting more and more aging demographics that are causing these shows to lose audience and to lose money.
But they want the networks to keep them on for sort of prestige reasons.
And I think this is really why they're protecting a sort of cartel.
They want to shore up Colbert really to protect their own shows from being canceled for the same reason.
Now, an update on the Epstein business.
Apparently, the Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche is going to try to meet with Gillen Maxwell to see what she knows about this Epstein list.
Again, we're not talking about a list per se, but we're talking about the clientele of Epstein.
And Debbie and I were talking about this, and we're talking about what is it that Gillen Maxwell would know?
And I think the answer is this.
What she would know is which of the rich and powerful men that hung around with Epstein were doing it because they were and are pedophiles.
In other words, Epstein created this kind of highly the chic ring for the rich and powerful.
But presumably there were people in that ring who came for the, because other powerful people are coming.
So Bill Gates is going to be here.
Bill Clinton's going to be here.
Would you like to come?
Oh, sure.
I'll be happy to come.
And there are people who are in that group, perhaps, say, an Alan Dorshowitz.
Why is he there?
Well, he's making a lot of money off of Epstein.
Epstein is his client.
Epstein is paying by the hour.
So Alan Dorshowitz is not there for the young girls.
He's there because he's a lawyer and he has been hired by Epstein to represent him.
And so there needs to be a distinction made between the Epstein circle of influence and between the Epstein customers.
Now, by customers, I don't mean, although people talk about the Epstein prostitution ring, I don't believe Epstein was a pimp in the sense that he was collecting money.
You know, hey, Bill Gates, you owe me $700.
No, Epstein was wealthy.
He had a finance career.
He had an island.
So this is not a guy who's going to be operating by saying, make sure you send me the check.
I'll be sending you an invoice.
It doesn't function like that.
But Gillen Maxwell knows who's who.
That's the point.
And so maybe some sort of an Epstein list can be compiled based upon Gillen Maxwell's inside information.
We'll have to wait and see.
I don't know if you saw that Hunter Biden gave a recent interview.
And the most amusing part of the interview, or not amusing, well, amusing in a sense, is that he suggests that his dad was pushed off the ticket by none other than Nancy Pelosi.
I'm going to quote him.
They already made a decision.
They clearly made a decision.
When I say they, I mean the speaker.
Now, there's a lot of interesting tidbits in that Hunter Biden interview, but I don't want to give him the importance of dwelling on it as if his statements, by the way, laced with obscenities.
There's a lot of talk about different types of drugs.
But what is interesting here about this statement that I'm highlighting is just this, that you have an admission that the Speaker of the House has the power to push out the president, not just the leading candidate for the Democratic Party, but the actual sitting president, the incumbent.
Now, where would Nancy Pelosi get that kind of a power?
And the answer, I think, is this.
She always had it.
And by that, I mean Joe Biden never had the power.
Joe Biden was a pawn of Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and other people, I would argue, including Obama.
This was the coterie of people who were making the decisions.
And it isn't that Nancy Pelosi just jumped in at the end and said, I'm involved.
She was involved from the beginning.
And this is why she had that kind of power, because Biden was from the outset an extension of this junta.
They were controlling him and not the other way around.
Now, let me talk a little bit about this Obama scandal.
Trump just said that Obama is the ringleader.
And Trump also used the word treason, which I think shows that Trump is not flinching from the idea that Obama needs to be prosecuted.
Trump said, I'm going to leave it to the DOJ.
I'm going to leave it to Pam Bondi.
And I have my doubts about Pam Bondi, but I think if Pam Bondi felt that Trump himself was determined that this go forward, then I think it will, in fact, go forward.
I also saw a post by Julie Kelly saying, hey, if you can use seditious conspiracy against those on January 6th who had no plans to overthrow the government, it's hard to see how the DOJ could not pick that up and use it on the Obama and Biden regime.
Exactly.
In the case of January 6th, they were quite willing to reach for the seditious conspiracy charge, which is one step short of the treason charge.
I guess the treason charge is reserved for if the country is at war or if there is a direct concert or collaboration with a foreign enemy.
Here, that is not the case.
And so maybe seditious conspiracy is a better description than treason.
But Julie Kelly's point is it's already been used by the other side.
We should not flinch from using it.
Do you remember the email that Susan Rice sent herself?
Think about this.
She sends an email to herself, January 20th, 2017.
She's supposedly documenting this White House meeting with Obama, and Rice emphasizes that we got to make sure that everything is done, quote, by the book.
In fact, she says Obama wants it to be done by the book.
So clearly, there's an effort by these seeming conspirators to cover their tracks right at the beginning.
It's like, hey, listen, we're hatching a scheme, but let me go right back to my office or right back to my apartment, send myself an email.
So if this ever comes out and if it ever becomes scrutinized, and God forbid, if the other side ever gets into power, I can produce this email to myself and say, hey, look, I was just recording that we all agreed that this was to be done legally and done by the book.
And we are not engaging in any kind of seditious conspiracy, even though, of course, we are.
This, by the way, is a good time for you, if you haven't seen it, to go back and watch my original film on Obama.
2016, Obama's America came out in 2012.
It was actually looking forward to 2016, the fateful year that we're talking about here, where Obama's two terms came to an end, Trump was elected, and Obama tried quite successfully, by the way, to subvert the first Trump presidency.
If you want to watch the Obama film, it's now available.
You can see it on YouTube, on Google Play Movies and TV, on Apple TV, on Fandango at home.
At the top of my Twitter, at the top of my X, I have the links to where you can find the movie and watch it.
And it's illuminating to watch because Obama is the turning point.
Obama is the place where not just the Democratic Party, but the whole country took a turn.
Remember, Obama used the term the remaking of America.
And for many people, it was boilerplate.
Oh, yeah, all these politicians talk about hope.
They talk about change.
They talk about remaking.
But with Obama, He meant something very concrete, very particular by remaking America.
And I would argue that to a large degree, he did remake America.
And when Trump talks about making America great again, a lot of what he means is undoing the damage that was done by Obama.
Now, I want to emphasize that if we have a conspiracy case here, it should include the media.
It should include the news organizations that were in on it, that were well aware that all of this was based on lies, but were nevertheless feeding this false information to the American people.
They were part of it.
And there is no automatic First Amendment protection from engaging in seditious conspiracy.
If you are part of the conspiracy, you can be faulted for that.
You can be held responsible.
You can be jailed.
You can be given the appropriate penalty.
And my friend George Pavadopoulos also posted something that often gets missed, the role of foreign intelligence agencies in all this, because it wasn't as if Clapper and Comey and Brennan and these guys functioned merely within the parameters of the United States.
No, they worked with British intelligence.
And I'm not just talking about Christopher Steele.
I'm talking about British intelligence agencies.
I'm talking about spies who are ensconced in places like Oxford University masquerading as researchers or professors.
I'm talking about the Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, who was part of the seeming entrapment of Papadopoulos.
Maybe he was put up to it by Clapper and Comey and U.S. intelligence.
But the point is that these foreign entities are actively involved in all this.
And I think Papadopoulos' point is they should not escape investigation, they should not escape scrutiny, and they should not escape consequences.
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I want to focus in this next segment on the nefarious operations of the federal judiciary.
I'll start with a couple of rulings by district court judges.
Boston Obama judge Indira Talwani has struck down Congress's withdrawal of funding from Planned Parenthood.
She says it's unconstitutional.
Now, how can it be unconstitutional for Congress to give money, for Congress to stop giving money to Planned Parenthood?
Isn't Congress free to give money to whoever it wants to or doesn't want to?
Well, she says it is a violation of Planned Parenthood's right to free speech.
But how is that possible?
Planned Parenthood has the same right to free speech it's always had.
That's not the same thing as a right to government subsidy.
I might have a right to free speech, but I can't say that if the government fails to fund my books or my films or pay for my website, that my First Amendment rights are being trampled.
So this argument from this Obama judge is downright nonsensical.
She also claims that it is a violation of equal protection of the laws.
I assume that her reasoning goes something like this.
Planned Parenthood is providing contraception.
And if Planned Parenthood doesn't get funding, there are certain Americans who are getting contraception from Planned Parenthood who won't be able to get it.
And this is therefore a denial to them of, well, here's where it kind of all breaks down, a denial to them of what?
There is no, quote, right to contraception.
And so people, just to show that people are being treated differently, some people can afford contraception and some people can't.
That's no different than saying that some people can afford filet mignon and other people can't.
Some people can afford to live in the suburbs and other people can't.
Some people can afford to go to the opera and other people can't.
So there is no coherent denial of equal protection.
Equal protection is when a law is applied in such a manner that, like let's say, for example, the cops decide that we're only going to stop black men who are speeding, for example.
Well, that's obviously a violation of equal protection.
If every single person stopped is black, and when white people are caught speeding, they are allowed to, oh, go on, sir, and we're not going to give you a ticket.
Well, there is a violation of equal protection, and it's a violation based on race.
But where is the violation in this case?
Well, I suppose one could say, well, it's a violation of equal protection as applied to women, because after all, women are the ones.
But even here it breaks down because birth control is not exclusively for women.
True, only women can get pregnant.
At least it's obvious that pregnancy applies to one gender.
Although even on that point, there's a lot of confusion coming out of the left.
So I suspect that this is another delaying tactic that will do nothing more than postpone the congressional decision because Congress has every right to do this.
This will obviously be appealed and I think just as obviously be overturned.
Now, I want to focus on something else that happened in Washington, D.C., which is a very interesting kind of private meeting of the top judges in the country.
There is a group called the Judicial Conference of the United States.
It's supposedly the national policy-making body for the federal courts.
And they have these regular meetings, and they had one on March 11th of this year.
Now, who's in this group?
Well, you have the chief judge of each of these judicial circuits.
You have the chief judge of something called the Court of International Trade.
But you also have one district judge from each regional circuit.
So you've got this kind of small group, and the group is presided over by the Chief Justice, which is John Roberts.
Evidently, at this otherwise perfunctory meeting at which policies are made for the courts, various matters are discussed for how the courts can operate, maybe ways to speed up the process, maybe ways to avoid different courts coming up with different and sometimes contradictory rulings.
There was a kind of working breakfast at which Roberts spoke.
And evidently in the question-answer session, Judge Boseberg, this is the judge who has been a thorn in the side of Trump.
This is a Democrat nominee judge.
This is a left-winger.
He stands up and he basically says that many of his colleagues are concerned that the Trump administration might disregard rulings of federal courts and this would cause a constitutional crisis.
And he's basically telling the Chief Justice, like, what can you do?
What are you doing to stop this or to prevent this from happening?
Now, Chief Justice Roberts kind of deflects the question, basically says, hey, listen, I'm hoping that that doesn't happen.
It hasn't happened.
I am hopeful that no such constitutional crisis will materialize.
But it's really interesting that this conversation occurred at all, not just because Trump is the president and because this is a seeming attempt by a district judge to create a fortification in the judiciary against Trump.
The significant point here is that Trump himself is before Judge Bozberg.
He has had more than one case before this judge.
And not only that, so the judge seems to be kind of taking sides against one of the people appearing in his own court.
Judges are supposed to be umpires.
They're supposed to be to call balls and strikes.
They're supposed to be neutral.
They're not supposed to favor or disfavor someone appearing before them.
And yet here is Boesberg seemingly doing exactly that.
But not only that, the premise of his statement turns out to be completely false.
He's saying, well, what if these Trump people don't obey the rulings of these district judges, him as well as others?
So the question is, name a ruling where a district judge has made, and there have been a number of these rulings, and they have thwarted some key decisions by the Trump administration.
But in every single case, the Trump administration has followed the ruling.
Not in a single case, as the Trump people said, we don't care what the judge decided.
This is obviously a wrong decision.
We're going to pretend he didn't make it, and we're going to appeal it.
But in the meantime, we're going to do the opposite of what the judge says.
The Trump administration, in no case, has done that.
As I say, even when the rulings went clearly against Trump, you've got to stop firing these federal officials until you have appealed the decision.
They stop doing that.
You've got to free this guy, the Columbia University activist Mohammoud Khalil.
Okay, off he goes.
He's released and he's free, at least free for the moment.
And you've got to return Brego Garcia from El Salvador to the United States.
Even though the circumstances of that are complicated, yes, the guy was, in fact, repatriated to the U.S. to face other charges here in this country.
So the point here is that the Trump administration is obliged to follow the law, but it has been doing that.
And as Amy Coney Barrett pointed out in one of the recent Supreme Court decisions, the judiciary needs to do its part and follow the law as well.
I think what you have here in this particular case that I'm describing is not necessarily a violation of a law, but a violation of the spirit of the judiciary, which is to, number one, treat Trump in a fair-minded manner as a litigant.
Don't take sides against him.
Don't act in advance as though he's somehow going to subvert your decisions.
He hasn't done that.
There's no reason to imply some movement among the judges that requires the intervention of the Chief Justice.
This is just utterly out of line by Judge Bozberg, but it goes to confirm the point that this guy, far from performing his role solely as a judge, is also playing a dual role as a left-wing political anti-Trump activist.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast my friend Steve Cortez.
He is a founder of the League of American Workers.
He's a senior advisor for Catholic Vote.
He's a former senior advisor for Trump, both in 2016 and 2020, also for Vance in 2022.
He's been on a contributor to Fox and CNN.
And he has a new documentary that is, well, very timely.
It's called You Don't Know Barack, Exposing Obama.
By the way, you can follow Steve at Cortez Steve on X at Cortez Steve or the website CortezInvestigates.com.
Steve, thank you for joining me.
Appreciate it.
Dinesh, thank you so much for having me.
I'm almost nervous to talk about this topic to somebody like you who has done so much amazing work, documentary work, specifically on Barack Obama.
So I'm standing on your shoulders of what you've already built in that regard.
Oh, you're very nice to say that.
Well, I think as we'll find out, our work on Obama covers somewhat different areas of the man, right?
I focus more on his upbringing, the dreams from my father, his trips to Africa, and the influence of his dad.
But let me start with something that Trump said very recently.
He said that in this whole Russiate scandal, the attempt to frame Trump as a Russian asset, a campaign that ruthlessly destroyed, I would say, the first half of the Trump presidency was executed by very high people in the Obama administration.
Of course, the Steele dossier was cooked up and paid for by the Hillary campaign.
There was a lot of collaboration by the media.
But Tulsi Gabbard said recently, and Trump seems to be backing her up, that this is really the work of Obama.
It's not even Hillary who's the driver of this.
Obama is the head of the snake.
And Trump even went on to use the word treason.
Now, there are some people and some Republicans who say, well, you know, Obama's a former president.
There's going to be civil unrest if anything happens to Obama.
They're kind of hoping that the DOJ will go after Brennan and Clapper and Comey, but maybe leave Obama alone.
I thought I'd ask you to weigh in on whether or not you think that the DOJ should take the step.
I won't call it unprecedented because, of course, Trump was indicted.
Trump had a mugshot.
Trump had 90-plus charges against him.
Should Barack Obama, in your view, be indicted here?
Well, look, Dinesh, if that is where the evidence leads, then 100% he should be.
He's hardly immune.
Of course, just because he's a former president does not give him immunity to crimes, especially crimes rising to this level.
And by the way, will the evidence show that?
I believe it will.
What we have seen so far does indicate that Obama was fully aware and, in fact, more than just awareness, that he was driving this plot, this insidious plot against the then newly elected president of the United States, Donald Trump, trying to effectively lay a trap, a poison pill, to try to pollute his presidency with a complete lie, with a complete fabrication, using the U.S. intelligence community as the weaponized arm of the government to lay this trap for Donald Trump.
And if that all does, in fact, lead via the evidence to Obama, then he is guilty of significant crimes against this country, not just against Donald Trump and not just against Trump voters, but against the entire country.
So I have no doubt that people, even you mentioned Clapper, for example.
I think it's very clear that Clapper has committed serious crimes and has been doing so, by the way, for quite a long time, even before he ever thought about Trump as president.
So I think it's a must that he ends up in handcuffs and that he ends up indicted.
Will it lead ultimately to Obama?
I suspect it will.
And if the evidence, again, is strong, then should we pursue it?
100% we should, because we cannot allow anyone in this country to engage in seditious plots against the duly elected president of the United States and certainly not those who have been entrusted with the highest levers of power possible in this American republic.
And Steve, I agree completely as well.
And I think that it is very important to have the left which was trying to do this to us and to feel in a way some of the heat turned on them, right?
And they went after the, they didn't hesitate to go after Trump.
I mean, it probably crossed their mind, hey, could this cause some civil unrest?
And I think the Democrats thought, well, so we have the police, we have the military, we'll do what we need to to put that, put that down if it rears its ugly head.
And so I agree that we should not, out of some sort of squeamishness, hold back.
But the Supreme Court in its presidential immunity decision did say that actions undertaken by a president in official capacity, this is as opposed to say private actions.
A president would not be immune for, let's say, tax fraud.
But wouldn't Obama be able to say that regardless of how abominable his behavior might be, hey, I was doing it in my official capacity.
I had a meeting right in the Oval Office with all these cabinet people, and therefore I'm off the hook.
Right.
Well, but that doesn't fly logically nor legally.
I'm sure that would be their argument, by the way, if it does get to that point.
Their argument would be in the official capacity as president.
But if you are using official channels and official powers, but to commit what is knowingly and clearly an illegal deed, then you are not actually acting in an official capacity or in a lawful capacity in president.
In other words, it's very clear that if the president were to walk out on the street and shoot somebody, he's acting in a private capacity and he could be charged with murder.
But if he were to tell the CIA in the Oval Office, I want you to go and kill Citizen John Doe, why?
Because he's my political opponent.
Yes, you used government channels.
You acted in a quasi-official way, but could he still be personally prosecuted?
Of course he could.
And I would argue that what happened here was a political assassination based on a clear lie.
And when you do that to somebody, when you use the powers of the government, the awesome and vast powers of the government to purposefully spread a malicious lie, and you know that it's a lie, all to try to discredit and undermine a duly elected public official of any level, whether it's a town mayor or the president of the United States, then you are committing a crime for which you can be personally liable.
And look, do I think it would be good?
Let me just be clear on this, okay?
As much as I can't stand Barack Obama, and I make it very clear in my documentary, and I try to be serious and objective about it, of course, but I hold no positive, no goodwill toward Barack Obama.
Would it be good for this country to have a former president indicted in that way?
Perhaps not, at least in the near term.
Would it be contentious?
It would be.
But is it necessary for us to lay out all the evidence and to find out, have full disclosure for the American people of what he did?
And then, as a country, in a serious and sober way, make that determination, does he need to, in fact, himself personally be indicted?
And perhaps, let's say we get to that point, Donald Trump may decide for the good of the country, I'm going to pardon him, actually.
But it's clear that he's guilty.
And here's why.
And I think what Tulsi Gabbard has done is she has thankfully started that process.
What many of us have long suspected for valid reasons, but we were not able to show concrete evidence.
She has now at least started to show the audit trail of concrete evidence that shows that Barack Obama had a full awareness and, in fact, participation in this insidious plot against Donald Trump as an incoming president.
And you're right, too, Dinesh.
It had serious consequences.
It just wasn't just a matter of, oh, they besmirched him and it hurt his reputation.
No, it seriously hampered his ability to act as commander in chief for that first term.
I still think he had a very successful term, but it would have been far better if he didn't have to constantly fight this ludicrous hoax that was perpetrated against him, not just by political opponents in the political arena, not campaign operatives, not a corrupt media.
You know, all those things happen, but no, his predecessor, the president of the United States, abusing his own powers to lay a trap for his successor.
And I think that's the reality of who Barack Obama is.
And that's part of why I did this documentary to also show what has he done in his post-presidency.
And I thought it was important to show that this is a man who claims to be for the people, who claims to be the representative of the common man, you know, or forgotten Americans.
In reality, if we look at his actions, the opposite is in fact true.
And particularly in his post-presidency, where he has lived a life with the jet set, the global elites of tech, the glitteratis of Hollywood.
His life is Martha's Vineyards and Private Jets and the French Riviera and has forgotten about Chicago.
And Dinesh is somebody who lived most of my life in Chicago.
I was chased out of there by the crazies like a lot of people, but I consider myself still a Chicagoan.
The fact that Chicago produced this man, created him politically, the fact that he constantly trumpeted himself as a Chicagoan, that he was this man from the south side with a white sock hat on, community activists in Chicago, cared about the city.
The second he made it, once he used Chicago, once he exploited the narrative of Chicago to become president of the United States, two things happened.
Number one is nothing got better for the people he claimed to represent, the people who launched him effectively into the White House, particularly poor black and brown people on the west and south sides of Chicago.
Nothing got better for them.
But then secondly, he forgot about Chicago.
He has hardly ever come back, doesn't care about it, doesn't talk about it, certainly doesn't act in any way that shows that Chicago is his home and that he wants it to be better.
And in fact, I would argue he's actually making Chicago much worse by his presidential library, which is where I do a lot of the shooting for this.
It's a hideous structure.
I mean, it's just unbelievably ugly.
And I realize ugliness is subjective, but I think most people would agree that this brutalist architectural style is not in any way endearing.
It's massive.
It's out of scale.
It costs nearly a billion dollars, more than three times the planned initial budget.
It is five years behind schedule and still not done.
And when I saw that physically, when I saw it in person, is when I really determined I've got to do a documentary on Obama and I'm going to start the documentary right here in front of this hideous structure, which in a tragic way is actually representative of who Obama is.
Steve, can you illuminate how Chicago fits into this Obama picture?
And I say this Because here you have a guy, African dad from Kenya.
He's got a white mom from the Midwest, but he grows up in Hawaii.
And then he goes to Occidental College and mysteriously transfers from there to Colombia.
Suddenly, he's at an Ivy League school where he produces a thesis which has never been surfaced.
His grades and transcripts have never been released.
But nevertheless, he goes to Harvard Law School.
He becomes the president of the Harvard Law Review.
He's subsequently trumpeted as a constitutional scholar.
Although, to my knowledge, he has never published a scholarly article on the Constitution or any other, not just legal topic, but any topic at all in any scholarly journal or magazine in his life.
Mysteriously, he then surfaces in Chicago as some kind of a community activist.
So my question is, here's this kind of weird guy.
I mean, his history is so peculiar that some people relentlessly think somebody must have orchestrated this, someone must have put him up to it, someone must have choreographed his journey.
Do you think that he strategically went to Chicago to kind of do the Alinsky?
Why did Obama go to Chicago?
Well, I think you mentioned it right there, Alinsky.
I really do believe that's why he very smartly, you know, from an evil perspective, but very slyly selected Chicago, is that Chicago, unfortunately, and I don't say this with any pride as a Chicagoan, but Chicago has long been the home of leftist radicalism in America, going all the way back to the hay market days.
But in our present era, it's really more because of Saul Alinsky.
And Saul Alinsky and the people he interacted with in Chicago, both directly and those sort of indirectly, you know, sort of his almost ideological grandchildren, and you might call them and great-grandchildren.
They have been extremely effective on the political left because his rules for radicals, which I encourage everybody on the right to read, by the way, because some of his tactics are truly brilliant.
Now, therefore, an absolutely malicious goal of Marxism.
However, some of his tactics are brilliant.
And also, you need to understand the tactics of the left so that you can best counterpunch against them, repel them, and counterpunch.
And Rules for Radicals has been a bit of a Bible for this secular humanist leftist crowd.
And I believe that Obama took a survey, didn't really have a home per se, certainly not in the continental United States, and said, where do I go?
Well, I go to Chicago.
I go to the home of Saul Alinsky.
I go to the South Side where he operated.
I'm going to find lots of radical colleagues and allies there.
I'm black.
I have a Harvard degree.
I'm going to be an easy sell to these people, to these allies, and they're going to quickly propel me.
And indeed, they did, you know, first into the state legislature, and then through a series of really lucky breaks, he ends up in the U.S. Senate as a very young man.
And then because the entire world falls apart in 2008 financially, he ends up going from a relatively obscure senator to the president of the United States, you know, again, in remarkably short order.
Now, that meteoric rise, it did involve a lot of luck, but he probably could not have taken advantage of that luck had he not been in Chicago.
So I don't think it's a coincidence, you know, that Hillary Clinton found much of her ideological bearing from Saul Alinsky.
So did Barack Obama.
So did a lot of other radicals who've had a really significant effect, negative effect upon this country.
So in some ways, it was inevitable he would go to Chicago.
But regarding Chicago, you know, what have leftists done to that city?
And what has Barack done to try to heal the pain in that city?
One of the things I point out in the documentary, it has the widest life expectancy gap of any city in America.
And this is from the NYU School of Medicine.
This isn't Steve Cortez trying to document this in Streeterville, which is a very nice neighborhood near Michigan Avenue, which is the high-end shopping district of Chicago.
Mostly high-rises, mostly older white folks.
Average longevity, 90 years old in Streeterville.
Very good, healthy, generally wealthy place.
Just six miles away in Anglewood, not far from this hideous new Obama library.
By the way, the Anglewood could use a billion dollars rather than building this monument to Obama's ego.
But in Anglewood, average life expectancy, 60 years old.
So a 30-year gap in the same city, only miles apart.
And that sad metric, I think, tells you the failings of Chicago.
Yes, there is a credentialed elite who lives near the water there, near Lake Michigan, who does quite well in Chicago, but the masses suffer and they suffer greatly through terrible education.
Right now, 45% of young black men aged 20 to 25, 45% of them are neither in school nor working.
I mean, think about that tragic situation.
And what did Barack Obama do for them?
Nothing as president.
What did he do for them as post-president?
You know, again, nothing.
And I would argue actually even worse than nothing because he insulted them in this last presidential election in November of 2024.
And that's part of why I did this doc also, Dinesh.
I think for the first time, he became a net negative for the Democrats.
He was a sainted star of the Democratic Party until last November.
And I think part of how he was a net negative for Kamala Harris is that he was a scold, and he particularly sermonized against black men in America.
He couldn't believe that they were rallying to America first and to President Trump in increasing numbers.
And he told them that's only because you don't want a woman, because you're misogynistic.
And black men recoiled against that.
They don't like being talked down to by Barack Obama, and particularly younger ones who don't remember 2008, that election.
They weren't adults at that time.
And so they don't have this natural goodwill toward him.
And it was interesting.
I found that again and again.
And of the people I interviewed, the Chicagoans that I interviewed, my guests for this documentary, I interviewed two in particular, powerful, persuasive young black citizens of Chicago who had voted for Barack Obama, who were huge fans of his with high, high expectations, and had all of those hopes massively disappointed and have now turned completely ideologically to the other side.
And they are not rare, especially among young black men who really resented him scolding them and talking down to them.
So I think the shine is off of that, what was once a rising star.
There are dents in that armor of Obama.
And I think we're going to continue to see his stature descend.
And that would be a good thing for this country.
Absolutely, guys.
I've been talking to Steve Cortez, former senior advisor for President Trump.
The website CortezInvestigates.com.
Follow him on X at Cortez Steve.
By the way, the documentary, You Don't Know Barack Exposing Obama.
Great stuff, Steve.
Looking forward to watching the film.
Guys, check it out.
Steve, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you, Tony.
I'm talking about the Reagan Doctrine.
This is all part of a discussion of my book, Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
And our subject, broadly speaking, is regime change.
I gave an example yesterday about how regime change in Grenada, small country though it was and is, turned out very well.
We're now going to see regime change in Nicaragua.
The regime change actually comes, as it turns out, after Reagan leaves office, but it's nevertheless the result of Reagan's actions and his policies, just as the collapse of the Soviet Union, which comes first in 1989 with the Berlin Wall, and then in 1991-92 was also the result of Reagan's actions and policies.
Now, the Sandinistas are in power in Nicaragua.
They are socialist.
They are communist.
They are allied with Cuba.
They are allied indirectly through Cuba with the Soviet Union.
And a group of counter-revolutionaries appears in the bush.
These are guerrillas.
And they are young people for the most part.
Started out with just a few hundred people.
The movement gathered steam.
And at its peak in about the mid-1980s, you have about 12 to 15,000 Contras, the name Contra referring to kind of counter-revolution.
And this is a real force.
And the Sandinistas are very worried about it.
And so is the left in the United States.
The left is allied, by the way, with the Sandinistas and wants them to stay in power.
And Reagan decides to support the Contras.
He likens the Contras to the founding fathers.
And some people kind of ridicule this idea because they say, you know, you've got these guys who are like 19 years old, you know, Jose and Pablo and so on.
Are they really the equivalent of Madison or Washington?
Well, Reagan's point is just this, that freedom is not the sole prerogative of the English-speaking world.
Freedom may be an Anglo-Saxon idea in its inception, in its conception, but it doesn't mean it's an Anglo-Saxon idea exclusively in its application.
And Reagan believed, as the founders did, that American ideals, although cooked up in America, original in America, that's why the founders spoke of a new order for the ages, but nevertheless, universal in their relevance.
And Reagan uses the phrase, he says, the Declaration and the Constitution are, quote, covenants we have made not only with ourselves, but with all mankind.
What a striking statement that suggests the universality of American principles and their universal application or relevance.
Here's a quotation from Abraham Lincoln.
He said this in 1848 in the context of the Mexican War.
Any people anywhere, being inclined at having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and form a new one that suits them.
This is a most valuable and sacred right, which we hope and believe is to liberate the world.
So here's Lincoln reflecting on a very particular situation that has to do with Texas and Mexico.
But Lincoln says that this fight about freedom isn't just an American fight or North American fight or even one that is restricted to Western countries.
It's a universal fight for freedom around the world.
Now, Lincoln is very cautious.
He doesn't just say that if you are under a tyrannical government, just go ahead and rebel.
Any people anywhere being inclined, so you need to have the motivation and having the power.
That's a very interesting statement.
You have to have the means to rebel.
You don't just want to rebel and get crushed.
Some of the slave revolts took that form.
They, in many ways, set back slavery.
Why?
Because the masters crushed them and then were even more alert to the possibility of further revolts.
And so the clamps on the slaves became even tighter.
So any people anywhere being inclined and having the power have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government.
Now, Reagan knew the Contras were poorly equipped.
They didn't have good military training.
And Reagan's view was we're not going to be doing the fighting for them.
This is a key point, and a point that becomes very relevant later on when we're talking about Iraq and Bush and the deployment of troops, or even the Gulf War, a little bit earlier in the 1990s when George H.W. Bush mobilized American forces in conjunction with Muslim and Arab forces to eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.
But in both cases, there was a full deployment of American power.
In the case of the Contras, Reagan's idea was, let's give them some weapons.
Let's give them the means to fight their own fight for their own freedom.
Why?
Not just because we care about freedom in Nicaragua, But we don't want a hostile power over there in our backyard.
The Contras are going to be pro-American, especially if we come to their aid.
Now, the Congress was not in the mood to do this.
And so there was a big fight between Reagan and the Democratic-led house.
Reagan had the Senate in the first term.
He had a narrow majority in the Senate, but you need both houses of Congress to pass a law.
On the left, the Sandinistas were romanticized.
They were treated as like popular heroes of a popular revolution.
Hey, we may not like their leftism, but they are chosen by the people.
They reflect the aspirations of the people.
They have replaced this terrible dictator Somoza.
And there's a phenomenon going on here that needs to be pointed out, and that is the migrating search for a leftist peasant paradise.
This is a theme that is well explored in a book I recommend to you called Political Pilgrims by a political scientist named Paul Hollander.
But what Hollander points out is in the 1930s, the left in the West looked to find this workers' paradise, this peasant paradise in the Soviet Union.
Problem was Lenin and Stalin killed way too many people, so the illusion of utopia was difficult to sustain, and so it had to move.
And so the left began to say, all right, well, it's perhaps not in the Soviet Union, but we could find the workers' paradise in China.
But again, there was evidence of the bloodthirsty consequences of Mao's cultural revolution, and the brutality of his regime became so chilling and so obvious that the enthusiasm of the West was dampened.
And so the next stop in the 1960s was Castro's Cuba.
This is going to be the new peasant paradise.
But again, Castro began to execute dissidents, shut down the press, and became so nakedly authoritarian that the left was in search of a new place for its migratory dove, you might say, to land.
And what better place than Nicaragua?
And the Nicaraguans are very aware.
The Sandinistas are very aware of the fact that there was a desperate yearning on the part of the left in America and in Europe to support them.
And so they played along with this idea of the peasant paradise.
Ernesto Cardenal, one of the Sandinistas, was like, well, I'm a poet.
And he actually was a poet, but a kind of a revolutionary poet.
Even Daniel Ortega, who was ultimately, well, he was the head of the Sandinistas, and he was the leader of the country, the chief dictator, if you will.
It was ultimately a dictatorship of the Sandinista movement or the party.
Ortega himself wrote poetry, but it's extremely dumb and illiterate type of poetry.
Don't let nobody talk with this man.
Let him sleep on the floor.
If he makes a move, belt him one, the galleys, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Nicaragua.
This is an example of the garbage poetry this guy produced.
But for the left, it was, wow, the guy's a poet.
And so there was a huge group of people.
These were called Sandalistas or international listas.
They came from Belgium and Germany and England and, well, Minneapolis and Seattle.
And they went down to Nicaragua.
And their idea was to help the revolution.
So they would pick coffee, they would teach literacy, or they just sit around in the cafes in Managua and sing the praises of the Sandinistas.
Rock musicians from America went down there.
There was sort of Woodstock in Managua.
And there was a group, a left-wing group called Witness for Peace, which would take tour groups down to Nicaragua.
So all of this was the left's attempt to bolster, to shore up the Sandinistas, partly because they liked the Sandinistas and partly also to thwart the objectives of the Reagan administration.
As for Congress, Congress passed an amendment that was called the Boland Amendment after a Massachusetts congressman named Boland, Edward Boland.
And it basically said no money, no congressional allocations for Nicaragua.
In other words, for the Contras.
And moreover, cabinet agencies and intelligence agencies were prohibited from involvement with the Contras.
So this was a way of trying to shut down Reagan's policies in Central America.
And as we will see when we pick this up tomorrow, Reagan was undeterred.
Now, this undeterrence in this case might have turned out in some respects to be a little reckless because, as we will find out, and as some of you will remember, this is the root of the Iran-Contra scandal.
This is the root of a certainly the biggest scandal of the Reagan years.
And the left was hoping it would reach a level that would paralyze Reagan, maybe even get him impeached or removed from office.
Those things did not happen, but the left wanted them to happen.
I was, in fact, in the White House, not in the foreign policy area, but in domestic policy at around this time.
So I'm very aware of the mood produced by the Iran-Contra scandal.
But we're going to talk about how Reagan got himself into that situation.
By and large, his actions, I think, were foolish, even though his motives were good.
And somehow, even though his actions were foolish and caused a good deal of distress for the Reagan administration, in some ways set back his agenda, fortunately, the setbacks were temporary, and Reagan was able to close out his second term with magnificent success.
And even more important, it kept the Contras alive at a critical time.
The Contra movement would probably have petered out had Reagan followed the Boland Amendment to the letter, but he did not, as we will see.
And the net effect of it is the Contras kind of stayed in the game.
And the Sandinistas, their abuses, their excesses became more and more obvious.
And all of this came to its climax when the Sandinistas declared a national election.
So when we pick it up next time, we'll follow what happened in the election, who came out ahead in the election, and how Reagan achieved.
Even here, even in this very problematic area, this one place where the Reagan doctrine looked like it was going to go crashing down or burst into flames.
Nevertheless, it ends up producing positive, positive regime change.
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