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July 24, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
53:36
FRAMING TRUMP Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1132
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Coming up, the Democrats say there's nothing new about these new Tulsi Gabbard revelations on Russia collusion, but I will tell you what is new, including something rather explosive about Hillary Clinton.
I want to look at the implications of a Florida judge blocking the release of Epstein grand jury testimony, and Will Chamberlain joins me.
We're going to talk about Tulsi Gabbard's latest findings on the Russia plot and also about the Epstein case.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
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There is a chasm that has now opened up between the right and the left over the issue of Russia collusion.
Now, it's hardly surprising that there is disagreement between the two sides, but it's almost as if the two sides are not talking to each other at all.
From the point of view of the left, there's nothing here.
There's nothing to see.
And we see this also echoed in the media, not because of its coverage, but because of its lack of coverage of Tulsi Gabbard, of the latest intelligence.
These are intelligence assessments made by a large number of people.
Dozens of FBI agents are involved.
The CIA is involved.
So this is a comprehensive review, but the left is very dismissive of it.
And the grounds for their dismissal is very strange.
Now, in the media's case, I can totally understand why they're not covering it.
The reason is they're part of it.
They are co-conspirators.
They were in the know.
They knowingly perpetrated lies.
And so they don't want this to be covered.
If you saw yesterday, you have CNN.
As soon as Tulsi Gabbard mentions Obama and starts going into what Obama did, they cut away from it.
They can't show their own viewers the truth.
And so they pretend like, oh, she's just babbling and we'll give you the real story.
The truth, in other words, has to pass through our portals before it gets to you.
But how do you resolve this kind of a chasm?
I mean, for many on the left, there is no issue here.
The only reason this is being brought up at all is to cover up the Epstein scandal, which I'll talk about in the next segment.
So Epstein is the real story, and this is a non-story.
Some people go on to say, well, Tulsi Gabbard is only doing this to prove her loyalty to Trump, and that's because her loyalty has been somehow called into question.
Now, how do you resolve this kind of a clash?
Well, there's actually one really good way to do it, and that is in court.
So indict Obama, indict Comey and Brennan and Clapper.
And by the way, I think these guys are expecting it.
I don't know about Obama, but Clapper said that he had hired a criminal defense attorney or maybe a team of attorneys.
So this is very good news.
These people know that they are under scrutiny and more than under scrutiny.
The latest news in this area is that, remember, Tilsi Gabbard has been talking about this and talking about this now very surgically, very eloquently, and for several days, really most of this week.
And then she said, I'm referring all of this to the Justice Department.
So what's going on in the Justice Department?
Initially, it seemed very little, and I wasn't confident that they would do much about this.
I know that for a person of the personality and the temperament of Pan Bondi, she's probably going to shrink, by which I mean think twice, think three times, think four times, about whether to open up a case against Obama.
She might be more willing to do it against the others, but she is the kind of temperament, I think, that would hesitate, to put it mildly, before bringing the handcuffs and the mugshot out with Obama.
But what she has done, and this is notable, is assemble what's called a strike force.
Now, what's a strike force?
It's like a special prosecutorial Team to evaluate all this evidence and look basically for the criminality in it.
Because that's the job of the Justice Department, not to decide if what happened here is unethical, in a broad sense, inconsistent with democracy, whether it is to see if laws were broken, and if so, which ones.
Now, the treason here, it seems to me, is not primarily against Trump, but against the American people, right?
Because we have a democratic system where it is the right of the people to choose their elected leader.
And so subverting that process, it does subvert the guy who is elected, but it's a bigger subversion against the people who have the right and the power to make that selection.
It's their rights that are being violated here.
And that's what makes this such a serious crime.
Now, what is the new information here?
We're hearing from the left.
There's nothing new here.
We've heard about Russia collusion.
And one of the talking points of the left, this was the subject both of an op-ed and the New York Times, and I've seen it also echoed in the Atlantic, the New Republic, other places, is that we've had these earlier reviews.
So what could exactly be new in what Tulsi Gabbard is bringing forward?
So let me specify at least a couple of things that are brand spanking new.
The first one is that the references to Trump having been the favorite of Putin, the left has pretty much dropped the idea that Trump was colluding with Putin.
They've redefined the issue now to be not collusion, because they know there was no collusion.
And the Mueller report, the Mueller report confirmed that there was no collusion.
The Durham report put a nail in that coffin.
So they can't go to collusion.
So they have to pull back to, well, Russia did want Trump to win.
But what is the evidentiary basis for this?
And as it turns out, that evidence was itself, quote, trumped up.
Because when you look at the now declassified intelligence, you realize that there is no proof that Putin preferred Trump.
There is a twisting of passages in the intelligence.
At one point, for example, in the intelligence, a Russian pundit, think about it.
This is not Russian intelligence, but some commentator in Russia says that Trump and Putin should, quote, work together like businessmen.
He's advocating that.
He's not describing the fact that they are.
He's simply saying they ought to.
They can do business with each other.
And this is, can you derive from this, A, that somehow Trump is in Putin's inner circle or vice versa?
No.
Can you derive from it that Putin has a preference to Trump?
No.
This is not even coming from Putin.
It's coming from some other guy.
And yet this is massaged.
It is interpreted to make it look like falsely that Putin has a preference for Trump.
Now, the second new fact, which is an even bigger bombshell, and if the cases were reversed, this would be headlines everywhere, is that there is strong reason to believe that the Russians preferred Hillary.
This is new.
Now, why would the Russians prefer Hillary?
It's not because Hillary was seen as being pro-Russia.
The answer, as it turns out, quite surprising, is the Russians had a lot of dirt on Hillary.
And this is in fact in the Russian intelligence dossiers.
So let's look at what that dirt is.
From declassified intelligence, we see Putin had damaging information about Clinton that could have been used against her had she become president.
And the Russians, in fact, were not releasing that information because they thought it would be more useful to them to hold it back and use it for blackmail purposes.
So what did they have on Hillary Clinton?
It turns out that the Russians believed that Hillary Clinton was a psycho.
They believed that she was having a mental breakdown.
They believed that she was under heavy medication.
I'm not quoting from the intelligence report directly.
Hillary was suffering from, quote, intensified psycho-emotional problems, including uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and she was placed on a daily regimen of, quote, heavy tranquilizers.
So, by the way, all of this is a like one-to-one match on what we know to be Hillary's explosive personality.
I mean, it would have been great to be a fly on the wall for you and I and to see Hillary's like reaction on election day.
It was probably very tempestuous.
And so the Russians here are not giving us a portrait that is so outlandish that we could go, oh, wait a minute, Hillary is so serene.
She is such a stoic personality.
No, this matches the rage that Hillary is fully capable of.
And the Russians had facts about this.
And the Russians go on to say one further thing, which is that she was, quote, obsessed with a thirst for power.
And once again, I ask you, doesn't this seem not only plausible, doesn't this match everything we know about Hillary and about the Clintons generally, that they're perfectly Willing to engage in all kinds of shenanigans, crimes.
They will put up with the most horrendous marriage.
Why?
Because what unites them is this shared lust for power.
And it must have been, it must have driven Hillary into an absolutely sociopathic frenzy that she came so close in 2016 and yet never got it.
And so all of this, by the way, is known to Russian intelligence.
Ultimately, it becomes known to U.S. intelligence.
And it's known to Obama.
This is the point, the Obama circle sitting in the White House in December of 2016.
Notice that this is one month after the election.
If Hillary had tempestuous fits, they would have already occurred.
And so Obama knows about them.
This is the interregnum between the election and Trump being sworn in in January of 2017.
And so this is the thrust of Tulsi Gabbard's argument that this is not a case of politicizing intelligence.
It is the case of manufacturing it, making up a case against Trump that you know to be false.
You know to be false.
This is, if not treason, something very close to it.
And it kind of easily meets the definition of seditious conspiracy.
In fact, to the degree that seditious conspiracy is used in the sense that it was used in the January 6 trials, this is seditious conspiracy at a level that far transcends that.
And you'd have to go back to the Civil War to find examples of seditious conspiracy of this sort.
And so I say that this chasm between the left and the right can be put to bed in a court of law.
Let's not rely on argument.
There's no point arguing with the left, going on podcasts and disputing this.
Let's put it in court.
Let's bring out the intelligence agents.
Let's put Clapper and Brennan and these guys into the witness stand if they'll agree to testify.
Probably my guess is they will all take the fifth.
We need to see this kind of retribution.
And I use the term in a positive sense.
Retribution here is fully deserved.
It's not like we are framing them the way they tried to frame us.
No.
We are holding them accountable for their effort to frame us.
And if this results in some kind of mass democratic freak out, some kind of civil disturbance, and so on, that's the price to be paid for upholding the law.
I return to Obama's classic statement that should now be applied to him.
No one, least of all the president, is above the law.
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So we have a very powerful irony at work just at the time when the biggest hoax, the biggest hysteria of the first Trump term is being fully exposed.
Just as we're beginning to see that this Russia collusion, Trump colluding with Russia, Trump being Putin's puppet, Trump being Putin's cocker spaniel, Trump doing Putin's bidding, all of this is being completely debunked.
Even the left has to retreat into the assertion, well, you know, the Russians did buy ads on Facebook.
Well, the Russians did have a strong preference, even though even that is being capsized in this latest trove of documents being released.
But the irony is this.
At the time when the left's last effort to create fake hysteria was just at the time when that is being shot down, sunk, the left is trying to do it again.
And they're trying to do it again now with Epstein.
This is their new hysteria.
This is their new go-to hoax.
And I say hoax because they will grab onto every little thing and try to make it seem like a big thing and try to make it seem like there is some massive cover-up underway.
The latest thing reported by the Wall Street Journal is that Trump is, quote, in, end quote, the Epstein files.
Now, first of all, when we say the Epstein files, there are no files in the sense of, you know, it's not like there are four manila folders that somebody is holding somewhere and Trump's name is in those files.
What they mean is that Trump is connected to Epstein in the record.
And the truth of it is we know that's true.
Trump knew Epstein.
Trump has had dealings with Epstein.
Trump has been at social events with Epstein.
But apparently this friendship fell out, broke ultimately over Trump's discovery of some of the more seedy and nefarious activities of Epstein.
And then Epstein is banned from Mar-a-Lago and the Trump-Epstein connection comes to a bitter end.
So the fact that Trump is, quote, in the files is nothing more than saying Trump is in the record and that's nothing new.
So what is the explosive revelation here?
Now, it would be explosive if somebody said, well, Trump is a pedophile.
Trump has had sex with underage girls.
Nobody is even suggesting that.
No one has produced a shred of proof of that.
Trump was, no one has been able to show that Trump is part of the Epstein kind of circle of access to the underage girls and Epstein Island.
So what we have here is nothing more than like insinuation and wishful thinking.
But if you follow the news, you can see that the media is going all in on this.
Why?
Because they are hungry for a new Russia collusion type scandal that they can use to paralyze Trump's second term.
So they were successful to a large degree in the first term.
Even though Trump's first term had notable accomplishments, they were fewer than they would have been.
Why?
Because they did a successful Russia collusion hit on Trump.
And they're trying to do it again.
Now, when I say they, I mean the Democrats, but I also mean the media.
The media plays the biggest role here.
And in fact, to me, it is one of the reasons why I think a dozen or so prominent media figures need to be indicted along with Comey and Brennan.
Now, they'll shriek First Amendment and free speech, but the truth of it is you don't have free speech to engage in any kind of a conspiracy.
If you're engaged in seditious conspiracy, obviously conspiracies are transmitted via speech, right?
Five guys get together.
Let's rob the bank.
That's a conspiracy.
That's why you're violating my free speech by playing a tape of me talking about robbing the bank.
Well, you have a right to free speech, but what you are speaking about is illegal.
And so the point here is that by holding these journalists accountable for knowingly perpetrating lies and being part of this, an essential part of this conspiratorial circle, notice that when we look at the biggest misinformation and disinformation campaigns of recent history, I'll mention three.
Number one, the disinformation scandal of COVID.
All the lies about the origins of COVID, all the lies about who can get COVID.
Yes, perpetrated by the Democrats, but promulgated, publicized by the media.
Number two, the scandal of the fact that not only is Biden an incapacitated president, he's not really the president at all.
Other people are making the decisions.
Other people are working the auto pen.
All of this was concealed by who?
The media.
Because they didn't know, they knew.
They were in on it.
And now the scandal of Russia collusion.
So what I'm getting at here is that it's not that this Russia collusion scandal is by itself.
Whether it's Epstein, whether it's Russia collusion, whether it's COVID, whether it is who's really running the country between 2021 and 2025, it's the same culprits in every single case.
And that's why accountability is key.
Now, the latest news on Epstein is twofold.
One is Pam Bondi trying to get a session with Gillen Maxwell.
And like I said, we'll have to see what comes out of that, what Gillen Maxwell is able to reveal.
That's new, if she's willing to reveal anything.
And the other is that a judge in Florida has rejected the Trump administration's request to unseal grand jury testimony.
Now, the judge appears in this case, it's by the way, a Democrat nominee judge, so it's not like she's doing it to protect Trump.
Her reason, her name is Rosenberg, is actually based upon solid precedent.
Apparently, there's a decision in the 11th Court of Appeals, which says that these grand jury materials cannot be released except under some very narrow exceptions.
And the judge goes, what are the narrow exceptions?
What are the circumstances here other than the public wants to know, other than that there's a lot of curiosity, or other than that Trump and the administration is under the gun and they need to release something?
Those are not called judicial reasons to release documents.
So the judge is basically saying, she even says, quote, my hands are tied.
Another way of saying this is not as if I'm making a political decision one way or the other.
She says, I can't release these records under a set of rules or criteria established by the court that is right above me, that is on top of my head.
And so the Florida documents, at least, there are a couple of New York judges that are looking at the same question pertaining to Epstein documents in New York.
But with regard to the Epstein documents, let's remember the Epstein case originated in Florida.
That's where Epstein served the better part of a year in prison time.
So Florida is the venue of the Epstein conviction, or at least the very mild conviction that he got on one count of prostitution, I believe.
And those documents evidently are going to, at least for the present, remain under seal.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast Will Chamberlain.
He is Vice President for External Affairs at the Edmund Burke Foundation.
He's also senior counsel at the Article 3 project.
The website, by the way, is burke.foundation.
You can follow Will on X at Will Chamberlain.
Will, thank you for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
I want to dive into this, these revelations by Tulsi Gabbard, supported by documentation from the intelligence community.
Do you think that this is a scandal or a case that is limited to Brennan, Clapper, Comey?
Or do you think it rises to the level of Obama?
In other words, is Tulsi Gabbard right and is Trump right, echoing Tulsi Gabbard, that Obama here is the chief perpetrator and the others are merely carrying out the wishes of the former president?
I think it's a little bit in the middle.
I certainly think it reaches to President Obama.
In office, it's pretty clear that they had a big principles meeting and that he was involved in setting the direction for all of this investigation for essentially doing a 180 on the intelligence, going from there is no Russian cyber hack to actually Russia was very much involved in that, the incorporation of the steel dossier, all that Obama was involved in.
Whether he'll be prosecuted, I think it's going to be really challenging to prosecute him for the stuff he did while he was in office because of presidential immunity.
And it's hard to see how that's not an official act.
You know, ordering your intelligence chiefs, ordering your Department of Justice to do anything is a classic official act.
So I suspect he'll be immune.
But if he engaged in conduct after he left the presidency, kind of continuing this conspiracy against President Trump's right, he might be criminally liable for that.
But I think that in general, most of the exposure will fall on his subordinates.
What do you think is new, Will, about these Tulsi Gabbard revelations?
I say this because the standard line on the left appears to be something like this.
Hey, we had a Durham report and we had the Mueller investigation and we had a Senate report which featured, among other people, Marco Rubio.
And none of them said the things that Tulsi Gabbard is saying.
So where is Tulsi Gabbard getting, quote, new information that goes beyond what we already know?
So I think that what was not publicly available knowledge was the nature of the intelligence community's findings prior to the election in 2016.
We did not have confirmation that the intelligence community had determined that Russia was not looking to hack us.
And then the other thing that we're seeing is the disclosure, the public disclosure of these email chains between top members of the intelligence community and other people setting the new direction to sort of flip that intelligence product on its head to craft a totally new one.
This is new.
This is not something we had suspicions about this.
And I think probably, you know, people like Devin Nunes and others had some amount of access to this.
They've hinted at that in public postings that I've seen, that they had access to it, but that the CIA prevented the publication of that and kept it classified.
It's Tulsi that has unclassified all that material and then laid it out in a way to make clear what the essentially the fabrication of intelligence was, how they had an intelligence product that said X, and they decided intentionally to flip that into an intelligence product that says not X. I mean,
it's interesting, Will, isn't it, to look at the details of this because you'll see documents which have rather vague allusions to Trump, like a Russian pundit is talking about the fact that, hey, you know, maybe Trump and Putin can work together because they're both businessmen.
Now, this hardly proves that Trump is a Russian puppet or anything to that effect.
But I suppose if you're an intelligence analyst, you can massage or interpret this information and spin it pretty much any way you want.
And so it looks like Obama and the gang, they know that this is a subjective process.
And so if they come up with the opposite conclusion, even if it's based on the same set of facts, and then moreover, if they classify that conclusion, no one's going to be the wiser.
Wasn't that the heart of this?
And then you go tell the media, but of course the media itself doesn't have access to any of the original documents.
Right.
I think, I mean, you had the 50 and one intelligence Agencies saying that the Hunter Biden laptop was a potential product of Russian disinformation.
And, you know, the interesting thing is, if you listen to some of those CIA spooks now, they'll stand by what they wrote in that document because what they said was something kind of unfalsifiable, that it bears the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.
Well, in their view, I guess the hallmarks of Russian disinformation or anything derogatory towards Democrats, fine, whatever.
But it's something you can see how they're able to play this game and finesse these essentially arguments and really, I mean, I hate the word disinformation, but it really is a kind of disinformation where it's sort of like, you know, it's not true, it's not false, it's just BS to drive a narrative.
I mean, the thing is we're familiar, right, Will, with disinformation as a, I mean, these guys have been trained in lies, right?
That's what the CIA, for example, does.
But it's always been our understanding that we are okay with this kind of training in the dark arts because they are going to apply it abroad against the adversaries of the country.
And little did we know or suspect that this was going to be deployed as a weapon of domestic political engineering.
And you use the phrase finesse.
I mean, I'm reminded right here of the very artful email that Susan Rice sent to herself, basically saying, hey, by the way, I just want to emphasize that everything is, I mean, everything is on the up and up.
Think of it.
Why would you, you know, you and I go to meetings.
We don't send ourselves emails unless we're trying to cover our tracks.
And wasn't that what was going on here, quite obviously, at least now with the benefit of hindsight?
Yeah, emails to file, those are classic, right?
You're not trying to communicate with anybody except the future investigator who's looking through your email account.
Yeah, that's that's we're seeing a lot of that kind of finesse.
And I think that's a finesse is a good description of what all these people tried to do.
But in the end, it wasn't nearly as elegant as they thought it really was.
I think they actually will find themselves in serious criminal jeopardy because they ultimately they fabricated an intelligence report.
They fabricated an intelligence report to say the opposite of what their intelligence community had previously determined.
And that report ultimately was the catalyst for the Mueller investigation, for this endless counterintelligence work, for the attempt to criminally prosecute President Trump.
And there's a pretty good argument that that conspiracy kind of continues on to this day.
I mean, my guess, Will, is that the reason that they were so confident about this is one, they thought that they could prevent by doing all these things and other similar shenanigans, Trump from ever getting back into the White House.
That's number one.
And number two, they probably thought that based upon past behavior, we can count on the Republicans, even if they find out, to do nothing.
Because Republicans are the type of people who say things like, well, just because the Democrats acted in this nefarious way and prosecuted us doesn't mean that we should be prosecuting them.
And moreover, we don't want to set a bad precedent by the kind of actions we engage in.
We don't want to have senior officials of the government indicted.
I mean, all of this is almost nonsensical, almost comical, I think, at this stage.
But I don't think that they counted on a second Trump administration that would not only be in office, but that would begin to open up this Pandora's box with an intention of actually doing something about it.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, this line from kind of more constrained Republicans, let's put it that way, you know, that we should be afraid of setting a precedent that Democrats might exploit.
Those same people will complain all the time about how Democrats do unprecedented things all the time.
It's like maybe we shouldn't concern ourselves so much with the precedents we set given that they are not relevant to the Democrats' decision-making calculus.
And the second point here is, you know, people who talk about opening Pandora's box, I think most of us would be just looking at over there at this box that's been opened for 10 years and wondering, is that the Pandora's box you're talking about?
The one that they opened a decade ago and that has unleashed untold horrors on our democracy and, you know, maximized partisan divide in our country for a long time.
That ship has sailed.
We've already, we've opened the lawfare box.
We told Democrats not to do it.
They did it anyway, gleefully.
If they don't ever feel the pain of their own rules, they will not change their conduct.
For me, the most, well, I don't know if entertaining is the right word, revelation in the Tulsi Gabbard material is the information that the Russians were apparently holding about Hillary Clinton.
Apparently, they had come to the conclusion that she was a bit of a psycho, that she is obsessively hungry for power, that she is disposed to going into psychotic rages, that she is so out of control that she has to be heavily medicated.
And what got me chuckling was I was like, this is exactly my picture of Hillary Clinton.
In other words, had they said Hillary Clinton is very stoic, Hillary Clinton is very serene, I would have been like, well, that doesn't really match the Hillary Clinton that we've known over the last 25 years.
But the Russians were giving a picture that they basically had the goods on Hillary and apparently favored Hillary in the 2016 race, not because she was pro-Russia, but because they felt that they could use this information, apparently, against Hillary in some way.
I mean, that's new, isn't it?
I hadn't heard any of that before.
I also read that part of their assessment was they thought there was no way Trump could win.
So they were sort of not willing to release derogatory information about her prior to the election in the fruitless hope of, in their view, of changing the election results.
They were withholding it to be able to use it against her once she was president.
That's the theory outlined in the DNI report.
But yeah, the funny thing is all that stuff reflects things that were actually pretty apparent to the public at the time.
I mean, think about what it takes to engage in the conduct she did with her email server.
I mean, we forget about that, but she built a private email server to handle government correspondence and had it in her house with the obvious intent of avoiding FOIA requests.
That's kind of psychotic.
What are you doing?
No one else would think to do that, to like say to themselves, Yeah, I'm going to have a lot of communications, but I'm going to run for office in the future.
And so I don't really want to see those communications disclosed.
So I'm just going to host them in my own house.
Sorry?
And then, you know, the health issues, gosh, we remember, remember that famous video on 9-11, 2016 where she fainted at the Ground Zero event and had to be hoisted into her car.
You know, that was all there.
The funny thing is this vindicates so many of the claims of the kind of 2015, 2016 pro-Trump influencers who were called crazy and conspiracy theorists at the time.
It's like, no, not only was she, in fact, very unhealthy and very psychotic, but the Russians also had evidence of that that they were withholding at the time.
Yeah, withholding.
I think that's a key point.
Hey, what do you make of this?
The Democrats right now, it seems to me, are taking the line that all of this, all of it, does not withstand scrutiny because it's all an effort to deflect attention from the true scandal of the day, which is Epstein.
So, I mean, I find this sort of very peculiar because remember, they tried to ruin Trump's first term with a made-up hysteria over Russia collusion.
And in a way, they're doing exactly the same thing now, which is they found another issue.
In this case, it's Epstein.
Same type of whipped-up hysteria.
Trump is in the Epstein files.
But now it is being used to try to sideline the exposure of the earlier hoax.
Is it going to work?
And how should the Trump people counter this effort to, hey, look over here?
Yeah, this isn't going to work.
Remember, I mean, the Democrats have been in power for the last four years and they were in power under Obama, and the Epstein information is all old.
This is all conduct that's 15 to 20 years old.
If they had derogatory information that affirmatively linked President Trump to Jeffrey Epstein's misconduct, they would have released it at some point in the last decade.
They don't have it.
They know they don't have it.
And especially given what you just discussed, how ruthless the Democrats were about fabricating the whole Russiagate scandal, Ukraine, you name it, the number of scandals they've tried to pin on President Trump and failed to do so.
If they had something that connected him to Jeffrey Epstein's behavior that was real, they would have released it if they were willing to release all this other nonsense.
Well, and we know that to be true because, I mean, think about it.
The Republicans are basically the puritanical party, right?
The Democrats are not.
You could reveal that Bill Clinton was in the Epstein files and a lot of Democrats would be like, yo, but he was a really good president in the 1990s.
I really don't mind.
But I think the Democrats know that Trump could not survive, regardless of his policies.
If Trump were basically having sex with underage girls, it would sink his chances of being elected in November.
So I'm just strengthening your point that there is no way that that kind of explosive material, if they had it, would not have been out there, let alone with the media starving for that kind of information.
So I think you're quite right that this is a whipped up frenzy in the hope that people won't pay attention to that.
And I think this is also why Trump is annoyed with the focus on the Epstein issue.
He's like, look at all this other important stuff coming out.
And you guys are trying to figure out what Epstein did in the late 1990s and who was on the Epstein list.
So, guys, I've been talking to Will Chamberlain, Vice President for External Affairs at the Edmund Burke Foundation.
Follow him on X at Will Chamberlain.
The website is justburke.foundation.
Will, thank you very much for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks for having me, Danish.
I'm discussing Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
And I intend today to complete the chapter called Making the World Safe for Democracy.
Now, democracy is a form of government that is not all it's cracked up to be.
We often hear from the left these words saving democracy and a threat to democracy.
And it's not obvious why democracy is the best form of government or a good idea at all.
The traditional defense of democracy was made by Winston Churchill when he said it was the worst form of government, except for all the others.
Notice what a weak defense this is of democracy.
It's a lesser evil defense.
It's democracy is bad, but take a look at all the alternatives.
But nevertheless, what democracy has going for it, I would say, is that it gives the people their due.
And what I mean by that is that the people are enlightened and have a good perception, not just of their short-term interests, but of their long-term interests, they can elect leaders who will reflect those priorities.
And you get a pretty good system of government, which is what America has had for much of its history.
But if the people are twisted and decadent and depraved, they're going to pick leaders who reflect that.
This is, I think, what the founders were afraid of.
This is why Franklin said, you have a republic if you can keep it.
Now, I'm not getting here into the distinctions between democracy and a republic.
Let's just say that we have a constitutional democracy that because it imposes restraints on majority rule, because it has checks and balances, because it has separation of powers, it's not a purely democratic form of government.
It's republican in the broader sense as well.
Now, I mentioned earlier that Reagan had built his policy toward the Soviet Union by relying on a distinction made by Gene Kirkpatrick between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes.
And The implication of Kirkpatrick's work was that it's all right, in fact, it is an expression of the lesser evil, to ally with authoritarian governments to defeat totalitarian ones.
And it might seem that Reagan would stop there, but interestingly, he didn't.
And if you look at Reagan's record over eight years, even though the focus was the Soviet Union, even though its ultimate goal was to bring down, to roll back, to defeat the Soviet Empire, Reagan also believed that these right-wing autocracies were not a good idea either.
Now, why do I call them right-wing?
I call them right-wing because by and large, left-wing autocracies have an ideological dimension to them.
Think of Cuba, which has a socialist ideology, or North Korea, even Nazi Germany, a fascist ideology, or Italy.
But what was the ideology of, say, Marcos or Pinochet?
Well, the answer is there really wasn't much of an ideology.
This is just like a strong man who wants to be in charge of his country.
I'm going to loosely refer to that as right-wing, even though the label is not exactly accurate.
But Reagan's view was that these right-wing autocracies are not a good idea why.
Number one, they oppress the people.
People get tired of it over time.
And number two, if people get tired enough, they then support socialist ideological revolutions against these traditional autocracies, and then you get something worse.
And we saw the something worse in a number of cases, not just, by the way, in the socialist case.
Look at Iran.
They opposed an autocracy by the Shah, and they got something worse, which is they got Islamism, they got the rule of the mullahs.
Now, let's look at what Reagan did with some autocratic regimes in his own day, the Philippines.
Critical test for Reagan because Marcos was in fact a Reagan ally.
Marcos liked the United States.
Marcos said, United States, you need to support me because I'm fighting against the communists.
And Marcos said, I have martial law, but that's the reason for it.
But there was a democratic movement in the Philippines led by a woman named Corazon Aquino, whose husband, Beninho Aquino, had been assassinated.
And Reagan said, all right, well, you know, Marcos, if you're doing such a great job, you need to have elections.
Let's see if you can win them.
Let's see if you're as popular as you're telling us you are.
Marcos had elections and he lost.
And Aquino became the prime minister.
The Philippines, which was an autocratic regime, became a democracy.
The somewhat more problematic case is South Africa.
And South Africa today is a big mess.
And so one can look back and go, that was having the apartheid regime step down, bringing in these African National Congress thugs, people like Malema and others to run the country now, it's proving to be a disaster.
But let's remember that we're now looking at South Africa with 30 years of hindsight.
Actually, a little more than that.
In Reagan's time, the opposition to apartheid was led by Nelson Mandela.
And Reagan's view was not to support any kind of revolution in South Africa, but nevertheless to put gentle but firm pressure on the South African regime to open up its political process.
And ultimately, it did.
And ultimately, there was a free election.
And ultimately, Mandela was elected.
And Mandela himself, who had had a rather somewhat checkered past, by the way, Mandela used to be a communist.
But Mandela had sort of, you could say, grown over time.
He had been imprisoned in Robin Island.
And he was not the bitter man that one might have expected him to be.
Unfortunately, looking back, the Mandela period, which lasted until Mandela's death, was a kinder, gentler South Africa.
And essentially, with his death, the forces of barbarism have been unleashed again.
So even though I think Reagan was not wrong to support the end of apartheid, to call for an expansion of the franchise, I think that the subsequent evidence puts this into a rather questionable category.
Now in Chile, Reagan pushed for a referendum, which was ultimately held in October 1988.
Think of it.
This is basically just about five months before Reagan stepped down.
Pinochet had a referendum, but he didn't make it a referendum on himself like Marcos did.
Pinochet agreed to step down.
Chile had free elections, and a guy named Patricia Alwyn became the elected prime minister.
Chile has been a democracy ever since.
And so we're seeing a little bit of a pattern here.
It's not a widespread overthrow of every authoritarian regime, but we see that countries are moving in the democratic direction.
South Korea, another example, they held their first free election in 1987.
This is the first free election in South Korea in history.
A guy named Chun Doo-wan becomes the first leader in South Korea.
South Korea was run by military dictatorship, but they transferred power peacefully to an elected government.
And slowly we began to see that in Central and South America, for example, which were these are continents, a continent, characterized by these strongman, so-called cardio dictatorships, we see that democracy is advancing in places like Bolivia, Honduras, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Guatemala.
Not all of these become perfect democracies, but they move in the democratic direction.
And at the end of the Reagan years, you could look around the world and see what is the mainstream or normative Form of government?
And the answer is some form of democracy.
Prior to Reagan, it seemed like most of the world was either in the Soviet orbit or some form of authoritarian dictatorship.
And by the end of the Reagan years, it looked like democracy.
And by democracy here, by the way, I don't mean like rule of the mullahs or I'm talking about Western-style democracy with parliaments and rule of law and typically some form of admittedly imperfect enforcement of human rights.
But this is a major turnaround.
It's a shift in the global landscape.
And this democratic revolution had many heroes.
I won't say that Reagan was the sole figure, no.
But he was the main figure because he was the head of the most powerful nation guiding this process, even if there were many indigenous forces pushing it forward.
In 1917, Woodrow Wilson brought together a special session of Congress and he said, the world must be made safe for democracy.
In Woodrow Wilson's time, this was a simple bombast.
It was rhetoric.
It was wishful thinking.
But in the Reagan era, it was in fact made so.
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