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July 28, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
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MAXWELL LIST Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1134
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Coming up, I'll tell you why I think some prosecutions are forthcoming in the Russia collusion business.
I'll also reveal why Gillen Maxwell got partial immunity and what she might reveal.
Josh Hammer of Newsweek joins me.
We're going to talk about current issues, but also claims of bogus claims of genocide in Gaza.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
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I was quite heartened to see just recently an interview with the CIA director John Ratcliffe, in which he emphasized that the new revelations produced by Tulsi Gabbard about the Russia collusion hoax are not merely resulting in a kind of perfunctory referral
to the DOJ.
Let's send them over to the DOJ, see what happens.
But there is a concerted push, both by Gabbard at the OD, at the intelligence agency, but also coming from the CIA, from Ratcliffe.
We want to see some prosecutions.
And now the left is very nervous about this.
And the left is putting out the word through the media, there's nothing here, there's nothing new.
Come on, the Russians did try to interfere in the election.
But let's remember that the Russia collusion hoax was not about did the Russians have favorites, did the Russians try to influence the outcome?
That would be interesting, but relatively minor.
The key issue was, is Trump collaborating with them?
Is Trump somehow in cahoots with Putin?
Is Trump a Russian asset?
This was the flame.
This was the firepower behind the allegation of Russia collusion.
The word collusion itself tells you the key to the whole thing.
But we now find out not only that the collusion has been debunked, that is debunked as far back as the Mueller report, confirmed by the Durham report, but it's not even clear the Russians wanted Trump to win.
The Russians might have preferred Hillary to win.
And so we come to what was new in these revelations.
And what is new in the revelations is one, the Russians expected Hillary to win and they had dirt on her that they hoped to use against her.
Two, James Brennan went before Congress and he said the steel dossier had nothing to do with this Russia collusion findings on the part of these intelligence agencies, even though Brennan knew that it did.
In fact, he was part of the, he made sure, Brennan did, that the steele dossier was appended, was included, was referred to, and in fact, was the main, quote, evidence that was used to reopen this investigation.
So let's go back to the meeting in the White House with Obama.
At that point, and this is something else we didn't know, the intelligence agencies had concluded that there was no Russian assistance being given to the Trump campaign.
There was no collusion between Trump and Russia.
So Obama knew this.
Comey knew this.
Brennan knew this.
They all knew it.
And Obama basically said, you know, let's discard that.
Let's start over.
And Obama's motive, obviously, is really clear.
Let's cook up a new case.
And this is really the heart of the hoax.
This is the heart of what Obama did, what the intelligence agencies did.
This is really what needs to be prosecuted.
Now, here's an article I have in front of me from the New York Times, which is talking just about the fact that Brennan went before Congress.
This is 2017.
And I'm now quoting the New York Times.
He said that the dossier, quote, was not in any way used as the basis for the intelligence community assessment that was done, end quote.
So this is a flat out, a bald-faced, or as people today like to say, a bold-faced lie.
But the New York Times wants to cover for Brennan.
So, look at its next sentence.
The newly disclosed material complicates that narrative.
I love this.
Complicates the narrative.
Not that he's flat-out lying, not that it contradicts the narrative, but it complicates it.
And this is the kind of thing where this is the kind of cover that the media gives.
Now, imagine if the shoe were on the other foot, imagine if this were a scandal involving Republicans.
This would be blaring from the front page of the Times.
But here, they are trying to shield Brennan and shield Comey and shield Clapper and shield Obama.
Now, let me turn to what's going on with the Epstein files.
The left keeps insisting that Trump is listed in the Epstein files, and they keep repeating this.
Now, what makes all of this really odd is that the Epstein files have existed really since about 2007.
This was under the Bush presidency, then followed by the Obama presidency.
All the sweetheart deals with Epstein, all the, you know, the feds are now turning it over to the local Palm Beach authorities.
All of this happened under Bush, and it happened under Obama.
None of it has happened under Trump.
And yet somehow Trump is the guy who is being challenged as being, the Democrats are, we got to see the files.
We got to see the files.
Trump is in the files.
Now, what does it mean to say that Trump is in the files?
There was a deposition taken of Virginia Juffrey, one of the victims in this Epstein ring.
And Virginia Juffre was asked specifically about Trump.
And she specifically said that, no, Trump had nothing to do with any of this, but she did name Trump.
Trump was talked about.
Trump was discussed in the files.
And it's possible that some of the other depositions, the same thing.
So the idea that Trump is, quote, in the files is not new.
It's well known, and it's not scandalous at all.
Trump is, from everything we know, had nothing to do with Epstein's underage ring of girls or any of that.
So there's no scandalous behavior.
There's certainly no hyenas criminality.
But the left is using this terminology of being in the files to imply, well, Trump was obviously involved with these girls.
Trump was obviously one of the Epstein clients.
They know that that's not true, but it's almost like they're either hoping it's true or they want people not to think in a clear, to make a clear-headed distinction between being, quote, in the files and being part of the Epstein nefarious ring.
Now, it's very interesting that this conversation has occurred between the Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and Gillen Maxwell.
Apparently, it lasted several hours, eight or nine hours.
And I don't know if Gillenn Maxwell spilled the beans, but if she spilled the beans, there's going to be a lot of names that Todd Blanche would have noted, would have taken down.
Now, some people are saying, well, why was there even any discussion of giving her immunity?
Apparently, the type of immunity that has been discussed so far is very limited.
It's not any kind of, you get out of jail, it's not you get a pardon.
It's just this, that, and you know, some people have said, well, since Killer Maxwell is in prison, what kind of immunity can you want?
What kind of immunity does she need?
Well, she actually does need immunity in the sense that if she is going to, if she engages in further criminal behavior, let's just say, for example, perjury or any other kind of criminal behavior, her sentence could be extended.
She could be kept in jail even longer.
And not only that, but if she implicates people, and let's say those people then would have claims against her, they could sue her.
They would have other types of legal claims against her.
And so the immunity that Gillen Maxwell probably asked for is, listen, I want to make sure I will not suffer any additional charges, jail time, any of that for what I'm about to say.
My sentence cannot be changed, but I don't want to be facing a harsher sentence just because I opened up and gave you the goods.
What I'm really hoping is going on here, and I'm not one of these people to engage in this 4D chess type of conversations, but it would be great if Trump has been drawing the Democrats here into a trap.
And by that, I mean the Democrats are with increasing shrillness, release the files, release the files, release the files.
You have them.
Let us know what you know.
And it would be really fantastic if you go, in a sense, to the horse's mouth, which is Gillen Maxwell.
If she doesn't know what's going on, nobody knows.
Collect all this information, put it in a very digestible form, and then bam, release it, blow, just blow it wide open, full disclosure, name names.
Democrats won't be able to object because they're the ones who have been insisting that this documentation be released.
And in one shot, this act would exonerate Trump and it would vaporize the reputations of the Democratic pedophiles.
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I'm going to talk about Trump's trade deal with the EU, with the European Union.
It's a trade deal that is a big deal.
And so I'll say some words about it today, and I'll probably pick up on it to say more tomorrow.
Here's Trump.
We were able to make a deal that's very satisfactory to both sides.
It's a very powerful deal.
It's a very big deal.
Very Trumpy in rhetoric.
And yet I want to argue that even though Trump is very graciously, very magnanimously, it's a deal that's very satisfactory to both sides, I want to show that this was a deal highly beneficial to the United States and in fact, a little bit of an embarrassment to the EU.
And I will show you the proof of that in a moment.
So let's look at what the deal says.
The deal says that for most products, including cars, the EU, the European Union, will pay a tariff of 15%.
Now, it is worth noting that when Trump floated the 15%, the Europeans scoffed.
We're never going to do it.
Absolutely not.
This is ridiculous.
So they have ended up agreeing to the 15% that Trump had proposed.
This is, by the way, many weeks ago.
Trump has agreed to try to have a certain zone of products where there are no tariffs on either side.
But in addition, the EU is set to invest $600 billion, that's over half a trillion, in the U.S. as part of the deal.
So one of the things we see with Trump here is he's trying to have higher tariffs that we impose on them, low tariffs that they impose on us, and they also agree to take a bunch of their money and invest it in plants, businesses, jobs in the U.S. Trump has been doing this with Japan.
He's been pursuing it with China.
He's now obviously got an agreement with the EU.
So the EU has agreed to purchase from the U.S. $750 billion worth of energy, which is oil and natural gas, and make in addition the $600 billion investment.
And this is Ursula von der Leyen representing the EU negotiated this deal.
The negotiations, by the way, conducted at Trump's golf course in Scotland.
And you might step back and ask, well, how is Trump able to pull this off?
Like, how do you get a deal where the initial demand that you made is not only fully agreed to, but you get all these additional agreements.
Yeah, we'll buy your oil and natural gas.
Yeah, we'll put all this money in your country.
Why would the EU agree to this?
And we find out that Trump's negotiating strategy is really simple.
He always threatens to go to ridiculous lengths.
So Trump essentially says to the EU, we'll tariff you 15%.
EU goes, absolutely not.
We will hit you with retaliatory tariffs.
And by the way, this is what economists always predict.
Tariffs never work according to kind of orthodox economics because if you threaten tariffs, the other side will do tariffs.
And so Trump is essentially going up here against the collective wisdom of the economics profession.
So Trump says, all right, if you don't agree to 15%, we'll increase the tariffs to 30.
Now, this is where realism begins to set in.
Why?
Because the Europeans do a very profitable business with the United States.
In fact, they have been running a pretty whopping trade surplus.
Let's look at the numbers.
The EU exports 500 billion plus annually to the US, and they run a $200 billion surplus.
So this is a big part of Europe's economy.
For them to be hit with 30% tariffs is essentially to make their products largely uncompetitive in the U.S. market.
So the Europeans, and Ursula van der Leyen basically admitted this.
She basically said, this is a heavy load to carry, but I'm going to agree because the alternative is far more painful, is far worse.
So this is really how Trump pulled this off.
And you know that he pulled something off because, well, here comes the Financial Times.
Trump worked out exactly where our pain threshold is.
This is quoting a EU ambassador, who's basically saying Trump figured out how to drive a hard bargain and he did.
Here are some comments by leading economists or leading figures out of Europe, commentators.
Nicolas Ostberg, I'm embarrassed to be a European today.
I can't believe we agree to a deal like this.
No deal would have been way better long term.
What does that tell you?
Trump got a really good deal.
Here is Daniel Foubert.
What kind of victory is it when a Europe agrees to buy $750 billion in American energy and arms just to avoid being crushed by higher tariffs?
What kind of sovereignty is it when a foreign president imposes an ultimatum and gets compliance within a few months?
Ursula von der Leyen has reduced the European Union to a client structure, polite, obedient, irrelevant.
The deal she celebrates is economic tribute, wrapped up in diplomatic language.
Jorge Liberiro.
The EU-U.S.
trade deal is objectively bad for the EU, possibly even terrible.
Most EU products will be subject to a whopping 15% tariff, tripling the 4.8% average rate before Trump's second term.
So the old tariffs from America were low, something like 4.8%.
So let's round it off to 5%.
They're going up to 15%.
And what price is Trump paying for this in reciprocal tariffs?
None.
What do the Europeans threaten to do in retaliation?
Nothing.
And so what's going on here is that it's not just that the EU is being exposed or embarrassed.
So is the entire economics profession.
Let's back up and remember that these are the same economists.
By the way, hundreds of them signed a letter, prominent figures from universities across the country basically saying if Trump's tariffs go through, you can expect rapid runaway inflation.
And so I ask you, have we experienced rapid runaway inflation?
No.
Prices have gone up in certain things.
They've gone down in others.
Overall inflation is quite low.
In fact, much lower than it was under Biden.
So where is this runaway inflation?
It doesn't exist.
And so what's really happening is we're beginning to realize that all of these economists with a lot of degrees behind their names, and in some cases, even a Nobel Prize, they actually don't know much about economics or they don't understand economics as a science.
I'm not denying that they know how to run some charts and run some models and run some numbers, but for economics to be a science, it has to be able to make valid predictions.
It turns out these guys can't make predictions, even about the short term.
It's like saying, I'm going to take some hydrogen, I'm going to take some oxygen, I'm going to mix it up, and you're going to get, you know, nitric chloride.
No, wrong.
We just did it.
We didn't get that.
We got water.
We got H2O.
So these economists are proving that unlike science, they don't know what they're talking about.
But Trump does.
Trump said, we're going to do these tariffs, and they are going to not produce these results that the economists have warned against.
The economists turn out to be wrong.
At least to date, Trump turns out to be right.
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Guys, it is always a pleasure to welcome back to the podcast our friend Josh Hammer.
He's a senior editor-at-large of Newsweek.
He also hosts the Josh Hammer Show podcast and syndicated radio show.
He writes a weekly newsletter, the Josh Hammer Report, his latest book, Israel and Civilization, the Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.
You can follow Josh on X at Josh underscore Hammer.
Hey, Josh, welcome.
As always, let me start by asking you about the revelations from Tulsi Gabbard.
Now, the left claims there's really nothing new here.
They insist that the Russians did, in fact, try to meddle in the election, whether or not with any success.
And even if there wasn't a Trump collusion, the Russians did unilaterally favor Trump.
So from the left's point of view, there's nothing here.
And some on the right have a little different concern.
I think they feel like there's a lot here, but guess what?
Republicans never do anything about any of this.
They talk a good game.
They post a lot of memes, but nothing happens.
What is your take on the importance of these revelations and whether or not you think anything will, in fact, come of them?
Well, Dinesh, I think that there's a lot here.
I think that Tulsi Gabbard has done a tremendous public service, actually, in unveiling and declassifying a lot of this to the broader public.
I mean, this 2020 House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence report that was previously declassified, this is pretty galling stuff.
I mean, they're showing quite clearly here that John Brennan, Jim Clapper, James Comey, really John Brennan above all, they knew darn well that the Steele dossier, this utterly discredited Clinton campaign documented from the presidential election cycle, bought and paid for by the campaign and the DNC and Fusion GPS, the old British spook Christopher Steele.
I mean, it's a tale that Americans have kind of forgotten by now, these salacious details, the compromont, the P-tape.
I mean, we know that John Brennan and those guys knew that this was bunk.
And yet, for years, Dinesh, for years, categorically, at least as recently as 2023, when Brennan was testifying in Congress and told then Congressman Matt Gates this in a direct back and forth, he said that the CIA had nothing to do with the steel dossier.
But what Tulsa Gabbard has just shown us shows that that is a lie, shows that that is absolutely a lie, that they did rely, at least in pretty relevant part, on the discredited steel dossier to fabricate this rushed out-the-door January 6, 2017 intelligence community assessment.
All of this laying the predicate for what would ultimately become the Rod Rosenstein-appointed Mueller probe in May of 2017 that swallowed up more than half of the Trump presidency.
So I think it's a very big deal.
I think that Barack Obama's implication is no small deal as well.
I do wonder, putting up my legal cap for a second here as a lawyer, I do wonder what could happen at this late juncture.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I'm pretty skeptical that Barack Obama is going to be doing a perp walk in handcuffs.
I personally would love to see that.
But, you know, we did just have this whole presidential immunity case at the U.S. Supreme Court last year, Trump versus United States.
And whatever the evil and really evil actions were of Barack Obama and trying to weaponize the intelligence community to spy on the then incoming president there, nonetheless, intelligence community operations, communications, that is core Article II executive power.
So I think that Barack Obama, unfortunately, is going to be immunized from prosecution.
We'll see what happens with the other individuals here.
There's going to be some possible statute of limitations issues.
I fear, just looking at some of the statutes that some folks have mentioned as possible prosecutorial cause of action for a clapper or a Brennan or someone like that there.
I do think, though, I mentioned that 2023 congressional testimony from John Brennan to Matt Gates.
I think you could probably throw out a decent case that John Brennan perjured himself.
Now, that's not necessarily what we're all hoping for.
We're hoping here for a big, you know, perp walk mug shot, the kind of thing that Trump got in Fonnie Willis's Fulton County, Georgia, that whole shenanigans there.
So I'm not sure that's going to happen.
Just be very sober and realistic with you.
But at a bare minimum, at the barest bare minimum, Dinesh, this is a tremendous public service for Tulsi Gabber to declassify these documents and for us to see the truth finally come out.
I saw something that the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, said very recently, which I thought was interesting.
He said, not only did they orchestrate this, not only did they cover it up, but they are still covering it up.
And as you know, guys like Clapper and so on are going on TV shows now and doubling down.
So I wonder if there might be some kind of a legal case that includes the cover-up.
Because if you include the cover-up, I mean, I'm not aware of anything that Obama did, for example, after his presidency in relation to all of this, but it's quite clear that the others did.
I wonder if there might be some, because listening to the tone of Ratcliffe, I got the idea that he was very much saying, hey, we're sending this over to the DOJ to be prosecuted.
Yeah, so look, I'm not sure that we've seen the end of this yet, actually.
The impression that I've gotten from both Tulsi Gabbard as the DNI and from John Ratcliffe as the director of the CAA, the impression that I get as of the time that you and I are talking is that there is probably going to be more to come.
I'm not sure that we've seen the end of these revelations and declassifications.
I might be wrong about that.
That's just the impression that I've gotten.
So let's see there.
But look, I think that something could happen.
I'm just trying to temper the expectations of the audience here.
I don't want anyone to think that Barack Obama is going to be getting a Donald Trump-style mugshot.
Again, I would love nothing more than to see that.
Now, you do raise a very astute point, Dinesh, which is what if Barack Obama took action after he was president of the United States there?
What if, let's call it that period between January 20th, 2017, Inauguration Day for Trump the first time, and then May of 2017 when Rod Rosenstein tapped Bob Mueller as a special counsel there?
There was a few months there of an interval.
Was Barack Obama communicating with Jim Comey behind the scenes?
Because after all, Comey was Barack Obama's FBI director as well.
So it's possible.
I mean, it's possible there.
But for any kind of prosecution, you know, it's not enough to simply say that evil deeds were committed.
You need a specific criminal statute.
The statute has to be within the statute of limitations.
Now, that does get us potentially into interesting territory when it comes to the whole statute of limitations conversation for at least the following reason, which is that let's rewind a little bit to Alvin Bragg, the Soros Funded hack in New York City when he was doing that truly absurd Stalinist-esque prosecution of Donald Trump on the Stormy Daniels charges.
Alvin Bragg found a rather, shall we say, creative way to avoid a pretty glaring statute of limitations problem there.
There's a little bit of an element of in me, Dinesh.
It's kind of my devious side that says that what's good for the goose is good for the gander there.
So we'll see what Pam Bondi's DOJ strike force can come up with there if it comes to some sort of more creative way to invoke some of these criminal statutes where the statute of limitations might have looked like it would expire for someone like a Brennan or a Clapper.
I mean, remember, Josh, also in the January 6th cases, they were very creative with seditious conspiracy charges, which they, at least in public, likened to the Civil War.
And you're talking about guys who weren't even in D.C. They weren't even in the Capitol, but they were nevertheless drawn into this seditious conspiracy claim based upon just angry texts that they sent to each other about, yo, you better drag Nancy Pelosi, you know, head first.
And the idea was this proves that they were subverting the Constitution, subverting democracy, et cetera.
Josh, let me turn to the issue of the Epstein files.
This thing has exploded.
I don't know if it's at its peak kind of detonation right now, but there was this rather interesting kind of Q ⁇ A with Gillen Maxwell conducted by the Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.
Where do you see this going?
Is it something where, is it like a grenade that Trump is trying to sort of diffuse?
Is it something where, you know, I would imagine if there are figuratively speaking bodies buried that Gill and Maxwell would know where they are.
Where do you see this going?
Yeah, I think it's a combination of both those things.
I think that President Trump, personally, based on all that I've been able to glean from folks in the administration and whatnot there, I think that Donald Trump was genuinely shocked, actually, at the level of backlash that this whole Epstein files saga has generated, even from large swaths of his own base.
You know, Dinesh, a couple weeks ago, I was debating at Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA Student Action Summit Conference in Tampa, Florida.
I was doing a debate about Israel, so not really directly related, but all throughout that weekend, I mean, just the sheer volume of the vitriol directed at the administration when it comes to Epstein, I was pretty taken aback myself, to be honest with you.
So that's clearly out there.
I think that Trump has indeed been shocked.
So there's an element of this, I think, is just trying to put out this grenade, as you say there.
But perhaps there's also an additional impetus to try to unseal or to do something.
And again, that something is kind of vague right now.
It's not exactly entirely clear what exactly the action item request is from a lot of the folks who are truly, truly upset.
So, you know, again, putting on my legal hat to Naj, one of the problems that I've had with this whole narrative going back a very long time now is when folks talk about the Epstein files, you know, my legal hat kind of rings.
Like, what exactly are you talking about?
I mean, let's trace the history here.
So it was back in 2007 during the Bush administration.
Alex Acosta was the U.S. attorney back then looking into Epstein.
He handed it off to the Palm Beach County, Florida local prosecutor's office.
That was a questionable decision at best.
But I mean, is that the Epstein files, the Palm Beach County, Florida prosecutorial decisions?
Are we just talking about 2019 when the feds took it back up there?
You know, there's not going to be like a tidy kind of compendium of notes that this is the files.
And you're not just going to say, oh, here's the infamous list of all the folks who were on the so-called Lolita Express to commit these heinous, unspeakable crimes.
It just doesn't work like that when it comes to criminal procedure, when it comes to court documents, things like that there.
So I've always actually been a little confused as to what exactly the ask is.
But I do think that President Trump has been truly gobsmacked, frankly, based on all that I can tell at just the sheer level of backlash from within his own house.
And I think that above anything else, I think you're probably right.
He's really just trying to diffuse this grenade and move on because the administration, frankly, Dinesh, is winning on virtually every cylinder right now.
They are firing on all shots.
This is a tremendously successful administration thus far, and they desperately just want the story to be behind them at this point.
And if you were to put your finger on the source of the vitriol coming, let's say from the right, would you say that it goes something like this, that look, we know that this whole Epstein case predates Trump.
We know that most of it really happened under Bush and Obama, not even under Biden.
So Trump is a latecomer to this.
But what happened is with Trump, people expected full disclosure.
They expected Trump to be different than his predecessors and open the books, release the files, don't even necessarily, quote, vet them, just let us see what's in there and we'll sort it out.
And when Trump basically goes, was not only said no, but said no in a kind of bellicose way, like, why are you bothering me with this nonsense?
People just went berserk.
Yeah, I think that's fair.
I mean, if we're going to steel man it, let's call it, like paint the best picture of what these folks are saying, I think that's a very good steel man narrative.
Now, look, I mean, you know, in these folks' defense, the folks who are truly, truly crying foul, the administration has not handled this, Grave.
This has definitely not been the administration's finest hour.
I mean, look at what Pam Bondi said on Fox News back in February about the file sitting on her desk.
Compare that to the statement that was released a few weeks ago from the DOJ and the FBI.
It's not just difficult to reconcile, it's impossible to reconcile.
So something here clearly does not add up.
That doesn't mean that the president of the United States is covering up the world's most heinous global pedophilia sex trafficking rain.
That doesn't mean that Jeffrey Epstein was a foreign intelligence agent and there's blackmail or compromat.
I mean, you know, one thing does not necessarily lead to the other.
But clearly, look, if I had to give you my best guess as to what happened here, I think that Donald Trump on the campaign trail, a lot of folks saw this as a popular issue with the base and were talking a lot about it on the stump, maybe in the very early days of the second term there.
And then when it came to do like a really deep dive and kind of to what I was saying a few minutes ago to actually look at what is here and what can physically and legally be unsealed, they kind of realized that there's actually not a whole lot there, at least that hasn't already been made public, that they can necessarily make public that would satiate the public's interest there.
That's my best guess as to what is going on.
But 100%, this has not been the administration's finest hour.
Josh, finally, let's turn to the issue of Gaza.
Now, I noticed that every day we seem to see in the international media, the New York Times, the BBC, Reuters, et cetera, efforts to kind of pick out a poster child for civilian suffering in Gaza.
There was a front page picture, I believe yesterday or the day before, in the New York Times.
And you have this kid whose whole back appears to be like protruding out of his back.
And to somebody just looking at the picture, you would think, oh my gosh, we are reaching like, you know, Holocaust levels of imagery here.
This is absolutely shocking.
But it turns out that there is a little bit of a backstory that the Times and other outlets did not let us in on.
Can you talk a little bit about this, I would say, fraudulent effort to create a symbolism around Gaza that does not match the facts?
Yeah, so the young child in question, Mustafa al-Mutawak, if I have his name correctly there, has a very rare muscular condition, a genital condition that prevents his muscles from filling in like a normal young boy of his normal age would.
So, you know, this image, New York Times put it on page A1, the front page there.
This is the same New York Times, by the way, that throughout the Holocaust back in the 1940s was routinely burying coverage of the Holocaust back on page A13, 14.
It very rarely, if ever, made front page news.
It's not just the New York Times.
Dinesh, I mean, how many times have we seen this?
I mean, you and I have seen this playbook tried out so many times.
I mean, there's a nickname for this sort of information operation, this sort of adiprop.
You know, folks call it Pallywood, not Hollywood, but Pallywood, Palestinian Hollywood.
There's a guy named Richard Landis who lives in Israel who his whole career has been exposing the fraud, that is Pallywood, which is, they've done this time and time and time again, really since the beginning of the contemporary Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
I guess since the beginning of the modern state of Israel in 1948, but this is just the latest instance there.
It's just one information operation after the other.
I mean, you know, just a week or two ago, Dinesh, the headline, the news was that these, you know, Jews living in today and Samaria had burned a church in Taib.
That's blatantly false.
We now know from people who have literally been there and taken the camera and shown the footage that the church is right there.
It has not burned down.
I think there was a fire on an adjacent field.
I don't even, I think it was an accidental fire.
I don't think it was deliberate arson.
So it's just one information operation after the next.
And, you know, Israel's going to have to fight through this there, but, you know, it's one standard, Dinesh increasingly applied to the rest of the world.
It's a different standard applied to Israel.
I just wish that smart, intelligent people would pause, take a deep breath.
When they see something happening from Gaza, think for a second, who is transmitting this information to me and what is their motive?
Qui bono, who benefits from this narrative, this propaganda getting out there?
And then only through that filter can the truth ultimately be discerned.
And here I think we get to the key of how some of these outlets like the BBC seem to operate.
I mean, they seem to have made a kind of a priori decision.
The information we get from the Hamas people, we're going to treat that as fact.
And the information we get out of Israel, we're going to treat that as questionable.
And, you know, we need to really scrutinize it and verify that it's true.
And that double standard looks to me to be operative across a wide swath of mainstream media coverage.
And you're saying that the antidote to it is to keep exposing it and for the ordinary citizen to become a little more alert and vigilant of the fact that they are getting a filtered account of the truth and not just the unvarnished truth itself.
Yeah, look, ultimately the truth is the truth.
Now, the tough part, Dinesh, and this has been my experience now debating Dave Smith, who's a viciously anti-Israel libertarian comedian, commentator.
I've debated him twice now, both at Princeton back in February and then at this turning point conference a couple weeks ago in Tampa.
And I've learned through my debates with Dave Smith that the truth, unfortunately, is not always enough.
That is kind of one of the harrowing catch-22s, the paradoxes of our age, if you will, is that, you know, many years, Ben Shapiro, who I've known for a very long time, I used to work for the Daily Wire, you know, one of Ben's catchphrases once upon a time was his notion that facts don't care about your feelings.
And I think it was probably true when Ben said it 10, 12 years ago, whenever he first coined that phrase.
But, you know, increasingly today, Dinesh, I'm not entirely sure that the truth and the facts are always going to prevail over an overly emotional narrative.
It's kind of just the nature of the age.
It's one of the very difficult things that folks like me and you have to deal with is that we're dealing with a very kind of hyper-emotional age there.
But in the long run, especially for people of faith, for Jews and Christians alike, you like to think that truth prevails in the long term there.
So we got to keep doing what we're doing day in and day out.
No, absolutely.
I mean, Josh, just from my side, you know, one of the things I learned with making the documentary films is that films are an inherently emotional medium.
That's the whole point of why, you know, movies and documentaries always have music.
And sometimes you can just test it by just, you just remove the music and watch a Disney film.
It's a completely different experience, right?
So that the facts and feelings, I think, go kind of in harmony with each other.
And ideally, you want to win on both fronts.
Guys, I've been talking to the one and only Josh Hammer, senior editor at large of Newsweek, the book, Israel and Civilization, the Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.
Josh, as always, thanks for joining me.
God bless you.
Thank you.
I'm about to launch into what may be the most important chapter of my book on Reagan, Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
And the chapter is called And the Wall Came Tumbling Down.
Now, this chapter is important on a couple of fronts.
It describes perhaps the major event of the second half of the 20th century.
So it's important in its own terms.
In fact, our world would not be the way it is had that not happened.
We would have had a different configuration of power.
We would be dealing with different kinds of threats and challenges.
So the achievements of Reagan made possible a new world that's not without its own challenges, but nevertheless, they're not the same as the ones that Reagan had to deal with.
Reagan, in a way, settled the issue.
And you know, when you settle the issue and you win, weirdly enough, you find that that issue then goes away.
And even your skill and reputation in achieving the result is diminished at the same time because people don't realize that, as time goes on, that this was as big a problem as it was.
I remember somewhere, I believe it was the church father Augustine who said that he did not want to be remembered because he wanted the heresies, the Christian heresies that he fought against to be so thoroughly defeated that they would be forgotten.
And obviously he would be forgotten because, for example, if you're dealing with the Martianites or the Aryan heresy, who even knows what those were today?
And since we don't know what those were, we're not likely to remember the guy who effectively diffused them, challenged them, combated them, overthrew them.
So Augustine, of course, is remembered, but interestingly remembered more for his autobiography and also remembered for his great book called The City of God.
So Augustine did not, in fact, vanish into obscurity.
And by the way, neither will Reagan.
But let's dive into the chapter here.
The opening quotation, in a way, sums up the subtle achievement of Reagan here.
It's a quote from Sun Tzu.
It says, to subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill, right?
So in foreign policy, as on the, let's say, in the judo ring, the most effective thing is to use your opponent's strength against him, to nimbly step aside so he makes a lunge, loses balance, and then you just let him slide over your back and down he goes, and that's a judo throw.
The less force applied, the greater the skill involved.
And so the point we're going to look at here is that the Cold War raged for half a century, or the better part of half a century, and yet it ended, some would say, not with a bang, but with a whimper.
But that is a wrong way to understand it.
It's actually a war not made, but avoided.
It's a great conflict that was prevented by a brilliant combination of statesmanship exercised in large part by Reagan, but Reagan working in conjunction with others.
And we want to trace and see how this happened because some of the things that we're going to be talking about, I'm going to start by talking about the issue of missile defense.
Well, guess what?
Missile defenses are back in the news.
Trump is reviving the strategic defense initiative, which used to be called SDI in the 1980s, but it's being revived in a new form.
Israel, of course, has their iron dome.
And so we're now hearing about missile defense in the context of a golden dome.
But even though the imagery and the metaphors may vary, the idea is pretty much the same, to create an effective fortress of missile defense that can stop missiles.
And we're talking about nuclear missiles here fired against the United States.
By the way, by way of background, missiles can be fired at the United States really in three ways.
The first is missiles fired from the sea by submarines.
These are sea-based missiles, and the submarine would have to come into the vicinity of the United States, into essentially American waters, and fire at close to medium range.
The second way to fire missiles at the United States is from the air, and that is by bombers, similar to the B-2 bomber that went over to Iran and bombed their nuclear facilities.
B-2 bombers can also carry nuclear missiles.
And so the second way to launch nuclear missiles against us is to fly overhead or fly nearby and fire these missiles from the planes.
The third way is the so-called ICBM, which is the intercontinental ballistic missile.
And that is the most accurate, most deadly, most heavy, most destructive type of missile.
And it's fired from the ground.
So where are these missiles stored?
Well, they're stored essentially in long, deep holes in the ground that are called silos.
And out of the silo comes the missile.
And the missile is essentially a carrier device, which then has warheads.
The warheads are the destructive force of the missile.
So the missile itself is not destructive.
The missile is a guided rocket that has in it the circuitry that carries it to its target.
Now, before the missile hits the target, it discharges the warheads.
The warheads are all independently targeted and have their own guidance telemetry or their own guidance electronics.
And a single missile can carry multiple warheads.
One warhead in some cases, five warheads.
The MX missile, I believe, 10 warheads, if my memory serves me right.
And so you can hit 10 targets with a single missile.
Why?
Because as you get into range, each warhead goes off and hits a different target.
So this is the nuclear terror.
This is the nuclear menace.
This is something that the world has been dealing with ever since the first dropping of the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
But none of this is really, this is really not in my chapter at all.
This is just basically a little bit of background as we dive into the chapter, which begins with this line.
There was one factor, one vital factor in ending the Cold War.
This is Margaret Thatcher talking.
It was Ronald Reagan's decision to go ahead with the Strategic Defense Initiative.
Now, this seems like an odd thing to say because SDI was never, in fact, fully deployed.
Not only that, it was not really deployed at all.
The research was underway.
The program was funded, but the Soviet Union began to disintegrate prior to any real deployment of missile defense.
And yet, we find that Alexander Bismertnik, this is a guy who is the former foreign minister to the Soviet Union, he told a Princeton University audience in February 1993, he says Reagan's missile defense program accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union.
He's not alone.
Other Soviet officials have said the same thing.
And yet, if we can flash back to 1983, when Reagan first announced the program, when he proclaimed it, when he declared his intention to do it, it was widely ridiculed.
It was not only ridiculed by the left and by the Democrats, it was ridiculed By a lot of scientists, by a lot of academics.
It was also ridiculed by some on the traditional right.
And by this, I mean that we talk today about the Republican establishment.
And usually, when we use that phrase now, we include Reagan in it.
We think of Reagan, and the Republican establishment goes back to the two Bushes and Reagan, and of course, before Reagan, to Nixon.
But in Reagan's own time, he was not the establishment.
The establishment was Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford, but not Reagan.
And there was a whole understanding of defense policy developed by Republicans in the 1960s and 70s and early 80s.
And Reagan's announcement of missile defense was a challenge to, a contradiction of, a repudiation to some degree of an article of faith, not merely on the left, but on the right.
And that article of faith was mutually assured destruction, abbreviated MAB.
And mutually assured destruction was the basic idea that when you have two heavily armed nuclear powers facing off against each other, it is better, it is actually desirable that neither side build any kind of missile defense.
Both sides want to be fully exposed to the full might of the other.
Why?
Because then you have a condition of mutual assured destruction.
And that is going to be the basis of deterrence.
You're going to be deterred in striking me, and I'm going to be equally deterred in striking you, knowing that either of us doing that is going to initiate a retaliation that produces mutual destruction.
You can't get away with it, and I can't get away with it either.
And that knowledge, that knowledge of prospective and imminent and unavoidable extinction becomes the basis for both of us to hold off, to not go for it, to be deterred in doing it.
So the point of mutually assured destruction, paradoxically, is not to produce any kind of destruction.
It is the opposite.
It is to prevent destruction because destruction is too costly a price to pay for either side to initiate nuclear attacks.
It's kind of like if you were to say to somebody who is, let's say, a murderer or a villain of any sort, every time you try to go blow something else up or kill somebody else, you automatically detonate a device in which you are blown up.
Think of how effective that would be in deterring people from going around blowing up other people or blowing up other things or trying to kill other people because there would be the certain knowledge that their attempt to do that would automatically cause themselves to, let's say, burst into flames or to be blown to smithereens.
And this is the basic logic of MAD, of mutually assured destruction.
But Reagan's view was that MAD is a little MAD, by which I mean a little crazy, a little too risky, a little too dangerous.
And so Reagan, through missile defense, was proposing a modification, an alternative to mutually assured destruction.
And this is why even a bunch of very smart people on the right were like, I don't know about this.
Or maybe even Reagan is going down the wrong road.
And yet Reagan, being Reagan, had that cocky and serene confidence.
No, I've got this well figured out.
I'm going to go do it my way.
And you will see that my way will turn out to be, as it in fact did turn out to be, the right way.
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