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July 29, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
55:57
TRADING PLACES Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1135
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Coming up, Trump makes a favorable deal with the EU and the left, believe it or not, is upset about it.
I'll tell you why.
I'll outline how Trump's executive order on drug prices is going to prevent Americans from paying up to 10 times more than Europeans and other foreigners for the same drugs sold by the same manufacturers.
And I've got a new guest, a comedian, Tim Young.
He's going to join me for a sardonic and sarcastic look at the issues of the day.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Music by Ben Thede.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy, in a time of confusion, division, and light.
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This episode of the podcast is called Trading Places.
It's obviously an allusion to the movie of that title, but my topic is trade.
And it's the U.S.'s relationship on various trade fronts with the EU.
It's the recent pact that was negotiated between Trump and Ursula von der Leyen, representing the EU.
And this is a pact that resulted in a 15% tariff on key European imports, including cars.
And this is an escalation.
The Europeans were used to pay about 4%.
They now pay, they're now going to pay 15%.
But if you're looking for some reciprocal taxes on the European side, there are none.
Not only that, but the Europeans have agreed to buy a lot of American oil and natural gas.
And they've agreed on top of that to invest a half a trillion or so dollars into the U.S. economy in various business ventures.
Now, all of this is to many people, and certainly many people on the left, but also some of the free market economists on the right, a surprise on a number of fronts.
One is you had some of the free market economists, by the way, friends of ours on our side, conservative economists, who said tariffs are bad because tariffs are interfering with the free market.
And therefore, we're going to see the market plunge.
By the way, markets are at record highs.
We're going to see inflation.
Inflation, as of right now, is at pretty much record lows, record lows certainly compared to the Biden era.
And so you have these economists, not just the liberal economists, who, by the way, hundreds of them had signed letters about how Trump was going to wreck the economy and bring the market down and bring the growth rate of the country down.
And none of this has actually occurred.
But my point is that it's not just the left, it's also the conservative economists who have found themselves to be wrong.
Now, why is that?
Let's talk briefly about what a tariff is and how a tariff works.
And we can understand this better if we look at a tariff on a single commodity.
Let's just talk about, let's say, the BMW.
This is a German import.
And let's just say that you've got a BMW that costs $100,000 or $80,000.
I'm not sure what BMWs cost.
I guess it depends on the model.
But the $80,000 BMW as a result of tariffs is now going to cost $100,000.
So does that mean that because there's a tariff on BMW, and let's say the tariff is $20,000, that BMW is going to raise the price by $20,000?
Answer, no.
Why?
Because remember, BMW still has to compete with lots of other cars, including American cars and Japanese cars.
And so BMW is going to say, yeah, we can raise the price to $100,000, but then a number of people might decide, we don't want a BMW.
We'll go buy a Lexus.
We'll go buy an American car instead, an American luxury car.
So BMW is going to think twice about whether or not to raise their prices by that much.
Now, I agree, BMW will want to pass some of the tariff cost on to the customer.
So let's say the price of BMWs goes up not from 80 to 100, but BMW decides to split the difference, and now BMWs cost $90,000.
What is the effect of that going to be on the market?
Well, the truth of it is BMWs are more expensive, but it doesn't follow that cars are more expensive.
In fact, it follows that all cars other than BMWs are now cheaper relative to a BMW.
And that means that if I'm in the market for a car and let's just say I have $80,000 to spend, I don't want to spend one penny more than that, I just take the BMW off my list.
I don't go running around demanding, drawing on my savings to find another $10,000.
I go, hey, the BMW is a little too expensive for me right now.
I'm going to go look at a truck or I'm going to go look at another luxury car, which I can find for that price, particularly an American car, because the tariff rate on American cars is zero.
So this is just a way of illustrating the common fallacy that you hear that tariffs automatically produce inflation.
They drive prices up.
They only drive prices up if more people decide to take more money and buy BMWs.
If they buy anything else, the effect on inflation is zero.
All right.
Now, how did Trump get this deal with the EU?
How is it possible that Trump could raise tariffs on them without any trade wars?
Why would the EU agree to this?
The answer is pretty simple.
The EU, for reasons that I would attribute to its own stupidity, doesn't really generate a whole lot of oil or natural gas inside of Europe.
This is, by the way, their own decision.
The EU was, remember the Nord Stream pipeline?
Remember the fact that the European countries would buy a lot of oil and natural gas from Russia?
They all got whooped into this whole Ukraine thing.
They all decided to cut Russia off.
Some of them were even happy when the Nord Stream pipeline was blown up.
They're like, oh, yes, on principle, this is a wonderful result.
And now these guys have a continent that doesn't have enough oil and natural gas.
So they have to buy it from somewhere.
The U.S. has giant amounts of natural gas, also a considerable amount of oil.
And so the EU is in a way beholden to or dependent on the United States.
It's also dependent on the United States for its export market, because by and large, there's been a lot of deindustrialization in Europe.
They have allowed a lot of their consumer goods, as we have, to be made in China and made in other parts of Asia.
They don't make a whole lot of stuff anymore.
But some of the stuff they make, like cars, like German cars, for example, they export to the United States.
And they rely on that income.
So the United States, by contrast, doesn't export anything close to the same amount of goods to Europe.
So when Trump says, listen, I'm holding all the cards because you need our market.
We don't really need yours.
And it's this lopsidedness, which evidently was missing from the equations of the free market economists I've alluded to, Trump recognized that politically the EU is in a weaker position and is likely to want to make a deal.
Another factor that often goes ignored is that the United States is the military superpower of the world, so much so that we spend on our defense more than the next eight countries combined.
And the Europeans have not been spending very much on their own defense.
Now, Trump has been egging them, pushing them, forcing them to spend more and threatening to reduce the U.S. military commitment to Europe if they don't do that.
In other words, if they don't carry more of their own load.
And so in NATO, for example, the Europeans were paying 1% to 2%.
By 1% to 2%, I mean of their own GDP.
And the United States was paying the bulk of it.
So this is crazy.
And Trump was like, well, whose defense is it?
Not ours, yours.
Who's paying the bulk of it?
We are, not you.
Well, gradually, reluctantly, through some arm twisting, the European countries have decided, all right, we're going to pay now up to 5%.
So the Europeans have upped their defense spending to 5%, and that's a victory.
I mean, that's progress.
And yet the Europeans still know that they can't defend themselves.
I mean, this is a scary idea, right?
After two world wars, you would think these European countries would be, we need to build a strong defense.
After all, we are in a much more dangerous neighborhood than, say, the United States, which is essentially cordoned off by two massive oceans on either side.
And so the United States has less to worry about in terms of an outside invasion.
We're certainly not going to be invaded by Canada or by Mexico.
But Europe knows that they have a greater risk because they have been invaded repeatedly.
So Europe needs the U.S. defense umbrella.
And that is Trump's second Trump card, which is that, listen, we are joined at the hip.
If you want our oil and natural gas, and if you want our military protection, we dictate the terms and not you.
Now, some of the Europeans are scowling and complaining.
I saw yesterday that this is the Prime Minister of France, François Bayreux, quote, it is a dark day when an alliance of free people brought together to assert their values and defend their interests resigns itself to submission.
Submission.
Now, I would say that to some degree Europe has, in fact, submitted.
Why?
Well, the short answer is that Europe, the EU, is weak.
The EU is weak on all fronts.
They're weak on crime.
They are weak in protecting their own borders.
They are weak in responding to the threats of radical Islam.
Weakness is Their middle name.
And interestingly, it's not just Xi who knows that.
It's not just Putin who knows that.
It's Trump who knows that.
And Trump recognizes that when it comes to trade, there is a certain amount of political arm wrestling that's going to go on.
And Trump, it turns out, is a pretty good arms wrestler.
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I'm continuing my discussion of the United States and the European Union, the European countries.
By the way, when Trump went to his golf course in Scotland, this was the venue for the negotiation with the EU.
A lot of reporters and people on the left were saying, like, why is the taxpayer paying for this?
He's going to his own golf course.
So this is a, first of all, of course, Biden at the taxpayer dime would go and lie on the beach.
Trump is at least working.
That's point number one.
The second point of it, I think this is something that's very difficult for journalists and these middling people who are, very difficult for them to understand.
And that is the economics of people who are billionaires.
I remember when I was doing that debate with Nick Fuentes, a point came to my mind that I never made, but it's worth thinking about.
We were talking about Miriam Adelson, the donor whose husband, Sheldon Adelson, owned the Venetian hotel before he died.
Anyway, Miriam Adelson gave Trump $100 million.
And the implication was that the United States is in the pocket of Israel because, you know, this rich Jew gave Trump $100 million.
Now, when you think about the fact that Trump's own personal net worth is somewhere in the range of $4 to $6 billion, and a billion is $1,000 million.
So if I have $4,000 million, and then some woman is planning to give me $100 million, that is a, that's less, that's about 5% of my net worth.
I'm not exactly going to turn the country over to them because you're giving me 5% of my own personal net worth.
This doesn't even count all the money that Trump is able to raise from other people for the campaign.
So the point I'm trying to get is people lose their sense of proportion.
They don't realize that Trump can't be bought at that level.
True, if you offer Trump $7 trillion, that would be basically, that would be one-third or one-fourth of the size of the U.S. GDP.
And then you could say, all right, well, that's enough money to buy this guy, but it's not going to work at that level.
So similarly, the idea that, oh, you know, Trump's going to go to his own golf course because he wants to save a few dollars and have the taxpayer reimburse him for the use of the facilities.
This is a Lilliputian mode of thinking.
It makes absolutely no sense.
And here's another reporter asking Trump, was part of the rush to get this deal done to knock the Jeffrey Epstein story out?
As if Trump is only going to Europe and sitting down with the EU to make deals that, by the way, have been in the works for weeks and have been promised for weeks, he's only doing this in order to get Jeffrey Epstein off the front page.
This is the kind of stuff that, this is the sort of media coverage that we're getting on important issues.
Now, let me move on to talk about a big issue that Trump addressed a couple of weeks ago when he signed an executive order on pharmaceutical prices.
And I'm bringing this up now because it ties into the way that the United States deals with the EU.
There is a scam that RFK seems to have been the first one to expose and then, of course, alert Trump to it.
And what RFK pointed out is that In the United States, we pay for drugs, and by drugs here, I don't mean drugs.
What I mean is drugs.
I mean, I'm talking about the medicines that you use for various ailments.
The same drug, let's say a breast cancer drug, that will cost Americans $16,000 will cost about $1,500 in Sweden.
Same drug, same factory, same company, but the price is totally different.
And you think, wait a minute, don't we live in a free market?
Why would a U.S. pharmaceutical company, and by the way, we're not talking about a Swedish company, we're talking about a U.S. company that is charging the Europeans a lot less.
Well, as it turns out, the U.S. drug companies were kind of brought into the room by the Europeans and they said, if you want to sell your drugs over here, we are not going to pay the retail price.
We're just not doing it.
So we will block you from selling or you agree to sell to us at a fraction of the price.
The U.S. drug companies thought to themselves, they realized, okay, well, the only way we can do this is to take all the R ⁇ D or research and development costs of a drug, which by the way, that's the most cost of a drug.
The hardest thing about a drug is not to make more capsules.
The hardest thing about a drug is to make the invention and do the research and development and go through the complex clearance processes to make sure the drug works.
Then the rollout is the easy part.
So for these drug companies, they decided that the only way that they could make this work is to put all the R ⁇ D costs of these drugs on American consumers.
Let the Americans pay the higher price and let the Europeans get the drugs at a cheaper price.
So the U.S. companies agreed to essentially do a unique type of accounting.
We will sell the drugs to the Europeans at the marginal cost, the cost of making an additional capsule, and we will stick the R ⁇ D cost on the U.S. customer.
So think of the radical unfairness of this.
And it's being done by our own drug companies and by our own companies.
I mean companies in the United States.
I don't mean our in the sense that they have any loyalty to us.
The opposite is true.
Clearly, they're willing to screw us over in order to give the Europeans a deal and be able to sell in the European market as well.
Here's a common asthma drug.
$500 in America, $40 in the United Kingdom.
What about all the Ozempic, weight loss, fat shot drugs that various celebrities and now other people use?
Americans pay eight to 10 times more for that here now in the United States than the Europeans do.
Now, Trump stepped in and said, no, enough.
I'm signing an executive order that gives the United States what can be called most favored nation treatment.
If a drug costs $30 in Sweden or find the lowest price, go around Europe and the industrialized countries, find the lowest price, and whatever that is, that's what Americans are going to pay and not a penny more.
And if there are RD costs, research and development costs, Trump's point is you need to amortize those over everybody who's buying these drugs.
Why?
Everyone gets the benefit of these drugs, and therefore everybody should share in the cost of these drugs.
Remember, the RD cost of a drug is part of the cost of a drug, right?
Just like, for example, let's say it takes you five years to make an iPhone.
That's a lot of costs for Apple.
Apple is going to want to recuperate those costs.
They're going to amortize that over the cost of the iPhone.
And they're going to include all that RD cost into what iPhones cost because they're going to have to get that money back one way or another.
So the point we're trying to make here is that although the reason, by the way, that the big pharmaceutical companies were able to stick it to the American consumer can be summed up in a single sentence.
They own too many people in the U.S. Congress.
In other words, you will have Democrats who go out there campaigning against drug prices, people like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren.
Then once they get into power, they don't do anything to control drug prices.
Why?
Because they're getting lots of money from the pharmaceutical companies.
And this is happening on both sides of the aisle.
So Republicans and Democrats have both been owned to a large degree by big pharma, certainly unwilling to take on big pharma because if they don't give you money, you still don't want them to give your opponent money.
And they certainly will if you go against them.
So this is why big pharma has been able to have its way.
And once again, the advantage of having a billionaire in the White House is he doesn't care.
He's able to take these guys on.
And so what he's doing is he's not saying to them, I'm going to shut you down.
He's not saying to them, you can't make a profit.
He's not saying to them that you can't engage in R D. He knows that R and D is essential to be able to make these drugs.
His point is these R D costs, you know, we are tired of being suckers.
You can't just stick these R D costs on the American consumer and then say, all right, the American consumer is going to shoulder the weight.
And then all the goodies are going to be handed out at much lower giveaway prices, basically, to the Europeans just because otherwise they're not going to open their markets.
Trump's point is, I will help you to fight the Europeans to get a fair deal for you from them.
But the bottom line of it is there's enough of the American customer getting shafted, the American customer and consumer getting screwed over.
So if you want to know what America First means, you see it right here.
You see it in a president who's saying to himself, I've been elected to protect the interests of the American people.
And notice that this is not a partisan point, right?
It's not just Republicans who get diabetes and not Democrats.
It's not just Republicans who are overweight and not Democrats.
The point is all Americans benefit from this lowering of drug prices.
And even the media was very reluctant to criticize Trump on this score because they know that a scam has been underway.
They also don't want to be seen.
Many of these media organizations are also, by the way, in the pocket of the pharmaceutical companies.
And why is that?
Because the pharmaceutical companies buy most of their ads.
If the pharmaceutical companies pulled out, some of these media companies would collapse.
So, big pharma, in a sense, has put the media or large parts of the media into its back pocket, essentially by creating a form of commercial dependency on big pharma.
So, big pharma, because of its giant profits, is able to create a major advertising industry and use that as leverage against the media.
So, we finally have, after not just years, but decades, somebody standing up against a drug lobby and somebody trying to make sure that the costs of drugs are not just borne by people here in the United States, but ultimately by all the people around the world who use these drugs and benefit from them.
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Guys, I've been a follower and admirer of Tim Young, comedian and commentator, for a while, but I haven't had him on the podcast.
So I'm delighted to have him joining us today.
He's the host of Tim Runs His Mouth.
He's also a Heritage Foundation Media Fellow for Communication.
By the way, his website, TimRunsHisMouth, it's x.com slash Tim RunsHismouth.
And you can follow him on X at Tim RunsHisMouth.
Tim, welcome.
Thank you for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
This was a topic I was reluctant to comment on myself, but as it turns out, everyone is talking about it on social media.
It has to do with the model Sidney Sweeney, who has been hired by American Eagle to do what seems like a reasonably innocuous ad, which includes the phrase, Sidney Sweeney has good genes.
Now, because of the pun on the word genes, the left is hopping mad about this.
They claim that this is eugenics, this is white supremacy.
And so we're getting a backlash against this ad, which is probably doing more to amplify the reach of the ad.
But as a kind of expert on aesthetics, I thought I would ask you to weigh in on this topic.
What do you think?
When's the last time somebody shopped at American Eagle?
I feel like that was like something I went to in college like 20 years ago.
I'm not sure like the last time I've seen somebody wearing anything American Eagle.
But let's be real here.
Well, before I get to this, I didn't know Sidney Sweeney still existed.
I know that she got a push because of her boobs.
That was like a big thing for a while there.
I know that you don't talk about such things, Dinesh, but that's why you got me here.
I don't even notice such things.
No, you don't.
Of course not.
Of course not.
Debbie's roaring in the background.
She's tempted to intervene.
Her boobs got her a lot of really mid-level acting gigs for a while.
And like, good for her.
You know, like my boobs don't get me booked on things.
But, you know, this whole ad, if this was a black person, if this was a Muslim person, if this was anybody else other than a white person, you got good genes, it would be celebrated.
This almost seems like, you know, it's like the reverse of like what BLM would have had.
You know, they would have gone around with an ad like this.
Oh, you've got good genes, black people.
And everybody would have celebrated it.
But because it's a white woman and because it's an attractive one, I mean, if she was, again, like, I'll even broaden it more.
If she was a chonky white woman with purple hair and one of those nose rings that makes her look like a bull and said, you've got good genes, they'd also be like, oh, yay, what a great ad.
Look, she's so perfect and beautiful.
But it's because she's a pretty white woman who's fit and, you know, has some nice assets.
It's offensive to everyone on the left.
I mean, I think you nailed it because a lot of people are interpreting it purely through the kind of racial lens.
But I think a lot of it does have to do with the fact that she has the almost the 1950s or maybe you could even say 1980s like girl next door look.
She, you know, she's not beautiful in the sort of stunning supermodel sense, but she's just something very attractive about her.
And so I think it is the left's campaign over now, really, seems like two decades, to uglify our culture, right?
To uglify our culture in architecture.
Look at the way they do it in movies.
I mean, look at Stewardesses on airplanes, right?
Big change since the old days.
So this is not something that's limited to advertising.
It is a campaign that has been doing a long march through the culture.
Do you think that this means, is this a one-off or is this a hint?
Do you think that we may be returning to a kind of a cultural MAGA to go alongside, you can say, policy or political MAGA?
I mean, I want that to be the case.
I want there to be more pretty people.
I mean, when I go to watch a movie, I don't want to see a bunch of fat Uggos like myself.
I want to suspend reality and pretend that there are pretty people out there and I'm one of them with them.
You know, so like, I want this to be the cultural shift.
And you know what?
This campaign is working for American Eagle because anytime there is divisiveness like this at this extreme of a measure, people will show up and shop at American Eagle for the first time in a while.
Like I said, I didn't even know that they existed.
But also, you know, to the Sydney Sweeney point, you know, at the end of the kind of mid-Superman movie that just came out, Supergirl showed up who was a classically blonde girl in a mini skirt that's, you know, super skirt, whatever you call it.
And everyone thought it was Sidney Sweeney because it's some new actress or whatever, because she's just got this classic, like you said, like 80s girl next door, pretty, the girl that is approachable and whatever.
You know, it would be smart for brands and films and TV to go back to that, but they just can't help themselves, the left.
No, that's so true.
Since we're in the cultural terrain, let's talk about Stephen Colbert.
Now, I have to admit, I was not a super fan of Colbert.
It's one of these guys I don't like to watch because it's the kind of guy where if he's at dinner with you, you know, you know, that kind of annoying uncle who keeps making jokes that aren't really that funny, but since you're in his company, you kind of feel obliged to laugh and it becomes very painful when you have to keep doing it over time.
So, but I did laugh really hard when Colbert was canceled.
And then I noticed that there were major lamentations coming in from the media.
Is this because journalists are like Colbert's last holdout?
I mean, these guys seem to love this guy and be genuinely grieved that he's being given the boot.
They think there's got to be some conspiracy afoot and that the fact that he's losing $40 million cannot be the real reason.
Let's start with the point that Stephen Colbert was once funny.
He was once incredibly funny.
And I had a connection with his show back in the day.
I went to his 500th episode and I was actually offered a chance to audition to be his in-house comedian, you know, the warm-up comedian for the Colbert Report.
And I look at that and I look at what it was at the time.
It was very funny.
He was a knockoff of Bill O'Reilly, obviously a spoof of Bill O'Reilly.
Very, very funny.
He was even on both sides, even though we all knew he was left, sort of like Jon Stewart.
And he took that, that gig and that success got him this late show gig.
And as soon as he got to the late show, it just became political propaganda.
And it really is the media just holding him up because he, like the view, is the first round of when you want to drop a crazy leftist talking point, you send it to them, they say it.
So I think this is the beginning of, it's the first domino to really fall here in late night TV.
I think probably Jimmy Kimmel's got to be on the ropes too.
And hopefully daytime TV follows with the view.
Now, can you, you know, as someone who's in the comedy world and has an insight into these guys, what is the process that causes a guy like Colbert to do that, right?
Because it appears to be a suicidal move.
You have a shtick.
It's working beautifully.
You would think, I got a bigger stage now to do that.
And you decide, well, I'm not going to do that.
I'm going to, I'm going to sound like, you know, Ana Navarro on the view and expect people to think that's funny.
And sure enough, the show meets its usual and expected demise.
Why would a guy like Colbert, pretty smart guy, knows the comedy world, actually knows what's funny because he was funny, as you say, at one time.
What are the pressures that make someone go in that direction?
I don't know if it's pressure.
I think it's a bubble.
I think you're making a lot of money.
You have, you know, on these shows, you have 14 to 30 writers.
It depends on how big the staff is.
They're all going to be liberal because they're New York, LA.
They all have the same ideas.
And then all of your friends are like Hollywood elites.
And so you're in these bubbles where you think that your opinion is the superseding opinion over everything in the world.
And that's just not the case.
And that's why these people are failing.
Look, I mean, not to bring you up, Dinesh, but like you understand documentaries.
You make incredible work.
You don't make it just for the right.
You make it for everyone.
It's digestible and it's done very well.
And you understand audiences.
You understand people in a way that like the left, they get in their own heads.
They don't understand what's happening in the real world, like you or like even me with my comedy and what I do with my media stuff.
So I think that there's going to be a drastic shift in the media.
I think there already has been.
But I think you and I are going to be making a lot more money here pretty soon.
Just, you know, put that in.
Yeah, that doesn't sound objectionable.
All right, let's talk about Trump.
This guy, I think, has been, he has an ability, and he's always had this ability ever since he got into politics to create consternation at a level that I think you and I can only envy, right?
I would love to have it.
When I speak on campus, usually, I would, you know, I would try to get the audience really riled up.
And if one or two people ran shrieking out of the room, I would consider I'm doing well.
I just need to keep doing that.
But Trump operates at a whole different level.
Now, of late, the Democrats have been saying, hey, if you try to do any kind of tariffs, any kind of trade deals, you're going to wreck the global economy.
That was point number one.
Point number two, if you try to seal the border, it's never going to work.
We need comprehensive immigration reform.
And without comprehensive immigration reform, nothing meaningful can happen.
And on and on it goes.
We're going to get runaway inflation.
So it appears like, and we're talking here not just about, you know, Chenk Uygur And some commentators, we're talking about credentialed economists, 10,000 PhDs.
I mean, these people are making prognostications, and Trump kind of waltzes in.
Muhammad Ali style, he announces, I know more than all of you people put together.
But the most important thing is he time and again he proves that he does.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
No, by the way, I didn't know that's, is that how you say Chenk's name?
I've never heard that name pronounced before.
I don't really know how to say it.
I will just tell you that, and you may find this really surprising, that guy, Chenk Oygor, is in fact 10 years younger than me.
I say this because I've put pictures of him side by side with me, and he looks old enough to be my dad.
So I have an aesthetic critique to make of Chenk, but pronouncing his name is probably beyond my pay grade.
Yeah, same here.
Same here.
Look, Trump proves everybody wrong all the time.
You know, all of these, again, they're all part of the Democrat.
Everyone you talked about there is part of that Democrat industrial complex and the leftist industrial complex.
So they're paid and they get paid based on their ideas that come out, whether it be academics or economists that are tied to the administration or the last administration or these people who got trickled down from USAID and all these government programs for immigration reform and everything else you can think of.
So of course they're going to keep pushing their things.
Of course they want Trump to be wrong.
When they knew, I don't know how they look at the numbers.
I know they're making up the numbers.
I don't know how they make up the numbers to make it seem like they were even remotely successful or lie about trying to be successful under Biden.
Trump, time and time again, comes out, proves them wrong.
The numbers are looking great on everything across the board.
His comprehensive immigration reform is deport illegal aliens, including the violent ones.
It's great.
You know, seal the border, fantastic.
Everything is working.
Tariffs are working.
We're cutting deals with people.
We're evening the playing field.
Yes, it's going to be a little painful at the beginning when we even the playing field, especially for me, who gets action figures from China and Japan.
So like they've gone up like 10%.
That's fine.
I'll eat it.
But America is going to be great again.
And we're in the right direction with the right guy.
I'm so glad I voted for him.
You said something a moment ago that I've been sort of digesting.
And that is you said that there is big changes coming in the media.
Now, I noticed flashing back not that far long ago that CNN was kind of like your standard for news, particularly the more kind of hard news the event, the more people would turn to CNN.
If it was a flood, if it is a war, you know, CNN was sort of the standard bearer.
And of course, they were the first ones out the gate in the whole cable, 24-hour cable news industry.
But those guys were getting away with some blatant falsehoods, right?
I mean, the most recent one, by the way, was simply the, I mean, the way that CNN, well, this guy who, the guy in New York who goes into the building, sprays bullets, you know, the shooter, and CNN goes, well, it looks like a white guy.
Actually, no, it doesn't look like a white guy.
I couldn't tell if he was black or like Middle Eastern.
Well, it turns out he's a black guy.
He's not a white guy.
But I mean, for CNN, and I notice they don't come out and do an apology.
What they do is they just pretend like they never said it, and they just move on.
And they've been doing that even with Russia collusion.
I mean, do you think that the reason we're getting essentially virtually no media coverage, no mainstream media coverage of the Tulsi Gabbard revelations is it's just too uncomfortable for the people who were in on the hooks?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
No, I mean, look, they are dead to rights on pushing false narratives for years now.
They know after the Paramount settlement with Trump that Trump is willing to now sue and we're emboldening people on the right, which we should all do, sue the heck out of these people when they lie about you.
So I think they do not, and I think their legal teams are saying, hey, don't apologize for things.
Just let it slide.
And hopefully we won't, you know, you don't want to have an admission of guilt at this point.
But, you know, really the overall, talking about the media shifting and the landscape shifting, you're seeing Fox start to license, Fox News starting to license podcasts.
They had Charlie Kirk on co-hosting this weekend, which means they want his audience, wink, wink.
Because we know, I mean, Charlie's a great guy.
I'm never going to knock him, but obviously Fox wants his audience.
I hope he's getting paid good money if they pick him up.
But there is, I think the media is, their numbers are all falling from the skies.
Like they are all on the bottom.
Podcasts like ours are doing really well individually.
I don't think you'll ever see me sign with anyone because I don't want a boss ever again.
It's nice to work for myself and I can take sponsorships from whoever.
I'm a sellout.
I take whatever money.
So if you're out there, you want to sponsor people, come on.
But the entire landscape is shifting.
And I think cable news is basically dead now.
So it's going to be very interesting to see where this all goes.
If, again, like CNN and ABC don't get sued into the ground, I don't know how The View hasn't gotten sued into the ground.
You know, they had Sonny Hosting have to come out and drop her legal notices or whatever they called them.
They were apologies about Pete Hexeth and Matt Gates when they were accusing them of being rapists.
I mean, it's disgusting things that they'll just say.
And they had to backtrack.
So I think big media and our legacy media is dead.
And I think they know it.
And it's just kind of like circling the drain at this point in many, many different ways.
Yeah, absolutely right.
Good stuff.
Guys, I've been talking to Tim Young, comedian, commentator.
Follow him on X at TimrunsHismouth.
X.com slash TimrunsHismouth.
That's the way to find his show.
Tim, great to have you.
And hope I can have you back.
This was a lot of fun.
Absolutely.
And you got to do my show too.
Let's hang out sometime.
Happy to.
I'm in the chapter called And the Wall Came Tumbling Down.
This is from my book, Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
And we're talking about the Strategic Defense Initiative.
Now, where did Reagan get such a wild idea?
Reagan actually heard about missile defenses all the way back in the 1960s.
In 1967, a little before Reagan became governor.
Remember, Reagan was inaugurated governor of California in January of 67.
He visited the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is in California, and he had a conversation with Edward Teller.
Now, Edward Teller, I knew him in his later years.
He was the genius scientist who invented the hydrogen bomb.
Edward Teller earlier had been a key figure in Los Alamos in the creation of the atomic bomb.
He was a junior scientist then working under people like Enrico Fermi and others to build a bomb.
And after he did, as you know, some of the scientists like Oppenheimer had second thoughts.
They were like, oh, what we did is terrible.
We're going to feel guilt for the rest of our lives.
Teller wasn't like that.
Teller was actually an émigré from Eastern Europe.
And in fact, I think Jewish, and he might have been fleeing in some ways the Nazis.
And Teller was like, no, there's good and evil in the world.
And we need to have weapons to keep us strong to be able to fight against the evil forces in the world.
This is all what made Edward Teller into a right-winger and a conservative.
And Edward Teller told Reagan that, look, my students are doing work on space lasers.
They're not developed yet, but they're going to be accurate enough at some point where they can be used to shoot down missiles.
And Reagan and Teller had a really interesting conversation.
I learned about this later from Teller.
He goes, yeah, Reagan told me, he said, you know, every time somebody invents a weapon, somebody else develops a counter weapon.
Or you develop a sword, somebody else will develop a shield.
And this is the back and forth of weapons development through history.
So to Reagan, it seemed logical that when somebody develops nuclear weapons, somebody else will figure out a way to neutralize those weapons.
Now let's fast forward to 1979.
Reagan's running for the presidency.
And as part of his campaign, he stops at NORAD.
Now, what is NORAD?
It is the nuclear weapons facility in Cheyenne, Colorado.
There is a giant crater in the Colorado Mountains, and buried deep in it are U.S. nuclear weapons.
So if you want to know where some of our land-based ICBMs are, there's a good number of them right there.
But there's also a command and control facility.
And Reagan stopped there and talked to the superintendent, a guy named James Hill.
And he told Reagan that there were all these advances.
Let's remember, we're talking now about a decade later from the conversation with Teller.
And James Hill tells Reagan, we've made a lot of progress to develop this sort of missile technology and counter-missile efforts to try to block these incoming missiles.
So Reagan then poses to General Hill a very simple question.
He says, let's not worry about a first strike, a second strike, and all that.
What if, either by accident or deliberately, a single ICBM, a single nuclear warhead is fired at the United States, at an American target, what can the United States do to stop it?
And General Hill rubs his chin and he says, well, nothing.
And Reagan says, well, why is that?
And Hill says, well, it's not just because we don't have a way to stop it.
That is part of it.
He goes, but we don't even intend to stop it.
And Reagan was like, what?
And then Hill goes on to say that it's the official policy of the United States.
Let's remember I talked a day or two ago about mutually assured destruction, that it is our policy not to build a defense, to be to leave ourselves, you could say, naked or vulnerable to a full-scale nuclear attack.
That is essential for mad or mutually assured destruction to work.
If each side is building defenses, then you have a whole different calculus, right?
It's kind of like if you and I are standing 50 yards apart, we both have shotguns.
We're deterred from shooting each other by the knowledge that the other person will have enough time to shoot back.
But what if the other guy shows up and he's got a bulletproof vest?
Well, then there's a good chance that I can fire, but it's going to hit the vest.
And so the other guy goes, well, maybe I can absorb his strike and then decimate him either in the beginning or in retaliation.
But either way, the deterrence fails because of the expectation and hope that you've got enough to be able to absorb some or all of the other guy's strike.
So Reagan then thinks about this and Reagan thinks to himself, we're spending hundreds of millions, well, billions on our defense budget.
And are you telling me that we can't stop a single incoming missile?
So Reagan begins to really think about this and recognize that the whole framework of mutually assured destruction of SALT, the strategic arms limitation treaties, the entire defense policy of the West is flawed, that it has a vulnerability.
And now Reagan comes in in 1981.
He doesn't actually do anything about this for two years.
His famous speech on strategic missile defense was in 1983.
So this is two full years after Reagan takes office in January of 1981.
And Reagan now makes an announcement, and that is, we're going to do these missile defenses.
Now, interestingly, Reagan's announcement of SDI, many people don't know or they forget that it was a response to something that somebody else did.
And that somebody else was the U.S. Catholic bishops.
The U.S. Catholic bishops had been talked into the idea.
I say talked into the idea because bishops in general don't come up with public policy, foreign policy ideas.
Their staff does.
So their staff, which is by and large left-wing, anti-Reagan, anti-nuke, had come up to the U.S. bishops and said, you need to sign a moral protest against U.S. nuclear policy.
You need to talk about the immorality of building missiles with a view To attacking someone else and causing massive damage.
This mass destruction, which would inevitably involve the killing of large numbers of civilians, is morally unacceptable.
So, you see here echoes about the whole civilian debate that we have now in the context of, say, Gaza.
So, the U.S. Catholic bishops had put out this idea that our missiles, the U.S. missile policy is immoral.
And the answer, of course, was nuclear treaties and the nuclear freeze and ways to limit nuclear weapons.
But Reagan realized that to announce a missile defense policy is actually a very effective counter to this moral critique.
So the moral critique was one of saying that when you have mutually assured destruction, each side is able to threaten to destroy massive numbers of people in the other country.
And it's that that the Catholic bishops have zeroed in on.
You have the intention to cause mass destruction, mass destruction of facilities, but also of people.
And when you have the intention to cause mass destruction, the key word here is intention, because mutually assured destruction doesn't work if you don't have the intention.
If you say, listen, I've got these missiles, I can destroy large numbers of people, but I'm not going to.
I don't intend to.
Then deterrence itself collapses because the other guy goes, well, listen, this guy doesn't even intend to strike out against us.
Why don't we strike first against him?
It's only when both sides go, I have every intention.
Even if you try to debilitate and destroy me before I'm out for the count, I will throw everything I have at you.
I not only mean to do it, I will do it.
This is the essence of keeping deterrence credible, making it really work.
And so this is what the Catholic bishops had zeroed in on.
But Reagan realized that to say, all right, we are going to change the equation.
We are going to change the whole framework.
Instead of just focusing on offensive weapons, we're going to build a defense.
And by the way, at one point, Reagan said a very outrageous thing that caused a lot of hawks, a lot of right-wingers, a lot of Republicans to freak out.
And Reagan said, once we've built this missile defense system, once we've made it really good, we will consider giving it to the Russians, giving it to them.
And people go, why would you do that?
Well, Reagan's point was really simple.
We don't really have any aims on Russia.
We don't want to conquer Russia.
We don't want to make Russia an extension of the United States.
We don't want to rule over Russia.
We don't want to destroy Russia either.
So if we can guarantee our own protection through missile defense, guess what?
I'm going to make another bulletproof vest and give it to you.
And that way, not only am I safe from you, but you are safe from me, which doesn't bother me in the slightest because my intentions are entirely defensive.
So in this way, you can see here how not only militarily and technologically, which we'll talk about more next time, but morally, Reagan, you could say, morally disarmed the Catholic bishops.
Reagan morally disarmed the left.
Reagan came up with an idea that was not only cool and interesting from a technological point of view, we'll see very soon the impact of this idea on the Russians, but Reagan also came up with an idea that took the moral attack that was being launched against Reagan with considerable force and basically knocked it to the ground.
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