Dinesh D'Souza - GOOD JEANS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1136

July 30, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza

55:20

GOOD JEANS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1136

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	Coming up, Sidney Sweeney has good genes.
	I'm going to talk about the controversy over Sidney Sweeney, American Eagle, why this is all so offensive to the left.
	I'm also going to talk about a different type of genes, and that is a new study which refutes the conventional wisdom that human beings and chimpanzees have 99% of their genes, their DNA, in common.
	John Saylor, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute, joins me.
	We're going to talk about Trump's scorched earth campaign against elite universities.
	If you're watching on X or Rumble or YouTube, listening on Apple or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
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	This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
	Music America needs this voice.
	The times are crazy, in a time of confusion, division, and light.
	We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
	This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
	I'm going to talk in this opening segment about a very unusual subject.
	I mean, unusual for me, and that is Sidney Sweeney and the very bizarre controversy over her appearance in an ad for American Eagle.
	But before I get there, a couple of items in the news.
	You've heard that the left keeps saying Donald Trump is in the Epstein files.
	And I want to give you one example of how Trump is in the Epstein files.
	I'm going to read a few lines from the deposition of Virginia Jufre, one of the probably the most well-known of all the Epstein victims.
	What is the basis for your statement that Donald Trump is a good friend of Jeffrey's?
	Answer.
	Jeffrey told me that Donald Trump is a friend of his.
	But you never observed them together?
	No, not that I can actually remember.
	When did Donald Trump flirt with you?
	He did not.
	That's inaccurate.
	Did you ever see Donald Trump at Jeffrey's home?
	Not that I can remember.
	On his island?
	No.
	In New Mexico?
	No.
	In New York?
	Not that I can remember.
	End of discussion.
	Trump is in the Epstein Files.
	Yeah.
	Let's move on to the New York Times.
	You might remember that in the interview I did with Josh Hammer, he talked about how the New York Times, in order to demonstrate starvation in Gaza, used on the front page a now iconic photo of a mother holding a child.
	You can't see the mother very well, but you see very vividly the child from the back.
	And the child's back has the spine like protruding out of the back, giving you the idea that this child has gotten no food at all.
	Now, Josh Hammer went on to say that that is not in fact starvation.
	This child has a genetic or a disorder of the spine.
	The spine is protruding.
	This is essentially a kind of bodily distortion or malfunction.
	It has nothing to do with starvation per se.
	And the New York Times knew this.
	So what does the New York Times do?
	This is very telling of the media.
	They ran a correction.
	We have appended an editor's note to a story about Muhammad Zakaria al-Mutawak, a child in Gaza, blah, blah, blah.
	The Times has learned that he had pre-existing health problems.
	Look how they downplayed pre-existing health problems.
	Not that the whole image of starvation was, in a sense, misleading and utterly false.
	But the Times notably does not post this on the Times' own website, which, by the way, has something like 50 million followers on X. They post it on something called New York Times Communications, a very small subsidiary New York Times site on X that has about 89,000 followers.
	So this is the Times' idea.
	Let's try to get millions of people to see the original image, and then let's try to get a much smaller number of people to see the correction.
	And now, new numbers just out on economic growth.
	Deb and I were talking about that just last evening.
	Economic growth, 3%.
	The expectation was 2.4%.
	And 3%, in case you're trying to put this in perspective, is a good number.
	Our economy, the United States' economy has been growing at approximately a rate of about 2% since the middle of the last century.
	That's about our historic average.
	We were below That average.
	And so the country was moving into a kind of stagnation.
	But this is a decent number.
	Now, Trump would like that number to be at 4%, 4.5%.
	And those are truly glorious numbers.
	Why?
	Because think about a $20 trillion economy.
	A $20 trillion economy grows at 4% a year.
	That's a pretty galloping rate of growth.
	Not only that, it increases the size of the GDP.
	It increases the size of the tax base.
	The government takes in more revenue.
	And so not only is the deficit smaller in relation to the overall economy, in relation to the now growing and bigger pie, but the government has more money coming in from tax revenues.
	And as a result, they don't have to spend as much of borrowed money.
	So this is Trump's way of growing our way out of a problem.
	And I see even the financial networks, not just Fox Business, but here I'm looking at CNBC, Joe Kernan.
	He goes, hey, 3% with the market at new highs.
	We haven't seen inflation go up.
	None of these, quote, horrible things have happened.
	An acknowledgement that a lot of good things are happening on the economic front.
	So let's talk about Sydney Sweeney.
	Sidney Sweeney is basically your white girl next door.
	She was asked by American Eagle to pose in jeans, and their slogan was, Sidney Sweeney has good jeans.
	Now, by the way, Beyoncé has posed in jeans.
	I think she did the Levi's ad.
	No criticism at all.
	Black woman in jeans, no problem.
	And of course, had Sidney Sweeney been a big fat, you know, beached whale with a nose ring and a mustache and blue hair, there would be not an eyebrow raised.
	In fact, this is the encouraged mode of modeling in the 21st century.
	We're seeing a kind of campaign of cultural uglification.
	And as I mentioned in my conversation yesterday with the comedian, Tim Young, yes, I mentioned that we're seeing the uglification of buildings, the ugly of stewardesses, the ugly of a lot of things in our society.
	Even by and large, actresses in movies these days aren't pretty.
	They just don't look good.
	It's almost like there's a deliberate effort to make them look, if not average, many times below average.
	Like there's something a little bit disturbing about this person's face.
	And we're so used to this.
	In fact, watching commercials these days, it's almost offensive to see the way in which they try to go against traditional images of America.
	It's anti-American, the whole thrust of it.
	So the Sidney Sweeney thing is a way to cut the other way.
	And of course, there is an implied, I don't think that the ad company that was doing this was going for this, but there's an implied pun on the word genes.
	Sidney Sweeney has good genes.
	But I think that could be taken in a very benign sense.
	She has good genes in the sense that she looks good.
	Her genetic structure is good.
	But of course, from the left's point of view, this is their deconstruction, their demystification.
	I'm quoting now from MSNBC.
	Sidney Sweeney ad shows an unbridled cultural shift toward whiteness.
	Whoa.
	Well, first of all, if there's a cultural shift toward whiteness, I think this is a good idea.
	I'm a little sick myself of seeing that basically we're living in a country where 70% of people are white.
	And yet if you look at commercials, you think we were living in the Congo or you think we were living like in Brazil.
	Why?
	Because the non-whites predominate.
	And even if there's an occasional white in an ad, it's usually a stupid person who's being instructed by a black woman about how things really are.
	You know, how do I find the right detergent?
	Well, guess what, sister?
	You know, you need to use this.
	So this is the prototype of our advertising.
	And it's just so sickening and so blatant.
	So Sidney Sweeney is just a way of cutting the other way.
	And all the diatribes against her are just so crazy.
	A trauma surgeon has a video on X. Sidney Sweeney's ad is xenophobic.
	It's racist.
	It's scientifically inaccurate.
	What's inaccurate about it?
	And by the way, you might have seen recently an ad that is, by the way, bombing big time.
	It's the ad for Jaguar.
	Look it up if you haven't seen it.
	But it's basically strange people who look like they're from another planet.
	Most of them are black.
	And the ones who are white look like they are aliens.
	They look like they're from like Mars or Uranus.
	And evidently, Jaguar's point is these are the people who need to be driving our cars.
	So not normal people, but these strange people from another place, if not another universe.
	And sure enough, Jaguar sales take a nosedive.
	And by the way, American Eagle, which is the Sydney Sweeney company, their stock is up 24, almost 25%, since the ad.
	So even though the left keeps saying, ah, it's very controversial, the ad is very divisive.
	Well, I mean, when the stock is going up, that tells you that it's not all that divisive.
	Nobody cares about the so-called backlash.
	The backlash is an artifact of social media.
	Now, Sidney Sweeney is no conservative or right-winger per se.
	She's just basically the image of the all-American girl.
	There was some speculation that she was MAGA because apparently some years ago or recently her mom had a 60th birthday party and the guests, as a joke, decided to call it Make 60 Great Again.
	And they wore Make 60 Great Again hats and one of them had a blue lives matter shirt.
	And so people thought, you know, she's kind of Trump associator or has MAGA type of views.
	But Sweeney herself weighed in and basically said, no, no, no, I'm not trying to make any kind of political statement.
	Stop making assumptions.
	This was just a fun idea for a fun event.
	And so the question is, well, let me give you this example.
	This guy, who's obviously off his rocker, says that the reason we know that Sidney Sweeney is a Nazi symbol is her initials are SS.
	SS.
	Get it?
	So the left is unhinged.
	And the fact that they're unhinged is it's not about Sidney Sweeney.
	It's not about jeans.
	It's not even entirely about her being white.
	I think even more it's about her being attractive.
	And even more, it's about the fact that the uglification of America is now being contested by the right and contested not just in like op-eds that are appearing on Real Clear Politics.
	It's being contested culturally with companies saying, all right, well, let's go the other way.
	So it'd be interesting now to see a rival trend of pro-Americana in advertising and then let the market decide.
	Let the market decide if it wants the blue-haired people to be selling jaguars or if it wants Sydney Sweeney to be selling jeans.
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	I've been talking in the last segment about Sidney Sweeney and her genes.
	And I mentioned that genes can be taken in a double sense to refer to genes, you know, the stuff we wear, the blue genes, but also genes referring to genetics.
	And in this next segment, I'm going to talk about genetics, not about Sidney Sweeney anymore, but about the genetic differences between human beings and chimpanzees, our closest genetic relative.
	Now, you might have heard it said.
	It has now been said for 30 years or more.
	And it has been said not just in common parlance.
	It's been said in textbooks.
	It is said as we speak at the Smithsonian.
	It is said in the Nature Channel.
	It is said in the History Channel.
	It is said that human beings and chimpanzees differ genetically by only 1%.
	In other words, that human beings and chimpanzees have 99% of their genes in common.
	Now, this is a statement that the left delights to make for really two separate reasons.
	The first one is it seems to corroborate the idea of evolution, of, you know, we're descended from the apes, or to put it more accurately, human beings and chimpanzees have a common ancestor.
	This appears to fortify that idea.
	But the second reason that it is thrust upon us is to diminish the idea that human beings are unique, that human beings have, for example, a distinct moral instinct, that human beings have a soul that animals don't have.
	So there's an attack, implied attack here, even on Christianity and on the Judeo-Christian idea of an external moral code and of inner conscience.
	Why?
	Because if human beings and chimps are so similar, well, then either maybe chimps have a moral code, which doesn't really make humans all that unique, or maybe the human moral code isn't all that unique, all that special.
	Maybe it's something that itself evolved under the particular environmental conditions that human beings had to endure.
	So this idea has become what one writer, Jonathan Wells, has called an icon of evolution, a kind of fundamental idea pushed by atheists, by leftists for the reasons that I just gave.
	But guess what?
	This idea turns out to be wrong, turns out to be false.
	In other words, common sense turns out to be right.
	There is a wider gap between human beings and chimpanzees.
	So the old claim is overturned in a recent paper published by a group of scientists, U and company, YOO and company.
	And the, now let's remember that we don't, in order for animals and in order for living beings to be different, you don't need radically different genetics.
	After all, the root of the cell, the root of life, DNA, is found in human beings, it's found in chimpanzees, it's found in the zebra, the platypus, the amoeba, and even the apple tree.
	So we expect to find a commonality of DNA among all living things, including, as I just mentioned, plants.
	But what about this 1% difference between human beings and chimpanzees?
	It turns out that that 1% is really something in between 12.5% and 13.3%.
	And that is, in fact, genetically a large difference.
	What it really shows is that the genes of the humans and the chimps are in many cases so different that they cannot even be aligned.
	They cannot even be seen as coming from directly the same source.
	And just to do a little bit of simple math, the actual difference between human and chimp DNA is 14 times greater, 1,400% greater than the often quoted 1% statistic.
	So in other words, it's not like the 1% statistic is slightly off.
	It's totally off.
	And yet, this is a statistic, as I mentioned, it's been promulgated.
	Bill Nye, the science guy, in his 2014 book, Undeniable, he goes, as our understanding of DNA has increased, we have come to understand we share around 98.8%, so there's the 99% number, of our gene sequence with chimpanzees.
	Here's the Smithsonian right there on their website.
	While the genetic difference between individual humans today is minuscule, about 0.1%, study of the same aspects of the chimpanzee genome indicates a difference of about 1.2%.
	So there's the 99% number again, right on the Smithsonian website.
	And they haven't even taken it down.
	The Smithsonian right now is still promoting this inaccurate information that humans and chimpanzees differ by only 1% or only 1.2%.
	There is a larger trend here that is worth noting that makes this story important.
	And that is that while there have been intermediate stages in which the evidence for God appears to be contradicted by this or that finding in science, it often happens that a later finding reverses this earlier foundation for skepticism and shows that the older conventional wisdom,
	that it makes sense to believe in human uniqueness or to believe in creation or to believe in God or to believe in the beginning of the universe or the world is absolutely correct.
	I'll just give one example of this larger trend that I'm referring to.
	In the middle of the 20th century, a majority of scientists believed that the universe, our universe, not the Earth, but the whole universe, had existed forever.
	This was sometimes called the steady state theory.
	And the steady state theory is, as the name suggests, the universe is in a steady state.
	It changes, but then it changes back, so that there is no beginning.
	It's almost like an infinite series of numbers going backwards with no end, right?
	If you were to run the number table down to one, but then start writing negative numbers backwards, negative one, negative two, negative three, you can keep going.
	And that was a belief that described, that structure of infinity described the age of the universe.
	Now, it was a series of discoveries starting in the 1960s, but continuing through the 1990s that coalesced around what is loosely called the Big Bang Theory when scientists came to understand that, no, the steady-state theory is wrong.
	The idea that the universe has always existed is false.
	The universe, in fact, did have a beginning, and in fact, had a beginning at a specific designated point in time that can be, with a very high degree of accuracy, pinpointed.
	So that's a classic example of how the original statement in the book of Genesis in the beginning, you stop right there.
	There was a beginning.
	So says the book of Genesis.
	And now modern science has proven that belief to be accurate.
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	Guys, I'm always delighted to welcome back to the podcast John Saylor.
	He's Director of Higher Education Policy, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York.
	The Manhattan Institute publishes a very fine journal called City Journal, and the website there is city-journal.org.
	You can follow John Saylor on X at John D. Saylor.
	John, welcome.
	Thank you for joining me.
	I would like to ask you about this Trump scorched earth campaign with the universities, which I'm watching with some exhilaration and delight.
	The campaign appears to not be a systematic effort to target all the universities or all the elite universities simultaneously.
	It's almost like they are picking and choosing a few kind of key bad actors and giving them like a public thrashing with a view to getting them to straighten out and have everyone else fall into line.
	Do you agree that this is their approach?
	Make a big example here and a big example there, and then see if you can straighten out a wider system of corruption?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	I think that that's what we've seen.
	And whether that's going to be the approach for the next four years is, well, yet to come.
	But I think that what we will probably see is the model expanding outward, especially as the administration kind of narrows down its policy targets.
	And as, frankly, they get more people on board and more of their people kind of work through these long and complicated negotiations, these long and complicated attempts to right the ship.
	I mean, we started out in a situation where, you know, every day it seemed like the administration was making really earth-shattering decisions.
	I mean, some of these decisions are pretty technical.
	A lot of people who are not involved with the universities wouldn't really understand what's going on.
	But when the Trump administration says we're going to cap indirect cost rates at 15% rather than at some universities, it's up to 60%.
	Nobody outside the sciences really knows what that means.
	But what that functionally has meant for universities is that they might not get $100 plus million dollars that they've relied on every year from the federal government.
	And that means that the universities have had to come to the negotiation table and listen.
	And now, especially with this deal with Columbia, I think that it's becoming clear that universities will actually come to the table and they will actually make pretty big concessions.
	And I think at the root of all of that is this one problem that universities have.
	So I'm an investigative journalist.
	That's primarily how I have insight into higher education.
	And I always remember one of the first big stories I worked on, I talked to a professor and he told me every day the universities wake up and break the law.
	And when I first heard that, I didn't know if maybe, you know, this was an exaggeration.
	Professors often say things that are a little exaggerated, especially disgruntled conservative professors.
	But what I found through my reporting is that that is pretty much absolutely correct.
	For the last 20 years, universities have pretty routinely ignored important features of American civil rights law.
	And, you know, the Trump administration, especially the DOJ and various offices of civil rights, are totally within their right and can very easily conduct investigations that will require universities to pretty significantly change how they do things like provide scholarships, hire professors, and things like that.
	And they, you know, so I can imagine a world in which these big concessions that we're seeing from Columbia and other universities will not only go to places, we're not only going to see that repeated at places like Harvard, we're also going to see that repeated much more broadly as universities kind of have to account for the way they've acted with impunity for the last two decades at least.
	I mean, part of what you're saying, John, is that despite the courts narrowing the scope of racial preferences, affirmative action, these universities have basically decided we don't really care.
	We are, in many cases, private universities.
	And even though we get lots of government funding, we don't think that the government has the political will or the guts or the strength to force us to conform.
	And in many ways, these universities were correct, right?
	Under the Bush administration, they were not held to account.
	They obviously are not going to be held to account under Obama.
	But even in the first Trump administration, you didn't have this vigorous campaign with the universities.
	But what you're saying is that all the Trump administration is doing now, they don't have to employ any kind of exotic type of cudgels.
	They just come along and say, guess what?
	You've been violating the Civil Rights Act.
	You're violating Title IX.
	And so the universities suddenly realize that the Trump administration is holding the strong cards.
	And this is why, I mean, I understand Harvard is pushing back, but they're negotiating behind the scenes.
	And Columbia, as you say, has already to a large degree capitulated.
	Yeah, that's absolutely correct.
	So, even before the Students for Fair Admissions decision, which officially deemed affirmative action in admissions to be unconstitutional or also in violation of the Civil Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act made very clear that discrimination in hiring is not allowed.
	That's both for public and private entities.
	So even if you're a private university, this applies to you as an employer.
	And while there are some very small exceptional cases where employers who have historically discriminated, like the employer has actually gone out and said, we're not going to hire people of a certain race, unless you have a situation like that that needs to be remediated and a court basically can determine that that's what happened, it's pretty much just across the board illegal to say we're going to hire based on race.
	We're going to give special preferences based on race.
	We're going to give you 10 extra percentage points in your application if you're an underrepresented minority.
	All of those things, they weren't just made illegal a couple years ago with the Supreme Court's decision.
	Those have been illegal for a long time.
	And so there are two implications to that.
	On one hand, that means that, well, I mean, it's pretty much an open secret that universities have been violating the law for a long time.
	So if somebody comes along and actually wants to enforce the law and make universities account for the way they violated the law, then universities are in a pretty bad place.
	But also, universities have been violating the law for a long time with total impunity.
	They're used to a situation where they simply do not have to actually follow these laws.
	To the extent, it's so bad that a lot of professors and administrators actually don't know what the law entails.
	And you'll see, you know, when I get public records, I often see just evidence of confusion.
	Some people know what is actually legally required and what is, you know, legally prohibited.
	And some people have no idea.
	And so they'll just openly state things like, oh, I don't want to hire white men for sure, which in a court could get them in a lot of trouble.
	And you're right.
	For the most part, universities just have not been taken to court on this.
	And it's really hard to find plaintiffs.
	It's really hard for somebody who has spent 12 years of their lives getting to the point where they can apply to a professor position, then say, yeah, I'm going to go sue the university and pretty much blacklist myself.
	But the one entity that can take universities to court without that kind of power imbalance, actually with the power imbalance going a little bit in the other direction, is the federal government.
	And with the federal government actually wanting to take action, this is what we get.
	You know, the Columbia decision, ultimately, they're paying $200 million to settle things.
	And I think that, you know, that seems pretty reasonable.
	Even, you know, left-leaning professors like Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard, former Clinton administration, you know, just big name in Democratic politics.
	He said that that decision or the Columbia deal was great.
	He said that this is a good model for how to reform things.
	And I think that we're going to see universities across the country doing something like this.
	I don't think it'll be long before Harvard takes a step towards settling this long drawn out negotiation process.
	You know, when I first heard about the Columbia decision, I thought it was very bad because it looked to me, at least at first glance, like Columbia was sort of paying a type of a ransom.
	Like, listen, you know, we want to continue running our racket.
	So we'll pay you $200 million for you to look the other way.
	But then when I started reading the small print of the settlement, I realized, no, Colombia is going to have to really get rid of its DEI.
	They're going to have to damp down on the anti-Semitism.
	They're going to have to change their hiring practices.
	They're going to have to agree to some sort of a monitor from the administration that's going to be looking over their shoulder.
	Let me ask you, John, about one of the ways, one of the vehicles the Trump administration is using, particularly with Harvard, is this issue of anti-Semitism.
	And this is, to me, a little bit trickier simply for the reason that one of the things that you and I and many others have been militating for for quite a long time is the restoration of genuine debate and free speech in the university.
	So it would be unfortunate, I think we would agree, if the campaign against anti-Semitism had the effect of universities, in a sense, just taking their existing regimes of intolerance and censorship and adding anti-Semitism to the list.
	So, you know, you can't do Islamophobia, you can't do racism, you can't do anti-Semitism.
	Well, we're going to make sure that we come down even harder on a kind of freewheeling debate on the campus.
	How can the Trump administration strike an appropriate balance between, you know, it's important for Jewish students to feel safe on campus, and at the same time, it's important to have free speech.
	How do they make that work?
	Yeah, so, you know, it's really important to compare the debates over anti-Semitism with some of the debates over allegations of racism that came especially to a head in 2020.
	You know, in 2020, I think a lot of critics like you and I pointed out that these university students are basically defining virtually any, or like they have the capacity to define almost anything as racism.
	If you say that you don't agree with affirmative action, that's racism.
	If you say that, you know, like there was a widely used document for DEI trainings that said that like, you know, the idea of meritocracy, the idea of individualism, these were all characteristics of white supremacy.
	So, you know, In that case, what we see going on is not universities just policing racism, it's actually universities deeming things that are not racism to be racism and then policing just ordinary discussion that should very much be within bounds.
	And so, you know, when it comes to actual instances of race-based harassments, universities have the right to already, you know, per existing law, they have the right to say, like, no, if a university student runs up to, you know, a student of a different race and starts harassing them because of their race, university can take action.
	It's not necessarily controversial to say that, like, that kind of, that's not you expressing your free speech.
	That is harassment.
	And in the case of a lot of the instances where we see allegations of anti-Semitism, what really we're seeing going on is some very specific instances of harassment based on students' Jewish identity.
	And I think that universities should be serious about following up on that, even if it's unpopular, because that is coupled with student activists who are carrying the banner of social justice.
	Now, I also agree that it is incredibly important for universities not to be pushed into just a new version of DEI, where instead of focusing on the categories that social justice activists want you to focus on,
	like BIPOC or gender and sexual minorities, you just focus on protecting Jewish students at all costs, even if that means censoring legitimate debate.
	That can't happen.
	If that happens, then you are taking the wrong turn in higher education reform.
	And I think the most important thing is to recognize that the tolerance for harassment of Jewish students that we've seen since October 7th has primarily come from students and faculty members who have ideologically predisposed to do these kinds of things.
	Essentially, this comes from an ideological position that says that Israel is an oppressor state, that this oppressor-oppressed mentality is a legitimate and perhaps the ultimate way to understand the world.
	And we don't get there without the hiring policies, without the curricular policies, without the incentives that universities have faced for the last 20 or so years.
	What the real problem is, is that universities have been on a kind of ideological mission that happens to have pushed a relatively small group of students and faculty to be excessively radical in ways that are truly antithetical to what a university ought to be.
	So when the Trump administration or any administration wants to fight anti-Semitism, what they really need to do is say, we need to get back to what the university is about and not hire people on the basis of their commitment to social justice, but hire people, promote people, reward universities on the basis of their commitment to the pursuit of truth.
	If you aim at that, then this issue of anti-Semitism, I think, will largely be covered and remediated.
	I mean, very interesting.
	I remember in the George Floyd period, there was an Indian kid, I believe, who applied to Stanford, and his application essay was Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter, again and again.
	I think, what, 100 times or 500 times?
	That was his essay.
	That's it.
	And he got in, right?
	So I think that's an illustration of what you're talking about.
	Universities viewed this kind of ideological positioning as equivalent to merit, as equivalent to a good bit.
	This is the kind of kid we want at Stanford.
	He's really going to be an asset to the institution.
	And once you do that, you change the character of these institutions and you make them, you give them an ideological vector to a much greater degree than they already did before.
	Guys, I've been talking to John Saylor, Director of Higher Education at the Manhattan Institute.
	Follow him on X at John D. Saylor, the website for City Journal, city-journal.org, or just Manhattan.institute.
	Thank you, John.
	I really appreciate you joining me today.
	Thanks so much for having me.
	I'm in the section of my book, Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader, where I'm talking about the Strategic Defense Initiative.
	And when Reagan announced it in 1983, there was even in the administration itself a sense of being aghast.
	I talked to George Schultz, the Secretary of State, later, and he said he told Reagan, you shouldn't be saying these things.
	We don't have the technology to do this.
	So Schultz had an objection, which was more technological.
	But the Under Secretary of State, a guy named Lawrence Eagleberger, had a different objection.
	This changes the whole strategic doctrine of the United States.
	So for Eagleberger, it was about disrupting the architecture of mutually assured destruction.
	And Eagleberger is like, we can't mess with that.
	And Reagan kind of knew that there was this discontent brewing right around him.
	So he asked a speechwriter to draft the speech, but he didn't really get the idea approved or passed through the normal channels at the State Department.
	And when I asked George Schultz about it later, I'm quoting him now.
	SDI was entirely the president's idea, he says, with like a twinkle in his eye.
	And the way he went about it was also characteristic of him.
	Kind of saying, yeah, Reagan was known to kind of have his own way.
	Very much like Trump, by the way.
	Trump is a little bit more sort of declatory about it.
	This is the way it's going to be.
	With Reagan, it was just like the State Department is conveniently not informed before the announcement.
	And as I discussed it with Schultz, he made the point to me that Reagan was open to hearing objections to SDI, but not to the concept itself.
	He wanted to do it.
	He wanted to hear criticisms and arguments about how to do it.
	And Reagan would say things like, I want constructive criticism.
	And what he meant by constructive criticism is don't criticize the idea, criticize the mechanism for achieving it.
	Now, the Soviet Union reacted to SDI with hysterical denunciation.
	Here are some quotations from Soviet official publications like Pravda, Izvestia.
	Reagan's program is, quote, insane.
	It is a, quote, bid to disarm the Soviet Union.
	And this criticism coming from the Soviets was mirrored by attacks coming from the left.
	Here's the former Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara.
	This is, by the way, a Democratic appointee, Secretary of Defense, I believe, in one of the predecessor administrations.
	I don't remember if it was Kennedy or if it was Johnson.
	But McNamara calls missile defense, quote, pie in the sky.
	And a prominent defense writer named Strobe Talbot wrote for Time magazine.
	He said, this is more like a video game, an arcade game.
	And the New York Times, in the same vein, says SDI is, quote, a pipe dream, a projection of fantasy into policy.
	Now, here's a very peculiar situation.
	I say peculiar because let's reflect for a moment on what the Soviets are saying and what the left is saying.
	The Soviets are saying this is very dangerous.
	This will disrupt the defense standoff, which is to say mutually assured destruction.
	This is, quote, a bid to disarm the Soviet Union.
	Why?
	By making its incoming missiles ineffective.
	And yet the left is saying it's a video game.
	It's not real.
	It can't work.
	So think about it.
	If strategic defense is really science fiction, if it can't possibly work, then why would the Soviet Union be afraid of it?
	If it is a video, if it's an arcade game, the Soviets would be for it.
	Hey, listen, United States, go spend billions of dollars on a complete boondoggle, and we love it because there's nothing here.
	But of course, that was not the Soviet view.
	The Soviet view was that it was not pie in the sky.
	It was not fantasy.
	This is a technological feat that the Soviets believed that the United States was quite capable of pulling off.
	And Weinberger, the defense secretary whom I met at a conference, said to me, he said, you know, the Soviet reaction kind of confirmed what Reagan had been saying all along, Reagan's belief in the viability of a missile defense, not one that existed already, but the ability of the U.S. to build it.
	Now, after a little while, the left realized that the United States was making technological advances in this area.
	They were exposed to all kinds of ideas, which, by the way, I and others were writing about.
	A good friend of mine from Dartmouth was the lead writer for SDI, for the Wall Street Journal.
	And this guy, who was very knowledgeable, even though he was an English major at Dartmouth, he took the trouble to really learn all this stuff.
	And he was writing about all these different technologies.
	By the way, how do you shoot down an incoming missile?
	One way to do it is to shoot it down by a rocket that is shot from the ground itself.
	This might seem the most obvious way to build a missile defense.
	This is the concept behind the Iron Dome in Israel and perhaps the Golden Dome.
	You watch an incoming missile, and by the way, the missile takes something like 45 to 50 minutes to get here, but it can be tracked.
	And you track it, you aim, and you essentially shoot it down.
	Very similar to using a handheld device to shoot down a helicopter or shoot down a plane.
	That is one way to do it.
	But there are other more exotic and maybe more interesting ways to do it.
	There was something called the electromagnetic railgun.
	Wow.
	There was something called the neutral particle beam, the X-ray laser.
	Edward Teller, whom I mentioned before, had really wild ideas.
	And his idea was to have space platforms.
	So there would be platforms in space.
	And so you wouldn't have to wait for the rocket to come over U.S. airspace and then shoot it from the ground.
	On the contrary, these space platforms would identify the incoming ICBM, blast it out of the sky itself, so only the debris would re-enter the atmosphere.
	And of course, that would be relatively harmless.
	So the left, once they began to realize that all these technologies were in development, they quickly modified their critique of SDI.
	So they were still against it, but now they were against it for a different reason.
	Not no longer it's pie in the sky, no longer it can't work, no longer it's a video game.
	Now they said, well, yeah, you could build a defense, but you know what, you can't build a leak-proof defense.
	In other words, you can put on a bulletproof vest, but your ears are still exposed and your head is still exposed.
	And so it's only a partial defense.
	And the underlying implication is that, hey, listen, when you're talking about the firing of nuclear weapons, a partial defense is just as good as like no defense at all.
	The mocking image that the left constructed about SDI was the astrodome.
	You really think, Dinesh, we can build an astrodome over the United States?
	And so the idea here was to give up the idea Because either you have a complete defense or you have no defense.
	But Reagan realized that this was actually very dumb because a partial defense is far better than no defense at all.
	If you're in a Mexican standoff with a guy 50 yards away from you, both of you have shotguns, is it a good idea for you to have a bulletproof vest on, yes or no?
	Yes.
	Because even though your head is still exposed, you obviously are still at risk.
	You are less at risk than if you didn't have it.
	Not to mention the fact that if he fired the first shot and it got you in the vest, you would have a chance to be able to strike before he's able to get off a second shot.
	So the point is the fact that a bulletproof vest doesn't cover your whole body is hardly a good argument for not using it.
	In fact, some very kind of ingenious strategic types on the right would told Reagan, listen, you don't even have to use this missile defense to protect people.
	You have to just use the defense to protect our missiles.
	That way, if the Soviet Union, for whatever foolhardy reason, launches a first strike, their hope, of course, is to paralyze our missiles so we can't strike back, and then they would decimate us in a second strike.
	That was the key to the Soviet strategy in the nuclear age.
	So just protect our missiles.
	Don't worry about protecting people.
	But Reagan's view was, how dumb is that?
	I'm an elected leader in a democratic society, and you're telling me to use our technology to build, put a bulletproof vest essentially around our missiles and not around our people.
	So Reagan understood that this is a moral and a political problem.
	He's not going to do that.
	Now, final point I want to make about all this is that the critics tried to make SDI look ridiculous by giving it the name Star Wars.
	And their intention was to make Star Wars, to use that label to convey the idea that this was foolish, this is wild, this is like science fiction, guys.
	This is not something that can even work.
	But interestingly, even though a lot of conservatives in a very reactive way were like, stop calling it Star Wars, Reagan's own view was, go ahead and call it Star Wars.
	Reagan called it Star Wars.
	Reagan didn't really mind because Reagan's idea was, look, we realize why you're trying to call it Star Wars.
	You want to associate it with science fiction and made-up stuff and video games.
	But for most people, that's not what Star Wars evokes.
	For most people, what the movie evokes is good and evil.
	It's the Jedi Knights against the dark forces.
	And so Reagan was like, yeah, that's actually right.
	We're dealing here with an evil empire.
	We are basically the good guys.
	We are the Jedi Knights.
	These are the bad guys.
	And we're building a missile defense to stop them.
	So Reagan understood that the left's christening of this name, Star Wars, was a kind of strategic blunder.
	And so it turned out to be.
	The program to this day has the kind of unofficial name of Star Wars.
	And Reagan's view was, that's just fine by me.
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