Dinesh D'Souza - FUDGING THE NUMBERS Dinesh D'Souza Podcast Ep1139

All Episodes

Previous Next

Aug. 4, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza

54:08

FUDGING THE NUMBERS Dinesh D'Souza Podcast Ep1139

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	When the administration is trying to dig us out of a deep hole, it's difficult for them to take your personal finances into account.
	You have to do that.
	I choose to diversify my savings with gold from Birch Gold Group, and you can, too.
	Just text the word Zinesh to 989898.
	Birch Gold will send..
	you a free, no obligation information kit on gold.
	Birchgold has an A plus rating with a better business bureau and tens of thousands of happy customers.
	You two can diversify with Birchgold.
	SMS Dinesh to 989898.
	Coming up, I'll reveal why Trump was right to fire the woman responsible for the latest jobs numbers.
	I'll draw on the work of a Polish commentator to show why Europe has become a pale shadow of its former self.
	And Scott Walter, President of Capital Research Center, joins me.
	We're going to talk about his new book Exposing the Dark Money Group called Arabella Advisors.
	If you're watching on YouTube X or Rumble, listening on Apple or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
	Hit the subscribe to follow the notifications button.
	I'd really appreciate it.
	This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
	America needs this voice.
	The times are crazy.
	In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
	This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
	The defunding of PBS and NPR is hitting many people on the left pretty hard.
	They had been warning that this would be terrible, people in rural areas wouldn't get the news, as if people in rural areas are all sitting around waiting for PBS to come on or NPR to come on.
	As far as I can tell, the real audience for NPR is African cab drivers in Washington, DC and Northern Virginia.
	But here's Will Stancel.
	Left wing pundit on X and he says that you don't have to be a fan of things like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and so on.
	He goes, It's terrible that these things are being closed.
	And when somebody goes, Are you really a fan of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting?
	Are you a regular listener and viewer?
	He goes, It's fun to tear the stuff out of the walls, to break things, but you tear enough stuff out of the walls, the house will fall down wiser men than you built those things and you're destroying them for cheap, idiotic thrills.
	Now it's actually really fun and funny to hear a bomb throwing leftist, a self styled revolutionary talk like this.
	Why?
	Because they're talking like a real fuddy duddy.
	Suddenly the bomb throwing leftist has revealed himself to be a stuffy old man.
	I've never met this Will Stansel guy or seen a picture of him, but I can now envision him as a kind of graying guy with like a toothbrush mustache and umbrella.
	He looks sort of like a probably like a Republican from the nineteenth century.
	You know, and it's sort of interesting how the left now says things like well, you know., don't take down that fence because you don't know why your great grandfather built it in the first place?
	Again, this is the kind of rhetoric you normally expect from reactionaries, from right wingers.
	But here we are seeing the left now turn reactionary and say basically you didn't build PBS and see these institutions so don't be so hasty to take them down.
	Of course, the core of the matter.
	I saw David Brooks recently making the point that he goes, I don't think it can cross Donald Trump's mind that there are neutral arbiters who are objective and not politicized.
	This gets to what I want to talk about in this opening segment because our side is going about cutting back and defunding not just NPR, not just PBS, but also recently Trump fired this woman who was in charge of the Bureau for Labor Statistics, we are scaling back on institutions like the CDC.
	And of course, the point of view of David Brooks is that these institutions are neutral.
	Now, by the way, that's the problem, isn't it?
	It's not that neutrality is the problem.
	The problem is that there are people posing as neutral who aren't neutral.
	The media poses as neutral.
	Are they neutral?
	No.
	Harvard poses as neutral.
	Is it neutral?
	No.
	The foundations and nonprofits pose as neutral.
	Are they neutral?
	No.
	Was the CDC neutral under COVID?
	No.
	Was the FBI neutral?
	How about the CIA?
	Were they neutral when they evaluated Russia collusion?
	No.
	So point to make here is that these so called neutral arbiters have all demonstrated that they are not neutral at all.
	Neutrality is the mask that they wear to protect themselves and to put themselves beyond criticism and beyond accountability.
	So what's happening is not that we reject neutrality.
	We're just learning to look behind the mask and let's talk a little bit about the firing of this woman from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
	So this is the Bureau of Labor Statistics is part of the Labor Department.
	They put out data.
	And the basic theme is that this data is number crunching.
	It's accurate.
	Here's Jerome Powell.
	Good data helps not just the Fed, it helps the government, it helps the private sector.
	The U.S. has been a leader in that for a hundred years, and we really need to continue that.
	So the woman managing this was a woman named Dr. Mekintarfer, and she has been now given the boot.
	Now the left and the media are screaming that this is very bad because data will no longer be neutral.
	The new people taking over from her will well, let's see what they're going to do according to the New York Times.
	The New York Times says the following That is not to say political interference would be impossible.
	So they're warning about the kind of political interference that you could get from the newly appointed regime at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
	Here's the Times.
	Government statistics rely on hundreds of methodological decisions, many of them judgment calls with no obviously correct answer.
	A sufficiently sophisticated agency head might over time be able to nudge the data in a politically advantageous direction.
	Now, here's the New York Times saying, listen, there's no such thing as pure objectivity.
	Yes, numbers are objective, but how you read the numbers, the kind of economic models that you create, the data that's fed into the computer, that is a matter of discretion or choice.
	And so says the New York Times.
	Somebody on the right, a Trump MAGA economist, could in fact rig the numbers, could in fact slant the data, could in fact spin it in a way that is beneficial to one side or the other.
	And my point is boom, voila, this is exactly what has been going on all along.
	This is exactly what doctor McIntoffer is doing.
	This is how the existing regime at the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been operating.
	And Trump has even provided proof of that.
	He said, Look, the Bureau of Labor Statistics put out all these rosy statistics under the Biden administration.
	which then had to be revised.
	So they show massive job growth, all of which is politically advantageous to the Democrats.
	And then later, when it doesn't really matter or after the election, they go, Oops, we overstated it.
	No, and the employment numbers weren't that high.
	They were actually much lower.
	Now the point is who got it wrong and why did you get it wrong in a direction that benefits your side?
	Let's remember, these are Democratic appointees who are making these decisions.
	And then when you do the correction, it's kind of like, again, it's like the New York Times running a correction after everything is already over.
	They do the Hunter Biden, for example, laptop thing, oh the intelligence officials, it's Russian disinformation.
	After the election, oh well, it's not Russian disinformation.
	So you do what you can to help your side get over the finish line, and then of course you calmly and generally to a much smaller audience, you make your correction.
	So the point here is that the Democrats have in fact been bending the data.
	And they, while they were running the government, they had their own people producing this data.
	So if we could trust the objectivity of it then, well, then there's no reason we can't trust the objectivity when a Trump administration., we have our people looking at the numbers and our people putting out the statistics and our people putting out the facts.
	My friend Kevin Hassett, my old actually colleague at AEI, he's now head of the National Economic Council, he was on NBC, CNBC actually, and he was making the point I'm making in a slightly different way.
	He says, quote, if I'm running the BLS, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and I have the biggest revision outside of COVID in fifty years, we're talking here about the biggest revision of the numbers.
	I said X, now I'm saying why.
	Then it's incumbent on me to explain why in a very transparent way to show how the numbers add up and what you're doing to address it.
	So basically what Kevin Hassett is saying here is that if a mathematician goes wrong and doesn't go wrong by slightly underestimating, let's say the distance from the Earth to the Sun, which happens to be eight light minutes, and let's say the mathematician comes in at seven point five, okay, you made an approximation, you were slightly off, you revise it to the correct amount, but let's say it's eight light minutes and you claim it's one light minute.
	And then you've got to issue a correction.
	What Kevin Hassett is saying is, how are you so far off?
	You're supposed to be a mathematician.
	How did you blow it?
	And not just blow it in the sense of a mere accident, blow it in a way that is politically helpful to your team, namely the left, namely the Democrats, namely the Biden administration.
	And then later, when it makes less of a difference, you make the adjustment, you make the correction.
	This is suspicious behavior to put it mildly.
	And so there's a breakdown of trust on the part of Trump.
	Trump with by the way one of his own cabinet agencies.
	Once again, let's be clear that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is inside of the Labor Department and the Labor Department ancestor to the president who happens to be one Donald J. Trump.
	In a time when Hollywood continues to pedal moral confusion and cultural decay, Angel Studios is doing something truly remarkable, creating films that inspire and reflect our values.
	Their latest release, Sketch, is a prime example.
	Imagine Stranger Things meets inside out, but with virtue, imagination and heart at the center.
	The story follows a young girl whose sketchbook falls into a mysterious pond, only to have her wild, colorful drawing spring to life.
	It's suspenseful, it's funny, it's deeply moving entertainment with a moral compass.
	If you're a premium angel guild member, you already have two free tickets waiting for sketch in theaters starting August sixth, if not, now is the time to join and take a stand for media that strengthens families instead of tearing them down.
	You'll also unlock Angel's entire streaming library content that aligns with faith, freedom, and truth.
	Visit angel dot com slash Tinesh Today, become a part of the Angel Guild to receive two free tickets to sketetch in theaters august sixth go to angel dot com slash Dinesh.
	A big retail chain just canceled a massive order to My Pillow, leaving Mike Lindell with an overstock of classic My Pillows.
	And so hey, their loss is your gain.
	For limited time, My Pillow is offering the entire classic collection at true wholesale prices.
	Get a standard My Pillow for just nineteen ninety eight.
	Wow, one more.
	Upgrade to queen size for just twenty four ninety eight or king size for twenty nine ninety eight.
	You can snag body pillows for thirty nine ninety eight and versatile multi use pillows for just twelve ninety eight plus when your order is over seventy five dollars or more, you get one hundred dollars in free digital gifts, no strings attached.
	That's right, premium pillows at unbeatable prices and bonus gifts to top it off.
	So don't wait, head to mypillow dot com or you can call eight hundred eight seven six zero two seven, that's eight hundred eight seven six zero two seven, and don't forget to use promo code Dinesh to grab your standard my pillow for only nineteen ninety eight while supplies last.
	What is the problem with Europe?, we see images from time to time that suggest a civilization in decay.
	We'll read about plummeting birth rates.
	We will see whole towns in Germany and England that seem to have been taken over by the radical Muslims.
	You see garish scenes of massive protests for Gaza, and it looks like Europe has totally lost its moorings.
	And yet if you listen to the European leaders.
	They exude an air of confidence, of sophistication.
	Whatever you think of Macron in France, he seems to be kind of a cool cat, a young guy, well dressed, speaks well, and Kirstarmer with his kind of authoritative British accent, and the German guy with his bespectacled German thick voice,
	all of them posing together, taking their obligatory courts and bows, surrounded, if you will, by the architecture of old Europe.
	and they assure us that everything is going well.
	Now there's a Polish commentator named Daniel Fuber.
	I think that's how you say his last name.
	He appears to me to be a French background, but he lives in Poland.
	He's a Polish guy, and he has a critique of Europe that I think is worth sharing, and I'm going to summarize it in my own words while reading some of his lines.
	So his argument is this, and that is that Europe has become a kind of open air museum of the past.
	It has all the great cathedrals, it has magnificent castles, it has Big Ben, it has the Eiffel Tower and the Palace of Versailles, it has all that.
	In that sense America or other countries have very little to compete with the grandeur of Europe.
	At the same time, the Europeans appear to be very progressive.
	They're into recycling and they're into climate change and they're always talking about managing the future and they're always talking about coming to terms with the new global world that we live in and making sure that this globalization advances apace, they're always talking about new forms of technology.
	But according to Daniel Fubert, it is an illusion.
	Why?
	Number one, he says, They preserve the buildings but erase the meaning.
	They protect the monuments but mock the faith that built them.
	He says cathedrals are kept for acoustics, castles have become venues of wedding photos, traditions are paraded like costumes, stripped of conviction.
	And every time something from the past stirs, people talk about reviving religious belief, or they talk about the Latin Mass, or they talk about restoring the manners or the dignity of the past, or they talk about the fact that Europe and these European nations once considered themselves nations.
	As soon as you do that, the European leaders say, This is dangerous, this needs to be stopped, this needs to be blocked.
	And so there is a kind of embalming of the past.
	The past exists and it's there to see, and you've got a lot of brown and black.
	and foreign tourists taking photos.
	But says Daniel Fubert, this is like Muslims selling trinkets at the foot of the pyramids.
	The pyramids are gone, the civilization behind it is gone.
	It's now nothing more than an opportunity to take a selfie.
	Second, Fubert says, The European claim to the future is utterly bogus.
	They use these futuristic slogans, but they have absolutely no meaning or no coherent meaning.
	Let's take the slogan diversity.
	Europe has always been very diverse, but it was very diverse because all the European countries were different from each other.
	The diversity came out of nationality.
	And so let's describe this diversity.
	It's going to sound a little stereotypical, but the reason these stereotypes developed is because they're largely accurate.
	And so with the French, you get French flamboyance, you get the French language, you get French culture.
	But with the British, you get a more pragmatic, a more scientific., a civilization that produces people like Isaac Newton, the stiff upper lip, a stoic sense of endurance.
	And what do you get from the Germans?
	With the Germans, you get organization, you get discipline, you get military power.
	From the Poles, you get religion, dogmatism, stubbornness, an unwillingness to yield, a willingness to defend the frontier.
	From the Italians, you get whimsicality, a kind of love of life, a kind of open air, affection for good food and romance and courtship, and so the Spanish bring a combination of Catholic devotion and at the same time great cultural richness and creativity, the creativity that built the great Spanish civilization of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, so this is diversity.
	And all of it coming together produces a very powerful, rich, forward looking continent.
	But that diversity is now diminished.
	It's gone.
	And says Daniel Fubert, it's replaced by something these slogans of like sustainability.
	So this is how he puts it.
	Europe has no border, no army, no God, no industry, but don't worry, your garbage is being recycled.
	He goes, that's the priority, not defense, not birth rates, not energy independence, but sorting plastic.
	The culture, the continent that once built cathedrals and empires is now building recycling bins.
	And so what Foubert says is this is decline, but it's decline with a kind of sanitary label.
	It is like, listen, We can no longer control the seas, but you know what?
	We can control our carbon footprint.
	We can't afford our kids, but we subsidize wind turbines.
	We can't produce anything, but gay, we got a really good ESG score.
	So this is the pathos, and the word pathos comes out of the word pathetic.
	This is what Europe has become.
	And then he looks at the children of Europe, and he goes, these Europeans, he goes, they provided everything except formation of their children.
	They gave comforts, screens, trips, space, but he goes, but no boundaries, no instruction, no gravity.
	They outsource discipline to schools, morality to cartoons, meaning to the internet.
	He goes, these parents worked hard, but for what?
	For children who despise their history, resent their privileges, dismantle the very world they inherited.
	So the buildings are standing, but in a way what he's saying is the chain of custody, the chain of transmission, our obligation to raise our children in our values, that cord has been broken.
	And then he makes a final point that I think is really worth considering.
	And he says a lot of times when we think of decline, we think of something that goes down, down, down, and then there's nothing.
	there.
	And he says, but that is never the case.
	It's not that there's nothing there.
	Somebody else takes over.
	Here we go.
	If you don't like the culture of your ancestors, don't expect to live in a world without culture.
	You will live surrounded by the culture of others, of their ancestors, of their civilizations, which have nothing to do with you, and you will be nothing.
	You will be culturally dominated, a foreign culture will be imposed on you, you will be treated as inferior.
	He goes, that's the rule.
	Abandoning your culture doesn't free you, it opens the door to occupation.
	And I think this is a very profound point, the point being that there is no such thing as a vacuum.
	When the Inca civilization fell, it was replaced by the Spanish.
	When the Europeans conquered Africa, they dominated the Africans and left their own imprint, and it's not always the case that the society is conquered by military force.
	Sometimes, for example, the stronger force that conquers another culture is itself conquered by that culture.
	So a good example of this would be the Romans, they conquer the Greeks, and then they submit to Greece.
	They start speaking Greek, they begin to worship the Greek gods and the Greek idols, they begin to write in Greek.
	Notice by the way, that the New Testament, although written under the Roman Empire, is written in Greek.
	And so we come back to Faubert's point, which is your streets will bear their names, your language will submit to theirs, soon you will not belong in your own land, in your own culture.
	What you couldn't defend, not because you didn't have the means to defend it, but because you didn't want to defend it becomes no longer yours.
	Guys, I'd like to invite you to check out my Locals channel and consider becoming an annual subscriber.
	I post a lot of exclusive content there, including content that's censored on other social media platforms.
	On Locals you get Dinesh Unchained, Dinesh Uncensored.
	You can also interact with me directly.
	I do a live weekly QA every Tuesday, 8 p.m.
	Easter.
	No topic is off limits.
	I've also got a movie page on Locals with some very cool films, mine but also films by others.
	Two thousand Meals is up there, Police Date vindicating Trump, Trump Card, our only feature film called Infidel starring Jim Caviezle.
	big film coming up this fall.
	If you're an annual subscriber, you can stream and watch these movies for free.
	They're included with your subscription.
	So check out the channel.
	It's Dinesh.
	Locals dot com.
	I'd love to have you along for this great ride.
	Again, it's Dinesh.
	Locals dot com.
	Is the continued divide between Trump and the Federal Reserve putting us behind the curve again?
	Can the Fed take the right action at the right time or are we going to be looking at a potential economic slowdown?
	And what does that mean for your savings?
	Debbie and I diversify with gold through Birch Gold Group.
	We do it for peace of mind knowing that if the bottom falls out out, we have something tangible that we can hold on to.
	And Birchgold makes it incredibly easy for you to diversify into gold too.
	If you have an IRA or old four hundred one K, you can convert that into a tax sheltered IRA in physical gold or just buy some gold to keep in your safe.
	First, get educated.
	Birchgold will send you a free information kit on gold, just text my name Dinesh to the number 989898 again.
	Text Dinesh to 989898.
	Consider diversifying a portion of your savings into gold.
	That way, if the Fed can't stay ahead of the curve for the country, at least, you can take action for yourself.
	Guys, I'm delighted to welcome my old friend Scott Walter to the podcast.
	Scott and I go back a long way to my days at the American Enterprise Institute.
	This is in the early nineties.
	So we've been friends for, well, twenty five, thirty years now, and Scott has remained in DC.
	He's kind of moved up the ranks.
	He is now the president of Capital Research Center.
	But before that, he served in the George W. Bush administration.
	He was Special Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy.
	He's testified many times, including recently before Congress on the whole issue of these nonprofits and so called dark money.
	His book, which is just out in paperback, this is what we're going to focus on today.
	It's called Arabella, Arabella, the Dark Money Network of Leftist Billionaires Secretly Transforming America.
	The website of Capital Research, by the way, just capital research dot org.
	Hey, Scott, good to see you.
	Glad to have you on the podcast again.
	The Trump administration, as you know, has been making some efforts.
	Trump is trying to defund the left, particularly the left that is cashing in on the government.
	So you have USAID, you have the recent defunding of NPR and PBS, there's an effort to scale back the bureaucracy in the Department of Education.
	How do you think Trump is doing so far in the effort to defund the bureaucracy of the left?
	Well, it's wonderful to see because, as you know, you know.
	You know, this was attempted during the Reagan administration and defunding the left was a buzzword of supposedly monstrousness, but of course, almost no defunding happened.
	In the first Trump administration, there was a good deal of talk of this, but again, not that much progress.
	They've made a whole lot more progress this time, but there is a long way to go.
	And of course, lots of the folks whose funding has been cut off are now suing the administration demanding it be turned back on.
	Scott, you have done such valuable work in looking at these nonprofits.
	We interviewed you, you might remember in 2000 Mules about rivers of money flowing into the issue of elections and how to sort of manipulate the results of elections.
	You now have a new book that focuses on a somewhat mystical entity called the Arabella Network.
	Now most people, if they've heard about it, haven't heard a lot about it.
	What do we need to know about this Arabella network?
	What is it?
	Well, I think the simplest way to understand it is to think of a pyramid.
	At the top of the pyramid you have Arabella advisers.
	that's a for-profit consulting firm, Beltway Bandit, we call them, right?
	It creates and operates everything below it in the, Now in the middle of the pyramid, you have half a dozen nonprofits of different legal types.
	That's where the money goes in.
	That's where a Zuckerberg, a Gates, a Soros, a Ford Foundation, they write checks to those nonprofits that then get operated by Arabella advisors.
	At the base of the pyramid is what your viewers see.
	That's the hundreds and hundreds of these fake groups with names like Keep Iowa Healthy, Secure Michigan Elections, Flourish.
	Floridians for a fair shake, yada yada.
	They want Americans to think, Oh, these are some neighbors of mine here in the States, and they're upset about something that's, you know, some wrong being done when in fact it's just a dufus at a desk in DC who's created a website and bought some Facebook ads.
	Wow.
	I'm getting the picture now, Scott.
	So I think what you're saying is that Arabella Network is an effort to create not democracy, but a sort of masquerade of democracy, right?
	Because going back to Tocqueville's idea of democracy, you have local agitation and New England town meetings and people clamoring for this or clamoring for that.
	And Tocqueville saw this as a very healthy sign of citizens participating in government.
	And of course it is a healthy sign if they are in fact citizens and if in fact you do have these local sort of revolts, but you're saying that it's also possible to manufacture them.
	And Arabella Network is in the business of creating fake agitation, fake revolts.
	But of course the fake revolt has the same effect as the real one if the media amplifies it, if people believe it, people think, oh my gosh., people are really upset about this or upset about that.
	Now, let me ask you this.
	It sounds like the money is coming from these billionaires, these, these leftist billionaires.
	What is their incentive for pumping money into these organizations?
	Well, you, you really hit them right on the head with your Tocqueville reference because yes, the traditional America is decentralized, right?
	Neighborhoods, towns, states have real powers.
	But of course, every single policy by some strange coincidence that Arabella has ever pushed.
	would centralize more power in Washington.
	Now, that answers the question of why do the billionaires want this?
	And by the way, it's not just billionaires like people like Pierre Omidyar or Soros or Gates.
	It's also the billionaires with the same last name, Foundation.
	right the Ford Foundation loves this too and MacArthur and on and on so the point is if you centralize power in Washington and take it away from ordinary Americans it's a lot easier for the billionaires to manipulate the machinery in Washington which the rest of us never even see or don't f have the time to be monitoring.
	That explains why the billionaires love Arabella.
	And isn't it also true, Scott, that it gives the billionaires a mask or a shield of anonymity, right?
	If Bill Gates has his own foundation, he could do some of this directly, but I think what you're suggesting or implying is that if Bill Gates did it, attention would focus on Bill Gates.
	Maybe people would start protesting outside one of his palatial homes, but by giving it to a nonprofit, which is then steered by a seemingly independent group of people.
	Then Bill Gates gets to sit back and give Solomonic interviews as if he's not actively involved in any of this, but of course he's still seeing the results of his donation.
	He's still getting what he's buying.
	No, that's exactly right.
	You know, the billionaires write the checks to those Arabella run nonprofits, but remember there's about half dozen of those, and then there are hundreds of projects.
	You have no idea when you see a project by, you know, Arabella's new venture fund.
	Well, who of the many people pouring money into the new venture fund was supporting that project?
	You'll never know.
	Scott, you mentioned a rather peculiar setup for this pyramid.
	You've got the for profit organization at the very top and the nonprofits underneath it.
	What is the legality of that?
	And I say that because presumably a nonprofit has rules of transparency, tax deductibility.
	So how is it possible for for profit entities to, in a sense, maneuver or manipulate this ensemble of nonprofits to its own end?
	Well, you know, it is not in theory illegal because the legal understanding, right, The legal fiction here is, well, there's a nonprofit and it hired this place to help it.
	Now, you know, most nonprofits are going to hire people that, like, I have a website and I have a nonprofit.
	We have to hire somebody to host the website, right?
	So nonprofits are going to have vendors and all that.
	But you're right, it's quite unusual.
	And by the way, it also is one of the original Arabella lies.
	When they first applied for their very first nonprofit with the IRS to be recognized as a charity, it said, well, for one year, we expect to be using Arabella Advisors LLC for profit, you know, to help us get launched, but just for a year.
	Well, that year was 2005.
	Wow.
	Scott, what is the right counter to all this from the right?
	I mean, one of the things that you're doing is you expose, you bring public attention to what these guys are doing, and capital research more generally has done this in so many different areas.
	You also, in a way, export your knowledge and expertise to the Congress.
	You've appeared before congressional committees.
	I think you were in front of Brandon Gill's committee recently.
	With our two of his committees.
	Two of his committees.
	Okay, awesome.
	But should the right, Scott, be imitating this model?
	Should we be trying to what is the answer to this?
	It seems somewhat nefarious manipulation of the democratic process.
	Well, I would say both and, which is to say the conservatives should both be using the model when it makes sense for them, because as I said, it's in theory, it's a legal thing.
	But then the other thing though is the most important thing is exactly what you're doing, which is exposing this.
	Because here's the thing.
	It's a wizard of Oz operation.
	Now, when Dorothy first sees the wizard, big, scary, very powerful influence on her, right?
	But when the dog pulls the curtain back and you see it's just some guy at a microphone, not so powerful anymore.
	So the illusion only works as long as it's an illusion.
	And that both for American citizens and for lawmakers, right?
	You have legislators terrified when they're attacked by some Arabella fake group.
	But once everybody knows it's a fake group, well, that's not so much to be scared of.
	Scott, talk more generally about where we've come in our politics over these last 25, really, few decades that we've known each other.
	It seems, as you say, in the Reagan years, there was an awareness that you had this state within a state.
	And when people talk about the deep state, they often think about hidden entities that are within the bowels of the government.
	But I think one of the things that Capital Research, your organization, exposes is that there are hidden entities that don't aren't necessarily within the government at all.
	They hide inside of academia or the media or the intermediate sector somewhere between the private sector and the government, the so called non profit sector.
	Is the non profit sector itself part of this deep state or at least an ally of the deep state?
	Oh, absolutely, absolutely.
	And in fact, I'll give you a great Arabella example.
	There's a little tiny thing called Governing for Impact, which is one of their fake groups.
	And they even, for a long time, for years, they kept their website set up so that you couldn't even find it in a web search.
	If you'd have to know the precise URL to type in and then you could get to it.
	Right.
	And now they created it two years before Biden took office.
	And all it did was work with Harvard Law types to do legal strategy to reverse all of the regulatory reforms of the first Trump administration.
	Right.
	All kinds of things in environmental, Title IX about Biden.
	boys and girls sports whatnot now so they were working with the future and then the existing once biden took office, all his people to do all this regulatory work.
	And then the second that Trump won his second term, what did they do but instantly pivot to creating the legal strategy for all the lawsuits that are going against the Trump administration now, whether it's nonprofits saying, hey, you can't dare take my funding away or stop my funding, or whether it's a state or city saying, you know, you can't put ice here, you know, on or on.
	The entire assault against the whole Trump administration, all the lawsuits, which are now in the hundreds, you know, the basic strategies hatched by this little entity, all Soros funded for its initial years.
	I mean, this is very interesting, Scott, and significant because I think when many people think about these federal judges, these district judges that are running interception against Trump, we think that the judges are somehow moving on their own.
	But I think what you're saying is that no, there have to be plaintiffs who bring a case and say, Hey, you got to get ice out of California or that say, Hey, you cannot defund Planned Parenthood or Hey, you can't do this or you can't do that.
	And that operation is coordinated.
	Now that operation presumably is going to go out and do a little bit of judge shopping to make sure we get a Clinton judge over here, a Biden judge over there, an Obama judge over here.
	So the judges come into play, but to put it somewhat differently, the judges are not the quarterbacks, they're the receivers, aren't they?
	That's not a bad metaphor, and yes, it's a very complicated machinery, right, that's working together to produce those results.
	Guys, I've been talking to my buddy, Scott Walter, president of Capital Research Center, the book Arabella, the Dark Money Network of Leftist Billionaires Secretly Transforming America, now out in paperberback.
	By the way, you can follow Capital Research on X at Capital Research, the website capitalresearch dot org.
	Scott, as always, a great pleasure, and thank you for joining me.
	Thanks for letting me be here.
	I'm discussing my book, How An Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader, and we're now in the second part of the book.
	In fact, we're kind of approaching the wind up of the book.
	We're going to finish this chapter and the wall came tumbling down.
	Then I have a chapter that looks at the personality, the character, the character.
	who Reagan was as a man and that's going to be a kind of portrait in leadership and an attempt to look at Reagan very clearly for strengths and weaknesses.
	I'm also going to draw out the analogy between Reagan and Trump and then of course I have the summation which will also tie things into the present.
	Now if you were to ask people on the left or even on the right, let's focus on the right for a minute.
	How did the Cold War come War?
	Their answer typically would be, well, on the left it's likely to be Gorbachev.
	On the right it's likely to be, well, Reagan and Gorbachev together, with Gorbachev, of course, being the arm of the scissors that was on the Soviet side, and Reagan being the other arm of the scissors that was on the Western or the American side.
	And this has now become something of the conventional wisdom that Reagan and Gorbachev were certainly both necessary, wouldn't have happened without the other, but it took both of them to do it together.
	I want to focus on a slightly different question which I think gets to the heart of the matter.
	How did we get Gorbachev in the first place?
	To frame this question a little differently, let's look at the Soviet leadership going all the way back to the beginning.
	You start off with Lenin and then you have Stalin.
	Stalin and Lenin are very similar.
	Stalin is responsible for more butchery than Lenin, but that's not because Lenin was a better man.
	Stalin had in a way, well, first of all, he had a much longer term in office.
	Second of all, he had different occasions, the relocation of the Kulaks, World War II.
	So Stalin had more opportunities in a wider landscape or theater to carry out his homicidal operations.
	And then we continue on beyond Stalin, Khrushchev, who repudiated Stalin for tactical reasons, but of course he never repudiated Lenin.
	He certainly didn't repudiate communism.
	And then beyond Brezhnev, we had Andropov, we had Chernenko.
	And so this is the train of Soviet dictators, all of them not only similar ideologically, but they even looked the same.
	They wore the same kind of coats, they wore the same kind of stuffy expressions, and you could almost swap out the one for the other and it wouldn't make a whole lot of difference.
	And then you have Gorbachev, clearly a different looking guy, a different talking guy, and a guy with a different animating spirit.
	So the first question you have to ask, and very few people think of asking this, is what made the Soviets change their course.
	What made them pick a very different horse?
	How did they even end up with a guy like Gorbachev?
	Who knew that a guy like that could make his way through the Politburo system?
	So the argument I want to make is that the Soviets realized that what they were doing wasn't working, that their system was failing, and that they had to.
	They had no choice but to go in a different direction.
	Now, when I say that the Soviets realized that their system was failing, I do not mean that their infant mortality rates were high, their life expectancy was low compared with the rest of the industrialized world, their stores were empty.
	All of these things were true for seventy years.
	So the Soviet ruling class, the so called nomenclatura, lived very well themselves.
	They didn't care if the stores were empty or not.
	They had reasonably good doctors to look after them, so there's nothing new here, no reason to change course.
	But the Soviets had a way of dealing with these domestic problems, and that is to project their power abroad.
	And this strategy was paying rich dividends.
	I mentioned during the Carter administration alone how a number of countries topped off with Afghanistan fell into the Soviet orbit, and the Soviet goal was to use international power, international prestige, and possibly even concessions that were somehow wrung out of international negotiations with the West to substitute for the domestic problems inside the Soviet Union.
	Now here comes Reagan, and it's very clear that when Reagan came in, the Soviets were worried, but they were not too worried because other presidents had talked tough.
	And so they thought, well, Reagan says these things, but what's he actually going to do?
	And then Reagan deploys the Persian cruise missiles and the Soviets go, wow, he didn't just say he was going to do it, he did it.
	It demonstrated the unity and resolve of the Western Alliance.
	Reagan was able to hold these wayward Western countries together.
	Number two, Reagan deploys the Reagan doctrine.
	Suddenly, the Soviets have to fight everywhere that they are in power in the third world, they have to fight in Afghanistan, they have to fight in Angola, they have to fight in Nicaragua, and their advances are stopped.
	No new country falls into the Soviet orbit and they lose Grenada.
	So suddenly the trajectory, even though modestly, is in the opposite direction.
	And in Afghanistan with the Soviets, this was a little bit of a powerful affirmation of Soviet prestige, but Afghanistan was getting out of hand.
	It was becoming what Gorbachev would later call a bleeding war.
	And so we see here With the missiles, with the Reagan doctrine, and then on top of that with the Strategic Defense Initiative, the Soviets are now invited into a very expensive arms race in space, one that they can't afford, and one that they do not believe that they are going to win.
	And so I'm quoting in the book The Sovietologist Richard Pipes, he goes the momentum of the Cold War had dramatically shifted.
	And if this seems like a kind of neoconservative or right wing American point of view, many Soviet officials would say the same thing.
	They would say that we were starting to lose ground.
	I'm talking about officials like Andrei Gromyko, Anatoly Dubrin, and so the Soviets recognized internally that the tide had turned.
	And so when Chernenko died in nineteen eighty five, let's remember, Reagan came in in nineteen eighty one.
	For the first four years, he was dealing with the old Soviet Union under first Andropov and then Chernenko.
	And when Chernenko died, the Soviets go, okay, time to change course.
	And so we get to the key point I've been trying to make here, and that is that it's Reagan, in other words, who seems to have been largely responsible for neutralizing the Soviet strategy of the 1970s and creating the loss of nerve that caused the Soviets to seek a new approach.
	When we think about the famous initiatives of Gorbachev, they were called glassnost, which means kind of openness, and then perestroika, which is reorganization or restructuring.
	The point I want to make is that Gorbachev did create those initiatives.
	But they were in response to circumstances that he didn't create, circumstances that were to a much larger degree shaped by the effectiveness of Reagan policies.
	And that's why again later, this is Ilya Zaslavsky, he was in the Soviet Congress of People's Deputies.
	He gave a rather startling statement later where he said the true originator of both Glasnost and Perestroika was not Gorbachev, but was in fact Ronald Reagan.
	Now, the reason it's difficult to clearly understand the Cold War not only at the time., but even now is because we have been subject, as by the way, we're subject in other areas too, to historical revisionism.
	And this revisionism began with Gorbachev himself.
	I've discussed in my earlier work how there's been revisionism about, for example, fascism, how fascism, which used to be seen for a long time, both by its defenders and critics as a left wing phenomenon, it was somehow moved very slyly, very subtly, but very effectively into the right wing camp.
	Suddenly, fascism was described as it still is by many.
	as a right wing phenomenon.
	This is called changing the tablets or it's called using your power to rewrite history to your benefit.
	And something like this occurs also with the Cold War.
	Gorbachev, the moment the Soviet Union collapsed, Gorbachev declared, I did it.
	I'm the true architect of all this.
	I deserve the credit.
	And of course, the Western media was only too happy to give it to him.
	The only way to give it to him is to make it seem like Gorbachev was always a progressive.
	He was a democrat, he was a liberal in the classic and perhaps even in the modern sense, and so he far sightedly took the Soviet Union in a more enlightened direction.
	We will see when I pick this theme up tomorrow that nothing could be further from the truth.
	None of this was Gorbachev's intention, in fact, the very opposite, and so what we want to do is plumb beneath the revisionism and try to uncover the true story of how the Cold War really ended and also why who brought it about.

▲