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Aug. 5, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
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RUNAWAYS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1140
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Coming up, the Democrats have become runaways.
They're trying to thwart the Texas redistricting, and I'll talk about how they can be stopped.
In fact, Texas publisher Tony Ortiz joins me.
We're going to talk about obstacles that a red state like Texas faces in trying to institutionalize the Trump agenda.
Also reveal why Trump's plan to reopen the mental asylums is a good one.
and necessary idea.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
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My topic for this opening segment and in fact also for a subsequent interview is the Texas runaways, the very remarkable phenomenon inside of Texas of Democrats fleeing the state to avoid to block Republicans from passing redistricting in Texas,
which will alter the balance of power in the midterms, give the Republicans something like five more seats and make it more likely that Republicans can hold on to their house majority.
But before I go there, I can't resist talking about Trump and the fact that every now and then he sort of drops the presidential mantle and becomes a cultural guru and a cultural commentator.
So here's Trump.
Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the all caps hottest ad out there.
You might wonder why is Trump getting involved in this?
But of course that's the answer is because he's Trump.
He goes, the jeans are quote flying off the shelves.
Go get him, Sydney.
And then in order to make a contrast that actually I've made on the podcast before, on the other side of the ledger, Jaguar did a stupid and seriously woke all caps advertisement that is a total disaster.
The CEO just resigned in disgrace and the company is in absolute turmoil.
Who wants to buy a Jaguar after looking at that disgraceful ad?
Shouldn't they have learned a lesson from Bud Light?
And then on and on he goes and he brings in Taylor Swift.
She was booed out of the Super Bowl and became quote no longer hot.
So all of this has inspired a fellow on Twitter whose handle is Prison Mitch to offer a Sydney Sweeney solution to the twenty twenty eight presidential race.
I've shared this with Debbie and she really chuckled so I said I have to share it with you as well.
Prison Mitch goes very straightforward from here.
Number one, Sydney Sweeney attends the twenty twenty eight Republican National Convention.
Number two, rips off her American Eagle shirt like Hulk Hoganan revealing a Vance twenty eight tank top.
Number three, five hundred and thirty eight to zero landslide.
Number four, President Vance.
So this is the way in which Republicans can play cultural politics in the twenty twenty eight election.
All right, let me turn to Texas and what's going on here.
Well, according to the Democrats, what's going on here is a straightforward attack on democracy.
Let me give you some samples of Democratic discourse.
James Tallerico, my Democratic colleagues and I just left the state of Texas to break quorum and stop Trump's redistricting power grab.
Trump is trying to rig the midterm elections right before our eyes, but first he'll have to come through us.
Same rhetoric from Kathy Hochel in New York, from Newscomb or Newsom in California, here's Hakim Jeffries.
Republicans are afraid to face voters in a free and fair election.
That's the reason the extremists want to gerrymander the Texas Congressional Map.
Well, who are these extremists?
We're talking about Dustin Burrows, who is the moderate head of the Texas House of Representatives.
Burrows got into office with Democratic votes, in fact, with a majority of Democratic votes.
So is this an extremist?
And yet Burrows is the one who's pushing this redistricting in Texas.
Here's a commentator on social media.
The core principle of democracy is you can't get to fifty one percent and then change the rules so you win every election forever.
Well, the key point here though is this is what.
Democrats do.
Republicans do it too, but there's nothing unique about Republicans doing it.
This is gerrymandering.
I saw that the Stephen King this morning put out basically the usual kind of very unself conscious type of rant where he goes and this is an attack on democracy.
And I go, well, why don't you explain to us why it's so different in Maryland or in California or in Illinois?
Because they have done gerrymandering.
They have all these very weird salamander shaped districts.
That's by the way where the name gerrymandering comes from.
It goes back really to the nineteenth century when a governor in Massachusetts named Jerry, Elbridge Jerry would draw these weird districts and they combined his name with salamander, salamander shaped districts, and you've got gerrymandering.
So you've got Illinois doing redistricting and Maryland is.
So apparently Stephen King is now going to tell us, well, that was okay.
That was not an attack on democracy, that's actually saving democracy, that's protecting democracy.
Look, let's be kind of bare knuckled about this and recognize that although democracy is based on a certain type of neutral assumption, one man, one vote, we've got a system of House of Representatives and Senate, the truth of it is states have a lot of power in drawing these districts.
It can be done at the state and local level.
And even the Supreme Court has said it's not a judicial matter, it's a political matter.
Now, it's true that if you go too far, then state courts can intervene and stop you.
from doing it.
So if Texas passes redistricting, It will be challenged in the state courts, but it's not an attack on democracy.
In fact, it's an exercise of democracy.
Other states do it, and so Republicans are really doing it too.
The real difference between the Democrats and the Republicans has been a difference of will, and that is the Democrats are completely willing and unscrupulous in using these mechanisms to gain power.
It's not that they will flout the democratic process, although they'll cheat and do things like that when they need to, but usually what they're doing is.
they are pushing the process to its limit.
So for example, if you have absentee ballots, they will calculate whether the more Republicans or Democrats are likely to use them.
If you have a system where somebody opens up the ballot and there are markings on the ballot and you're not clear who the vote is for or both boxes appear to be checked, the Democrats will push to make sure they have adjudicators that are going to decide the issue their way.
So they're perfectly willing to kind of monkey with the Democratic process even at the micro level to eke out whatever advantage they can for themselves.
Now the Texas Democrats are well, they went to Chicago and hung out with Governor Pritzker over there and doing all kinds of like social media videos that are now all out there like we're in Chicago, we're hiding out.
You almost get the idea, you know, you remember under under slavery the you'd have you'd have these people who would be in Chicago and they'd be like, you know, we're we're riding the underground railroad.
We're bringing slaves from the south to freedom and of course in the 19thury, coming north meant coming really through Chicago.
If you think about it, Chicago is the closest city north of slavery.
And so it was an important way station for the underground railroad.
So I fully expect these Democrats from Texas to be riding the subway in Chicago, making videos, I'm on the underground railroad.
In other words, creating an absurdly and unjustifiably heroic image of themselves as if they are somehow acting to prevent an assault on democracy, even though what we have here is nothing more than a pedestrian exercise of democracy with Republicans finally doing what Democrats have long done.
Now, interestingly, the governor Abbott, who is not known to be sort of an extreme tough guy in these things, nevertheless has taken a pretty hard line, not only saying that these people are risking losing their office.
I'm not quite sure how that would work.
I have a guest very knowledgeable about Texas politics coming on, and I'm going to ask him about that.
But Abbott goes, yeah, you're forfeiting your office if you don't show up to vote and exercise your But Abbott also says that you've been raising money off of this, and Abbott points to a provision in the law, the statutes that says that to quote, solicit, accept or agree to accept funds to assist in the violation of legislative duties, he goes, that could be a violation of the state's bribery laws.
So this is Abbott, I think, using a certain amount of maybe creativity here and talking about how these Texas Democrats could face A expulsion, B discipline, and maybe even criminality prosecution.
Now I suspect there's a little bit of sort of drama going on on the Republican side no less than on the Democratic side, but it's to good effect because I think what Abbott is basically saying is, you know what?
Call off your big dramatic exit, come back and do the job that you've been elected to do.
The fact that you're being, see, one of the things is that when people are out voted in a democracy, they always scream that their rights are being violated.
A good example of this was in fact the South.
They ran an election against Abraham Lincoln.
They lost.
They didn't even claim that Lincoln stole the election or cheated or got people not eligible to vote.
They admitted that Lincoln won fair and square.
And yet they were like, We're out of here.
And that's basically the approach of the Texas Democrats.
They're all in a democratic process.
They don't have the votes.
And so they've said, in effect, We're out of here.
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Some big news on the DOJ front.
It was reported yesterday on Fox, but also in other places that the Trump DOJ has announced the convening of a grand jury in the Russia collusion hoax.
development and a development that I feared would not take place because Pam Bondi had appointed a strike force to receive these allegations from Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe and it was very clear that Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe were dead serious.
The crimes have been committed, it looks like and they need to be prosecuted and it doesn't matter who did them, whether it's Clapper or Comey or Obama, let's prosecute them.
Department of Homeland Security and the CIA don't make those decisions, it's the DOJ.
And so the files go over to Pam Bondi.
And Pam Bondi, who generally is a bit of a cautious operator, said, I'm going to start a strike force.
Now the problem with a strike force is strike force can sort of sit on its hands and be quote reviewing the files for weeks.
But no, in very short order, the strike force appears to have taken a critical step, and that is the grand jury.
Now, it's important to know a little bit about grand juries because we think of grand juries like, oh, the grand jury is going to be evaluating the evidence and deciding grand juries don't do very much of that.
They simply have to make a decision about whether it is probable, meaning more likely than not that there is a criminal violation here.
The standard of proof for grand juries is much lower than it is for juries.
If you're in a jury trial, then the standard of proof is very high.
You need a unanimous jury and you also need a proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
That's not the standard for grand juries.
And that's why there's a saying in the legal community that you can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.
It what it means is that prosecutors by and large have the grand jury in their back pocket.
And for me, this is actually good news in this case.
Why?
Because the left has used it against us.
They convened grand juries.
They indicted Trump.
They went to town using their power.
And guess what?
It's now our turn.
So according to the reports, federal prosecutors have been given the go ahead to convene the grand jury.
If the grand jury decides there's going to be an seek indictments against?
It appears from the reporting that their initial targets are people like Brennan and Clapper.
And I think that that is obviously a good move.
These would be the first really top level Democrats who are being indicted, and they are, of course, deep state or police state type of officials, and yet it's not their scheme, is it?
In other words, I do not believe for one minute that Clapper and Brennan on their own carried out this scheme.
whose authors are higher up than them.
And who are they?
Well, they're really only two names that come to mind and each of them has played a role, although a different role.
One is Hillary Clinton, the other is Barack Obama.
So Hillary Clinton can be understood as the author of the Russia collusion hoax, right?
She and her campaign started it.
We now know that she personally authorized it.
They create this fake dossier.
So that's the Hillary Clinton part.
But Hillary Clinton by herself doesn't have the official authority to mobilize the entire apparatus of the federal government.
That requires someone else.
In fact, it requires the president of the United States, one Barack Obama.
So Hillary Clinton is the originator and the author of the Russia collusion hoax, Obama is its chief executive, its chief implementer.
So it's quite obvious that for justice to be done, these two people need to be charged, prosecuted, and locked up.
This is, of course, a tall order, and there are many people on our side, mainly on the basis of past experience who say, well, this will never happen.
And I think Trump himself has said that in earlier times, he himself would not have gone for these kinds of measures.
But since the Democrats have done it, why shouldn't we?
And that's kind of my position.
Some people say, well, Dinesh, two wrongs don't make a right.
I've explained on this podcast that two wrongs often do make a right in the sense that they achieve the justice that a single wrong has created in the first place.
So my thought is that what the Justice Department should be going for here is to bring someone to the state.
to bring strong cases against Clapper, Brennan, and Comey, and then look to flip them against Hillary Clinton and Obama.
So this is going to require skillful deployment of the tremendous resources of the DOJ.
The DOJ has unlimited funding, it should deploy massive platoons of prosecutors.
They should charge to the max, which is to say threaten these people with life in prison or hefty legal penalties.
That's going to be the only kind of bludgeon that's going to get them to fess up and say, well, listen, I did it, but you know what?
This goes back to the sort of Nuremberg defense, I'm just following orders.
Barack Obama told me to do it.
Well, maybe he didn't say it exactly that way, but he gave me the wink and the nod.
That's why I did it.
Why else would I have done it?
I got the clearance, the green light to do it from the very top.
Now, let me say a couple of words about something else that came out of Trump just recently, an executive order that essentially overrides the laws that closed the mental asylums in the nineteen sixties.
Now, executive orders by themselves don't cancel out laws.
And so this is Trump kind of pushing the envelope a little bit, but what he is doing is trying to establish something that is very sensible.
And that is quite simply reinstitutionalization.
When Debbie and I drive every morning to the podcast, we are right on our way unmistakably.
We see this woman out there and she has a big sign to give her money.
She's essentially panhandling.
But when you look at her a little more closely, it's pretty clear that she's not.
She is a little retarded, maybe entirely retarded.
And I would say there is a very high chance that she is also some sort of an addict.
She is an alcoholic or possibly a drug addict.
It's a little hard to say, obviously, based on appearances, but you've got someone, think about it, who is not only unable to take care of themselves, they're unable to avail themselves of public assistance, which is available to them.
They also have no interest in going into asylums and places where they would receive shelter and medical care.
but they don't want it.
And why wouldn't you want it?
The answer obviously is because I'm nuts.
I don't even know that it's available or I don't even want it because I don't know what is good for what is good for myself.
So if you're wondering why we have this seeming epidemic of they're often called homeless, but homelessness here is not the cause.
Homelessness is the symptom and the result of the cause, which often is addiction, lunacy, various forms of schizophrenia and mental breakdown, people who really are not able to function on their own.
Think of it, they all have, they must have, right?
Some family connections.
They've all grown up with friends and circles of people that they know.
Why are none of those people willing to help them?
Why can't you go to your neighbor, go to your friends, and say, listen, I'm down and out.
I'm going to get back on my feet.
The answer, of course, is that you probably have already done that.
And they've probably given you money, and you use the money to go buy drugs.
And then they helped you again, and you did it again and again and again.
And again, and so they've given up on you and they're like, no, no, I'm not going to give you anything more.
I'm enabling you.
And so that's how you end up, quote, homeless.
That's how you end up on the street.
So Trump is trying to fix a problem that's been a problem now.
And it's really think of how disgraceful it is that we've had this problem now for thirty to forty years.
No previous president, not even Republicans have taken any significant action to do something about it, but Trump finally has.
I see it as just a first step.
And of course, the media is complaining, quote, here's a headline Trump order pushes forcible hospitalization of homeless people.
Think of how misleading this is.
Oh, you're homeless, you don't have a home.
I'm going to forcibly hospitalize you.
No, they're being hospitalized not for quote homelessness.
They're being hospitalized for being bonkers.
So that's really what's going on.
You're as a result of being bonkers, you're homeless.
But notice how the journalist camouflages the bonkers part and emphasizes the homeless part.
Trump is locking up.
Trump wants to forcibly hospitalize homeless people.
Not exactly.
That is a distortion of the truth.
problem and Trump is trying in his own way to at least start the process of fixing it.
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Guys, I'd like to welcome to the podcast a new guest, Tony Ortiz.
He is the founder and publisher of Current Revolt, the website, by the way, currentrevolt dot com dot It's a Texas focused news outlet covering all things connected to Texas politics.
It's sometimes called the Texas newspaper of records, and it breaks a lot of big stories, mainly focusing on a lot of shenanigans and scandals in.
You can follow the publication on X at Current Revolt.
Tony, welcome.
Thank you for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
It seems like there's a big stir going on in Texas, and as I understand it, the Republicans are getting ready to do some redistricting.
This is within their authority.
They are a majority in both houses, and they have, it seems, the votes to pass it.
And so the Democrats decided, what can we do to stop it?
What kind of guerrilla tactics can we do pursue to block this legitimate exercise of democratic power?
Am I reading the situation right?
Can you describe for us what's really going on inside the Lone Star State?
Yeah.
Well, Dinesh, you're one hundred percent correct, so that's exactly what's going on.
Republicans make up the majority of the Texas House and of Texas, the Texas Capitol, right?
And we're seeing this new trend, I think, a lot, largely led by Donald Trump, President Donald Trump, where Republicans are finally winning elections and they're flexing their power traditionally.
What we've seen are Democrats winning.
And they just beat down our rights and they really take advantage of the power they get when republican traditionally what we saw when Republicans would win, they would kind of just let the system do its own thing and very rarely capitalize on their wins.
And now we're seeing that especially here in Texas.
So Texans make up the majority, we've decided to redistrict and the Democrats obviously don't have the numbers to fight it.
So instead they fled the state.
Now update us on this business of the Texas House Speaker, because as I remember, this is a guy who had gotten his speakership really through a majority of Democratic votes supplemented by some Republicans And there were a lot of kind of MAGA right wingers in the state who said, well, this is terrible.
This is mean he's going to be doing this is Dustin Burrows, the bidding of the Democrats.
Can you give us a sort of early report card on Dustin Burrows?
And it does appear like that on this issue, he is not only on board, but he seems to be taking some leadership.
Yeah, well, Dustin Burrows, Speaker Dustin Burrows has actually been really great as far as sessions goes.
And many in the grassroots and maybe the MAGA Trump side would be surprised to hear that.
But his performance or his duties at least in this session have been rather great.
He has been a good leader and you're correct.
He did win with a majority Democrat vote.
And despite that, he has gone ahead and pushed through with these redistricting and the Democrats have taken off.
And I think that's probably surprised them a little bit.
And he's following through on his Republican ideals and whatnot.
You know, he did have an opponent for his speakership and that opponent, you know, it was kind of interesting.
A lot of people, I don't think, did a lot of background on his opponent.
It was a representative named David Cook who ran against him.
This was a representative who was pro lockdowns, pro vaccine.
He's pro-vaccine, pro-COVID shutdowns.
He defended George Floyd and a bunch of other stuff.
Whereas Dustin Bros was kind of the opposite.
So I think it's been a shock for some people that just didn't do enough vetting for that speaker race.
Well, I think it's also partly the case that sometimes I think, you know, right of center, we're too hasty to declare people to be rhinoceroses as if to say that they are Republicans in name only.
You may as well join the Democratic Party.
We don't realize that no, these guys actually are right of center and they do have in general a conservative agenda.
If you don't think that they're right enough, okay, we'll field a candidate to oppose them.
But somehow the idea that these are Democrats in disguise, I think doesn't really work.
And Dustin Burrows is proving that to be exactly the case.
Now let's talk about these Democrats.
What is their strategy?
I mean, I assume that they realize we can't like go hang out in Chicago and New York like for a year, right?
So isn't this just a short term delaying tactic?
Is it just a performance artistry for the media?
Is it just to go get a free trip on a private jet, go hang out with obviously Pritzky?ker over in Chicago is not missing any meals, so maybe there's some good Chicago deep dish pizza to have.
What's going on here?
What are they trying to accomplish?
Yeah, it's all of those things, right?
So this is the third time that Democrats in Texas have walked out since 2003, and their past efforts have failed, right?
In 2003, we did have redistricting and they walked out for that.
We passed that anyway.
In 2021, Republicans pushed for stronger voter ID requirements.
They took off, they came back, we passed that anyway.
And this is probably going to happen here again, right?
A lot of this is posturing and not just from the Democrats, but also a little bit from the Republicans, right?
So the Democrats have taken off.
For them, this is a little mini trip.
This is some fundraising efforts, right?
It gets them the needed cash injection that they need, especially being in Texas, where it's very hard to win as a Democrat in many areas.
It's funny, they've taken it, they've taken off and they've got the backing of Pritzker.
And I was laughing because some Democrats have complained that billionaires are the problem, but then they go off with Pritzker, who's a multi-billionaire.
And it's just the hypocrisy is kind of funny.
But yeah, and then now you got Governor Greg Abbott, who has said that he's going to arrest these people and you know they need he's going to vacate their seats there's there's two problems with that one you can't extradite anybody you the texas dps and the police and and the national guard or texas national guard or texas guard can't work outside of the state.
So there's little chance that they're going to go out and grab these, these Democrats and bring them back in.
So that's not happening.
As far as vacating their seat, there has to be a court process involved and it happens in their home county.
So if you can imagine if you're a Democrat and you win your Democrat county and then you're getting tried in your Democrat county to have you to be removed, what's the chances of that actually happening?
Almost none.
So a lot of this is postureuring by both sides and it just makes a really great fundraising opportunity.
Pretty interesting.
Now, I thought it was you mentioned it's amusing that they are going flying into the arms of a billionaire namely Pritzker, but isn't it amusing on a second count?
And that is that Illinois is one of the most gerrymandered states in the country, right?
And so the Democrats have been doing all this, and so when they flex their muscles these days and go, well, you know, if you guys redistrict, you know, we're going to start doing it too.
I'm thinking you've already redistricted Maryland, you've already redistricted Illinois.
Look at the very peculiar shaped districts you've carved out there.
And you have huge swats of rural Illinois, you know, just thousands and thousands of, I mean, just a vast stretch of territory.
And yet all that space has pretty much like one representative because they figured out how to draw the line to kind of get all the red people into one county so they can take all the other seats.
So the Democrats, it seems, have been at this game for a while.
They're really good at it.
And I think what you're saying is Republicans are finally kind of matching them, matching them, their wits.
Absolutely.
And I'm a Chicago native.
So I came to Texas back in 04, but I'm originally from Chicago and still have family there.
And you're right, it's so gerrymandered.
You can be in one side of the street, you cross the street and you're in a completely different district.
And then you cross the street again, you're in another district.
It's absolutely absurd and hilarious, like you said, that they're complaining about gerrymandering and then they took off to the most gerrymandered state.
And, you know, Newsom, Governor Newsom in California has announced that they're going to retaliate by doing redistricting themselves.
And what a lot of people don't know is, you know, California has created an independent, years ago created an independent redistricting system.
And that is completely separate from the Democrat leaders, right?
So in order for Newsom to act on this threat, they need to actually hold a special election that would require voter approval to temporarily modify California's independent redistricting system.
And just to hold that election is going to cost them 200 million dollars, and will they spend it?
I think they'd be willing to, because they're willing to throw the money away on any sort of garbage, but whether it'll actually happen or not is up for debate.
And isn't it also true because the other noises are coming out of Kathy Hochul in New York, and she's like, well, you know, we're going to take action in New York.
But I understand that there are obstacles in New York for them to do the same thing.
In other words, I think what you're pointing to is a number of these democratic states have created these independent commissions.
They've done it as if to say, well, listen, we're a blue state, but we're not trying to control the process.
We have this objective commission, even though they often nominate people to those commissions.
But the commissions, such as they are, do act as a bit of a restraint on people like Hochul and Newsom, so that they might threaten to do things.
But I think what you're saying is it's not all that easy for them to pull it off.
It's not.
And, you know, winners make the history, right?
And Republicans have performed very well recently.
President Donald Trump has basically requested it.
He wants these five state seats specifically in Texas, and he's going to get them.
Texans want it, right?
If you were to go around and pull the state, Texas majority want more Republicans in office.
You know, we talk a lot specifically in Texas.
We talk a lot about the fear of people coming into our state and turning the state blue.
Actually, stats show that is to be quite the opposite, especially during the Beto versus Ted Cruz race.
Stats found or polling found that Texas natives voted overwhelmingly for Beto versus Texas, kind of like Texas immigrants, people coming here from other states.
So what we're starting to see is I think a lot of these moderate right or even Republicans in leftist states are moving to right wing states such as Texas.
They're realizing what they've got here and they're voting properly and becoming maybe even stronger conservatives.
I mean, that's very interesting, isn't it?
Because it seems to me like if a high-tech company moves from San Francisco and forces its employees to move with it, then it's quite possible you're going to get some Dem Democrats, you're going to get some Progressives, because it's not their choice to move.
They're moving because the job kind of relocated.
But on the other hand, if you got people who freely go, hey, listen, I even though I like the sunshine and I like the beach, I'm going to leave California for Texas, who's going to be the kind of people who are thinking that?
It's going to be people who go, I like the idea that there's no state income tax, I like the idea that everything is much better run in Texas from the DMV to everything else.
And so those are going to be right leaning conservatives for the most part.
And not to mention the fact that aren't we seeing a rightward drift in the southern Hispanic part of Texas?
Texas, the fears that Texas was going to go blue because of the emerging Hispanic majority of Texas, that has proven to be not true.
Right.
You know, and it's it's very funny you say that because Democrats have cited this as an argument against redistricting.
They're stating that these, uh, these new districts, uh, minimize the voices of blacks and Hispanics, but polling is showing that Hispanics are trending very far towards Trump.
And so the Democrats are losing that minority base.
They're losing that Democratic, that Hispanic voting base that they've largely abused, right?
And what we're finding is that Hispanics that are allowed to vote, legal Hispanics generally don't like illegal immigration.
In fact, I'm a Hispanic myself.
The Hispanics I've talked to are more overwhelmingly against illegal immigration than even white Republicans or white conservatives.
They they they they they attach that as somebody who's taking advantage of the system when they themselves have either followed the rules or have done immigration properly.
You know, we are we're seeing with Trump this really I think it's remarkable to watch, right?
You've got this white guy, you've got a billionaire in his late seventy years and he connects with working class Hispanics who.
uh, who are from a different world than Trump completely.
Um, what is it about Trump that you think, um, resonates so well with those people, particularly Hispanic men?
Yeah, there's a there's a term called machismo in Spanish and it basically it's like this almost like alpha male kind of aggressive macho man attitude and Trump has that right.
And I think Hispanic men especially can kind of relate with that.
They like a guy who's tough, who follows up on what he says, who doesn't take any kind of trash talking and will throw it back very easily and Trump signifies that and right.
And, and, you know, yeah, yeah., Trump's a billionaire, but I don't think Hispanic men, and I'll speak for all of them, of course, but they don't look at that as something to be jealous of.
They look at that as something to aspire to, something the American dream, right?
To come here to follow the rules, create a family and acquire wealth.
And Trump kind of signifies that as well as his attitude.
And so, yeah, Democrats have really focused on just like the weird trans stuff and the body mutilation and the hormones and the, the just all sorts of nonsense.
And Hispanics look at all that and they're just grossed out and they don't want to be associated with it anymore.
You're saying that the Hispanics don't think that David Hogg and Tim Walls and Eric Swalwell have the you don't think they're not seen as alpha males, huh?
I think you look at your average Hispanic woman and she could probably bench press David Hogg.
So I think that's a problem for them.
Yeah.
Guys, I've been talking to Tony Ortiz, founder and publisher of Current Revolt.
The website is currentrevolt dot com.
Follow him on X at Current Revolt.
Tony, very illuminating stuff.
Thank you very much for joining me.
Thanks for having me.
In my discussion of Ronald Reagan, how an ordinary man became an extraordinary leader, I'm going to focus on Gorbachev and how Gorbachev after the end of the Cold War fashioned an image of himself as a liberal, as a kind of a progressive, as a western style democrat.
But we need to go back and look at Gorbachev's words and actions before the fall of the Soviet Union to see if any of this is even true.
And it turns out it's not.
Gorbachev started out by saying that the Soviet economy needed a boost because people were not working hard enough, they were drinking too.
much vodka.
They lacked a work ethic.
They were doing too much of their trade on the black market.
So Gorbachev didn't understand that the reason they were doing all this is because of the inherent features of the Soviet system, no incentive to work, no way to keep the fruit of your labor, and so people resort to the black market.
They don't have incentives, so they don't work that hard.
The black market was actually the closest thing to free enterprise in the Soviet Union and vodka.
Well, let's just say it made life a little more bearable under communism.
But yet Gorbachev kept talking about, quote, greater discipline and greater order and we need to demand more from everyone.
And he also wanted more centralization of power.
Now, after a little while, Gorbachev realized I'm doing these things, but nothing is really working.
I'm not seeing any change.
And so Gorbachev went through a period you can almost track this in his statements of moral and intellectual confusion.
He started saying things that made no sense, similar, by the way, to what some politicians say in this country, give you a couple of his quotes, everyone has got to restructure things.
But Gorbachev didn't know who's the everyone and restructure what and how.
And then another favorite line from Gorbachev, everyone has got to develop a new way of thinking and acting.
Again, this has a certain sort of idiot quality to it because Gorbachev didn't know what he was saying.
He just knew what I'm trying isn't working.
We need something kind of radically different, but he was very unclear what.
Even Gorbachev, as I say, didn't understand what he meant.
He wanted, of course, greater efficiency.
And so what he would do is he'd say, let's give the local farms more autonomy.
This was actually a good thing.
But at the same time, he's like, there's no political accountability.
So let's strengthen the central committee and its power to oversee things that are happening locally.
So this is just contradictory behavior by Gorbachev.
Economically, he does this, he does decentralization, but then politically, he's doing centralization.
Now, we don't really want to be too hard on Gorbachev because this was a system, I think, in complete disrepair and complete breakdown.
So it's not easy to know how to fix it.
And as I will argue soon, there is no way to fix it.
If you have a system that is inherently dysfunctional, the only thing you can do is to abolish it.
Fixing it doesn't really work because all you do is end up adding features to it.
It's kind of like saying, all right, well, you know, my car isn't running.
It's fundamentally not, doesn't have a workable system, workable engine.
So I'm going to put on a new muffler.
I'm going to give it a new paint job.
I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that.
No, the car is basically a lemon.
It's junk.
It needs to be put into the junkyard and you need a new car.
That's what Gorbachev ultimately had to come to realize, but it wasn't until the whole system had already collapsed.
Gorbachev was very clear at the beginning that his goal was not to destroy the Soviet system at all, it was to save it.
Gorbachev in a weird way was a communist true believer.
And in this respect, we can contrast Gorbachev with some of the other Soviet leaders.
We think the opposite, right?
We think the other Soviet leaders were true believers and Gorbachev was the reformer.
He didn't really believe all that stuff.
I would argue that the truth is the opposite.
The other Soviet leaders were cynics.
They realize our system doesn't work.
All we are here for is to loot the country.
And so the country doesn't make much grain, but whatever it makes, we can take.
It doesn't make too many good cars, but whenever it does, we can use it.
It's for us.
We, the ruling class, have privileges nobody else does.
So they were cynics.
Gorbachev was like, No, I want to prove that Leninist systems and policies do work.
We can make them work.
And Gorbachev went to the Soviet military and he basically said, Listen, I know you people are disenchanted, I know you're frustrated.
But I'm doing economic reforms that will make the country boom, and then there will be more money, there will be more resources for the military.
So Gorbachev was basing his promises of military success on economic success.
He had no intention, I repeat, of presiding over the destruction of the Soviet Empire.
And by the way, all of this made Gorbachev immensely popular in the Western media.
Had Gorbachev actually said I'm destroying the Soviet Union, he would not be so popular.
But as you know, the left likes people who are socialist, who are trying to create a socialism that works.
Gorbachev, in a sense, was a little further to the left than they were themselves.
And so they warmed to Gorbachev.
They liked Gorbachev much better than Reagan.
And so, according to the columnist Mary McGrory of the Washington Post, Gorbachev had a blueprint for saving the planet.
She called it cosmic stuff.
Author Gail Sheehy of the New Yorker, she says Gorbachev has this quote luminous presence.
He has a talent for quote reaching out to people of all levels.
In nineteen ninety, Time Magazine proclaimed Gorbachev a quote political genius who was highly popular with the Soviet people.
They compared him to Franklin Roosevelt.
And essentially what they were saying is that just as Roosevelt introduced the welfare state to save capitalism, Gorbachev was introducing his reforms to save socialism.
So in my book on Reagan, I call these gorbasms.
They're like they're so embarrassing because they show that Gorbachev was the kind of leader that Western intellectuals admire.
Almost everything they said about Gorbachev was completely false.
He's very popular among the Soviet people.
Well, later Gorbachev ran for election against Yeltsin and some of the other candidates.
and his vote total kind of came in at around one percent.
He was extremely unpopular with the Soviet people, but of course the Western liberal intellectuals neither knew nor cared what the Soviet people actually thought.
And as I say, Gorbachev was repeated the kind of cliches that liberals love.
We live in an increasingly complex world.
We are now globally interdependent.
The Cold War is over, but let's not argue about who won it.
You know, thunderous applause from the journalist quacks who listened to this kind of rhetoric.
Now, as it turned out, the vices that Gorbachev sought to eradicate from the system, from the Soviet system, all turned out to be the essential features of the system.
In communism, nobody works.
There's the old communist joke that you pretend to work and they pretend to pay you, and that's kind of how the whole system goes along.
And Gorbachev tried to fix that without success.
Gorbachev also, I think, underestimated that liberty, even when suppressed over a long period of time, is pretty contagious.
So Eastern Europe, for example, now Eastern Europe, some people think, well, Eastern Europe was under communism since nineteen nineteen, no, Eastern Europe was under communism since nineteen forty five.
Why?
Because when the Soviet armies came into Berlin, the Nazi regime collapsed, the Soviets did not withdraw from the Eastern European territories that they had overrun.
They just never kind of went home.
So Eastern Europe, in a way, had a more recent experience of communism, still pretty long.
forty or fifty years and I would argue that in some ways the communist stain on the Eastern European psyche has not even to now fully dissipated.
But nevertheless, the Russians suffered under communism for seventy years, the Eastern Europeans for something more like forty two to fifty years.
But Gorbachev had no comprehension of any of this.
And when Eastern Europe erupted, people were demanding freedom, they ultimately pulled down the Berlin Wall in nineteen eighty nine.
Gorbachev was just flummix.
He's like, What's going on?
He didn't get it.
If Reagan was the great communicator, Zbigniew Brzezinski, by the way, this was Mika Brzezinski's father, a much more impressive individual than Mika.
Zbigniew Brzezinski said that Gorbachev was quote the great miscalculator.
And his counterpart in America is not FDR, it's really more Jimmy Carter, the great bungler.
Gorbachev was like that, which is to say that Gorbachev was not entirely a bad guy, but he was a kind of a fool.
And it's so ironic, people kept saying Reagan's a fool, Gorbachev's a smart one.
The opposite is true.
Gorbachev was sort of the guy who was like he's like the guy in the old ever ready ad the batteries where the guy, the toy soldier kind of walks in the wall and keeps going.
That's Gorbachev.
That's not Reagan.
And ultimately what the Gorbachev experience proved is that the only way to reform communism is to kill it.
The only way to fix it is to destroy it.
The only way to survive it is in the end to get beyond it.
And so conservatives in the West had been had been saying this for a long time.
They were saying that communism, let's go back to Jean Kirkpatrick and a theory about authoritarian and totalitarian powers, totalitarian powers cannot be fixed.
They don't remedy themselves.
They are immutable, they are irreversible, and the only way for a communist society to be changed really is for it to be shut down.
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