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Aug. 6, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
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HOW IT HAPPENED Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1141
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Coming up, I'll give you two key points to remember about the Russia collusion hoax that make a great difference in what happens going forward.
I want to consider how Harvard, Columbia, and Dartmouth are operating very differently with regard to the Trump administration and its policies on DEI and anti-Semitism.
Rahim Kassam, editor of the National Pulse, joins me.
We're going to talk about how the DOJ should proceed in the cases against Brennan, Comey, Clapper, Hillary, and Obama.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Music by Ben Thede.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
I'm going to talk about two topics in this opening segment: the issue of redistricting, which I talked some about yesterday, and also the topic of Russia collusion.
There's interesting developments on both fronts.
So let's begin with redistricting.
Suddenly, this issue, which is a Texas issue, the Texas legislature getting ready to pass redistricting.
And the redistricting would draw new districts in Texas and in some ways knock out some Democrats by creating reddish or red-leaning districts.
Now, Republicans normally could not pull this off.
If the Republicans tried to do this 10 years ago, it wouldn't really work.
But why does it work now?
What's different?
What is the purpose of doing it midstream?
Well, the purpose is that you have Hispanic parts of Texas that were deep blue that are now not so blue, and in some cases, in the middle, pinkish, and in other cases, they have moved red.
So now that you have the red and the pink and the blue, there's plenty of room for Republicans with a creative bent of mind and a little red pen to be able to draw these districts in a manner that is favorable or advantageous to the GOP.
Now, the Democrats are responding to this not only in Texas, but all around the country.
And they are acting as if gerrymandering has never existed until now.
Texas is starting something really awful, and they're going to do it too.
They're going to finish the fight that the Republicans started.
And I want to show you why this is an utterly idle threat, and it is not something that we should pay any attention to.
Let's start with the governor of Massachusetts, Maura Healy.
I saw this morning a press conference, and she basically goes: if the Republicans keep this up, Governor Abbott, Ken Paxton, I am going to make sure that we do redistricting in Massachusetts.
And so I was like, redistricting in Massachusetts, I cannot, off the top of my head, name a single Massachusetts Republican congressman.
What are you going to redistrict about?
And so I went into Grok, AI, and sure enough, I discovered that there are no Republican congressmen in Massachusetts.
Not only that, the last two Republicans who were elected in Massachusetts in the House were both elected in 1992.
So it's been 30 years since any Republican had office in Massachusetts.
So my message to Governor Healy, go ahead and redistrict.
The Republican presence in Massachusetts is going to go from zero to, well, zero, unless you can figure out a way to take it to negative three, but you can't.
The redistricting is something that Democrats have been doing for a long time.
Trump himself said when he was asked, Aren't you worried the Democrats will do it?
He goes, They'll do it anyway.
They have done it long before we started.
That's the spirit play hardball.
Here are some blue states that have zero Republican House seats: Massachusetts, zero.
Rhode Island, zero.
Vermont, zero.
New Hampshire, zero.
Hawaii, zero.
New Mexico, zero.
Connecticut, zero.
Delaware, zero.
Here are three states, blue states, with only one GOP seat: Maryland, Oregon, Maine.
Now, is this because there are no Republicans or virtually no Republicans in these states?
Not at all.
It's because of gerrymandering done by the Democrats.
They have ensured that their districts are structured in such a way, drawn in such a way, that they always sustain a decent majority of blue voters.
And that's why Republicans get little or nothing out of those states.
Even in so-called moderate states that are controlled by the Democrats, Colorado, Minnesota, Illinois, Virginia, New Jersey, where you have a lot of Republican voters, but those Republican voters are vastly underrepresented in the Congress.
Why?
Gerrymandering.
So it's now time for the Republicans to respond, not just in Texas, but in Ohio, in Florida, in a lot of other places, certainly a number of the southern states.
And what this will really do is make the country more representative in the aggregate.
Because when Democrats do it and Republicans don't, there's a lopsidedness.
The reason the Democrats are screaming is not because Republicans are doing it, but because Republicans are doing it too.
They want Republicans to behave like the old kind of cheerful losers, you know, the kind of Mitt Romney, who seemed almost more excited that Obama won than he did, extended a kind of overenthusiastic congratulations, happy to attend Obama's inauguration.
He was a good loser.
And so the Republicans, by and large, always are popular with Democrats when they prove to be major losers.
McCain was very popular with the Democrats.
Notice how the Obamas and Clinton are very happy to extend an olive branch to George W. Bush, but they won't do it to Trump because Trump doesn't play their game.
Now, happily, Governor Abbott in Texas is playing tough.
He's ordered that these Democrats be arrested.
He wants them investigated for fines and bribery.
He's talking about the fact he's made a petition in the Supreme Court of Texas for them to lose their seats.
And two of the Texas House Democrats, this is Philip Cortez and Eddie Morales, they decided, well, we've worked too hard to get these seats.
We're not going to take any chances.
They're back in Texas.
So already the runaways are starting to turn around.
They're beginning to realize that they can't run forever, and so they might as well run back, which is, by the way, what they did twice before when they attempted the same tactic.
All right.
Let me talk about RussiaGate.
There are two things I want to tell you.
One is that the Democrats are now saying, you hear this in CNN, you hear this in the media, Democratic officials, they're saying, we never, we never accused Trump of colluding with Russia.
We merely said that Russia was interfering in our election.
That's all we said.
Now, this is flatly false.
And there are multiple supercuts of clips on CNN, on MSNBC, featuring all the big names of the Democratic Party accusing Trump of collusion.
But I want to focus here on something that John Brennan said in August of 2018.
This is an op-ed of the New York Times.
You can look it up yourself, because this is the kind of thing that's going to get this guy indicted.
And of course, if John Brennan goes around saying, now, well, I never said that Trump was engaged in Russia collusion.
Well, let's look at the receipts.
Here's John Brennan.
I'm quoting him.
Mr. Trump's claims of no collusion are, in a word, hogwash.
The only questions that remain are whether the collusion that took place constituted criminally liable conspiracy, whether obstruction of justice occurred to cover up any collusion or conspiracy, and how many members of Trump Incorporated attempted to defraud the government by laundering and concealing the movement of money into their pockets.
So here's Brennan.
He's saying, did Trump collude with Russia?
Yes.
And so did Trump's team, Trump's people.
Now, the only question is how much, how far, what laws they broke, but they did in fact collude with Russia.
And we know that at the time that John Brennan said this, not only was there no evidence for it, but Brennan himself and others, including Obama, were deliberately peddling false evidence.
A second point I want to make is that it is downright surreal to see Democrats warning against the dangers of prosecuting your political opponents.
Here is an article today from Axios.
I'm going to just read the headline: A.G. Pambondi's decision to order a grand jury investigation into Obama-era intelligence officials is a watershed moment in the history of MAGA retribution after 10 years of demanding the arrest of Trump's political enemies.
Wow.
Just to be able to write that kind of headline without any self-consciousness.
I mean, the same people who have spent eight years trying to imprison Trump, this is their main political strategy.
It started out with Russia Gate, then with multiple, four separate bogus prosecutions in 2023.
So even though they did this blatantly, they've got a mugshot to prove it.
90-plus criminal charges.
These same people are now saying, oh, wow, it's MAGA retribution.
And if you can believe it, Trump is trying to go after his political enemies.
Wow.
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The Trump administration is engaged in a kind of scorched earth battle with elite universities, notably the colleges and universities of the Ivy League.
Now, we've heard a fair amount about Harvard.
We've heard some about Columbia.
And we've heard very little of or from my own alma mater, namely Dartmouth.
Now, that may seem to be the result of the Trump administration somehow singling out Harvard, singling out Columbia, but this is actually not the case.
I want to show that Harvard, Columbia, and Dartmouth have all responded to the Trump administration in really completely different ways.
The Harvard response has been the most belligerent.
And admittedly, the Trump administration has assaulted Harvard politically, legally, on multiple fronts.
You violated the civil rights laws.
You're practicing racial discrimination.
You need to stop with all the trans nonsense in your sports teams.
You are also allowing and encouraging anti-Semitism.
You're making Jews feel unsafe.
We don't like the fact that you let in so many foreign students.
We don't know how many of them are jihadis and anti-Semites.
So Harvard is being clobbered every which way.
And Harvard has dug in and counter-sued the Trump administration in a kind of Democrat-favorable jurisdiction in Boston.
And so the Trump administration, which is likely to win this battle in the long run, has been increasing its cudgels and making demands of Harvard that are to some extent a little outrageous, but outrageous, I think, in a justified way.
They are a strong response to what Harvard is doing.
So in other words, they're not unduly harsh.
They're being duly harsh with Harvard.
And apparently, Harvard has, behind the scenes, been negotiating a kind of ransom payment, if I can use that term, of $500 million to get Trump to back off.
And that negotiation is ongoing.
It hasn't really been concluded.
But right in the middle of it, the Harvard people, the Harvard negotiators, were kind of stunned to see that Columbia made a $50 million deal with the Trump administration.
We'll invest $50 million into the U.S. government or will repay the U.S. government $50 million, but that will then come with the restoration of our federal grants and the government.
Now, there are many other conditions in the Columbia deal, but $50 million is a long way from $500 million.
And so the Harvard people are like, well, why us?
Why are we being made to pay $500 million?
And the answer is because you're scum, because you have been belligerently digging in.
You are the worst of the worst.
You have used your prestige in a bad way.
You have discriminated in blatant and shocking ways against white males.
And you discriminate politically against Christians on the campus.
So you deserve the pulverizing that you're getting.
And you might be able to get out of it, but it's going to cost you.
Now, Columbia, by contrast, has shown a willingness to deal with the Trump people.
They haven't counter-sued.
They haven't tried to win some short-term legal battles.
They haven't gone to create a sort of international or national coalition of universities against Trump, as Harvard has.
And yet, the Columbia deal is fairly humiliating for Columbia.
In fact, a lot of people on the left are very unhappy that just like so many law firms, just like some media companies that have paid big fat settlements to Trump, they were not happy that Columbia gave in.
But what about Dartmouth?
You haven't heard anything about settlements.
You haven't heard about any cancellations of funding.
And the answer is that Dartmouth has actually been reforming itself.
It's probably not been reforming itself enough, but it's reforming itself nevertheless.
And certainly, by the standards of the Ivy League, Dartmouth is doing the most to address these concerns of the Trump administration.
Let me give you a couple of case points.
One, 600 academic institutions signed a letter basically saying the Trump administration is persecuting Harvard.
It needs to stop.
They stand with Harvard.
Most of the Ivy League universities signed.
Dartmouth did not sign.
Sean Bailock, who is the female president of Dartmouth, has decided we're not going to be joining the herd.
We're going to be addressing these issues.
And so, now, by the way, Sean Bailock is not a sociologist.
She's not a women's studies professor.
Had she come out of that milieu, she probably would be a left-wing activist.
She's not.
She's a cognitive scientist, a neuroscientist.
So coming out of the sciences, her approach is far more pragmatic.
And so what Dartmouth is doing is scaling out its DEI, cutting out its affirmative action.
In fact, they've hired apparently the former top lawyer at the Republican National Committee to represent Dartmouth in its dealings with the Trump administration.
So this is just nothing more than a very smart recognition, which is, hey, listen, we want to deal on a friendly basis with the Trump administration.
Let's pick a Trump-friendly guy to do that.
Now, I don't want to for one moment suggest that Dartmouth's problems are over.
The college is radically lopsided.
The degree of outspoken leftists to outspoken conservatives is going to be something like 97 to 3.
So this is a very unhealthy situation.
And it actually doesn't produce academic debate.
It doesn't produce a true diversity of perspectives.
It doesn't produce students who are fully ready to jump into a society in which there are many more points of view than are adequately represented at Dartmouth.
So I wouldn't mind a certain degree of bludgeoning, even of Dartmouth, to say, listen, don't be too complacent.
There's a lot that you two need to fix.
But that being said, we now have three different models of dealing with the Trump administration: Harvard, which represents kind of extreme aggression.
And I think because of that, it's going to meet with extreme punishment.
Then you have Columbia, which tried to do moderate aggression, but quickly decided that it was the wiser course of action to enter into a negotiated settlement.
The negotiated settlement is perhaps not as expensive as Columbia might have feared, but it's pretty humiliating for Colombia.
To give you a single example, the Trump administration is going to have a kind of ombudsman or monitor that is going to be overseeing Colombia's activities in terms of free speech, in terms of anti-Semitism, in terms of the safety of Jewish students on the campus.
So, something that colleges would never have agreed to, never even considered.
Remember, these are colleges, these are not state universities.
It's one thing if the legislature of Ohio said we want to appoint an ombudsman to be looking over what's going on at Ohio State.
They have every right to do that.
They are the primary funders of Ohio State.
But colleges like Harvard and Yale and Columbia and Dartmouth are private universities.
So, to give the government sort of a key to your room to be able to come in and look and see what you're doing and make sure that you're in conformity with the laws, this is an extraordinary.
I've never heard of this kind of degree of federal oversight.
And here, the Trump administration doesn't have to go defend it in front of a court.
Why?
Because Columbia has agreed to it.
Columbia said, Come on in, here's a key, use it wisely.
And so, what we have is a détente, a meeting of the minds between the Trump administration and Columbia, at least for now.
Treaties sometimes can kind of fall apart.
But the Columbia approach, as I say, is moderate resistance followed by negotiated settlement.
And then you have the Dartmouth approach, which is essentially try not to get in the sniper sights of the Trump administration.
Try to be on your best behavior.
And even if you're doing some things that are bad, do them sort of under the table.
Hope that the Trump administration doesn't notice.
Of course, I hope that the Trump administration does notice.
And our friend Harmee Dillon, who is a Dartmouth grad, is now in charge.
She's the assistant attorney general in charge of civil rights.
I'm sure she is keeping at least one eye fixed on her alma mater.
So Dartmouth might be able to get away with some stuff, but it's not going to be able to get away with a whole lot.
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Guys, it's always a pleasure to welcome back to the podcast Raheem Kassam.
He is editor-in-chief at the National Pulse, former editor of Breitbart News, London Bureau, former chief advisor to the British politician Nigel Farage.
The website is thenationalpulse.com.
You can follow Raheem on X at RahimKassam.
Raheem, thanks for joining me.
As always, let's talk about this redistricting scandal.
There is something inherently comic about the Democrats acting as if we have operated in a zone of complete political neutrality right up to now.
And suddenly Texas has decided to break all the rules and shatter the family China and engage in this shocking practice of redistricting.
And the Democrats go, hey, hey, hey, if you do it, you better watch out because we might start doing it as well.
What do you make of this very bizarre spectacle?
Yeah, thank you for having me back, Dinesh.
I appreciate it.
One of the things I do, I run a website called The National Policy, very kind to mention.
And one of the things I do to make sure that we actually do take the pulse of the nation is I leave Washington, D.C. as often as I can.
And I just had an opportunity to do it this last weekend on a trip where I like to sort of start in a city and go through kind of more rural areas, talk to people, understand what's going on, what are their concerns.
And one of the things that really stood out to me amongst all of this, especially when we talk about this redistricting kerfuffle, is that everybody knows, everybody is cognizant, nobody is unaware of the fact that Republicans and Democrats alike have been going back and forth on this stuff for as long as anybody can remember.
But what sticks in the craw for most people is that the Democrats come to the table with this indignation that somehow makes them seem like victims and heroes all at the same time, where in reality, what people have been living with in their local communities,
not just in terms of congressional districts, but all over the place in terms of the political settlement, the democratic settlement that they're expected to deal with in day-to-day lives, is nothing close to the form of representation that they consider appropriate or accurate for their communities.
And this is taking place all over the country.
It's actually a really good argument to be having right now because, you know, in amongst whatever you want to think of, the Epstein saga and all of these other things that are going on in the background, I talk to left-wing friends of mine and they're scratching their heads and going, how do we keep snatching, you know, victory from the jaws of defeat or defeat from the jaws of victory, rather?
How do we take these issues and make them losing issues?
And you see it time and time again across the board.
And that speaks to not just being, you know, quote-unquote out of touch, which is the most popular, I think, political parlance for something like that, but it speaks to a lack of leadership.
It speaks to a lack of moral purpose.
It speaks to a lack of a party that is actually coalescing around an issue and identity platform.
And I think that, you know, that is the undergirding of what you're seeing right now.
The Democrat Party somehow seems to be moving further and further away from what the American people are telling them and moving closer and closer to arguments and issues that actually nobody believes them on, not one scintilla.
Do you think, Rahim, that the reason for that is that the Democrats have been spoiled over the past several decades?
They have had what you could describe as a courtier press, right?
So they can adopt the most preposterous, outlandish positions that don't need substantiation, that are brazenly hypocritical.
And the media will relay them with a straight face.
They'll be invited on Face the Nation or Meet the Press.
They will never be asked to account for the hypocrisy.
And so as a result, they begin to believe their own nonsense, so to speak.
You or I could never survive that way because if we're out there on a campus, we're going to be challenged.
We operate in a largely liberal milieu.
But for them, I wonder if they have in some ways come to believe their own lies because they just never get called on them.
Yeah, look, I mean, I'm sure the same is true for you.
I'm challenged every day.
I'm challenged when I walk through A major transport hub.
I'm challenged when I walk down the street.
I have protesters showing up outside my restaurant now.
You know, we are not living in this bubble where we get to take up positions that are even remotely, remotely as ludicrous as some of the things that the Democrats go on television and say.
And yes, a lot of that is because of the pliant media class that they've had.
And I will add, by the way, this as well, on top of that, it's funny during the run-up to the last election, you had President Trump going out there and making his case in front of these massive podcast audiences.
But those podcast hosts today are not as pliant as, say, the New York Times is towards the left.
They are not as exploring fealty to President Trump as the liberal media based in New York and Washington, D.C. have done for the left and for the globalist cause, really, for decades.
It's interesting, especially when you consider this conversation that's going on around Howard Stern and his contract renewal at the moment.
And it reminded me of Howard Stern's interview with Joe Biden during the last campaign, where Biden sat in that chair basically silent for the entire interview.
Well, Howard Stern read out what was purportedly a list of his accomplishments to him, with Biden just sort of mumbling, yeah, yeah, yeah, we did that, yeah, yeah.
And now, of course, nobody wants to watch.
I mean, Howard Stern was getting 25 million daily viewers at one point.
I think he's getting about 125,000 now.
Nobody wants to watch this.
People are sick and tired of having their intelligence insulted.
But more than anything, I think they're sick and tired of having their republic besmirched by that behavior.
That is on the shoulders and the hands of the media class.
You know, I had the comedian Tim Young on the show, I guess last week it was.
We were talking about Colbert, and I said, you know, it's very difficult for me to listen to this guy.
He's so unfunny.
And Tim Young goes, you know, he used to be funny.
He used to be really good.
And he had a shtick and he had a caricature, but he delivered it pretty well.
And then he got this big late night show and he metamorphosed into a completely different creature.
And the thing that I find really odd, whether it's Howard Stern or Colbert or some of these other guys who are now finding themselves on the street, that they, it's not that they lack talent.
It's not even that they aren't smart, but they, is it that they just don't realize that they're entering into a bubble?
They want the cultural accolades of being in the bubble and they chase their own audience away.
Is that what's happening?
Yeah, look, I think we both know that to have a national television show like that, there are always compromises that you need to make with the editorial standards at whatever organization that you're working for, with the people that are working around.
Suddenly your team goes from, you know, when you're upstart, your team goes from, well, you, to maybe you and a buddy, to maybe you and five buddies.
And then suddenly you've got 30 around you, writers, editors, producers, staff, runners, you name it.
And then suddenly all of this other stuff comes into play.
And after a while, I don't mean to sound sympathetic towards them, but I suppose I am in this regard.
After a while, you can't keep fighting that machine that is constantly telling you to support the advertising dollar, to support the CEO's dollar of where they've been putting their money and where they've been putting their political fealty for years and years.
And that's what's happened to these guys.
I'm sure Stephen Colbert, but I'm certain of it.
Behind closed doors, I'm sure Stephen Colbert knows still how to write a joke.
I'm sure Stephen Colbert still laughs at crude, non-politically correct humor behind closed doors, perhaps behind two or three closed doors.
But for these people, they made their deal with the devil.
They sowed the wind.
They're now reaping the whirlwind.
And it's not just in a situation where we had 10, 15 years ago, where you can bring in another late night host or whatever.
No, the whole game has changed.
Nobody's watching those channels anymore.
I can't think of a single person in my life who, at the end of the day, they come home from work and they turn the television on and plonk themselves in front of the TV and go, well, I can't wait to watch tonight's Corporate news programming.
I don't know that anybody truly feels that way anymore.
Some people are still setting their habits for sure, but I don't think anybody now is excited about the prospect of consuming that kind of media.
Rahim, coming back to the redistricting issue, and I also want to make a bit of a segue to the issue of Russia collusion, the other big issue that's in the news.
But it looks to me like we are seeing the beginnings of a much less invertebrate Republican Party.
A good example of that would be: well, look, I mean, this redistricting in Texas, the Texas politicians could have done this before.
They're doing it now.
Why?
Partly because they want to be in sync with Trump, partly because Trump is prodding them to do it.
But Dustin Burroughs, who's the head of the Texas House, by and large, got his job with a lot of Democratic votes.
So he's not, he's considered to be kind of on the moderate, if not rhino side of the Republican Party, and yet he is spearheading this Texas redistricting.
I also see that Pam Bondi has gone perhaps a little beyond my expectations.
It looks like she's ready to convene a grand jury, and convening a grand jury, as you know, almost certainly means indictments.
Indictments for who?
We don't know yet, but quite likely a Brennan or a Clapper or a Comey.
It would be, it would more than make my day if it included Hillary or Obama.
But at this point, I doubt those names would be on the table.
But even the fact that we are at this point is further down the road than we've been so far.
Does this suggest that the Republican Party, the GOP in general, is beginning to say, listen, if the Democrats have been playing hardball in this way, yeah, we're going to exact a little bit of retribution.
Retribution is another term for justice.
Look, I'm a populist, but I'm also a bit of a cynic, as many probably know.
I would love to say yes.
You know, clearly the GOP has grown up here.
I don't believe that to be the case.
I think this is what happens in a power vacuum is that these politicians see the ability to take on more power, to keep out their enemies for longer, and they will necessarily fill that gap.
I think what's happening in terms of the leadership that's going on, yes, of course, there is so much leadership coming from the White House and from President Trump.
But I think really the leadership is coming from the base up at the moment.
The number of years now that I've spoken to my friends in Texas, our members at the National Pulse in Texas, who go, I can't believe it.
I don't understand.
We have dominance in this state, but we're not doing the things we need to do.
We're certainly not doing it on the topic of Islam in Texas, as many people know and raise every single day.
We're not doing it in terms of this, fixing the redistricting.
All of these things that have bubbled up actually from a grassroots level.
And actually, when the grassroots, when the MAGA base, because I don't think the MAGA base, for all that the good people here are in Washington, D.C. working in the Trump administration, I still don't think the MAGA base is in D.C. The MAGA base is all around the country.
The MAGA base is these people that I met this week, you know, Doug in Louisiana.
I would take, by the way, and I've met the president many times, I would take conversations with them every single day of the week over any single politician that I've ever met, perhaps every single politician I've ever met put together, because that is the basis on which change is made.
And that is the basis on which people keep their eyes on the prize the closest is in their communities, in their neighborhoods, and all of that filters upwards.
So yes, you know, the GOP base is certainly pushing the institutional Republican Party in the directions that it needs to go.
I'm just not sure yet that the politicians themselves have had certain changes of heart rather than realizing that, oh, you know, hey, this is how I hold onto my seat for another two, four, six years.
Now, one of the issues for the MAGA base, and it's, I hesitate to mention it a little bit because the issue of the police state, the issue, for example, of being under political prosecution, does not affect the ordinary Person, all that much, right?
It was the January 6th protesters who got corralled into that net.
Of course, there were pro-lifers who got hit under the FACE Act.
But still, if you look at the number of people, it's maybe a couple of thousand people, not a small number, to be sure, but nevertheless, small compared to the MAGA base as a whole.
And yet, it seems to me that this is a critical issue affecting us because even if not all of us have heard helicopters over our front lawn or had someone in armor and long guns come through the front door, the truth of it is it could happen to any of us.
I mean, it's happened to a degree, to a smaller degree to me.
It could happen to you.
I think you're well aware of that.
And so living in that atmosphere is not really living in a free country.
So that has got to be stopped.
How do you think it's going to be stopped if it is going to be stopped at all?
Yeah, look, I mean, I know for a fact that during the Biden years, I was on at least two subpoena lists.
Never actually heard very much of it.
But, you know, we live under those threats.
And I frankly would say that we live under those threats in order that the ordinary person really doesn't have to.
Because what happens if you strip away that level of protection, if you strip away the level of protection that President Trump has offered the base for so very long, right?
His mantra of, you know, they're not after me, they're after you.
I'm just standing in the way.
It's not just a clever political line.
It's true.
Here's the thing that requires reminding every day to people who kind of brush this stuff off: is that if your political representatives, if the people that you have democratically elected to send them to be your representatives, whether it is in your state capital,
whether it is at a hyper-local level, whether it is here in Washington, D.C., if they are easily persecuted, if they are criminalized, if the justice system can be weaponized against them, then there is almost no point in the franchise.
There is probably fewer people that would come out and vote in that scenario.
And it kind of collapses the country around it.
And this, honestly, we were so close.
People don't realize how close.
I know the left always goes, oh, we were so close to a coup on January 6th.
Nonsense.
We experienced effectively the nullification project of the first Trump administration.
And then we witnessed the persecution on the back of January 6th, the persecution of both and the execution, by the way.
Let's not forget the Ashley Babbitt, the people who were killed here in Washington, D.C., the execution and the persecution of ordinary MAGA voters around the country.
It happened because people objected to ballot drop boxes at a hyper-local level.
I don't need to tell you that.
You're the expert on it.
You saw exactly what happened there and exactly the sorts of people who kind of just, you know, some of these people had just got into politics, right?
They were like two, three years in the political world and they're objecting at their state level to this thing.
And suddenly they've got a knock on the door, you know, from guns up DHS agents or whatever they were saying, hey, you know, we've been sent to bring you in for some questions.
Okay, well, that is not the way a republic works.
It's not the way a democracy works.
It's not the way Western civilization works.
It's not even the way you would treat your, you should even treat your worst enemies, right?
Like we should be able, we are civilized enough to be able to come to an agreement over our differences.
My problem with this and your question is, again, here's the cynic in me.
I don't really think it stops.
We can do things to push back.
We can do things to show the other side what it feels like.
But I think there is a bloodlust amongst a certain leadership in the globalist political class, and that goes for here in Washington, D.C. It applies equally in London, in Brussels, and all around the world, that actually they're quite content to chip away at the foundations of Western civilization and its democratic, democratically elected governments.
If it only increases their chances of staying in power by 1% or 2%, they will take that bet.
So sure, some of them this time around, I'm sure, I hope, God, I hope, that some people will see a consequence for what happened during the Russia Hoax, certainly.
But I actually don't think, and it's not an if, right?
It's a when the left gets back in power, and that can be a Mamdani power in New York, it can be a presidential power here in D.C. I think they go right back to it.
I am afraid you're right.
And it's scary to think that this becomes the normalization of political combat when certainly many of us who lived through the Reagan years have always hoped that there would be a way back to a certain degree of civility.
And you're saying you might be waiting a long time.
Guys, I've been talking to Raheem Kassam, editor-in-chief at the National Pulse.
Follow him on X at Rahim Kassam, the website, the nationalpulse.com.
Rahim, as always, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you for having me.
The end of the Cold War was an historic event in the largest meaning of that term.
And it was significant not only because of its massive global implications, it essentially reset the whole board in terms of the foreign policy of countries.
It created new orientations, new optimism, in some ways, new problems.
Islamic radicalism kind of gained traction in the aftermath of the Cold War.
And of course, the opening epical event of the 21st century was, of course, 9-11.
But the end of the Cold War was also remarkable because it was unexpected.
Virtually no one except Reagan saw it coming.
Virtually no one predicted it except Reagan.
And so Reagan's prescience in being able to see this and not just see it in the sense of a prophet who will see events in the future but have nothing to do with their realization.
In Reagan's case, he not only saw it, he helped to bring it about.
In fact, he was a key architect of it.
But the presumed architect is another guy, Gorbachev.
And I've been emphasizing that Gorbachev wanted to save communism and not destroy it.
It was never Gorbachev's intention to implode or wreck the Soviet system.
Reagan, however, decided to do business with Gorbachev.
And even more than that, he personally grew to like the guy.
Now, many conservatives at the time were very disturbed by this, alarmed by it, to the point where they were not only sulky, but accusatory toward Reagan.
You're a fool.
You're a pawn.
You're being played.
And Reagan ignored them.
He pushed ahead, trusting his own instincts and his own judgment.
Now, what is it that Reagan saw in Gorbachev?
The first thing he saw is that Gorbachev was not a creature of the Stalin era.
Many of the early Soviet leaders had been young in the days of Stalin.
They had, in fact, had to, you may say, step over bodies or they had to wade through blood to get to their positions.
They were kind of murderous thugs underneath all that kind of diplomatic exterior.
But Gorbachev wasn't like that.
He had vacationed in Europe.
He knew a fair amount about the West.
He was cosmopolitan rather than provincial.
Not to say he was not a card-carrying communist, but there was a kind of sense of normalcy and humanity about them that you could not identify in his predecessors.
Margaret Thatcher noticed it first, and she said, I like Mr. Gorbachev.
They had a meeting in Checker's House in Britain in 1984.
And, you know, if this had said, if this had been some Neville Chamberlain figure, If this had been Macaron or even Mitterrand, the socialist prime minister of the time in France, then you might have dismissed it because they tend to have this sort of unnatural affection for socialists and communists.
But coming from a hawk, Margaret Thatcher, it carried some weight and it carried some weight with Reagan.
And Reagan, after meeting Gorbachev, basically shared Thatcher's assessment.
Caspar Weinberger, the defense secretary, did not like this.
And he said later that he challenged Reagan.
He told Reagan, wait a minute, he goes, why are you seemingly well disposed toward the Soviets under Gorbachev?
He says, didn't you call them an evil empire?
You can see here Weinberger kind of very shrewdly using Reagan's own words against Reagan.
And Reagan, somewhat shockingly, I'm sure shockingly to Weinberger, said, I was talking about another time, another era.
Wow.
So Reagan is suggesting here that the facts on the ground have changed.
The leadership of the Soviet Union is different and a different approach is called for.
Now, listen to the words of a group of leading conservatives in response to Reagan's change of direction or change of heart.
Reagan is, quote, ignorant and pathetic.
That's columnist Charles Krauthammer.
William F. Buckley.
To greet it, it being the Soviet Union, as if it were no longer evil, is on the order of changing our entire position toward Adolf Hitler.
That's William F. Buckley.
So notice embedded in here this idea that the Soviets cannot change in the same way that Hitler is always going to be Hitler.
George Will, quote, Reagan has accelerated the moral disarmament of the West by elevating wishful thinking to the status of political philosophy.
Paul Weirich of the Free Congress Foundation, conservative activist, quote, I told him, him being Reagan, he had totally changed his position.
I told him to go read his earliest speeches.
I told him nothing that he was saying made any sense.
So this is the conservative braying or squealing against Reagan and accusing him of forgetting what he himself knew, accusing him of, at the very least, a kind of radical inconsistency of approach.
Now, how do you defend Reagan against such a charge?
Part of it is to think about the nature of inconsistency itself.
For a statesman whose ultimate objectives are clear and who is moving to achieve them, then adapting yourself to situations as they develop sometimes makes it seem like you are being inconsistent, inconsistent in word and inconsistent in deed.
A good example of this, by the way, or a way to think about this historically, is the philosopher Edmund Burke, who was a vehement critic of the French Revolution and explained in his great book, Reflections on the Revolution in France, why revolutions are bad.
Revolutions lead to oceans of blood.
Revolutions are inherently kind of this kind of apocalyptic element and they try to create a new man and they end up producing nothing more than corpses.
And then Burke turns around and defends the American Revolution.
And again, there are people in England who accuse Burke of inconsistency.
Now, Winston Churchill, reflecting on this, makes the following observation.
He says, and I now quote him: A statesman in contact with the moving current of events and anxious to keep the ship on an even keel and steer a steady course may lean all his weight Now on one side and now on the other.
His arguments in each case, when contrasted, can be shown to be not only very different in character, but contradictory in spirit and opposite in direction.
And then lowering the hammer, Churchill says, continuing, we cannot call this inconsistency.
The only way a man can remain consistent amid changing circumstances is to change with them while preserving the same dominating purpose.
I've given myself the analogy of a ship.
You're trying to maintain a straight course, but guess what?
The ocean is pushing you to one side, and so you throw your weight on the other.
And then the ocean is pushing you to the other side, and you switch and throw your weight on the other side.
So are you being, quote, inconsistent?
Not at all.
You are responding in an apparently inconsistent way, but it's because the circumstances are changing.
You, in fact, are trying to make sure, and in fact, are making sure that the ship maintains, in fact, a forward and onward and straight course forward.
And so this is the point to remember about Reagan.
He understood that the circumstances were different.
His goals, which is Soviet rollback, liberation of Eastern Europe, ultimately the possible defeat of the Soviet Union itself, remain exactly the same.
But Reagan decides to make a bet, take a chance on Gorbachev.
And to the conservatives who kept saying, you know, don't do that.
Gorbachev is fooling you.
Reagan would say, well, what do you mean he's fooling me?
Are you saying that he doesn't have these personal qualities?
And they kept saying, oh, he's an actor.
And Reagan said, I think I'm a good judge of acting.
I don't think he's acting.
So here Reagan appeals to his own acting career.
And he goes, This is not a performance by Gorbachev.
I'm able to see past that.
And I'm able to get a grip, get a glimpse of the man himself.
So Reagan makes here a huge, a hugely important judgment.
And it turns out in retrospect to be the correct judgment because Gorbachev becomes, well, I suppose it's not a good analogy to say his like dance partner, but Gorbachev becomes the other side of the coin.
Gorbachev becomes the guy who will ultimately take the inside step of dismantling the Soviet regime, his own regime.
And Reagan will stand on the outside, encouraging him, supporting him, and egging him on.
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