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Aug. 11, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:00:22
FIXING THE CENSUS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1144
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Coming up, the Trump administration wants a new census, and I'll tell you why Democrats are outraged and fearful.
I'll spell out how Media Matters might have ensured its own demise.
And Jeffrey Tucker, president of the Brownstone Institute, joins me.
We're going to talk about his new book on how COVID provided the world's governing elites with a pretext for tyranny.
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The Trump administration has announced just today, this morning, that it is deploying federal troops to Washington, D.C. This is a combination that involves the National Guard,
and the idea is to take over D.C. and straighten the place out, make it safer, make it safe, make it a protected area for the people who live and work in D.C. Now, this is not the same as the federal government doing this to Chicago or LA or Denver, even though those are Democratic-run cities.
Those are very often in bad shape.
St. Louis, I believe, is the worst in terms of crime rates in the country, but Detroit is really bad.
Baltimore is really bad.
LA is pretty bad.
San Francisco is pretty bad.
And D.C. is pretty bad.
But what makes DC unique is that it is also the home of the federal government.
The federal buildings are where else in D.C. And so there is a direct federal interest here in maintaining law and order over and above the federal interest in securing the country in general.
Trump has the authority to do it.
And I think he wants to make an exhibition of how a city, a Democratic city, under Republican executive control can be completely different from what it is now.
Now, it's kind of a remarkable sight to see the Democrats screaming about this.
Their talking point is that the city has seen a drop in its crime rate.
And in fact, I'm looking at posts this morning from a whole bunch of leftist posters, Mika Irfan, Jessica Tarlov, Donna Brazil, Joe Walsh, Brian Krassenstein, and they all seem to be composed by the same guy, i.e., none of these people, or they seem to be slightly rewritten versions of some sort of memo that went out from the Democrats because they all talk about crime being at a, quote, 30-year low.
It's down from last year.
Now, these Democratic cities are such cesspools.
Murders are routine.
Very, you don't hear much about it largely because a lot of the crime is black on black crime and it's not treated really by the media as newsworthy at all.
Blacks are evidently expected to be killing each other.
Of course, if there's a single white on black crime, it has to be on the front page.
It's a racial incident.
It needs to be investigated.
The country has to come to a halt.
But crime is normalized in these cities.
So it doesn't really matter if the crime rate goes up or goes down a little bit.
The truth of it is these are very dangerous places to be in.
I lived in D.C. for about 11 years.
Well, no, around 14 years, actually, now that I do a little better count.
And the thing about DC is not just that there's a lot of crime in D.C., but you can be in a safe area in D.C. and you walk two blocks and it becomes dangerous.
So East Capitol Street, which is right around the Capitol, is pretty safe.
East Capitol and 2nd, safe.
Third, safe.
Fourth, a little bit less safe.
Fifth, sixth, and seventh, getting questionable.
Eighth, ninth, and tenth, already highly questionable.
You go further and you're basically in a kind of a war zone or you have to look over your shoulder as you walk and be ready to put your running shoes on just in case you need them.
So this is DC.
And in this respect, it's somewhat different from New York City, where there are large areas of Manhattan that are pretty safe.
It's only once you get into certain areas into the Bronx or into Queens or Brooklyn that things become more dubious.
DC is unsafe lots of places.
And in fact, you can just be walking home from a restaurant and you find yourself in an extremely unsafe zone.
So the Democrats seem to be saying, in effect, leave us alone.
We like our crime the way it is.
It's gone down.
We don't mind the current level of crime.
The Washington Post, which is very much on board with this line of thinking, did an article about this, but the article itself implodes when you pay attention or read carefully what is being said.
Here's a section of the article: quote, this is a safe city, says one resident, and this is my favorite part, speaking on the condition of anonymity over concerns of personal safety.
So here's a guy saying, you know what?
I think our city is pretty safe.
Okay, sir, can we quote you?
No, you can't.
I don't want you to use my name because I won't feel safe.
Somebody may use that to target me.
I might have a home invasion.
Someone may try to rob me because my name was in the Washington Post.
So what does that tell you?
Follow this guy's actions and not his words.
And his actions suggest a person who's living in fear.
All right.
Let me now talk about Trump's proposal for a new census.
The Democrats, again, are upset about this, and we know why they're upset.
They act like they're just trying to stick by the rules.
Hey, listen, censuses can be done every 10 years.
But the rules don't say that they have to be done every 10 years.
The rules merely say that you shouldn't go more than 10 years without having a census.
This means that you can do a census every year if you want.
You can do a census more often.
You just need to do it every 10 years.
And the reason that the Democrats like things the way they are is that in the last census, the census in fact admitted that it overcounted Democrats and it undercounted Republicans.
That's one problem.
And we have been, in a sense, the census goes, oops, we made a big mistake.
And this mistake could be significant.
It could be two or three congressional seats.
And in a country that's evenly divided, that makes a difference.
But here's the other point.
The census also counts legals and illegals together.
And it apportions House representation.
Now, Senate representation is unaffected because it's two seats for each state.
But house allocation or the number of house seats in a state like California depends on the population of California.
And when you're counting the legals and the illegals, California has something like a dozen seats more than it should have because of the illegals.
Subtract or remove the illegals and the representation of California would drop as precipitously.
So Trump is basically saying, let's count the Americans and leave out the illegals.
But the Democrats are freaking out because their electoral advantage relies on these illegals.
In fact, you begin to see here a motivation for why the Democrats are so big on the illegals.
They love the illegals.
Now, maybe part of that is a long-term expectation that these guys will get amnesty.
At some point, they're going to be able to vote, or their children are going to be able to vote.
But there's a short-term gain that has nothing to do with illegals voting.
It's quite simply that by being illegal and being here, you provide one more head to count for the census, and that affects the allocation of congressional seats.
Now, the U.S. Constitution seems to say that we should count the people here, but here I think we have a clash between the language of the Constitution and the motives of the Constitution.
People pass laws, they have a certain intent.
I pass a law, for example, it has to do with, let's just say, making it easier to apprehend criminals.
And then someone goes, but reading your language, it actually affects other people too.
And I go, yeah, but that's not my intent.
So the founders, I think it's safe to say, never intended that we would have vast numbers of people sneaking into the country against the wishes of the people and the government, breaking our laws.
And nevertheless, hey, we're here.
Count us in the census.
So this is something the Supreme Court is going to have to sort out.
And the court can either go with a literal reading of the Constitution and just go, hey, listen, the Constitution says count everybody, so you've got to count everybody.
It doesn't matter whether they're legal or illegal.
It doesn't even matter why they're here or how long they've been here.
If they're here, count them.
That's one way to go.
That's, in a sense, a certain type of strict literalism.
Or you can go for something that's more sophisticated.
I would call it contextualism.
And that is, hey, the language does say that, but clearly that's not what the founders meant.
That's not what they intended.
That was not the purpose of this particular provision of the Constitution.
And therefore, let's go with the intention of the people who made the rule.
And the intention of the people who made the rule is that the censuses exist for the purpose of counting Americans, because after all, it's Americans who deserve political representation through the House and also, obviously, through the Senate.
So this is, I think, a very ingenious move on the part of Trump, the census, a new census.
Why?
It forces the Democrats to become more explicit, to nakedly expose their own motives.
And their own motives are: we like the illegals, we want the illegals.
We've been letting them into the country because we get the short-term benefit of increasing our political allocation.
Our blue states get more representatives, and the red states get proportionately fewer representatives.
And Trump is basically saying this is not fair.
This needs to be corrected.
This is certainly a fight that's worth having now.
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According to some reports, Media Matters, the Media Matters group, it's a hit group on the left run by one David Brock.
Well, Media Matters is on the brink of collapse.
Now, this David Brock character, a fellow I knew in his younger days, I'm looking at a picture of him right now on MSNBC and I'm kind of chuckling because it looks like he is combing his hair in the manner of like George Washington.
You know, the white hair combed straight back like we see in some of these documentaries of the American founding.
And yeah, David Brock, in his true beliefs, could not be further removed from the founders.
This guy is a kind of walking sleazebag.
Even in his younger days, he was extremely sly and duplicitous.
He essentially broke with the right and claimed that we were tormenting him and we were all against him because he was gay.
The truth of it is we treated him very well.
We did not torment him in any way.
This was a kind of a narrative that he made up later, a fictitious kind of past life in which he was victimized and was forced to flee the right because, of course, it was full of so many racists and homophobes.
And then in his writing, he began to make up things about the conservatives he was hanging about around, not me, but others.
And he'd say, well, these people were making insensitive remarks and so on.
And the truth of it is that he himself was part of this gang.
No one ever noticed that he was in any way uncomfortable with any conversation anyone had.
So this guy is a very slippery character, very appropriate for Media Matters.
And Media Matters over the past decade or more has been doing these exposés, vicious exposés of the right.
But then Media Matters decided to go a little too far.
And they had been getting away with a lot of sleazy tactics, but they decided to sort of take on X. And by the way, Media Matters is funded by a lot of dark money donors, liberal billionaires who don't want to be themselves exposed or identified, but they like what Media Matters is doing and hitting out at the right, doing its kind of bogus fact checks.
But Media Matters is now being sued by X, and it's being sued by X because of a campaign that they conducted against X's advertisers.
It was a very successful campaign, and evidently what Media Matters did was they rigged their own searches so that they made sure that the results of that search would produce advertising from different companies along with like Nazi content.
Now, there's not a lot of Nazi content on X. You and I know that from our own X accounts.
But what Media Matters is able to do is pull the Nazi content and pull the advertising content into single screenshots.
And they make all these screenshots and they send them to the advertisers who are suitably horrified.
Oh, we don't want to be, we don't want to be shown alongside neo-Nazi content.
We better pull our ads from X. But this was all a scam.
This was all orchestrated by Media Matters.
And so Elon Musk decided, okay, I'm going to sue them.
And not only that, I'm going to sue all their donors.
And not only that, I'm going to sue the advertisers themselves because all of these people are colluding in a dishonest campaign.
And by the way, this kind of collusion, when it produces economic damage to a business entity, the business entity can calculate the extent of that damage.
Like if we lost advertising, let's just say over a period of years and it's worth, we lost this much money and we took a blow to our reputation, we are going to sue you for a giant amount of money.
And not only that, Elon Musk has very deep pockets, so Media Matters is swimming in legal bills.
Apparently, Media Matters has made desperate appeals to its big donors like Soros and Susie Tompkins-Bull, saying, please give us money to fight the lawsuit.
And now the liberal donors are like, we don't want to be part of this.
I'm assuming that they don't want to be paying massive amounts of legal fees, but not only that, they don't want to be exposed themselves.
The moment that they remain part of this Media Matters apparatus, they have to disclose all their email exchanges with Media Matters.
If Media Matters send gleeful texts to them, hey, look, we screwed over Elon Musk and X is going down because of us.
All of this is going to come out in court in front of a jury.
Apparently, Media Matters is now engaged in all kinds of backdoor negotiations with X in which they are begging X to drop the case.
X, of course, is refusing to do this.
And of course, X has got very good lawyers.
We happened to, in fact, one of them happens to have been one of my defense lawyers in my case in New York against the Obama administration, the campaign finance violation case.
And apparently, Musk has sued these people in multiple jurisdictions in multiple countries.
There's also an investigation that the FTC is going on.
There's apparently a revolt on the part of the staff.
Donors are exiting.
And the law firm representing Media Matters, which is the Elias Law Group, this comes from Mark Elias, who is himself a shady character.
But apparently he's now demanding that Media Matters pay up $4 million in unpaid legal fees.
And Media Matters is, we thought you were our friend.
Oh, what?
You want us to pay?
But Elias is like, yeah, we're filing the paperwork.
You better pay us.
So X has demanded that Media Matters do a full retraction.
They pay out every penny of their bank account and they shut down permanently.
Media Matters is trying to save face because it would be devastating for them to do this.
And so they're saying, why don't we offer a methodological clarification of how we came up with these posts?
And X is like, that's not going to do it.
We're not satisfied with that.
The lawsuit is going to proceed.
What the FTC is investigating is the degree to which Media Matters colluded with other so-called watchdog groups to blackball X from advertisers.
And the key thing to realize here is that what these people are doing is they are weaponizing misinformation.
In other words, they're claiming that X has all this false content, including, by the way, racist content, homophobic content, content by supposed extremists and neo-Nazis.
But they were unable to show that this content, such as it is in a free speech environment, you're going to get some of this content, that this content was in any way wedded to or connected to ads that were running on X. So what Media Matters did, evidently, is they kind of faked the algorithm.
They manipulated the search to show something that is not in fact true.
They engage, in other words, in misinformation of their own.
And X decided, let's call them on it.
And let's remember that when you're dealing with this, not the civil suit filed by X, but the FTC investigation, that could lead to criminal charges, felony charges.
And you're dealing with very powerful people.
You're dealing here not just with David Brock and this guy, Kara Soni, who's the CEO of Media Matters.
You're dealing with people like Soros, you're dealing with other liberal billionaires.
You're dealing with companies like Disney that used to advertise on X and cancel their ads in the wake of this campaign.
So a lot of people are running for cover here.
And this is actually part of the great value of having Elon Musk on your side.
This guy is not only able to fight, there are lots of conservatives, by the way, who have the resources to drive these kinds of organizations into the dust.
The last one I remember was Peter Thiel and Gawker.
You might remember Gawker, the website, the left-wing media company, and Gawker would engage in all kinds of dubious and fake news.
And finally, Peter Thiel just sued them into the ground.
And Gawker went bankrupt and they shut down.
And today there's no Gawker.
And that was done by Elon Musk.
This is rarely done by conservatives.
Conservatives don't engage in this kind of, you could call it legal warfare, which is, you know, lawfare.
I'm talking about lawfully here from the right to hold the left accountable for its misdeeds.
But that's exactly what's going on here.
And essentially, I think Media Matters got intoxicated by power.
They thought, we've got this censorship industrial complex.
Guess what?
We are part of that.
We get money from the billionaires.
We have these other nonprofits in cahoots with us.
In fact, the tech companies to some degree were also in cahoots with them.
And hey, if we go to the advertisers, the advertisers will step in and cut the legs out from under X so Elon Musk can continue to fund it on his own.
But the idea of making X economically self-sufficient, economically viable, that will never happen.
So really, what Media Matters is trying to do was to cancel X. And by canceling X, they were trying to cancel you and they were trying to cancel me and try to shut down our ability to have a free speech platform, an alternative to the heavy censorship regimes already in place at Google, at YouTube, at Facebook.
Now, the censorship on those platforms, I'm happy to say, seems to be down.
It seems to be less than it used to be.
They've gotten a little better, but they've gotten a little better largely in response to X. They've seen that free speech works.
They've seen that free speech actually engages, allows for, enables all kinds of exciting and interesting debate, all kinds of breaking news stories.
X has now become the information, the news platform really for the country and to some degree for the world in general.
So kudos to Elon Musk for holding Media Matters accountable.
It looks like Media Matters is flatly in the wrong here.
They are very nervous about being called to account.
And if they go under, I, for one, will be celebrating.
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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?
Are we going to be looking at a potential economic slowdown?
And what does this mean for your savings?
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Guys, I'm always delighted to welcome back to the podcast Jeffrey Tucker.
He is the president of the Brownstone Institute.
He writes on economics for the Epoch Times.
He's the author of a dozen or so books, but we're going to talk about the most recent one.
It's called Life After Lockdown.
By the way, the website of the Brownstone Institute is just brownstone.org.
You can follow Jeffrey on X at JeffreyA.
Tucker.
Welcome.
Thank you for joining me, Jeffrey.
This book sounds like something that is close to your heart.
Do you think that as we look back at COVID, we have something very important to learn about our society, maybe the vulnerability of our institutions, maybe the nature of our elites, maybe the nature of tyranny?
I mean, there are so many different elements to this, and you seem to be just glancing over your table of contents like you're all over this.
Talk about, let's start by just asking you, why did you decide to write this book now?
Well, I don't think we've come to terms with what happened over the last five years at all.
We're having a little bit of discussion, but it could be like the Vietnam War after that ended.
Everybody wanted to forget about it.
And many years went by before we had some blunt talk about it.
So this is some blunt talk about what we lived through, which I don't think was some sort of public health error.
Very early on, I assumed that there was this act of naivety.
Like people just thought, well, if a virus comes along, you can just jump under your sofa and hide from it, then it'll go away.
I knew that could have been true.
Everybody with any knowledge of public health and virology and immunology knew that was not the case.
But as time went on, I realized that there was something more insidious going on here.
There was really an attempt to reconstruct the infrastructure of society itself.
And that sentence that I just uttered comes from the mouth of Anthony Fauci.
He wrote this in August of 2020.
We had been through the initial stage of lockdowns.
We went through the summer of protests and riots and things like that, where young people were permitted to leave their TikTok to go out for the right political reasons, you know, blow off a little steam and then brought back in August of 2020.
Anthony Fauci and his co-author David Mirandz explained what it is that they were doing.
And they were attempting to reconstruct the world, which they said had been going wrong for, I may mistake this, but I think they said something like 21,000 years.
Wow.
Very Concerned that people are moving around too much, that we're making too many choices, we're infecting each other with all sorts of terrible germs.
We need to stop doing this.
We stop living in big cities.
We need to stop shaking hands.
We need to stop owning pets.
We need to start living in really extreme isolation from each other and cultivating only sort of digital friendships on the subscription model if we expect to have health.
Of course, you know, the amazing thing about this article is it comes out during a time of extreme ill health.
People are turning to substances.
It's liquor, it's weed, it's psych meds, and you know, depression.
You can't see family members when they're dying.
You can't have weddings and funerals.
You can't go out to eat.
You can't go to bars.
And he's out there saying, no, this is the new world we've constructed for you.
You have to understand.
We, the elites, we, the experts, know what it is to maintain a clean immune system.
And that means as little contact with other people as possible and as little contact with pathogens as possible.
So it basically was an attempt to reverse not just modernity, but the whole of human history and the whole of human progress.
I mean, it's right there.
And they wrote it out there for everybody.
And I think, you know, my book is just an attempt to take this seriously.
They played with us.
They toyed with us.
They ran an experiment on us.
And the purpose was to deploy a new technology called mRNA, which they imagined would put the whole of humanity on a subscription model of immunity.
So this under this new technology, they would deliver spiked proteins through lipid nanoparticles without an off button, inject it into you, and game your system to deal with the latest pathogen that happened to be around, whatever it may be.
And the beauty of this technology from their point of view was that it permitted the scientists to generate inoculations very, very quickly, depending on whatever the new pathogen was, and put us all on a subscription model.
So it'd be shot after shot after shot, just like we were invited to get booster after booster after booster.
That was just the beginning.
We're all going to be lining up for our shots all the time.
This is what they really imagined.
They could not get mRNA technology approved through normal FDA channels, and they've been trying for the better part of 30 years.
So the EUA of March 13th, 2020, enabled the industry itself to bypass normal regulatory channels and bypass normal efficacy standards and safety testing to get right into the population, provided we were panicked sufficiently.
Now, Dinesh, the incredible thing about this is that this went on from March all the way to November.
They wanted to wait until after the election to get it done so they could deny Trump credit for having produced the solution.
I mean, it's the most sadistic state plan you can imagine, during which time, of course, we all had to go to absentee ballots.
Those were enabled by the CDC in March of 2020 through an executive order that no one voted on, causing the most insecure elections in 2020, about which you've made a beautiful film and spoken about a lot.
And everybody called you conspiracy theorists.
Well, it wasn't, I mean, it's not, you're a conspiracy documentary maker.
I mean, not a theorist.
I mean, it's all laid out for you right there.
And then things started to go awry in the spring of 2021 because then it turned out, of course, that the pathogen being a typical respiratory pathogen has wily ways and began to mutate and outsmarting the mRNA.
Meanwhile, the lipid nanoparticles building spike proteins all over your body and the virus is ignoring it.
So, you know, eventually the evidence came in that the vaccinated were actually more vulnerable to getting sick than the unvaccinated because natural immunity tends to be broader and more longer lasting.
These are all things we knew going into this.
So that's when the Credibility began to decline.
First of Fauci, then of public health, then of all one agency after another.
NIH, FDA, CDC, HHS.
And then the incredulity spread.
Then it spread to the pharmaceutical companies that were denying people normal therapeutics like hydroxychloroquine.
Even the British armies knew about that drug.
They used it for hundreds of years.
So it's just ridiculous.
And then ivermectin was taken off the shelves.
The JJ vaccine, which was not mRNA, got deprecated.
They were trying to drive the whole population into this one system.
The system didn't work.
Everybody got COVID anyway.
At the end of the pandemic, everybody's sicker than ever.
Very crucially, however, we no longer believe.
We don't believe in the systems they constructed for us, whether it's the big media or the big tech or academia that stayed silent or the retail branches of the deep state at your local Walgreens and CBS.
Everything lost credibility.
And that's sort of where we are.
And all the polls show this.
And it's affecting everything.
That's why the media is on the collapse and you're on the rise.
It's why the latest American Medical Association polls of young parents are showing that people are not willing to commit to the vaccine schedule.
It's why the credibility of doctors is onto the decline.
So this really is the collapse of an entire paradigm.
They tried to reset the world.
Instead, they discredited the entire ruling class, not just in the United States, but all over the world.
That's my big story.
Do you, I mean, this is fascinating, Jeffrey, because you've been a, I would say, probably accurately described as sort of a libertarian writer and thinker over the last couple of decades, if not longer.
And now we see this very incestuous collaboration, also called the conspiracy, involving agencies of the government, to be sure, but also the big tech companies, which are certainly private companies, involving innumerable media institutions, which are also private and not functioning simply as an extension of the government.
You mentioned the pharmaceutical companies.
Has this given you a, or forced you into a sort of a, you know, I have to look at a new way in which these elites come together.
And it's not so much a private-public distinction anymore because all these guys are really in the same bus.
Yeah, Dinesh, this has been, for me, a bit of an ideological trauma.
You know, we used to have a very simple model of the world.
Public, bad, private, good.
Public sector is always screwing up.
Private sector is awesome.
There's the state and then there's liberty and we've solved all problems.
Except that does not fit what we went through in this deployment of this totalitarian state in our time.
And so, you know, empirically, you have to look at who the cooperating partners are in this whole thing.
And I'll tell you something else that's really alarming to me.
It's not just the state imposing itself on the private sector.
A lot of times, when you look really carefully at the way this thing unfolded, it was very unclear sometimes which was the hand and which was the glove, the public sector or the private sector.
You see what I mean?
So you had a lot of private actors that were driving these policies.
There's no question that the vaccine companies were responsible for lobbying for the mandates on business and on the public sector because vaccine uptake was too slow, it was too low.
They wanted customers.
They deployed state power to get those customers.
And then you had private companies, you know, really risk averse, imposing those on their employers.
Now, some of my libertarian friends say, oh, well, private companies can do whatever they want.
You know, there's a problem with that because the shots themselves are Indemnified against liability, which you would never have in a real free market.
And there they were pushing their mind employees.
If something goes wrong, nobody's responsible.
That is not the way we think of capitalism as actually working in its purest form.
So it's extremely important to look at the particulars of these cases to understand that what we call the state is a really complicated institution.
We're not talking about politicians anymore.
And we're not even necessarily talking about civilian bureaucracies like the Department of Labor.
You know, when we got the order to split the workforce in essential and unessential, that did not come from the Department of Labor.
That came from a sub-agency of the Department of Homeland Security that was operating under the cover of classified information.
It was a kind of a quasi-martial law that bypassed the elected representatives entirely.
And they worked very closely with the private sector, not just the pharmaceutical companies, but also the medical doctors, the medical journals, the pharmaceutical retail outlets, which in turn advertised for the major media, which did their bidding.
And they were able to enlist vast amounts of academia because they're getting the grants to certify all these drugs as safe and effective.
So when you look at the way it unfolds, what we call the state, or what Adam Smith or what classical liberalism calls the state, has grown really complicated and really wide and deep.
And if you want to do something about the system, you cannot just isolate, oh, the public government's bad.
Sometimes, and in this case, it's very interesting.
If you want to do something about the deep state power that is unaccountable, your best path may be to empower that old-fashioned idea of democracy, right?
Let's get our elected representatives to exercise power over the deep state.
And that, I think, is what we're seeing unfold with the Trump administration right now.
People call him an authoritarian.
Well, I'm not always comfortable with everything he's doing, but I tell you what, there's never been a more ferocious enemy of deep state power.
And certainly not in my lifetime.
I mean, probably not in the last century.
So to me, like, I don't even know what a path for freedom looks like until we can get some kind of connection between the voters' wishes and the people who are in charge of the system, which should be the people we elect.
Hope you see what I mean.
I think so.
And I think also, you know, for me, Jeffrey, like one of the most vivid scenes of this whole COVID thing that shows you the long reach of the arm of tyranny would be you'd look inside some Walmart or you'd look inside some Target and you would have a person go up to a complete stranger and begin to shriek at them in the most tempestuous terms.
Why aren't you wearing a mask?
And you began to realize that this tyrannical impulse is not simply the prerogative of bureaucracies and institutions.
I mean, it's their right in human nature, right?
And I'm sure in small villages, it was expressed in the village busybody who went looking in everybody's window to see if she could spot something and spread the news about what so-and-so is doing behind closed doors.
I mean, this is a human phenomenon, and it is simply being channeled, I think, now through these massive structures.
And I think what you're saying is that they reached a terrifying apex and COVID.
The politics of fear was at its zenith.
And all of this, if we don't understand it and come to terms with it, this could all happen again to us and happen in a way that's more permanent than COVID turned out to be.
Yeah, just on your point concerning the sort of populist enforcers, the sort of ruling class professional people that were telling me stop walking the wrong way on the grocery hall and the quasi-Nazis that are screaming at me to put on a mask and that sort of thing.
Back in the day, there was a book called The Black Book of Communism that had a, I'm sure you remember it, that had a chapter on the Cultural Revolution.
And that had a very interesting analysis of what was called the Red Guard.
These were the regular people who took Mao's edicts more seriously than Mao himself did, right?
And so they became the extreme enforcers of this ideological vision.
Well, that is essentially what woke became, especially during the COVID part, just a period of insanity that spread itself in all kinds of different directions, leading to terrifying results, even in the world of transgenderism.
And that's when our crosswalks got painted with rainbows, and we were screamed at for infecting other people and for declining the vaccination.
It was all just this terrible thing.
And you know what?
It helped me understand something about this word totalitarianism.
It doesn't just, totalitarianism doesn't just mean the government controls everything, it means the totality of everything becomes coercive.
You know, it gives rise to a culture of control and irrationality that can become ferocious and dangerous under the wrong conditions.
And we were headed that direction already before COVID.
And COVID just unleashed that in shocking ways.
That if you aren't paying, if you're not closely paying attention to what happened to COVID, you don't understand something about the way power works in our time.
It bears a close study for that reason.
We need to come to terms with it and recapture something like the old values, pre-digital values, to help resist against this in the future.
Also, we have to dismantle the structures, the deep state structures of power, including private power, that gave rise to what happened to us in those five years.
Great stuff, Jeffrey, and the book sounds really wonderful.
I'm excited to read it.
It's called Life After Lockdown.
The author is Jeffrey Tucker.
Follow him on X at Jeffrey A. Tucker, the website of the Brownstone Institute, just brownstone.org.
Jeffrey, as always, thank you for joining me.
Thank you, Dinesh.
Thank you so much.
I am approaching the conclusion now, not the conclusion of the book, Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader, but rather the conclusion of the discussion of the Cold War, which I think does represent Reagan's supreme accomplishment.
Reagan had domestic accomplishments, he had accomplishments that had to do with uplifting the morale of the country, but nothing really compares to what Reagan did in bringing down the Soviet empire, which let's remember had been a bit of a menace since the 1920s and certainly became a serious menace after World War II.
Now, Gorbachev is the new Soviet leader.
He's been in office for a couple of years, and Reagan decides to bet on him, to work with him.
And the question is: what did Reagan see about Gorbachev that convinced him that Gorbachev was a departure from the old Soviet model?
Reagan might intuitively have thought that.
I mentioned earlier that Margaret Thatcher met with Gorbachev and came to her judgment that he was different.
But what really convinced Reagan?
And I suggest in the book a rather unusual answer to that question, and that is that Reagan, in interacting with Gorbachev, began to tell him Reaganite jokes.
This seems a little hard to believe, but no, we know for a fact that Reagan did this, and we know for a fact what Gorbachev's Response was.
Here's the kind of joke that Reagan tells Gorbachev.
He goes, He says, There's an American and a Russian guy, and they're arguing about their two countries.
And the American goes, Look, I can go to the Oval Office, pound the president's desk, and say, Mr. President, I don't like the way you're running your country.
And the Russian goes, Well, I can do that.
And the American said, You can?
What?
And the Russian goes, Sure, I can go to the Kremlin.
I can walk into the general secretary's office and I can say, Mr. General Secretary, I don't like the way that Ronald Reagan is running his country.
Now, here's the key point: according to Reagan, when he tells this joke to Gorbachev, Gorbachev laughs.
Gorbachev thinks it's hilarious.
And think about what that says about, well, think about what it says about both men.
First of all, the audacity of Reagan to do this.
It's a joke about Soviet tyranny.
He's like, hey, Gorbachev, let me tell you one.
And Gorbachev, far from being offended, how, you know, well, yes, you know, we may restrict freedom of speech, but we have good reason, or rather, well, there are all kinds of other liberties we offer our citizens.
None of this.
Gorbachev thinks it's funny.
And for Reagan, that's kind of illuminating about who this guy is.
It's kind of a way of saying that Gorbachev is detaching himself from the Soviet regime and going, yeah, you know what?
I can stand apart from all that and even chuckle at it.
That's one of the weird things about our country.
Now, Gorbachev's favorite Reagan joke, apparently, involved Gorbachev himself.
And this is Reagan now telling Gorbachev the joke.
And Reagan says, well, it's a response to Gorbachev's own crackdown on corruption.
And Gorbachev apparently had issued an edict saying that in the Soviet Union, anybody who is caught speeding on the highways, no matter what his position, no matter how important he is, he should get a ticket.
In other words, this is Gorbachev's effort to say that we are all subject to these laws, including the ruling class, the so-called nomenklatura.
Now, according to Reagan's story, one day Gorbachev comes out of his summer house called the Dacha, his country home, but he's really late getting to the Kremlin.
So he tells his limo driver, listen, get in the back seat, I'm going to drive.
The limo driver is a little bit taken aback, but of course he agrees.
Gorbachev jumps into the front seat and limousine goes flying down the highway.
Now, as they go flying down the highway, they pass two motorcycle cops, and one guy takes off after him to stop him.
But after a while, he comes back to his buddy and his buddy goes, Hey, well, did you give him a ticket?
And the guy goes, No, I couldn't.
He was too important.
And so his buddy goes, his partner goes, Well, who was it?
And the cop goes, Well, I couldn't recognize him, but his driver was Gorbachev.
So another Reagan play on Gorbachev, a joke in which Gorbachev is not really the butt of the joke, but he's in the joke.
And Gorbachev thought this was so funny that he would tell other people the joke in the Soviet delegation.
So again, you're seeing a guy who has, you could call it a Western sensibility.
I won't say an American sensibility, but rather someone who seems larger than the Soviet Union in his comprehension, in his interests.
And for Reagan, and the same thing could be said about Trump, Reagan believed in personal diplomacy.
In other words, you could mouth all the ideological slogans you want, but if Reagan looks you in the eye, he can figure you out what is your relationship to this ideological claptrap.
Do you really believe it?
Are you part of it?
Are you part of the system?
Are you going along with the system?
Do you have the potential for capsizing or overthrowing the system?
Reagan is making these sense of judgments.
And I think the other thing about Reagan is he commented that Gorbachev on multiple occasions protested to Reagan the phrase evil empire, which is to say Gorbachev didn't like it.
And now, the ordinary kind of conservative or neocon reading of this is that Gorbachev is an apparatchik.
He has his own rival ideology.
Obviously, he doesn't like to be called an evil empire.
He's been raised to believe that we are the evil empire.
But Reagan did not understand Gorbachev's objections in this way at all.
According to Reagan, it showed that Gorbachev had a conscience.
Because if Gorbachev was perfectly happy trampling on people's faces and undermining their rights, he wouldn't really care.
Yeah, I'm the evil empire.
So what?
A truly ruthless dictator is not going to be intimidated by the accusation of being ruthless.
He's not trying to be anything else.
He likes the fear that his ruthlessness inspires in people.
But this was not Gorbachev.
He was annoyed.
He didn't want to be identified with an evil empire, and that alone told Reagan something very important.
So what happens?
Reagan is pushing Gorbachev to give up his previous demands and come to Washington, D.C. and sign the INF Treaty, the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty.
Basically, both sides agree to reduce their intermediate-range nuclear weapons, their missiles, to zero.
This is again more ambitious than anything the nuclear freeze contemplated.
You're not freezing your arsenals, you are eliminating them.
Not all nuclear weapons, but the intermediate-range nuclear weapons.
And Gorbachev agrees.
In a somewhat shocking development, he comes to Washington, D.C., he drops the demand that the U.S. relinquish missile defenses.
He signs the INF Treaty.
And this is for the first time in history, the U.S. and the Soviet Union agree to eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapons.
And this was very beneficial to the U.S. The Soviets had four times as many warheads aimed at us as we had aimed on them.
So we had not only never signed a treaty to eliminate a whole class of weapons, we had never signed a treaty where they give up four and we give up one.
So, in other words, they agree to far greater concessions on their side.
And they also agree to something else, which is on-site verification, something that they had never agreed to before.
On-site verification means that you can verify the reductions not just by having satellite pictures, but also by sending people to go look.
Hey, there are no nuclear weapons here.
And so the dubs who had insisted, oh, this is absurd.
This is Reagan's posturing.
This is very unrealistic.
Reagan really blew it by walking out earlier of the arms control negotiations.
These people are proved completely wrong.
But what's really interesting is that conservatives also thought Reagan was wrong.
Tom Bethel, the conservative columnist, friend of mine, writing in the American Spectator, Reagan is walking into a trap.
The only way he can get success is by doing what the Soviets want.
Turns out to be completely wrong.
Republican senators, Steve Sims, Jesse Helms, they planned all these killer amendments to undermine the intermediate range nuclear treaty.
They thought Reagan was being taken in.
Reagan was being conned.
Right-wing groups took out a full-page ad.
I believe this was in the New York Times, but also in other papers, accusing Reagan of being sort of like a Neville Chamberlain.
Now, it's important to realize with the benefit of hindsight, these criticisms kind of missed the larger current of events.
Something much bigger was going on, bigger than the INF treaty.
Reagan was onto that, and they weren't.
So when we pick this up again tomorrow, I'm hoping to complete this section on the Cold War by laying out how we saw this Spectacular unwinding, not just of the Soviet Empire, that would be astonishing in itself and something that really no one on either the left or the right had truly predicted.
Reagan predicted it, but no one else did.
But it was a dismantling of the Soviet regime itself.
This happens very rarely.
In fact, I'm trying to think, I'm running my brain through history to see if I can think of another example.
You know, it's like imagine the Roman Empire coming, the senators getting around the table and saying, in effect, we dismantled the Roman Empire.
That did not, by the way, happen.
The Persian Empire, it didn't happen that way.
Alexander the Great destroyed the Persian Empire, nor did Alexander dismantle his own empire.
He died and his empire ultimately crumbled.
So this is the way that empires fall.
But in a unique episode in world history, the Soviet Union abolished itself.
So we're going to reach that tenouma, that conclusion next time.
And it's well worth recalling because a lot of times the news, the everyday news is full of bad news.
And sometimes there are blips of good news.
But this is good news on a scale that you rarely get in history.
These are the kind of events that occur not just once in a decade, but sometimes once in a half century or in a century, an event that just as it happens, you know right away that you're looking at something that will be a centerpiece in the history books.
And it happened and it happened in the late 1980s, 1989 through 1992 in a series of astounding events that I will recount tomorrow.
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