Dinesh D'Souza - NIGHT AT THE SMITHSONIAN Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1151

Aug. 20, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza

55:11

NIGHT AT THE SMITHSONIAN Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1151

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	When the administration is trying to dig us out of a deep hole, it's difficult for them to take your personal finances into account.
	You have to do that.
	I choose to diversify my savings with gold from Birch Gold Group, and you can, too.
	Just text the word Dinesh to 989898 Birch Gold will send you a free, no obligation information kit on gold.
	Birchgold has an A plus rating with the Better Business Bureau and tens of thousands of happy customers.
	You two can diversify with Birchgold.
	SMS Dinesh to 989898.
	Coming up, I'll reveal why the Smithsonian is badly in need of a political detoxification, how that can be accomplished to the benefit of both history and fairness.
	I'll review the comic incident in which a Democratic assistant Attorney General is arrested and she keeps screaming, I'm an AG.
	Breitbart News, editor and chief Alex Marlow, joins me.
	We're going to talk about his new book, about the law fair against Trump.
	It's called Breaking the Law.
	Hey, if you're watching on X Rumble or YouTube, listening on Apple or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
	Click the subscribe to follow the notifications button.
	I'd appreciate it.
	This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
	This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
	America needs this voice.
	The times are crazy.
	In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
	This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
	Dinesh D'Souza Podcast Before I launch into my opening topic, which is the Smithsonian and Trump's effort to remake the museum system, the federally run museum system called the Smithsonian, which is in fact an overseer of multiple museums.
	If you've been to Washington, DC, there's the Museum of Natural History, the Museum of Air and Space, and many others, all of them collectively telling a story about America and we'll get to that in just a moment.
	But I like to begin with a couple of items in the news and comment on them.
	So Trump, as you know, has called for not only getting rid of the voting machines, but also getting rid of mail in ballots.
	And now we see a massive proliferation of governors, senators, media pundits, all firing back at Trump.
	And here's a classic example from Debbie D right here in the podcast studio is laughing.
	Fortunately, I didn't marry a woman named Debbie Dingle, although I guess if I had, I would be rescuing her from that last name.
	So, I mean, things could be worse.
	She could be like Debbie Ding Dong, which would be worse.
	But here's representative Debbie Dingle.
	I guess that sounds alarmingly close to Debbie Dangle, like something's hanging down.
	So maybe that was maybe that was it maybe that was Michelle Obama's maiden name, Michelle Dangle.
	But now Michelle Obama, of course.
	Anyway, we will not pursue that line of intellectual inquiry.
	But here's Debbie Dingle.
	Mail and ballots are critical for seniors, people with disabilities, service members and their families.
	We're not a democracy if everyone cannot participate.
	And in some form, this rhetoric is echoing all over the place.
	But if you think back to this whole debate, you remember the term that we used to use very commonly in elections that you don't hear that much anymore absentee ballots.
	And what I'm getting at is that there is a big difference between mail in ballots and absentee ballots.
	The Democrats know this.
	They're confusing this in the same way that they commonly confuse illegals and immigrants.
	Trump is cracking down on immigrants.
	Trump is forcibly sending immigrants to other countries.
	No, he's not.
	Illegals are not immigrants.
	And similarly here, the absentee ballots were always designed for people in very special circumstances who could not be expected to show up and vote in person.
	So to mention a couple of groups, people in nursing homes, yeah, they're not mobile, they can't vote in person, military families living abroad.
	So it has long been understood, there's nothing new about this that some people need absentee ballots, but the expectation was that everybody else needs to vote.
	And if they these days we even have early voting so that you don't have to vote on a particular day.
	The excuse that, oh, you know, that particular day just happens to be horrible, I can't possibly vote on that day.
	Well, you have a two week period of early voting prior to election day when you can step in and vote sometimes an even longer period.
	So the Democrats are invoking the rationale for absentee ballots in order to oppose legitimate requirements of having people who are not service members, not stationed abroad, not confined to nursing homes to basically say we need to have mail and ballots for everybody, not just in these special cases.
	Here's some good news.
	Tulsi Gabbard has stripped thirty seven intelligence officials of their security clearances.
	Who are these people?
	Well, this can be called the Obama gang inside the intelligence agencies.
	When Obama ordered a new Intel report with essentially a predetermined conclusion, earlier the intelligence agencies said Trump was not colluding with Russia.
	Obama goes, let's do a new intelligence that shows that he is.
	Well, there were thirty seven people who said, Yeah, let's we're happy to work on this.
	We'll come together as a special ops team and make this happen.
	people who have been stripped of their security clearances because Tilsi Gabbard says, listen, the weaponization of intelligence to advance a partisan or non objective agenda, this is inconsistent with what national security requires.
	So this is a punishment.
	It's not as mild a punishment as it sounds because all these guys, when they leave the government, typically go on to lucrative careers where they're able to parade their clearances as evidence that they can be trusted.
	They are trusted at the highest levels.
	They see things that other people don't see.
	They're privy to information other people aren't.
	So I'm looking at the list of these thirty seven people.
	We won't recognize most of these names, but you might recognize a couple Charles Cupchan, for example, Dilpriet Sidu, Heather Guterres, Joel T. Meyer, William J. Tuttle.
	So these are the spooks who tried to get Trump.
	And now we got them.
	And like I say, these people probably belong, there probably needs to be far severe penalties, but at least we'll take what we can get.
	We'll start with this, and that is they've lost their security clearances.
	Now let me talk about the Smithsons.onian, Trump says it's gone completely woke, it's out of control.
	And he says where everything discussed is how horrible our country is, how bad slavery was.
	And this is what the Democrats have jumped on.
	Trump is saying that our museums are teaching that slavery is bad.
	What are you demanding is does he want us to teach that slavery is good?
	If you look at what Trump is really getting at here, Trump is really saying that there's a one sided view of American history.
	It's all negative and American achievement is not stated.
	It's understated if it's stated at all.
	So why do you want to talk all the time about slavery when you could be talking for example about the Great Industrial Revolution.
	Why would you talk only about the sins of America when you should be also talking about the entrepreneurial achievements of America?
	Why would you talk about the plight of the American Indians and not talk about the settlers who went out west and essentially took a largely barren and certainly undeveloped continent and made something of it?
	Think about Manhattan.
	Manhattan when the Indians had it was essentially nothing when people say, Well, you know, the Dutch bought Manhattan for like a very small pittance of money.
	That's because that's what Manhattan was worth.
	Manhattan was basically dirt.
	It wasn't worth any more than what the Dutch paid for it.
	Now, Manhattan has been developed.
	Manhattan today is worth a lot more, but that's not because of the dirt alone, it's because of what was put in the place of that dirt over subsequent decades.
	The Smithsonian attracts about twenty million people a year, many of them kids, and so this woke one sided left wing Marxist view of history, that's what people are getting.
	The critique of Trump is all based on the idea that what we're getting now is objective history because it's coming from academic sources, academic committees, but these are left-wing committees convened by the Smithsonian to give a spun narrative.
	The spun narrative goes on and on, it's LGBTQ stuff.
	It is the Marxist spin on American history.
	Everything is about stopping hate.
	All the discussion of Asian Americans, again, doesn't focus on achievements, IQ scores, SAT scores, over-representation of Asians, the model minority know it focuses really on things like you know a Filipino guy was beaten up on the street of LA and the suspect is a white supremacist.
	Nothing about Antifa, nothing about the left wing revolutionary organizations, the weather underground, it's trans propaganda, it's the US flag shown burning, it's the KKK which is always somehow slyly associated with the right even though the reality is the opposite.
	This is the disgrace called the Smithsonian.
	Now if it were me, I would probably just shut the whole thing down because like I said.
	say, any country that degrades its own history in this way is essentially a country that is on intellectual suicide watch.
	Because countries that are strong and successful are countries that affirm their own heritage.
	Not to say that they are not aware of their mistakes, not to say they don't learn from them, but they don't parade them, they don't indoctrinate their kids in them, they don't teach their kids to hate their own country.
	Now, here is Rick Wilson, basically one of these Lincoln project guys, and he's being highly sarcastic.
	He's highlighting Trump's statement about quote how bad slavery was.
	What were the good parts of slavery, Maga?
	And so I decided, All right, I'm going to take him up on this, and I'm going to actually tell you, and I've been a very prominent critic of slavery.
	My movies depict the horrors of slavery.
	In no way do I claim that there was slavery was a good thing.
	But on the other hand, I do have enough intellectual nuance to realize that even very bad things sometimes do have a silver lining.
	So I'm going to answer Rick Wilson's question, What was the good part about slavery?
	Here's my answer.
	Slavery bought brought millions of Africans into the orbit of Western civilization where their descendants, not them, but their descendants.
	have liberties and opportunities unavailable anywhere in the lands that they came from.
	And then I give an example when Muhammad Ali was asked his view of Africa, he replied, Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat.
	So what is Ali getting at?
	He's getting at the fact that even though his ancestors had it worse in America, he Muhammad Ali is very glad to be here.
	And I'll note also that when people talk about slavery, they and the museums, the textbooks, the history channel, it's all the same, they never highlight the role of the Democratic Party.
	What I've done today and I'm replying to a number of these prominent Democrats and leftists, is I say, Hey, we're not trying to not teach about slavery, but what we are trying to teach is facts like this in eighteen sixty, this is the year of the Civil War, when there were about four million slaves in America, about twenty five of them, in fact, less than twenty five, were owned by Republicans.
	There were fewer than ten Republican slave owners in the country, which means that all the other slaves, three million nine hundred and ninety nine thousand nine hundred and seventy five, so all of them minus the twenty five, let's say.
	All of those or the vast majority of those.
	There were a couple of other smaller parties, so it wasn't just Republicans and Democrats, but the Democrats owned the vast majority of the rest of the four million slaves.
	I guess that's my point.
	Was there ever an exhibit?
	The Smithsonian has had hundreds of exhibits on slavery.
	I promise you that not a single one of them pointed out that the Democrats owned virtually all the slaves.
	I promise you that not a single one highlighted the fact the Democrats passed every segregation law in the South.
	I bet you that not one of them highlighted the fact that quote.
	The Ku Klux Klan was the domestic terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.
	I'm actually quoting a progressive historian from Columbia University, Eric Foner, but I bet you even he wasn't quoted to this effect in any Smithsonian public document.
	So the Smithsonian has existed to spin history, to whitewash it, to twist it, to sanitize it.
	We're not getting objective history.
	It's not as if Trump is walking in and saying, We're getting objective stuff.
	Let me change it to my view.
	No, what Trump is actually trying to achieve is a modicum of balance, and I say about time.
	Hey, when I flip a container around and I can't pronounce it or recognize the ingredients, I just put it back.
	But that's why you're going to find balance of nature, fruits and veggies in a capsule.
	These are the fruit and veggie supplements.
	You're going to find these on a shelf in my home because every single ingredient is a fruit or veggie plucked from the soil.
	No binders, no additives, no artificial colors, no fillers.
	It's just whole fruits and veggies gluten free and vegan friendly.
	These harvested ingredients are freeze dried into a fine powder using an advanced vacuum cold process to better preserve nutritional value.
	I'm getting thirty one ingredients from fruits and veggies.
	And if you don't like taking pills, hey, consider opening your fruit and veggie supplements and mix the powder into a smoothie or sprinkle them over food.
	Join me in taking balance of nature every day.
	Use my discount code America, you get thirty five percent off, plus free shipping and for a limited time, a free bottle of fiber and spice.
	This is the fiber and spice.
	But you got to use my discount code America.
	Here's a number to call eight hundred two forty six eight seven fifty one.
	That's eight hundred two forty six eight seven fifty one or you can go to balance of nature dot com when you use discount code America, you get thirty five percent off plus a free bottle of fiber and spice.
	When the cultural tide turns against truth, it becomes more important than ever to support the storytellers who are willing to stand for it.
	And this is what Angel is doing.
	They're not just producing entertainment, they're giving a home to stories that reflect the principles this country was founded on faith, family, and freedom.
	They've released films like Sound of Freedom, which exposed the modern day reality of child trafficking when Hollywood refused to touch it.
	They're backing projects like The Last Rodeo and Green and Gold stories that celebrate Middle America., sacrifice and generational legacy.
	Angel is not answering to Hollywood gatekeepers, they answer to their members, and that's where the Angel Guild comes in.
	Guild members vote on which projects move forward.
	They help support the stories that deserve to be told and proving that when ordinary people unite behind truth, extraordinary things happen.
	Join the movement, go to angel dot com slash Dinesh, join the Angel Guild today, support films that reflect your values angel dot com slash Dinesh.
	I want to highlight two features of high level Democrats that have recently.
	dramatized in two episodes I'm about to describe to you.
	One of them is that Democrats think that they are above scrutiny.
	They are above the law, they can do things that other people can't do, and they can get away with it.
	And the second thing is that Democrats think that their titles give them a certain degree of immunity.
	Now why do Democrats think this?
	By and large because they've been able to get away with it.
	That's why they think it.
	Why does someone think he's a master thief?
	Because he's made seven ro robberies and no one's caught him.
	And so Democrats have this sense of immunity, of being above the law.
	Now recently, an investigator at the Trump administration, in fact, this is Poulte, William Poulte, has discovered that one of the governors of the Federal Reserve, Lisa Cook, has done allegedly the same kind of mortgage fraud that I've talked about with regard to Letitia James, with regard to Adam Schiff.
	And what is that?
	designating more than one home as your primary residence for favorable mortgage rates and favorable tax treatment.
	So this is apparently what Lisa Cook has done.
	She has a out of state condo.
	So she goes, that's my primary residence.
	At the same time, she has a home in Michigan and two weeks, just two weeks from that, from designating the condo as her primary residence, she designates her Michigan home as her primary residence.
	And so this is straight out mortgage fraud.
	Why?
	Because the law says that you can only have one primary residence.
	may give you certain types of legal immunities.
	It can't be taken away in litigation, for example, or it may give you certain tax benefits.
	It's your primary residence and therefore you get a tax reduction or it could even be that it's your primary residence and so you get preferred mortgage rates which don't apply to a second home.
	So this is what's going on.
	This is a left wing Democrat on the Federal Reserve and think about it.
	This is a person setting interest rates and yet she is playing the system to get beneficial rates for herself.
	On a somewhat more amusing note, you might have seen a social media video that's gone viral.
	It involves two women in a bar who are getting arrested basically for trespassing or disorderly conduct.
	I don't know, some sort of a fracas ensued.
	The women appear to be intoxicated and they are being asked by the establishment to leave.
	They refuse to leave, so they call the cops.
	That all seems fairly routine, but as it turns out, one of these women is an assistant attorney general in Rhode Island, Devin Flanagan.
	And she has a kind of sidekick who is a clone of her and it seems to sort of worship her.
	And when the cops come and ask these two to leave, they won't leave.
	And they're like, Don't put your hands on me.
	That's against the law.
	You can't touch me.
	And the cops are like, You need to leave.
	And if you don't leave, they're going to put handcuffs on you, which is actually what happens.
	But the point I want to get at is that they that the moment that the cops show up, the woman goes, I'm an AG.
	Now, first of all, she's an assistant attorney general.
	She acts like she is the attorney General.
	I'm an AG.
	I'm the Attorney General.
	And This is repeated multiple times.
	I would say something like eight to ten times in the course of a couple.
	I'm an AG, you can't do this, you have no right.
	And the other woman is like, she's a lawyer, she knows what the hell she's talking about.
	And the cops, to their credit, are not intimidated by this nonsense.
	This is all just flim flam, and but what I'm getting at is the sense of entitlement behind it.
	That's the key.
	The Fox News host, Brett Baer, was recently in Washington, DC.
	I don't know if he went through a light or he was speeding.
	He's pulled over by the cops.
	If you watch that video, I don't know who happened to video it, but Brad Bear is a perfect gentleman.
	He realizes, hey, I was going too fast or hey, I didn't see the light.
	He pulls over, he gets a ticket, he takes, you know, he's going to pay the fine, he drives off.
	That's the way it should be.
	That's the way you behave if you're under the same laws as everybody else.
	Clearly what you have here is a prominent Democrat in Rhode Island, and she's probably used to throwing a weight around in, you know, girl boss style.
	And so this is a case, again, a small incident by itself, but revealing of an attitude of entitlement.
	So the same party that's always talking about the little guy and we got to play by the rules.
	No one's above the law.
	This is what they kept chanting when Trump was under scrutiny.
	But when it comes to them, they really do believe that they are above the law.
	Mike Lindell tells me a major retail chain just canceled a big order leaving My Pillow with an overstock of classic My Pillows.
	But their loss is your gain.
	For a limited time, My Pillow's offering the entire classic collection at true wholesale prices.
	Get a standard My Pillow for just seventeen ninety eight upgrade to queen size for just twenty two.98 king size 24.98 you can snag body pillows for 29.98 and versatile multi use pillows for just 9.98 plus when you order over 75 dollars you get 100 dollars in free digital gifts no strings attached that's right premium pillows at unbeatable prices and bonus gifts to top it off so don't wait go to mypillow dot com or you can call 800 876
	0227 that's 800 876 0227 don't forget to use promo code Dinesh and grab your standard mypillow for just 17.98 while supplies last Guys, I'm always very pleased to have back on the podcast our friend Alex Marlow,
	the host of the Alex Marlow Show, editor in chief of Breitbart News, but also a bestseller author who has a great new book, and it's called Breaking the Law Exposing the Weaponization of America's Legal System against Donald Trump, a topic very relevant now, particularly as the Trump administration tries to hold some of the scoundrels who are behind all this responsible or.
	You can follow Alex on X at Alex Marlowe.
	His website is alexmarlowe.
	com.
	Alex, welcome.
	Thanks for joining me.
	I know you've been in the frenzy of a book tour, which I know all too well myself.
	Let's talk about this lawfare against Trump.
	Now, if I try to put this in its widest perspective, it seems to me that the Democrats tried to go after Trump in three distinct waves.
	So wave one, which was right around twenty sixteen, was let's frame this guy as a Russian asset.
	This was a political strike on Trump.
	It was intended to, it of course resulted in investigations by the FBI and others, Rod Rosenstein.
	The second wave was impeachment.
	Let's impeach Trump, which was tried twice, and the third wave was, I think, the subject of your book, which is lawfare, which it seems could itself be divided into the category of civil lawfare and criminal lawfare.
	Do you agree with this kind of overall summary of the three-pronged attack on Trump in three successive waves?
	Yeah, I haven't thought exactly that way, but it makes perfect sense the way you sum it up.
	I Initially, the idea was we're going to frame him as a Russian agent and then we're going to try to use the powers of impeachment.
	And I go through in the book, the first couple of chapters are a history of law fair, and I go back to Franklin Roosevelt.
	And I know, Dinesh, you always like to tie history to what's happening currently.
	And I think that's always a good exercise to do that.
	And then I get into all the ways they tried to use impeachment and investigations while he was president, which really did kind of nullify a lot of his first administration, really relevant stuff.
	And they tried to impeach him for everything.
	I mean, we only remember the two impeachments.
	Maybe most of us only probably remember the first impeachment, but they really tried like dozens and dozens of times to try to impeach him, which is pretty amazing.
	Literally everything I list everything.
	It's an absurd list.
	And then they did get into, of course, the post presidency using the law fear against first his supporters with the J six stuff that was really overwhelming.
	And then focusing on Trump himself.
	And there were six major cases, two of them civil.
	The only thing that I might differ with is your characterization at the end of civil, there was a civil lane and a criminal lane.
	They were one and the same.
	And that's something that should be highly illegal.al and definitely immoral that Tish James in particular, her New York court, tried to prosecute Trump as if he was a criminal, even though it was a civil court, which you're not supposed to do that.
	It was entirely unprecedented.
	And they did try to frame him as a criminal.
	And the way she conducted the case, so I'm happy to detail, was as if he had committed a crime and not some sort of a civil violation where he had maybe deprived someone of some money they were due.
	And that really was the tone of it.
	And it does get muddled, it does get confusing.
	And I think I tried to do a good job of explaining all the nuances to it so people fully understand what happened, which was all an effort to subvert the election in my opinion, which again, Dinesh, one of your subjects.
	Again, Dinesh, one of your subject matters.
	Alex, instruct us and how it can come about that you have these multiple cases.
	You mentioned six.
	Now, two of them, as I understand it, were in New York.
	One of one, of course, was the civil case.
	Well, I guess three were in New York if you count the E. Jane Carroll case.
	Right.
	And then you have the Fannie Willis in Georgia, and then you have the two Jack Smith cases.
	So my question is this, is it the Democrats all have the same frame of mind and all of these?
	developed organically so that all these people were attacking Trump in their own way using their own weaponry?
	Or was this all really one single operation somehow coordinated across state lines and really comprehensively plotted and executed?
	How does this kind of come about?
	Yeah, this is the question to ask.
	And I think this is the most fundamental thing in the book is that I trace every single one of the cases against Trump to the Joe Biden White House and the upper echelons of the DOJ, which is blatantly illegal.
	We have due process clauses in our constitution.
	We have equal protection clauses.
	Clearly, when you have a coordinated political persecution that is widespread, it is a conspiracy, literally.
	We all talk about conspiracies.
	This is one of them that was done by the White House and Joe Biden's White House.
	There are many sources that assumed within Joe Biden's White House that Trump would be in jail for the 2024 election.
	That's a fundamental point I'm making that no one has really spelled that out to people that there was a deep connection throughout all of them.
	And I walked through where the connection takes place that said your initial premise is also true.
	All these people get their talking points.ints, there are the same marching orders from the same groups of people.
	And they have a knack for figuring out what is our pain points on the right.
	And they don't really need to be shown what to do.
	There doesn't really need to be a level of coordination for it to become apparent that these people are all on the same page somehow.
	It's one of the left gifts that we don't have on the right is they all get on the same page.
	We're getting Trump now.
	That's the narrative.
	And they all did try to do it.
	But I think what's more fundamental in the legal sense and what should be investigated is you go through the cases you get.
	Tish James in New York was making White House visits.
	She also had a she was someone who was a freakquent person inside the White House, also someone who had campaigned against Donald Trump when she was running for her position that she had said, I'm going to get him.
	Fonnie Willis was going to in Georgia.
	She was going to the White House a couple of times.
	Her deputy Nathan Wade, her boyfriend who is a family lawyer, someone who had no business being on a RICO case, he had two eight hour visits at the White House during the case.
	How could that possibly be?
	Only if he's coordinating.
	In the Stormy Daniels case, the one that ended up in the criminal convictions, there was a guy from the top of the DOJ named Matthew Colangelo who would have been in a spot to be a Supreme Court judge or an FBI director or a cabinet secretary.
	He went down to the Southern District of New York to try to prosecute Donald Trump.
	This is a massive demotion.
	It only would have happened if there was coordination at the top.
	You had another Biden aide who is part of Fannie Wills' team to take out Trump.
	A guy named Jeff DeSantis who had worked in the Biden campaign, then he goes down to Georgia to try to take out Trump.
	Jack Smith met with the Biden White House before the indictments, something that would have been impossible in any other time in history, Dinesh, that that would have been seen as legitimate.
	Every single case, all six of them have a tie to Joe Biden, and that's where the investigation should begin.
	Do you think, Alex, as we look back on these cases, one of the things I remember is we would say to the left, well, look, if you guys had a case against Trump.
	We would expect you to make it, but the fact that you've got ninety plus criminal charges is a pretty clear indication.
	You've got a man who doesn't have a single criminal charge for seventy years of his life and then suddenly he's facing ninety.
	I mean something seems off, right?
	And the left would just go, well, this guy is obviously a habitual criminal and this is the only way that we have to go after him.
	He just commits crimes every time he turns around.
	Now looking back at those six cases, was there even a single one of them that carried any kind of merit or carried any kind of fear on your part that, you know, there's something here, they might be able to get him on this?
	Or are you able to look back and go, you know what?
	These were all equally preposterous.
	Yeah, it's a fantastic question.
	They all were preposterous.
	And even the ones that seemed the worst were somehow even more preposterous the more you look into it.
	The most absurd one was the Eugene Carroll case, which again, by the way, a Biden White House connection, Reid Hoffman funded that case, a mega donor to Democrats and a frequent Biden visitor.
	He went to the Biden White House five times in 2022 alone in the middle of all this stuff.
	So that case was the most absurd one.
	If you read it, Dinesh, I'd be shocked if you weren't laughing when you actually hear what she claims Trump did to her.
	She had no witnesses and apparently she had maintained this dress where it had Trump's DNA on it, but she wouldn't turn it over to the court.
	I mean, the details are just completely ridiculous top to bottom.
	That one's ridiculous.
	The Stormy Daniels one, it was a lapsed offense that where the statute of limitations had come up and they strained to make it a felony because they tried to piggyback it on a campaign violation as if paying hush money, which is not illegal, is somehow a campaign violation, which had never been tried before in a court.
	That case was one of the most absurd and was the only one that.
	ended in a criminal conviction.
	And then the penalty for that, where we're talking, you know, perhaps hundreds of years in jail as a maximum for all of these breaches that were not breaches at all, that was an absurd one.
	The most ridiculous one, of course, was Jack Smith entirely because Jack Smith's job didn't exist.
	It was a fabrication.
	So Jack Smith, in order for that job to be created, it would have required a presidential appointment and a Senate confirmation, neither of which Smith had, which is why Judge Eileen Cannon eventually threw it out.
	It was a total fishing expedition and he had eighteen months to dig into documents, to do interviews, to have subpoena power.
	And he was completely unmoored.
	He answered to no one.
	This is unthinkable in American history and was clearly absurd when you look back on it.
	And yet he was able to operate with impunity for eighteen months until finally the Trump team pieced it together and Judge Cannon threw it out.
	But all of that was designed as a harassment campaign.
	Tish James, I mean, the whole premise was that Trump was undervaluing his properties.
	She said in her court, Arthur Angeron really, the judge said that Mar a Lago is worth eighteen to twenty eight million dollars.
	That's less than one acre properties in Palm Beach are worth.
	Those go for about forty million.
	Trump claimed it was about seven hundred fifty.
	I think Trump underestimated it.
	I think Mar a Lago is worth aboutorth about two billion dollars based off of my research.
	They wanted him to claim it was worth twenty billion.
	I mean, I'm sorry, twenty million.
	It's Janesh, one after the next is infuriating, completely ridiculous, every single one of them.
	Let's turn Alex to what is going on now.
	There seems to be an investigation inside the DOJ to hold some of these Russia collusion orchestrators accountable.
	As you know, there might be some investigations of the Letitia James mortgage shenanigans and extending to Schiff who seems to be have maybe done the same thing, declaring two homes to be his primary residence.
	So it would be somewhat ironic if you actually got them on that particular charge, right?
	But based on what you're saying, the main perpetrators are clearly still at large, right?
	Alvin Bragg is still at large, Eric Garland is still at large, Jack Smith is still at large.
	Now, is there any accountability that can be done now for all that?
	Or is this just a case where you have an expose, you alert the American people to an injustice or a series of injustices against Trump?
	But how do you actually prevent that from happening again?
	Yeah, this is the right question.
	And I've directed people to a lot of different investigations and we've got some really serious people who would be in charge of investigations like this, people like Ed Martin who are fearless of the press and would lead up some of this stuff.
	So I'm optimistic we'll get more investigations.
	We already have two investigations of Jack Smith, which as I laid out, the guy had an unconstitutional job for eighteen months to harass the front runner of the opposition party.
	His wife made documentaries about Michelle Obama, Dinesh.
	I mean, that's where he comes from.
	And he got to investigate Trump for eighteen months in a fake job that should be investigated and it is.
	Letitia James, who campaigned to bust Trump, ignored crime in New York and clearly denied Trump civil rights.
	This is what is known as a conspiracy against rights in the legal world.
	She should be looked into for that and she is.
	So we're seeing the investigations take place.
	There needs to be a half a dozen more and I lay them out in the book.
	I have some teasers at brightbart dot com for people who would like to see where I think the investigation should go next.
	But yes, they need to start and they are starting.
	So I'm actually optimistic here that maybe for once we could actually see some results from investigators.
	But your note of, I guess, light cynicism, which I share, which is that these people don't end up being held to account.
	They all end up running free.
	They all end up getting contributorship on cable news.
	Well, I do think that there is one long term solution here.
	We just have to win every election.
	There's too many liberals on the bench and the way to get them out is to win every election.
	Every judge election, we have to get involved and then we need to hold our elected leaders to account so that we're appointing the most conservative people possible so that there are these types of liberal judges who are clearly activists, who are on the bench, who are trying to do us political harm, the way they did to President Trump and the way they almost deprived us of our right to vote in 2024.
	One heartening thing that I do see Alex is that in the past, and we're seeing it, we're seeing the media try the same tactic now, but it's not working.
	Their tactic now is to say, and this is like Ken Delaney at NBC, you know, that the Republicans are politicizing the judiciary, the Republicans are weaponizing the government against Democrats.
	Now, this is so out there and coming after everything that Biden and Harris did, it's so laughable.
	And yet in an earlier era, I think you know and I know that Republicans would be like, well, we stand duly chastised.
	We should not be like the Democrats.
	We're better than they are.
	We have to act on principle.
	I think that we've learned that the most effective way to stop this gangsterization of the left is to give them a taste of their own medicine.
	That is a temperamental shift and I think on the balance, a very needed one.
	Oh, we are, we are exactly the same place here.
	And this is so, such a great moment for this because we have every benefit of every argument here.
	We can say that, well, it's tip for tip.
	They did this to us.
	They used that we're just asking questions approach with Trump to harass him for years on end.
	So we're completely free to to do that, but we're also righteous with the law.
	And I go through this pretty carefully that each and every one of these cases has clear violations of the law, which is why the book's title Breaking the Law.
	The play on words is that the law itself is broken.
	The left hates law and order, and I go through their history of how they hate law and order, starting with the border and then going to the Soros funded DAs that are making our cities more chaotic.
	They don't regard law and order as anything more than a means for them to achieve more political power.
	And once you have that framework, you don't care what the New York Times writes.
	But I would note, Dinesh, it is interesting, there have been two major pieces in your time since the book came out, accusing the Trump DOJ of politicizing things on their own behalf, which is completely ridiculous if you've been in the head head space I've been in the last year and a half, seeing each and every one of these cases get politicized to try to eliminate their top political competitor.
	Guys, a timely and important book from our friend Alex Marlow.
	It's called Breaking the Law Exposing the Weaponization of America's Legal System against Donald Trump.
	Follow Alex on X at Alex Marlow, the website, alexmarlow dot com dot Check out the book.
	And Alex, thank you very much for joining me.
	Dinesh, you're the best.
	I appreciate you so much.
	I'm continuing my discussion drawing on my book, How An Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader of Reagan's Personality and His Character.
	And I want to begin by talking about Reagan's view of God and of religion.
	And after that, I'm going to talk about Reagan's informality, the way that he dealt with people one on one.
	And again, it's kind of interesting to keep Trump in the background as well because we'll see that there's a sort of overlap between Trump and Reagan's view of religion.
	In fact, I was doing my locals QA yesterday, and by the way, if you haven't signed up for my local channel, do consider doing it.
	Why?
	Because we can have these conversations back and forth, which you can't do in a normal podcast setting.
	You can watch me or listen to me, but you can't interact with me.
	But anyway, we were interacting on the issue of Trump's kind of religiosity and Trump had made some statement basically saying that, you know, very trumpian by the way, you know, if I if I solve this Ukraine war and I bring peace, he goes, Trump goes, and I think he's half joking, but only half joking.
	He goes, well, I think God may keep that in mind in, in, like letting me into heaven.
	And so someone is like, Taneš, you need to let Trump know that good deeds are not going to get him into heaven.
	This is, you know, in other words, someone, one of my interlocutors was asking me to instruct Trump in the Protestant doctrine of salvation by faith alone.
	Well, I shouldn't say Protestant doctrine, it's a Christian doctrine more broadly, but there are nuanced differences between Catholic and Protestant understandings of what that means.
	And I was kind of chuckling and shaking my head as if, you know, you can't instruct Trump in this kind of thing.
	It's very hard to instruct Trump in anything at this in particular is just not going to work.
	But let's look at Reagan by contrast.
	I was friends in the old days with a guy named Joe Sobrin, who was a senior editor of National Review, just a wonderfully humorous and insightful man.
	He lived in Princeton, New Jersey when I lived there as well editing a magazine called the Prospect Magazine published by an alumni group at Princeton.
	By the way, Samuel Alito in those days was one of our subscribers.
	Alito is also a Princeton grad.
	And Sobrin lived in Princeton, we became good friends, and we're talking about Reagan and Joe said the following.
	He said, You know, he said, The reason that Reagan is so effective in communicating moral ideals is precisely because he is not all that devout himself.
	If Reagan were devout, let's just say Reagan was, you know, like the Pope, or let's say Reagan was a person known for his rigorous religiosity, Joe's point is, well, then some people may be able to say, Well, you know what?
	He wants everyone to be like him.
	He wants to enforce a code of morality on everyone.
	He wants to bring the hammer down, if you will, on the country.
	But because Reagan's style is very relaxed, it's very dearing, people get the idea that, you know what, Reagan respects certain norms.
	He may even fall short of them himself.
	But nevertheless, that makes him more like the rest of us.
	And as Joe put it, and this is the line that stuck in my mind and I put it in the book, he goes, he would rather appear to be a sinner than abolish the idea of sin.
	very perceptive remark about Reagan.
	And this is all corroborated by the fact that Reagan was a very irregular churchgoer.
	He didn't go at all when he was president.
	When I say you didn't go at all, he would go in certain ceremonial holidays and so on.
	But somebody once asked him, Hey, why don't you go to church?
	And he goes, Well, it's, you know, it's issues of security and secret service has some concerns.
	But note that those concerns didn't stop Jimmy Carter from going or George Bush or even Bill Clinton would pretty regularly attend St. John's Church, which is across from the White House.
	Now Reagan did go to church back in California once he completed the presidency, but he was kind of funny about all this.
	He was a little superstitious at times, he liked to knock on wood, he carried a good luck penny, and his sense of humor also showed a certain type of slight religious irreverence.
	One of Reagan's stories actually was about a guy who falls off a cliff and as he's plummeting down.
	He grabs a tree limb that's sticking out of the mountain and he's looking down at the canyon like three hundred feet below.
	And so he's in a desperate situation because he's hanging off of this tree.
	And so he looks up and he goes, Lord, if there's anyone up there, give me faith, tell me what to do.
	And then a voice comes from heaven that says, If you have faith, let go.
	And then the guy looks down and he looks up again and he goes, Is there anyone else up there?
	That's Reagan.
	Reagan thought that was extremely funny.ny because it's a case where human nature is pulling in the opposite direction.
	If you have faith, let go is just not what someone wants to hear in that situation.
	But all this being said, Reagan would insist that at the Republican National Convention there is a minute of silence and there is a, or that there's a prayer.
	Pastors would sometimes come and offer to pray over Reagan.
	And Reagan not only allowed that, but he was quite moved.
	Reagan kind of dabbled in religious prophecy.
	He would ask Billy Graham things like, well, when do you think the world is going to end?
	was an end.
	So he was interested in the apocalypse.
	Reagan believed the founding of the state of Israel was a providential event.
	And I think this is the important thing about Reagan, his personal lightheartedness about religion, the fact that his common word for God was the man upstairs, which again shows that whimsicality.
	But Reagan was quite serious about the fact that he believed in the teachings of Christ.
	He was once asked about whom he admired most and he goes the man from Galilee.
	So that's that's Reagan.
	And I think more telling, he believed in the providential hand of God over America.
	And this is a belief that Reagan shared with Lincoln and shared with George Washington before him.
	So that's a little window into Reagan's religiosity.
	Now let me talk about his personality.
	Here's one thing Reagan had in common with Trump.
	He could talk to people from all walks of life.
	He was at ease talking to Prince Charles as Trump would be talking to King Charles, but at the same time Reagan could talk just as easily to a guy at a construction site, Trump the same.
	And Reagan would talk to secret service agents who came from very different walks of life than Reagan.
	And I remember when I was in the White House, I would see very strange people walking in the hallways, and these people were all very comfortable.
	Now I'm not saying that these people were all personally interacting with Reagan, but they were there for some sort of White House event at one time or another.
	So who are some of these people?
	Well, one day I walk down the hallway andway in their habits.
	Another time I'll see like a bunch of like Soviet they were called refusniks.
	They were like Soviet dissidents with like long beards and some of them were monks and others were just writers and poets.
	Another time I see, you know, Afghan veterans, in other words, people who Afghans who had lost limbs in the war with the Soviet Union.
	Then I see like the sons of Italy, Fulbright scholars from Africa, a bunch of black guys in suits.
	And all these people were coming to the White House on one occasion or another.
	Typically I would say they would go to a briefing and Reagan would stop by, say a few words, so their interaction with Reagan was minimal, but nevertheless, Reagan knew how to talk to all these different kinds of people.
	That's the point I'm getting at.
	Reagan meets the Prime Minister of Japan, a man named Yasuhiro Nakasoni.
	And this is a very formal guy who gives Reagan a very slight classic Japanese bow.
	And Reagan doesn't really want to bow, so Reagan and Reagan wants to know what he should call this guy.
	So he says this, What does your wife call you at home?
	Because Reagan didn't want to call him Yasu hero.
	So the guy goes, Well, my wife calls me Yasu.
	So Reagan goes, Yasu?
	I'm Ron.
	This is such an American thing to do, very Reaganite, very informal.
	And Reagan was kind of the same way with Gorbachev.
	Reagan would tell Gorbachev stuff that Gorbachev did not expect to hear, and not expect to hear, especially from Reagan.
	To give you one example, Reagan and Gorbachev are chatting.
	And think of it, these are two world leaders there to settle some really important issues.
	And Reagan says to Gorbachev, he says, he says, I got to tell you about this article I just read in People Magazine about a man who weighed over a thousand pounds.
	And this guy was trying to get to the bathroom, but because he was so large, he got stuck in the doorway.
	And Reagan goes, It really frightened him and he immediately went on a diet.
	And you can see Gorbachev's face and Gorbachev doesn't really know what to say, so he says something like, well, is this a real fact?
	And Reagan goes, oh yeah, it's in People magazine.
	It's true.
	It's true for sure.
	And so now, again, to someone listening, academic or some media, I'm going to be like, well, this is typical Reagan indulging in this kind of nonsense.
	But Reagan did not hesitate to engage in very colloquial familiarities with people.
	He was very chatty with Margaret Thatcher.
	In fact, his joke, and this was a joke, is that she was the quote other woman in his life.
	And he also didn't like to be scolded by her, which he was not by the way above doing.
	Margaret Thatcher was known to and so one time, for example, Frank Carlucci, one of Reagan's top aides, said to him, mister President, Reagan was about to take a certain action, and Carlucci said to Reagan, If you do this, Margaret Thatcher's going to be on the phone.
	And Reagan was like, Oh, I don't want that.
	As if to say, like, no, no, no, I don't want to be, I don't want to get a call from Margaret Thatcher, you know, to lecture me.
	I'm not going to do that.
	whatever it was, obviously something quite minor.
	And a...
	At one another occasion, Reagan is calling a Democratic congressman.
	This was in the days when you had some reasonable Democrats and Reagan was trying to persuade him to come over to Reagan's side on a particular vote.
	And when he called the guy, he realized that the guy was in Australia and Reagan was calling him at 3 in the morning.
	Reagan didn't know that, but the moment he found out, this is Reagan, he goes, Oh, he goes, Congressman so and so.
	He goes, It's not really me.
	It's an imposter pretending to be me.
	I'm sure the real president will be calling you back at a more decent hour.
	So this is Reagan just being very genial and witty and apologetic.
	And Reagan had the ability to do this even with Democrats.
	Jimmy Carter invited Reagan to speak at the dedication of the Carter Center in Atlanta, and Reagan gave such a touching and magnanimous tribute to Carter.
	Think about it, these two had quite bitterly contested the nineteen eighty election that after Reagan finished speaking, Carter came up to him and said this.
	He said, I think I now understand more clearly why you won in november nineteen eighty and I lost.

▲