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Aug. 25, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
55:11
THE RETRIBUTION Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1154
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Coming up, I'm going to talk about the FBI raid on John Bolton overdue in my opinion, but I'm also going to talk about more broadly the ethics of retribution, or we can even say the ethics of revenge.
I'm going to dive into the roots of Kraka Barrels bizarre.
decision to dump its logo, it turns out there's a lot more behind that.
And film writer and director Ben Pauling joins me.
We're going to talk about his new film on child trafficking.
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John Bolton, yes, that John Bolton has been raided by the FBI.
This happened over the weekend.
And it is the first time that one of the anti-Trump, or in this case more accurately, never Trump, someone who's now allied with the Democratic Party, allied with the people who went after Trump.
And so finally we're getting here a bit of I'm not going to hesitate to use words like payback or retribution.
I'm not even really afraid of the word revenge.
Now these words are loaded and they carry a connotation, but I'm going to use these words for the very reason that you are afraid of them.
And when you think about it, you see that these words and these terms are fully and justly applicable.
Now revenge is something that is an unpleasant thing, and it's an unpleasant thing because not because the act is wrong, but because private people shouldn't take the law into their own hands.
So let's say for example that somebody comes and harms a member of your family, you go out there and take a baseball bat and go and harm them.
Well, that's revenge, but it's also vigilanteism and you shouldn't do that because we have laws.
And I get that.
But we're not talking about that.
Why?
Because we are now talking about actions taken by the state itself.
So it makes no sense to take our private opprobrium or concerns about vigilanteism and private justice and somehow apply it to something that is not private.
This is a public agency doing the raid.
And it was the full scale raid with lots of FBI agents, apparently a search that lasted hours and hours.
Bolton was cleared out.
He finally was able to return to his house.
If you looked at a picture of his wife, she looked like she had seen a ghost.
And a little part of me, at least in an earlier era, would have been a little bit sympathetic to these people, but I'm not.
I think this is all well deserved.
In fact, I would go further and say we need to see a lot more of this.
This is only the beginning.
To quote Churchill, it's not the end, it's not the beginning of the end, it's maybe the end of the beginning.
But the idea that this should somehow all cease because on principle we shouldn't do this kind of thing, this is the kind of nonsensical talk that I don't want to give a lot of importance to.
Although I'm about to discuss some critics who say that the Republican Party is somehow, you know, two wrongs don't make a right, that's Chuck Todd, I'll come back and talk about that.
Now, it's important to stress that Bolton hasn't been charged with anything.
He's not facing yet any indictment or any charges.
The investigation precedes that, and it's an investigation over classical classified documents.
So isn't this interesting?
Trump had a raid, Mar Lago, over classified documents, and now Bolton has a raid over classified documents.
It's very interesting that people who claim that classified documents are a very serious matter when the Trump raid occurred.
are now suddenly basically acting like classified documents don't really matter.
And this is just purely targeting a Bolton.
And you know, this is just Trump going after the people he doesn't like and Bolton's been a prominent critic and that's why he was raided.
Well, how do you know any of that?
Do you know for a fact if Bolton is in possession of illicit classified documents he's not supposed to have?
No.
So the people saying this don't really care about classified documents.
They never did.
They never did before and they don't now.
This is purely a case where they are trying to criticize Trump for doing that.
that which they have been doing for a long time.
It's okay, in other words, for them to do it.
It's not okay for Trump to do it.
Here's Chuck Todd.
The virus killing democracy right now is this two wrongs make a right mindset revenge over principles.
Now this tweet is so interesting that it requires a little bit of dissection.
I'm going to dissect it into two parts.
Let's look at the first part.
The virus killing democracy right now.
So according to Chuck Todd, the threat to democracy comes from this two wrongs make a right syndrome.
Now, what is the first?
wrong?
Seemingly, the first wrong was the raid on Trump, the raid on Mar Lago.
And basically what Chuck Todd is saying is given that was wrong, we can't make it right by doing another raid on, say, Bolton.
But when did Chuck Todd ever say that the Mar Lago raid was wrong?
He never did.
Not one time did he intimate that.
Not only that, he egged it on.
So did many others.
So it's important to realize what they're really saying.
They don't really believe that was a wrong.
They're only saying that now.
They believe that was a right.
wrong.
So in other words, when they go after their political opponents, it's right.
When they are gone after, it's wrong because it's them.
This double standard is built into everything that they say.
And so when they say revenge over principles, what is the principle here?
Is the principle really that we should not do what the other side is doing?
We should let them do it, let them get away with their wrong, and then don't do to them the same thing in order to deter them from doing more of it so that they will feel inspired to keep doing it to you because they know that they will never be held accountable because you are too principled being Republican to ever act the same way.
So this is the mindset, if you will, of the left.
Now, let's think about John Bolton.
What did he do with these classified documents?
What we do know is that John Bolton wrote a book.
And he wrote a book that the government actually tried to stop him from publishing.
but a judge told him that it was okay for him to publish it.
The judge gave him permission, but the judge did say this in his opinion.
I'm now going to read.
Upon reviewing the classified materials as well as the declarations filed on the public docket, the court is persuaded that defendant Bolton likely jeopardized national security by disclosing classified information in violation of his non disclosure agreement obligations.
This is the court saying that Bolton A possessed classified information and B misused it by revealing it in his book.
Now you might say, well, why'd the court let him publish the book in that case, apparently the court decided that Bolton's First Amendment rights now that he's no longer in the government outweigh the dangers that he's posing to national security.
So the court came out in Bolton's favor, but it did admit that he had abused classified information.
The other thing that's interesting is that Bolton himself was a strong champion of the FBI raid on Mar Lago.
Here's what he said.
There's no evidence there's a partisan motive here.
He went on to say, in effect, trust the professionals in the justice department.
Again, I think everybody ought to calm down and let the process work its way through.
So the remarkable thing here is that Bolton is actually showing us the correct way to respond not only to the Trump raid, which is what he was referring to, but to the raid on him, because after all, if there are all these professionals in the justice department, if you can really trust the process, you know, grand jury, the raid, the grand jury, the indictment, the prosecution, hey, the jury can be trusted.
If our system is working beautifully, then Bolton has nothing to worry about.
We should not talk about any partisan motive because there clearly can't be one.
The professionals of the DOJ would never allow it, and we should quote, let the process work its way through.
Now, let's talk a little bit about this issue of retribution.
This is the other thing that Chuck Todd mentioned.
Revenge, he says, not principle.
But I want to argue that revenge is a principle.
Retribution is kind of a more polite term than revenge, but it has the same meaning.
And what is its meaning?
What is the meaning of the term revenge?
The meaning is tit for tat.
Now, I don't know if you're familiar with game theory, but game theory is this whole academic field in which you discuss a complicated situation in which you have essentially a prisoner's dilemma, if you will.
There are two people who are accused of conspiring together to have committed a crime.
And the way the game theory works, and I won't go into the details of it, it's basically something like this that if you both stay silent and don't confess, they'll never get you because they require one of you to confess.
But on the other hand, each person is facing a lighter penalty if he rats out the other.
So even though the point of the game theory is that even though it's in your interest to keep your mouth shut, the problem with that is that the other guy might rate you out and then you get a long sentence and he gets a short sentence or none at all.
Now, people have tried, academics have tried for a long time to figure out, is there a solution to this prisoner's dilemma?
How do you create a kind of equilibrium that causes this process to kind of come to a halt, come to a balance or an equilibrium.
And the political scientist Robert Axelrod many years ago found out that there is really one way to do it.
And that way, and this is circling back to my topic here of revenge and retribution is called tit for tat.
So tit for tat means that when you're playing these games of the prisoner's dilemma, so to speak, you don't become a cheat and rat the other guy out all the time.
Because think about it, if I rat you out and you rat me out, we're both going to get a severe sentence because we'll each testify against each other.
each testify against the other.
How do we produce, if you will, a situation in which there is a stable balance, in which in a sense we can cooperate to our mutual benefit.
And the answer is tit for tat, which means you play the game in such a way that if somebody else strikes at you, you don't over respond, you just strike back tit for tat.
If you strike at them, they strike back at you, tit for tat.
But if you don't strike at them, they won't strike at you either.
So tit for tat, which is basically nothing more than we're going to do to you what you did to us is in fact the solution to the problem.
It is the way to get out of the conundrum of the prisoner's dilemma.
Another way to put it is that retribution is simple justice.
In fact, I go even further.
Our entire legal system is based on retribution.
You do something wrong, what does the state do?
Well, in a sense it takes its revenge on you.
It gives you some of the taste of the suffering that you imposed on somebody else.
You went and did a home invasion on some other guy, you get five years in prison.
What is that called?
Retribution.
It's actually not even wrong to call it revenge.
What it's not is deterrence.
Deterrence, in fact, has nothing to do with justice.
Because imagine if I were to say to you, you know, you did a home invasion on some other guy, let's call him Tom.
And so to solve this problem, I'm going to not ask whether Tom suffered and how I should make you suffer to match Tom's suffering.
I'm not even going to go there.
I'm just going to ask what is going to deter some other guy, let's call him Pablo, from raiding another person's home, let's call her Jane.
What does that have to do with this situation?
How does that set this situation right?
So in other words, the point I'm getting at is deterrence is worthless from the point of view of consoling or making whole the victim.
It's also totally worthless from the point of view of making the perpetrator pay for his bad actions.
The only way to think about justice in that context is, you guessed it, retribution, also known as revenge.
And so if the Trump people now are exacting some retribution, which is to say some revenge.
And look, when I use these terms, I'm not talking about the legality of things.
It's important to realize here, I'm not just saying let's just take revenge and make some trumped up legal charge against Bolton, not at all.
The moral issue, which is retribution, is separate from the legal issue.
The moral issue is, yes, it is right to show some of these never Trump people who perpetrated and cheered and supported the law fair against Trump, give them a taste of their own medicine.
Legally, you still have to find a statute, a law, something that they did wrong according to the law.
So I'm not suggesting that we circumvent the law or ignore the law.
Ultimately, the Democrats were trying to get Trump using the law, and I'm saying we should try to get them also using the law.
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Have you been following this controversy involving the restaurant chain called Cracker Barrel?
Well, it's not just a restaurant chain, it also has a kind of store which sells all kinds of weird stuff, but a lot of it having a patina of Americana.
I've been to Cracker Barrel probably a few times in my life.
Debbie, I think, said it's been years since she set foot in a Cracker Barrel.
Although she does claim that dangling from one of our Christmas trees is a Cracker Barrel ornament, a kind of old fashioned like log cabin ornament.
that is our sole connection to the Cracker Barrel chain.
But Cracker Barrel evokes a kind of older America.
They used to have a logo of this kind of old guy and Cracker Barrel of course is a kind of a barrel or drum and it all looked very nineteenth century ish and that was the vibe of Cracker Barrel.
This is going to be like good food like your grandma or great grandma used to make.
And now this kind of woke, bespectacled forty something is the new is the CEO of Cracker Barrel and her marketing director basically.
Basically, it looks like her.
You're basically talking about this matriarchy of woke urban women who run these companies or run some of these companies now.
And they probably have not grown up on Cracker Barrel.
I don't even know if they've ever eaten in a Cracker Barrel.
And they decide to change the whole place.
And so they change not just the logo, which now just basically is a kind of yellow patch, but replacing the old man is gone.
The nineteenth century feel is gone.
And even the look of the stores is changed.
It looks more like some LGBTQ loft in Soho.
and I'm using the term LGBTQ advisedly, apparently there's been a kind of gay infiltration of Cracker Barrel.
Here is some of this history, which I didn't even know about.
In other words, what I'm getting at is this change of logo isn't something they just decided to do as a kind of one off.
It's apparently part of a lawsuit or scandal that went back to the nineteen nineties.
They were accused of discriminating against gays, and so they brought in the human rights campaign.
which has a kind of classification of how favorable these companies are to gays.
And so Cracker Barrel got a failing grade.
And so they started with these major LGBTQ reforms and importing all this DEI, woke ideology, progressivism.
So this guy Steve Smotherman is apparently a kind of corporate leader who's pushing the LGBTQ.
But apparently they were pulling these so called controversial items.
I mean, oh yeah, you can't have a man and a woman.
It's too heterosexual.
They're blocking certain groups having dining events., they're funding Pride parades.
So in other words, what I'm getting at is all this was the backdrop, the backdrop against which, a decades long backdrop against which this latest move has been made.
And look, I think they're going to ruin their brand very much like Bud Light.
A couple of people on X have posted, hey, listen, why is Cracker Barrel doing this stupid stuff?
Have they actually wanted to strengthen their brand, bring in increased customer loyalty, which is a key thing that restaurants try to do?
Here's a guy.
If I run Cracker Barrel.rel, I'd save it in a week.
They should hire this guy, by the way.
Kids who say yes, ma'am, eat free on Sunday.
Bluegrass music after six PM.
Real butter only, no margarine.
Families with four plus kids get cobbler on the house.
Civil War trivia night, losers wash the dishes.
No ESG, meaning no climate change or any of that nonsense.
Here's another guy, kind of along the same vein.
If I was made Cracker Barrel's CEO, I would do things like they should hire this guy too.
Fiddle player on Friday night.
Men in plaid and women in long skirts.
get a free baked potato with their meal.
Families with three or more kids and both parents get twenty percent discount.
American history night with quizzes and prizes.
So these are people who are telling this restaurant, by the way, for free.
They spend all this money, millions of dollars to bring in all these one consulting firm, another consulting firm, then the two consulting firms disagree, so they bring in a third consulting firm to arbitrate between the two consulting firms.
It's all a massive ripoff scheme, and it's all staffed by these activists, leftists, and gays pushing this agenda.
Oh yeah, you need to go Pride.
Let's, you know, maybe we'll find some new customers at the Pride parade.
So here's Cracker Barrel just immolating, decimating its own brand.
And sure enough, I look to see how's their stock doing and just in the last few days since they launched this new brand, their stock nosedive down something like, if I'm going based on memory here, but something like 100 million dollars just disintegrated in terms of value for the company.
So they need to rethink these w ignorant matriarchies.
These companies need to think about what it is that, you know, the old saying, like what it is that brought you to the dance?
What it is that made your company into what it is?
That's why people eat there.
That's why people come there.
And you want to take advantage of that and build on that rather than essentially erasing it, rather than burning it down.
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Hey guys, the topic of child trafficking is a really serious and profound one, but not one that I think most people, well, including me, understand all that well.
And I have as a guest today a new guest, Ben Pauling.
He is a writer and director of a film called Dream.
The website is dreamfilm.us And the film centers on a young man named Ray who has a dream and is kind of drawn into this perverse world of child trafficking.
Apparently the film was inspired by a real dream that led to it, and it's caused Ben and also his co-director, who is Samuel Pauling, to really dive into this issue and become active, not just on the creative side, but also in the issue itself, in helping to solve this problem.
Ben, welcome.
Thank you for joining me.
And let's begin with, well, let's hear a little bit about who you are and tell us about how you had this dream.
What was your dream about and what made you think of it as, hey, this is an idea for a film.
Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Dinesh.
Well, for to start with, I I'm a filmmaker.
I've been working in film since I was, you know, a child first into acting.
And then I started getting into wanting to tell stories with my family when I was just at the end of high school.
My older brother started getting behind the camera.
My dad was working with a reality TV production company, and we embarked on the mission to go forth and tell our own stories and start our own company.
And so we'd been working on that for several years, developing stories, working with different producers on writing and crafting our skills.
And it was actually during COVID, right at the onset of the world going silent.
I really started to hear about this issue a lot more.
It was in 2020.
And I remember seeing a documentary talking about this issue.
And I started to notice just on the small print of news stories, these rescues that were taking place.
And I started to wonder why that wasn't getting coverage more, why that wasn't headlining news that this was taking place.
And I remember August 2020, it was August 6th.
I went to sleep and I I had this dream and I was standing at the gate of this industrial warehouse looking into what seemed to be just a industrial business security gated fence.
I looked into the blackout windows and I just felt behind these walls were children that were just crying out.
And I looked to the right of me and there's a man standing at the gate and he was asking me what I was doing there.
And he started looking at me and asking me, you know, questions.
And he started coming towards me like he was going to kill me.
And I remember waking up from this dream and just having this vivid impression on my heart that this This was a real occasion.
and that this was going on and I immediately ended up texting my brother and other people thinking that this was maybe a dream from God to do something about it.
And so I went driving around looking for this place for my dream hours just, you know, because in the dream it was along train tracks.
So I was driving along the outskirts of town, train tracks, and looking for maybe, you know, a location that resembled this place.
And as I was out there looking for this, that this story came to me.
And I was looking for a story at the time.
I was, you know, asking, praying, you know, what is, what is the, what is the story that I'm supposed to work on, you know, and what is, because I really feel compelled to only do things that are, you know, really important and have a purpose behind them and I can really feel like I'm called to do something and I remember just in that moment that that was just an answer to prayer I felt compelled that this was the story I was supposed to tell and I immediately went writing this story and I was going to make a short film I was just going to get
this this imprint of my dream and the exact vision that I had for what this was supposed to lead to out on the paper and it soon became a bigger story and then and we we transitioned it into a feature-long script and within a week of doing that I sent it out to an A-list actor and And that person responded within a day.
And then we were now in conversations and planning to shoot this film through Hollywood traditional financing and we got financiers on it.
and subtly i started to notice that people were kind of wanting to change the story you know let's change it from child trafficking to drug trafficking or let's kind of like not really talk about that part of the story that's not really good for marketing and this is all pre sign of freedom so that's been sitting on the shelf and so One month before filming, that person pulled out and we were kind of wondering what we were going to do then.
Then soon after the financing pulled out and I was just praying and we had this trailer that we had shot that was crafted to help get this person on board.
And soon I started pitching that around Hollywood in hopes to get other people to finance it.
And so a year goes by and I'm compelled to go on fast beginning of January 2023.
And it was right as I embarked on that fast that I started to watch more video games.
videos and I started to do more research and I started to uncover what what ended up being something I put in my film which was another rescue story of a man who's rescued over 11,000 kids his name's Troy Brewer out of Texas with his organization they've got 18 I think it's 20 now something rescue centers around the world and it's all started with food banks and then ministry and then they would just rescue these kids along the way and they would buy these kids and
And they would start these redemption ranches and homes where they kind of set up this whole thing to where a lot of these world governments have started to partner with them because they're really good at building infrastructures of what takes place after the kids are rescued and building the homes and building the ecosystems to where they're going to be having a forever home afterwards.
and just putting the right people in place to where the kids are going to have an actual life to where they're healed and they're restored and they have a lot of them have grown up to be doctors and just really successful people throughout the 28 years they've been doing this.
So I see a story from this guy about this little girl and a dream he had.
And there was one of these little kids that was rescued in Columbia, nine-year-old girl, mute, wouldn't talk to anyone was so traumatized from everything she'd been through and he had a dream about her when he saw her picture he had a dream and in his dream he was walking into the rescue center she ran up to him he said it's okay i'm your papa troy it's okay for you to start talking now she she gives him a hug she starts talking she's just totally healed from all this trauma in his dream and he wakes up from his dream and
And he leaves his anniversary in Florida and flies down to Columbia to see if it's going to take place.
And it happens just like his dream.
This girl ended up being totally healed, totally set free.
And he's sharing these pictures of her and before and after.
And I was compelled by the story.
And I just knew there was something to it.
I added this character into my story, this little girl.
And so seven months ago, I ended up posting that trailer that I had been holding on to for for so long i just felt compelled that the people that were going to tell this story or help us tell it were everyday people and so i really wasn't you know having any presence online or anything.
I just posted it on an account and, you know, within an hour, 100,000 people, within a day, a million people saw it, then two million, then within a week, 4.6 million views on the trailer and that opened up all these doors to news outlets and podcasts and different people within the child rescue field and my brother called up that guy that had that story of that girl that I wrote my story and right as he calls him up to tell him that we want to help our film with
the work he's doing he lets us know that that's awesome he loves films and you know uh he's kind of caught up right now there's this little girl they rescued seven months earlier that was just retrafficked and it happened to be that same little girl the cartel came in and they shot the caretaker and they took the little girl, girl ripped her from the home.
And that had never happened in 28 years of them doing this kind of work.
And so I knew that wasn't a coincidence that, you know, this little girl that I had been inspired by wrote my story.
Now we're hearing on the phone, right, as she's been trafficked.
And we, because the trailer going viral right in that very week, we had connections with these other people that were ex-military, special ops, these kinds of people.
And we connected his in ministry with those people we got to be the connecting point between that little girl's rescue at 10 years old right on her 10th birthday they found out she was sold to two different cartels and they tracked her down and miraculously rescued her for the second time.
And it was through sharing that story that on different platforms and we became an investor and partner on this that we started fundraising to make this film.
Ben, let's talk a little bit about the issue here just because I want people to have a clear sense of you mentioned the cartels, you mentioned people, these little kids being trafficked and retrafficked.
Is this all a global type of ring in which these children are used for what?
Sex?
Is it slavery to put them to work?
Is it a form of sexual molestation?
Is it a combination of the two?
What is going on?
Do people actually buy these kids or do they treat it like a form of prostitution?
I'm trying to get a I mean, I realize it's a very disturbing and sordid topic, but what actually happens here?
Yeah.
Well, I think the word trafficking has a lot of different meanings but in this specific instance and with this little girl she was sexually trafficked and then she was she wouldn't be responsive so they put her into labor trafficking and then thankfully that didn't take place the second time she was trafficked it was just labor trafficking but that was over in a different country you know and so our story focuses on the fact of americans the fact that this issue
is stemming and it's feeding and the demand is coming from us here in America and by us I mean the fact that this issue a lot of these people that are going going over to these other countries and paying for these kids are, and that's fact, that's how our partner Troy got into this rescue mission.
This field was he was over there in a different country helping with food banks, and a lady brought him two kids because it's typical that it's usually a middle aged man from America that's going over there to buy these kids.
And so she thought he was one of them.
And so this is an issue that's taking place around the world, and it's for all sorts of reasons.
And particularly in our country, there's those, you know, kind of scum of the earth bottom barrel, just pedophiles.
files, but there's a whole deeper, darker world at play that is operating at every level and it's operating at the highest levels when it comes to this issue.
And it's for, I believe it's much deeper than just simply a, you know, kind of deviant desire.
It's a dark, it's an evil that's taking place.
And they use these kids for a lot of evil, you know, things that when it comes to, you know, a lot of satanic ritual type things that are taking place.
And it's really the whole system is feeding it.
And our system has been feeding it for a very long time.
And it hasn't been brought to the light in a lot of these kids, you know, in the foster care system.
And obviously now, because of the border, all those kids that went missing and they're trying to find them.
But when they are finding them, I mean, these kids are so messed up.
That's the things.
I mean, Troy, you know, he deals with all of these stories and all these kids and they come and they tell him, you know, what's been done to them.
And when they, when they're telling them, you know, some of the things.
that these kids share after being rescued is hard for anyone to believe.
And it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's as dark as you can imagine when, when you, when you want to, I can't even imagine a lot of the stuff I've heard.
And, and Ben, is the goal here to tell the story?
I mean, I'm imagining if one were to, you know, give a lecture on this topic, it would make it difficult for people to sit there and like listen, right?
So is it the case here that by creating a kind of, I won't call it an adventure story, but it's a kind of a journey into this dark world where you based on a dream., you then discover that there's a lot that's real behind the substance of the dream.
You're drawn into that world and you play the lead character who is making these discoveries.
Your goal is to like alert people to this dark world that you know, almost a world that people don't get to see behind the curtain.
So it's a it's a consciousness awareness raising enterprise, isn't it?
Talk about how you want to take this film from here.
I've seen the trailer.
It's riveting.
It's very well done.
You want to take it across the finish line.
talk a little bit about the actual mechanics from here forward about how do we get this film out?
I want to try to do my part to help you do that.
Thank you, Dinesh.
Yeah.
I mean, this story really is, as you said, it's to bring awareness and especially bring awareness that this is taking place in our country and that it's up to us to step forward with supporting the people that are doing this.
It's not the government's job.
It's our job.
And it's something that we as Americans need to realize someone else, if it's not us, who else is going to come up, who else is going to do this, who else is going to come to the rescue?
And then putting in place at the end of the film, clear pathways for people to partner and understand how to get involved and how to make an impact.
And then, you know, we want to talk about where this film's at in production.
We've raised a big percentage of our budget through tax-deductible donations, people through a partner organization that has been willing to partner with us.
And through that, those proceeds made off of those donations, the percentage that that makes up of the budget is actually going to be going right back into the fight and it's going to be going to partners that we have like Troy Brewer and others that are coming alongside, especially here in the US.
And so our goal with this is to get this into every theater in America and then internationally.
And, you know, like I shared before, millions of people, 18 million people have seen the trailer.
We've raised $3 million so far.
We're needing to raise another two.
So we're hoping to make this film for $5 million.
and then bring this to theaters.
And so we're still in the middle of raising right now because of the fact this has been a fully regular everyday person funded project.
All of our investors are everyday people and all of our donors are everyday people that are outside of Hollywood, that are outside of that agenda and are really coming around us to be able to do something that is really unique has touched a struck a chord with with people already and for it to maintain that uh that purity and that that non-compromise to where this goes out and it it says exactly what it needs to say and it makes the impact that it needs to make and so right now production going back in another
several weeks and we're hoping to raise the additional funds uh on our on our website uh dreamfilm.us to be able to finish that and get this out there.
Good stuff, guys.
The website is dreamfilm.us.
You should watch the trailer, it's really captivating.
You can find out more about the film.
I've been talking to Ben Pauling, the writer and director.
Ben, it's a great pleasure, and thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you, Derek.
I'm discussing my book, How An Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader, and we are now in the last part of the book.
We've discussed the policy side.
We're now talking about Reagan the Man.
The chapter is called The Man Behind the Mask.
And then there's a really final chapter.ter, which is called Spirit of a Leader.
So we'll close out this discussion and this topic with that chapter coming next.
But the last section of this chapter called The Man Behind the Mask focuses on Reagan's family.
So let me talk about that.
Reagan was very close to his wife, his second wife, Nancy Reagan.
They were not the same type of people at all.
They were different, but interestingly, they suited each other.
And not only did they suit each other, they appeared to be in a way that some of us found a little bit strange.
Some people even found it a bit too much.
They were a kind of a self contained unit.
The Reagan's own daughter with Nancy, Patty Davis, once said, Ronald and Nancy are two halves of a circle.
And that's a good way to think of them.
But the bad side of it, the reason I mentioned the strangeness of it is everybody else was outside the circle, including, by the way, Patty Davis.
Now the press was highly critical of Nancy O. She's, you know, Mary Antoinette.
She wants new China in the White House.
she wears all these fancy clothes, came out a little bit later that she consulted an astrologer or so.
All of this made her seem not only like she was withdrawn from the ordinary person, but a little bit of a cook to boot.
But I think these criticisms of Nancy were unfair.
Remember she came out of Hollywood.
She once dated Clark Gable.
So she was elegant, she was stylish, and by the way, she was not more ostentatious about the White House than say someone like Jackie Kennedy, whom the press adored and almost worshipped.
Nancy Reagan was not superstitious throughout her life.
It was really after the assassination attempt by Hinkley that Nancy began with the astrological hocus pocus.
And it's very important to realize that even though the press insinuated to the contrary, remember Kitty Kelly, the gossip driving author, implying that somehow Reagan's policies were driven by this astrology nonsense, it had no effect, never came up in any policy discussion, certainly none that I am aware of.
Nancy Reagan, I think, was also wrongly suspected to be someone who was driving Reagan's policies in any sense.
And the truth of it is that she didn't care about that.
She was a socialite.
Her world was the world of Betsy Bloomingdale.
It was the world of the runway.
It was the world of gossip and Hollywood and the arts.
Bob Hope once quipped, Ronnie's hero is Calvin Coolidge and Nancy's is Calvin Klein.
I like that line.
I've used it myself.
And it captures, I think, the essence of Nancy Reagan.
She was uninterested in tax rates, marginal tax rates, the laugh for a curve, the Reagan doctrine, missile defenses, all of this was foreign to her.
Now, not to say that Nancy stayed out of Reagan's business.
She was a politician's wife, she understood it well, and she played the part very well.
Here's a scene in nineteen eighty four.
The Soviet diplomat, very seasoned diplomat Gromiko, Andre Gromiko, pulls Nancy to the side and he says, Does your husband believe in peace?
She goes, Of course.
And then he says to her, You should whisper the word.
peace in his ear every night.
And Nancy said, Yes, I will.
And she goes, and I'll also whisper it in your ear.
And then she leans over to him with a smile and she says in his ear, peace.
So this is Nancy showing that she can't be rolled.
She can't be bullied, even by a career diplomat like Gromiko.
When Nancy got involved in issues, it was really mainly to protect Reagan.
Reagan was really her cause.
When Nancy thought that Reagan was becoming unpopular for some reason or another, she would urge him to moderate his position on things.
Not because she cared about the positions, but she cared about his reputation.
So she thought he was being a little bit too severe on abortion.
She said, You need to moderate, but Reagan said no.
She also didn't like the term evil empire.
She thought, Stop using that term.
Reagan said no.
She thought strategic missile defense, she had been reading all this stuff.
It's a pie in the sky.
It's never going to work.
She told Reagan, maybe you should move away from that.
Reagan did not do that.
So it's not that Reagan, because of his affection for Nancy, was somehow always surrendering to her will.
On the contrary, he believed correctly that he knew better about these kinds of issues.
Now, it's true that when you had personnel that were making Reagan look bad, Nancy would press to get rid of them.
When somebody said something controversial, made Reagan look like he had all these weirdos working for him, Nancy would try to get that person pushed out.
In fact, one time she went to Vice President Bush, I think I got this from my friend Peter Robinson, who was a Bush speech writer, and Nancy goes, you know, let's you not my role.
And Nancy goes, it is exactly your role.
So this is the kind of backroom tiffs that would occur in the White House Nancy pressuring George HW Bush.
But one guy that Nancy did not like at all was the chief of staff, Don Regan.
Now Regan and Regan got along pretty well.
They were two Irishmen.
They had the same sense of humor.
They were kind of from the same generation.
But you know what?
Nancy won in the end.
Don Regan was out.
And Ed Rollins, who was political pundit and I think at one time ran the Republican National Committee.
He said something I always remembered.
He's like, Your chances for survival, meaning in the White House or in the administration, are always better if Nancy Reagan has no idea who you are.
I think the good news is that Nancy Reagan had no idea who I was, at least not until much later when I wrote a book on Reagan.
In fact, I think I've mentioned on the podcast I gave a speech at the Reagan Library and sitting in the first or second row was none other than Nancy Reagan, so she completely knew who I was later, but this was by the way the mid nineteen nineties.
The children were a bit of a problem, not all of them, but two out of four, maybe arguably.
three out of four.
Patty Davis didn't like Reagan's policies at all.
In fact, she didn't even want to use the name Reagan for that reason.
She's like, I want to identify with my mother's name, Nancy, Nancy Davis.
There's a funny story about Michael Reagan, the adopted son, who I've had as a guest on the podcast.
And when Reagan was governor of California, Michael Reagan was working at a car wash.
And his friends were really puzzled.
They're like, Isn't your dad the governor?
And Michael Reagan goes, Yeah.
And then they'd be like, Well, doesn't he help you out financially?
And Michael Reagan was like, actually, no.
And many later, when Michael Reagan was a successful talk show host and people would call in and they would protest the kind of do it yourself philosophy implied by Reaganomics.
And Michael Reagan goes, hey, listen, don't complain to me.
I've been living under Reaganomics all my life.
In other words, my dad's a cheapskate.
He expects me to pull my own weight.
He doesn't just fund me because I'm his son and he has the money.
He wants me to make it on my own.
So this philosophy that Reagan is advocating in public, he's also practicing that in private.
Now, Reagan was not all that close, I think it's fair to say, with any of his kids.
And when Ron junior, the youngest son with Nancy, decided to become a dancer, Reagan tried to object, but Ron was obstinate, he was determined to do it.
And apparently Michael Reagan Michael Reagan told me this that he said that Reagan also tried to stop Ron junior from moving in with his girlfriend.
And then Reagan was like, I can't make him do it.
And then Michael Reagan was, well, dad, there's good news and bad news.
Reagan goes, what do you mean?
Michael goes, Well, the good news is we know he isn't gay.
And Reagan kind of laughed.
So this was Reagan's somewhat distant relationship with his kids.
His grandson Cameron was once asked by a reporter how often he saw his grandfather, and the grandson goes, All the time, I see him on TV.
So I think it's fair to say that the great communicator Reagan did have some kind of a breakdown of communication with his own children and grandchildren.
And so we have to understand Reagan's pro family rhetoric more as an aspiration than as a complete reality.
In fact, strangely enough, Reagan showed his normalcy in this respect.
He was just another guy who believed in family values and the stability of family, even though his own family was not entirely stable.
He did have, um, strange relationships, if you're going to be honest about it, with the children.
And I close this section by saying in this respect as in others, an extraordinary man like Reagan never seemed more ordinary to his fellow citizens.
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