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Aug. 26, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
54:41
SOCIALISM 101 Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1155
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Coming up, the Democrats on the left are saying that Trump is a socialist.
What the heck?
I'll explore the meaning of socialism in the context of this outlandish accusation.
Author Robert Netzley joins me.
We're going to talk about his book called Biblically responsible investing on Wall Street as it is in heaven.
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is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
Music by Ben Thede.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Is Donald Trump a socialist?
This seems like a almost some kind of a joke, and it is a joke because the idea that this quintessential American capitalist, this product of the American capitalist system, this capitalist tool to use the phrase that Forbes magazine used as its motto for many years.
This man of construction who built his father's empire into something much, much bigger, this icon of American commerce, this cultural embodiment of free markets and capitalism, this guy is in no way a socialist.
So where do we get these accusations of socialism that are coming against Trump, not just from the left.
Now here's something kind of ironic, right?
Because the people on the left are themselves, if not socialist, pro socialist.
These are the people pushing for the Democratic Party to embrace Mamdani.
They're like, hey, this guy's a generational leader, Wire Schumer and Hakim Jeffries keeping their distance from him.
So the left likes socialism.
And frankly, if Trump were a real socialist, they would be getting behind him.
But they know he's not.
They're trying to score a point.
They're trying to do what the left often does, and that is to drive a wedge between Trump and his own supporters.
They know Trump's supporters are free market.
And so they're like, this guy's a socialist.
Are you comfortable with a socialist?
That's the game they're playing.
Now, the game they're playing is not falling entirely on deaf ears because there are some people on the right.
And some of the libertarians notably, I think of a young journalist Hannah Cox, you know, she's like Trump is showing signs of being a socialist.
And let's look at what this is all about.
It's about Trump cutting a deal with a company Intel, a computer chip company, in which Intel essentially cedes or gives up ten percent of the company to the US government.
Now I admit this is a little bit strange, right?
strange because we're not accustomed to companies doing this.
We have governments that run operations.
We have a private sector.
The government and the private sector interact in all kinds of ways.
Governments, for example, give money and grants to research universities, and sometimes those grants carry terms and conditions, and the government also makes contracts with private companies to do all kinds of things, defense contractors, private prisons.
The government can hire a private group to manufacture certain things for the government, make school buses, to just take a wild example off the top of my head.
But the government doesn't typically own a part of a large American company.
So this is unusual.
How did it come about?
Well, it came about really as a deflection or as a kind of pirouette from the tariff discussion.
Trump basically was imposing tariffs.
Intel wanted to get around those tariffs.
The Intel can get around the tariffs by basically keeping its business in the United States.
Intel doesn't want to do that.
They want to keep considerable portions of their business abroad, and yet they don't want to be tariffed.
And so what do they do?
They come to mister Art of the Deal himself., namely Trump, and they say, All right, how about this?
So a negotiation occurs.
And this is an important thing to recognize about Trump is he's a very transactional guy.
Trump will impose a penalty, and if you come to him and say, Well, let's make a deal.
It's kind of like a guy in business, right?
You owe him ten thousand dollars and you can't pay, and you come up to him and say, Listen, I don't want to have my car taken away or my house foreclosed on.
How about if I give you five right now and then I'll agree to give you the rest in installments and I'll agree to pay you three percent interest.
And Trump is like, okay, well, let's do it that way.
This is not socialism.
This is the actual opposite of socialism.
This is called cutting a deal to make something work.
And I think that's all that goes through Trump's mind.
Trump in a way operates far more in the mechanics of getting things done than does he sit back and go, well, let me see.
If the government owns ten percent of Intel, you know, is that in conformity with Marx's Das Capital?
Is this something that the socialist writers of the nineteenth century talked about?
No, they did not.
I'll answer the question even if Trump won't.
The socialist writers of the nineteenth century talked about socialism as the government owning the means of production.
And what does that mean?
That means the government owns every bank, every car company, every private school, every not every private home, but every thing that makes other things, every energy company, the government, every computer company, the government owns the means of production.
That is socialism.
So if Intel, I mean, we're not even talking about about the government taking over Intel.
The government's not doing that.
The government's not even taking over a controlling share in Intel.
The government owned fifty percent or fifty five percent, then in effect, the US government is managing Intel.
It's like a takeover.
And by the way, we shouldn't be playing the innocent here.
The US government has taken over not only companies, but whole industries.
Now they do it in very sneaky ways.
But after the two thousand eight crash, there was a great government invasion of the banks and also of the financial services companies.
The government didn't take them over, it didn't take ten percent of their profits, but it did establish far greater control over these companies.
So the Intel transaction isn't all that strange given what happened under Obama.
There was a great increase of government power over the sectors of not only banking and finance, but also energy.
The government gets involved.
They do it under some pretext.
In this case, it's climate change.
In that case, it's financial regulation.
However, they do it, they do do it.
So with regard to Intel., Intel is still going to make the decisions it does as a private company.
It's in private hands.
The government in a sense becomes just another shareholder in this case holding ten percent.
Now, I'm not entirely comfortable with making this a precedent for the way that government deals with businesses.
So let's just say, for example, that the Trump administration were to make dozens, hundreds of these deals with auto companies.
Listen, Ford, give the government six percent.
Hey, Microsoft, give the government twelve percent.
This would not be a good way to go because this is moving in the direction of excessive government involvement in the private sector.
So I think that would be a mistake.
But as a one off, as a hey, you know, Intel doesn't want to play by the tariff rules, but they're willing to give this up instead.
I think that's really what's going on and should be understood in that way.
Now, let me offer a couple of other comments on things happening in the news.
A woman named Lisa Cook, who is a member of the Federal Reserve, has been fired by Trump.
Why?
Because it looks like this woman has cheated on her own mortgage.
Why?
Well, in a manner that has been alleged to be done also by Adam Schiff, also by Letitia James.
It's the good old primary versus secondary residence gambit, in which you're you get certain benefits, tax benefits, mortgage benefits on your primary residence, but they don't apply to a secondary residence.
This is well established in financial practice, but also in American law.
To give you an example of how this works, let's say you get sued and somebody tries to take your house.
In a number of states, you can't do it.
The house is your primary residence.
However, let's say you have a second place, a condo in Miami, that doesn't get the same legal protection as your primary residence.
So here's a good example of how your primary residence matters.
So what these people have figured out how to do, public officials, is, what about if I pretend I'm living in two places as my primary residence at the same time?
This is not allowed.
This is where the fraud or the alleged fraud comes in.
And this is apparently what this woman named Lisa Cook has done or she's accused of doing.
Now, can Trump fire her?
This is going to be challenged legally.
why?
Now the left thinks it's clear cut.
They go, well, it's because the Federal Reserve Board is independent and ash, Trump does not have the authority.
Well, I'm actually looking at a chart, an official chart of the U.S. government.
It has the legislative branch, the executive branch, and the judicial branch.
Under the executive branch, we have the cabinet departments, but then I also see all these independent agencies, among which we see the Federal Reserve.
Now independent here does not mean that it is independent of executive control.
That's not what independent agencies mean.
An independent agency simply means it is an agency independent of the cabinet infrastructure of the government.
It's an agency separate from that.
It is set up very often for a specific purpose.
But like I say, it does not mean it's not under the executive branch.
Now, Trump is not trying to fire Lisa Cook by just saying, I don't like her.
I want to get rid of her.
I think interest rates are too high.
And so I want to put in my own person so that they can be brought down.
Trump may want all those things, but he is firing her for cause.
And the cause is corruption.
If you are involved in any kind of corruption, then the chief executive, Trump, can say, I don't want a person of this ilk to be running this organization.
And she is, as one of the Federal Reserve governors, one of the heads of this organization.
So I think there's a good chance that Trump gets away with it, that Trump has the legal authority to get rid of this woman, Lisa Cook.
In any event, it will be contested, it will be challenged.
There's no doubt about Trump's broader agenda.
I don't think he wants Jerome Powell in there, but he's reluctant to get rid of Powell.
Powell doesn't have that much longer on his own term.
When I had James Fishback on the podcast, he had a great idea.
Name Powell's successor now, because right away the markets will start paying attention to what that guy, the successor, not Powell, has to say.
It's kind of like a lame duck president.
When a new guy has been elected, people immediately gravitate to the new guy and look to see where he's going, what his pronouncements are, what his policies are likely to be.
And so this could be a very smart move for Trump to get ahead of the curve and move the Federal Reserve.
In the right direction, even before there is an official switch at the helm.
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a free bottle of fiber and spice that's balanceofnature dot com I'd like to talk about Trump's executive order on flag burning.
Trump's executive order basically imposes a one year sentence for burning the American flag.
Now the wording of the executive order is more subtle than that and in fact it talks about the objective of this executive order to quote enforce the already existing laws.
And there are some people who I think very reactively say Trump is going against the First Amendment because although flag burning might be distasteful and a bad thing to do, it is nevertheless not illegal.
People have a right to express their point of view.
Let's remember the First Amendment government shall make no law, and so government here means the federal government, it means the state governments.
The truth of it is that government does make some laws that impinge upon free speech.
You can't reveal national security details, even though you're doing it by leaking to the New York Times, for example.
So the First Amendment, many of us think of ourselves as close to First Amendment absolutists, but we are not in fact absolutists.
Now, the other thing is that there have been all kinds of efforts in recent years to go after people who have offended the sensibilities of the left.
Here's an article four could be charged with hate crimes for destroying LGBTQ pride flags, Atlanta police say.
And goes on to say, police said all four were also charged with obstruction, criminal damage to property, conspiracy, and prowling.
So you can see here what's going on.
On the one hand, the government says we're not going after speech, wech.
Let's look at what's going on with these LGBTQ flags.
It looks to me like you have these LGBTQ protesters and somebody grabbed their flag, which is an expression of their point of view and burned it also as a gesture of an expression of a point of view, namely I don't like this flag.
Now, you can in theory say that you are quote damaging property, namely the flag.
It looks to me like there's no obstruction really involved at all, although in some cases where people have looked at LGBTQ like rainbows painted on a pavement, somebody goes and paints over those and then they're like, well, this is destruction of federal property.
Well, the federal government itself is using the pavement to send a message, if you will, with the rainbow flag, just like the guy who's washing over it is sending a message by removing that flag or painting another flag on top of it.
The conspiracy to me is a bogus charge because all it means is that two guys decide let's go do that.
There's no real conspiracy involved and prowling is just sheer stupidity and should be thrown out just based on the fact that the word is described.
What are you doing when you're quoting prowling?
The word is truly meaningless in this kind of a criminal context.
So I think what's happening is that for a lot of people on the right, it's kind of like, listen, the left basically has all kinds of rules and laws and they are perfectly happy to go and go after speech when they want to.
They go after speech on campus.
They go after speech in many other settings.
And yet we're not allowed to do it.
So if you want to burn a flag, we've got to be like, we don't like it, but guess what?
It's constitutional.
So again, we are somehow always made to be the suckers.
Yes, you know, we have to swallow our feelings and we have to repress our annoyance at what is going on, but we are constitutionally prohibited from acting.
The left, by contrast, is perfectly free to act.
I guess they could say, well, we don't care about the Constitution and you do, so that's your problem.
So this is a we're right back to the conservative conundrum or the conservative dilemma.
Again, my solution to this is very much to follow the path of the left, which is to say, we cannot criminalize speech itself.
That's true.
So we do what the left does.
And that is we go after ancillary things.
If some guy burns an American flag, well, let's just say that as a group of patriots who are having a Fourth of July celebration, and somebody comes, takes the flag and burns it.
Okay, you just charge them with criminal damage to property, coming right back to this headline.
You charge them with conspiracy.
You charge them with prowling Because why were they at our event?
They're quote prowling.
This is all, there's a lot of flim flam here, but it's the flim flam of the left.
And what are we doing?
We're taking their toolbox and applying it to the situation.
So again, we cannot restrict free speech itself, but we need to be, we need to show some of the same creativity and inventiveness of the left in saying, all right, I can't get this guy for having a view against the LGBTQ, but I can get him on a hate crime and I can get him on conspiracy and I can get him on criminal damage to property.
So if the left is using those tools to go after us, I guess my idea is we should use those same tools to go after them.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast a new guest.
It's Robert Netzley.
He is an author.
He is also the founder and CEO of the Inspire Impact Group.
It's the parent company of faith based financial firms, Inspire Investing, Inspire Advisors, and also inspireinsight dot com.
Robert has appeared in Fox Business, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, The Financial Times, and he has a book, Biblically Responsible Investing.
And I love the subtitle, On Wall Street as it is in Heaven.
It comes out in September, so keep an eye out for it.
You can probably order it now.
The website inspireinsight dot com.
You can follow Robert on X at RobertNetzlee.
Robert Netzley, NETZ LY.
Robert, welcome.
Thank you for joining me.
This is a very interesting concept of biblically responsible investing.
Now, in years past, I guess I would have to say educationally, I'm a little bit of a product of the Milton Friedman School, which takes the view that the job of corporations is to maximize profits and shareholder value, and that perhaps pursuing that logic, the job of an investor is to ma try to get the maximum return that you can from your investments.
Now what you do with that return becomes yours to figure out.
You might decide I want to give it to the Salvation Army.
I want to give it to all kinds of good causes.
But the investment itself becomes a transaction kind of separate from the philanthropy or the charity or the giving.
I take it that you do not make this kind of bifurcation.
You have a concept of biblically responsible investing.
So let's begin by asking you what that means.
Yeah.
Good to be here, Dinesh.
Thank you for having me on.
and you're right, there is.
There's this tension there at investing, right?
What do we do with the money we earn?
How do we earn it?
And how do we think about that biblically as a committed Christian?
Personally, how I stumbled into this was through my work as an investment professional at Wells Fargo Private Client Services Group.
And to explain your question or answer your question through the story, here I was managing money for clients of the bank.
And I was also a volunteer president of our local Pro Life Privacy Center, very pro life.
My wife and I always have been very involved in that sphere.
And one day I stumbled upon this article explaining this concept of biblically responsible investing.
And it kind of made me think, okay, what are these companies I'm investing in doing to make a profit?
And so I curiously looked into my own portfolio, my clients' portfolios, and really, the Holy Spirit just gripped my heart on this issue because here I was, president of the local Prolife Pregnancy Center, and I was also owning three stocks of companies that were manufacturing abortion drugs.
And it hits me out of the head that here I am advocating to save the lives of these unborn children, and yet I'm making, literally making money.
Every time a young lady goes to Planned Parenthood and has an abortion, I made money on that transaction.
And I'm recommending all my clients to do the same thing.
Total misalignment of priorities, to say the least.
And so in a nutshell, biblically responsible investing is an effort to take the idea that God owns everything and that all that I do is to glorify and honor him very seriously.
So if there's a famous Bible verse, 1 Corinthians 10:31, whatever you do, whether you eat or drink, whatever you do, do it all to the glory of God.
So if we can eat and drink, you know, eat my oatmeal this morning to the glory of God, certainly I should be able to invest money to the glory of God.
And there's a there's a real intentionality that we should put behind that.
So that's the basic idea and in short, how I got into this work so many years ago.
And is part of your approach to say to people, because, you know, as a practical matter, you know, most of us, we are so focused on getting the job done.
And for most people, I think the task of making money, you know, occupies most of their time, right?
So when they invest, they are typically going to buy some kind of an index fund that might own hundreds of stocks or a mutual fund that has an assortment of stocks over which they don't have a lot of control.
And so how would you say if I were to come to you and say, well, look, I've got a considerable net worth.
I want my investing to be biblically responsible, but I've got this kind of a portfolio.
And quite honestly, I don't have the time nor the skills to investigate these companies and know exactly what each of them are doing.
How would you steer an investor that wants to be in the harmony that you describe and in the kind of the biblically straight path?.
How did they get on that path?
Yeah, well, that's my story that I share about in the book, my personal journey, because here I was, you know, sitting at the desk of the bank, dreading a client come up to me and ask me to place another trade for them in some mutual fund that invests in abortion or pornography or LGBT activist companies or whatever.
And, you know, I was just dead in the water at Wells.
I couldn't do my job with a clean conscience.
So long story short, I ended up leaving the bank.
You know, told my wife, hey, honey, I think God's calling us somewhere else.
She's like, we've got two babies in a mortgage, so what's the plan?
Less than two months of savings in the bank, fully prepared never to pay my mortgage again in my life., leave all of that behind and start this new firm dedicated to trying to answer that question.
So how do we how do we actually go about investing this money that God has given us?
We don't just put it under our mattress and you know, wait for Jesus to come back.
We were charged to do something with this and make a productive effort for the kingdom of God.
And so that was in 2011 that has led me into this business that we have now, Inspire Investing.
I won't bore you with all the details that are in the book if you want to go ahead and read that, but we've become from zero to over three and a half billion dollars in assets that we're managing now according to biblical principles.
So our sixth year in the Inc.
five thousand listing of fastest growing private companies.
We've been in the top three fastest growing investment firms in the nation.
There's a movement of God going on where he's opening the eyes of his people to this huge problem.
We're taking his money and putting it into things that are destroying lives, totally antithetical to his will for this earth, right?
As the subtitle on Wall Street as it is in heaven implies.
And we don't have to be that way, right?
So we are, my company Inspire Investing is an ETF provider of, among other things.
So we have investment vehicles that you can buy with ticker symbols like WWJD and PTL and this and that, low cost index based products.
that do just as well as their secular counterparts and are sometimes lower cost than some of their secular counterparts.
So you can invest just as well for, you know, in line with biblical values in publicly traded companies and still seek to avoid, you know, exposures and things that would be, you know, deeply antithetical to things that you care deeply about.
We're not the moral beliefs here to tell you what those things need to be.
I've got my opinions and my convictions and happy to talk with people, but I'm sure there's something on the list.
If you go to our website inspireinvesting dot com, you can click on an inspire insight tool and for free, you can screen your invest portfolio, type in a ticker symbol, ETF stock, mutual fund, and just see for yourself what's going on under the hood.
This mutual fund in your 401k owns this stock that at this date gave this much money to Planned Parenthood, or makes this abortion drug, or sells this sort of movie, you know, that kind of data that you can make your decision.
And so, obviously, the book has a lot more information about how to go about that, some of the biblical underpinnings, the questions I wrestled through and how thousands of other people have wrestled through and how to actually practically go about this process.
If we've been convicted in the spirit that something has to change, what do we do with that?
That's what the book's about.
Some of these cases look to me to be pretty much easy cases.
So you mentioned the Planned Parenthood, the pornography, but there's a whole shady area, I think, of companies.
Let's take hypothetically a big pharma company that is not really too interested in curing people because if it did, there wouldn't be a market for these drugs.
And so what they really want to do is they want people to become obese so that they can give them all kinds of antibio obesity drugs.
They want people to get diabetes so they can then treat them.
There's a kind of subtle vested interest on their part.
And so you can see where I'm going here.
I'm going into areas that are more gray, which is not it's not that they're flatly violating any biblical prescription, but on the other hand, they are operating maybe in a morally ambiguous territory at best.
How do you handle those kinds of hard cases?
It's a great question.
And there are some different categories.
There are inherently immoral products and services.
Just abortion drugs have no good purpose on this earth.
They are immoral, right?
By definition.
Pornography also in that category.
Human trafficking and supply chains, some pretty black and white issues that I don't think many people would want to be invested in who are listening to this show, right?
And then you have those kind of in the in between, maybe they're not completely, you know, just black and white.
Maybe it's alcohol for some people.
You know, it's an industry that has problems, but in itself is not inherently immoral.
You mentioned the drug companies that have a lot of ethical, you know, issues to them that perhaps don't fall into like abortion categories.
And then you have this other category of business that I'll add to the list, companies that are actually doing a better job than others, being a blessing to the customers, making something that really is like that drug company that's actually working on something, you know, that's like a biotechnological marvel that's going to improve the lives of millions of people around the world without hooking them on some, you know, nefarious drug, you know, for the rest of their life that's kind of causing all these issues, right?
So there's sort of these three categories.
And so with our process, we look to exclude the bad actors, the clear bad actors, we just don't invest in them, right?
We have a scoring system that you can see online if a company has a negative score in our Inspire Impact score process., we just don't invest in those.
But then we go on and say, okay, well, with the companies that are left, which is 85% of all publicly traded companies in the United States, avoid those egregious issues.
How do we choose where to actually allocate capital?
And we want to look for those companies that are above average.
So if we're looking at drug companies, we're going to say which ones are operating with the highest degree of ethics, making things that are actually adding value to people's lives, not extracting value that are beneficial, not dangerous, et cetera.
And we score those companies and allocate capital to them.
I will say there are another category, LGBT activism, DEI, this whole situation that we've found ourselves in in corporate America these days, that can be another gray area.
It's a company that is maybe the things they're producing are not inherently problematic, but their corporate practices internally could be very problematic.
So what do we do with a company like that?
That's where corporate engagement comes in.
And we've gotten more and more out there into the marketplace as far as speaking biblical truth to corporate power to actually change the way these companies are operating.
Most recently, you may have seen in the news Costco stopped selling agreed to not sell Miphopristone, the abortion drug in their over 550 pharmacies.
That was our shareholder engagement efforts.
So we kickstarted that over a year ago and have been working as investors to stop them from going off the deep end along with CVS and Walgreens and selling and promoting abortion drugs, which have no place in their pharmacies.
So because of our efforts and the coalition we put together, Costco has decided not to sell the abortion drug Miphopristone.
Walmart has made the same decision.
So those are, I mean, millions and millions of people who are now going to be able to shop at these stores and not have abortion drugs on the shelves.
So those are some other examples of just how we deal with those in between companies.
There's the bad that we just kind of exclude.
There's the good ones that we're looking for.
And if there's a problem in the middle that's kind of in between, oftentimes we'll engage with them.
And God has blessed us with some really exciting success stories.
We've got a bunch of those in the book, actually, some behind the scenes of how those discussions went, conversations with high-level executives that are kind of behind the curtain there.
It's been fascinating to see what God has done through that.
How do you think about AI?
I say this because it seems quite obviously that this is a frontier of economic growth, economic possibility, ways of making things easier, quicker, more efficient.
I for one am quite enthusiastic about the promise of AI, and yet every now and then we run into somebody who goes, tells me and my wife, you know, AI is from the devil and AI is going to create, you know, human extinction and the machines will take over like in the movie The Terminator.
You know, you're in the financial world and this is in some ways quite obviously the future.
Is your attitude toward it one of optimism and possibility or do you think that there's a dark side to worry about?
Yes, to both.
I mean, this is the thing, you know, with every major human invention, I think there's a side to each coin, right?
I mean, look at the internet, wonderful thing.
We're on the internet right now using it for good purposes, and yet there's a whole dark side to the internet.
Gunpowder way, way back in the day, right?
There's good uses and there's bad uses.
Here we are with AI, and it's there's the world we would like to live in, so maybe some people would really like to go back to a pre-technology days., like, okay, that sounds exciting in some ways, but it's also not realistic.
So I think practically speaking, as an investor, as an investor, if you're sitting here listening to, this is one of the, the stewardship responsibilities we have to use the capital God's given us to shape the future in a God glorifying way, in a way that promotes human flourishing and and not welcome in, you know, Terminator 17, you know, in our own, uh, existence here with Skynet and whatever else we want to think about.
So I do think AI has real promise to do a lot of good and it's also got a lot of, um, danger and risk.
And so hopefully we can encourage good stewardship of those sorts of things through our stewardship of the companies that are developing these technologies.
And here's the thing.
If those of us who have sincere, conservative, biblically aligned, you know, convictions on these issues are silent.
If we don't engage with the decision makers as, you know, as investors, with the board members, with the executives, then the only people left to speak about those things are those who have diametrically opposed viewpoints.
And I think this is how we've gotten so messed up in our corporate culture today, just as in America in general because Christians, Conservatives, you know, have often had a more this sort of live and let live approach.
We haven't really spoken up into the board members.
Sometimes we show up with, you know, picket signs, you know, here or there, and that can have some effect.
But meanwhile, you've got the leftists who have been mobilizing troops for decades in boardrooms.
And is it no wonder that now we're in such a quandary?
And I can't tell you how many times as we've engaged with corporations and gotten, you know, these private conversations with executives, how many of these people have told us, thank you for reaching out.
Thank you for this conversation.
time in my, you know, decades of doing this job that I've ever heard from a Christian investor or a faith-based investor group.
And so if we've not, we've just been totally silent.
You know, if we invest our money into a BlackRock fund with iShares or Vanguard or American Funds or any of these big secular groups, do you realize that you're giving them the ability to vote your shares, right?
Your proxy votes with your shares are being outsourced to those fund companies.
Is it any wonder, right?
That would be like taking your vote for president and giving it to some progressive leftist nonprofit and saying, hey, just vote for it, vote for me and I don't really care what you do.
We would never do something like that.
And yet, that's exactly what we've been doing with our money.
And so we need to kind of wake up and realize that we need to take back the stewardship responsibility of our capital, our investments, and start using those things for God glorifying ends.
And here's the wonderful thing.
22.4 trillion dollars of stocks, bonds, mutual funds, ETFs, et cetera investments are walking around today in America in the pockets of church members, not just professing Christians, but church members.
That's a little more than half of all the investments.
According to recent peer research, half of all the investment assets in this country are owned by professing, or not professing, but church members in America.
That could make some big change.
BlackRock, I think, is maybe four or five trillion dollars, the largest asset manager.
It's just 22.54 trillion dollars.
So if we got just a little bit organized, things would be much different.
No, that's a great point.
You're saying we have a lot of power if we only would think about using it and using it, using it in the right way.
Guys, I've been talking to Robert Netzley, author, founder of Inspire Iminsight dot com the book Biblically Responsible Investing on Wall Street as it is in heaven out september 16.
Robert, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you, Dinesh.
It's been a pleasure.
I'm beginning my last chapter of Ronald Reagan How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
And this chapter is called Spirit of a Leader.
So it gets to in some ways the heart of why I would write a book like this.
I generally not in the habit of writing biographical type of works.
I haven't done any others.
I did do an analysis of Obama in my book The Roots of Obama's Rage, but it's hardly a biography of Obama.
So this is the closest I've come to doing a study of a man.
But even in this case, the purpose is not to give a kind of chronological or historical sequential account of his life.
He was born on so and so date, he went to this college, and so on.
I mention those kinds of things along the way, but the goal here is to understand Reagan's effectiveness and to understand what leadership, particularly presidential leadership means.
Now, here is the puzzle of Reagan recapitulating the theme and really the title of the book, right, how an ordinary man became an extraordinary leader.
Here's the puzzle that you have these amazing events that occurred in the nineteen eighties in the Reagan years, the restoration of economic growth, curbing of inflation, the ending of the gasoline crisis, a technological boom, the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet regime, Soviet communism, the spread of freedom and democracy around the world.
And Reagan was present.
He was a guiding force, I've argued, in all these events.
And yet even his defenders have had a little difficulty accounting for how he did these things.
Why?
Because here's a guy who seemingly lacked the background for it.
He didn't have the policy orientation, the intellectual style.
He was a plausible type of statesman.
He did have a compass of good and evil, but he didn't seem to be involved in details of public policy.
His governing style was kind of unorthodox, he seemed to spend a lot of time kind of in his acting role as president, gave a lot of speeches, made a lot of jokes.
So the question I ask is how despite these qualities was he so successful?
And my answer is pretty simple.
He was successful not in spite of these things, but because of them.
Now this requires a little bit of explanation.
There were presidents before Reagan, I think of Nixon Carter, who had much more detailed interest in public policy, and they were willing to work diligently to master these details, and yet think about it, Carter ends up as one of our worst presidents, not the worst in my opinion, but at the bottom.
Nixon, of course, failed in the sense that he was ejected from office.
So we have to reexamine what we mean by effective leadership.
Now, interestingly, some people who were around Reagan who did not understand Reagan did do exactly that.
Case in point is the Prime Minister of France, Francois Mitterand.
Now, Mitterand was elected as a socialist.
He was ideologically, even temperamentally contemptuous of Reagan.
But in nineteen eighty six, Mitterand sounded a completely different note.
He was asked by an interviewer to explain Reagan, and he said Reagan's strength is quote primal, primal, like a rock in the Morvinvan, like plain truth, like the wilderness of Nevada.
These are very vivid images.
Think of an immovable rock.
Think about a vast wilderness.
It's like nothing can disturb it, nothing can change it.
It is there it is.
And what Miranda is saying is Reagan was like that.
Now, I argue that to be effective as a leader, you need three things.
And the first of them is vision.
And by vision, what I mean is you need to have a clear destination.
This is where I want to go.
And you need also to have conviction about that destination.
And yet, where do you get vision from?
It's not a literal word.
We don't by vision mean sight.
We don't mean I have a my vision is twenty twenty, I can see really clearly in front of me.
By vision here, we actually are referring to something that involves perceptive power, imagination, and I would say even moral imagination.
So here's an example of Reagan's vision.
I can envision a scenario in which Soviet power is not only rolled back, but the whole system is implodes like an earthquake.
Now to see that and to see it not just as I had a dream, but rather to see it in all its clarity as somewhere that you can actually get to, that is vision.
Now the second thing is action.
And by action I mean simply the ability to get from here to there.
You have a destination, okay?
It's kind of like I have an idea for a company.
I know how I can revolutionize the way people, you know, send information.
But it's a whole different thing to actually build it.
If you think of artificial intelligence, for example.
For example, many people envisioned it.
HG Wells envisioned a version of this going back to 100 years ago.
I can envision a society where you have robots and you have information that is somehow past, but to build it is a whole different thing and it's taken really 10 decades to carry out.
So vision, action, but there's a third element that we often forget, and it's a peculiar element to constitutional democracy.
It is popular consent.
By popular consent, what I mean is you cannot have in a democratic society.
And again, people go, no, no, we're not a democracy, we're a republic.
Well, okay, you cannot function in a republic if you are dragging people against their will to a destination they don't want to go to.
So you can have all this vision, hey, I want to take America here, but the American people are like, no, we don't want to go there.
You don't deserve credit for yanking the American people in a place they don't want to be.
So the consent here involves taking people to a place where they do want to go.
But here there's a little bit of a trick because the people don't always know in advance where they want to go.
And so in representative democracy, the people are always indicating their values, their preferences, but their preferences are at a very generic level.
People are not saying invade Grenada or don't invade Grenada.
They don't actually know what's the right thing to do in that given situation.
People are not saying sign the INF Treaty, the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, or don't sign it.
People don't know what's in that treaty.
They don't want to be the ones to have to make that kind of final judgment.
That's why they've elected you.
that his goal was to reflect the aspirations of people, the American people, and to take them to a destination.
And if it's not someplace that they themselves envisioned, once he gets there or even on the way to getting there, he needs to convey to people, this is where I'm taking you and this is why and this is why where we're going is going to be better than where we are now.
So Reagan fully understood this complex process, the interaction between a people and their elected leader in which the elected leader is.
an embodiment and a reflection of public opinion, but guess what?
He is also the creator of that public opinion.
He is also able to forge that opinion.
And at times he will run against that opinion not in the long term, but in the short term.
In other words, what he will do is he will say to the American people, for now, you're actually wrong.
I'm going to go, let's say for example that we're talking about the issue of whether or not Reagan should walk out of an arms control treaty discussion with the Soviet Union.
If you actually took a poll among the American people, they would say don't walkk out, stay because the American people generically believe it's good to try to work it out.
But Reagan, of course, makes a judgment, yes, but the best way to work it out is to convince the Soviets we're not going to sign anything that they put in front of us.
We don't consider progress to be, hey, we had a meeting and we came out with a signed agreement because you know that in advance and you can then manipulate what goes into that agreement and we will be under pressure to sign.
So no, I'm going to go against the American people.
I'm going to walk out, but I'm going to show the American people that they were wrong and I am right and in the end the Soviets will come back to the bargaining table and we will get an agreement but it's going to be an agreement more on my terms and not on theirs.
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