Dinesh D'Souza - EUROPE R.I.P. Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1157

Aug. 28, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza

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EUROPE R.I.P. Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1157

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	Coming up, I'll discuss the fall of Europe, which I'm going to term Europe RIP.
	One of America's great mathematicians, a fellow named Terrence Tao, attacks the Trump administration for cutting his department's federal funding.
	I want to argue that Tao and others have brought this on themselves.
	And I'm going to review an exchange, a social media exchange I had with a black woman who, strangely enough, accuses me of being too hard on the racist Southern Democrats of the 19th century.
	Wow.
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	I talked earlier this week about Cracker Barrel and about its very antiseptic logo that moves away from the traditional logo.
	And Cracker Barrel is now in damage control mode because their stock has plummeted.
	I don't think I've seen a single person who likes the new logo, but management is kind of doubling down, but they're doubling down by acting like, well, we didn't we wish we had paid more attention to people's sentiment, we wish we had rolled this out in a different way, but they're not retreating to the old logo.
	They're saying, We're still very traditional in our stores and we don't the old guy that we've taken off the logo, we still like him and his vibe is still to be found in our stores.
	But guess what?
	You did get rid of him as part of your logo.
	I think what's going on here is this is not really just about a rebrand.
	It's not just about the fact that Cracker Barrel brought in this kind of new team of bespectacled women to be their chief marketing officer, their CEO, and these people had a kind of one of their stress sessions or one of their powwows and they decided, let's come up with a new logo.
	It's much deeper than that.
	It is an LGBTQ infiltration of So I guess what I'm getting at is that Crack a Barrel is really more in the position of one of these universities, which is to say that the ideology infuses the whole institution.
	It then expresses itself in something like this terrible logo.
	And so it's not a matter of getting rid of the logo.
	It's like saying to Harvard, listen, change your logo or get rid of your new logo, come up with a new symbol for the college, well, all the rot that is in the college is going to remain.
	And I think that's what's happening here at Cracker Barrel.
	They're kind of doubling down and digging in because really this is who they are.
	Now Democrats are beginning to realize that this DEI stuff and the whole vocabulary, not just of race-based DEI, but gender-based DEI, LGBTQ is really making them look like cooks.
	And so apparently there's a group, a democratic group that has come up with a list of words that Democrats should not use.
	Let's go through this list.
	They shouldn't take the word violence and attach it to something else like environmental violence.
	That's out.
	Nobody knows what that means.
	They should stop saying it.
	Dialoguing, bad word.
	Triggering, well, actually, this is one of the left's favorite words.
	I'm triggered.
	Othering, which basically talks is the idea that you're sort of making someone into the other.
	Microaggression, body shaming, subverting norms, cultural appropriation., cultural appropriation is kind of like, you know, someone shows up, for example, and they're wearing, you know, they've got a hat with the head of an Indian brave.
	Oh, how dare you engage in cultural appropriation?
	The Indian symbol belongs only to American Indians, only they are allowed to wear that kind of hat.
	This kind of stupidity, again, the left has been pushing it and not just engaging in it, but trying to inflict it on the whole society.
	Existential threat.
	I think that the reason they want to give this one up is that they've been warning about existential threats with the same enthusiasm of fundamentalist preachers warning about the existential threat to the world.
	The world is going to come to an end in nineteen eighty three.
	This is basically the mantra of the climate change movement.
	And nobody sees these existential threats.
	Where's the existential threat to the climate, to democracy, to the economy, blah, blah, blah, radical transparency, the unhoused, in other words, not the homeless, but the unhoused, food insecurity, housing insecurity, person who immigrated, birthing person.
	I could go on allyship, BIPOC, involuntary confinement, which basically refers to putting criminals in jail.
	So Democrats have realized that these are words that they shouldn't be using, but here's my point.
	The point is not the vocabulary.
	The Democrats are acting like if we can only amend our rhetoric, if we can only change our words, our message is going to resonate.
	Well, what if the problem is not with the words but with the message itself?
	I think that may in fact be the real problem.
	All right, let me talk a little bit about Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
	has been arrested again and once again the left led by what appears to be Kilmar's personal champion, Senator Van Hollen of Maryland.
	This guy's like, I'm tracking what's happening to Kilmar Garcia.
	I want to make sure that this man gets due process, I want to make sure I'm thinking to myself, well, you know, this is so strange.
	You are a US senator.
	You have gone down to El Salvador to have margaritas with Kilmar Garcia.
	You seem to be following this guy's progress.
	And could you say the same of any of you?
	other constituents.
	In other words, you've got lots of people in Maryland, US citizens who would like some attention from you.
	They have all kinds of issues, sometimes personal issues, sometimes broader issues.
	Hey, I didn't get my Social Security check or this or that.
	Can you honestly say that you have devoted as much time as you're giving to Kilmar Garcia to any of them?
	I would venture to say that the answer to that question is probably not, which is a way of us seeing so clearly that for Democrats, these illegals, illegal aliens, and ideally illegal aliens who are in some trouble with the law.
	I mean, this is the guy who's accused of being a trafficker.
	And that doesn't in any way deter Senator Van Holland from treating Kilmar as a poster boy for rights, a poster boy for due process, a kind of embodiment of constitutional values.
	There was some talk about deporting Kilmar Garcia to Uganda.
	I mean, that would be a very interesting and strange twist.
	I mean, this guy belongs, he's from El Salvador.
	The Trump administration tried to send him back.
	The left put up such a shriek and the judge ordered him to be returned.
	So wouldn't it be ironic if this guy, who actually would probably be okay in El Salvador, his native country, is sent to Uganda, where he would be a complete misfit, where probably his prospects would be worse than they would be in El Salvador?
	Certainly, I think the Trump administration is determined not to let this guy stay in this country.
	And since he is admittedly illegal, there's no question that he is illegal.
	There is no obligation to keep him here.
	There may be some debate about what to do about him.
	Can he be, should he be charged here and tried here?
	Should he be sent to a prison in El Salvador, but the idea of merely sending him away, deporting him, removing him from the country, I can't see how a judge can stop that.
	And that is what the Trump administration seems determined to do.
	I want to talk a little bit about Europe.
	And I want to comment on a very interesting observation I saw the other day, which talked about Europe and the Soviet model.
	And it also talked about Western Europe and Eastern Europe.
	Now, here's what I mean by the Soviet model.
	The Soviet model is often thought to be a kind of ideological communism.
	And the Soviets did present it that way that were following Marx, were establishing a communist society.
	In many ways they tried to do that.
	But in another way, the Soviet system was just characterized by inertia, bureaucracy.
	Nothing really got done, a massive administrative state.
	All the industries of the society are kind of operating in sync with the state.
	If we describe the Soviet Union that way, it's not that different from how a lot of institutions operate in the West.
	Not by the way, just in Europe, but even in the United States.
	Look, for example, at something that is in some ways very European, which is high speed rail.
	The Europeans are always boasting about high speed rail.
	You don't have enough high speed rail in the United States.
	Well, they were trying to build high speed rail in California.
	Thirty years of planning, lots of construction work, thirty eight billion dollars spent.
	How many miles completed?
	Basically less than one hundred and twenty miles, about a two hour drive.
	And already falling apart, how many tickets have been sold to this high speed rail?
	Zero.
	So this is a classic Soviet style operation.
	They extract resources from the people, they deploy it to something that is supposed to be vaguely collectivist or statist.
	It doesn't exist except in the kind of fantasy of the planners.
	There's no actual functioning rail system that's even there.
	And yet so much money, so many resources have already been devoted to it.
	But of course, there's a parasitic class of planners, bureaucrats, politicians, all of whom have benefited along the way.
	So these resources have gone somewhere, somebody got paid, somebody got contracts.
	And so from the point of view of the administrative state, this is not a failure because they got to leech off the system, and that is that in the era of the Cold War, which, by the way, I've been covering in my discussion of my Reagan book, there was Eastern Europe and there was Western Europe.
	And Eastern Europe was in the communist orbit.
	Countries like Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland, these were de facto under Soviet control, Hungary, and so on.
	Western Europe was Britain, France, Germany, meaning West Germany.
	The capital, in fact, of Germany was not Berlin as it is now., it was Bonn, which was in West Germany.
	Berlin was on the East German side.
	But in many ways, if you fast forward from then to now, then in the past, Western Europe was seen as modern, developed, and Eastern Europe was seen as Soviet, which is to say static.
	Nothing happens in Eastern Europe.
	And the Eastern European model was believed by many to be an extension of the Soviet model and therefore intellectually and operationally bankrupt.
	Western Europe was seen more as part of the forward thrust along with the United States of development and of progress.
	But how different things seem today?
	And by this I mean it's almost as if the two Europes, Eastern and Western Europe have exchanged places.
	Look at Western Europe now.
	The model seems to be decadent morally, socially, institutionally.
	State services are uniformly bad.
	Social trust has disintegrated.
	Western Europe is run by these elites that meet in Brussels.
	They seem disconnected from the population.
	They treat popular opinion as a nuisance that needs to be suppressed.
	There's all kinds of corruption and much of it now is not even that hidden.
	It's like institutionalized, it's formalized, you can see it, but people feel they can do nothing about it.
	You seem to have an independent media, but it's not independent at all.
	It seems to be an extension of the managerial bureaucracy.
	The media essentially is a form of propaganda.
	And even elections in Europe, Great Britain has Brexit, but they do not in fact exit from the EU.
	There's a kind of partial exit and even that appears to be somewhat questionable.
	So people vote for things and yet nothing changes.
	And or the candidates that they vote for are somehow sidelined or they're declared ineligible to run or the election itself is postponed or cancelled.
	And meanwhile in Eastern Europe, you begin to see not the full development of vitality yet, but Eastern Europe is doing in many ways better than Western Europe.
	Look at a country like Poland, for example, or like Hungary.
	Here you seem to have more impressive economic development.
	These countries are coming up.
	Now, they're not as rich as France or Germany or England, but the way to look at these societies is not just in terms of like who's better off, because there's no question that Western Europe got a massive head start.
	The question to ask is who is ascending and who is descending.
	You know, you look, for example, when you're looking at escalators at an airport, one escalator is as descending.
	You go on it when you want to go down.
	I would argue that Western Europe by and large is descending.
	It's on its way down.
	It's on its way out.
	But Eastern Europe is ascending.
	And that is not something that one would have expected, and yet it is something that is occurring.
	Let me now change gears and talk a little bit about mathematics, about universities, about UCLA, and about what some people, a guy that many people consider to be perhaps the most brilliant mathematician alive.
	It is a fellow named Terence Tao, TAO.
	You can look him up on YouTube.
	He is a prodigy.
	He was a prodigy at a young age.
	He grew up, I believe, in the Philippines.
	He developed a very early interest in math and a phenomenal capacity for math.
	But it's one thing to be a quote math whiz, it's another thing to have a deep understanding of the mathematical structures, not just the abstract structures themselves, but also the way in which mathematics becomes a transcript, a hidden description of the way that nature itself operates an interesting subject.
	There was a Princeton physicist many years ago who wrote an essay called The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics.
	And what he meant by this is that the universe for reasons that we don't know and we can't give a reason, the universe kind of follows the script of mathematics.
	There are all kinds of things, the motions of the planets, but that's just one example that follow mathematical laws that can be described in terms of equations and described in terms of formulas.
	The formulas, in other words, are not just formulas in the mind, they describe the world in which we live.
	And why is that?
	Well, there is no reason, or at least there is no secular reason.
	I guess one reason one could give is that God is a great mathematician.
	God designed the world according to a kind of mathematical plan.
	So the greatest of mathematicians try to figure out what is the mathematical underpinning of reality itself.
	Anyway, you've got this guy Terrence Tao, and he is a these days a professor in the Department of Higher Mathematics at UCLA.
	And the Trump administration has cut funding for a lot of these universities, including UCLA, and including for his program.
	And so here's Terrence Tao basically saying that complaining about Trump saying that he is witnessing, quote, a deliberate dismantling of the institutions that have sustained American science for generations.
	Now, when I first saw this, I was like, you know what?
	It looks like the Trump people have really gotten this wrong, it seems, because after all, there's nothing political about higher math.
	There's nothing political about the kind of work that this guy, Terrence Tao, does.
	And then I look into it and I see right away.
	that what's happening is that in this department and with this young guy, Terrance Tao himself, all these people are pulled into political activism.
	Let me quote Terrance Tao signing an open letter in twenty twenty.
	This is by the way in the wake of the whole George Floyd business, this is Terrance Tao.
	We are enraged at the everyday operations of a white supremacist society.
	Complicity with these systems of oppression is deeply rooted in the origins of this country.
	Wait a minute, why is a guy who is supposed to be doing higher mathematics engaged in this kind of low grade political activism.
	I guess what I'm saying is if you are a scholar and you want your department to be uncontaminated by politics, you don't want a Republican administration interfering with it.
	You want to simply devote yourself to the purposes of academia, then do that.
	But that's not what this guy is doing.
	What happens with these guys is they want to have it both ways.
	They sign on to the bashing of the Republicans, the bashing of the Trump administration, the bashing of the founders, America's a racist society, and then when the very people you've been bashing come in and cut your funding.
	Why?
	Because they don't like the politicization that you have admittedly been a part of, then you start complaining science itself is being threatened.
	Well, science is being threatened by you.
	You are the one who have introduced politics into all this.
	So my sympathies for Terrance Tao are diminished when I realize that he has allowed himself to be part of the problem.
	All these years when UCLA was becoming a propaganda factory, when grad students and young professors were bullying their peers into signing letters, establishing all these systems of DEI that undermine merit.
	Did he hear from him?
	Did he speak up?
	Did he denounce these practices?
	Did he call for a depoliticization of his own department?
	No, he was part of it.
	He joined the team.
	Maybe he never thought that a day of reckoning would come, but the day of reckoning is finally here, and in some ways I think he is reaping the harvest of what he has himself, alas, sowed.
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	Guys, the topic of nutrition has come to the forefront culturally, politically, and it's something that not only concerns us as a society, but concerns us individually, our own families.
	I have a guest, I think a new guest, Ellie Hirsch.
	She is a certified nutrition expert, a health and wellness advocate, and she is here to talk to us on behalf of Brightcore.
	You can follow Brightcore on X at mybrightcore, the website mybrightcore dot com forward slash Dinesh.
	Ellie, thanks for joining me.
	I really appreciate it.
	One of the topics that I've learned about, to be honest, through Brightcore.
	Ricor, and it's freaked me out a little bit is this whole, you know, this whole topic of these so called microplastics.
	Now, I mean, I know that we live in a society where, you know, there's a lot of plastic, right?
	And that's something that makes modern society quite different from earlier traditional societies.
	But what I didn't know and what comes as a little bit of a shock is the way in which these plastics make their way in micro forms into our bodies.
	Now, can you begin by talking about how it is that we seem to ingest or take in so many microplastics?
	How does that happen?
	Well, microplastics, which are about the size of a sesame seed and nanoplastics, which you can't even see with specific instruments, they're everywhere.
	They can't be avoided.
	Okay.
	I mean, they're in our foods.
	They're in our water systems, right?
	94 percent of water, tap water and bottled water contain microplastics even if you try to filter it out, they're still going to be there.
	They're everywhere.
	They're in our soil and then it just goes up the food chain from there.
	So they're in our clothing, you know, polyester, they're in our furniture.
	They're literally everywhere.
	You can't avoid them.
	And that's what's scary.
	And is it the case that, you know, let's just say for example, I'm drinking water from a bottle.
	When you say that they're in there, does the water kind of scrape the plastic off the bottle?
	And is that how it gets into my system or is the plastic somehow in the water itself?
	It's it's both.
	Okay.
	So even when you try to filter out water, so filtered water, you know, so they say.
	in plastic bottles that water contains microplastics.
	And then yes, where it's housed, which is the plastic, also, you know, creates more microplastics.
	So you're kind of getting hit from every aspect.
	And you just, you can't avoid it.
	And it's in the food we eat.
	And, you know, what's crazy is that the average person, you know, they're looking to ingest 11,500 microplastics.
	Okay.
	And if you are a big eater of protein, you're looking at 3.8 million because 88% of the meats that we eat, the seafood that we eat, even vegetarian meat options, meatless options, they contain microplastics.
	So you can try to do things, but it's not easy because they're there.
	Elia, a normal person would listen to this would say, well, like, why isn't this like banned?
	Like, why hasn't the government outlawed it?
	What is the FDA doing?
	How do they allow this to occur?
	Is this something that has just because of the omnipresence of plastic in our society, they were like, huh, there's not a whole lot we can do about it.
	How did we get to this point where we're even dealing with this kind of a problem?
	Well, I mean, you know, RFK Jr., okay, he's making America healthy again.
	Okay, he's bringing these issues to the forefront.
	He's talking to the FDA about it.
	He's doing something.
	And I hadn't heard of that before.
	So I'm so happy that he's on our side and he's bringing this to people's attention.
	It's all about education and making changes.
	We can't change everything, right?
	I mean, it's in the air we breathe.
	It's in the soils, okay?
	And so those types of things, you just can't help it.
	There's just, you know, so much more plastic these days, like you said, right?
	We're just consuming more items that are in plastic.cs and they're just, you know, they're being made of everything.
	So it's really hard to avoid.
	But I feel good about, you know, our government right now, okay?
	Not so much in the past, but right now that they understand it.
	And so much so that RFK Jr's regimen, his food he eats, mostly contains meat and fermented foods, which I will get to later, which is really, really important.
	And we'll get there in a bit, but that's where this all culminates.
	And I think it's worth noting, Ellie, that these microplastics, I mean, not only do they like infiltrate your body, but they even infiltrate your brain.
	And now this is like, even more scary, right?
	Because you think of your brain as somehow your mind is somehow shielded off from the rest of your body.
	Something could be in your stomach, your intestines, but you don't think it has a way of making its way into the thinking organ of, uh, namely your, your brain, but it does.
	Yeah.
	I mean, Americans are, I would say at this point, probably ingesting six times more microplastics than they were back in the nineties, okay?
	And nothing is protected.
	So this is an interesting non fun fact, but our brains right now because of all these microplastics we're consuming, it's not one hundred percent human.
	And when you say that, you're like, what?
	No, it's ninety nine point five percent human, but it's zero point five percent microplastics.
	That's what's happening in our brain right now.
	And that leads to all types of problems, right?
	So BPA, which is a chemical in microplastics, when that's in your brain, it can lead to brain damage, brain inflammation.
	It's going to affect your heart.
	There are so many studies out there with blood clots and microplastics.
	When there's blood flowing around and the microplastics are floating there, you know, you're going to get heart attacks and you're going to get strokes and it's not good for our health at all.
	Now, in some ways, you know, we think about political solutions for ways to maybe minimize exposure.
	But I think what you made very clear is you can't avoid exposure, at least not at this point.
	And there needs to be some kind of strategy that people can take to fight these microplastics and sort of repel them.
	What is that strategy?
	Well, I mean, we as humans, we can only control what we can control.
	Obviously, education is very important, right?
	Again, I mentioned the government, RFK Junior, the fact that they're doing something about it, I mean, that's a huge step, okay?
	But you may not want to wear as much polyester as you've worn before, right?
	Because polyester contains BPA and, you know, the workout clothes, yoga clothes, those tight kind of shirts that men wear to work out, when BPA meets up with heat, that's what activates it.
	So maybe you don't wear as many, you know, polyester clothes.
	And those are, you know, maybe that's one thing you can do to make yourself feel better.
	You're still ingesting it, right?
	But what can we do on the inside to really help?
	Because we know they're in your body.
	So once they're in your body, what can we do to kind of get rid of them, right?
	And as I was mentioning before in RFK's diet, it all comes down to fermented foods, okay, specifically kimchi.
	And I believe you're going to put a graphic up about kimchi and Bacillus pumilus.
	And what that is, it's a unique bacterial strain of kimchi, one of nine hundred.
	And it's the only thing that can degrade microorganisms.
	Microplastics, right?
	Which is such a powerful statement.
	Because, wow, now that we know that, then we can tell people how to protect yourself, right?
	I mean, it's hard to be proactive, but you can be active by eating kimchi.
	Now, you know, we all know that not everyone's going to eat five bowls of kimchi a day.
	Okay.
	It's obviously a Korean staple.
	Another fun fact is that Koreans live six years longer than Americans.
	Okay.
	They eat this stuff, you know, morning, noon, and night.
	Now, that's just not realistic.
	Not I love kimchi.
	Not everybody loves it.
	Even know what it is.
	It also has a ton of salt in it, right?
	So we don't want to introduce high blood pressure and other problems, but kimchi is the king of fermented foods.
	It is a superfood and it's really important.
	And I think what you're saying is that if you can find a way to have kimchi, not necessarily by, you know, making your local Korean restaurant your breakfast, lunch and dinner stop.
	Right.
	And there is such a way and that way is the way of taking kimchi, actually making it very benign by putting it in a capsule, right?
	Where you can take it and get it.
	And you're done with it and you get your kimchi.
	Talk about that and talk about how people can go about doing that.
	Sure.
	Well, I'm so proud and honored to be part of Brightcore because this is something that not a lot of people know about.
	And again, it starts with education.
	And there's a capsule that you can take three times a day.
	You get all the benefits of kimchi, not just regarding microplastics, right?
	But your overall health because fermented foods are so important.
	We know that they're antimicrobial, antibacterial.
	All these fancy words is a simple way of saying they keep away the bad guys, right?
	So what we can control, we talked before about what we can and can't control is our microbiome, right?
	Our gut, right?
	And we know that seventy percent to eighty percent of our immune system is housed in the gut and the gut protects everything.
	And, you know, this pill, this capsule, it's one hundred percent natural, okay?
	It's non GMO, it's made in the USA.
	And we talked about salt before.
	There's virtually no salt.
	We've taken all the salt out.
	So you really only get the benefits of kimchi and it's convenient, it's efficient.
	And like you mentioned, you're not going to sit there and eat five bowls of kimchi.
	Again, I love it, I would probably do it, but it's just not, you know, the taste some of some people doesn't like it.
	So it's just not a staple in our country.
	But that's why we offer it and it's just making changes.
	The success stories that we have heard from our customers is so mind blowing for me and we love to talk to our customers.
	We like to find out, you know, about their health journey and really help them along the way and some of these success stories, you know, whether it's obesity, right?
	Did you know that kimchi, these kimchi one pills, they are helping people lose weight, okay?
	Digestion and bloating, they're helping with that as well.
	The other thing they're helping is better gut health, which we talked about before.
	That is so important.
	Everything starts in the gut.
	Did you know that kimchi is a beauty secret?
	It's an anti aging secret, right?
	Look at me.
	I'm almost fifty.
	Okay.
	So when we hear these success stories, and there's one that I'm saving for last that really got me and, you know, talking to customers and when they talk about this, it's, it's emotional, um, because it's so important.
	So obviously, you know, COVID and all that stuff, we have people suffering from a post vaccination syndrome, right, from the COVID vaccine.
	So people are having certain ailments and symptoms.
	They have no idea where they're coming from.
	How do you get rid of it?
	They can't pinpoint it.
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	And I've been talking to Ellie Hirsch, certified nutritionist with Brightcore.
	Ellie, thank you very much for joining me.
	You're welcome.
	Thanks for having me.
	I want to talk to you about an interesting exchange I've been having on social media, actually on the X platform with a black woman who has faulted me for being an uncritical champion of Lincoln and also for bashing the South.
	According to her, I am faulting the South because of the history of racism in the South and the history of slavery in the South.
	And I'm also faulting the Southern Democrats for being racists.
	Now all of this may seem like wait a minute, what's the controversy even about?
	Isn't Abraham Lincoln the founder of the Republican Party?
	So celebrating Lincoln would not appear to be a very odd thing to do by someone who is in fact pretty much of a lifelong Republican.
	Moreover, isn't it a fact that slavery was in fact the whole plantation system was in fact southern.
	We're not talking about just slavery because there was slavery going back to the time of the founding.
	All slavery was legal in all thirteen of the original states of the Union, but at that time, slavery was kind of small scale.
	It wasn't until the invention of the cotton gin around seventeen ninety one that slavery began to expand into an elaborate system of plantation agriculture using very often large numbers of slaves and you had some of these plantations that were just absolutely huge involving not just tens but hundreds and in some cases approaching certainly in South America thousands of slaves.
	Now this did in fact occur in the south.
	The predominant party was in fact the Democratic Party.
	So where really what really is this controversy even about?
	The Southern Democrats and this is where I think this woman is going with this critique of me as she says the Southern Democrats were the true conservatives.
	She's defending the Democrats of the nineteenth century.
	She's saying that well, you know, I guess she says they might have been racist but that wasn't the their defining characteristic.
	They in fact wanted to conserve southern values.
	And don't we admire these southern values even when we see them today, values like chivalry and values like the kind of ideal of the gentleman, a certain measure of magnanimity, the politeness that characterizes southern culture, not to mention, for example, the heroic legacy of somebody like Robert E. Lee, who was, by anyone's account, a great military general, and I think in many ways, I'd have to say a great man.
	And the truth of it is, I accept all this.
	I am not a critic of Robert E. Lee.
	In fact, I have I admire a lot of qualities about Lee, but of course I don't admire the side that he fought on.
	I don't admire the side of the Confederacy.
	I don't admire the cause.
	I think it was Grant who said of Lee that, you know, he was in fact an impressive figure.
	They never you can almost be hard pressed to find a greater man.
	But then says Grant, but it's hard to think of a worse cause for which a man could dedicate his life.
	I think it's important to realize with Robert E. Lee that he dedicated his life to that cause reluctantly.
	In other words, Lee did not want secession.
	He did not want war.
	He felt as a citizen of Virginia, as a person who had all his ties in Virginia, his family in Virginia, he's like, I can't raise my sword against Virginia.
	So I understand why Lee went that way.
	But Lee's reluctance shows you that he also knew that he was enrolling ultimately in a cause that he did not support, namely, namely secession.
	And look, we shouldn't confuse the good qualities of the South that we see today.
	I mean, it's not in a way an accident that the Republican Party today has its base in many ways in the South.
	We're not exclusively a Southern Party because we have strength elsewhere, including in the West, but the South is the most reliable base right now of the Republican Party.
	But it's a reliable base not because of racism, not because of segregation, it's a reliable base because of other things like patriotism and profanely and the fact that the South is in many ways a more traditional society.
	Now, when we talk about who are the real conservatives, the North or the South, there are two separate meanings of the word conservative that are being elited or jumbled together.
	Sure, Jefferson Davis, who was the head of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis was a conservative in that he wanted to conserve the plantation system of the old South.
	So he was a conservative in that sense.
	But when you use conservative in that operational sense, just somebody who wants to conserve something, well, I would say that today's Democrats also want to conserve things.
	What do they want to conserve?
	They want to conserve the modern plantation system that they set up starting with FDR.
	They've now set up a new type of plantation system.
	It's not just for blacks, it's for Latinos, it's called the Barrio, it's for American Indians, it's called reservations.
	So the Democrats today have an expanded plantation model.
	But that plantation model goes back almost a hundred years.
	It began at least in the nineteen thirties and it's been continuing through the great society and Democrats want to conserve that.
	Democrats also want to conserve a lot of the ideals of the nineteen sixties, the sex drugs and rock and roll, the bohemian lifestyle as what Debbie calls the Moulin Rouge Society.
	The Democrats are trying to conserve those ideas.
	They're trying to conserve DEI, they're trying to hold on to affirmative action.
	Does that make Democrats into quote conservatives?
	No.
	So the distinction I'm talking about is the operational conservatism that simply makes one want to conserve something.
	And that's not conservatism in the sense that we understand it today.
	is understood substantively.
	If there's any aspect of quote conserving, it's conserving ultimately the ideals of the American founding.
	We are conservatives, we are trying to conserve that.
	The broader issue here is that whenever you're conserving something, you can never say I want to conserve the past just as it was.
	That would make conservatism into an absolutely impossible pursuit.
	Why?
	Because frankly, none of us can hold on to the past just the way it was.
	Can you hold on to the past just the way it was when you were a kid?
	No.
	You're not the same person as you were when you were twelve.
	And so you cannot get it back like that.
	Usually when you say I want to conserve the past, what you mean is there were a lot of good things that happened in the past.
	There are a lot of good ideas, a lot of good values, a lot of good principles.
	I'm going to conserve those and apply them to the new situation in which I find myself now, which is by definition different than the situation you faced before.
	That was the Lincoln approach.
	That's why in that sense, Lincoln and Lincoln himself, by the way, did not hesitate to call himself a conservative in the sense that I have now described it.
	So anyway, we're having this, you know, these days, any kind of substantive conversation is quite rare in social media.
	A lot of it is about memes, a lot of it is about just splashy back and forth, a lot of it has to do with something that, you know, this guy was interviewed by Megan Kelly said that and everybody is outraged or Cracker Barrel has a new meme and we don't like it.
	But discussions of history, of ideas about the true pedigree and ancestry of the two parties, this is actually kind of infrequent.
	So I'm actually glad to see this kind of a conversation when it erupts.
	And I thought I would take this occasion just to clarify that look, when we are criticizing the racism of the Southern Democrats, we're not criticizing the South per se.
	In fact, my argument is that the institution of slavery was not merely promoted by the Southern Democrats, but it was done with the coordination of the Northern Democrats.
	At one point, this woman who was criticizing me says, Well, Dinesh is falsely claiming that the Southern Democrats wanted him to preserve slavery indefinitely.
	Actually, I don't say that.
	What I do say is that the idea of preserving slavery indefinitely was in fact the central idea of the leading Northern Democrat, one Stephen Douglas.
	Douglas' idea, popular sovereignty, and if you think about it, what does popular sovereignty mean?
	It means every state, every territory should decide for itself if it wants slavery.
	For how long?
	Indefinitely.
	And so the principle implies that if, let's say, states and territories want to decide if they want to have slavery now or in the future, according to Douglas' principle, they should be allowed to do that.
	It's a matter of choice.
	It's a matter of each community exercising its own sovereignty certainly over this issue.
	So hopefully that offers some clarification in a debate that can always very often become quickly muddled, but I remain as ever a third.
	As ever, a stalwart defender of Lincoln, the founder of the Republican Party, and it's a very interesting curiosity that the principles of Lincoln today have been abandoned by many people in Lincoln's north, in the northern part of the country, and meanwhile some of those same principles, interestingly enough, today are more frequently found north, not in the north, but in the south.

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