Dinesh D'Souza - MAGA AND THE GATEKEEPERS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1210

Nov. 12, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza

58:44

MAGA AND THE GATEKEEPERS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1210

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	Is the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians the revival of an ancient conflict recorded in the Bible?
	The nation of Israel is a resurrected nation.
	What if there was going to be a resurrection of another people, an enemy people of Israel?
	The dragon's prophecy.
	Watch it now or buy the DVD at thedragonsprophecyfilm.com.
	Coming up, Trump seems to have waded into some controversy with some comments about H-1B visas.
	I'll talk about that.
	I'll consider the question of who is MAGA and what is America first.
	And I also want to explore whether the Reagan model still defines American conservatism and whether the gatekeeping function of William F. Buckley is still needed on the right.
	If you're watching on YouTube, Rumble, or X, listening on Apple or Spotify, please subscribe.
	I'd appreciate it.
	This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
	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.
	Who is MAGA and what does MA mean?
	This is a question that deals with substance, which is to say, what does the Make America Great Again movement stand for?
	But it also raises a different type of question.
	Who gets to decide that?
	Who defines MAGA?
	Now, there may seem to be an obvious answer to this question, which is Trump.
	Who else?
	Who created MAGA?
	Now, that answer is not quite as obvious as it may seem because one could make the argument that MAGA created Trump, that Trump did not invent the MAGA movement, but rather he became its frontrunner.
	He became its spokesman.
	He became its interpreter.
	But the MAGA movement is somehow prior to Trump, maybe bigger than Trump.
	To some degree, I think it's obviously true that we want a MAGA movement that will outlast Trump.
	But no one can deny that Trump is the, in a sense, the representative of MAGA.
	And of course, he's in a position of power as the president.
	So he gets to implement MAGA, to put it into practice.
	And all of this is a prelude to saying that there is now a kind of a MAGA fury, or at least a fury in some quarters of MAGA against Trump.
	And the reason is this recent interview with Laura Ingram in which they're talking about these H-1B visas.
	And Trump is, the context of it is Trump is extolling the virtues of the things he's doing.
	And Laura basically goes, so I take this that you're not going to be focusing on cutting off these H-1B visas.
	And Trump is like, well, we're going to need them.
	And Laura's like, what do you mean?
	Why can't American workers do all those jobs?
	And Trump is like, well, they can't.
	That was the punch.
	It was the punchline, but also like the punch to the gut because Trump is like, no, you are living in a kind of illusion here.
	The idea that all these jobs, and he's talking about certain types of specialized jobs, as we'll see in a moment.
	And Laura makes a point like, well, wait a minute, didn't Americans used to do this job?
	What about when we were growing up?
	Is her quote.
	And I guess Trump's point is, well, what does that have to do with now?
	For decades, these jobs have ultimately been either outsourced or we have had other people, foreigners doing them.
	We're essentially importing specialized labor the way some other countries do.
	Arab countries, for example, typically bring in Asian Indians, they bring in Europeans to do all the jobs that they don't know how to do.
	In the case of the Arabs, they never learned.
	In the case of America, it seems like people have forgotten to.
	In other words, we're not training our own people to do these jobs.
	And now suddenly it's like, give us the jobs.
	And Trump's point is, but you can't do them, or you can't do all of them, or you certainly can't do certain types of jobs.
	And Trump gives two examples.
	One is working in missile factories, and the other is making batteries.
	You might remember some months ago, there was a raid by ICE on a facility where apparently a bunch of Korean workers were working in the what I take to be very specialized field and rather dangerous field of battery making.
	And these guys were like rounded up.
	Trump is sort of saying, I don't approve of that because, number one, we need those guys to do it.
	Number two, you can't just pick people off the unemployment line or out of the homeless shelter and go, hey, you make batteries.
	Trump says there's going to have to be a transition or learning process.
	So who's right here in this exchange?
	Well, in my view, both are right, but they're talking past each other.
	Basically, what Laura's doing is she's defining the goal.
	And the goal is really to have Americans to do these jobs.
	There is no reason to import people to do work that can be done here.
	So I agree.
	Trump is right in that he is applying with what he always does the kind of practical lens.
	Trump is a guy, as a real estate guy, you know, at some point, you need the architect, and the building doesn't get, there's not going to, you don't want the building to fall down.
	And so you need to have people who can deliver the goods.
	It's not wishful thinking.
	It's not, well, it's not idle boasting.
	Yeah, we're the best country in the world.
	It is show me the people who actually know something about batteries.
	And this is actually very interesting because when you look at all the comments responding to this exchange on social media, by the way, a bunch of people, including me, posted this exchange between Trump and Laura.
	Most of the comments are just kind of, well, the English word is thrasonico, which basically means like puffing out your chest and, oh, yeah, we can do it.
	And I'm tempted to say, well, can you do it?
	You know, there's one guy on social media who loves to post about this stuff.
	I don't recall his name, but in his handle of his photo, first of all, he shows himself.
	He has no shirt on.
	And then he has a like inverted baseball cap with the kind of adjusto strap shown to advantage.
	Now, this is the kind of guy, by the way, who probably thinks, well, I can do it.
	I can work in a missile factory.
	I can work in batteries.
	And I'm thinking, well, first of all, put on a shirt.
	Second of all, either take off your cap or you might want to rotate it the right way around.
	And the third is you might actually want to learn the skills that it requires to do these kinds of jobs instead of just making these kind of broad declarations.
	So, MAGA here, I think, is in a bit of a quandary.
	And I say a quandary because even in the social media discourse over all this, there's a lack of realism.
	Let me say what I mean by this.
	I'm going to read a post of mine and then interpret it.
	Here's the post: many people, meaning many people say, our education system sucks.
	I mean, who would disagree with that?
	It's all indoctrination, no real learning.
	Many people, me included, have been demonstrating this really now for the last three decades.
	Standards have plummeted.
	There's a whole body of data to support all this.
	And then I write: the same people: is Trump seriously saying our graduates are not the best in the world and can do any job you can think of?
	And then I just wryly comment: let's at least get our stories straight.
	In other words, if we are right, if we MAGA are correct that our education system K through 12 is a shambles, public education is a disaster, COVID was a major setback to education on top of the already low standards and wasted money.
	If universities have become engines of indoctrination, doesn't it follow that if what we have been saying is true, then you're going to have a bunch of people who are not all that ready for the workforce, not all that ready, particularly for more demanding jobs, not that well prepared in certain fields where we know that there are shortages.
	We know, for example, that American students are less likely to go, for example, into the math and science fields.
	I just saw this morning a study that came out of one of the UC colleges.
	And this was a study that showed that students in the university we're talking about in the University of California system cannot do simple addition and subtraction.
	A typical problem goes something like this: 76 plus 25 equals 38 plus dash.
	They can't solve that problem.
	They're in college.
	They don't know how to solve that problem and they cannot deliver the correct answer.
	This is something that probably I could do in about the third grade.
	And these are students in college.
	So I think the point here is this is not about we need a little bit of realism here about what we're trying to do and what we're trying to fix.
	I see a bunch of here.
	Let me read you a couple of comments.
	This is a guy named Kang Min Lee.
	This is an utter betrayal of the entire base.
	He's talking about Trump's comment.
	Somebody else, we have been betrayed.
	And there's just a lot of this kind of stuff.
	And I can only put myself in the place of Trump and think of how he must be shaking his head basically to say, look, I mean, are we trying to practically address these problems?
	Or is this all about a certain type of idle posturing?
	And I say idle posturing because one of the classic features of countries that are not doing well is they lapse into a kind of decadence.
	They lapse into a kind of illusion.
	They divert their attention from the problems that are to be solved, and they live in a world of make-believe.
	This is a little bit harsh, but it's also true.
	I remember years ago when I first went to Venice, and I did some tours that were about the art in Venice and also the history of Venice.
	And this is what I learned about the history of Venice.
	The Venetians were the best in the world in making certain types of ships.
	And they dominated the trade in the entire Mediterranean.
	And Venice was an immensely prosperous society.
	It became a patron of learning and of the arts.
	But then, as it turns out, the Venetians just got beat.
	The Spanish built better ships.
	And that's how basically, that's how Columbus was able to cross the big ocean and get to the Americas.
	The Venetians couldn't do it.
	Their ships weren't good enough to do that.
	But the Spanish were able to build ships that did it.
	And the Venetians, instead of saying, how do we get better?
	How do we make better ships?
	The Venetians basically decided, you know what?
	Let's live in a land of make-believe.
	Let's create carnival.
	Let's have these, let's all put on costumes and let's make all these, let's live in the world of fancy.
	And you know what?
	We still have some wealth left over from before.
	So let's start dissipating it over time.
	And so what has happened to Venice today?
	Well, basically, it is a tourist center that is lost in time.
	When you stand there and you see the old homes that were built by the Doge and by all the aristocratic families of Venice, you're like, I'm looking at what Venice used to be 500 years ago, but is not anymore.
	Now, I hope this is not going to be America's fate.
	I do know historically that countries that go down basically never come back up, right?
	I mean, look at the Greeks.
	They were on top of the world in the 5th century BC and they're finished.
	Look at the Romans.
	Look at the Ottomans.
	Even the British Empire is now just a sickly shadow of its old self.
	We don't want to be following in that track.
	And the beginning of wisdom is to have a certain degree of realism about what the problems are in our society.
	Now, I want to talk about the issue of MAGA and gatekeeping, gatekeeping.
	And I say this because I've seen in recent days a number of people bashing none other than someone who was to some degree my mentor, William F. Buckley Jr., the longtime editor of National Review and a very prominent figure on the conservative scene in the latter half of the 20th century, certainly from the late 1960s all the way to the end of the century.
	And Buckley was sort of the poster boy for intelligent conservatism.
	And his magazine was immensely influential.
	And the critique of Buckley now appears to be that Buckley was very narrow-minded.
	Buckley was a gatekeeper.
	Buckley shut out people like the John Birch Society.
	Buckley pushed out people that he deemed to be unacceptable to conservatives.
	And the idea is that Buckley narrowed the realm of acceptable discourse.
	And we today need to open the gates and have a much wider debate.
	Now, once again, I am completely for free speech.
	This is not an issue of whether or not we allow people to talk.
	This is not an issue about whether they should be blacklisted or de-platformed.
	I don't support any of that.
	But what we're talking about is something rather different.
	And that is who is given a sort of respectability within the conservative fold, within the MA movement.
	I want to say a word about Buckley, and that is that the critique of him appears to be largely ignorant and coming from people who know nothing about the old National Review.
	The old National Review, which should be, by the way, distinguished from National Review today, which is a completely different organism, a different animal.
	But the old National Review was extremely diverse.
	Buckley was not narrow-minded in any way.
	In fact, I would argue that he had an affinity for kooks, brilliant kooks, but kooks nevertheless.
	And so you could walk into National Review in those days, and you'd find one of the editors who's like sleeping on the couch and had been there for like three days.
	Weird.
	But this guy was, you know, a southern agrarian, and he believed the Civil War was won by the wrong side.
	And Abraham Lincoln was a tyrant.
	So with Buckley, the old National Review had paleoconservatives.
	And even the paleoconservatives were a varied bunch.
	So some people who thought, well, life was really great in 19th century England.
	We need to aspire to that.
	And other guys were like, no, life was actually much better in the medieval era when Thomas Aquinas was in the University of Paris.
	We should aspire to that.
	And then there were other conservatives who were like, oh, no, we got to go even further back to the ancient Greeks.
	Or maybe there were one or two who believed we got to go even further back to the Stone Age.
	Anyway, the point being, there were paleoconservatives of one variety or another.
	There were European reactionaries.
	There were libertarians who wanted to dissolve the government, maybe even take down all the stop signs.
	You had the traditionalists who admired, say, Chesterton and Edmund Burke.
	You had Catholic conservatives.
	You had neoconservatives.
	You just had the gamut.
	And so the idea that this was sort of a small or narrow, small tent, not at all.
	The opposite.
	It was a very, very big tent.
	And even though it was a big tent, it was not an unlimited tent.
	So Buckley's view was: yes, we have room for a lot of different points of view, but we don't have room for people who think that like blacks are apes.
	If that's your point of view, you're a bigot.
	We don't really want you around here.
	Yeah, you have free speech on the street, but you don't have free speech in the columns of National Review.
	We're not going to be asking you to do a book review on the subject of Africa.
	And similarly, we don't have room for blatant anti-Semites.
	We don't have room for complete lunatics.
	When I mentioned this recently, one of the guys from the John Birch Society was like, well, you know, we were blacklisted in the Buckley era.
	And part of the problem was that the head of the John Birch Society was in the habit of just accusing prominent Republicans, by the way, including President Eisenhower, of being a communist.
	Now, it's one thing to say, you know, Eisenhower was naive about communism, Eisenhower, which, by the way, would be itself a strange thing to say.
	Eisenhower was the supreme commander of World War II.
	He had a pretty good idea of what the world looked like.
	And he had a kind of canny military man's understanding of strategy and of real politique.
	So to call him naive is not all that easy to do.
	But where's the proof that Eisenhower was a communist?
	There actually is none.
	There's no real proof.
	And so Buckley's view is these people are nuts.
	And they're making our movement look stupid.
	And they're making us look bad.
	And so, again, they're allowed to have their, they can send out their newsletter to their members, and they did.
	But we don't necessarily want them in our camp.
	And that was the gatekeeping that Buckley performed.
	In other words, a wide variety of views, yes, but outright bigots and kooks, no.
	And that's kind of my view.
	Now, my view now is that we want a conservative movement and we want a MAGA that is widely open to different points of view.
	We want classical liberals.
	We want traditional conservatives.
	We want some of these so-called post-liberals.
	And I'll be talking about them in subsequent podcasts.
	This idea of post-liberalism is a very intriguing idea.
	By the way, some of the so-called groipers who are looking for, some of the groipers just don't think about intellectual foundations at all, but some do.
	And the ones that do generally appeal to some form of post-liberalism.
	So we're going to want to talk about post-liberalism and what, if anything, is the connection to the so-called Groyper movement.
	That's a topic really for another day.
	But my focus today is on the simple fact that all movements need some form of gatekeeping, right?
	And this is not just political movements.
	The religious groups, the Presbyterian church needs a form of gatekeeping.
	Otherwise, what does it mean to be a Presbyterian?
	Isn't there going to be some ability to distinguish a Presbyterian from a non-Presbyterian?
	I mean, if a Muslim comes along and goes, I'm a Presbyterian, they have to be able to say, well, no, you don't believe in this, you don't believe in that.
	So you have free speech, but you're not a member of our group.
	So we need to have some form of that if conservatism is to have any meaning, if being a Republican is going to have any meaning, if being MAGA is going to have any meaning.
	We have a lot of room for a lot of people, but no ugly bigots, no vicious anti-Semites, and no outright lunatics.
	You know, Thanksgiving holds so many memories.
	I'm sure it's the same for you.
	But right now, there's a girl finding out if she's pregnant, and in the next couple of weeks, she's going to make a decision.
	And whatever decision she makes will become her memory of this Thanksgiving season for the rest of her life.
	Now, what will she be thankful for a year from now?
	You.
	She'll be thankful that you introduced her to her baby by providing a free ultrasound.
	And she'll be thankful she chose life as she prepares for her baby's first Thanksgiving.
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	Call 833-850-2229.
	That's 833-850-2229.
	Or you can go to preborn.com/slash Dinesh.
	Preborn.com/slash Dinesh.
	Have you heard about the new movie, Call Sign Courage?
	It's the story of Space Force commander Matt Lomeyer.
	He's the one who blew the lid off the military's DEI agenda.
	He saw how Marxist messaging, critical race theory, and rampant DEI training was changing the culture of the military.
	Suddenly, everyone was equal.
	They stripped away merit-based selection and promotions, and the lack of accountability, competency, and effectiveness had actually become a domestic threat.
	He spoke up, how it was tearing apart the military's unity, readiness, and the whole reason why we have a military in the first place: lethality, the ability to fight and win wars.
	They broke into his home.
	He was spied on and threatened, but Lomeyer didn't back down.
	So career officers kicked him out.
	Then President Trump made him Under Secretary of the Air Force so he could solve the problem.
	When the stakes were high, this guy stood up.
	Don't miss Call Sign Courage, the Matt Lomeyer story.
	Watch it by the DVD at salemnow.com.
	That's salemnow.com.
	Guys, I'm really delighted to welcome to the podcast really an old friend, Mark Joseph, who is an author.
	He is a film producer.
	He's also a music producer.
	He's a columnist.
	His company is MJM Entertainment Group.
	And as we'll talk in a moment, Mark and I go way back, in fact, to my very first film on Obama.
	We worked together on that one and also on some others.
	Mark is also the producer of the film Reagan, starring Dennis Quaid.
	He's the author of several books.
	We're going to talk about the new one called Making Reagan, a memoir from the producer of the Reagan movie.
	It's available on Amazon.
	Mark, thanks for joining me.
	I really appreciate it.
	I have very fond memories going back to the Obama film that we worked on together, which was, of course, such a big shift for me because I'd been coming out of the world of think tanks, writing books, didn't know a thing about making movies.
	And it was really thanks to you and John Sullivan and some others that I learned for the first time the ropes of how to make a good film.
	You've gone on to do a bunch of important work.
	Most recently, of course, the Reagan film.
	Let me start by asking you this.
	I'm seeing on social media now a fair amount of what I take to be just ignorant hostility to Reagan.
	And it's based on the idea that the Reagan generation screwed over the younger generation in all kinds of ways.
	And therefore, we need to get away from Reagan.
	We need a new hero.
	Maybe it's a Pat Buchanan, maybe it's somebody else, but a non-Reaganite conservatism is the only way forward.
	I thought I might ask you to address that as we dive into your book, focusing on Reagan and his importance.
	Boy, that is a really apropos question to the moment.
	I think obviously I hear a lot of that chatter, but you know, part of it is just governing.
	You know, it's easy to be in the pundit class.
	It's a different matter to govern.
	And I think that's what Reagan discovered as well.
	Because he famously, you know, said, and when he was governor of California, he raised taxes at one point.
	I forgot what the fees were.
	It wasn't an income tax.
	It was some kind of a fee.
	And he had said before that, you know, my feet are in concrete.
	And then when he gave in, he said, the crackling sound you hear is the sound of the concrete breaking underneath my feet, something like that.
	So there was a pragmatic side to Reagan.
	That's true.
	But he would often say things like, half a loaf is better than nothing.
	And so in our film, there's a moment where he goes from, you know, every movie is about character development.
	And there's a moment where he goes from being his mother's wide-eyed, optimistic son to Nancy's more suspicious nature.
	And that is in the airplane in Air Force One during Iran-Contra, where we have her say to him, You have got, they are out to destroy you and impeach you.
	You have got to fight back.
	And so there is this side of Reagan that's always trusts the other side, and all the fellows are not going to work out a deal.
	But he would get burned from time to time because the other side wouldn't keep their part of the deal.
	And so Ron Contra, after that, he goes to Reykjavik, and that's where he walks away from Gorbachev.
	So all that to say, it's a mixed bag.
	I understand what they're saying.
	You know, Reagan had things he wanted to do that he couldn't do once he got into office because he was talked out of it.
	For instance, he wanted to get rid of the Department of Education.
	He wanted to recognize Taiwan.
	And, you know, the smart, moderate folks came to him and said, sir, you just can't do that.
	We would upset the international order, and we can't do that.
	So he was restrained to some extent by those voices around him.
	But in terms of the big picture, I think we have to, for the young conservatives that you're talking about, they have to kind of pick and choose from their different heroes.
	And there are elements of Reagan that I think they can learn from.
	But certainly, you know, Reagan spent time in Hollywood and in Washington among people who disagreed with him.
	And he learned to function and get along.
	And so when you move from punditry to governing, there are going to have to be some legitimate compromises made along the way.
	Do you think part of it, Mark, is this?
	And that is that when you live in a certain era, you confront the urgent challenges of your own time.
	And if you are successful, the more successful you are, the more those challenges go away.
	I remember it was actually Saint Augustine who once said, you know, that the heresies that he fought against, he wanted to defeat so completely that subsequent generations would not even hear about them.
	But the net effect of that is the subsequent generations come along, the heresies have disappeared, and they go, well, what good is Augustine?
	What did he really accomplish?
	What's his relevance to our life?
	And I think something like that is going on with Reagan.
	We all live in the aftermath of the Cold War when the world came probably as close as it has to at least the possibility of complete extinction.
	Reagan steered us away from all that.
	He won the Cold War without firing a shot.
	And young people today, being born after that era, go, big deal.
	Yeah, you're right.
	That was his kind of primary mission, right?
	And if you look at, we based, I know you wrote a book on Reagan, of course, years ago that I have, but we based this movie on Paul Kengore's book.
	And if you look at his life, you know, the interesting thing that Paul did was he went back to the church Reagan grew up in and looked at the sermons that young Ronald Reagan heard as a kid.
	And a lot of it was anti-communist stuff.
	So it was almost like it was his mission and everything else was preparation for that.
	But I think the principles that can be learned, you know, I think Charlie Kirk lived out kind of the Reagan, the Reaganism, the Reaganite attitude of addition, not subtraction.
	And I think the principles that these young guys can learn from Reagan are, you know, just the attitude of bringing in people.
	You know, there were Reagan Democrats famously, as you well know.
	And Reagan actually said at one point, I don't like even using the word conservative because it drives people away who I'm trying to reach.
	That's Mr. Conservatives saying that.
	So I think, look, being affable is one thing.
	Reagan told Dana Rohrabacher, you know, part of my research was interviewing about 55 of the people that knew him and worked with him.
	And Rohrebacher said something I've never forgotten.
	He said that Reagan told him, because our views are considered so extreme, we have to go out of our way to be gracious with people.
	I thought that was really fascinating.
	And he told the story of they were going to, I think, a South American country, and they had learned through their intelligence that upon landing in that country, the leader was going to attack Reagan.
	And of course, Rohrebacher, being the kind of St. Peter type person that he was, said, sir, let me write the speech attacking him right back.
	And Reagan said, no, Dana, we're going to do exactly the opposite.
	When we land, I'm going to praise him.
	And that guy will be so embarrassed, he won't give the speech attacking that he was planning to give.
	And that's what happened.
	So there's kind of a wisdom there.
	I know we're in the Trump counterpunch era, but I think there is a kind of a wisdom to that, that you do have to govern.
	And, you know, whenever possible, try to get along.
	Probably the one thing that I think these days a lot of our young activists would fault Reagan the most is that whether wittingly or unwittingly he did the amnesty, he sort of opened the gates.
	And the idea is that somehow he was the kind of founding father of the open borders policy of the Biden administration.
	Now, I think you know that I realize this is a very unfair portrait of Reagan, but nevertheless, I think it's worth confronting it frontally.
	Reagan did do an amnesty.
	It was a partial amnesty, but an amnesty nevertheless.
	Was Reagan, in fact, the bad guy on this and should at least be repudiated on that issue?
	Well, I think that goes back to the naivete that he would occasionally show.
	One of those, he said, the greatest regret of his political lifetime was signing the Therapeutic Abortion Act in 1967 as governor.
	And again, in that circumstance, the fellas came to him and said, sir, this is only for the health of a mother.
	Well, he took that at face value, didn't understand that health would later mean whatever people wanted it to mean.
	So there's that, the amnesty, legalizing 3 million illegal aliens.
	Again, part of the deal was, hey, the border shuts down and 3 million, that's the deal.
	The fellas said that's the deal.
	So again, there is a bit of a naivete, which is hard to, it's hard to think of that with the guy that fought the Cold War.
	But again, I think there's two competing natures within him, his mother's good naturedness and his wife's, you know, don't trust anybody.
	And when he would go one side, and of course, he was encouraged probably by the business folks in the administration who wanted that cheap labor to make that deal.
	So look, that's just a part of all of our human weaknesses.
	So I don't think it serves any point to deny that.
	There's no doubt that that changed California politics forever, for instance.
	And it did lead to different views, to an environment that we had to face when we had, what, 20 million that came in more recently.
	Yeah.
	You mentioned earlier Trump, and I think it is instructive.
	The situations are different.
	We're talking about people a generation apart.
	But how would you compare the leadership styles and the strengths and weaknesses of Reagan and Trump?
	Well, look, it's fascinating.
	I mean, you have Ronald Reagan grows up in the middle of Illinois in a polite, you know, place where everybody makes casseroles for each other.
	And they're, you know, and Trump grows up in New York, where he's got to fight the unions and the mob and politicians.
	And, you know, you have to fight for your daily survival.
	And so I get it.
	You know, I don't have any, I'm not a Trump hater, but they're very different in their achieving their goals.
	And, you know, in the Reagan, in the movie, I had Gorbachev say a line where he says to Reagan, sir, they say about you that you pick people's pocket and make them feel good about it.
	I think there is something to that, that Reagan had the ability to, he had a way of preserving your dignity as he crushed you.
	And there is a certain art and finesse to that.
	It's not the art and finesse you learn running the Trump organization in New York City.
	So they're just very different creatures, but they're both people of conviction.
	I think that Trump's, you know, both of them learned things along the way.
	Reagan wasn't a tax cutter until 1978, after his gubernatorial term had passed, when he met people like Arthur Laffer and Jude Wininsky.
	So they both acquired things along the way.
	I think that Trump was not initially pro-life against abortion, obviously, and he learned to be more.
	But at the same time, I think Reagan led a movement, and Trump is sort of Trump and his movement take turns alternating.
	I remember, for instance, the movement that Trump leads did not like the COVID shot, for instance.
	Trump invented the COVID shot, basically.
	So there are times when he gets too far ahead of his movement.
	But it's an interesting, it definitely means that these are not, his movement are not mind-numb robots.
	They think for themselves.
	When they disagree, they tell him.
	And one time they booed him about the COVID shot.
	And actually, I think in a weird way, that shows it's a healthy movement that they can boo their dear leader when they think he's out of step.
	You know, years ago, Mark, when I was at the Reagan ranch up in Santa Barbara, this is the one that is now run by the Young Americas Foundation.
	In the Reagan bookshelves, there are some of the books that Reagan himself owned.
	They haven't been moved.
	And so I was picking them up and looking inside them, including some really thick books like Whitaker Chambers' book called Witness.
	And you can see in Reagan's copy of that book some fairly elaborate underlinings, markings, notations made by Reagan in his own hand.
	Very interesting because it showed that whether or not you would consider Reagan himself, quote, an intellectual, he was very interested in ideas.
	And you can see him thumbing through a work by Milton Friedman or Hayek, Solja Nietzsche.
	I mentioned, of course, Whitaker Chambers.
	Now, that's different than Trump, isn't he?
	I envision Trump like out in the construction yard, like, let's get this done, move that boulder over here.
	Why is this tree so big?
	Why hasn't it been trimmed?
	So for Trump, I see him more as an operational man of action, and Reagan more as somebody who, in a way, inhabited the world of ideas and was always thinking about how to translate ideas and ideology into practical action.
	Yeah, I wouldn't say Reagan was an intellectual necessarily as we understand the term, but he was extremely well read.
	But, you know, he would read a wide variety of periodicals.
	Of course, Human Events was his favorite.
	Trump is a different animal.
	Trump is a consumer of visual and audio media.
	So he doesn't, I don't think he sits and reads the kind of books Reagan read, but he's watching everything and he's taking it all in.
	And, you know, we used to make fun of people used to make fun of Carter for micromanaging the tennis, the schedule, the tennis courts in the White House grounds.
	I mean, there's no doubt that Reagan, Trump has a bit of that in him.
	I mean, he's micromanaging the details of the gold leafs in the Oval Office and overseeing the construction of the new ballroom.
	So there is an element that is very un-Reagan-like in that he is very, very detail-oriented, cares about all this stuff, and is exactly doing the kind of stuff that people made fun of Jimmy Carter for doing.
	How he has the time or the energy to do all this stuff, I have no idea.
	I mean, foreign policy alone, if it were me, I wouldn't have time to think about the ballroom.
	But I guess he doesn't sleep.
	And, you know, this is just 24-7.
	Yeah, I mean, I talk sometimes to my family in India and they're like, wait a minute, wasn't Trump just in South Korea?
	Wasn't he just in Japan?
	He's back in Washington, D.C., and there he is having meetings one, you know, one after the other.
	Reagan, of course, had been, people, I think, would sometimes say that Reagan was lazy.
	Reagan wasn't lazy, but on the other hand, Reagan was not the kind of guy who would stay in the office in general until midnight, was he?
	Yeah, I think he actually cultivated and enjoyed people thinking he was an idiot.
	And again, this is a smart tactician uses that to your advantage.
	And so, if your opponents think you're taking naps all the time, they let their guard down.
	I think that was the case with Reagan.
	Just to give you two quick examples, what I learned from his aides, one of them told me that, you know, on the red carpet, when he was a Hollywood actor, he would always position himself to the very left-hand side on the red carpet and leave Errol Flynn to be in the middle.
	And people thought, oh, what a modest guy.
	But he wasn't being modest.
	He was thinking ahead of the captions.
	He'd get mentioned first in the captions, left to right, Ronald Reagan.
	So he's no slouch.
	He's thinking stuff through.
	I think he also had learned early on to pace himself.
	He had a very bad bout with ulcers when he was governor that he said he was healed of.
	But I think he really learned to pace himself.
	Trump, on the other end, I just, again, I don't know how he does it.
	I think he sleeps like four hours a night and he's drinking a lot of Diet Coke.
	It seems kind of superhuman to me, but definitely, you know, different approaches to governing and just to the way they position themselves.
	Mark, this is fascinating stuff.
	As you know, I did a biography of Reagan.
	I very rarely have a conversation with somebody about Reagan where I learned some things in the course of the conversation.
	This is one of those conversations.
	Guys, I've been talking to Mark Joseph.
	By the way, you can follow him on X at Mark Joseph00.
	And the book, Making Reagan, a memoir from the producer of the Reagan movie, available now on Amazon.
	Mark, thanks very much for coming on.
	Thanks, Dinesh.
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	I'm hoping today to complete my discussion of near-death experiences and draw a general conclusion that will help to move this discussion forward.
	And I'm considering various kind of atheist objections to near-death experiences.
	One of them is that these near-death experiences are kind of dreamlike experiences, somewhat similar to what might happen if you take hallucinogenic or mind-altering drugs.
	Now, it's true, people who take heavy doses of recreational drugs, they do get this kind of, they move into this fantasy world.
	They see wild colors, they have soaring sensations, they move between exhilaration and drowsiness, disorientation, decreased vision.
	But here's the point.
	Those people know that they're on drugs.
	And not only that, their experiences typically, while they might have elements of flashing lights and so on, by and large, there is a lack of coherence.
	There's a kind of fuzziness to all that.
	And that's why when you get out of the drug-induced state, you have a kind of hazy recollection of what that was all about.
	But people who have near-death experiences are non-drugs.
	The point is that they're having these experiences.
	The experiences themselves are different.
	They are remembered very clearly.
	They have a lasting transformational impact.
	And not only that, the experiences are remarkably similar.
	You know, you might have 10 different guys who are on drugs.
	Each of them has these hallucinogenic dreams or visions.
	And all the visions are completely different.
	They make one person is over here, another person's over there.
	They can compare notes, but you wouldn't be able to find the common denominators that you can find when you're talking about people with these NDEs or near-death experiences.
	Now, a neuroscientist, Michael Persinger, says, I've figured it out.
	The NDE is not a big deal.
	I can replicate it.
	And I can replicate it by placing a helmet on your head and stimulating certain parts of your brain.
	And if I do that in a kind of carefully controlled way, you will experience a bright light.
	You will experience the sensation of going through a tunnel.
	You will have some of these emotional responses that NDEs seem to display.
	First of all, that turns out not to be true.
	There are a number of people who tried the helmet, including, by the way, the atheist Richard Dawkins.
	And he goes, well, I didn't do it.
	I didn't see any of that.
	So right away, we know that this is, at the very least, you can say a hit or misdevice.
	But let's say it's not.
	Let's say that you could have a neuroscientist who has figured out that certain parts of the brain correlate with emotional states, certain parts of the brain, let's say with perception.
	And so by kind of tapping or prodding those areas of the brain, you can generate these experiences.
	I would argue, so what?
	After all, these are artificially induced states.
	So, yeah, you can give people certain types of drugs or you can give them electric shock treatment, but that doesn't mean that the experience isn't real.
	Here's what I'd write in the book.
	If I tell you I'm being blinded by the sun, that's the analogy to the near-death experience, you cannot prove that this is a mental illusion by showing me that you can also blind me with a flashlight.
	The point being that the sun is out there.
	It's in the natural landscape, if you will, of my experience.
	You are now artificially trying to create the same effect.
	And maybe you can do it, maybe you can't.
	But either way, it doesn't prove whether my original experience was real or not.
	So this is no refutation of the near-death experience.
	And not only that, in order generally to have an experience, you have to have a functioning brain.
	And the fact that we have near-death experiences on the part of people whose brain has stopped functioning, that is significant.
	Now, there is also the rather familiar and maybe somewhat tedious evolutionary argument against near-death experiences.
	And the idea here is this, that when your life is threatened, we have a kind of evolutionary reaction.
	We have a defense mechanism.
	And the defense mechanism is for our mind to detach, at least temporarily, from our body, almost to observe our body in a third person way.
	And this helps to reduce pain.
	It also helps to help in some ways to endure something that may otherwise be unendurable.
	An animal, for example, that is being mauled by a predator is such a horrifying experience that if you can some way soften the blow through a sort of detachment, the idea is that evolution programs that into the species.
	Now, I don't really know if this is true.
	It seems somewhat plausible to me.
	But again, I emphasize this argument is completely irrelevant.
	Why?
	Because people who have their heart stopped or people who have no brain function are not engaging in any evolutionary avoidance behavior.
	Maybe it is the case that if I'm in Alaska and I'm being chased by a bear and the bear is basically raining blows on my head, I find a way to sort of mentally detach from that so that I can almost observe it from the outside.
	And this is a way for me to cope with the pain, maybe, maybe, and maybe again.
	But again, if I'm lying in a hospital bed in a coma stove state and my heart has stopped or my brain is stopped, I don't have the ability to even react in those ways.
	You can't devise those kinds of tech.
	First of all, you can't devise those techniques when you're sleeping, let alone when your heart stops.
	So, again, this is all very interesting, but is in no way an underminer, if you will, of the near-death experience.
	And finally, I want to consider the psychologist Susan Blackmore's explanation of what she calls the dying brain phenomenon.
	So, her idea here is that when your brain, when you're dying, your brain is breaking down.
	And since your brain is breaking down, it tends to do some things.
	One is your brain is being constricted.
	And so that's why it gives rise to the idea of passing through a tunnel.
	It reflects the physical constriction of your brain itself.
	Number two, she says that you have this kind of life review, but the life review occurs because your brain is just trying to sort of reorganize itself unsuccessfully, as it turns out.
	The brain is breaking down, but it's trying to reorganize itself by pulling up everything that's kind of in its reach.
	And that is all the memories and experiences of your life.
	And that's why it appears to you that you're having some kind of a life review.
	But basically, Susan Blackmore says you're not.
	This is just the dying brain.
	Now, the benefit of this argument is that it does explain the sort of similarity of near-death experiences around the world.
	Because after all, as Susan Blackmore says, we as humans have similar brains, we have similar hormones, we have similar nervous systems.
	So if our brains break down, they're going to break down in the same way and they're going to give rise to the same types of experiences.
	But here's the huge flaw in this reasoning, and that's this: if dying brains break down in this way, and if dying brains basically break down in a manner that produces, let's say, the experience of going through a tunnel, a bright light, warm feelings of love, a life review, here's my question: Why do only people who have near-death experiences see these things?
	If these are in fact the marks of a dying brain, everybody who dies should have these experiences because everybody has the same dying brain.
	If brains that die generate these kinds of experiences, why is it not the case that we see universal reports of these experiences across the board from all cultures, not merely from people who have near-death experiences, but from literally everybody, or at the very least, most people.
	The truth of it is when most people are dying, they have faded recollections, not vivid ones.
	They have increasing incoherence, not increasing coherence.
	They are more disoriented than ever.
	And these symptoms are radically different from the perceptual clarity, the emotional bliss, the kind of concrete vividness of the near-death experience.
	Not only that, you have people who have near-death experiences and then they go back to having normal lives.
	So explain that, Susan Blackmore.
	In other words, let's say my brain is dying and I'm having these near-death experiences.
	What is Susan Blackmore saying that after that, if I come out of it, my brain reverses itself, it undies or it comes back to life, it rewires itself so that now I can drive, I can talk, I can go to work, which is exactly what people with near-death experiences do.
	So evidently, their brain isn't dying and certainly hasn't died.
	Their brain may have done something or gone through something, but it's back to normal or back to the way it used to be.
	The brain is functioning normally.
	So let me out of this draw my conclusion from all this, and that is that the fact that there are these near-death experiences, I think, is very damaging for people who say that there is no afterlife at all.
	The fact that consciousness appears to be able to somehow survive what medical science would deem to be the unsurvivable, you're clinically dead, your brain dead, your heart has stopped.
	The fact that your consciousness goes on, that's a pretty telling fact.
	Because near-death experiences that point to an afterlife should not only be very rare, but if the atheists are right, they should not exist at all.
	They should be impossible, but they are not only possible, they actually occur.
	That being said, I want to close with this chapter with a really important point.
	And I've made this point by allusion before.
	The fact that there is survival after death is a whole different thing from saying that there is immortality.
	Because immortality is not just survival.
	Near-death experiences could mean that there is a form of survival after death that lasts, I'm just now speculating, two months or a year or five years.
	It doesn't necessarily mean that there's a part of you that lives on forever.
	That's a whole different thing.
	That's not just survival.
	That is, in fact, an afterlife that stretches either indefinitely into the future or that stretches in a certain way outside the orbit of time itself.
	And so as we move on now beyond near-death experiences, we're going to move into the realms of physics and cosmology.
	We're going to talk a little bit about brain science.
	We're going to also enter the world of philosophy.
	If all of this seems daunting, it really isn't.
	I'll be clarifying it for you along the way.
	But we're now going to move beyond the near-death experiences into what are the real possibilities for eternal life beyond the grave.
	So buckle up.
	That's where we're going next.
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