Dinesh D'Souza - COUNTER PUNCH Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1219

Nov. 25, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza

53:28

COUNTER PUNCH Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1219

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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, big setback for the Trump DOJ.
	The judge has thrown out the Comey and Letitia James cases.
	I'll talk about how the Trump administration can counterpunch.
	I want to outline what a Democratic congresswoman, Representative Sheila Cherfilius McCormick, allegedly did to line her pocket with illicit COVID money.
	And New York Post columnist Miranda Devine joins me.
	We're going to talk about the FBI and Thomas Crooks.
	If you're watching on YouTube, X or Rumble, listening on Apple or Spotify, please subscribe.
	I'd appreciate it.
	This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
	America needs this voice.
	The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
	We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
	This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
	We are rolling into Thanksgiving, and of course, we all have a lot to be thankful for.
	Certainly on the political scene, we're just thankful that we don't have a continuation of Biden and Harris.
	Think of what the country would be like.
	We have enough problems as it is, but a rescue operation is entirely different from making things a lot, lot worse.
	And so we have that to be thankful for, not to mention countless blessings that you and I have in our ordinary lives.
	By the way, tomorrow will be the last podcast for this week, and then we're off Thursday through Sunday and pick it up on Monday.
	In case you haven't already, here's the Dragon's Prophecy DVD available through Amazon.
	Just put in the title of the film and it'll pop right up.
	Or you can go to thedragonsprophecyfilm.com.
	You can stream it off of multiple platforms.
	And you can also order DVDs from the website.
	Very good stocking stuffers or gifts for Christmas.
	So this is an excellent time to make sure you get everything in early and then you're good to go.
	I'd like to say a couple of words in a semi-humorous mode about Candace Owens and some of her theories about how the Charlie Kirk assassination is connected now somehow to efforts to assassinate her.
	And these efforts are being spearheaded evidently by the French.
	And it all has to do with her claims that Brigitte Macron, the wife of the president Macron, is really a man.
	Those theories have themselves evolved over the years.
	First, it was that Macron's wife is a man.
	Then it turns out that this was in fact a man whose sister died, and then he became a woman to, in a sense, become his sister.
	This is all a little too convoluted to really follow.
	And of course, no surprise, there is a Jew involved.
	There's an Israeli assassin.
	So evidently, this is a pack of French assassins.
	But maybe because the French have never learned to shoot straight, they needed an Israeli to go with them.
	And according to Candace, she has turned all this information over to the authorities.
	No word from the authorities so far.
	My guess is no word will be forthcoming.
	And pretty soon, Candace will conclude that the absence of response from the authorities shows that they too are in on the cover up.
	Who isn't?
	And so, really, all of this, you know, there are a couple of theories here.
	One of them is that Candace is just suffering from a psychiatric breakdown, and I think that cannot be dismissed.
	I saw a post a day or so ago that basically said that this lawsuit filed by the Macron family is so crushing and crushing because Candace was repeatedly not only warned but sent all kinds of evidence,
	birth records and photographic evidence and pictures of Brigitte Macron and her kids and her first marriage before she married Macron.
	All of this is provided to Candace.
	So in other words, it's difficult for Candace to say, I was operating in good faith.
	I really thought this all was true.
	Evidently, they made every effort to show her that it's not true, but she forged full speed ahead anyway.
	I've never really seen anything quite like it.
	And of course, the other theory is that all of this is just being done for social media attention.
	Something that's kind of hard for me to grasp.
	People sometimes accuse me, well, Dunosh, you're only saying these things for clicks.
	And I'm like, no, I don't really, I mean, first of all, I don't make a living on social media.
	Social media is like my pastime.
	And so I do it kind of for fun.
	I do it to keep abreast of some of the stuff going on, both relevant and crazy.
	I do it because I kind of like being in the fray.
	It's, to me, entertaining and amusing and interesting.
	Now, sure, social media is one of the ways that I promote my films.
	And that's just because it is part of the, you know, the pipes, as they say, of our culture.
	It used to be the pipes were articles and television appearances, but now it's all those things, plus also social media.
	Let me talk for a bit about this dismissal by a judge, by the way, a Democratic pointee judge, of the Comey and Letitia James indictments.
	This is an obvious setback for the Trump administration and for the DOJ.
	It caused Comey to make a kind of pompous video.
	I've been exonerated, although, you know what, I fear they might try to do it again.
	And it does look like this dismissal is going to be appealed.
	Now, when you look at the decision by the judge, she is not saying that there is no merit to it.
	She is not saying that Comey is innocent.
	She is not saying that he didn't lie to Congress as alleged in the indictment.
	In fact, the prosecutor Halligan, Lindsay Halligan, has produced documentary evidence that we haven't seen before, pretty well showing that Comey was very much in on it, very much part of the plot to frame Trump, quite knowledgeable about facts to the contrary when he testified to Congress.
	But according to the judge, all of this needs to be dismissed because Halligan, who was appointed by the DOJ to fill a vacant slot, is not properly appointed.
	In other words, the issue here is not the merits of the case.
	It's not even the claim that Comey didn't do any of it.
	It is that the process of naming the prosecutor was invalid.
	And this is the relevant section in the law.
	If an appointment expires under subsection C2, the district court for such district may appoint a U.S. attorney to serve until the vacancy is filled.
	So the law seems to say that the district court may do this, but may doesn't mean must.
	The judge seems to be saying that only the district court could make an interim appointment, and an interim appointment cannot be made by the DOJ.
	So this is a case where, reading the language of the law, it is a little cloudy, but the court is reading it to say that this is a bogus appointment.
	Now, let's say that Lindsay Halligan's appointment is somehow invalid and there should have been a different procedure followed, or maybe even that she shouldn't have been appointed at all and somebody else should have.
	My point is: so what?
	And I say so what because a case is brought by a prosecutor operating under the authority of the DOJ, operating under the authority of the federal branch of the Department of Justice, which is part of the Trump administration.
	And this particular prosecution was cleared by the DOJ and approved at the highest levels by the DOJ.
	In other words, approved by people like Pam Bondi.
	They signed off on it.
	And in that sense, the prosecutor, Halligan, is their agent.
	So whether or not the prosecutor was properly appointed would seem to have no bearing on whether or not the case is properly brought and whether or not the case has any merit.
	So I think that there is a good possibility.
	I'm not a lawyer, but I'm just thinking out loud.
	I'm quite capable of doing basic legal reasoning in accordance with statutes and in accordance with law.
	The appellate court could easily conclude that regardless of whether or not the Halligan appointment is valid, the indictment itself is valid and therefore this dismissal is unwarranted.
	So right now, I'm sure there's some champagne corks being popped in the Letitia James quarters and the Comey quarters.
	Both of them seem to be caught red-handed, the one for just lying, the other for doing mortgage shenanigans, as her indictment alleges.
	And so, it would be a real pity if these two get off the hook simply on a technicality.
	It won't be the first time it's happened.
	But it really also shows, by the way, from the Trump administration side, the importance of doing this by the book.
	And I say this because Democrats could do it in the last four years, and they didn't have to follow the book.
	Why?
	Because for the most part, they had Democratic pointee judges in Washington, D.C.
	And these judges would just kind of sign off and go along and overlook any kinds of errors that they made.
	They were basically in cahoots with the prosecution.
	That is not the case here.
	In almost all those cases, and this will also apply to the Bolton case, you have Democrat nominee judges who are going to be looking at these indictments with a certain type of ideological hostility that is to be expected.
	And therefore, we got to do things the right way in order to get the right result.
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	There's a powerful new film coming out from Angel Studios on the Wonder Project.
	It's called Young Washington.
	It tells the untold story of how George Washington's character was forged long before independence when he was just 20, facing failure, loss, and near death.
	Directed by John Irwin, who made Jesus Revolution, American Underdog, starring Andy Serkis, Ben Kingsley, and Kelsey Grammer.
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	Young Washington releases Independence Day 2026 on the 250th anniversary of our nation's founding.
	Become an early supporter by joining the Angel Guild today.
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	Go to angel.com forward slash Dinesh.
	Help make Young Washington the number one movie this Independence Day.
	It's angel.com/slash Dinesh.
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	By 2010, they filed for bankruptcy.
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	What do you do when you cross a Democratic congresswoman with a whole bunch of government COVID money?
	The answer is you get corruption.
	Now, corruption, I wouldn't say, is the exclusive province of one party over the other, but I would say it is much more predominant, much more congruent with the Democrats than with the Republicans.
	There are really two reasons for this.
	One is the Democrats know they can get away with it, and they have gotten away with it.
	Think about people like Hillary Clinton, who has stayed one step ahead of the posse for like 40 years.
	Think about Obama, who can sleep at night because he's one of the most, maybe the most protected man in the world.
	And it's very difficult, even when he does stuff, to hold him accountable for it.
	I'm not even sure there's been any serious investigation into various deaths that have surrounded Obama, his steward, who drowned outside the Obama estate in Martha's Vineyard earlier when Obama was subsequent to his being an attendee at Jeremiah Wright's church,
	a choir boy, a choir leader alleged to be involved romantically, sexually with Obama, was gunned down in his apartment, unsolved to this day.
	And so, so Democrats, by and large, have lived a charmed life in relationship to the law.
	And even when they've done really bad stuff, you're surprised at how light their penalties are.
	And I could give you many cases like this.
	The other reason Democrats tend to be corrupt is they tend to think of the government's money as their money.
	In other words, they tend to think of the government's money as money that has been allocated to them to spend.
	And they spend it on their own political benefits.
	They spend it on their own campaigns.
	They spend it on programs that end up getting votes for them.
	And so they think if I spend some of it on myself, like what's the difference?
	What's the real difference between benefiting me this way and that way and this way and that way or this way?
	Even if this seems to run somewhat afoul of the law.
	Now, we see in the case of Representative Sheila Cherfilius-McCormick, by the way, not somebody I knew of before.
	She is a representative, a Democratic congresswoman in Florida.
	And she and three co-defendants have been charged with stealing basically $5 million of COVID money.
	Now, it's interesting how this all came about.
	It turns out that she and some associates, in fact, including her brother, a guy named Edwin Cherfilius, they ran this company called Trinity Healthcare Services.
	And they made a deal with FEMA or the Federal Emergency Management Agency under COVID to hire, to provide personnel for COVID services.
	Evidently, the company is providing people who were overseeing vaccinations and maybe helping out at these various COVID centers, clerical staff, nurses, and canvassers at these vaccination sites.
	So in 2021, this company billed FEMA for $50,578.50.
	And the government incredibly wrote them a check, not for $50,000, but for $5 million.
	In fact, $5,057,850.
	So they basically moved a couple of decimal places.
	And by the way, governments are notorious for this kind of carelessness.
	Think about it.
	It's not their money.
	They don't really care.
	And who knows what kind of COVID abuses there occurred?
	There was just so much money sloshing around.
	I wouldn't be surprised if COVID fraud was in the billions of dollars.
	When a government can just tax people and get the money or print money, there's a certain type of reckless indifference to it all.
	So anyway, $5 million of unearned money goes into this company's bank account.
	Now, evidently, they figured it out.
	On the day the money came, Sheila Cherfilius-McCormick took a screenshot of the Bank of America activity.
	She texted it to her brother.
	And then, about a month later, the money began to move.
	A few months later, $2.4 million moves from bank account one to bank account two, which was under a different name, SEM Consulting.
	On the same day, another $190,000 was moved from bank account one to bank account five, which is an account controlled by Edwin Churfilius.
	This is the brother.
	The next day, $1.2 million, $1.25 million was moved from bank account one to bank account nine, which is controlled by two other family members.
	A few days later, $830,000 moved from bank account one to bank account seven, controlled by a friend of Churfilius in Orlando.
	And on and on it goes.
	You get the idea.
	There's evidently even a campaign aspect of this where they're moving money around to people and then funneling it back into Sheila Cherfilius McCormick's campaign funds.
	So she decides, hey, you know, I run for election.
	Why don't I funnel some of this money to help me for that purpose?
	And what I'll do instead of the money comes in straight, people are going to look, where'd it come from?
	So I'll funnel it through friends and family members who will then funnel it to the campaign.
	Now, this sounds actually a little bit like the straw donations that I got involved in in 2012 in the Wendy Long campaign.
	But of course, the big difference in my case was I was giving my own money.
	In this case, she is funneling money that is provided initially by the government.
	That's not money that's due to her.
	It came into her account by accident.
	Now, I'm quite sure, well, there's a final aspect to this, and that is that the defendants, which is to say, Congresswoman Churfilius McCormick and her brother, they lie to the IRS.
	So they can't obviously say to the IRS that we have been stealing government money and not returning it when it's erroneously put into our account.
	So they had to account for the money some other way.
	So the tax fraud is on top of all the other illegalities.
	Now, in fairness, I can kind of see what the defense is going to say in this case.
	They're going to say, listen, we didn't ask the government for this money.
	We didn't bill the government for this money.
	They decided out of their own stupidity to give it to us and they put it in our account.
	So why are we obliged to give it back?
	So there's going to be a certain kind of almost commonsensical, that's your mistake, not mine.
	But as it turns out, this is not, I repeat, not the law.
	The law is actually pretty clear.
	This isn't your money.
	If money is erroneously deposited, let's say, for example, I'm trying to send you a wire for $1,000 and the bank erroneously sends you the wire for $10,000, you don't get to keep the other nine.
	It's true.
	It's not your mistake.
	The money just showed up in your account.
	But the issue here is not that you had no idea and the money just sat in your account and you're happy to give it back.
	It's that you are fully aware of what's going on.
	You're like, aha, this is fantastic.
	Let's start moving this money out of here before they figure all this out.
	In fact, maybe they'll never figure it out.
	And we just get to keep the money.
	So it looks to me like this is a pretty clear cut.
	If these facts are true as alleged, and of course we have good reason to believe they are, this woman has been indicted.
	I haven't seen any public claims that she did anything, that she didn't do any of this.
	It looks like she's been caught red-handed.
	Now, what's going to happen to her?
	Well, there was an effort on the part of the Republican Congress to censure her.
	That got ensnared in a bunch of procedural issues and got blocked.
	The censure resolution failed.
	But I don't think that's going to make any difference.
	I actually predict that Representative Sheila Churfilius McCormick will pretty soon be, she will resign.
	And very soon, either she's going to do it on her own account of her own accord, as they say, or Hakeem Jeffries is going to make her do it.
	Now, you might go, wait a minute, these Democrats are so corrupt.
	They're perfectly capable of keeping corrupt people in their stable.
	And I think all of that is true, but I also think that there is a limit.
	If there is a case where the facts are in dispute, the Democrats could say, well, we're going to let this all play out and through the legal system.
	But on the other hand, when you've got straight out theft like this, and essentially a Democratic congresswoman with her hand in the cookie jar, no one can argue here that when you're talking about a $50,000 invoice, you get $5 million that you didn't notice.
	Well, if you had left the money there, you could make that claim.
	But since you started moving it, you did notice.
	And in fact, you were kind of quickly clearing it out of your account so that it wouldn't even be there if somebody figured it out.
	If someone goes, well, you know, it's all this money.
	How do you come?
	Well, the money's gone.
	So the money was quickly shoveled into multiple other accounts, obviously to move it out of the place where it was accidentally where it accidentally landed from the federal government.
	So this is a woman I think who's going to get her comeuppance.
	And it seems, at least if the facts are true as alleged, that this is well deserved.
	Thanksgiving holds so many memories.
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	Guys, I am a huge fan of our next guest, Miranda Devine.
	She's been on the podcast before.
	She just seems to produce this excellent combination of breaking news reporting and at the same time, excellent and insightful commentary.
	She's a New York Post columnist.
	She's a Fox News contributor, but she's also the host of the weekly show Pod Force One, which you can find on YouTube.
	You can follow her on X at Miranda Devine.
	And of course, her latest book, The Big Guy, available where books are sold.
	Miranda, great to have you on the podcast.
	Thanks for joining me.
	I want to talk to you about two topics that you've been covering and writing and speaking about.
	The first one is Thomas Crooks, the fellow who fired multiple shots at Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.
	And the other is a recent conversation you had with JD Vance.
	But let's start with, let's start with Thomas Crooks.
	It seemed for a long time that we knew little or nothing about this guy.
	There'd been some intimations that he acted on his own, or there was no indication that he had any co-conspirators.
	But you have been able to put out through sources some new information on Crooks that evidently the FBI was holding back.
	Can you talk about what that new information is?
	And then maybe we could try to explore why the FBI has been kind of keeping this information close to its chest.
	Yeah, thanks, Dinesh.
	Look, I mean, the FBI now has confirmed all our reporting from last week from a source who found basically uncovered, looked for Thomas Crookes's online footprint, his digital footprint across 17 different platforms, you know, Google Play, YouTube, this bizarre site called Deviant Art, which is apparently the big hub for furries,
	which is this weird sexual fetish where people dress up as animals and, I don't know, have cartoon animals depicting sex, whatever, humanized sort of animals.
	So I'm not quite sure what that's all about.
	Thomas Crookes didn't himself share any of these furry images, but he did share other kind of weird images of, you know, cartoon images of like a woman with a man's body and so on.
	So I don't know what that's all about.
	He had they, them pronouns on deviant art as well.
	But I think that's really a small sliver of what we found or what our source found.
	I think most interesting is the fact that Thomas Crookes was online for a long time when he was young, you know, 15, 16, 17, making threatening comments, you know, really violent rhetoric online to the point where other users would tag the FBI and say, you know, look at this guy publicly.
	It's all done in public.
	And the fact that he didn't come to the attention, we're told, of the FBI or the Secret Service or, you know, other intelligence, we've got 17 intelligence agencies in this country.
	It's hard to believe that a guy would be so openly over such a long period and naming members of Congress like Elon Omar, the squad, making threats like murder the Democrats.
	And he would escape attention, even with people flagging him.
	And then in January 2020, he did a 180 flip.
	He went from being rapidly pro-Trump to being rabidly anti-Trump.
	And then his sort of rhetoric escalated, became more violent.
	And he started talking about assassinating political leaders and military leaders.
	And then he just disappeared in August of 2020 mid-pandemic.
	As far as our source can tell, there's no activity of his online in any of those platforms.
	He did have several encrypted apps, we're told.
	The FBI last year did tell us that.
	And I think Kash Patel mentioned that as well.
	But they've basically hit a dead end.
	And Kash Patel says, only since we made a fuss.
	And, you know, when I was writing the piece, I asked the FBI for comment and I just got two words back, no comment.
	I don't understand that.
	And I don't understand why members of Congress, several of them, but including Ron Johnson, whose job it is to do oversight of the FBI, have complained that they've been stonewalled.
	That's their word, stonewalled, when they've asked for basic information that should be available to the public.
	Thomas Crookes is dead.
	There's no excuse like there is with other cases where you have to have a trial and the person deserves a fair trial.
	You don't want to poison the trial.
	Thomas Crookes is dead.
	There is no trial.
	So the American people are, and I'm sorry about the other victims.
	Corey Comperatore, the firefighter, was killed and two other rallygoers were grievously injured, who were sitting in the bleachers behind President Trump when Thomas Crookes managed to crawl onto a roof and fire off eight shots.
	And, you know, at least three of them hit victims.
	And Helen Comperatore, who is the widow of Corey, was promised answers, promised a full report by the FBI.
	And I don't believe that the FBI has given her a report.
	They certainly haven't given the public any report until we finally published this information last Monday and Tuesday.
	And then on Friday, we had this press release that the FBI seemed to only give to Fox Digital.
	They gave an interview, not on air, but a print interview to Fox Digital, to Brooke Syngman.
	And this ridiculous press release that is perfectly accurate because it exactly reflects our reporting and confirms it was all accurate, apart from one little bit that I can mention later, that not our inaccuracy, they left something out.
	But the title of this press release is Correcting False Media Reporting.
	Now, there was no, I mean, all the information they've put out there is information that we have published in the New York Post.
	So if that's the false reporting, they're certainly intimating that our reporting was false.
	And that is false.
	So I don't understand why they just didn't put out the press release without the insulting headline.
	But they're trying to cover up for cover, save face, let's call it, for having not been transparent with the public for I don't know what reason.
	It could just be that it slipped their mind because they're busy.
	I don't know why they don't just say that.
	Or there could be some other more nefarious or perhaps some other thing that we don't know and maybe we shouldn't know.
	I don't know.
	But I'm not, I don't think that we should be satisfied with the answers that are coming and frankly the hostility that I'm getting from the current leadership of the FBI.
	And, you know, Kash Patel just did an interview with Catherine Herridge, who is a fantastic reporter, former Fox, former CBS, now has her own independent shop.
	And she does these interviews allied with the LA Times.
	So no complaints about her and her questions are great.
	And I'm glad to see Kash Patel doing an interview by himself, but I still don't understand why he's claiming to be fully transparent and that they are going to tell the American people everything they want to know when they haven't been transparent on Crooks and when they tried to shoot the messenger on Crooks and claimed that we'd, you know, even in this interview with Herridge, he says other strange things.
	Anyway, it's all very unfortunate.
	And there's another element of it, which is that Crookes had interactions with a neo-Nazi, a Norwegian neo-Nazi who went by the name of Willy Tepez.
	I don't think that's his real name, but that's the name he used to interact with Crookes online.
	Now, in that FBI press release, I mentioned they said that Crooks never responded to Tepez, but that's not true.
	And, you know, we've published some of that.
	And, you know, that neo-Nazi group was then Designated by the State Department last June, just a month before Butler, as a terrorist organization.
	So, you know, the FBI currently is saying there's nothing there, that Crooks acted alone.
	Okay, we'll take them at their word, I guess.
	But I still think that it would be very beneficial to know, for the public to know, exactly what that link was and what was going on with Crooks.
	And was there any other links with these, either the neo-Nazis in Norway or other entities through the encrypted apps?
	Or could they not find anything in the encrypted apps?
	And the other question is: why did the FBI or the Secret Service or the Capitol Police or any of the 17 intelligence agencies that this country's taxpayers spend a fortune on?
	Why did they not pick up the years of increasingly escalating violent language from Crooks targeting members of Congress and others?
	Why was that not picked up?
	I'm told the Capitol Police has a job.
	They have their own intelligence division whose job is to look after the 500 some odd members of Congress, of the House and the Senate, and they have web crawlers to look for just these kinds of threats.
	Elon Omar was named in person during Crooks' pro-Trump anti-Democrat phase.
	That surely should have raised a red flag when you have the word kill and murder, the words, you know, like kill and murder and wrap the dead body up, hang them, etc.
	I mean, a lot of assassinate, these should be keywords.
	And Kash Patel is telling us, oh, you can't expect us to be, you know, invading people's, you know, I don't know, YouTube replies.
	But these are public.
	And I know there is web crawling software and I know it's used by law enforcement.
	It doesn't mean that you're reading American citizens' private posts.
	It's just that if they're posting threatening language like that targeting politicians and others, then by name, then that should be flagged.
	I think everyone expects it to.
	And what's more, other users online who were alarmed by Crooks's violent rhetoric flagged the FBI.
	They tagged the FBI in replies to Crookes saying, we're telling the FBI, thanks for being out in the open so the FBI can see you, et cetera.
	Everyone assumes that law enforcement is looking at this.
	And whether it's the FBI or the Secret Service or the Capitol Police or some other entity, even the CIA, since Crooks was interacting with a foreign terrorist or a foreign member of a terrorist organization, it just beats me.
	It also seems, Miranda, that, you know, when you have this intersection between, I don't know what to call it, because some of it is trans.
	Some of it is the phenomenon we saw with the Charlie Kirk alleged assassin where he wasn't trans, but he apparently was dating a trans person and they were part of some sort of trans circle of communicants that talk to each other on these Discord channels.
	So in other words, I guess what I'm getting at is I wonder if with Thomas Crooks, even if you just were to look at a picture of the guy, you could see that he was a weirdo.
	I mean, you could see this is some sort of a misfit kid.
	And so I'm just surprised that they don't probe these connections more because it may well be.
	I mean, we now seem to have a fairly long procession of people who are in these kind of weird sexual communities.
	But not only that, there seems to be perhaps a mental illness or maybe just a psychological radicalism that goes with that that does have a connection with violence.
	In other words, what I'm getting at is the Crookes example fits into a pattern.
	Do you agree?
	Yeah, somewhat.
	I mean, we haven't got a lot of evidence, but there is some link through this Deviant Art site, which is an online hub for furries, and that links to the alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk Tyler Robinson, whose Live In Lover was a furry and got transitioning.
	And then, you know, Crooks is they then pronounce.
	I don't want to make too much of that, but I do think that what the link is, you've got these sort of disaffected young men who are online, especially during COVID.
	A lot of them, teenage boys, young men, don't have a lot of outlet.
	So they're online and they love gaming.
	And it seems that through these gaming platforms, they get introduced to bizarre sexual practices.
	And, you know, and sometimes the furry stuff is not even sexual.
	It's just cartoon characters.
	And I mean, a lot of these are just like still, I mean, they're not far out of childhood.
	So furry cartoon characters, I guess, are attractive to them.
	And then they become sexualized.
	And, you know, we don't even know what role porn has, but there's a lot of perverted stuff that is accessible online to young men that twist their minds.
	But they're, you know, through those pathways, these vulnerable young people can be groomed and twisted and manipulated and used.
	Now, I haven't seen any evidence of that.
	I'm just looking at the outcome.
	I'm looking at the inputs and the outputs.
	The inputs seem to be similar types of people on similar type of online platforms with not much else in their life.
	And then you see them metamorphize into these, you know, either deviants in terms of sexual issues.
	And then they commit violence.
	And that there's been school shootings and now these two assassinations.
	So it's certainly something that I would have assumed that the FBI was looking at.
	And I don't know why that would be a secret.
	And if they are looking at it, all they have to say is, yes, we're looking at it.
	They don't have to tell us which particular case is part of it.
	But I think it would allay a lot of fears in the public that we see these links.
	We're not sure if they really are links, but there are a number of crimes now that are mounting up and it's concerning.
	And you're seeing also in Portland and other places a lot of transgender violence.
	Andy No has chartered that.
	Is that connected?
	So it's something that worries the public.
	It's something I'm not sure if there's a mechanism within the FBI to do, to actually talk about that other than the director, you know, having to do endless interviews, which isn't ideal either.
	Miranda, let's pivot to your recent conversation with JD Vance.
	He seems to be in such an interesting position because there is now some of these debates swirling around MA and America first.
	And I see some people trying to pit America first against MAGA.
	I don't know if part of this is just an attempt to look beyond Trump to what a Republican agenda might look like in 2026 and 2028.
	What was your take from this conversation with JD Vance and how is he navigating these swirling currents?
	Well, the interview was a little before a lot of the latest sort of civil wars broken out before MTG went ballistic against Donald Trump and Donald Trump retaliated in the way he usually does brutally and she decided to drop out.
	But my take from the conversation with him was that America will be in very good hands if he does become president as Donald Trump has said that he wants him to.
	He thinks that JD Vance and Marco Rubio are the dream ticket and Marco Rubio as vice president, now the Secretary of State.
	And JD is America first and he has a really deep philosophical, I think, basis.
	And he's also creating it.
	I mean, he's building it right now that, because this is new.
	You know, it's, I think Donald Trump didn't invent America first or, you know, nationalist populism, but he certainly grabbed it by the reins and took it to heights that no one thought would be possible in a very short time.
	And, you know, for Donald Trump, it's really just patriotism.
	It is instinctively putting America first and it's common sense, pragmatic politics of a builder, you know, someone who's just dealt with the concrete world all his life.
	And for JD Vance, I think he's benefits from seeing what's worked with Donald Trump and also from his own childhood, which was incredibly challenging.
	His mother was a drug addict.
	He was brought up by his grandmother, his grandparents, I think, or an uncle.
	And we know all about his troubled childhood from the wonderful book that he wrote.
	But he's well and truly very resilient and he's risen above all of that and has his own family that he's incredibly grateful for and adores his wife and kids.
	And he's young and supremely clever and very confident and understands what makes America tick and understands the terrible injustice that has been done to middle-class America over the last 40 years and often at the hands of Republicans.
	Republicans were just as much to blame for shipping American jobs offshore and getting us into these terribly costly foreign wars, costly in blood and treasure.
	And so JD Vance, also a veteran, also fought in Iraq or was in Iraq and he understands that better than most.
	So I think that if he can get through the 2028 election and win against, you know, Democrat dirty tricks and lies and media partisanship and whatever else they throw at him, the dark forces that are, you know, roiling this country, I hope he does.
	And I think it would be a really good eight years to consolidate what Donald Trump will have achieved against all odds again.
	But he's very courageous and strong.
	And I think he's also very personable and hilarious.
	I mean, he has a very good sense of humor and he gets on well with his fellow cabinet members.
	And his staff are all very good and smart and young and energetic.
	So I think he will manage to pull together all the threads of MAGA and America First and turn them into something that's practical and that does make America great again.
	Well, Miranda, coming from you, that's all very, very reassuring.
	By the way, on a slightly humorous note, I had him on the podcast.
	This was actually, I think, when he was running for the Senate.
	And he comes on, he goes, hello, Dinesh.
	And I haven't been called that, you know, since my parents, you know, called me that.
	That's the way my name is pronounced in India.
	But of course, he has an Indian wife.
	So he knows that.
	So he delivered the impeccable Indian pronunciation of my name and startled me because I never hear that.
	And so I had to laugh out loud.
	So say it again.
	What's the proper pronunciation?
	So, you know, I say it obviously the American way, which is Dinesh, but in India, it sounds more like Dinesh, Dinesh, with a soft, you know, D sound.
	And in fact, it means in Hindustani God of the sun.
	So that's the literal meaning of the name.
	Guys, I've been talking to the one and only Miranda Devine.
	Follow her on X at Miranda Devine.
	The podcast is Pod Force One.
	Great title.
	You can find it on YouTube.
	Miranda, as always, thank you for joining me.
	Thank you, Dinesh.
	I hope I got that right.
	There you go.
	Subscribe to the Dinesh D'Souza podcast on Apple, Google, and Spotify.

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