Dinesh D'Souza - IMPORTING JIHAD
Aired: 2026-03-16
Duration: 01:05:49


=== Jihad Came By Design (15:14) ===

[00:01:34]  Anything to declare?
[00:01:42]  Welcome to America!
[00:01:47]  Jihad did not come to America by accident.
[00:01:50]  It came to America by design.
[00:01:53]  But it was not exclusively the design of the radical Muslims.
[00:01:56]  They couldn't have done it by themselves.
[00:01:58]  In reality, jihad came to America because the left and the Democratic Party wanted it here.
[00:02:05]  If you're shocked, that's because it is shocking.
[00:02:08]  It also has the added merit of being true.
[00:02:11]  Islamic terrorism is now routine in America, and the problem is likely to get worse.
[00:02:17]  Even a quarter of a century after 9-11, we are not equipped to deal with what the radical Muslims have in store for us.
[00:02:24]  They're not merely interested in striking the White House or iconic buildings, the symbols of American government and capitalism.
[00:02:31]  They're showing up in our streets, schools, churches, and neighborhoods.
[00:02:35]  It's the phenomenon of the jihadi among us, the terrorist next door.
[00:02:41]  The reason for this rash of terrorism is global jihad.
[00:02:45]  Even though the left pretends not to understand this, we all know it's true.
[00:02:50]  But what we don't seem to understand is that the global jihadis don't operate alone.
[00:02:55]  They need help, and they have it.
[00:02:57]  The jihadi might have arrived next door, but how did he get there?
[00:03:01]  He got there because someone gave him the keys.
[00:03:04]  Terrorism in America is the result.
[00:03:07]  It is the triumph of the Red-Green Alliance.
[00:03:10]  Hang with me.
[00:03:11]  I'll explain.
[00:03:12]  Now, in just a couple of weeks, we've seen no less than five terrorist incidents.
[00:03:18]  A jihadi rams an explosives-laden vehicle into the Temple Israel Synagogue in Bloomfield, Michigan.
[00:03:24]  Another jihadi walks into an ROTC classroom at Old Dominion University in Virginia, yelling Allahu Akbar and killing a veteran instructor and wounding others.
[00:03:35]  Two ISIS-inspired jihadis threw homemade bombs at an anti-Islam demonstration outside Mayor Zorhan Mamdani's mansion in New York City.
[00:03:45]  A man wearing a sweatshirt that said property of Allah randomly fired into a bar in Austin, Texas, killing two people and injuring 14.
[00:03:54]  A man named Kyle Chris, also known as Muhi Mohanad Najam, was arrested in Texas for attempting to enter an elementary school in tactical gear and carrying a holstered gun.
[00:04:06]  All of this in just a short period, and all of it during the month of Ramadan.
[00:04:11]  Makes you wonder about the religion of peace, doesn't it?
[00:04:14]  And yet media coverage of these events bears little resemblance to what's actually going on.
[00:04:20]  In one case, the Texas Elementary School, there has been very little national coverage at all.
[00:04:26]  Think about it.
[00:04:27]  A radical Islamist from Iraq who became a naturalized citizen in 2022 walks into an elementary school with the intention of killing people and is arrested.
[00:04:37]  Not a big story?
[00:04:38]  We've been hearing for weeks about Savannah Guthrie's mom in Phoenix.
[00:04:42]  That's an interesting story, fine, because of the Savannah connection, but it's not as relevant as a story that reveals how a jihadi tried to get into an elementary school with a firearm.
[00:04:53]  If things like that happen, our children are in danger.
[00:04:55]  This would seem to be a more pressing public issue than a TV anchor's 84-year-old mom going missing.
[00:05:03]  But as it turns out, there's a reason for the under-reporting of the Texas elementary school incident.
[00:05:09]  The reason is to keep the media spotlight away from how radical Islam poses a danger to our society.
[00:05:16]  In the minds of our journalists and editors, why unnecessarily foster Islamophobia in this country?
[00:05:22]  That's the way the media and the left see it.
[00:05:24]  Islamophobia, not radical Islam, is the problem.
[00:05:28]  Here's a headline from ABC News.
[00:05:32]  Old Dominion suspected gunman IDs as ex-Army National Guard member, FBI.
[00:05:39]  Notice what is missing from this headline, any reference to Islam or Islamic terrorism.
[00:05:44]  Only further down in the article do we read this.
[00:05:47]  The school shooting was allegedly committed by a former Army National Guardsman who was convicted of giving material support to ISIS.
[00:05:56]  Hmm, yes.
[00:05:57]  Well, how telling that they chose to leave out the ISIS angle from the headline.
[00:06:03]  I can imagine this sort of conversation in the ABC newsroom.
[00:06:07]  Hey, shouldn't we highlight that this guy was convicted of supporting ISIS?
[00:06:11]  Journalist.
[00:06:13]  I don't know if that's relevant.
[00:06:14]  I find it much more interesting that this guy once served in the U.S. National Guard.
[00:06:19]  Oh, yeah, well, I guess you're right.
[00:06:22]  Now, a second strategy, even more common, is for the media to mislead Americans about the motives for these terrorist incidents.
[00:06:29]  Jake Tapper on CNN is typical.
[00:06:32]  Recently, he said in reference to the Bloomfield, Michigan attack on the Jewish temple, to be clear, we don't know the motives.
[00:06:39]  Well, this is an obvious deflection.
[00:06:42]  Jake Tapper knows the motive.
[00:06:43]  Everyone knows the motive.
[00:06:45]  But since the attacker didn't leave a manifesto or issue a public statement before the attack, Tapper can wrinkle his brow and declare, motive unknown.
[00:06:54]  I even saw some of this media head scratching about motive in connection with the Austin shooting.
[00:07:00]  Are the motives of a Muslim who opens fire wearing a sweatshirt that says property of Allah, all that unclear?
[00:07:07]  Is it reasonable to shake your head and say, gee, I wonder what's bothering that guy?
[00:07:12]  When media outlets pretend not to notice what cannot go unnoticed, something's up.
[00:07:18]  Finally, the media does its best to cast blame on the right and the Republican Party, even if this involves ridiculous stretches and contortions.
[00:07:26]  Here is MS Now, the old MSNBC.
[00:07:29]  The Republican Party is having right now a real fight on its hands, has a real fight on its hands, amid wings of the Republican Party that are extremely anti-Semitic or flirting with anti-Semitism.
[00:07:42]  And Republicans on the other side of the party were saying, hold on, what are you doing?
[00:07:46]  This is not, this is ripping us apart.
[00:07:48]  Democrats are having a fight on that as well.
[00:07:52]  But it's been pretty pronounced within the Republican Party.
[00:07:55]  Wow.
[00:07:56]  What makes this analysis so sneaky is it is based on a fact.
[00:08:00]  True, there is an anti-Semitic strand in the GOP with some prominent names associated with it, like Tucker and Candace, but this is hardly the mainstream of the Republican Party.
[00:08:10]  Not only that, but this anti-Semitic camp on the right has absolutely nothing to do with Muslim jihadis launching Allahu Akbar attacks.
[00:08:20]  The motivation for that is not Tucker's podcast or Candace's latest investigation.
[00:08:25]  The motivation for that is Islam itself.
[00:08:29]  So now we get to the reason for the media's extreme reticence, or in some cases, shameless prevarication regarding these attacks.
[00:08:37]  Well, there are actually two reasons.
[00:08:38]  One of them is obvious, the other more subtle.
[00:08:41]  Let's get to the obvious one first.
[00:08:43]  The single factor that unites these jihadi attacks in America, the single factor that accounts for the terrorists next door, is immigration.
[00:08:52]  I'm tempted to say illegal immigration, but that's not correct.
[00:08:55]  All of the incidents mentioned above involve legal immigration.
[00:09:00]  The perpetrators in every case are either naturalized U.S. citizens or the children of naturalized U.S. citizens.
[00:09:08]  The attacker in Bloomfield, Michigan is Ayman Mohammad Ghazali, a naturalized citizen originally from Lebanon, the old Dominion shooter, Mohammad Jala, a naturalized citizen from Sierra Leone, the Austin shooter, Nediaga Diagni, a naturalized citizen from Senegal.
[00:09:26]  The two young Muslim terrorists in New York, Amir Balat and Ibrahim Kayumi, are both the children of naturalized citizens.
[00:09:34]  Now, that's a problem for the left because the left loves immigration.
[00:09:39]  The left loves immigration so much it refuses to distinguish between legal and illegal immigration.
[00:09:46]  Illegal aliens are, in the left's vocabulary, undocumented immigrants.
[00:09:50]  The problem, in other words, isn't that they are breaking the law, it's that we have failed to document them.
[00:09:55]  The solution, of course, is to give them the necessary documentation.
[00:09:59]  So, leftists in the media, which is to say the entire mainstream media, covers for Islamic terrorism because it knows that the source of that terrorism is imported terrorists.
[00:10:12]  And how are these terrorists imported?
[00:10:13]  Well, they come through the various avenues of immigration, including chain migration, the H-1B visa racket, the disastrous Afghan airlift, questionable refugee and asylum claims, and so on.
[00:10:27]  Basically, they play the system and they're here to stay.
[00:10:32]  The tens of thousands of military-age Muslim men who came from faraway lands in Somalia, Afghanistan, and Sierra Leone didn't come here empty-handed.
[00:10:42]  They brought Islam with them.
[00:10:44]  And for many of them, Islam includes dreams of a caliphate, hatred for the great Satan, that's us, by the way, and a commitment to violent jihad, the jihad of the sword.
[00:10:54]  Our immigration system, legal and illegal, has imported huge numbers of people who hate America and want to overthrow the American system.
[00:11:02]  They're now in a position to launch coordinated attacks in our malls, our stadiums, and in our residential neighborhoods.
[00:11:10]  We're accustomed to lone wolf attackers for the most part, but imagine teams, each one made up of a dozen or so highly trained terrorists, launching coordinated attacks in our towns and cities.
[00:11:21]  We're completely unprepared for that.
[00:11:24]  And it's an outrage.
[00:11:25]  Why would we allow these people into the country?
[00:11:28]  How did we let this happen?
[00:11:30]  As conservatives, we've been somewhat blind over the past several decades to the dangers of legal immigration.
[00:11:37]  We were basically legal immigration, good.
[00:11:40]  Illegal immigration, bad.
[00:11:42]  We presumed that the legals all came here in pursuit of the American dream.
[00:11:47]  We are discovering, we should have known all along, that this is not necessarily the case.
[00:11:51]  Even so, conservatives did not bring the America haters into the country.
[00:11:56]  We did not do this.
[00:11:58]  We did not let this happen.
[00:12:00]  The left did.
[00:12:01]  The Democratic Party did.
[00:12:02]  The Biden administration, or maybe I should say, the third Obama administration did.
[00:12:07]  They let it happen.
[00:12:08]  They made it happen.
[00:12:09]  Without them, we wouldn't have this problem.
[00:12:12]  And my point is not that they allowed it, but that they wanted it.
[00:12:16]  And now they are ferociously resisting any plans we have for getting them, the bad guys, out of here.
[00:12:23]  Wait, am I really saying that the left, the Democrats, the Biden regime wanted to bring Islamic terrorists into this country?
[00:12:30]  That these same people want to keep them here?
[00:12:34]  Yes, that is what I'm saying.
[00:12:35]  I realize this runs counter to a conventional wisdom on the right.
[00:12:39]  We conservatives customarily argue that the left and the Democrats bring in the third world because the third world people typically vote for Democrats.
[00:12:48]  Even in the case of illegals, the left envisions future Democratic voters.
[00:12:53]  And the left also benefits from the way that illegals are counted by the U.S. Census and influence the allocation of electoral representation in the House.
[00:13:02]  Yeah, okay.
[00:13:04]  But at the same time, we assume that the left didn't want the terrorists here.
[00:13:08]  They didn't intend for the jihadis to come.
[00:13:10]  They merely opened the gates and a whole bunch of undesirables, criminals, human traffickers, jihadis crashed through the open gate.
[00:13:19]  But this way of thinking is, in my view, naive.
[00:13:21]  Why would we presume that the left didn't want to let in the very people that they consciously and deliberately let in?
[00:13:28]  Why would we assume that importing those people was not part of their intention or somehow not consistent with their interests and objectives?
[00:13:36]  Actually, it is consistent with those interests and objectives.
[00:13:39]  What I'm suggesting is that imported Islamic terrorism is the result of the red-green alliance.
[00:13:46]  Here, the red stands for communism, socialism, and the cultural left.
[00:13:50]  Green is the color of the Islamic flag and therefore represents Islam.
[00:13:55]  Let's look more closely at how this red-green alliance works.
[00:13:59]  I recognize, of course, that the reds and the greens have different end goals.
[00:14:03]  For the reds, it's a permissive socialist society, a coalition of radicals, a rainbow alliance of blacks, browns, and feminists and gays and trans people.
[00:14:13]  For the greens, it's the caliphate under the rule of Sharia.
[00:14:17]  Yet, even if the end goal is different, notice how the intermediate goal, the way to get to the end goal, is the same for both the Reds and the Greens.
[00:14:26]  Both hate traditional America.
[00:14:29]  They hate the flag, the Constitution, the 4th of July.
[00:14:33]  Both hate Western civilization and use the power at their disposal to undermine it.
[00:14:38]  Now, how do they do this?
[00:14:40]  For the Reds, it's through the propaganda of the universities and the media, and also occasionally through Antifa-style riots or trans-inspired terrorism.
[00:14:49]  For the Greens, it's through violent jihad and also infiltration and capture of American institutions from the school board to local government.
[00:14:59]  The point is that both the left and the Islamic radicals are united by a common enemy, and destroying that enemy, us, is their top priority.
[00:15:08]  So, why would we naturally assume that the left simply imports Muslims for benign purposes?
[00:15:14]  For decades, we've assumed the left simply wants to promote multiculturalism or simply wants to advance its electoral objectives.
[00:15:22]  But it's entirely rational to believe that the left wants and needs the Muslims here to help them in their scheme to destroy traditional America, conservative America, Western civilization, Athens, and Jerusalem.
[00:15:37]  The left hates our founding and wants to move away from it.
[00:15:41]  So do the radical Muslims.
[00:15:42]  Leftists despise our Constitution and would replace it if they could.
[00:15:46]  So would the radical Muslims.
[00:15:48]  The left hates conservative and Bible-believing Christians and is not above cheering when harm comes to them.
[00:15:54]  The radical Muslims are pleased to be the ones inflicting that harm.
[00:15:59]  In some cases, the red and the green merge into one.
[00:16:03]  The red doesn't have to ally with the green because the red and the green are blended together from the outset.
[00:16:08]  Think about a guy like Zorhan Mamdani.
[00:16:10]  He represents the left, which is the red, and he also represents Islam, which is the green.
[00:16:14]  Notice that there's no tension between these two vectors in Mamdani's life.
[00:16:19]  They're perfectly compatible.
[00:16:20]  They go naturally together.
[00:16:22]  My wife calls Mamdani a human victory arch because his presence looms over New York City, the city of 9-11, like a monument of Islamic colonialism.
[00:16:32]  I see him as the jihadi in the mayor's office who happens to be the mayor.
[00:16:37]  Mamdani's victory was not through conquest, but through surrender.
[00:16:41]  New Yorkers turned the city over to him, and he's already in the process of delivering what he promised, which is Islamification.

=== Jibing At The Label (16:28) ===

[00:16:48]  Would anyone be surprised if more terror incidents follow?
[00:16:52]  Terror is necessary to subdue the holdouts to comprehensive Islamification.
[00:16:57]  On this trajectory, New York is on course to become New Yorkistan.
[00:17:02]  My conclusion is that our jihadi problem has a twofold root.
[00:17:07]  It arises out of the toxic fumes of Islam, which inspires the violent jihadis to ram us and shoot us and firebomb us.
[00:17:15]  And the Muslim perpetrators are in turn enabled by their covert allies in America, the left-wing progressives and Democrats who are their partners in the project of unmaking and remaking America.
[00:17:28]  It's a gathering storm, and we had better be ready for it.
[00:17:32]  And that's the way I see it.
[00:17:37]  If you haven't been following precious metals, well, you might want to start.
[00:17:42]  Look at gold and silver.
[00:17:44]  Gold last year, 2025, up over $5,000 an ounce.
[00:17:51]  Silver, over $100 an ounce.
[00:17:53]  So that means gold is up 64% for the year.
[00:17:58]  Silver, 150%.
[00:18:01]  Now, there's been a little bit of a pullback since then, but that's normal.
[00:18:05]  The reason that people are doing this and the reason central banks are buying gold, they don't trust the government.
[00:18:12]  They don't trust the dollar.
[00:18:13]  They don't trust the debt.
[00:18:16]  You need to find out more about this as you figure out your own investments.
[00:18:20]  I recommend a kit from Goldco.
[00:18:23]  It's the 2026 kit on precious metals, a guide to gold and silver, and there's an easy way to get it.
[00:18:29]  Just go to dineshgold.com.
[00:18:33]  That's dineshgold.com.
[00:18:39]  Kai Schwemmer is a young conservative activist who was recently named the political director of college Republicans.
[00:18:48]  His appointment was criticized and he found himself almost immediately surrounded by controversy.
[00:18:55]  So I wanted to bring Kai on to talk about that, but also talk about some of the ideological and perhaps even generational divides on the right.
[00:19:05]  Kai, thanks for coming on.
[00:19:06]  I really appreciate it.
[00:19:08]  Let's begin with the controversy itself.
[00:19:12]  Now, I saw a video in which you said, hey, listen, I said a few insensitive things when I was younger in high school and as a teenager, and I want to get beyond those.
[00:19:25]  Well, I think one way we get beyond those is we reflect on what you said and why you said it.
[00:19:31]  So may I, you know, I mean, I'm too old to want to go through your old tweets and try to zap you with things you said.
[00:19:39]  I just want you to identify a couple of the things that you said that you regret and tell us why you said them and why you regret saying them.
[00:19:50]  That's a good question.
[00:19:51]  You know, when I look back and when I think about that statement that I made, it of course is true.
[00:19:58]  And this is something that people who have watched my content saw the moment I got back from having served a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Argentina.
[00:20:07]  And that was, I think, a catalyst for a lot of this reflection.
[00:20:10]  I did a live stream as well.
[00:20:11]  And I said basically the same thing, which is that I could reflect back and think about some times where I was too crass or maybe my approach to talking with people was a little too vulgar.
[00:20:22]  And I wanted to kind of put that behind me or I was trying to grow from that.
[00:20:27]  There's one clip that is being circulated by, you know, Joel Berry, James Lindsay, and a couple of others, part of this like, you know, anti-woke right crowd who, you know, they've been citing a video where I'm having a discussion actually with two national socialists, two Nazis, self-avowed.
[00:20:45]  And in that conversation, you know, I go a little bit over the line and, you know, I use verbiage and language to attack them.
[00:20:53]  And as much as, you know, I would go after them again, you know, I would do that all over.
[00:20:58]  I think even in that context, this kind of very heavy-handed and maybe excessively vulgar approach that I took wasn't right.
[00:21:05]  And, you know, I look back at it and I cringe.
[00:21:08]  And then, of course, you know, there's just the typical kind of juvenile, more crass humor.
[00:21:14]  I think that you can make jokes about everything.
[00:21:16]  I think there's definitely a place for edgy humor.
[00:21:18]  But reflecting, you know, I don't know if I can think of anything specifically, but I think about maybe the way I would carry myself.
[00:21:24]  And I don't think it was as clear to people that I was trying to be a follower of Christ, that I'm trying to be a good Christian.
[00:21:31]  And so I reflect kind of just on maybe my temperament, my demeanor.
[00:21:34]  And that's what I think about when I make a statement like that.
[00:21:39]  I mean, do you agree with the idea that while we should have very broad parameters for what speech is allowed, I mean, legally, that if you represent an organization, whether it's heritage or college Republicans, there should be some parameters defining who we are.
[00:22:01]  And I say this not just as a kind of moral stance, but also because, I mean, imagine some guy representing a major conservative organization who goes around, let's just say, casually using the N-word or just saying things that are extremely offensive to women or Jews.
[00:22:18]  Now, that can be used against our side, right?
[00:22:22]  That can be used by the left to say, look who these people are.
[00:22:25]  They're all a bunch of bigots.
[00:22:27]  So do you agree with the idea that there should be some parameters of acceptable discourse?
[00:22:34]  Not again as a legal standard, but as a moral standard for conservative institutions.
[00:22:40]  I don't disagree with the idea of parameters.
[00:22:42]  I think that we set those kind of parameters all the time.
[00:22:44]  What you have to look at, though, is what is the purpose and who's doing it.
[00:22:48]  Very frequently, I see that, you know, the argument being made is that, well, we have to set these parameters because the left is going to use these things against us.
[00:22:57]  And I actually, to a large extent, agree.
[00:22:59]  The parameters that I like to set are, you know, I would say interpersonal relationships, you know, the impropriety.
[00:23:05]  I think that's a much bigger Achilles heel, actually, right?
[00:23:08]  We think about very prominent cases, like, for instance, Matt Gates.
[00:23:12]  Although I think that case was not like this, you know, excessive, you know, out of the world impropriety.
[00:23:17]  I'm sure plenty of the members of Congress have engaged in similar activities.
[00:23:21]  I think these are the kind of, you know, spines that do thwart our, you know, chances to truly take power.
[00:23:27]  That being said, I think when you mention the specific things that you did, you know, remarks about women, remarks, you know, whether it's a use of a slur, right?
[00:23:39]  I don't think it actually is so much the left that goes after us for that.
[00:23:42]  I think it's almost exclusively the right wing that eats its own on those issues.
[00:23:47]  And although they may do it under this guise that, well, the left is going to go after us, so we have to establish the parameters, that almost never seems to be the case.
[00:23:55]  It seems to be that they are the gatekeepers in the right wing who are the only ones that actually go after people viciously.
[00:24:01]  And I would say, by the way, those are the exact same people who opposed Donald Trump in 2016.
[00:24:06]  It's very interesting because if you look at the argumentation that's being used against me, these people would be making the exact same arguments against Donald Trump in 2016 when the grab her by the whatever tape dropped, when whatever photo with whichever unsavory politician or unsavory character dropped.
[00:24:24]  These exact same arguments are made against Donald Trump.
[00:24:26]  They're just not currently being made because it's unpopular to do so.
[00:24:30]  But that's why I don't like the entire paradigm.
[00:24:32]  That's why I reject the strategies that they're using entirely.
[00:24:36]  You know, it seems to me that there are two reasons for why we have, we're in this situation.
[00:24:44]  One is, of course, that the left has engaged in almost relentless anti-white and anti-male rhetoric.
[00:24:53]  And this has produced a certain sense of guess what?
[00:24:56]  You know, if it's okay for you to unleash in this kind of uninhibited, demeaning way, then you're going to get a taste of your own medicine.
[00:25:06]  The second factor I want to mention is that I think in the time when I was your age, there was a much bigger private-public distinction, which is to say that people could make jokes in private.
[00:25:19]  And I confess to have made as many as the next guy.
[00:25:23]  But on the other hand, those jokes wouldn't be something I would put in an article or they wouldn't emerge in one of my books.
[00:25:30]  And so as a result, the private space was more protected.
[00:25:34]  But these days, if you go in a chat and you start talking to your friends and you start talking in the way that we talked in private, you're now held accountable to a public standard.
[00:25:48]  What do you think about that?
[00:25:50]  Yeah, I mean, it's something I reflect on a lot, obviously, being a young person and being interested in politics.
[00:25:57]  I have to think about that, right?
[00:25:58]  That my entire life basically is on the internet.
[00:26:01]  It will always be on the internet.
[00:26:03]  And maybe there's a part of me that's optimistic that we're going to create a kind of mutually assured destruction among the members of Gen Z who are running for office in the future.
[00:26:12]  I think everybody's going to have some skeleton in the closet.
[00:26:15]  And I think you do have to get to a point where we truly do practice and believe the principles of the atonement of Jesus Christ, where we are willing to extend forgiveness.
[00:26:26]  And I think what goes hand in hand with that is also that there's sincerity.
[00:26:30]  This is, I think, what I hate most about the politics of today is that whether it's on the left or whether it's on the right, the cancel culture that exists, it's almost never an attempt to hold people to their beliefs.
[00:26:43]  It is an attempt maybe to take their worst statement and to, you know, turn that into an actionable piece of policy.
[00:26:49]  And I think that to the extent that that's done, it's so disingenuous that it ought not even be, it ought not be even be validated or justified with responses or otherwise.
[00:27:01]  And so, you know, like you were mentioning, these group chat leaks, these crass jokes that people make, I just think it is so cruel and dishonest to take statements that people make, which certainly, yes, unsavory, crass, whatever.
[00:27:16]  I think it's very just uncharitable to take those statements and then try to extract from them a true policy prescription the way that oftentimes politicians and pundits do.
[00:27:30]  You said very recently that you are not a Groyper.
[00:27:34]  I saw a little video from Nick Fuentes basically saying something like, noted.
[00:27:39]  And so tell me, because I have a sort of an idea of what a Groyper is.
[00:27:45]  What is a grouper?
[00:27:47]  Did you used to consider yourself a Groyper?
[00:27:50]  Are you no longer a grouper?
[00:27:52]  Or have you always had some distance?
[00:27:54]  Can you give us some clarity about who is to you a Groyper and why are you not a Groyper?
[00:28:00]  I mean, I'll be honest.
[00:28:02]  I don't know if it's this easily definable thing.
[00:28:05]  There's plenty of people who may call themselves a Groyper and that then other Groypers could say, I completely disagree with this person calling themselves such.
[00:28:15]  I think from the very inception, I haven't really used the label.
[00:28:21]  I've used it a couple of times and more just kind of in a cultural sense.
[00:28:26]  Like the Grouper itself is a variant of this Pepe the Frog character.
[00:28:31]  But I think since my time on the internet, people have kind of noticed that I may be, although adjacent and certainly participatory, or because I participated in the America First circles, people would look at me and they'd associate me with this label Groyper, but there was something very different.
[00:28:50]  Maybe, you know, it was the fact that I was Mormon.
[00:28:52]  It was my demeanor, maybe.
[00:28:54]  And for me, I think the label is kind of unimportant.
[00:28:58]  I think I'm Kai Schwemmer.
[00:29:01]  I can participate in political circles, whether they be in the America First political circles, whether they be in the more, you know, college Republicans political circles.
[00:29:10]  I can do all of that.
[00:29:11]  And it does not require me to take on any other label or necessarily associate with a broad variety of ideas because I am who I am.
[00:29:21]  I'm Kai Schwemmer.
[00:29:22]  And I think when we discuss politics, it's actually far more productive to look at people as individuals and to look at certain ideas.
[00:29:29]  So I don't think that people are lying when they say that I've definitely participated in America First adjacent circles.
[00:29:37]  By nature of what I do politically and certainly many of the opinions that I hold, I think that's absolutely fair.
[00:29:45]  But, you know.
[00:29:46]  But you're saying America First generally.
[00:29:48]  I mean, you've streamed with Nick.
[00:29:50]  You've been to his conferences.
[00:29:51]  We're talking about Nick Fuente.
[00:29:54]  So has Laura Loomer.
[00:29:55]  So has John Doyle.
[00:29:57]  I mean, I think if that is the standard, you know, you begin to create a lot more Groypers maybe than you are comfortable with Dinesh.
[00:30:05]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:30:06]  And I'm not suggesting that it's something that you should be penitent for or anything like that.
[00:30:11]  I'm simply trying to say, well, let's talk about Nick because, I mean, I think I debated Nick several months ago.
[00:30:18]  It was on Iran.
[00:30:20]  And my take on Nick, which I don't know if you agree with, is that Nick wants to be the edgy man's edgy man.
[00:30:28]  And so he will say things that are not just aimed at getting a reaction, but aimed at positioning himself as sort of the most outrageous character on the internet.
[00:30:42]  And that, but I think you can also see that when you say those things, the people in the groups that you're saying them are going to get alarmed because they, first of all, are unaccustomed to hearing this kind of discourse.
[00:30:57]  And second of all, the idea that these ideas are being sort of put out there and even in a lighthearted way is almost even more disturbing because there is, in fact, a disturbing history to some of these.
[00:31:13]  I'm thinking particularly about things that have to do with Nazism and the Holocaust.
[00:31:21]  What's your reading on Nick?
[00:31:25]  And I mean, My take is that Nick is not a real Nazi in the sense that Nick wouldn't do the things the Nazis did, but Nick is a performance artist Nazi who says things for effect.
[00:31:38]  Do you agree or disagree?
[00:31:40]  I don't think he's a Nazi.
[00:31:42]  And so I agree with you there.
[00:31:45]  I also don't believe that he's a performance arts, performance art Nazi.
[00:31:50]  I think certainly you're right that he says things that, you know, what we would call clip farming, right?
[00:31:55]  You know, there's statements that he has made, and maybe it is the use of racial slurs, right?
[00:31:59]  Which can seem totally over the top.
[00:32:02]  But what I think is fascinating to realize is that there are certainly walls of political correctness that maybe we imagine are there.
[00:32:10]  But then when you see these things said, when you hear them said, you begin to realize that there are a ton of people who, you know, maybe even the audiences that we think would react most negatively can see that there's some element of truth.
[00:32:23]  I think that's where that comes from.
[00:32:24]  This is the reason that people use this kind of edgy or politically incorrect humor.
[00:32:30]  It's always with some portion of the truth.
[00:32:32]  And I think there is some, certainly there's some cultural value to saying things that maybe sound offensive, but then he'll say something about black Americans, for instance.
[00:32:42]  And you find that clip circulated among tons of black YouTubers who all say, hey, I agree with Nick Fuentes.
[00:32:49]  And what does that tell you?
[00:32:50]  It tells you that maybe there are these constructions or these construct political correct walls that bind us in a way that stops us from talking about certain things.
[00:33:02]  And so while my approach and the way I talk is to an onlooker, obviously very different.
[00:33:08]  And it's not an attempt to obfuscate.
[00:33:10]  I think it's just a clear difference in who we are as people and the way that we do politics and talk.
[00:33:15]  And I don't think that's a bad thing.

=== Free Market Risks (09:46) ===

[00:33:17]  I think you do need a diverse array of perspectives and ways of doing things.
[00:33:20]  But that'll also be your difference between a Donald Trump and a Ted Cruz.
[00:33:25]  I think you're going to have somebody who says crass things, who has baggage behind him.
[00:33:30]  And there is often even some value in seeing those people succeed or having giving them, like you said, an opportunity to talk about their ideas in spite of maybe the controversy or the polemics of it.
[00:33:44]  I mean, I agree with this principle, Kai.
[00:33:47]  When I was an undergraduate at Dartmouth, people kept attacking us as homophobes.
[00:33:52]  This was almost the origins of that term, you know, homophobia.
[00:33:56]  And we were so annoyed by this that we decided, a bunch of us right-wingers, to create the society of creative homophobia.
[00:34:03]  And so we had a, you know, we had a manifesto, we began to organize events.
[00:34:08]  But it was a way of jibing at that label.
[00:34:12]  And in your words, taking down the walls of political correctness.
[00:34:17]  Let's turn to a little more substantive discussion, if I can.
[00:34:22]  So we've come a long way since the Reagan years.
[00:34:25]  And in the Reagan years, conservatism was defined really around three pillars.
[00:34:31]  The first one was anti-communism and the idea is it's a very dangerous world.
[00:34:35]  There are a lot of bad guys out there.
[00:34:37]  We need to be strong so we can have peace through strength.
[00:34:40]  The second pillar was free market economics and the ideas that you need free markets to generate prosperity.
[00:34:47]  And the third idea was, I would call it traditional values, loosely speaking, which is pro-life and the idea of having a wholesome cultural communities.
[00:34:59]  I'd like you to reflect on those three pillars of Reaganism and say, do you agree with those?
[00:35:05]  Or do you think that one of those pillars is obsolete?
[00:35:09]  What makes us different now that causes this generational divide?
[00:35:15]  Even you've said things like, you know, what have the old conservatives really conserved?
[00:35:20]  This is what I want to get at.
[00:35:21]  Is Reaganism still relevant?
[00:35:23]  And how is the Trump agenda different from it?
[00:35:29]  It's a good question.
[00:35:31]  Remind me one more time.
[00:35:32]  What was the way you described the first pillar?
[00:35:35]  The first pillar is anti-communism and was simply the idea more broadly, because of course we don't have Soviet communism.
[00:35:41]  The world is a really dangerous place.
[00:35:43]  The United States cannot subtract itself from the world.
[00:35:47]  We got to realize there are good guys out there and they're really bad guys.
[00:35:51]  And we have to deal with that.
[00:35:52]  And the way to deal with that is to be really tough.
[00:35:55]  Yeah.
[00:35:56]  Yeah.
[00:35:56]  I think, you know, I'll say maybe we start with the good.
[00:36:00]  You know, I'm a glass half-full kind of guy.
[00:36:02]  I do think that to a large degree, the traditional values were largely maintained by the, let's say, the Reagan era Republicans.
[00:36:12]  I think, like you mentioned, the issue of life and to some extent as well, the issue of marriage, these were well defended.
[00:36:19]  And I think that's much easier to do when you come from a society that has a higher amount of social trust and social capital to begin with.
[00:36:29]  I think, unfortunately, and this, you know, a lot of the critique that my generation and I myself have, it has to do with this second column, the second pillar, which is about the economic prosperity to free markets.
[00:36:42]  I think we got a little lost after that generation.
[00:36:47]  And we began to see free markets and we began to see capitalism as the end that we are aspiring to rather than the means to the end.
[00:36:56]  When in reality, the end needs to be a prospering America, a thriving America, and thriving American families.
[00:37:02]  And I think as I reflect on what went so wrong, I don't think a lot of it was necessarily malicious.
[00:37:09]  But I think that if you could go back in time, I don't know if Reagan would go through with amnesty.
[00:37:14]  I think if we can go back and look at the way that the country is shaping or is shaping up and shifting over time, issues of immigration and of free market economics, we begin to look at them very differently and we get to calculate the risks differently as well.
[00:37:30]  As much as free markets are good, they are certainly the most effective way of ordering an economy.
[00:37:35]  They are not a moral good in and of themselves, like I said before.
[00:37:39]  And if we allow our perspective of politics to be so focused on them, we will begin to throw things like demographic consistency, cultural cohesion.
[00:37:50]  We begin to throw those by the wayside because it's very easy to make the argument that foreign laborers who come here either legally or illegally are going to be able to provide cheap labor, which enhances the ability to produce some kind of good.
[00:38:03]  And that is certainly something advantageous to corporations.
[00:38:07]  Is that good for the everyday American?
[00:38:09]  Well, we see in 2016 that there's plenty of people who felt the effects of that.
[00:38:13]  Offshoring, which produced some economic prosperity for the United States, certainly, also, you know, displaced a ton of people, threw them out of their jobs.
[00:38:22]  And the Trump revolution, I think, is a response to that.
[00:38:25]  I don't think it's necessarily a direct continuation.
[00:38:29]  Yeah, as I think about what you're saying, which by the way, I agree with completely, I think that what happened in the Reagan years was that the neocons essentially occupied the domain of foreign policy.
[00:38:42]  The libertarians took over the domain of economic policy, where this kind of free market absolutism, I think, you know, the idea being that guess what?
[00:38:54]  If you can make steel in Indonesia for half the price of what it costs to make it in Pittsburgh, you got to do it because it's going to promote efficiency.
[00:39:02]  That was very much a libertarian idea.
[00:39:04]  And the cultural conservatives were all focused on things like pornography and gay marriage and pro-life.
[00:39:10]  And so there was this kind of segmentation on the right.
[00:39:14]  I think what you're saying is that, guess what?
[00:39:16]  Cultural issues and economic issues are closely connected.
[00:39:19]  And I think what I take you to be saying is that we should reject this kind of dogmatic libertarianism, which makes the market this sort of final good.
[00:39:31]  You're saying it's an intermediate good toward prosperity, but the final good is in fact the well-being of American citizens.
[00:39:40]  Am I correctly summarizing what you're saying?
[00:39:43]  Yeah, certainly.
[00:39:44]  I think there's an unfortunate maybe we were gullible.
[00:39:49]  I mean, I wasn't alive.
[00:39:51]  I was in the premortal life.
[00:39:52]  So, you know, I have to put this on your generation, but I think there was this idea maybe of being gullible about how quickly the nation's, you know, moral character would diminish.
[00:40:04]  And that is, I think, really what we lose out on.
[00:40:07]  And I think about, you know, the fragmentation, that's not all that bad.
[00:40:11]  The issue is, though, that the right has allowed the left to write the rules for us.
[00:40:15]  And so, you know, we basically started making sacrifices.
[00:40:18]  We would say, well, as long as we can keep the free market economics, then, okay, we can, you know, maybe let some of the social issues fall by the wayside.
[00:40:26]  But the idea of like a constitutionally guaranteed right to gay marry or to get an abortion, these are ideas that to any of the founding fathers would have been, would not have been plausible.
[00:40:36]  Like that, that would have seemed ridiculous.
[00:40:38]  And I think that the right wing often underestimates just how vicious the left will be in attacking first this cultural pillar as soon as the guards are being let down, but then next the economics and also our stance on the global stage.
[00:40:53]  I think the left does not want an America that is a global superpower.
[00:41:00]  I think they almost see it as immoral.
[00:41:04]  And so we have to worry about every single pillar and we can't let a single one fall.
[00:41:09]  I mean, I think here we're this generational issue is, to me, it's very interesting because I lived through it, you know, and so to tell you, for example, about the DEI affirmative action debate, in the 1990s, the left's control over this issue was so complete.
[00:41:30]  I mean, every institution, every corporation, every university, that the number of people who were publicly attacking affirmative action, I could count on the fingers of two hands.
[00:41:44]  I mean, there was Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Glenn Lowry, me, a few others, and that was it.
[00:41:50]  I mean, we were outnumbered.
[00:41:52]  And we were outnumbered because, as you know, and this is true even today, even though in politics we might have been roughly evenly matched against the left, in culture, we were completely defeated.
[00:42:04]  And by that, I mean the left dominated academia.
[00:42:07]  They dominated the media.
[00:42:09]  They dominated the music industry, the entertainment industry.
[00:42:12]  So, and this cultural power, by the way, doesn't swap with elections.
[00:42:17]  It is a kind of permanent quasi-state outside the state.
[00:42:22]  And so on the cultural issues, this is what we were kind of up against.
[00:42:27]  Even with abortion, you had the pro-lifers who by and large were nuns with rosaries and people who were devoting their time on a volunteer basis on our side.
[00:42:37]  And on the other side, you had a massively funded, highly profitable industry that was also, by the way, getting government funding.
[00:42:48]  And so the scales were so absurdly tipped against us.
[00:42:52]  So for this reason, I think I'm not generationally harsh on the earlier generation, just because you have to realize how outnumbered they were.
[00:43:00]  We were, you know, in our time.

=== Lose-Lose Intervention (14:52) ===

[00:43:03]  Let's talk a little bit about now and about Iran.
[00:43:08]  Why do you think that this Iran war is a bad idea?
[00:43:13]  And I say that because it seems to me that Iran has been a thorn in our side since 1979.
[00:43:22]  Even if they, you know, you can debate how close they are to having a nuclear weapon, but their aspiration to have one and their knowledge about how to build one is not disputed.
[00:43:31]  They're a rich country, so they're able to get the resources to get there.
[00:43:36]  Why is it not a good idea if we can in a reasonable way knock out the mullahs and have a post-mullah Iran?
[00:43:46]  Why is that not America first?
[00:43:50]  Well, look, when we think about the Iran conflict, I think you're right to point out some of the circumstances, right?
[00:43:56]  Which is this idea of the imminent threat has been discussed and debated for 30 years.
[00:44:01]  We're obviously on the back of the bombing of their nuclear enrichment sites in, what was it, June of last year or just last year, right?
[00:44:09]  When we together with Israel also struck these enrichment sites, you had the Pager attacks, which were very successful.
[00:44:16]  But then somehow already now in March, we have this conversation that the threat is really imminent and Israel is going to strike no matter what.
[00:44:26]  And so the United States might as well go along with it.
[00:44:28]  I think a big problem with this whole conflict, that's kind of the context out of the way, is the way we are drawn into it.
[00:44:36]  I'm not alone in hearing the words of Mike Johnson or even of Secretary Rubio and looking at kind of the strategic situation and saying, hey, it looks like once again, we've kind of been brought into this because Israel was going to do something that was going to create some kind of threat to the United States.
[00:44:53]  And it looks like time and time again, we have an inability to restrain them.
[00:44:58]  Now, I totally hear what you're saying, and I agree.
[00:45:01]  I think that the United States can analyze threats and go in and take them out on our own terms, on our own time, when we deem it is most efficient.
[00:45:10]  But it doesn't seem like we're the ones actually making those decisions.
[00:45:14]  It looks like the strategic situation is time and time again being created by Israel, who's going to go in, whether we agree with them or not, to attack Iran, whether we are in the middle of negotiations or not, and thwart those negotiations or certainly hinder them, make them more difficult.
[00:45:31]  And I think that's the problem is that our foreign policy, our negotiations in the region are not so much autonomous.
[00:45:38]  They're something that are being, they are spurred on by whatever Israel decides to do in the region.
[00:45:44]  And I think to the extent that they rely on us to carry out some of these military operations to oppose Iran, because they would not have been able to destroy these nuclear enrichment sites themselves.
[00:45:54]  Some people argue that they would have been able to carry out the recent attacks, right, on the Ayatollah and on the rest of the regime by themselves.
[00:46:00]  If that's the case, why didn't they do that?
[00:46:02]  Why did we have to go in?
[00:46:04]  I look at it and time and time again, I say, hey, if we are the superpower and if they rely on us, the go-ahead should be on our terms and not on theirs.
[00:46:14]  I mean, I certainly agree with that in principle.
[00:46:18]  I mean, there are a number of cases historically.
[00:46:20]  I mean, World War II being a really good example.
[00:46:23]  We're allies with Great Britain.
[00:46:25]  Nazi Germany does not attack the United States.
[00:46:28]  They're at war with Great Britain.
[00:46:31]  Now, Great Britain tries to draw us into the war.
[00:46:35]  And FDR is sympathetic, but somewhat reluctant.
[00:46:38]  In fact, the U.S. doesn't actually get into the war until Pearl Harbor.
[00:46:42]  Although, interestingly, Pearl Harbor was not launched by the Nazis.
[00:46:45]  It's launched by the Japanese.
[00:46:47]  And yet we go into the war whole hog.
[00:46:51]  Now, let me frame it slightly differently, because to me, you have this global aspiration to jihad.
[00:47:01]  And this is coming, by the way, not just from Iran.
[00:47:03]  It's coming from a lot of different places in the Muslim world, but it has a violent component.
[00:47:09]  And it also has an infiltration component.
[00:47:12]  The infiltration component is let's burrow our way into Australia and Canada and Europe and the United States.
[00:47:20]  Let's have mosques mushrooming all over the country.
[00:47:25]  Let's take over school boards.
[00:47:27]  So you have people, and I'm not saying it's all Muslims, but they have a clear end goal.
[00:47:32]  It's a caliphate, it's Sharia.
[00:47:35]  And if you look at it in this global framework where there is, let's call it the jihad of the sword, but then you also have the sort of political jihad or the more subtle jihad.
[00:47:48]  Why not take it on on all fronts?
[00:47:51]  I mean, why not say, all right, look, if we can knock out the head of the snake, which is quite clearly Iran, and at the same time, we're going to have to deal with this jihad that we're seeing in our own communities.
[00:48:05]  Isn't this kind of comprehensive approach the right way to go?
[00:48:08]  Or is there a better way to go?
[00:48:09]  What's the better way to go?
[00:48:11]  Well, and I think you would actually agree with me.
[00:48:15]  I'm dubious as to the idea that if we kind of take out the Ayatollah and Iran or push the mullahs out, like you were saying, kind of this post-mullah maybe kind of look at the region.
[00:48:31]  I would ask, do you, Dinesh, really believe that that brings an end to this kind of global, you know, aspiration of jihad?
[00:48:39]  Like, do you think that brings an end to it?
[00:48:41]  From everything that I hear from Republican pundits and certainly what I've seen myself, because certainly they're of the religious element, there are aspirations that are not squashed once a head of state is taken out or once a military has been destabilized.
[00:48:58]  And frankly, past that point, I think oftentimes things get worse.
[00:49:03]  In the aftermath of the destabilization of Libya, you see a refugee crisis in Europe.
[00:49:08]  And a lot of the influx of Muslim refugees that we got into Europe is as a result of destabilization of Muslim countries.
[00:49:17]  So oftentimes these two issues are kind of pitted against each other.
[00:49:20]  It's like, well, which is more of a threat?
[00:49:22]  Do you think it's Israel?
[00:49:23]  Do you think it's Muslims?
[00:49:26]  I really don't think you can separate these issues because our intervention is going to often increase some of the problems that we see domestically, like with refugee crises, like with the change in populations and demographics.
[00:49:38]  And I am very skeptical that any amount of military intervention is ever going to stop the desire of Islam to spread itself around the Western world.
[00:49:51]  Well, my reaction to that is this, and that is that the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928, and it kicked off this phase of modern radical Islam and the modern incarnation.
[00:50:06]  But the radical Muslims were ragtag.
[00:50:09]  You know, they were ragtag groups in Egypt, in Pakistan.
[00:50:13]  Later, of course, you had groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS, but these guys never had control of a country, of a major state.
[00:50:21]  Now, again, later they got the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan, but even Afghanistan is a small country.
[00:50:27]  Not Iran yet.
[00:50:28]  Not Washington yet, right?
[00:50:30]  Exactly.
[00:50:30]  Now, Iran is a major country, right?
[00:50:33]  If you look at the Middle East, there's no doubt that Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Iran are the three kind of big boys in that neighborhood.
[00:50:40]  So I think that this inspired radical jihadis around the world because finally, with the Ayatollah Khomeini, they got a hold of a major state.
[00:50:49]  For this reason, I think that for the mullahs to fall would be a massive blow.
[00:50:54]  Now, it doesn't end the problem.
[00:50:55]  I agree.
[00:50:56]  The problem is global, but it would be a major, a major setback.
[00:51:01]  The other thing I think is that unlike, say, Iraq or Afghanistan, Iran actually has an ancient history.
[00:51:08]  They have been a constitutional republic.
[00:51:10]  They did have a parliament functioning before 1979.
[00:51:15]  They're a very educated people.
[00:51:17]  So I think the prospects for having a regime, and it may not be a democratic regime, they might decide to bring back the Shah's son and have some sort of a constitutional monarchy.
[00:51:27]  I don't know.
[00:51:28]  I think that's actually up to them.
[00:51:30]  But I don't have much doubt that what replaces the current regime would be better.
[00:51:35]  It probably wouldn't be ideal.
[00:51:37]  But if we can get a regime in there that's pro-American, see, that to me is America first, because that ultimately gets us a friend.
[00:51:45]  And I would say make the same argument about Venezuela.
[00:51:48]  Similarly, a country which has had a prosperous, the Venezuelan constitution is actually modeled on the U.S. Constitution.
[00:51:56]  Simone Bolivar was a great admirer of the founders and frequently talked about George Washington.
[00:52:02]  So for these reasons, it seems to me that Venezuela and Iran are different than, say, Iraq and Afghanistan.
[00:52:11]  Yeah, I don't disagree with the idea that they are, that they are different kinds of engagements.
[00:52:18]  And I like the fact that we are at least conscious of some of the issues that occurred there, this attempt at nation building.
[00:52:25]  But then I look at the statements that are being made by President Trump himself that, you know, we're going to make sure like to build Iran up, it's going to have this tremendous, amazing economy.
[00:52:35]  And we are going to, you know, replace the head of state.
[00:52:37]  We're going to have regime change.
[00:52:38]  We're going to encourage and enable the Iranian people to take back their government.
[00:52:42]  It will be theirs.
[00:52:43]  I look at that and I'm like, well, then how is that not nation building?
[00:52:46]  How is this not regime change?
[00:52:47]  And to be fair, I think it is regime change.
[00:52:49]  I think that's what he said.
[00:52:50]  I think he's been open about it.
[00:52:52]  The same way that when he talked about Venezuela, despite the fact that the left wanted to say, oh, this is all about oil and they don't want you to know.
[00:52:58]  If you listen to Trump's speech, he mentions oil like 10 times.
[00:53:01]  So I think we are clear about our objectives.
[00:53:04]  I just don't think they're going to be very easy to attain.
[00:53:07]  And right now, I think that the conflict in Iran, the war in Iran, it is a losing situation already because you have a friction between Trump, who has heard and who has campaigned and talked about this idea of not having these new endless foreign wars.
[00:53:23]  And certainly a representation of that is when we have boots on the ground.
[00:53:27]  That is to the average person, the immediate correlation that they draw up is boots on the ground means foreign wars, means Iraq, Afghanistan, all over again.
[00:53:37]  And then you have the other side, which is that, okay, well, we've already been in.
[00:53:41]  We have taken out the head of state, the Ayatollah.
[00:53:44]  And there is kind of now this effort at regime change.
[00:53:47]  Certainly the country is less stable now than it was just a month ago.
[00:53:51]  So what do you do?
[00:53:52]  You're basically stuck with leaving a country in a state of disrepair or needing to send in troops in order to actually pursue a successful regime change.
[00:54:01]  You can't carry out the regime change from the skies.
[00:54:04]  And I don't think that that is a, that it's like a win-lose.
[00:54:07]  I think it is a lose-lose situation.
[00:54:09]  Neither of these outcomes are particularly good for the United States because they either include an optical disaster by just destabilizing a country, potentially seeing refugees flood into Europe or a further destabilization of global trade routes, or you have a complete optical disaster of sending troops into Iran to die in another war with a mission outcome that does not seem likely to be obtained within the next couple months.
[00:54:34]  And so I think if we could have avoided it or certainly pursued negotiations, I actually do believe you could have come out to a goal.
[00:54:42]  The issue is, once again, we're kind of forced into it because the attack that Israel was going to go through with or without our support was going to obviously incur some negative response from Iran, which was going to be directed towards U.S. troops.
[00:54:57]  I think you can have regime change from the skies.
[00:55:01]  The way you do it is that you pulverize the regime enough that the Iranian people are confident to get out into the street and take back their country.
[00:55:11]  Remember, this is actually what happened.
[00:55:13]  This has happened multiple times before.
[00:55:15]  And even in the Cold War, where there was no pulverizing out of the sky, the key issue was to embolden the Czechs and the Romanians, the Bulgarians, the Eastern Europeans to go tear down the wall.
[00:55:28]  They didn't, why didn't they do that before?
[00:55:30]  And what made them confident to do it, what made them confident to do it is they're like, we have an opportunity to actually take back our own society.
[00:55:38]  Now, I think.
[00:55:40]  But can I push back on that?
[00:55:42]  It was a ton of diplomatic pressure as well, though, especially if you talk about, you know, the Berlin Wall.
[00:55:47]  You know, this is not something where the German people were going up and attempting to tear it down.
[00:55:52]  Maybe, yes, once the order came out, an order which, by the way, was almost kind of poorly interpreted.
[00:55:57]  Nobody really knew what was going on.
[00:55:59]  So Germans just kind of started showing up at the border.
[00:56:01]  Well, I think it was Gorbachev ultimately deciding not to use force, right?
[00:56:06]  Because in the past, if you tried to touch the wall, you'd get shot.
[00:56:10]  So the moment the German people realized, no, the Russians who have ultimately been maintaining this kind of power, the absence of Russian willingness to use the power emboldened the people.
[00:56:22]  And I guess what I'm saying is the same is true in Iran.
[00:56:24]  Once the mullahs are shown to be paper tigers, once the mullahs can't do anything to you on the street, the people will go into the street.
[00:56:33]  I guess that's what I'm saying.
[00:56:34]  Now, I'm wondering, and the reason I'm pursuing this discussion, Kai, is only because it seems to me really important for our side to be able to kind of come together to take on the left with the midterms coming on.
[00:56:47]  And I think that what this conversation is revealing is there actually is a way to do that.
[00:56:53]  It's not that we disagree.
[00:56:57]  I would even say that with Afghanistan and Iraq, the problem wasn't even the regime change.
[00:57:03]  Like, for example, don't you think it was a good idea for us to go knock out the Taliban after 9-11?
[00:57:08]  I mean, should we have left them in place?
[00:57:10]  The problem was that the moment we did that, we began a lengthy, tedious, and fruitless occupation in which literally Americans are over there trying to run their tribal meetings, trying to organize their education system.
[00:57:24]  I mean, I agree with you.
[00:57:25]  This is absurd.
[00:57:28]  The way to do regime change usually is particularly in a faraway country, is you get rid of the bad guy and you find one of his rivals, the guy from the other tribe who hates him, and you tell that guy, listen, I'm going to put you in, and all I'm asking you to do is be our friend and do business with us.
[00:57:45]  And other than that, you run the country however you want.
[00:57:48]  And so I'm looking for something similar to that, which I think is the Trumpian way, by the way.
[00:57:53]  I don't think Trump is a reincarnation of Bush.

=== Trumpian Lessons Learned (04:42) ===

[00:57:56]  And I think that may be the fear.
[00:57:58]  I have confidence that Trump has learned the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan, probably just as much as you and I have, and is not going to do it that way.
[00:58:10]  I think that the, you know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
[00:58:14]  I think that while you're right, I don't think that Trump is a Bush, you know, 2.0.
[00:58:20]  I don't, or I guess it would be 3.0 because we've already had two Bushes in the office.
[00:58:26]  Very different, of course.
[00:58:27]  But I do think, you know, nobody ever wants to go into an endless war.
[00:58:32]  I think that framing is kind of ridiculous.
[00:58:34]  It's like, yeah, guys, I think we should go in and we should pursue an endless war.
[00:58:38]  And it's like, nobody wants to do that.
[00:58:39]  But I do think that people are maybe ignorant of just how intentional every part of this has to be.
[00:58:46]  And what I look at, especially concerning some of the recent statements made from the admin, is that there just does not seem to be a clearly defined mission.
[00:58:54]  And like I was describing before, there's a friction between these two things.
[00:58:58]  There's a friction between the idea that, okay, if we want regime change, the most effective way, the most efficient way of doing it is by putting boots on the ground.
[00:59:05]  But there's a friction between, you know, that idea and the will of the American people or what we see, which is that we do not want Americans dying in Iran, even if it's just to be sure that there is a transfer of power to a more democratically aligned regime or government.
[00:59:19]  But then there's also the other side, which is, okay, well, we can't totally leave them.
[00:59:24]  We can't just abandon the region.
[00:59:26]  And so while I agree with you, I think there has to be something done.
[00:59:30]  Negotiations have to occur.
[00:59:33]  I also look back, like you just mentioned, to the case of Russia, where negotiation was possible, where you didn't have to kick Gorbachev out, where certainly pressures could exist that influenced his government in the right direction with perestroika and with whatnot.
[00:59:47]  And understanding all of that, I think you also have to examine the element, like you mentioned before, of Islam.
[00:59:53]  You have to realize that just because you see videos on X on your Twitter feed of protesters in the streets of Iran, there are just as many people in the United States who would happily cheer and who did, you know, during the No Kings protest for Trump being deposed, dethroned.
[01:00:10]  And if he was killed, I'm sure plenty of people here would cheer.
[01:00:13]  But at the same time, that would bring far more of them over to unite with a larger American cause.
[01:00:18]  And I think many of the protesters now, you even have them aligning with Iran as a nation.
[01:00:23]  I am very skeptical that our intervention is actually going to do more to encourage the revolutionary aspirations of the Iranian people.
[01:00:30]  I think it's actually probably going to unite them against us in an unsavory way.
[01:00:36]  One thing I do worry about, and it does connect with what you've been saying, is the fact that we do have a very avaricious defense industry, which produces a commodity called weapons.
[01:00:51]  And it is a very powerful lobby in Washington, D.C.
[01:00:55]  So, you know, when you talk about the people who are kind of going against the American people, I'm sort of less worried that it's going to be Iranians who talk us into this.
[01:01:06]  I'm more worried about the fact that, and we see this also in the domestic sphere, right?
[01:01:10]  You have powerful vested interests that are pushing against the will of the American people.
[01:01:17]  But while you and I may give $100 to our local congressmen or senators, these are people who can funnel millions, tens of millions of dollars.
[01:01:26]  And that is a problem I think that is intrinsic to our political system, the internal clash between special interests on the one hand and the will and the values of the American people on the other.
[01:01:40]  Well, Kai, listen, I want to thank you for joining me.
[01:01:44]  This has been a good discussion.
[01:01:45]  I appreciate it.
[01:01:47]  And I wish you all the best in your new position at College Republicans.
[01:01:52]  Make sure you take on the left and bring more people over to our side.
[01:01:57]  And all the best to you.
[01:01:59]  Always.
[01:01:59]  Thanks so much for having me, Dinesh.
[01:02:01]  Appreciate it.
[01:02:05]  Hey, I'm now on Substack.
[01:02:07]  It's kind of full circle for me.
[01:02:09]  I started out as a journalist writing articles for National Review, The American Spectator, The Washington Post, lots of places.
[01:02:16]  After my stint in the Reagan White House, I pivoted to writing books.
[01:02:19]  And that was way back in 1991.
[01:02:22]  So I've been mainly known as an author and, of course, later as a filmmaker.
[01:02:26]  But my first job, journalist, and now I'm getting back to that.
[01:02:30]  On Substack, you'll get original articles and commentary, groundbreaking investigations, exclusive access to film clips and show clips.

=== Devils Holiday (02:46) ===

[01:02:39]  And guess what?
[01:02:40]  It's free.
[01:02:41]  So check it out.
[01:02:42]  Go to DineshD'Souza.substack.com.
[01:02:49]  My latest film, The Dragon's Prophecy, is timelier than ever.
[01:02:53]  And it's now very easy to watch.
[01:02:55]  So make plans.
[01:02:56]  It's available on YouTube.
[01:02:57]  It's available on iTunes and also on Amazon Prime.
[01:03:01]  Here is the trailer.
[01:03:05]  Then another sign appeared in heaven.
[01:03:07]  An enormous red dragon.
[01:03:09]  Revelation 12.3 Once again, an armed attack in the Middle East.
[01:03:25]  But this time, it's different.
[01:03:32]  October 7th was the devil's holiday.
[01:03:38]  It's very hard to believe what happened, even though I was there and seen with my own eyes and seen them laughing and killing and having fun with it.
[01:03:46]  Because if you don't open the door, they are going to kill you and they are going to kill me, so please open the door.
[01:03:56]  So who are the Jews?
[01:03:58]  Who are the Palestinians?
[01:04:00]  And whose land is it really?
[01:04:04]  Could the fate of the world, of humanity itself, be somehow tied to this place?
[01:04:11]  The nation of Israel is a resurrected nation.
[01:04:14]  So what if there was going to be a resurrection of another people, an enemy people of Israel?
[01:04:22]  The Bible speaks about this whole war as a dragon representing the enemy attacking a woman representing Israel.
[01:04:30]  The civilian deaths on both sides represent victories on the part of the dragon.
[01:04:36]  Mastered everything within their ability to maximize the civilian casualty.
[01:04:41]  We came back to a land that was largely barren and empty, and we brought it back to life and we're going to keep it.
[01:04:48]  The devil hates the Jewish people because they represent the existence of God.
[01:04:54]  Because without that Jewish foundation, there is no Christianity.
[01:04:58]  If we're approaching the end of time, God will reveal himself more and more dramatically.
[01:05:06]  Speak back through the stones.
[01:05:08]  The story that they've been telling is that Israel is a colonial project.
[01:05:12]  The problem with that is the city of David.
[01:05:15]  We are an inconvenient truth.
[01:05:18]  Are you aware of any significant archaeological finding that contradicts the Bible?
[01:05:25]  Nope.

=== God Reveals Himself (00:23) ===

[01:05:26]  God's word stands firm.
[01:05:32]  The dragon will not prevail.
[01:05:37]  Your message here is become a dragon slayer.
[01:05:42]  Based on Jonathan Kahn's number one international bestseller, The Dragon's Prophecy.
[01:05:47]  This film contains graphic violence of October