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June 7, 2021 - Dennis Prager Show
07:26
Why Dinesh Left California...
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God, what a life.
What a life.
Let's talk about the move for a moment.
You were living in California, where I live.
So, what was the final straw?
Why did you move?
Well, I actually married a Texan.
Debbie, my wife, is originally from Venezuela, but spent most of her life in Texas.
So, we were kind of deciding between California and Texas and a whole bunch of factors.
You know, convinced me that Texas is the place to be.
One of them, of course, being the fact that I think Texas as a state has just run so much better than California.
And another, quite honestly, was that it's easier to get around from Texas.
You're more in the middle of the country.
That's right.
So in two to three hours, you can hop to Florida, to Pittsburgh, to Oakland.
You can get pretty much anywhere from Texas in a single shot.
Yes, and half the time as it takes from L.A. I'm well aware of that.
It's a great advantage in that regard.
Do you feel freer?
Absolutely.
The thing about Texas is, I would say, it's almost like Texas is the kind of original American spirit.
But it's kind of America in italics.
So that Americans in general like the idea of being left alone, like the idea of having their own space, like the idea of speaking their mind.
Well, Texans are kind of Americans only more so.
So what is the current betting on what was apparently an issue, I don't know if it is, that's what I'm asking you really, about Texas going blue?
In my opinion, Dennis, that is not going to be an issue for one simple reason, and that is that there is a big and very successful project underway to take Latinos and Hispanics, who are already conservative-leaning but habitually Democratic, and turn them into good Republicans.
And that is occurring with wonderful speed.
And it's occurring deep in what could be called Blue Texas, which is the Rio Grande Valley.
This is, by the way, where Debbie, my wife, grew up.
She knows this area very well.
And she said in the last two elections, she says, you know, when she saw these Trump trains of Latinos stretching for miles, she goes, I never saw this in my life.
I never saw it for Reagan.
I obviously never saw it even for Bush, who was actually popular among Latinos in Texas.
But nevertheless, Trump brought out something completely new.
And just recently, I don't know if you saw, but in McAllen, Texas, which is right on the border, for the first time in I don't know how long, they elected a Republican mayor.
This is, again, 80 to 90 percent.
So if we get the Latinos in Texas, it doesn't matter if we get some crazy Californians and people from Seattle, because Latinos plus whites will lock the state of Texas red.
What comprises the bulk of the Democrats of Texas?
Basically, the Democrats in Texas are the Latinos in the Rio Grande Valley.
These are people who are LBJ Democrats.
They've been voting Democratic for 50 years or more.
And the other is the cities.
So, for example, inner city Houston, inner city Dallas, inner city San Antonio.
This is basically where the Democrats get their vote.
So the idea of tipping the state would be to lock in the Hispanics, lock in the cities, and then win over some suburban Texans over to the Democratic Party.
But the reason it's not going to work is that the base, which is the Hispanics, are starting to drift.
And so if the Democrats lose the Hispanics, they have absolutely no hope of winning Texas.
Well, Austin is not Rio Grande Valley, and it's not Hispanic.
Why is Austin, is it because of UT Austin?
Yeah, Austin is actually one of the smaller cities in Texas compared to, say, Houston and Dallas, which are just much, much bigger.
And Austin has always been a little bit of a progressive.
You know, it's the same.
Austin's like Ann Arbor, Michigan.
It's a college town that happens to be the capital of the state.
So it's left-wing, but it's been left-wing for a long time.
So, Austin is not really the heart, in that sense, not the heart of Texas.
One of the sayings that they say in Austin, which is, keep Austin weird, what they mean by that is keep Austin unlike the rest of Texas.
So it's almost like you've got a little piece of Berkeley right in the middle of Texas.
You didn't mention the blacks in Texas, and the reason?
That they're not as significant a force as the Latinos.
I mean, basically, Texas is...
It's tipped by the white vote and the Latino vote.
So unlike other places like Chicago and Illinois and other states where blacks are a decisive part of the vote.
Now, there are a lot of blacks, for example, in inner-city Houston.
But if you look at the population of Texas as a whole, the worry was that since the Democrats were getting large portions of the Hispanic vote, it would be the Hispanics that would tip Texas into the Democratic column.
And that's why I think the key issue for the Hispanics has basically been, do we want to go the way of the whites and the Asians, or do we want to go the way of the blacks?
And I think that, you know, in some senses, if you think about that question, it answers itself.
Right, and by that, let me spell that out.
I think you mean the question really is, do we want to believe we're victims and the country keeps us down or not?
Is that a fair summary of what that means?
Exactly.
It also means that there is a known recipe for groups that are starting out at the bottom to make their way up the ladder.
Every day we see immigrant groups.
And by the way, I don't just mean, of course, The Orientals or the Asian Indians, but we see people from the West Indies, from Trinidad, from Nigeria, black immigrants coming to America, they follow a known recipe, and they improve their lives.
So the idea here is you assimilate to the cultural requirements of success.
Nobody's saying that you have to sort of...
You know, if you're a Latino, you have to stop eating tacos or enchiladas or stop dressing a certain way.
It's not about that.
It's about your study habits and your savings rates and the way you organize your family and the importance you place on education and work and entrepreneurship and faith.
And everything you just mentioned is now declared to be white supremacist values.
Well, this is something that I think is a profound problem for the country in general, but specifically for the black community, because essentially what the left has done is literally redefine merit, merit in its broadest sense.
All the things you have to do to make your life better and demonize those things as racist, as if to say, let's keep African Americans away from all these things.
But think of what a destructive formula that is for a group that has already had so much historical hardship.
Exactly right.
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