July 29, 2016 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:05:32
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[MUSIC PLAYING] | |
| Well, it's finally official. | ||
| Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. | ||
| Her journey to get the nomination from lawyer, to wife of a governor, to first lady, to senator, to secretary of state, and now to presidential nominee is rivaled only by Palpatine's monumental rise to Emperor of the First Galactic Empire. | ||
| Actually, if you look closely, they do wear very similar clothes, but I'm going to leave that comparison right there. | ||
| So, first off, I don't want to gloss over the fact that Hillary is the first female nominee by a major party to be president. | ||
| You guys know that I do not like identity politics, so I'm not going to make this all about her being a woman, but I think it's important for us to acknowledge this fact. | ||
| From now on, little girls across America can grow up and know that they, too, can have a chance at being president. | ||
| Being a woman won't inherently make them better or worse for the job as the leader of the free world, but they'll know that the trail has been blazed before And by the way, we shouldn't forget that it hasn't even been 100 years since women got the right to vote in America. | ||
| We're not even going to hit that anniversary for another 3 years in 2019. | ||
| But beyond being a woman, as many people have pointed out, Hillary is basically the most qualified person ever to be nominated. | ||
| As I said just a second ago, her entire life has led to this moment. | ||
| Her road goes not only from being a lawyer, but also to a senator and secretary of state, as well as someone that spent eight years living in the White House. | ||
| Many people argue that her experience is exactly the reason not to vote for her. | ||
| We talk about a broken system, and she's as ingrained in the system as anyone could possibly be, and I think that is a completely fair point. | ||
| People like experience when their candidate has it, and people like a clean slate when their candidate lacks it. | ||
| Kind of funny how that works out, right? | ||
| This Democratic convention has been largely about Hillary getting Bernie, his supporters, and his delegates on her side. | ||
| Bernie's been a total team player in this regard, much to the chagrin of many of his supporters. | ||
| At the end of the day, Bernie is now supporting a person who raised more Wall Street money and big donor money than anyone on the campaign trail, and who has helped build the very messed up system he's been railing against for 25 years. | ||
| Bernie could have said, forget this, and tried a third-party run, but ultimately, he fell in line with a party that clearly didn't want him to win. | ||
| What his endorsement of Hillary will do for his legacy and his message against the system, we won't know for years, but at the end of the day, right this very second, he's supporting the exact system that he was fighting against. | ||
| I've said many times that I don't like the idea of Hillary as president because I don't want political dynasties. | ||
| We had a Bush, then a Clinton, then a Bush, then Obama, now maybe a Clinton, then maybe Chelsea Clinton, then maybe Malia Obama, and then who knows. | ||
| Let's not forget that we left England a long time ago because we didn't want to be ruled By a monarchy. | ||
| My feelings for Hillary have been tepid at best. | ||
| I don't think she's the warmongering neocon progressives had made her out to be, but I also don't think she's a sinister globalist like right-wing radio hosts will tell you. | ||
| At times I've mocked her and at times I've defended her. | ||
| At the end of the day, I think she's just like the rest of them, a politician looking to gain more power. | ||
| She's just better than most of them at it. | ||
| Maybe that's why they hate her so much. | ||
| Don't hate the player, hate the game. | ||
| Or in Bernie's case, hate the game but then endorse the hell out of it once you lose. | ||
| I'm pretty sure I speak for a lot of us when I say I wish we had more choices in front of us in this election. | ||
| I think you can make solid cases for both Clinton and Trump just as you can make damning condemnations of them both. | ||
| If the Founding Fathers were here to see this, they might tell us to board a ship, find some new land, and try all over again. | ||
| But maybe, just maybe, the brilliant document that they wrote, the Constitution, will be enough to weather any storm that's coming our way. | ||
| Let's not forget, the president is only one-third of the government. | ||
| We have a brilliantly designed system of checks and balances to safeguard our freedoms and make sure that whoever is our president never becomes our emperor. | ||
| While the atmosphere feels incredibly toxic right now, and we've still got over three more months of this, God help us, let's not lose sight that the best government is one that you don't have to think about that much because it simply works. | ||
| That's why, at the very least, I'd love to see libertarian Gary Johnson get to 15% in the polls, so they have to include an alternate voice in the debate. | ||
| There are way more ideas out there than just the ones that Clinton and Trump are giving us. | ||
| At the end of the day, whether you want to make America great again or whether you're | ||
| with her, we're all in this together. | ||
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unidentified
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So let's try to find some common ground. | |
| My guest this week is an author, a filmmaker, a former policy advisor to Ronald Reagan, | ||
| and a guy who really, really doesn't like Hillary Clinton. | ||
| Dinesh D'Souza, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Good to be on. | ||
| How was that for an intro for you? | ||
| Would you want the doesn't really like Hillary first? | ||
| Should I have done that first? | ||
| Well, I think had we done this a year ago, you'd have to have Obama, but we now can cross out Obama, put in Hillary. | ||
| You're pretty much on target right there. | ||
| I'm on target. | ||
| All right, well, I'm looking forward to talking to you because I think we're going to agree on some stuff, disagree on some stuff, and that's what it's all about. | ||
| And a couple weeks ago, you debated my former boss at the Young Turks, Cenk Uygur, and we're going to talk about that more in a little bonus segment we'll do after, but I thought at the beginning of your debate with him, You laid out a really nice case about your life and what it was like to come to America as a young immigrant and what America is all about. | ||
| So I thought maybe you could just sort of recap that, just to start about your story. | ||
| I think I said that, you know, I think my story is similar to that of millions of immigrants who have come to America. | ||
| Historically, the Irish, the Italians, the Jews. | ||
| Today, the Koreans, the West Indians. | ||
| So, most of us grew up in societies that were messed up. | ||
| India had a legacy of socialism for 40 years. | ||
| There's very little opportunity for a young man trying to make it in the world. | ||
| And also a lot of corruption, a lot of bribery built into everyday life. | ||
| You can't get a ration card or you can't get a promotion. | ||
| You gotta slip some bucks behind someone's pocket. | ||
| So it leaves you kind of feeling dirty at the end of the day. | ||
| So I thought, look, I wanna come to a country where there's a lot of, in a sense, a ladder of opportunity. | ||
| And where a guy who has enterprise, and is smart, willing to work hard, | ||
| can move up that ladder and go as far as his talents will allow. | ||
| And to me, America represents that, and that's the American dream. | ||
| And my politics to this very day is based on that. | ||
| So my politics is not based upon tax cuts or building a wall. | ||
| It's based upon, at the end of the day, which side, which party, protects that ladder of opportunity. | ||
| Yeah, so before we get into the party part of it, do you think that that concept itself has changed over the years? | ||
| So you came here, what year was that? | ||
| I came, well I came as an exchange student in 78, I went to Dartmouth for four years, ended up in the Reagan White House in the 80s, was in think tanks for about 20 years, AEI in Washington, the Hoover Institution in Stanford, and now I do books and movies. | ||
| Yeah, so when you came here in 78, would you say that that time, or even through the 80s, or even through the 90s, would you say that that period of time allowed for a better opportunity than it would now? | ||
| That seems to be the sort of meme out there, that the opportunity now is not as great, and I always wonder if that's actually true. | ||
| I don't think it is. | ||
| I think that it is true to a degree, in the sense that there is more opportunity in certain fields and less in others. | ||
| So what happens is, you know, I think it was the economist Schumpeter who said, capitalism is this gale of creative destruction. | ||
| It comes and knocks out industries and replaces them with new ones. | ||
| So 100 years ago, most Americans worked on farms. | ||
| And then 30 years later, that we only needed a small number of people with tractors to be able to farm for the whole country. | ||
| And all the other guys had to get off the farm. | ||
| So if you were a farmer, not good, because opportunity was down. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But obviously new opportunities were opening up in manufacturing, etc. | ||
| So today there are new opportunities in creative entrepreneurial fields, not just technology but even services. | ||
| But there's less opportunity in traditional fields. | ||
| And so people who go in those fields or who were trained all their lives feel stuck. | ||
| Yeah, and people still want to come here, right? | ||
| That's what I always say. | ||
| When I hear from my friends on the left, and I was telling you before we started, I'm sort of a recovering progressive. | ||
| I would say I'm a classic liberal, sort of libertarian. | ||
| I'm sort of in that view right now. | ||
| But I always find that my friends on the left are constantly basically crapping on everything America's about. | ||
| And for all our flaws, and we can discuss many of them, everyone still wants to come here, right? | ||
| Disappearing from America, right? | ||
| People still want to do better here. | ||
| Well, you know, I call this the multicultural fallacy, which is that all cultures are equal and that no culture is better or worse than any other. | ||
| Well, frankly, if that was the case, no one would ever immigrate to some other place because it's really hard to leave your family and all the stuff you know and your life and your school and your friends. | ||
| You have to uproot yourself and go into a completely new culture where you're a total stranger. | ||
| That's not easy to do. | ||
| And you wouldn't do it if you didn't think that this new society was in a market way better. | ||
| Right, nobody's moving to go, I'm going to leave everybody I know and my culture and everything just so I can go somewhere worse. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Generally that's how it is. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So you're right, we're still the magnet for the world and that tells you something. | ||
| Yeah, I'm curious because, so you're from India. | ||
| Your skin tone is brownish to me, is that fair to say? | ||
| Totally. | ||
| OK, there was nothing racist or bigoted about that. | ||
| Every time you say something obvious to people, suddenly you're bigoted and racist and it's gross and whatever. | ||
| But the Indian community, which has done incredibly well in the United States, doesn't get sort of the social justice cred, despite The color of your skin, which is an interesting little dichotomy. | ||
| Well, the Indians are sort of seen as, you know, as honorary whites. | ||
| And this is what happens to successful communities. | ||
| You know, the left, in order to protect its narrative of oppression, has to sort of redefine successful people as belonging to the master class. | ||
| Because otherwise, it would totally disrupt this idea that you have to be white and preferably male in America to succeed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what happens is these immigrants come to, and most of them today are non-white, right? | ||
| Most immigrants don't come from Europe. | ||
| They come from the West Indies, they come from Pakistan, and most of these immigrants do quite well. | ||
| So it's actually the shame of America that the minorities who have been here the longest, blacks, Native Americans, are actually being left behind with these other groups that kind of, they come to the inner city, they kind of leapfrog their way out. | ||
| Sometimes it takes two generations, but very often their kids at least get out of there. | ||
| Yeah, and I know that all of—you would lay blame for a lot of what's happened to the black community on the Democrats, and that's a lot about what this book and your movie is about, so we'll get to that in a little bit. | ||
| But first, you mentioned that you were a policy advisor for Ronald Reagan, and I always think it's interesting, because Ronald Reagan now is thought of as, you know, the gold standard for conservatism and the right and all that stuff. | ||
| And I think the right has really—I don't even know that the right knows what it is anymore because its nominee is, I think, really more of a centrist, almost Democrat, who's sort of lying his way to trick people into thinking that he's | ||
| going to believe in Republican principles, and we can unpack that if you want. | ||
| But tell me, what was it like working with Reagan and in that way? | ||
| Was it as magical as everyone would make it seem? | ||
| Well, you know, the thing about Reagan was, on the face of it, he was ridiculous. | ||
| I mean, here was a guy who sort of put in a short day at the office, was always joking around. | ||
| It was difficult to take him seriously. | ||
| And most conservatives at that time didn't. | ||
| I mean, they looked down on Reagan. | ||
| And they also tended to feel that Reagan was sort of this bumbling guy and that you needed all the—he needed to be fortified with all these conservative think tank people. | ||
| Otherwise, he would go off the reservation. | ||
| But, to me, as a student at Dartmouth, listening to Reagan, I realized that this implausible man was actually challenging some really big ideas. | ||
| He was actually offering the notion that Soviet communism would collapse of its own weight. | ||
| He was offering this idea that the whole mutually assured destruction system of nuclear policy was obsolete after 40 years. | ||
| He was challenging collectivism. | ||
| Which was the big idea of the 20th century. | ||
| And so I thought, wow, this guy is actually about ideas, even though he's not an intellectual. | ||
| And he also just measured by his own standard accomplished a lot. | ||
| He said X, Y, and Z. Eight years later, X, Y, and Z were happening. | ||
| So I think he'll be judged as someone who was quite successful in achieving his goals. | ||
| Whether or not you agree with the goals. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Would you agree with my general assessment that I laid out of the Republican Party at the moment? | ||
| It just seems to me that it doesn't know what it is at this point. | ||
| As we're taping this, you know, we're a couple days or a week away from the convention. | ||
| We'll see what happens. | ||
| I have a feeling he's going with Newt as VP, and that's a little more of a standard, you | ||
| know, someone on the right and an establishment guy, but that they've chosen, for whatever | ||
| reason—and I understand some of the reasons related to free speech and just frustration | ||
| with the establishment, etc., etc.—they've chosen someone who really in no way is conservative, | ||
| really. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, the—so, Reagan conservatism was based upon three very simple ideas. | ||
| The world is a dangerous place and we need to be a little bit tough. | ||
| You can't solve every problem with a UN cocktail conversation. | ||
| Right, so you'd say Trump would agree with that. | ||
| Trump would agree with that. | ||
| Number two, that a free market economy is the way to deliver mass prosperity. | ||
| Not to say that there's no role for government, but the market itself, technological capitalism, is the best friend of the poor and the ordinary guy. | ||
| I think Trump would also agree with that in principle. | ||
| And the third one is essentially that we want to have a patriotic and decent society. | ||
| You know, sometimes when we talk in libertarian terms of the free society, we act as if the | ||
| content of that freedom doesn't matter, as if the founders had no preference as to whether | ||
| you became a farmer or, say, a pornographer. | ||
| As long as you were free to choose, it was okay with them. | ||
| No. | ||
| They actually had some idea of what that American dream would look like. | ||
| And I think Trump would agree with that, too. | ||
| Now, this all being said, we're in a very different time than Reagan. | ||
| Even most of the ideas of Reagan preceded Reagan. | ||
| Many people are waiting for Reagan. | ||
| Where's Reagan? | ||
| We want Reaganism. | ||
| But Reaganism was developed before Reagan. | ||
| Jack Kemp, Jean Kirkpatrick, many others were talking about the ideas that later came to be known as Reaganism. | ||
| Trump is also running kind of explicitly as a nationalist in addition to being a patriot, and that is a little bit of a problematic chord on the right. | ||
| Nationalism. | ||
| And I think that's what causes some of the neoconservatives and those kind of guys to balk at Trump. | ||
| And then, of course, Trump is just such an unknown, a wild card. | ||
| And so, even for me, I'm uncomfortable because I'm thinking I'm choosing between a known figure, Hillary, and an unknown figure, Trump, and it's difficult to compare. | ||
| Yeah, and I know that you don't like the knowns about Hillary, and that's what this is all about, so we'll get to that in a little bit. | ||
| But wait, we've got to go a little further on Trump, because I'm with you. | ||
| So do you consider yourself a neoconservative? | ||
| I saw that at some—it was written on your Wikipedia. | ||
| I take that for gospel, you know? | ||
| I mean, I've been called, you know, look, the right has been traditionally divided | ||
| into the paleo-conservatives, who are kind of the traditional old-line conservatives. | ||
| Then there are the neocons, who are basically the liberals who moved right. | ||
| Predominantly, but not exclusively Jewish. | ||
| And the third is, I would say, the evangelical/Christian conservatives. | ||
| I actually, well, I don't have three feet, but I kind of have one foot in each camp. | ||
| The think tanks I was part of were neocon, for sure. | ||
| But I was also, in my youth, kind of an admirer of Bill Buckley | ||
| and that kind of paleocon conservatism. | ||
| I'm friendly to the evangelicals and have debated atheists and sort of, I was present. | ||
| You've debated some people that I've got their books right here. | ||
| Absolutely, absolutely. | ||
| But I'm not, you know, I'm not a hardline fundamentalist. | ||
| I keep very good friendships and relationships with the atheists like Michael Shermer. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| In fact, we're heading off to a Libertarian conference to do a debate on the Bible. | ||
| Oh, very nice. | ||
| Oh, you and Michael? | ||
| Yes, we're debating in a couple of days. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's what libertarianism, of course, should be about. | ||
| That the two of you should be able to sit down and say, well, I'm a believer, I'm not a believer, but what's the role of government and all that stuff. | ||
| And that's really what the heart of libertarianism is. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| I mean, I've always admired guys like Christopher Hitchens, Shermer, guys on the left. | ||
| I mean, I did civil rights debates with people like Jesse Jackson, many of the civil rights scholars. | ||
| And they fall into two camps. | ||
| One camp are the guys who enjoy a debate and recognize that it has an inherent value in | ||
| a free society. | ||
| But there is another group that if you don't agree, they treat you like the enemy. | ||
| So like Cenk, I kind of felt like this was the guy who sort of was very upset and then | ||
| regarded to use debating the enemy as opposed to debating a fellow kind of seeker of truth, | ||
| and we're just trying to test our ideas against each other to figure out who's right. | ||
| Yeah, well, I almost felt, and again, I want to do a little bonus about it, so I don't | ||
| want to go too deep into it. | ||
| But real quick, I felt like you gave this really nice intro on why you love America, and then he basically said, yeah, basically. | ||
| I don't want to exactly quote him, because I know this is what people do. | ||
| But he basically was like, yeah, yeah, but now Republicans want slavery. | ||
| And it was like, Like you're just trying to win points, not make a point, which I think are two very different things. | ||
| Right? | ||
| No, I think that that's right. | ||
| I mean, I felt, uh, I've, there are different types of debates. | ||
| That was a debate where he sort of came guns blazing and, and, and he just kept firing from the first moment. | ||
| And then, you know, And Ike was trying to adopt this sort of Ali-rope-a-dope strategy, because I was just kind of leaning back and letting him punch it. | ||
| Not really trying to hit back, because it's silly for me to, you know, to attack his past and so on. | ||
| I really just wanted to let him go, and ultimately kind of try to get to the key question of which historically has been the party of bigotry and racism, and which is the party of racism now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right, so I want to do a little more on neokinds, then we're going to get right to that. | ||
| So it seems to me that the phrase neokind, and I think this is really what you're saying in a way, doesn't really have that much meaning anymore. | ||
| So it was sort of classic liberals that felt that, as you said, that there was an inherent value to our culture, and that at some point they felt we could export this, right? | ||
| that was sort of then adopted by the right, I guess, sort of like by like a Cheney-Bush situation, | ||
| and we tried to nation-build, and it failed miserably. | ||
| Would you agree that they were basic failures? | ||
| Yes, I think that the Reagan approach was that you have a principle or an ideal, | ||
| but prudence is the way that you get from here to there. | ||
| So, for example, our ideal was to bring the Soviet Union down. | ||
| But when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan with 100,000 troops, Reagan did not send 100,000 troops to push him out. | ||
| Reagan basically told the Afghans, you fight, we'll help. | ||
| So you go on the front line, you defend freedom, it's after all your freedom, but we'll give you some stinger rockets to shoot down Soviet helicopters. | ||
| This is called using prudence as a means to get to your end. | ||
| Now, contrast this with George W. Bush. | ||
| You know, this whole nonsense about the fact that in order to change a country, you have to invade the place. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Colin Powell's idiotic dictum that if you've invaded a country, you somehow own it. | ||
| And you now have a responsibility to rebuild the whole place. | ||
| Nonsense. | ||
| You know, politics is driven by the lesser evil. | ||
| If you get a bad guy out in power, your only responsibility is to put a less bad guy in his place, ideally a less bad guy who's friendly to you, so you can actually do some business and trade with him. | ||
| So I think American foreign policy needs to return to its modest goals of trade with us and don't bomb us. | ||
| And that's pretty much it. | ||
| Is that the irony about Iraq that kind of gets lost in everything? | ||
| Is that Saddam was a bad person. | ||
| We know this. | ||
| We know he gassed the Kurds and had torture chambers and did all these horrific things. | ||
| Although Trump said a few days ago that he, uh, what was it last week? | ||
| You know, he's, uh, he knew how to deal with terrorists, but did a lot of bad. | ||
| He funded a lot of terrorism too and all kinds of other stuff. | ||
| But the irony of Iraq is that we ended up getting rid of a guy that had nothing to do with 9-11. | ||
| Then we finally get the country to a place Where they were having democratic elections and then Obama withdrew troops, although Bush was the one that signed that order, and then the country went to shit. | ||
| And it's like we shouldn't—I would argue we shouldn't be there forever, but at the same time, it was incumbent upon us not to just pick up and leave one day, where now it's almost as bad right this very moment as it's been at any time in the last 10 years. | ||
| It just makes America seem like a terrible ally to rely on. | ||
| And this is, I think, why Karzai turned against us in Afghanistan. | ||
| Yes, I agree. | ||
| We were trying to do something kind of brave in Iraq, which is to build a Muslim democracy. | ||
| That's kind of a good thing to pull off if you can, because there's so little example of that in the Middle East. | ||
| There are Muslim democracies elsewhere. | ||
| Indonesia, there's democracy in India which has a lot of Muslims, but there's really no democracy in the Middle East that's a Muslim democracy. | ||
| We're trying to make one. | ||
| And it was worth a try, and I could possibly have worked, but we made it impossible for it to work because we lost faith in it, and we basically decided to pack up and go home. | ||
| Yeah, so it's really part of—it's a bigger issue about our elections and everything, because it's like it was getting better, but Obama had committed to leaving as part of Yeah, and I think that in all these things, you know, let's just look back at Bush. | ||
| If Bush had said, look, frankly, we don't really know who did 9-11 exactly. | ||
| in a way, I know that Obama didn't start it, but by leaving the way we did, here we are. | ||
| Yeah, and I think that in all these things, let's just look back at Bush. | ||
| If Bush had said, "Look, frankly, "we don't really know who did 9/11 exactly. | ||
| "We also know that it isn't just Afghanistan, "because clearly these characters came out of Egypt | ||
| "and of Pakistan, and some of them came from Saudi Arabia." | ||
| Don't forget Saudi Arabia, what, 17 to 21? | ||
| Right, there's from all over the place, right? | ||
| Meanwhile, he's bowing to the king. | ||
| So we're gonna adopt kind of Wild West justice here, which is the sheriff who goes in the bar, | ||
| the bad guys are in there, but he doesn't really know who they are. | ||
| So he catches a couple of bad characters, bangs their heads together, and walks out of the bar. | ||
| And the message to everyone in the bar is, don't mess with us, because we are rough guys and we shoot first. | ||
| Now, if Bush had said that to the American people, most people would go for it. | ||
| We don't care if Saddam Hussein did 9-11. | ||
| Just go over there and grab some bad guys and bang their head in the ground. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But Bush didn't do that. | ||
| He came up with this big elaborate, you know, weapons of mass destruction. | ||
| So this is sort of like the cops who say, you know, there's drugs in your house. | ||
| I'm going to break down your door. | ||
| Well, if you want to break down my door, you better find some drugs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you don't find drugs, it's going to look pretty bad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's what happened with us in Iraq. | ||
| The moment that we couldn't find those WMDs, the whole operation, I think, lost credibility. | ||
| Yeah, so all that said, right now the Middle East, it's hard to tell if it's in the worst meltdown it's ever been, or now it sounds like Egypt's a little more stable and they're one of our allies, and Jordan seems a little more stable, but Syria certainly. | ||
| I mean, the whole place. | ||
| What would you, as someone that sort of has the philosophical underpinnings of a neocon, but I hear what you're saying, you're not for invading places to give them democracy, what can you then do that would be more in the Reagan line of thinking to fix some of this stuff? | ||
| Like Syria, for example. | ||
| Well, I think that you want to—the simple principle is help your friends and curtail your adversaries. | ||
| The reason to me the Iran deal is problematic is at the end of the day, is Iran going to be weaker or stronger? | ||
| Probably stronger. | ||
| So not a good idea. | ||
| Syria is complicated because you've got, it's kind of a replica of the old Iraq. | ||
| You've kind of got a vicious dictator in there, but he is a secular dictator. | ||
| And you've got some bad guys in the opposition. | ||
| Typically the problem has been that if the bad, if the opposition wins, Which of that group is going to take over? | ||
| Is it going to be the little al-Qaeda-ISIS group? | ||
| What happened in Afghanistan, we kicked the Soviets out. | ||
| Very good result. | ||
| But then the Taliban, the most ruthless and fanatical of the opponents, they come in and take power. | ||
| So we helped the Afghans kick the Soviets out, but we did no management after that. | ||
| We just let a group come in that was as hostile to us as the Soviets would have been. | ||
| So basically we take a failing store, we like put some paint on it for a little bit, but then we kind of just cut and run when trouble starts. | ||
| That seems to be a bit of a theme here. | ||
| It's a theme. | ||
| Now the world's a dangerous place. | ||
| We can't fix it all. | ||
| I don't think we should try to. | ||
| I'll draw that line, because I think that's an interesting place that, look, I have a lot of friends on the left that'll say, you know, we should do absolutely nothing in Syria. | ||
| I would argue that we shouldn't be nation-building, but if there were, you know, humanitarian corridors or something like that, then that would be fine. | ||
| But I think my friends on the left often think they're taking the moral position by saying we shouldn't do anything. | ||
| Meanwhile, how many, what, 300,000 people are dead in the last five years or something to that effect? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that never strikes me as the moral position. | ||
| It strikes me as sort of, you know, the ostrich with the head in the sand position. | ||
| Yeah, this notion that sort of moral positions are held, abstracted from the conditions in the world, I think is foolish. | ||
| I mean, we were right to ally with Stalin against Hitler. | ||
| Now, Stalin was a really bad guy, but Hitler was worse and posed a bigger threat at the time. | ||
| Today, a lot of people are like, I'll never vote for Trump. | ||
| I'm never Trump and all this stuff. | ||
| And they say, I'm standing on principle. | ||
| But my reasoning is, look, American politics is played in teams. | ||
| Here are the two teams. | ||
| If you don't want Hillary and the Democrats, well, frankly, you got Trump and the Republicans. | ||
| There's no alternative to those choices. | ||
| Historically, the abolitionists, we admire them. | ||
| They were against slavery. | ||
| But the abolitionists were cranks. | ||
| You know, most of them, their political activity involved things like, let's get together and burn the Constitution. | ||
| That was what they did. | ||
| It's only when the abolitionists were integrated in the Republican Party, and the Republican Party won the 1860 election, the Republican Party fought the Civil War, that's how slavery ended. | ||
| The abolitionists couldn't have ended it on their own. | ||
| That's interesting because it sounds to me like you're selling a much broader... | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| But an atheist can be a conservative. | ||
| than people think of it as, right? | ||
| I mean, you've just said you don't mind debating an atheist, and you can both | ||
| accept that you have certain... I don't know that Michael... I don't think | ||
| Michael's a Republican, but he's definitely not a Republican. | ||
| Oh, he's a libertarian. | ||
| An atheist can be a conservative. | ||
| I wouldn't deny that for a minute. | ||
| Yeah, so it's sort of branding for you guys, and I think the Democrats have their own | ||
| branding problem, but would you say it's a branding issue for the Republicans in general? | ||
| Well, I would say that the Republican Party has treated its own brand very badly. | ||
| One of the things that Reagan did do is he built that Republican brand. | ||
| And it was a very good brand. | ||
| In fact, it was such a good brand that the liberals who had built the liberal brand, | ||
| by the time Reagan finished, they wouldn't call themselves liberals. | ||
| Even Hillary was asked, "Are you a liberal?" | ||
| She goes, "No, no, I'm not a liberal." | ||
| And the liberals have kind of gone back to the progressive label from the early part | ||
| of the century. | ||
| So, Reagan actually— I prefer regressive. | ||
|
unidentified
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Will you join me on that? | |
| The audience knows that's my preference. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, the point being that I think the Republicans with Iraq, with all the kind of Bush heavy spending and deficits, he burned the Republican brand pretty badly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that was not good. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Now let's get to the Democratic brand, because that's really what this book and the movie are about. | ||
| It's called Hillary's America. | ||
| And by the way, the picture that you have of her, she looks very like Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars. | ||
| Was that intentional? | ||
| She always wears those outfits that make her look like Emperor Palpatine. | ||
| My take on her was that she looks very Evita-ish. | ||
| There's a picture in the book, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, there's a picture of Evita. | ||
| And, you know, Evita, the Perón Foundation, the Clinton Foundation, this sort of notion of reigning imperial over a country, third-world-izing it a little bit. | ||
| You know, here's a good kickoff point for this whole thing, because Reagan once said, I didn't leave the Democratic Party, it left me. | ||
| And the hidden implication of that is, or not so hidden, the Democrats have been good guys. | ||
| It's only recently, let's say with the 60s or McGovern, that they went off the tracks. | ||
| So I'm actually, with this book and this movie, Hillary's American, I'm sort of breaking with Reagan. | ||
| I'm saying, you know what? | ||
| No. | ||
| There actually is a very sordid history in the Democratic Party that goes back 150 years. | ||
| These were never really the good guys. | ||
| They sounded like the good guys, and they always understood the importance of justifying very bad things by appealing to something noble. | ||
| Even during slavery, they tried to do that. | ||
| But if you strip away that kind of veneer, you realize that there's a lot of bad stuff going on. | ||
| And so, that is laid out rather uncompromisingly in the book and the movie. | ||
| Yeah, so I want to get into some of that. | ||
| You know, it's funny because a lot of people say to me, they'll say, I say I'm a liberal and they say, well, we see you shifting to libertarianism. | ||
| And I've realized over the last year or so that most of my liberal positions, whether on gay marriage or marijuana or whatever else, I can rationalize through a libertarian lens. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's the same rationalization, which is why classic liberal and libertarian are kind of the same. | ||
| But I did see, which is what you just quoted Reagan on, I've seen the progressives leave me. | ||
| My views are the same. | ||
| They're the ones that went that far with free speech and all this stuff, and it's like, I'm trying to pull you guys back, but not much more I can do. | ||
| Yeah, the progressives, I think, you know, when we look back at the 60s and the free speech movement and the Berkeley barb and all that kind of stuff, it turns out that that free speech slogan was somewhat tactical. | ||
| Because it's one thing to say, I believe in free speech, and so you better give me my free speech. | ||
| And frankly, if I were, if our places were I would give you your free speech, as opposed to you give | ||
| me my free speech because I'm on the outside. | ||
| But if I were on the inside, I'd be doing exactly what you're doing and block you from having a say. | ||
| And so that's where there's a parting of the ways and the libertarians come onto one camp, the true liberals, the | ||
| classical liberals. | ||
| And you may say the progressives and the leftists fall into a different camp. | ||
| So basically when you're talking about the inside and the outside, you're saying because they're using the | ||
| suppression Olympics thing, right? | ||
| So that if you are black or Muslim or whatever, wherever they're putting you in all of these things—and as you said before, as Indian, you're sort of off the chart, because your community has done really well in America. | ||
| But I think you would also argue that there are truly systemic reasons, funneled through the Democrats, that have left black America behind. | ||
| Yeah, we're having this big debate about Dallas, and you know, interestingly, the debate is sort of between the people who say it's the gun, or it's the cops, and on the other side, the people who say, let's look at the ideology of the shooter, let's look at his motives, he's a radical Muslim, and so on. | ||
| Now, I step back from this whole debate and I go, look, why is this stuff occurring all over the place and all the time? | ||
| And I think the reason is, if you apply the liberal principle, what is the root cause of it? | ||
| Well, the root cause of it is that we've actually allowed places to develop in America that are very uninhabitable. | ||
| You can almost say that it would cause PTSD to live in these places. | ||
| I mean, just imagine you walk around Oakland or inner city Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, even Dallas. | ||
| These places are horrible. | ||
| I mean, I grew up alongside very poor, I was middle class, but poor people in India. | ||
| But those people are not, they're poor, but if you gave them opportunity, they'd be fine. | ||
| That's because their families are intact and they know the value of hard work. | ||
| There just aren't jobs and opportunity for them, but they're fully prepared to take advantage of it. | ||
| On the other hand, we have created places in America where there's not only no jobs, but there's no education, there's no family structure to incubate the kind of values that enable you to be a successful citizen. | ||
| It's very unsafe and dangerous. | ||
| So, how do you grow up normal in places like that? | ||
| You don't. | ||
| So, this is what I call the urban plantation, and this is going to be one of the controversial ideas in the book, because in the past, some people would make facile analogies between slavery and what's going on now. | ||
| I basically make the same analogy, but not in a facile way. | ||
| I actually say that if you look at the slave plantation, ramshackled home. | ||
| And no family structure, because people are being bought and sold, and it's dangerous, and there's incredible punishments for falling out of line. | ||
| But there is health care, because if the kid gets sick, they call the doctor. | ||
| And there is a lifelong social security, because the slaves are provided for for life. | ||
| It's not all that different from there to the urban plantations, with the only difference that the people in the urban plantations keep voting for it. | ||
| Okay, so definitely I can see why some people would say this is an inflammatory thing to say, because basically you're pretty much saying that the Democratic Party has sort of given black America just enough to control it, sort of, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And at the same time, that just enough is exactly what is oppressing it, and then at the same time, they vote 90% for Democrats. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So I guess using the word plantation is intentionally inflammatory on your part, but I see what you're doing there. | ||
| Right, and the reason the analogy works is that if you think about slavery, now you own the slave, you don't actually have to feed him at all. | ||
| The slave is sort of like your car. | ||
| But then you realize, wait a minute, if my car is going to work, I need to look after my car. | ||
| I need to actually at least minimally make my car function. | ||
| And so what happened with the slaves is that you had to give the slaves a minimum subsistence living. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Now look, I'm not stupid enough to say that we have foundation owners running around in quite the same way, but here's what I'm saying. | ||
| That we have spent, over in our 50 years, trillions of dollars on people who, if their problem was just poverty, we could easily have gotten them out of poverty. | ||
| Just take this amount of money and divide it by the number of people, and a very big number appears, right? | ||
| So how is it that after A half century of trying, you still have these places be pretty much the same as they were 50 years ago. | ||
| That's kind of a very telling fact. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And I guess the real inherent problem is that if you give people a certain something, even if your intentions are good—so let's pretend everything you said—or not pretend, let's go with saying everything you said is totally right, but let's say the Democrat or certain Democrats' intentions are good, not that they're trying to do this. | ||
| That still you create a situation where if you're giving someone just enough to survive, you're basically creating a situation where for them to even go out and get better work or whatever it is, they're not incentivized to do it because they'd have to work that much harder to just have a tiny bit more than you're giving them. | ||
| So it really becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And I don't deny that there are rank-and-file Democrats whose intentions are good, and there are even people who voted for these programs whose intentions are good. | ||
| But it should also be said that, you know, there is FDR saying to fellow politicians, look, if I devise my social security program this way, no politician can ever undo it. | ||
| In other words, if I make the current generation of workers pay for the current... You know, I could have set this program up a different way. | ||
| You have a social security account that the federal government maintains, but it's your money, and your contributions go into that account, and they are an interest, and when you retire, you draw on your account. | ||
| It could have been drafted up that way. | ||
| But they decided, let's not do that, because then if later people decide they don't want it, then they'll just stop the program, and there we go. | ||
| So they designed it so it was hard to stop. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Johnson, too. | ||
| Very cynical. | ||
| Remember, Johnson came out of the sort of Dixiecrat wing of the Southern Democratic Party. | ||
| Very rough guy. | ||
| And the idea that he sort of suddenly just became a convert to the cause of civil rights is ridiculous. | ||
| I mean, that's just not a view of human nature that works. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Do you think there's a danger when we look back on some of the history, and when I was reading the book, you know, when you talk about any of these people from 150 years ago to 50 years ago? | ||
| That you lose a little bit of perspective on what it was like to live at that time. | ||
| I mean this in general. | ||
| I went to Thomas Jefferson's home in Monticello maybe a year or so ago, and I thought they did a really great job talking about how he had slaves but also was fighting to free slaves. | ||
| But I think that we have a way about us now where we automatically, we look at somebody | ||
| and we completely forget the context in which they lived and what things were like at that | ||
| time and we want to throw the baby out of the bath, like schools that are taking down | ||
| names of people that were important cultural figures a year ago or something like that, | ||
| that we forget that history shapes us. | ||
| I think this is a very important point, both for foreign policy and for history, because | ||
| when we're dealing with other countries is similar in that there's a culture there and | ||
| there's a whole ecosystem there. | ||
| And if you have no idea what it is, you're not going to be able to manage it or deal | ||
| with it in a very sensible way. | ||
| The founders, you know, the founders get together in Philadelphia. | ||
| Now they represent 13 states. | ||
| Slavery is legal in every one of those 13 states, not just in the southern ones, in all of them. | ||
| Now they're deciding whether to make a union. | ||
| Now, the people say, well, the founders should have outlawed slavery. | ||
| "Well, the founders, how it was slavery, all the 13 guys would have gotten up and gone home." | ||
| Or at the very least, a whole bunch of them would have. | ||
| You could not have gotten all those guys to stay in a union that did that. | ||
| So the point being that we're now insisting that the founders follow an option | ||
| that was not in practice available to any of them. | ||
| They were choosing, "Okay, either we have slavery, allow it for now and build an anti-slavery country | ||
| that will eventually abolish slavery, or we don't have a country. | ||
| We don't have to choose. Those are our actual options. | ||
| We don't have some third option of having an anti-slavery country | ||
| and getting everyone to join right now." | ||
| -Right, sort of taking an imaginary moral position as if it could be done tomorrow like that. | ||
| And it also shows the failings of all of us as humans, which I think everyone forgets, | ||
| because when I was at Monticello, when I took the tour, I thought they did a really nice | ||
| job of saying, you know, he was writing all of this stuff and made his life about freeing | ||
| slaves and giving the underpinnings of some of this. | ||
| And at the same time, we know that he was having sex with a couple of his slaves, I | ||
| think at least, and had a child with one of them. | ||
| I would think by standard definitions of 2016, he would probably be considered a rapist. | ||
| I mean if he, you know, because he owned this, he owned this woman and was having sex with | ||
| We don't know if it was voluntary. | ||
| So I think that sort of moralizing different errors is just really dangerous. | ||
| I think it is for us almost unimaginable to put us into those plantations and imagine what life was like. | ||
| For example, Sally Hemings, the woman with Jefferson. | ||
| Is it possible that normal human affections could have operated in that context? | ||
| Now, like traditional feminist theory would say, never. | ||
| You know, just because this man has such supreme power over her, that the idea that she could in any sense have loved him, but then these same feminists who say all this and write all these complex books about it, when it comes to Bill Clinton, and then suddenly they go, well, you know, so that's, this is where there's a certain kind of, feminism loses moral credibility. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because suddenly it's okay when Bill Clinton did it because we kind of need the Clintons to carry out our agenda. | ||
| And essentially what Bill is basically saying is, I can do whatever I want as long as I take the correct positions on women's rights. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So that's an interesting segue to something else that you talk about in the book. | ||
| Basically, you argue that Hillary and Bill, this was sort of a marriage made in Mordor or something. | ||
| Marriage made in hell. | ||
| I was trying to find something a little more creative because basically she knew that he sort of had these sexual proclivities and all this stuff and that she could sort of use him in a way to ultimately get what she wants which is the title of your book. | ||
| They're both very ambitious and I think the difference is that Bill has the natural talent politically. He's likable, he's gregarious, he can talk you | ||
| out of anything. And he has that kind of sincere look that he gives even when he's pathologically | ||
| lying. Now Hillary is also a pathological liar, but she can't pull it off. And so I | ||
| think Hillary realized early on that if I'm going to make my way politically, I actually need this guy. | ||
| And I need him to be attached to me. | ||
| And I actually need to figure out a way that he can never actually get away from me. Because he's | ||
| my pitchman. He's going to sell my product. And she realized that this guy is basically a sex addict. | ||
| He knows it, I know it. And the only question is, how can that now become the basis for a very | ||
| peculiar type of marriage? And I think the reason it did is basically Hillary says to Bill, "Okay, | ||
| Bill, listen. I'm I will become the manager of your sex addiction. | ||
| I'll make sure it doesn't kill you politically. | ||
| Because the truth is, Bill's in Arkansas. | ||
| I mean, even, I mean, mores have liberalized and so on, but this kind of pathological behavior doesn't fly in Arkansas. | ||
| So Hillary had to manage Bill from day one. | ||
| And if you read the Clinton biographies, it's obvious that Bill's campaign managers would give full lists to Hillary of all the women and so on. | ||
| So Hillary knew about this from Arkansas days. | ||
| And yet, every time it happened, she had to feign shock and go through this ritual of, I'm not speaking to Bill. | ||
| Here's Chelsea and I walking on one side of the beach and Bill is all by himself. | ||
| He's in the doghouse. | ||
| And the media plays along with this big little charade and the reconciliation. | ||
| You know, it's all comical and it's all pathetic. | ||
| I can't believe we're considering the possibility of going through it again. | ||
| Right, so basically you're saying she, while she was saying this is a vast right-wing conspiracy, was basically engineering the conspiracy. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| It just wasn't a right-wing conspiracy. | ||
| It wasn't a right-wing conspiracy at all. | ||
| In fact, I mean, what, Juanita Broderick, Kathleen Williams, these aren't right-wing, Paula Jones, I mean, so no, these are people who have just come out one after the other. | ||
| So I think a lot of people think Bill's the bad guy and Hillary is like a plantation wife, you know. | ||
| has been suffering while the master has been making good with all the slaves when the mulatto | ||
| is running on the foundation. | ||
| But I think in this case it's not that. | ||
| Hillary is not the enduring suffering wife. | ||
| I think with Hillary and Bill it's sort of wink-wink. | ||
| They both know what's going on and they've played a kind of a diabolical game with this. | ||
| So how do we as a nation extricate ourselves from this political mess? | ||
| Let's say everything you've laid out about the history of the Democrats, which now leads us to Hillary is right. | ||
| Let's say, I can tell you're not fully sold on Trump. | ||
| Is that fair to say? | ||
| Yeah, it's fair to say. | ||
| You don't strike me as fully sold. | ||
| So, I think most people are not happy about either one of these. | ||
| I mean, I even see on Twitter the people that all day long are telling me how wonderful Trump is. | ||
| There's definitely an element of, yeah, we don't know what his policies are. | ||
| We just like that he's wrangling the system. | ||
| And I understand that. | ||
| And I think all the Bernie people that are now very disappointed that he's supporting Hillary, I understand that. | ||
| How do we extricate ourselves from this crazy system? | ||
| I had Gary Johnson on here, who's running as a Libertarian, and I got to sit with him just like this and look him in the eye, and I thought, this is a good man. | ||
| This is a good, decent man, and I don't agree with him on everything, but at the very least, we need a third party, right? | ||
| At the very, very least? | ||
| Well, we haven't been able to create a three-party system. | ||
| The Europeans have political structures that allow for multiple parties. | ||
| Right now, a third party would either harm one side or the other side. | ||
| So right now, if you had a third party, a libertarian party, it would hurt Trump. | ||
| Do you think that's for sure? | ||
| Because I don't know which way he'd pull from at this point. | ||
| I think people are so frustrated with both of them that I think it would be—I know traditionally that's what people would think. | ||
| He's going to pull more from the Republican— I think what's more likely to happen is that if the Republicans take a terrible beating in November and, let's say, lose 40 states, which is—you know, which would be a rout, then you're more likely to see the remaking of the Republican Party. | ||
| The Republican Party would then undergo this kind of a severe internal convulsion. | ||
| Probably a lot of its leaders would be thrown out. | ||
| And the Republican Party would have to say, "Are we a libertarian party? | ||
| Are we a social conservative party? | ||
| What are the elements that define us?" | ||
| It's kind of the crisis that the Whig Party went through in the middle of the 19th century. | ||
| And essentially, the Whig Party collapsed, and you got the Republican Party, but not | ||
| a three-party system. | ||
| The Republican Party replaced the Whig Party and became the main opposition party to the | ||
| Democrats. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, with all that being said, I mean, how do we do it? | ||
| How do you actually get another party—I get what you're saying, that maybe we just need to replace one of these parties. | ||
| But I would argue we need—it seems to me that our political debate really is about this wide, and we're constantly debating it like this. | ||
| There's a reason that Wall Street gives like 51 percent to the Republicans and 49 percent to the Democrats, and that switches half the time, that we need something like this. | ||
| And it's not about just replacing these parties. | ||
| It's about getting a whole new set of ideas in there. | ||
| Yeah, it totally is. | ||
| You know, one thing I miss is when I was, well, when I was in my teens and early 20s, I looked up to people like Irving Kristol and Judge Bork and Jean Kirkpatrick, Solzhenitsyn, Hayek, Milton Friedman. | ||
| So these luminaries now, that helped to define the debate then, are no longer on the horizon. | ||
| But what's troubling is I don't see replacements for them. | ||
| It was also the case when I was at AEI, the American Enterprise Institute, we would have | ||
| conferences with the Brookings Institution, which was our counterpart on the left. | ||
| And there was a lot of common ground. | ||
| In other words, the Brookings guys would say, "You should spend more money on schools." | ||
| And the conservatives would say, "All right, we'd consider doing that if you'd consider | ||
| imposing more rigorous academic standards." | ||
| So you could have something called additive compromise, which is not that we take you and me and go in the middle, but we do what you want to do and what I want to do, and we compromise by achieving both. | ||
| And so that kind of common ground has become extremely rare. | ||
| By and large, if Obama does something, the Republicans' job is to block him. | ||
| And I think part of the reason for that is the belief that what Obama wants is actually fundamentally not what we want America to go. | ||
| It's not the case of two people who agree on a goal and are only disagreeing about means. | ||
| It's like one guy wants to go to Chicago and the other guy wants to go to Maine. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right, so you don't want to end up in... So why would you possibly board his bus? | |
| Right. | ||
| So I guess in that regard, you would probably agree with Marco Rubio in a certain way, that his one mantra kept being about that Obama fundamentally wants to alter this country, and that's what your previous movie was about. | ||
| I'm pretty sure he got it from me. | ||
| I mean, that was my mantra. | ||
| Did he take it from you? | ||
| I mean, he kept repeating it like a robot, even though they kept trying to get him to say something else, and he seemed unable to get off that switch. | ||
| But people didn't really hear that message. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| And I think it was the wrong time and place. | ||
| I mean, look, Obama's basically run through his course. | ||
| This is an argument that's not intuitive, because we always assume that our presidents—we elect them to do the best for the country. | ||
| We assume that they mean well. | ||
| And I think Obama means well in the sense that, unlike Hillary, Obama's not—he's not president to make money. | ||
| He's not trying to enrich himself. | ||
| He has ideological goals. | ||
| Now, I think the ideological goals are bad, but they're still held sincerely. | ||
| And it takes some argumentation. | ||
| I mean, I had to write, I wrote two books on Obama, I made a movie about him, just to sell that argument, even to conservatives who are a little bit shaken by it. | ||
| The idea he's anti-colonialist and motivated by the dreams of his father. | ||
| So, Rubio was sort of like touching on all that, but without even attempting to clarify or elaborate. | ||
| Right, so that's really interesting. | ||
| So you didn't like the substance of what Obama was trying to do, but you at least grant him the respect of, you felt he's doing what he thinks is right. | ||
| So basically, sort of getting American influence out of a lot of things, which I think there's merit to a lot of that, because we've messed up a lot of things, although often the vacuum ends up being a lot worse, so there's unintended consequences. | ||
| I think with Obama, you see, and I mean, The portrait I made of him in 2012 was that here's a guy who doesn't like this notion that he is the defender and protector of American interests. | ||
| It's the adjective American that gets him. | ||
| He sees himself in a more Olympian way. | ||
| He's sort of above the fray. | ||
| He's sort of president of the world. | ||
| And he can see that this America is pushing for some things, but it's kind of his job | ||
| at times to sort of resist it. | ||
| He's a global sort of balancer. | ||
| Now, that's not what a democracy elects its leader to do. | ||
| And so that's why I think there is a sense, even among his own supporters, there's a slight | ||
| discomfort with the way he talks. | ||
| He speaks a language that appears different from traditional Americana. | ||
| And by traditional Americana, I mean the language that John Kerry would be comfortable with, | ||
| Marcus, Jimmy Carter, certainly Truman, FDR. | ||
| Um, oh. | ||
| Obama doesn't speak that language. | ||
| Do you think there's more of a desire these days, I think, in the world, there seems to be a desire that we want to become this globalized civilization? | ||
| Now that's obviously, that's what you're saying he sort of wants, right? | ||
| That he doesn't want us sort of above anybody, but if we're all sort of equal playing field, Then things are a little bit different. | ||
| I assume you're not into the idea of globalism in that regard, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I mean, I love the fact Reagan— What's the fear, I guess, is my question. | |
| If his ambitions had become right and the United States had sort of pulled back from certain things and not done as much internationally, what ultimately do you think the fear is for you? | ||
| Well, the fear for me is that I think Obama thinks that the United States, for example, let's take something like energy. | ||
| We have 5% of the world's population, but we actually use 20 to 25% of the world's energy resources. | ||
| We use four to five times our share. | ||
| Now, the truth of it is, we mine a lot of that energy. | ||
| We buy the rest of it. | ||
| We're not stealing anybody's energy. | ||
| So, to me, there's nothing wrong with the fact that we use more, or the fact that we have a higher standard of living. | ||
| We produce more. | ||
| America's a richer country. | ||
| We have a very successful economy. | ||
| So, to assume that American affluence is the product of some global oppression is to me nonsense. | ||
| We didn't take it from anybody. | ||
| We didn't rob anybody. | ||
| Even in places like Iraq where we supposedly invade, we spend more money over there than we get out of it. | ||
| Now, if we had been real imperialists, we'd go to the Iraqis and go, listen, we're gonna be billing you weekly for all our expenses over here and taking it out of your oil revenues. | ||
| You're gonna be paying for this, not us. | ||
| Now, ironically, isn't that Trump's position? | ||
| That's kind of Trump's position. | ||
| Hasn't his position been basically, we should be getting their oil, we should be taking the oil from them? | ||
| So that's really interesting, because he, on one hand, is running as, I'm not a neocon in any way, I was against this war, and all this stuff, and at the same time, you're arguing that what he's really saying is that we should be taking, as long as we're there, we should be taking more. | ||
| As long as we're there. | ||
| You must almost think that Trump wants to be the CEO of Corporation USA. | ||
| Now, if you're a head of Corporation USA, you don't give other corporations breaks, right? | ||
| You might stay out of this trade war, do this or that, but if you get in it, you're in it for you, and you fight for your team. | ||
| And so Trump is using that language of nationalism. | ||
| Now, different than Reagan. | ||
| Reagan was actually a cosmopolitan, different than a globalist. | ||
| A cosmopolitan is a guy who goes, I like America. | ||
| But I also like the world. | ||
| Reagan was very comfortable with European leaders. | ||
| He liked French food. | ||
| He got along with Mitterrand. | ||
| He got along with Margaret Thatcher. | ||
| He loved Lech Walesa from Poland. | ||
| So while Trump would, to me, seem less comfortable in those milieus, Reagan wasn't. | ||
| And I identify with that Reaganite cosmopolitanism. | ||
| If it were me, the world would be a place of competing societies, all prospering. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| trading with each other, finding no reason to fight and lots of reasons to mutually benefit | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| from trade. | ||
| I think this would create a global engine of prosperity. | ||
| And I would even have liberal immigration. | ||
| I mean, I would have rules, so you can't just walk in the door. | ||
| But we let in a lot of legal immigrants a year. | ||
| I would just be a little more choosy about who we let in, so we get in, bring in immigrants | ||
| who help America. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which, that's pretty much what Trump is saying. | ||
| He's saying it in a more bombastic way, but that's basically—he's saying people can come in, but they have to do it legally. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Whether we trust—I mean, my issue is that I just don't know that I have any reason to trust our authorities that are doing this. | ||
| Not trust their intentions, but trust their qualifications and their training to know that we can let in the right people. | ||
| Well, terrorism has changed the game a little bit because now we have this, we have to have this elaborate vetting process. | ||
| In the past, it was simply a matter of, do we want more doctors? | ||
| Do we want more maids? | ||
| Do we need more agricultural workers? | ||
| It was kind of a simple, you know, what does the country need financially? | ||
| But now it's also become, you know, how do you create a net so that the few bad guys that are going to try to sneak past it get blocked? | ||
| And that's not easy to do. | ||
| Yeah, so what, in terms of the immigration thing, I mean, what would you say, because to me it's a two-pronged thing. | ||
| There's a cultural problem and there's a religious problem. | ||
| I see those things, and those things I think are intertwined at many levels. | ||
| But where, do you think we should be letting, I mean, I don't know how many people we're letting in right now. | ||
| But we let in about a million legally, but we let in an unknown number illegally. | ||
| The Islamic problem that Trump has talked about is, you know, that the problem with the Islamic population is out of a billion Muslims. | ||
| Um, you have a fairly large number that are sympathetic to radical Islam. | ||
| This is based on the Pew Studies and the World Values Survey. | ||
| Also known as gross and racist, depending on who you're talking to. | ||
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Okay. | |
| But we're not saying that these are all terrorists. | ||
| But we're saying that these are people who, if you said Hamas, they smile. | ||
| You know, Hezbollah, yeah. | ||
| You know, they like it. | ||
| And this population could be 25 to 30 percent of the billion people. | ||
| So that's 250 million people. | ||
| Now, you know, this is not the same as any other group. | ||
| I mean, you just can't find that many Buddhists or Hindus or anyone else that shows. | ||
| So there's something toxic about what's going on in the Islamic world today. | ||
| Again, I don't think it's due to Muhammad or the Koran. | ||
| It's due to something that's happened politically in the last 50 years. | ||
| But here it is, and it's a reality. | ||
| And so the truth of it is you're much more likely to have problems, from a terrorist point of view, with the Muslim population than you are with anyone else. | ||
| Just a matter of the odds. | ||
| And the question is, how do we deal with that? | ||
| So I would argue that if you were to look at three books, anyone that took any, you know, the big three monotheistic books, that anyone that took any of these books, literally, there is a tremendous amount of violence in all of them. | ||
| But you have to look at the ideology because only one of those big three religions right now is acting out on it. | ||
| So I don't mind what the books say because most people think they're metaphors or allegories or whatever. | ||
| But if one group is looking, you know, one subset of one group, just to be fair, is acting on stuff literally, then that's the inherent problem. | ||
| So I don't mind the books as much as the people that act on them. | ||
| Well, as I mentioned, so Sherman and I are going to debate the Bible, right? | ||
| So right away, he's going to come out and start reading passages in the Old Testament, stone your kids, you know, and this sort of thing, and all this sort of stuff, adultery is punishable by death, and so on. | ||
| Okay, number one. | ||
| I don't think we have good evidence that even the ancient Hebrews stoned their kids. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Second, there was a debate in early Christianity between the apostles on one side, many of them, | ||
| and Paul on the other, about whether the Christians should follow | ||
| any of that stuff. | ||
| And Paul won that debate, and the Christians decided, | ||
| no, we don't have to follow Jewish dietary laws. | ||
| We don't have to follow their codes. | ||
| Now, we follow the Ten Commandments, but we don't have to follow all those other rules. | ||
| And so, this is not some 19th or 20th century innovation. | ||
| From the very beginning, Christianity goes, we're not doing that, right? | ||
| So there it is in the book, and it is incorporated into the Bible. | ||
| But on the other hand, it's not read as a code. | ||
| It's read as an indication of how the people And I assume a certain amount of sophistication has to be applied to the Quran as well. | ||
| There are the passages from Mecca, the passages from Medina. | ||
| Muhammad said one thing when he was winning, another thing when he's losing. | ||
| And so, different Muslims read those passages differently, and also in the world. | ||
| I mean, by and large, I would not feel unsafe if I walked on the Muslim streets of Indonesia. | ||
| The Indonesian Muslims are, by and large, not blowing people up. | ||
| I would feel a lot less safe if I were, today, walking, let's say, for example, in Iran. | ||
| There are Muslims in both countries, but their history is different. | ||
| Right, and that's where everyone gets so confused on. | ||
| I mean, there's nationalities, there's ethnicities, there's the Sunni-Shia divide. | ||
| I mean, all of this stuff, and people want to paint everything with such a broad brush, it's kind of ridiculous. | ||
| All right, so we don't have a ton of time left, but I do want to hit on the atheism thing a little bit. | ||
| So you've debated Michael Shermer, who I love, and you've debated David Silverman, who's also been on the show. | ||
| Both of them, I think, view their own atheism slightly differently than each other, which I think is interesting. | ||
| So, are these debates purely intellectual for you, or do you have a sort of vested interest, but some sort of interest in actually trying to show Michael, if you're sitting across from him, no, you're actually wrong on this, or is it really just the intellectual fund? | ||
| No, I mean, I sort of rediscovered my Christian faith in adult life. | ||
| I was actually a very lukewarm, social type of Christian for most of my life, and I became more interested in it as an adult. | ||
| I became interested in it less as an explanation of the world and more as actually a way to | ||
| make your life better. | ||
| And one day I was watching TV and I look and I go, "Wow, there's Christopher Hitchens, | ||
| whom I know. | ||
| I know him from DC. | ||
| I actually once debated Hitchens on socialism in the late 80s. | ||
| And there he was debating some pastor from Birmingham and just flaying the guy. | ||
| And of course it was partly because the pastor went to divinity school and only knows the Bible, and Hitchens knows history and philosophy and literature and so on. | ||
| And so I'm like, you know, that's not a fair fight. | ||
| So I kind of email Hitchens and I go, Hitchens, stop this, you know, come on, debate somebody your own size kind of thing. | ||
| And I offered to step in the ring with him, to which he happily took me up on it. | ||
| So we started doing these debates, and they were a huge success. | ||
| You couldn't keep people away. | ||
| And we did ten of them, ten debates. | ||
| And then I debated Sam Harris and some of the other guys as well. | ||
| And I find that the atheist community, it falls into different camps. | ||
| I mean, they're all very different. | ||
| You get the idea from a Richard Dawkins that the reason he's an atheist | ||
| is that he's a true scientist and he's sort of looking for evidence out there, | ||
| kind of like the Soviet cosmonauts who would go up into space and go, | ||
| "Okay, report from here, no God ever found up here. | ||
| "We don't see him up here." | ||
| You know, that kind of thing. | ||
| That type of reasoning. | ||
| Now, a guy like Shermer's more complex because with Shermer, he'll tell you, | ||
| he'll say, "Well, I used to date this girl. | ||
| "We were in love, we were gonna get married, "and then she had a paralyzing accident." | ||
| And so both of us prayed to God, like, "God, come on, help us out here. | ||
| "Cure her, but she doesn't get cured or she dies." | ||
| And he goes, "That shook my..." | ||
| Christian faith. | ||
| So this is different. | ||
| To me, this is not atheism. | ||
| This is sort of like wounded theism. | ||
| It's sort of like, God, you know, it's not that I don't believe in you. | ||
| I'm a little ticked off at you. | ||
| I don't think you're running the world very well. | ||
| I'm not sure you're all that just. | ||
| See, this is a more complex atheism that, say, a Nietzsche would have been really interested in. | ||
| And it's very different than the sort of just scientific atheism, which is that, hey, I don't see evidence for a God. | ||
| Right, so I think when you're talking about the scientific atheism, you're sort of talking about new atheism, which I don't even like that term, because to me, new atheism means just atheists who are speaking up. | ||
| And I keep seeing them being attacked by the left, which makes no sense to me either, because these should be their natural allies who have no problem attacking Christians constantly, but new atheists, or whatever you want to call them, speak up about Islam, and that freaks out the left. | ||
| So we end up with all these strange connections. | ||
| I mean, I would say that for me personally, and I've talked about it on the show before, I'm not a believer, but I don't care what anyone believes as long as they're not trying to chop off my head. | ||
| If you want to, in the privacy of your own home, believe whatever you want and you're not trying to legislate on that, then I wouldn't have a problem. | ||
| But would you say that some of the things that you care about in terms of laws are framed by that? | ||
| No, not so much that, but I think what it is has been, you know, I've been much influenced by the idea, by Immanuel Kant's idea that the compass of reason is itself somewhat limited. | ||
| So take something like life after death, okay? | ||
| So here Shakespeare says death is the undiscovered country. | ||
| We live, we die, we're flung into the world, we don't quite know where we came from, we don't really know what comes after death. | ||
| Now, if I run into a Shermer and he goes, Dinesh, The belief that there's life after death is dogmatic and irrational, whereas the belief that there's no life after death is scientific and skeptical. | ||
| I'm like, sure. | ||
| Why is it skeptical not to believe in life after death? | ||
| Well, he's asking you for any standard of proof. | ||
| Right, but the standard of proof operates within experience, right? | ||
| So, for example, if I were to say, hey, I just saw a guy with two heads, you'd be like, ridiculous, we've all seen hundreds of people and they all have one head, so the chance of finding a guy with two heads, but if I were to tell you, I just came back from a star 50 light years away, and over there they have two heads, you could never contradict me, you could never say that's preposterous, Because you have no idea what goes on over there, right? | ||
| So, post-death is like that. | ||
| None of us have been there. | ||
| We have no idea. | ||
| So, no position has an automatic trump card over any other. | ||
| If I were to believe in X and you were to believe in Y, neither of us has an automatic high ground, because we can't expect what possible scientific test could we do to prove you right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, I fully get that example, but would you say that Look, if we both die at the same moment, every bit of, any shred of evidence that actually exists would say that's that, that we're mortal bodies and we're going to disintegrate and go into the earth and that's that. | ||
| It is somewhat of a leap of faith. | ||
| You're asking for something more than reason to say that I think my spirit's going to go up to heaven. | ||
| I mean, I know that's, it's a nice thought, and I don't, by the way, I don't believe I don't begrudge people those thoughts in any way. | ||
| I'm not sitting here thinking that I'm somehow holier-than-thou, no pun intended, you know what I mean? | ||
| I really don't. | ||
| But there's some level of... there's some reason jump there, right? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| I mean, Socrates didn't think so. | ||
| Here's Socrates, right? | ||
| He goes, listen, we know as human beings that we are a mixture. | ||
| We are a mixture of the physical And we are a mixture of the non-physical. | ||
| And by the non-physical, he's not talking about religion. | ||
| He's saying, consider a thought, right? | ||
| What is its mass? | ||
| What is its size? | ||
| You can't think of a thought in any physical dimension because it's not a physical thing. | ||
| Think of an emotion, love, hatred, envy, you know. | ||
| So he goes, we know as human beings, we've got physical stuff and we got some non-physical stuff going on, immaterial stuff. | ||
| Now, he goes, when we die, Socrates, he goes, it's obvious that the physical stuff will disintegrate. | ||
| He goes, ah, but what about the non-physical stuff? | ||
| He goes, I think that the non-physical stuff will endure. | ||
| It will continue. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because it doesn't have the same perishable sort of expiration date stamped on it. | ||
| Now, to my knowledge, no one has ever refuted this argument. | ||
| No one has actually proven that non-physical stuff requires physical stuff even in other worlds in order to endure. | ||
| So I just think Philosophically, if we look at the Greeks, the Romans, even pre-Christianity, all this stuff is there to be thought about. | ||
| And the beauty of a good liberal education is you're exposed to it, you think about it, you realize that there are things that you thought were obvious that are less obvious when you reflect upon it. | ||
| I go into these debates like that. | ||
| I never, like, quote authority, sacred scripture, the Bible, this is what it says. | ||
| I argue on the basis of reason alone. | ||
| Well, that's why I've thoroughly enjoyed this conversation, and that's why I can enjoy having a conversation with Michael Shermer, who would take the other position, and that's a beautiful thing. | ||
| All right, well, you guys can check out Dinesh's movie, Hillary's America. | ||
| It's in theaters right now, and the link to the book is right down below. |
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