Dinesh D'Souza critiques Hillary Clinton as a skilled politician within a Democratic Party he describes as having a 150-year legacy of dependency and sordid history, including the Clinton Foundation's role in managing Bill Clinton's behavior. He contrasts Reagan's prudent foreign policy with Bush's failed nation-building, arguing for trade over regime change, while warning that Muslim immigration poses unique security risks distinct from other groups. D'Souza also challenges "new atheism," distinguishing it from Soviet materialism and advocating for philosophical reasoning over empirical limits to argue that non-physical elements like thoughts may survive bodily disintegration. Ultimately, the discussion suggests that both political narratives and secular philosophies require deeper historical and metaphysical scrutiny rather than accepting surface-level conclusions. [Automatically generated summary]
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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, 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?
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
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.
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
Right, so you don't want to end up in... So why would you possibly board his bus?
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 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.
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,
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?
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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.