Oct. 29, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| I think a lot of Americans are fooled because our police state doesn't come in the usual kind of cartoon colors. | ||
| By that I mean Americans think, well, where's the revolutionary overthrow of the government that say Lenin did? | ||
| Where's the Stalin overcoat? | ||
| Where's the Hitler mustache? | ||
| Our police state is very cunning and it marches behind the banner of law. | ||
| Saving democracy, upholding truth by prohibiting misinformation, and even affirming liberty. | ||
| So it's a disguised police state, and it uses a lot of camouflage. | ||
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I'm Dave Rubin. | |
| We're here at the local studios in Miami, and joining me is an author, a podcast host, | ||
| and creator of the new film Police State, Dinesh D'Souza. | ||
| Welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you, good to be on. | ||
| I have to say, you've been on a couple times, but this is particularly fitting, I suppose, because your last movie, 2000 Mules, was the first movie that we ever released in such a way on Locals. | ||
| I did create Locals. | ||
| We are here at the Locals studio and now you're doing the same thing with the new film. | ||
| So this feels not only politically, obviously we've kind of come together in a lot of ways, but technologically and everything else. | ||
| So it's a nice moment for me personally, I suppose. | ||
| You know, the release of Mules on Locals was a kind of radical step because my old distribution model was to put the movie in the theater, let it run for three or four weeks, then there was typically a two-month interval theaters would control when you could release it in digital, and then you'd sell it on Amazon Prime or iTunes. | ||
| So when Locals approached me, we talked about this, the idea of doing something totally different. | ||
| And offering the film through Locals, and making Locals, in effect, into a movie platform. | ||
| It was sort of a wild idea, but it turned out to be a great idea. | ||
| It worked out okay, if I'm not mistaken. | ||
| I'm not privy to all the numbers anymore, but I think you did alright. | ||
| It was awesome, and it convinced us that that is the new way to do it. | ||
| And so, we're kind of replicating the same distribution for the new film. | ||
| And I don't know if excited is the right word, because as I've said about this film, it's not a film I wanted to make, because I never wanted the country to be in a spot where you'd need to make a film like this. | ||
| And frankly, if I'd made this film even five years ago, I think people would be like, is this a film on North Korea, Dinesh? | ||
| Or Iran? | ||
| Or China? | ||
| No, it's a film about how a lot of the elements of those unfree societies are now visible in our own. | ||
| So I want to get into, obviously, police state and what it's about. | ||
| And yes, it does feel like many of us who have warned about a whole bunch of this kind of, as I said to Ben Shapiro on my live stream this morning, it feels like in some ways like we failed. | ||
| Like we were yelling about a lot of this, but maybe we didn't do enough to stop some of it, let's say. | ||
| But before we dive into that fully, I thought maybe we could just talk about just generally what's going on in the world at the moment, because it is a crazy world. | ||
| What do you make of sort of where we're at, what's going on obviously in the Middle East, what America's role is supposed to be? | ||
| I'm just tossing a wide one at you. | ||
| I think this, the attack by Hamas, and the fact that it was not only missed by Israeli intelligence, which is something to be examined within Israel, but clearly missed also by U.S. | ||
| intelligence. | ||
| And now let's flash back to post 9-11, when many people, I mean me included, were like, There's something that's going on within Islam. | ||
| You've got this emergence of radical Islam, and it has become militant in a way that we haven't seen before. | ||
| Maybe it all started with the Khomeini revolution, but you see this militancy within the Shia and Sunni strains of Islam both. | ||
| Okay, we gotta give a lot of these new surveillance powers. | ||
| We need to collapse some of the old distinctions between intelligence gathering and, let's say, criminal prosecution. | ||
| Because we're not just trying to wait for a crime and then go chase who did it. | ||
| We're trying to prevent a crime from occurring before it does. | ||
| But... | ||
| We were warned even then, and this is a case where some of the libertarians, the sort of the Rand Pauls and Ron Pauls of the world were like, guys, if you give this power to the federal government, they not only can, but they will abuse it. | ||
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Right. | |
| That sort of gets us to your movie. | ||
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Right. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's one phase of the whole thing. | ||
| I think that's really interesting. | ||
| The other phase that interests me as someone who's written about education, about the campus, is how you have these guys who have been delicate flowers on the campus. | ||
| You know, don't offend me, don't trigger me, I can't hear an opinion I disagree with, microaggressions, make sure you get my pronouns right. | ||
| And then when you get a mass attack with all these atrocities, They seem to be politically okay with it. | ||
| They'll say, well, we're not defending Hamas, we're defending Palestine, but clearly they are okay with, in the name of decolonization and in the name of resistance, they tie their own domestic causes in with the cause of Hamas. | ||
| Yeah, do you see that, that tie-in and how quickly BLM sort of flipped into what I would argue is really a pro-Hamas movement? | ||
| The distinction, I can't make that distinction because I don't see anyone on the ground making that distinction, right? | ||
| At these rallies, you don't see anyone out there going, no, no, I'm for Palestine, I'm against Hamas. | ||
| No, I mean, look at the BLM could have posted a Palestinian child with big eyes, but they posted the Hamas terrorist coming in on a glider. | ||
| So what do you make of how that has now been exported into the United States? | ||
| And it does seem, you know, we always use the word systemic related to everything. | ||
| It does seem systemic in that it doesn't seem organic that these protests happen, what some might call an insurrection at the Capitol in the last couple of days, etc. | ||
| I mean, I've been struck by the fact that the left is a global movement. | ||
| The right is not a global movement. | ||
| The right tends to be confined within each country. | ||
| Now, there are some links that are beginning to emerge because people see the echoes, right? | ||
| I mean, you had this, quote, insurrection on January 6th. | ||
| We saw something almost identical in Brazil, right? | ||
| When you think about COVID restrictions, for example, restrictions on religious liberty, on right to assembly. | ||
| Yes, you saw them in America, but then, hey, they're in Canada. | ||
| Hey, they're in Australia. | ||
| They're in New Zealand. | ||
| They're all over Europe. | ||
| So, suddenly, and I actually raised this in the film, I say, wait, police state, yes, but police planet, maybe? | ||
| Because now you're beginning to see a global movement pushing kind of in the same direction. | ||
| I think that also applies to the sort of Hamas-BLM alliance. | ||
| The left here draws energy from similar forces abroad, and vice versa. | ||
| I don't know if you saw the Hamas leader, he's like talking about George Floyd. | ||
| Yeah, no, it's incredible. | ||
| He said, this is our George Floyd moment. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Do you think we have the right apparatus or the right fortitude to fight this? | ||
| I mean, it seems like things keep sliding somewhat in the wrong direction. | ||
| I keep telling people, like, I'm very bullish on the state of Florida. | ||
| That's where I live. | ||
| You're in Texas. | ||
| Obviously, some good things are happening there. | ||
| But the country as a whole seems very, very wounded, at least with the leadership we have right now and the agencies. | ||
| I think there are two problems here. | ||
| One is that there are some things that can be fought on an individual basis, like here's what I can do, but there are other things, and the police state is one of them. | ||
| It requires institutional coordination. | ||
| The way you block a police state is you have a Supreme Court ruling that strikes down this nefarious alliance between the government and the digital platforms, often operating, by the way, through intermediaries, you know, non-profit groups, academics, and so on. | ||
| The courts need to do that. | ||
| And then you need, you know, the Republican Congress to do things, and you need attorneys general to do things. | ||
| I mean, it would send a shockwave through the Democrats if you suddenly had Republican DAs in Texas, in Florida, and elsewhere, indicting major figures of the Democratic Party for crimes that are occurring in their state. | ||
| So legitimate prosecutions. | ||
| But if none of those occur... So what would be a prosecution? | ||
| Well, let's take an example. | ||
| I'm just playing the game the Democrats play. | ||
| So, for example, Texas. | ||
| There is open child trafficking going on across the border. | ||
| The Biden administration is well aware of it. | ||
| To them, it's a casualty of what they want to achieve, which is they want to bring all these people over here. | ||
| They know that this empowers cartels. | ||
| They know that these kids, because a lot of these adults come in with a kid, you know, Here's a dependent child, but it's not their kid. | ||
| And so the kid goes into basically a child trafficking operation because the child trafficking operations volunteer to quote, adopt these kids. | ||
| This is by the way, all in the movie. | ||
| And so the Biden administration is, yeah, that's ugly stuff. | ||
| And we're not, we don't intend that, but it's an acceptable consequence of what you're doing. | ||
| Well, imagine for example, if the Texas attorney general, and you can even do this locally, indict Mayorkas or bring an indictment for knowing participation in criminal and illegal Sex trafficking and trial trafficking. | ||
| So it's interesting because it's one of the things that I've been bringing up on the show a lot lately, which is that the Democrats seem so negligent when it comes to the border that it cannot be, it can't be negligence, that it must be intentional. | ||
| That's basically what you're saying. | ||
| I think now we're getting into this weird spot with Rashida Tlaib where it's almost like we have a, we have an agent in the Democratic Party. | ||
| How do you blend that as someone that just made a movie called Police State out, out this very week, out on locals and in theaters? | ||
| How do you blend doing the right thing without then becoming part of the police state, where you're taking out people who, you know, maybe you disagree with? | ||
| No, I mean, I agree. | ||
| And I don't think that the advice that we should do exactly what they do, because if they do lawless stuff, I'm not saying we should do lawless stuff. | ||
| But I'm saying that there is something ...invertebrate about the Republicans, and somewhat even the conservatives, which is, when you say things like, I can't do what the other side is doing, I'm standing on principle, I'm better than that. | ||
| This is actually the staple rhetoric of the right of center. | ||
| That is dependent on a context that I think is no longer our context. | ||
| So, you know, think of the movie, you know, Jimmy Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Balance, and he's this very straight-laced lawyer, and his basic idea is, you know, we have to believe in the law. | ||
| We don't believe in the law of the jungle, so I'm not going to go get a gun. | ||
| I have a law book, and if something happens to me, I'm going to, like, call in the authorities, report it to the sheriff. | ||
| Now, if you're in a small town with a decent sheriff and an infrastructure of that, that is the way to go. | ||
| That's the way I want to live. | ||
| On the other hand, if you take a covered wagon and go out west, and you suddenly realize that outlaws have encircled your ranch and they've got all these long guns, and they want to burn your homestead and rape your wife, take your kids, and if you say, I'm not going to go for my rifle because, you know, I don't want to be like them, and, you know, I'm better than that, I'm a man of principle, I mean, you don't even know what to say to such a person, because they have no appreciation of the gravity of the situation, and the fact that you're in a combat zone, and you need to act, at least start with the psychology of that, and then decide how you should respond. | ||
| Were you intentionally trying to bring that to my first question about Israel and Hamas? | ||
| Because that's what you basically explained right there. | ||
| We have one side that's saying we have some rules, and you might not like the rules that they're playing by, but they're saying we have some rules that have been born out of Western ideology, and we have another side saying we're going to try to kill as many of you, and as many of us as As much as possible, actually, at the same time. | ||
| That's a real problem. | ||
| I mean, with the Hamas thing is so creepy because the reveling in the massacre of women and civilians, you know, there's been a trope in America for 30 years about sort of, I think the philosopher Leo Strauss called it the reductio ad hitlerum. | ||
| Everything is linked to the Nazis, right? | ||
| And normally the problem with that is that the Nazis are so much worse that the analogy to Nazism always seems like a little stretch. | ||
| But think about it, the Nazis were very careful to have their death camps, not the concentration camps which were labor camps, but the death camps outside of Germany. | ||
| They were in the occupied territories, they were in Poland, and that's because the Nazis had to hide those crimes because they couldn't say, we're gassing the Jews and we're proud of it. | ||
| They couldn't do that. | ||
| But the Hamas does that. | ||
| Hamas basically goes, we're killing kids, and look, here we are. | ||
| And there's a certain kind of triumphalism about that, that I think is so morally unnerving, that when I see people defending it, or defending the cause that motivates it, it's very discombobulating. | ||
| So when you see the sort of chaos that we're seeing right now, these rallies, the protests, you know, we're only two, three years out of COVID summer of love and all of the chaos related to that. | ||
| We need law enforcement to do some things. | ||
| And yet you're making a movie about the ever encroaching movement. | ||
| Or ever-encroaching growth, I suppose, of the security state. | ||
| Well, I mean, we need law enforcement to do the things that it was empowered to do. | ||
| I mean, this is a little bit like sometimes when I talk police state, I'll have these Republicans. | ||
| This is like a classic Republican congressman response. | ||
| Well, Dinesh, we're supposed to be back the blue. | ||
| Now you're saying the police state... | ||
| And I'm like, of course! | ||
| There's no contradiction between backing the blue and backing the cops doing what cops are supposed to do, and similarly insisting that the FBI go after the mafia and go after organized crime and do the things that the FBI was set up to do, but... | ||
| You know, I have to explain in this movie what is going to cause an FBI agent, by and large, a good guy, and in fact, sometimes a right-of-center guy, to kick into an apartment at 6 in the morning, go find some 70-year-old grandmother, like, wrestle her to the ground, you know, twist her arms behind her back and put handcuffs, pull her down the stairs if she won't go willingly, pull her into the street where her neighbors come and gawk at her. | ||
| I mean, how do you get a good guy to do a bad thing? | ||
| I think that is key to understanding the psychology of a police state. | ||
| And that's what people used to ask about the Nazis, actually. | ||
| The same question. | ||
| Not to do that reductum, but I mean that was the same question. | ||
| These weren't all bad people five years before. | ||
| Yeah, and I specifically mentioned Hannah Arendt and her idea about Eichmann from the book Eichmann in Jerusalem, that Eichmann was, yeah, he was a Nazi, but that wasn't what motivated him. | ||
| He was sort of like, I want to be part of a really efficient system. | ||
| I'm an up-and-comer. | ||
| I want to be recognized for my own creative efforts. | ||
| I'll ally with this cause and I'll become a sort of master builder of this cause. | ||
| And so this was Arendt's famous phrase, the banality of evil, because this guy was not all about, you know, let's rid Europe of the Jews. | ||
| He was ultimately an opportunist and a social climber. | ||
| And I think that is an important insight. | ||
| There are evil people and then you have evil people who set up bureaucratic mechanisms to get good people. | ||
| And just ordinary people who want to get ahead in life to do those bad things. | ||
| Was the genesis of this movie January 6th? | ||
| Or, I'm guessing you've obviously been kicking these ideas around for quite some time, but was that really the thing that got you to make it? | ||
| I started out thinking... Or at least the reaction, let's say, to January 6th. | ||
| Well, I started out thinking that there is an untold story about January 6th, and I think we actually have it in the movie. | ||
| By that I mean, I always like to not just recycle what other people are saying, but break new ground in understanding an event. | ||
| And we can talk about that if you like. | ||
| But I started out saying, I've got an insight about January 6th. | ||
| Let's do a movie on that. | ||
| Then I realized there are four or five other guys making a January 6th movie. | ||
| And so I pulled back and I thought to myself, there's a bigger story here that connects to really all the features of a police state. | ||
| Because, I mean, I'm a creature of the 1980s, the Cold War. | ||
| There are police states, of course, now like North Korea, China, Iran. | ||
| And of course, the old Soviet Union. | ||
| So then I said, well, what do those police states have in common? | ||
| Well, they have mass surveillance of citizens. | ||
| They have systematic censorship. | ||
| They have this mind-numbing indoctrination and propaganda in the schools and in the media. | ||
| They tend to be one-party states, which is to say, not that they have no elections, but the elections are sort of controlled so that if there is an opposition, it's subordinate to the regime. | ||
| They criminalize dissent, they go after religious liberty, they have political prisoners, and I go, whoa, all these elements to one degree or another I see here in America. | ||
| And it's a shock for me because I'm an immigrant. | ||
| I mean, you know, I've written books like What's So Great About America, I've been very much of an American exceptionalist, a rah-rah American triumphalist. | ||
| And yet, that America is not the America we're living in now. | ||
| So this movie, to that degree, has a personal dimension. | ||
| It's like, what happened to those liberties and the Bill of Rights that were supposed to be unalienable, above political negotiation, not subject to majoritarian overthrow? | ||
| Suddenly, all those rights are in jeopardy. | ||
| Do you think our institutions have enough of a sort of self-correcting system within them to fix some of this? | ||
| I mean, it seems to me right now, if we didn't have a Supreme Court that leans the way it does, we would be seriously, seriously screwed. | ||
| And as we're taping this right now, the Republicans can't even figure out a Speaker of the House. | ||
| Like, it could end up being a Democrat. | ||
| That's how insane, with the Republican majority, it could end up a Democrat House, you know, in essence, controlled house. | ||
| It is absolutely nuts. | ||
| Now, look, we're not a full-fledged police state. | ||
| Obviously, if we were, we wouldn't be having this conversation and I wouldn't be making this movie. | ||
| So when the jaws of the police state snap shut... I have Yeonmi Park, who's a North Korean refugee. | ||
| She's a friend of mine. | ||
| And, you know, Yeonmi goes, listen, when the jaws of the police state are shut, there's no time that remains. | ||
| All you can do is run. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, get out, get your family out, get your money out, but we're not there. | ||
| Now, I think the reason our institutions have proven so vulnerable is, one, because there have been these sort of fear-inducing events. | ||
| Let's start with 9-11, but then let's add COVID. | ||
| Let's even add January 6, because if you think about it, all of those were pretexts For massive expansions of state power and encroachments on liberty that would not otherwise have occurred. | ||
| You can't tell Americans you can't go to church, you can't go to synagogue, unless it's a virus or you can't do it for that reason. | ||
| And similarly, I think the idea that you can't talk about AIDS subjects on social media It was after January 6th that that became okay to say, and YouTube is like proudly listing all the things you can't talk about. | ||
| You could deny elections, let's say, for four years before that under Trump, the second it went the other way. | ||
| It was restricted, exactly. | ||
| The other thing I want to say is that I think a lot of Americans are fooled because our police state doesn't come in the usual kind of cartoon colors. | ||
| By that I mean Americans think, well, where's the revolutionary overthrow of the government that say Lenin did? | ||
| Where's the Stalin overcoat? | ||
| Where's the Hitler mustache? | ||
| Our police state is very cunning and it marches behind the banner of law Saving democracy, upholding truth by prohibiting misinformation, and even affirming liberty. | ||
| So it's a disguised police state. | ||
| And it uses a lot of camouflage. | ||
| I mean, a classic example of this to me is Fauci. | ||
| If it was a Stalinist regime, Fauci wouldn't need to do any of this. | ||
| He wouldn't need to do any excuses, just like the ordinary goon for Stalin when he comes to you and catches you on the train. | ||
| He doesn't have to explain to you why you're being arrested. | ||
| You're on a list, you resist, they smash you over the head, that's the end of the story. | ||
| No explanations necessary. | ||
| But what Fauci does is, and I think, you know, again, the human motives are really interesting. | ||
| Here comes COVID and Fauci goes, oh crap, you know, I've been funding this gain-of-function research. | ||
| It's in collaboration with just this exact Wuhan lab. | ||
| I need to figure out a way to throw people off that scent, otherwise it may be blamed on me. | ||
| So what if I get some very top-notch virologists and get them to say, independently, that it was in a wet market? | ||
| Now, Fauci realizes, I have a weapon in my arsenal. | ||
| I give all these people money. | ||
| I fund most of them. | ||
| So let me call up those guys, put them up to the idea of writing a paper. | ||
| They'll understand it's tied to their federal grants. | ||
| They will send the paper to me in advance. | ||
| I will kind of review it beforehand. | ||
| But then when it comes out, I will have a press conference. | ||
| An act like I just discussed. | ||
| Very reputable academics have issued a paper. | ||
| You know, so, this whole flimflam... Sounds like the swampiest thing in swamp geography. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, this whole... But what I'm saying is it's only necessary because Fauci cannot openly say what Stalin could have said, which is, don't ask any questions, this is our official position, and if you say otherwise, you'll find yourself in prison. | ||
| So is the hope then, I suppose without giving away maybe some prescriptions at the end of the movie, is the hope then that the system now, because we have so much information, although they are clamping down on information, it's not as easy to just black bag the guy and get them out of the system. | ||
| The bullshit basically is now seen more. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| Compared certainly to North Korea or some of the other places you mentioned. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I mean, I think that, I mean, there are ways, of course, in which technology is also hurting us. | ||
| But it also offers counters to... There's an interesting scene in the opening pages of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag where he talks about a woman who goes into a market and her friends tell her, you're on a list. | ||
| You need to leave now. | ||
| And the woman goes, I better go to my apartment and pack. | ||
| Of course, she goes to her apartment, they're waiting for her there. | ||
| She's arrested. | ||
| That's basically the end of it for her. | ||
| And then Solzhenitsyn comments. | ||
| He goes, we have a very big country. | ||
| Had she just gone straight to the train station and gotten on a train, she would never have been heard from again. | ||
| She would have disappeared in the vast Soviet Union. | ||
| They'd never find her. | ||
| Well, obviously, today, they would find her. | ||
| It's a little different. | ||
| It's a little different. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So that's a good, to me, illuminating example of how technology can be part of the weaponry of a police state. | ||
| But I think the power of a film, and this was also to some degree true of 2,000 Mules, when you expose a system, the system then has to adapt. | ||
| It doesn't necessarily give up on its objective, but it can't do it that way. | ||
| So, for example, in the 2022 election, There were all these Arizona patriots, like, literally sitting at the drop boxes with, like, beer and a camera. | ||
| And they're like, if the mules show up, we're going to record them. | ||
| There's nothing illegal in sitting by a drop box. | ||
| There's nothing illegal, in fact, in putting surveillance on a drop box, because that's actually called for in the election rules. | ||
| And I think as a result, the Democrats They had to figure out a different way. | ||
| So in Arizona, they said, what if we have a glitch in all our machines on election day and all these dumb Republicans, instead of voting early, are all going to show up on that one day. | ||
| So if we can make it difficult that one day because of some accidental glitches, we will suppress the Republican vote. | ||
| So my point is not that, again, not that they gave up the scheme, but they had to do it a totally different way. | ||
| Similarly here, I think, with the police state, if you blow their cover and people really understand how this is put together, And they also, I also want to convince people, because there are going to be some guys who go to Nashville, you know, I'm not Trump, and I didn't go in the Capitol on January 6th and fight with the cops, and I pay my taxes, so they're not going to come for me. | ||
| So I need to show, and I do, a lot of ordinary guys in the movie, they're just going about their life, they're not, they didn't go in the Capitol, they're just participating in civic life, or they're upset with what their kid is learning in school. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Or that they don't want their kid to be a girl who's a boy. | ||
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Exactly. | |
| Like some basic stuff. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And then suddenly, you know, the hot breath of the police state, or what Orwell calls the boot-stamping on the human face, and they're like, whoa. | ||
| And by showing a lot of those people, and then not only, in some cases I actually have the body cam footage and all this stuff, it's all in the movie, in some cases I recreate it. | ||
| And so the beauty of a film is it's show not tell. | ||
| So you give people an experience of something that otherwise they might be in somewhat denial about. | ||
| I wanna talk a little bit, since you mentioned 2,000 meals, obviously, in the election. | ||
| I started asking you something right before we started, but I think it's worth bringing up, and it fits in the context of this, which is one of my issues with Trump, who I supported, obviously, and I like a lot, and I will gladly vote for him if he's the nominee. | ||
| Obviously, I think DeSantis, at the moment, is the best. | ||
| You actually, we should get into, you gave a great explanation of the difference between the two of them. | ||
| We can do that in a second. | ||
| But one of my criticisms or thoughts of why it might not work for Trump Is that if he believes they stole it from him, which is what he believes, you made a movie about it, then unless he has done the legwork to ensure that they will not do it again, I don't see how it makes sense to even be running to a certain extent. | ||
| Now I've heard what I hear people saying, is, well, he'll overwhelm the system this time. | ||
| This time, Biden is so bad, and he's a walking corpse, and they'll just, it will be a 10 million, you know, spread on this thing, and they won't be able to steal it. | ||
| That just does, that's completely antithetical to what you just said there, that basically the system always stays in front, sort of. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what would your counterargument be? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, if I was sort of advocate for Trump, which I'm not, I would say a couple things. | ||
| One is that One is that the peculiar circumstances of COVID allowed a complete promiscuous sort of discarding of the rules of the election. | ||
| So, for example, the rules say that election drop boxes have to be surveilled. | ||
| It's in the rules. | ||
| And yet, when we did 2000 Mules, we looked at five states. | ||
| There were whole states that had no surveillance at all. | ||
| And they're just like, we were COVID, we didn't get around to it. | ||
| And the courts were like, oh, I guess COVID, you know. | ||
| So they gave them a pass. | ||
| And as you lay out of the movie, I mean, it's pretty great in a time of COVID to have people dropping off things at 4am with cameras that you can't really see with masks on their face. | ||
| I mean, the mask kind of helped. | ||
| The mask also helped. | ||
| The other thing is the, so I think what happened in 2020 was that the election was Stolen in two ways. | ||
| One was the unleveling of the playing field. | ||
| And this really everyone agrees with. | ||
| In other words, the Zuckerberg intervention of money, the fact that the mail-in drop boxes were heavily concentrated in democratic areas, the fact that left-wing legal groups filed claims and got settlements out of left-wing election officials and secretaries of state who basically went, You're suing me for us not to clean up our voter rolls. | ||
| Okay, we won't clean up our voter rolls in a settlement. | ||
| All of these shenanigans went on, and they were legal. | ||
| Legal in the sense that they were, well, they weren't legal, but they were allowed by courts and they were legal in that sense. | ||
| The other thing was the mule operation, which was taking advantage of what I just said to recognize that when you have bad voter rolls, Again, you know, sometimes people didn't quite get 2,000 meals. | ||
| It's not that the Democrats were, quote, running off ballots on a machine, copying ballots. | ||
| When you have bad voter rolls, it's not difficult to come up with absentee ballots that are, the guy exists, but he doesn't live in Georgia anymore. | ||
| So without fully relitigating that, if you were sitting with Trump, what would you say to him regarding why wouldn't they do it again? | ||
| I would simply say that the Republican National Committee, with an impressive battery of lawyers, needs to go state by state and insist, and this is especially true in all the swing states, 24-hour surveillance on all the drop boxes. | ||
| That alone will kill the problem of mules, because you have the surveillance. | ||
| I mean, the simple truth of it is, with cell phone geo-tracking and surveillance, you can bust that operation. | ||
| I mean, we busted it to a degree, but law enforcement could have busted it wide open. | ||
| Do you have any reason to think that he's done that or that the RNC has done that? | ||
| I actually don't know. | ||
| And in fairness, it's not because... In fairness, it's because... And there are people who come to me and say, Dinesh, what are you doing to fix voter fraud? | ||
| And I go, well, listen, my job is done. | ||
| I made a movie. | ||
| And the point of the movie is to hand off to you guys. | ||
| There are organizations that deal with this day in and day out. | ||
| And so, in a sense, I've now fallen behind on that topic as I've pivoted to the topic of the police state. | ||
| I have reason to believe that they're now aware of it. | ||
| They've certainly got the team. | ||
| They've raised a lot of money on this issue. | ||
| There are groups like True the Vote that do this sort of day in and day out. | ||
| So I'm hopeful that it's going to be better. | ||
| Right, which half-fixed probably doesn't do it. | ||
| to think that they fixed it all? No. I think knowing just the GOP, I mean I've | ||
|
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lived with the GOP for 30 years, they're probably doing a half-assed job, so I'm | |
| gonna consider the problem like half-fixed. Right, which half-fixed | ||
| probably doesn't do it. And by the way, DeSantis could be the nominee and they | ||
| would still have those problems. | ||
| The thing that I would say would be different in that regard is sort of an offshoot of what you said on Tim Pool's podcast a week or two ago, which I thought was quite good. | ||
| His operational efficiency, I think, would start lending itself to taking care of some of that stuff. | ||
| Actually, can you just go into what you said? | ||
| You were talking Trump, DeSantis. | ||
| I was on with Ann Coulter, and Ann was sort of railing about Trump. | ||
| And she was a huge Trump person at one point. | ||
| She was the first one that said, it's going to happen. | ||
| She was a huge Trumpster. | ||
| I mean, I think she even wrote a book, which I wouldn't put, you know, in Trump we trust, you know, anyway. | ||
| And I was making the point, I said, look, Regardless of whether you think Trump should be the nominee, the real question to ask is, if DeSantis is so manifestly superior in the ways that you describe, why is Trump leading overwhelmingly? | ||
| In other words, what is it that the Republican base thinks about Trump that you're missing? | ||
| And I think the answer, very simply, is the Republican base thinks that Trump won the 2020 election. | ||
| And for that reason alone, The Republican base thinks this guy deserves another shot because he is the legitimate winner of the last one. | ||
| So the idea of saying, OK, well, too bad for him. | ||
| Let's just give it to someone else. | ||
| There's a reluctance to go there. | ||
| But the second point I made is just a political point. | ||
| And this is something I noticed going back to the days of Reagan. | ||
| There are some politicians who have this kind of larger-than-life quality. | ||
| Which is very evident. | ||
| I mean, if you're in a large ballroom of a thousand people and Reagan walked in the room, it was unbelievable to see everything go silent, every head turn. | ||
| And even Reagan, I noticed, I mean, this is maybe part of his Hollywood, he's very aware of this. | ||
| And he was very careful. | ||
| You know, just the way he held himself, the way he cocked his head, he knew that he was under sort of observation. | ||
| Now, there are other people who are really good guys, and I saw this with a lot of Reaganites who were sort of, they were essentially clones of Reagan on policy issues, but they just didn't have that je ne sais quoi, they just didn't have that stock quality. | ||
| They just didn't have that it, that's it. | ||
| And so my point to Anne was that sort of, you know, if you could combine the kind of charisma of Trump with the ruthless operational efficiency of DeSantis, that's kind of what I think everyone is looking for. | ||
| Yeah, well that's why to me, regardless of who I want to be the nominee or not, it's been so disappointing because it's like, man, all the pieces are here. | ||
| We could have the most united party. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Probably, well certainly in my lifetime, or maybe not since Reagan re-election or something. | ||
| I mean, I'm not advising Trump, but if I were, I'd be like, listen, you know, the first thing to do, and this is actually what a big man does, is call up DeSantis and sit down and say, you know what, we would make an unbelievable team. | ||
| And not to mention the fact that, you know, how do you, when you think about people who say things like, let's defund the FBI, let's take down the FBI, I say to myself, well, we need an FBI. | ||
| I mean, we need a law enforcement agency that goes out to organize crime. | ||
| The FBI does a lot of good things. | ||
| So how do you sort of fix the FBI? | ||
| It's not a simple matter of I'm going to fire the Christopher Wray and put in a new guy. | ||
| Somebody needs to burrow into the FBI and root out the bad guys because there's a corrupt structure of incentives that goes all the way down that makes even the good people act badly. | ||
| And so you need a bureaucratic infighter to do that. | ||
| So imagine if Trump were to say to DeSantis, you are my man to drain the swamp. | ||
| But I need you to go into the swamp, and you're the guy to do it, and clean it up. | ||
| Because that's actually not my temperament. | ||
| I have the intention, and I now have, of course, the determination. | ||
| But see, this is a mature politics, and this is what a mature party would do. | ||
| But the fact that it's not happening, it doesn't mean to me it won't happen, but I share your, you know, exasperation that it doesn't seem to be headed in that direction. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You could even take a guy like RFK to me and send him to go fix the agencies, even though I have big political disagreements with him. | ||
| It's like, that's a guy who's fighting a lot of the same battles that you're talking about when it came to COVID overreach and everything else. | ||
| Like, he's a lawyer. | ||
| He seems to get it. | ||
| Like, send him in. | ||
| I mean, think of the value it would be to Trump to find a prominent Democrat and basically say, this guy is going to be like my czar on COVID and free speech. | ||
| And having a Democrat, I mean, there's a strategic value to all this, which, you know, you'd think our side would understand by now. | ||
| But so this is a broader frustration I have. | ||
| And I think If there's one message I have implicit in Police State, it's not in the movie, but I think it's the clear take-home value of the movie, is that the spine of the Republicans needs to be stiffened, and Republicans also need to fight smarter, because they... | ||
| We're up against something. | ||
| I don't know an alternative to the Republican Party and I don't really sympathize with people who talk about a third party or we need some other, because this is the mechanism we have. | ||
| And it's a mechanism with a great history and it's one that could be very effective if we use the power, just the power that we already have right now. | ||
| Yeah, do you sometimes think, and again as a guy that lives in Texas and me here in Florida, that the micro version of it, the experiment of America, the state part of it will work? | ||
| We have an incredibly powerful Republican party here. | ||
| We basically don't have a Democrat party anymore in Florida. | ||
| You're not quite at that level in Texas, but like you've got a functional state that it'll just work in some places and it won't work in others, but of course that ever encroachment No, I mean, I think that's right. | ||
| I do think that the decentralization of power is an important theme for us because we, you know, I think Hayek used the phrase, a framework of competing utopias. | ||
| Hey, listen, you know what? | ||
| You have a bunch of states and the 50 states are doing a lot of different things. | ||
| Some are going to work and some aren't. | ||
| To me, what's interesting about the Democrats is that they are showing creatively imaginative ways to ruin places in different ways. | ||
| So, I just saw something very amusing about the San Francisco model versus the Chicago model. | ||
| So, the San Francisco model is that you don't have drive-by shootings where people, you have a massive homicide rate. | ||
| The San Francisco model is, let us have a low-grade criminality, but spread it throughout the city. | ||
| You cannot escape it. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
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It's everywhere. | |
| It's everywhere. | ||
| Yeah, some psycho homeless guy is going to come up to you and punch you or grab a chicken wing off your plate. | ||
| But it allows the liberals to say, well, listen, you know, I'm being compassionate. | ||
| The guy has issues. | ||
| Now, the Chicago model is that you have just, like, open gunfire. | ||
| But interestingly, it's not all over Chicago. | ||
| It's in the black areas. | ||
| It's in the barrios. | ||
| It's in certain pockets. | ||
| And so the progressive can say, well, you know, it's not affecting me. | ||
| It's not in my neighborhood. | ||
| Bam, bam, bam. | ||
| You know, somebody else is getting killed. | ||
| It's happening at their universities now. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So they even ultimately suffer the creep. | ||
| Look, Texas is very interesting because Texas was starting to trend a little bit more purple, but I think the Hispanics will save Texas, believe it or not. | ||
| The Rio Grande Valley is just moving dramatically. | ||
| We supported a candidate down there, Mayra Flores, and she got like 46%. | ||
| I mean, she's in striking distance, and with the trend her way, you know, she has a good shot the next time. | ||
| If I'm not mistaken, she was the first Republican that Elon Musk ever voted for in his life. | ||
| I think that's right. | ||
| I think that's right. | ||
| And she lost, but not by a lot. | ||
| And of course, next door. | ||
| So out of three, we got one out of three. | ||
| But I predict in 10 years, we'll get three out of three in the blue. | ||
| This is the deep blue part of Texas. | ||
| All right, I got one more for you then, for a guy that made a movie called Police State, and that talks about controversial stuff, and you've been attempted canceled a hundred times, and you do a movie about election questions last time, and people aren't happy about that and everything else. | ||
| This one seems a little more close to that edge. | ||
| I mean, how do you factor that into your life as a human being, as a father and new grandfather and everything else? | ||
| You know, I think this is a lesson I learned from my campaign finance case with the Obama administration. | ||
| And I'll admit... Right, you've been doing this a long time and you've paid the price, literally. | ||
| I mean, even though that, you know, people look back and they go, well, Dinesh, you're one of the first of the political prisoners and so on. | ||
| But I didn't see it that way. | ||
| I saw it as a one-off. | ||
| I thought, look, I made this film on Obama. | ||
| He's a bit of a vindictive narcissist. | ||
| And so he just put his attack dog Eric Holder, go get that guy. | ||
| I didn't see it as a precursor to Carter Page, Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn, of course now Trump. | ||
| The escalation under Biden, I think, has taken me by surprise. | ||
| The rapidity of it. | ||
| And also the comprehensiveness of it, because in some ways people talk about, you know, a deep state. | ||
| I don't like to use that phrase that much because, to me, part of the police state is in the open. | ||
| Some of it is hidden, to be sure, but some of it's even outside the government. | ||
| It almost is reminiscent, Orwell in 1984 talks about the fact that Big Brother has an inner party and an outer party. | ||
| So the inner party are the guys who are behind closed doors. | ||
| But the outer party is the propaganda of the media, it's the education system. | ||
| I mean, we can go on YouTube and read all the 17 topics we can talk about. | ||
| That's not hidden, that's not deep, that's just out in the open. | ||
| And what amazes me is the way that censorship You know, this is kind of how it works. | ||
| An academic will make, and these academics have nothing better to do, so they're like, we are students of disinformation, you know. | ||
| We've compiled the 500 most dangerous purveyors of misinformation. | ||
| I'm always on those lists. | ||
| I'm always on those lists. | ||
| Yeah, you're on the list. | ||
| So then what happens is that the Biden regime picks it up and they go, all right, Dave Rubin has been circulating lies about COVID. | ||
| We'll send his name to the CDC. | ||
| Dinesh has been circulating election lies. | ||
| We'll send that to CISA, the cybersecurity infrastructure. | ||
| And so you've got like 40 agencies involved. | ||
| They're compiling lists. | ||
| But then they know if we go to the digital platforms directly, we could get busted by the Supreme Court. | ||
| Let's bring in a middleman. | ||
| Let's go to the Stanford Internet Observatory. | ||
| Let's go to the Virality Project. | ||
| We hand off to them. | ||
| They then become our couriers. | ||
| They go to the digital platforms. | ||
| The digital platforms then bring out the hatchet, and then the media cheers. | ||
| So, I mean, look who's involved. | ||
| Academia, the media, the digital platforms, the government. | ||
| I mean, you've got multiple organs of society working in a sort of coordination. | ||
| It's a very scary thing. | ||
| It means that even if you win the election, That begins to fix the problem, but by no means does it fix it. | ||
| I don't know that I fully got my answer, though, which was about you personally. | ||
| Oh, me? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I basically learned from my case that you are safest, paradoxically, on the front line. | ||
| Because if I'm out there making a movie, and of course, now I'm much more careful than I was 10 years ago and kind of watching my back, I got some really good advice from the former Lieutenant Governor of Texas, David Dewhurst. | ||
| He goes, Dinesh, do not make a move without a lawyer signing off on it legally. | ||
| And do not make a move financially without a reputable accounting firm saying, do this. | ||
| Because if you do those two things, it's going to be very hard for them to get you. | ||
| I followed the advice of my lawyer. | ||
| I followed the advice of my accountant. | ||
| So they can try to say, well, you still owe us money, but they can't say that you're guilty of a criminal act because you went through, you took professional advice and followed it. | ||
| So anyway, my point is, I live my life now according to these Sort of guardrails. | ||
| Not that they're ultimate protection at the end of the day, but they allow me to be fearless. | ||
| You know, I told Bongino when we were talking about this film, I'm like, we cannot hold back. | ||
| And we need to also do this film in an understated way, but at the same time, when people describe what happened to them, We need to hire a couple of FBI consultants so our recreations are clinically accurate. | ||
| If there's a law enforcement guy and he's watching this film, let's just say from DHS or something, he's gonna go, whoa, that would have gone down exactly that way. | ||
| And that is exactly why you have your lawyer and accountant standing right off camera right now. | ||
| Just kidding! | ||
| You were solo! | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Good seeing you, my friend. | ||
| It's a pleasure. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop screaming, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist, all right over here. |
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