Dinesh D'Souza joins Dave Rubin to dissect his film The Dragon's Prophecy, linking biblical archaeology at the City of David with October 7th attacks and alleging a radical Islam-left alliance targeting Christianity. They critique Zohran Mamdani's "suave" condemnation of Hamas, arguing his ICC skepticism masks an export of jihad in American jeans, while analyzing Trump's plan to permanently lay off federal workers as a necessary reduction of government size amidst broader political meme wars involving Mike Johnson and Gavin Newsom. Ultimately, the episode frames current conflicts as part of a global strategy to destroy Western nations, challenging traditional narratives of blame and safety. [Automatically generated summary]
This is the Rubin Report, and in lieu of a Friday roundtable extravaganza, I have legendary director.
That's right, I'm calling you a legend, Danesh D'Souza in studio with me, co-hosting the show today.
We're going to talk about your new film, which I watched this morning, which was absolutely fantastic, The Dragon's Prophecy, and we're going to catch up on the news and all that stuff.
But before we do any of that, you mentioned to me right before that, right before we started filming, that you live in Houston.
Well, it's transitioning to fall, so it's a little milder in Miami.
Look, you know, the tropical look of Miami can't beat that.
We don't have that in Houston.
We have the humidity, but, you know, Debbie, my wife and I, we joke, she was born in Venezuela, I was born in Bombay, so we grew up in really hot country.
I was usually, I am able to watch just a short snippet of something before I do an interview, but I saw your interview with Roseanne Barr a few days ago.
And the way she was talking about the film, I thought, I have to watch the whole thing.
And I watched it this morning.
I mean, it's absolutely, absolutely wonderful.
So why don't we first, so we'll show you a quick shot of the movie poster before we get into anything.
And obviously people are going to recognize several of those people besides just you on that poster right there, Eric Metaxas, of course, who's been on the show, and B.B. Netanyahu and Mike Huckabee, et cetera, et cetera.
And let's show a quick portion.
This is just a small portion, about a minute of the trailer.
We'll get into that.
And then we're going to connect.
I mean, the fact that the movie is coming out in theaters on Monday, as you mentioned, it'll be streaming next Thursday.
But it is so timely relative to so many things happening right now, which I don't know if that was coincidence or happenstance or what.
Let's take a look at the trailer and then we'll pick it up on the other side.
The film is a departure from me in the sense that my films and really all of them in one way or another are about the meaning of America.
With this film, it actually began, I've long wanted to do a film on sort of Christian apologetics.
I went to Israel for the first time at the end of 2022.
And I discovered that there's all this archaeology going on in which they're pulling out, you know, stones and clay seals and inscriptions out of the ground.
And it's validating small details in the Hebrew and the Christian scriptures, kind of showing that the Bible is not like Greek mythology.
It's in fact a document about real people and real events.
So I was very intrigued by all this, but kind of put it to the side.
Nine months later, October 7th.
And that's when I got the idea of doing a film that would sort of combine the politics, October 7th, the war, with biblical archaeology.
And the link, as I saw it, was the ultimate question being whose land is it?
So the archaeology is good not just for authenticating the Bible, but for establishing the ancient presence of the Jews in that land.
And then I came across this fellow, Jonathan Kahn.
And he had this arresting idea that the battle between Israel and Hamas, Israel and the Palestinians, he said, is a kind of recreation of an ancient biblical conflict between the Israelites on the one hand and their longtime enemies, the Philistines.
And then he goes on not just to say that the Philistines, the Palestinians, it's the same name.
He goes on to show the tactics of the same.
He draws out this parallel in a very fascinating way.
And then my wife is on a Telegram channel where she's collecting all the footage of October 7th.
And I begin to realize no one has seen this stuff.
Apparently the Israeli government decided we're not going to be pushing it out there.
We're going to show it to select journalists.
But the consequences, people know about October 7th, but they don't have that feeling of having been there.
Right, so just to be totally here, because I did see the 47-minute video at an army base in Israel.
The stuff that most people have seen is not the worst of the worst.
Because that's what they didn't want out of respect for the family members of those who were killed and everything else.
I mean, there are literally, well, I'm sure you've seen it, that you have some of it in the film, but watching the man be beheaded with the Hamas guy smiling and laughing, that wasn't the worst of it.
I mean, there were things that were worse than that, that the two kids running into the bomb shelter, the father following them, and then the guy just throws the bomb in.
You see them all stumble out and die right there, and he's laughing.
What I found from a cinematic point of view, and this is putting my movie hat on, is I said, what's really fascinating here is this is filmed by the attackers.
So you're not going to see it from the point of view of the kibbutzes with the terrorists approaching.
It's almost like I'm going to put the audience on a motorcycle with a GoPro, and you get to ride over the fence into the kibbutzes from the Hamas side.
This is actually, the opening 10 minutes of the film, and some of the most brutal stuff is not in there.
But there's enough to give you a, and this is my filmmaking technique, right?
If I go back to 2,000 Mules, I don't want to tell you about election fraud.
I want to kind of put you on the scene.
You see a guy pull up in a car at night.
He's got a backpack full of ballots.
You know, make up your own mind.
And similarly here.
And I think a lot of the reason why October 7th has not resonated emotionally with enough people is they just haven't seen it.
And so that's how the film begins.
I think what's different for me is not only the topic.
This is my first film that is about Israel, about the Middle East, but it is also the fact that I'm integrating the political with the spiritual, the biblical, and even a hint of the apocalyptic.
In other words, Bible prophecy.
I think it's a very tantalizing combination, and it works in this case.
So that's why I really liked it, because I thought going in that I was watching something that was going to be a little more political, but it actually is much more spiritual, and then I guess you could say historically driven.
Zeb Ornstein, who I did the dig at the city of David.
Maybe you want to tell people what the city of David is and the excavation they're doing there and how that's connected to all this, because it's rather extraordinary.
I mean, you walk in the footsteps of Jesus without question, actually.
Well, the city of David is, well, it's built right around David's palace.
You know, this is how this archaeology is, and this is what first piqued my interest.
So the renowned archaeologist Elat Mazar comes to these folks at the City of David, a foundation that does archaeology, and she says, you have to move your office.
And so they go, why?
She goes, because the palace of King David, I mean, think about it, this is 3,000 years ago.
And until recently, people didn't even, people disputed whether David even existed.
His actual palace is underneath your feet.
unidentified
And they go, there's a mall over there, all this other stuff.
And so when they did the archaeology, they had to preserve the road above.
This is underground archaeology, an incredible archaeological project.
But I asked Zeb, I go, well, what is the probability that Jesus walked on that road?
And, you know, in Jerusalem and in Israel generally, there are some archaeological sites disputed, like the road to Calvary.
Some people go it's over here, some people go it's over there.
But in this case, Zeb says the probability is 100% because all the out-of-town Jews, so to speak, didn't have their own private bats.
They had to come to this bath, ritually cleanse themselves, go to the temple.
So the scenes right out of the Bible, Old and New Testament both, kind of spring to life.
And the reason I have that in the film is because Jonathan Kahn gives an exposition kind of from a biblical point of view.
But I have also a secular audience that's going to go, well, gee, how do we know that Pontius Pilate or Jeremiah, Isaiah, King David, how do we know these are real people?
So the archaeological section is a way of saying, guess what?
I couldn't answer that question 50 years ago, but now I can.
And I even offer the tantalizing ideas that as the world is becoming more secular, sort of God is speaking back and speaking back through the language of science.
That's what makes this so powerful.
You look at a seal, it's a clay seal, it has the name of some obscure guy in the Bible mentioned only once.
And then you go, well, all the people who've been telling me for 100 years that the Bible was written centuries later, they wouldn't have known about this guy.
This guy was the royal steward to King Josiah in like the sixth century BC.
Is that the weirdest part of what connects it to the political part, which is that the deeper you go down, the more you find out?
And that doesn't seem to match the narrative of whatever you want to call them, the anti-Israel set want you to believe, that the facts are literally right there.
The main left-wing critique of Israel is that the Jews are colonizers.
Now, first of all, how do you colonize your own land?
This is like accusing the Irish of colonizing Ireland, the Indians of colonizing India.
It makes no sense.
Not only that, but it's quite obvious that the colonization, to the degree that there is one, is from the Islamic side.
Right in the middle of Jerusalem is the site of the Solomonic temple built by Solomon, later rebuilt by Herod, the second temple.
This is supposedly on the site where Abraham was ready to sacrifice his son Isaac.
So it is far and away the holiest site in Judaism and Christianity.
And yet, what is sitting on top of it right now, an Islamic conquest arch known as the Dome of the Rock, and adjoining it, the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
So not only is this a sign of the Muslims basically saying, we're here now and we've taken it over, they would have been happy to have been called colonizers.
They were very proud of it, kind of like Hamas was really proud of October 7th.
But we also look at it in a deeper sense.
It's almost as if there is an endless war raging between God and the devil.
And the theme of the film is that the devil imitates God.
He inverts God's strategy.
And so what is more wonderful for the devil than to take the holiest site in Judaism and Christianity and go sit on top of it?
So that is a perfect segue to this segment, this portion that I wanted to show people, where you asked commentator Eric Stackelbeck about the uniqueness as it pertains to anti-Semitism, because that obviously is connected to a lot of the hatred of Israel.
So then is Israel just now the avatar for all the hatred?
Because it became a ridiculously successful, safe, largely safe, I should say, flourishing society that is the envy of much of that part of the world and perhaps now what we're seeing across the Western world.
So I think, and I think Eric alludes to this, there is a natural and a supernatural dimension to it.
And let's take a moment on each.
The natural dimension is in fact that anti-Semitism is a disguised form of envy.
The guy who's doing badly in the world likes to say that the Jews are doing better than his group, not because they are smarter, not because they work harder, not because they are more industrious, not because they study more, not because they have more Nobel laureates and have made more discoveries.
It's because they are uniquely wicked.
They are willing to stoop to things that I and my group, the virtuous group, would never stoop to.
So this is the natural human explanation.
And it applies not exclusively to Jews.
Other successful tribes get kind of the same thing.
The supernatural explanation, I think, is worth adding to it, because I think the natural explanation by itself doesn't give the full account of it.
The supernatural explanation is this, that going back to the very beginning, the rebel angels in heaven, God is fighting and the devil, the devil can never defeat God.
And so the devil develops a new strategy, which is to pick on the things that God cares about.
So like why does in Genesis 1, why does the devil tempt Adam and Eve?
But his idea is that if I can ruin God's creation, I get the last laugh on God.
That's my ultimate revenge.
And God, and in a sense, the devil picks on the Jews for the exact same reason.
If the Jews are the people of God, and by the people of God here I mean, I don't mean chosenness in some esoteric sense.
I just mean this is the instrument by which we get the Ten Commandments, the law, the prophets.
So the Jews are witnesses in a way to God in that sense, right?
So if that's the case, the devil goes, okay, I need to ruin those people.
How do I do it?
First of all, I push them out from the river to the sea.
I get rid of them.
And number two, I go occupy their holiest place and I declare it off limits and the Jews can't worship at the site of their own temple except at the wailing wall.
So the idea here is that the Jews and by extension the Christians because the Christians are, you know, Jesus, we present ourselves as spiritual Israelites.
We are engrafted onto the Jewish covenant.
That's how the New Testament relates to the old.
So if the Bible is right, you would expect to see now in a kind of end times or the last age an increased hostility to the Jews and increased persecution of the Christians.
And not only is that what we see, it's coming from the same people.
And I don't just mean it's the radical Muslims on the one hand, but notice it's also coming from the secular left.
The secular left hates Israel.
The secular left hates the Christians.
And the radical Muslims and the secular left, who would not seem to have a lot in common, like what does an LGBTQ guy have, you know, in common?
He's not going to move to Gaza.
His life isn't going to be that good.
And similarly, you can't take a bunch of jihadis and put them at the Folsom Street Fair.
They're not going to fit in so well.
So this odd, strange bedfellows are united by hatred of the Jews and the Christians.
And I think, so this is where the movie comes out.
The Jews and the Christians need to come together.
The Christians and Israel need to come together recognizing that we have a common adversary in both radical Islam and in the secular left.
Unfortunately for the lefties, they just get beheaded a little lower on the neck, right?
I mean, they just have to bury their head in the sand a bit more, but the beheading still ends up coming.
So clearly people can see how this is connected to so much of what's going on.
Let me just ask you one other question that will connect this to some of the news of the week, which I don't want you to give away the full conclusion of the movie per se.
But are you hopeful there's a way out of a seemingly intractable problem that's a political problem, but now you're also arguing is a spiritual problem, let's say?
Yeah, I think it needs to be dealt with at both levels.
I mean, my reason for having that and Yahoo in the film, for example, is to talk politics.
But I also ask him questions like, what do you think of Jesus?
You know, and I think he very interestingly talks about the Jewishness of Jesus and the fact, and you know, these days, of course, the left is trying to say Jesus was a Palestinian.
So there is a political solution.
What you have here with the political solution is, you know, Trump comes in and he'll say something that seems on the face of it absurd.
This guy doesn't even know what he's talking about.
But Trump is like a real estate guy, right?
He looks at the rubble and he goes, you know, I see some opportunities for some new buildings and clean streets and safe neighborhoods and people going to work and high-tech companies and prosperity.
Now, the spiritual side of it, I think, is very important and it's particularly relevant after Charlie Kirk.
And that is the sort of mood of renewal, of a need for us to connect the political to the moral to the spiritual.
And I think this film actually fits that mood very well.
Because where the film comes out, I don't mind giving away the ending.
In these kinds of films, the plot, so to speak, is not key.
It's the experience of the film.
The ending is basically saying this.
Look, if God has raised back the Jews and brought them back to their ancestral homeland, and if the devil has decided, let me recreate in a modern way the enemies of Israel, the Philistines, the Moabites, the Amalekites.
So if things are going back, then we have to go back.
And by we, I mean the Jews are going back, right?
You've got young 19-year-olds and 22-year-olds in Israel, and they're putting on the armor of the ancient Israelites.
And the message of the film is, hey, Christians, we need to do the same thing.
We need to go back to the way Christians were in the book of Acts.
I mean, the main difference, I think, between Christianity and Islam right now in the world, Islam has not lost the force of its original revelation.
Christianity, in many ways, has.
And so the renewal, I think, is to recover that, to recover the kind of energy of the early apostles who are on fire for the faith.
Now, there are Christians like this, by the way, in Nigeria.
This is why the radical Muslims want to behead them, because Islam is spreading basically by having eight kids, and Christianity is spreading by conversion.
So it's a competition.
And the Muslims are worried about it, and they want to stop it.
And I would put it philosophically in this framework.
Athens and Jerusalem, neither one can stand by itself.
These are the two pillars of the West.
Now, Athens at some level doesn't need a defense, right?
It's Socrates, it's Marcus Aurelius, it's the Greek theater, it's Pericles and the foundations of democracy.
But Athens has always been nourished and sustained by Jerusalem, which is Abraham and Moses and the prophetic tradition and the idea of a moral law that is outside of us, not merely inwardly generated, that puts claims on us.
And I think the founders would have said that the good life is to combine both.
That was the soil of the American founding.
So the restoration of the West requires, I think, a revival of Jerusalem, even more so than Athens.
And Athens ultimately needs to be saved by Jerusalem.
The way it was in the history of the West.
I mean, when we read Aristotle and when we read Socrates, we're actually not getting the ancient Greeks the way they were.
The ancient Greek society was incredibly bloodthirsty.
It had widespread slavery.
It was brutal in a manner that we would find unendurable today.
We get, when we go to, you know, we go to Yale and Dartmouth, we study Greece as filtered through Jerusalem.
Although Yale and Dartmouth are getting bloody again.
Yeah, in some respect, although it's a different thing altogether.
All right, well, let's connect a lot of this to what's going on.
So yesterday obviously was the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur, and surprise, surprise, unfortunately, no surprise, two Jewish people were killed outside of a temple in Manchester.
Two Jews have been, were died in a car ramming and stabbing attack at a synagogue in Manchester.
The attack came on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish religious calendar, and is being treated by police as a terror incident.
Police said they believe the attacker who was shot dead at the scene, Jihad al-Shami, 35, a British citizen of Syrian descent.
I was off for the holiday, so I was trying not to be on my phone and everything, and then I started getting alerts and seeing what was going on.
I mean, there's nothing surprising about this.
I sort of felt like I felt, you mentioned Charlie a moment ago, the day that Charlie was killed.
It's like it's shocking but not surprising that these things keep happening.
Then literally within hours in Manchester and throughout London, there were massive pro-Hamas.
That's what I call them.
You can call them pro-Palestine, but I have no problem calling them pro-Hamas rallies and where they're screaming river to the sea and they are screaming kill the Jews and a bunch of other stuff.
Not only that, I would say that the United States has a very bad record in fighting radical Islam, right?
Let's review briefly.
Number one, Jimmy Carter pulls the Persian route out from the Shah.
We get Khomeini.
That's how radical Islam gets a hold of a major state.
After 9-11, we pulverize the Taliban, but they're back.
So long term, they win.
Iraq, of course, was a mess.
So Israel is on the ground.
They're on the scene.
And I think part of what makes Israel so effective is when you are in Israel, you feel this.
Like Gaza, I'm standing in a kibbutz is like a football field away.
So Israel is on the edge of survival.
Americans don't have that psychology.
And as a result, there's a certain kind of nervous readiness in Israel.
So I attribute Israel's effectiveness not only to its sort of strategic brilliance, the Pager, I mean, this stuff, I don't see our CIA pulling off anytime soon.
But it's a combination of being on the scene and also being kind of battle-ready, battle-tested.
So Israel is, they know how to fight this war.
They can take on Iran, which is eight times bigger than Israel, and clobber Iran in a matter of days.
Now, the United States gets involved at the end, but guess what?
We like, can we, hello, hello, Mr. Trump?
You know, can I borrow like a B-2 bomber with some fighter jets to protect it for like 48 hours?
So look at our ROI.
I mean, to put it bluntly, look at our return on investment.
People complain, oh, we give $3.8 billion.
I mean, that's 5% of our foreign aid budget.
Every other country we give money to, we get nothing out of, probably just the middle finger.
But with Israel, we are getting somebody who is on the front lines fighting radical Islam, a fight that I add, we have been terrible at so far.
All right, so let's connect this to something that I've been like a little resident or hesitant to talk about, which is that it seems like some of the influencers on the right have gone all in on the obsessive hatred of Israel, connecting the Jews to everything.
Some of these people I've, in my past, considered friends, broken bread with, wrote blurbs for my books, been at weddings together, all of these things.
So I haven't talked about it that much.
Tucker, to me, something very strange is going on over there.
You've been talking about him quite a bit.
It's obviously connected to what we're talking about right now.
So now, to the backdrop of the clip we showed from the movie with the explanation of anti-Semitism, I want to show you this clip from Tucker's show where he's explaining something about anti-Semitism, where it comes from.
And if you're wondering why there's an awful lot of lunatic, anti-Semitic comment about Israel online, you have to wonder how much of that is organic?
Some of it, of course, there are always haters.
But how much of it is not organic at all?
How much of that?
The lunatic, all Jews are evil.
How much of that is being ginned up on purpose to make legitimate questions about the U.S. government's relationship with the government of Israel seem like crackpot stuff, like hate, like David Duke level lunacy.
Okay, I'm not even sure exactly where to begin with this.
This is a guy who every day on his show is obsessing over Israel while telling you that you're not allowed to talk about Israel, but he's making a lot of bank while doing it.
He constantly, every time he criticizes some individual person, it's always a Jew, whether it's Ben Shapiro or Mark Levin or he went after me in August, which I just found out, Barry Weiss, et cetera, et cetera.
And then there he is saying that Israel is likely to blame for the anti-Israel hate.
I mean, to me, the most, when he talks about lunatic content, the most dangerous lunatic content quite obviously comes out of Tucker himself, generally in the form of a ventriloquism with his guests.
So Tucker himself doesn't really say what Tucker's role is to ask a leading question that conceals an answer inside of the question.
And then his guest will expound it, and Tucker will wholeheartedly agree.
It's always his strategy is he's getting epiphanies.
And so his guest will say something like, well, you know, I think we should have allied with Hitler in World War II against Stalin.
Now, and Tucker will say something like, well, that's very interesting.
And then the guest will say, well, they're both autocrats.
And then Tucker will say something, well, you know, even at the time, there were people who said, now, here is where Tucker is playing a sleight of hand, because Tucker actually knows, Tucker's a very smart guy.
Tucker knows that at the end of World War II, people like Patton basically said, we're over here.
We've clobbered the Nazis.
Maybe we should go clobber Stalin.
But Patton would never say and never dream of saying, and in fact, no respectable person would dream of saying we should have allied with Hitler or that somehow Stalin posed a greater threat to the world at the time than Hitler did.
But for a lot of young people, these nuances are elided, they're conflated.
And so you can have young people going, wow.
I mean, you see, Tucker is like a sage of the ideocracy.
So for people who have historical amnesia, they don't know anything, when Tucker says something like, at the time there were people who did talk about this, the young people go, wow, this is like mind-blowing stuff.
You know, I have a connection with her going back.
But we have to remember that the Tucker and the Candace that we loved, we loved for different reasons.
They built their reputation on other issues.
They have both taken this dark turn.
We didn't tell them to do it.
They chose to do it.
And Candace follows the strategy of the bogus investigation.
Now, to me, this is somewhat embarrassing because in my films I do investigations.
And like Tucker, I like challenging received opinions, but I try to do it in a manner that puts out a bunch of facts, challenges premises, anticipates objections.
Whereas what Candace will do is she will put out an extremely incendiary suggestion, like, you know, take a look at this photo.
Here's a drain pipe.
Maybe a Mossad guy crawled out of it and shot Charlie Kirk.
Okay.
Did we see a Mossad guy?
Do you have any evidence there was someone who came out of the pipe or the pipe was even accessible?
So what do you think is actually, without even so specifically talking about the two of them, I mean, what do you think is happening with whatever this thing is on the right that we're referencing?
What do you think that is?
Because one of the things that I've been doing on this show since Trump got elected is talking about his wins over and over and over.
I think the country has, there's such an upside to the country right now.
We're fixing so many things, obviously, whether it's the border or the trade deals or trying to get peace in the Middle East or at least trying something different with Ukraine-Russia and cleaning up our cities.
Like the list goes getting woke out of our schools.
Like every day there is something new that is positive to talk about.
And there's a portion of the right that never talks about that.
And what I would want the president to be aware of right now is that those guys are trying to take MAGA out.
The thing that created the MAGA that brought in Elon Musk and Joe Rogan and Tulsi and Bobby and me and all these people, that's the thing they're trying to destroy.
You know, the reason it can break up the MAGA coalition is that it's not only an ideological divide, by the way.
It's also generational.
It is severing our young people away from our older people.
And Charlie felt that, right?
The donors are older.
By the way, the donors are not even predominantly Jewish.
I happen to know many of these donors.
It's the mainstream of the Republican Party.
It's businessmen.
It is evangelical Christian entrepreneurs.
It's Jews, right?
None of them are happy about this kind of anti-Israel turn and also the poisonous anti-Semitic thrust of it.
So turning point, I don't think it's going to go in that direction.
But if they do, it's very bad for them because they're not just going to suffer the exodus of the Jews, they're going to suffer the exodus of the mainstream of the Republican Party that is going to cut them off.
Because can you see some mainstream Republican businessman trafficking in anti-Semitism?
Impossible.
That's just not happening.
And Trump knows it, by the way.
So I think this is whatever its motive, its effects are potentially catastrophic, which is why I've decided, again, somewhat against my instinct, somewhat against my will, to kind of go all in on this, even against people I've known quite well.
So that was actually the last question I was going to ask you on this, and then we'll move on to some other things happening in the world, which is that there's a personal component to this that makes it very complex.
Tucker blurbed one of my books.
I reached out to him several times last spring saying, you can come on my show to talk about it, or I'll go on yours.
I offered to broker peace with him and Ben.
I did all of this privately, and it was all shunned away.
You toured with Tucker, you mentioned in Australia only a year ago.
So it creates this odd situation where you don't want to, I don't, and I sense you don't want to fight with people publicly.
And then there's this other set of people that not only I think are doing something dishonest, but are more than happy to throw everyone they knew under the bus at the same time.
All right, Tucker has some particular beef with this.
Let it be.
But when something is threatening to drive a wedge right through the MAGA coalition, so it's bad for MAGA.
It's bad for the country.
And I want to emphasize it's bad for America first.
I think one of the reasons I'm getting a lot of attack right now, and people are really desperate to show, hey, Dinesh, are you getting $7,000 for this post?
They're desperate to say that I'm somehow being paid, right?
And I say, listen, guys, number one, I'm Christian.
I'm not Jewish.
Number two, I've never made a film about Israel.
I'm clearly not obsessed with the topic.
This is the first time I've even talked about it in 30 years.
To be 100% honest with you, when I saw that the film was coming out a few weeks ago before I saw it and before I'd seen it, I didn't know which way you were going on it or where it was going to go or anything else.
And number three, ever since I discovered biblical archaeology because of my longtime interest in Christian apologetics, our family's been giving $100,000 a year to Jerusalem for biblical archaeology for the last three years, and we're going to continue doing it.
How do we go from the moral and the philosophical and the religious to government shutdown?
How do I segue through that?
I'm not exactly sure.
I will think about it for 30 seconds while we talk about perplexity.
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From the spiritual to the government.
The government has shut down, and yet somehow Dinesh D'Souza was able to get on a plane.
You're able to get to a hotel.
You were able to get in a car.
You made it here.
Things seem to be going okay.
And now they've, I love this clip because they've given the Trump administration an excuse to fire a bunch of people who probably don't deserve to have jobs in the first place.
Well, sometimes you have to do things you don't want to do.
And it's because the Democrats have put us into this position.
If the Democrats did not vote to shut down the government, we would not be standing up here talking about layoffs today.
We'd be talking about all the other news stories going on in the world in our country.
We'd be talking about all of the great things that this administration is doing to uplift Americans across the country.
But unfortunately, the Vice President of the United States and I have to come out here today to talk about a government shutdown that the Democrats put us in this position.
unidentified
And a second question.
I'm just going to clarify the timing of these potential layoffs to federal workers.
So there's something particularly interesting to me about this, which is that we go through this every couple of years.
The government shuts down.
Everyone blames the other side.
It's Republican administrations.
It's okay, fine.
We've all been through that.
The fact that they are now talking about permanent layoffs, meaning we are going to find out who is non-essential, which is a phrase which is a really sort of, you know, 1984 Orwellian phrase, non-essential.
Why do you have the job in the first place?
But that basically the Trump administration is using the shutdown as a way of cutting more of the fat that clearly the American people want post-Doge.
So this seems all good to me.
I don't see any downside to what's happening right now.
I mean, the difference here is that the Republicans have the will to do something that they've never had the will to do before.
The reason that the shutdowns worked politically for the Democrats in the past is that the Democrats could always appeal to, you're shutting down the government.
And Republicans would immediately go, yeah, I know, I know, but we're trying to get a blah, blah, blah.
Whereas this time, it's kind of like tee hee, you know, yeah, we're shutting down the government, but you're actually giving us a chance to do what we have long wanted to do.
So there's a little bit when my only disagreement with Carolyn Liebitt is she uses the word unfortunately.
He's leveled up for sure, you know, Trump 2.0 or whatever you want to call it.
But then it's also to the backdrop of, I don't know, after COVID, after Inflation Reduction Act, after all these ridiculous things that the government did, people just don't care as much about the government.
You know, the libertarians who don't get much right politically, like the ideology actually started to stick, I think, in some people's brains.
Yeah, and then, you know, the press, which generally has been the main instrument of attacking the Republicans, you know, they're reduced to now saying things like, well, you know, Dave and Dinesh, if you guys are hiking in Yellowstone, you know, the bathrooms may not really be working because the federal workers are, you know, laid off.
But okay, so the thing that the Democrats, well, the other tactic that they have, of course, is not just that the bathrooms won't work, but that everyone's going to die.
That's a big one.
Birdie's doing it.
AOC is doing it.
Millions are going to die.
But we've been through this all before, and I don't think anyone's buying it anymore.
A lot of this seems to have to do with the fact that they, part of what the Democrats want is to keep illegals on our health care.
And people voted for Trump for the exact opposite of that.
This is a spectacular moment.
This is on Fox News in the morning.
Lawrence Jones talking to Senator from New Hampshire, Gene Shaheen, about supporting health care for illegals.
Well, I think the problem for them is that, and you remember this going back now a decade and a half, they were sold on this idea that America is becoming more diverse.
And, you know, some people call it the browning of America.
And they thought we're going to get 70 to 80 percent of these brown and black people.
So the march of history, this is, you know, is inevitably in our direction.
And if we can just grease that along a little bit with some more illegals, this was their entire game plan.
So it's like you go into the Super Bowl, you know, this is your game plan.
They don't have another game plan right now.
I mean, think about it.
They're the party of crime.
They're the party of running the economy into the ground.
They're the party of coddling Islamic jihad, open borders, and Tifa, even the trans cause, which is very unpopular.
So they would need to do a whole kind of rebuilding.
And the rebuilding that is obvious to create a centrist party that would challenge, that would try to occupy the center appears politically impossible for them.
Even though you wouldn't be part of that party, would you be happy if that party could reconstitute itself?
It strikes me that although I won't vote for that, it would be nice because it would be healthier for America, as opposed to having a radically anti-America, sort of pro-crime, open-border loony bin.
It would still be, it would be healthier for America if it was something centrist.
For this reason, that even though it would be more difficult to beat that party, the problem now is that every time we lose, we put the whole country at risk.
Because it's kind of like you and I are alternating in driving a car, and one of us is a complete psycho.
And so it's like we can't afford to put the psycho at the wheel ever.
Because look what Biden did in just four years.
I mean, the level of wreckage, and every day new information comes out, right?
They gave $87 million over here, and they were promoting sex changes in Brazil, $45 million.
If you people would just calm down and not be completely insane, we would be, by default, we would be a little less crazy to whatever extent they think we're not.
How they characterize it is: you want to give health insurance to undocumented immigrants.
I understand that's not really an accurate depiction, but what it does do is it's a lie.
But what you support does bring back funding for emergency Medicaid to hospitals, some of which does pay for undocumented immigrants and people who don't have health insurance.
And also there is this provision, and it's not about undocumented immigrants, it's about people with asylum seekers and people with temporary protected status, et cetera, et cetera, but about their ability to get Medicaid.
So they're non-citizens.
They're not undocumented.
They're not illegal.
Why even include that in a bill knowing that they're going to seize right upon that and use that as a message?
Trump is now this kind of formidable combination of having learned a lot, so there's the knowledge component, but the other component, steely determination.
I mean, he's like Mel Gibson and the Patriot.
I mean, you know, Mel Gibson in the beginning is like, leave me alone.
I don't really want to get involved.
But at a certain point, you've messed with me enough and you've messed with my family enough.
It's like, you know, I'm now the guy, you know, who wanted to be left alone, but now you're going to be hearing from me in a very bad way.
But more importantly than any of that, we'll talk about the meme wars in just a second.
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I just want to be absolutely clear.
You did use the bathroom, right?
It was the bathroom.
All right, so the other part of all of this is that the meme wars have burst forth.
We showed you the video, of course, two videos now of Donald Trump putting Hakeem Jeffries in a sombrero, which somehow is racist.
Although if you go to a Mexican joint for dinner tonight and order margaritas and you tell them it's your birthday, they will put you in a sombrero.
Actually, let's just go right to Gavin Newsom's incredible meme work.
This is a man who wanted to make memes illegal two years ago.
We'll have more on that in just a second.
But he has now memed Mike Johnson.
And my God, this is hard hitting.
What's that?
Oh, sorry, this is the JD Vance one go.
unidentified
You're flying today.
I hope, of course, you arrive safely and on time, but you may not arrive on time because the TSA and the air traffic controllers are not getting paid today.
Our military is not getting paid today, starting today.
And obviously, the longer this drags on, the worse that it is for the American people.
Well, first of all, it's funny on its face because Mike Johnson is like the most stayed straight lace guy in America, you know, and he's giving us sort of instructions on all this.
I was thinking back to a generation ago when I was first starting out in politics and how the memes of those days were sound bites.
But people, they recognize that you go on Fox News, you go on CNN, you need to give sound bites.
But the value was never in the soundbite.
It was always in what lay behind it.
And so as a result, you've had a lot of think tank guys who were called upon, you know, Charles Krauthammer, because Charles Krauthammer would say a sentence or two, but you knew there was a lot behind it.
I think what's different in our culture now is that the memes are free-floating.
They sort of survive on their own, and people have developed high skill in producing a meme, but it's just a meme.
So would you prefer, I mean, this is what I was trying to unpack earlier in the week, is like, would you prefer that Trump not do any of these things?
Because to me, for him to, like, there's some version of the world, some alternate piece of the multiverse where I'm like, I wish Donald Trump would just not do any of that stuff.
But then in the world we live in, it's like it's a part of how he was able to accomplish anything, everything.
So to ask him not to do it just seems kind of crazy.
So in that sense, it becomes a tactical necessity.
It's also part of him.
It's the furniture of his mind.
I mean, if you go back to his posts going back to like 2007 or 8, you know, you have, you know, you'll have Beyonce, you'll have something going on with Whitney Houston.
unidentified
He irresistibly has to comment.
You know, Ariana Huffington, you know, her husband left for a gay man.
One more from Tax Network USA, and then we will talk about the oncoming communist disaster in New York City.
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All right, so according to Polymarket as of this morning, communist, I would say, jihad adjacent, Zorhan Mamdami, is likely to be the next mayor of New York City.
I want to show you one clip that we showed you earlier in the week of him on the view and then an ad he put up yesterday, which you might actually need a bucket to puke in.
Well, everyone should get your bucket now while we show you the view thing, because you're going to need it.
But first, here he is, Sarah Haynes on the View, asking him a bit about Hamas and all that stuff.
unidentified
Just this week, you were evasive with a reporter about condemning Hamas.
Given New York has the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, why should voters who see this as a moral red line trust your clarity and judgment?
An opportunity to just clear up, I think, a number of misconceptions.
You know, first and foremost, you're right.
I am running to be the mayor of the city, and this city will be the focus of my administration, ensuring that we make this a city everyone can afford and everyone knows that they belong to.
And also, millions of New Yorkers, myself included, care deeply about what's happening in Israel and Palestine.
And so to be very, very clear, of course, I condemn Hamas.
Of course, I've called October 7th what it was, which is a horrific war crime.
And of course, my belief in a universality in international law is also the same set of beliefs that have led me to describe what's happening in Gaza as a genocide.
Because what we see is a war crime being answered with war crimes.
And what we see is every single hour, the Israeli military killing a Palestinian child for close to two years.
And it's a horror that many New Yorkers feel so deeply.
I mean, the amount of words to just give drivel, utter drivel, but I would say more than anything.
First off, I don't think he in his heart condemns Hamas at all.
I don't think he is upset about what happened or anything else.
I think he's going to be horrible to the Jews, all that stuff.
Okay, people get that.
But his comment about the International Criminal Court strikes me as that should be completely disqualifying to be a member of the United States government at any level.
If you are a member of the United States government, you swear an oath to protect the laws of the United States of America, not an international criminal court which holds no jurisdiction.
But it's packaged with his half-whisper and all of his fancy language.
I mean, the kind of, there's a sort of suave style that he uses, which conveys to me this, that, you know, it's part of the reason I think we were very blind to the threats from communism in the past.
We always expected that they would come in the form of a Stalinesque guy with a heavy overcoat speaking in a Russian accent.
If Jihad comes to America, it's going to look like Mamdani.
You know, I hesitate to say, but if it comes with a right-wing endorsement, and as you know, even Tucker's been talking somewhat more benignly about Sharia, it's like safe streets, who wouldn't want that, you know?
So again, gee, if jihad comes to America, it will be a chubby, all-American young guy talking about it and making it sound like it's as American as apple pie.
The underlying and insidious fallacy of all this, of course, he's doing a moral equivalence, right?
Your war crimes over here, we don't want to do war crimes to, but think of it more like this.
If somebody does a home invasion on you and they destroy your house, they kill your wife, they rape your daughter, they blow the place up, and then they run away and you desperately grab your gun, you chase them, they all jump into a van.
And then they all come out with their own families and they put it in front of you and they go, you can't shoot because that would make you a murderer.
And so what's going on here, and I look at it this way, it is the bad people putting the good people in an impossible position.
It is the dragon, to use the meme of my film, it's the dragon making good, putting good in an impossible position in its battle against evil, even though it's very obvious that you, the home invader, are the one who is putting your family in jeopardy.
You are making them human shields.
You are responsible for what happens to them.
All this is kind of like swept over or swept under the rug by Mamdani.
So the jihadis in Syria and Afghanistan don't look like him, but he is their export.
And In that way, and so jihad is coming to America, but it's coming to America in American jeans and an inverted baseball hat.
It's grotesque, and it's obvious what they're doing.
I would liken that actually to the previous clip where whatever he said, where the women start applauding in the back, you know, what was it that they applauded?
I mean, here, you know, we've criticized the Democrats and said they don't know what they're doing.
Part of the ingenuity of the Democrats is that they are able to ruin cities and yet convince the residents of those dilapidated ruins to keep them in power so that they can do some more.
Now, that's not easy to pull off, right?
It's like empty buildings, homeless guys on the street, people picking your chicken wing off your restaurant, your blade at a restaurant.
You think people would be like, enough.
We don't want that.
And then Republican cities, I mean, I went to Chattanooga to give a speech a few months ago.
You know, I always say on the show, there's nothing new anymore.
There's nothing, we don't see anything that inspires you or anything.
I really, really enjoyed it.
I also loved the fact that you're releasing it on locals, and you've released your last couple of films on locals, which is going to be locals and rumble.
So, but that a piece of technology that I created then became the avenue that you use to release these films is unbelievably meaningful to me.