Tucker Just Crossed a Red Line & Betrayed Conservatism | Dinesh D’Souza
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All right, Dinesh D'Souza.
What brings you to Hungary, my friend?
My first time here.
It's kind of a wonderful place with a great history, and yet it's been somewhat sidelined in Europe for a long time.
And now I think on the verge of a big election, they have a chance to establish themselves as a conservative beachhead in Europe, which is needed.
Europe has become so decadent across the board that to find a little outpost that has that what we and Mayor call the pioneer spirit, very encouraging.
And Victor Orban was on this morning, and at the first glance, the guy looks like he's a, you know, he's like a salesman.
Yeah, he's just some kind of a guy who owns seven Dennis.
But then you realize that this is a guy with not only great political savvy, but I think he's got the shrewdness to realize that you have to win not just the political war, but the cultural war.
And his party fights the cultural war.
I mean, they have think tanks, they've got publications, they don't concede permanent authority culturally to the left.
Yeah.
It must be very refreshing, as it is for me, for you to come to a city that is as clean and pleasant as Budapest.
I mean, you travel probably more than I do.
I mean, to just come to a place that's working, you don't have a lot of that in Europe, and we have less of it in the United States than we used to.
Yeah, and it seems like the people here have patriotic attachment to their country, and they are.
They're fighting for it.
It's nice to see that spirit in the people.
And of course, this conference brings a lot of the right wing from all over Europe.
And so you run into the guy from Estonia and the guy from, you know, and what's cool about it is that those guys, I mean, the left does this so routinely that they're coordinated globally.
The right is not.
I remember going back to the Reagan years, you know, you'd find some commonality with the right-wingers in England, right?
But if you met a right-winger in France, you felt like you're not even on the same planet with that guy, because that guy's talking about throwing an altar.
Why the French Revolution was a mistake.
And so the European right seemed very alien to us.
But I think now there's a mega movement that is global.
No, and it clearly has all circled around the immigration issue.
But let me, since I've discussed that with almost everyone else, and that's what much of the conference has been about, let me ask you something that you and I have been focused on back home, which is some of the infighting on the right.
It hasn't really leaked into this, which has been nice.
But we're seeing some, you know, people are calling it the podcast wars or whatever now, you know, Tucker and some of these other people have become.
You've been pretty outspoken on this stuff.
You have to be because, you know, it started out as a fight over Israel and it started out what seemed to me a very distasteful, unseemly,
malicious attack on the Jews and on Israel.
I did not expect to see the second phase of it, which is now in full flower, and it is a taking the side of the radical Muslims.
I mean, not just taking the side of Islam, taking the side of the radical Muslims.
I mean, if you look at the Iranian regime and what it represents, it doesn't even represent Iran.
The mullahs will happily say it's about Islam.
It's not about Iran.
And so defending them Makes nonsense of what the right has been talking about in foreign policy for half a century.
Because Iran, going back, first of all, Iran represents radical Islam getting a hold of a major state.
It's been a thorn in the side of America and the West for 50 years.
And so this is well understood by a guy like Tucker, maybe less so by some of the others, but Tucker for sure.
And so the willful repudiation of the conservatism that Tucker himself represented along with us for many years is eerie and disturbing at a very personal as well as ideological level.
Do you think in some way the hyper-libertarian political position always ends up siding with America's enemies almost by accident in some cases?
Like if you were trying to give the most generous version of this to some of these guys.
I think that may be true.
And that would explain a guy like Rand Paul.
Right.
But it doesn't explain a guy like Tucker.
Because, you know, if you flash back to the Reagan years, Reaganism was based on three principles.
One, the world is a dangerous place, and it has a lot of bad guys in it.
And we need peace through strength to deal with the bad guys.
We need to be strong.
Free markets in domestic policy and an appreciation for civic order, civic virtue, traditional lifestyles in social policy.
Tucker was on board with all three.
So if he had come out of the Murray Rothbard Rand Paul tradition, then I would say, all right, that's where he's always been.
But this would be a new discovery for him.
Do you think we can end on this?
Do you think there's anything Donald Trump should do right now to heal some of this?
Or does he just need a big win in Iran and a big win on the economy and a couple peace deals and then he can sort of sail towards the midterms and feel good about everything?
I think that the chance for any kind of personal diplomacy with Tucker, Candace, and the others is probably past.
Yeah, yeah.
So Trump has really two choices.
He can ignore them or he can crush them.
I'm not sure it is, he needs to do more than he already has.
He's taken, I think, a pretty clear stance.
And the Tucker play, we've talked about this a little bit, you and I privately, may be post-Trump.
It may be aimed at steering the Republican Party via JD Vance in a different direction post-28.
It seems to me that it's going to be, it has to be anti-Vance in a weird way because I don't see JD abandoning the president.
So that means Tucker's got two and a half years to hit JD, too.
Yet that's not conventionalism on that, but it just seems weird.
I don't see how JD abandons Trump on this.
I don't think he can.
And already the ground seems to be shifting, at least to some degree, toward Rubio.
And so for JD to be secure in that position, he needs to be in the Trump lane.
I totally agree.
But his resolute silence, if I can use that phrase, so far, makes you think that he is not sure what to do.
And too much indecision, I think, will cost him going forward.
Unless Tucker really wants JD to stick with Trump so that he can take him out.
Well, the idea of Tucker becoming the president, I have always seen it as absurd and far-fetched.
I mean, Tucker has a better shot at being the next supreme leader of Iran.
Well, that one might be in the work.
You know, they're running out of people.
The list is getting pretty short of candidates, so it is possible.
It is possible.
Yeah.
Good to see you, Mother.
Good to see you.
Okay.
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