All Episodes
Previous Next
Oct. 19, 2023 - Viva & Barnes
01:15:14
Interview with Dinesh D'Souza - His New Documentary "Police State"! Viva Frei Live!
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good afternoon, everyone.
It's a twofer today.
This morning I was live with Vivek, and this afternoon...
He's been on the channel once before.
We've met in person before, correct?
Or does it feel like we have?
I'm actually not sure.
But I know I've been on your show.
So these days, it's a little hard to say.
It merges into one big movie.
I find myself...
People come up to me sometimes and they recognize my voice from a film and they act like they know me.
And it's because they sort of do.
The weird thing is people who follow, they do know you.
They know more about you.
And you sort of...
Forget that out there people know who you are and you don't necessarily know who they are.
Not in a bad way, but everybody who doesn't yet know who Dinesh D'Souza is.
Dinesh, you were on for a sidebar, was it about a year ago, I want to say, with Barnes?
Yeah, that's right.
It was 2,000 mules.
We were talking about elections and that's right.
Well, for people who don't know me, I'm a writer for most of my career.
I've written more than a dozen books, and now I make documentary films.
This new one, Police State, is number seven.
So I've been at it for about a decade.
Hard to believe.
But this one has got a sense of urgency to it because of the things that have been happening in the country.
I mean, the statement I make about it is it's not a film I've ever wanted to make because I never wanted America to be a country where this kind of a film needed to be made.
For those who don't know, I mean, 2,000 Mules documented, especially in light of the news today, you heard that Sidney Powell has pleaded guilty to one small misdemeanor charge.
The Kraken that was supposed to be delivered and a lot of the statements made by Sydney at the time, you documented the actual chicanery, not servers in Germany, not all this nonsense.
What was the thesis of 2000 Mules?
Well, 2000 Mules was an attempt to expose a very particular voter fraud scheme that was carried out in the swing states.
Carried out in the urban areas of the swing states using these so-called mules or delivery men, if you will.
And the genius, I think, of the approach is that it didn't rely on supposition or anomalies or even affidavits, all of which raised the question, well, who made the affidavits?
How do we know we can trust them, etc.?
This was relying on the evidence of cell phone geotracking.
If a mule goes from one dropbox to another, to another, to another to drop off votes, now the reason they go to multiple dropboxes, they don't want to put in 200 votes in one box where it'll become obvious that there was a vote dump, so they put in 5 here, 8 there, 6 here, is that their cell phone tracks them, and it not only tracks the movement, but it tracks the fact that they stop at these dropboxes for designated periods of time, and then there's some surveillance video.
Not enough, I wish there were more, but where you go to the surveillance video, you see these guys, and they They're looking around just like someone would do if they were doing something fishy.
They've got backpacks, which are evidently full of ballots.
They pull out sheafs of ballots, start stuffing them, and you can see this.
I mean, this is the beauty of putting this in a film, is it's like watching the guys break into Fort Knox, and you catch them in the act.
So, I'm very proud of that film.
I think it exposed a real problem.
And this film, in some senses, is kind of a natural...
Follow up.
It's a different topic, but it encompasses that topic.
Well, I mean, that's because you go from 2000 mules, how the 2020 election was fortified.
And, you know, it was this is what you illustrated was described in that Time magazine article, how the fortification of 2020 occurred versus how it looks like it's going to occur in 2024, which is weaponizing, as far as I'm concerned, all aspects of the government, you know, prosecution, judiciary to ostensibly keep one of the main leading candidates off the ballot.
Now, the new documentary is Police State.
It's pretty self-explanatory, but it goes through a number of, you know, the main prime examples of where the state has seemingly gone too far.
Describe the idea.
Well, the broad landscape of it is this, and that is ever since I came to America as a teenager and first learned about America, I thought of America as the epitome of the free world.
And then there's the unfree world, which at that time was mainly the Soviet Union and the Soviet Empire.
But of course now we have police states like North Korea, China, to some degree Iran, certainly Cuba, Venezuela.
And I said to myself, well, what are the common defining characteristics of all these places?
They have mass surveillance.
They have systematic censorship.
They have indoctrination and propaganda in the schools and in the media.
They're one-party states, which is to say, not that they have no opposition, because they allow opposition.
They even have elections.
China has elections.
Iran has elections.
But it's a controlled opposition that is subordinate to the regime.
Then you have political prisoners.
And so as I go down this kind of roster, I say to myself, whoa.
All these things are to one degree or another now present right here in the United States.
And that gave me the big question for the film.
Are we becoming a police state?
So Trump is part of that, but it's much bigger than Trump.
And as you describe the criteria of a police state, I'm checking off the boxes of Canada as well.
They say it's not a police state yet because you can still vote.
You can still leave your house, just not after curfew.
And then, you know, I always say the analogy is history doesn't repeat, but it tends to rhyme, and it doesn't have to be the same distance, but it's in the same direction.
And so you, I mean...
When does this idea come up?
Because we've all been complaining about what seems like a bigger and bigger government with more and more surveillance and doing worse and worse politicized things with it.
When do you get the idea for this documentary?
Well, I thought of it as a lot of times my ideas come out of personal experience.
And so when I first discovered America, of course, the first thing that struck me is the abundance, the opportunity, the upward mobility for someone like me coming from a poor country, India.
But the second thing I noticed was that there are these entrenched freedoms that are in the Bill of Rights, and they are supposed to be non-negotiable.
In other words, the right to free speech, the right to assemble, the right to conscience, to religious freedom, the right to petition the government and complain, equal rights and equal justice under the law.
And the idea of the founders is that these are unalienable, which is another way of saying that majorities can't take them away.
And yet we fast forward to now and I say to myself, which of these rights is now completely secure?
None of them.
None of them.
So I say, we're living in a different America.
It's the beginning of political wisdom to recognize that because we have to recognize our situation in order to be able to roll back the police state.
So we're not rolling back the Soviet Empire over there.
We're rolling back the police state right here.
And that's really the urgent task, I think, facing us as a country.
Now, I've seen the documentary, and without giving it all away, because people are going to go see it.
Actually, technical questions before we even get into it.
It is being aired for the first time on...
The 23rd and the 25th, or is it the 21st and the 23rd?
No, it's the 23rd Monday and the 25th Wednesday.
We have bought out hundreds of theaters.
This is kind of my new strategy of releasing a film.
We've bought the whole theater out, and if you go to the website, which is policestatefilm.net, you can't buy the tickets, by the way, in Fandango or just show up at the theater.
You've got to go to policestatefilm.net, put in your zip code, boom, the theaters will come up around you.
It's fun to see this movie in the theater.
It's very cinematic.
It's made for the theater.
If you can't go to the theater, then on Friday, October 27th, there's a virtual premiere.
You can watch from home, full screening of the film, live Q&A with Bongino and me to follow.
And after that, the film is going to be available for streaming.
In fact, it'll be exclusively on Rumble, not this, but next weekend.
And so you can buy it right off of Rumble, watch it.
So that is the sort of strategy of releasing the film.
but Policestatefilm.net is a one-stop shop right now to get tickets.
Okay, I'll put that link under the description afterwards.
Policestatefilm.net.
And yeah, I watched it off my iPhone.
I appreciate that it's cinematic.
Bongino is sort of the anchor character throughout the...
Character.
He's the anchor documentarian throughout, in addition to you.
We were talking before, you know, nothing in police state is new to me, with the exception of one of the stories which we'll talk about, but it goes through all of the, I say, what, five, six, seven of the big incidents.
I want to say this started with the Patriot Act after 9 /11, but I'm young, I'm ignorant, and maybe it started earlier.
When do you think America started taking the casual drive down the totalitarian way?
I mean, there are people who would, this is a debate about this, and some people would say that this goes back to the days of Hoover, it goes back to Watergate, some people would say it goes back to Ruby Ridge, and there are certain sort of echoes from those things.
So, for example, when Hillary Clinton said recently, you know, these Trumpsters are, they're cultists and they need to be deprogrammed.
See, some conservatives were like, there she goes again, basket of deplorables.
But see, I heard it in a little more chilling way, because when I saw...
What happened at Waco?
I saw a lot of Americans who were uneasy because you have buildings burning, families inside.
But they're like, but you know what?
Those guys are kooks.
They're cultists.
They're wacko.
They're not like us.
So, to me, this rhetoric of cultism is a rhetoric of dehumanization.
And it can lead to very bad things.
Incarceration.
It can lead to Waco.
Obviously, in the Nazi case, we know where that led.
But I also agree with you.
And I think the film sort of takes the position that things really got going after.
When a lot of people, and I'm sorry to say me included, said, we have to give the government these enhanced surveillance powers and other powers.
We need to collapse some of the old distinctions between, let's say, intelligence and investigation on the one hand, which was the real job of the FBI, and criminal prosecution on the other, which was considered separate.
We have to blend these things together.
And there were people then, Rand Paul, Ron Paul, you know, who warned us, you give the government this kind of power, it's going to, not just it can be, it will be abused.
And of course, the abuses, I think, began in the Obama years, but they have dramatically escalated in the Biden years.
Look, I want to say Alex Jones was definitely on that bandwagon of criticizing the Patriot Act.
Do you remember, I mean, the Pauls, or Rand Paul, Ron Paul, I forget which one.
Do we remember who else at the time was sounding the alarm on the risks of the Patriot Act?
There were some of the libertarians who were doing that.
Now, the left was doing it, but they were doing it from a very different point of view.
They were doing it from the point of view of you're targeting Muslims, and this is a kind of Islamophobia.
But interestingly, there's a fellow named Trevor Aronson who's done a really good job from the left of exposing the way in which the police agencies of government literally would entrap Muslims.
And I'm actually right on board with him because his point is that after 9-11, the FBI expected...
All these agencies, the DHS newly created, expected a massive surge of foreign terrorism that would justify continuing massive budgets.
But when they found that maybe the U.S. airstrikes and so on had kind of decimated Al-Qaeda over there, that these attacks were not being replicated, they suddenly realized We actually need to manufacture some terrorism right here at home because otherwise people are going to say, why are we taking off our shoes?
Why are we going to all these lengths?
And so they started the entrapment game.
Now the entrapment game began in a kind of subtle way because it would begin with people who really did hate America.
They'd find, let's just say, three guys at NYU who are like, we want to kill America!
And then the FBI informant was trained to sort of seduce them into advancing the idea.
Hey, listen, if you're going to strike at America, why don't you join ISIS?
The guy's like, man, I can't join ISIS.
I mean, I don't even have a passport.
And they go, well, what if we made it available to you to get a passport?
Well, I don't know what to do.
Well, what if we told you there's a training camp going on in Pakistan, and you have any money?
Only got $400.
Well, what if we give you some money, and you'd have $1,000, and we buy you an air ticket?
Think of what's going on here.
They're luring this guy to advance a scheme that he would...
He should not have advanced on his own.
He has neither the means nor even the wits to do it.
And then the moment before he gets on the plane, 10 agents are there to bust him.
The media has been alerted.
And then there's a press conference.
We're amazing.
We busted this amazing plot.
And so on.
This kind of nonsense.
I mean, and quite honestly, you know, the left was onto this.
Some of these guys, like Trevor Aronson.
The problem is that...
From the point of view of the left, once they started targeting January 6th protesters, the Whitmer kidnapping, using the same playbook, all these guys on the left went silent.
Well, it's true in retrospect.
We just covered a lawsuit.
I forget the name of it, but it was basically a judge came out and said, the level of entrapment here is like a made-for-TV movie.
You find vulnerable people, give them money that they didn't have, and you goad them into doing something that they never would have done but for.
And then you had the war, and I guess, you know, people felt safe for a little while.
It does lead you to believe as to whether or not playing history backwards.
9-11 gave rise to all of that state surveillance power, and then...
Okay, now, in the movie.
It was one of the ones that actually I was not familiar with.
It was a reenactment, but it was replicated based on actual transcripts of the guy who...
Who was it?
He met someone from...
Yeah.
The case involves a group called the Liberty City Seven.
This is a bunch of guys in Florida.
And they're led by this guy who's kind of a religious seeker, spiritual guru type, but also a bit of a scam artist.
And he meets this Muslim guy who presents himself as a sort of senior figure in Al-Qaeda.
And so this guy discovers that the Muslim guy has money.
And the Muslim guy basically says, we got $50,000 on offer for somebody who's willing to do a big job.
So this guy's like, well, what do you mean?
And the guy's like, well, you know, it has to be big.
And so we recreate this.
And there's a...
Almost an element of comedy to it, but of course it's a tragic comic scene because what's happening is this guy is trying to put a scam on Al-Qaeda and collect the 50 grand and do nothing.
So he comes up with all this exaggerated, absurd stuff.
I'll blow up the Sears Tower.
The Sears Tower will fall into the ocean and create a tsunami.
And the FBI guys are recording him.
But this is how devious they are.
They realize that when you go before a jury, a jury may be skeptical.
A jury may go, well, how do we know this guy really?
So guess what they do?
They tell him, listen, before we give you the money, you have to take the Al-Qaeda oath.
So this guy...
If I may stop you, the entire scene, though recreated, it's based on the transcripts of the audios, correct?
So it's not...
A lot of it is the exact...
The oath is actually what the exact oath he took.
In terms of the description of what this guy was going to do, he's like, I'll blow up the Sears Tower, it's going to fall into the water, cause a tsunami, kill a million people.
Which was this...
And he probably came up with that off the top of his head because the Al-Qaeda guy kept telling him it needs to be big.
And of course, what was really going on here, of course, is he's trying to scam Al-Qaeda.
Little does he know that the Al-Qaeda guy is an FBI informant and that the FBI is scamming him for its own purpose.
They want to frame this guy.
And in fact, he's out now, but he served.
A long sentence.
What year was that in?
This was in the short aftermath of 9-11.
Amazing.
Okay, so now you're making this movie about the police state.
You have your sort of your mental guideline, your framework in terms of what a police state looks like.
What are some of the examples that you highlight in the movie?
Well, I wanted to show two things in the movie.
One is I wanted to show informants.
I think the ordinary American can see these bad things happening but kind of doesn't know how they work.
And how they work is actually very tricky because how they work sometimes defies explanation.
I mean, think, for example, to think of an anomaly, think about the thousands of journalists and hundreds of news organizations that worked together to suppress the Hunter Biden story.
Now, if this was a Stalinist regime where the government controls everything, I can totally see how that would happen.
The order comes down.
Nobody covered the Hunter Biden story, right?
If it was Goebbels, he would be the propaganda minister.
He lets everybody in the press know anybody who covers the Hunter Biden story is going to be arrested by the Gestapo.
You would think, and again, applying libertarian theory, that there would be some rebel writer for the Dallas Morning News or the Sacramento Bee who goes, you know what?
If everyone doesn't want to cover the Hunter Biden story, they're idiots.
I'll go out front.
I'll cover it.
I'll have the credit.
I will get the biggest story of the year.
But it's very interesting that no one did that.
And not counting the New York Post.
None of them did that.
And in fact, they worked to suppress the New York Post story.
And that tells you that the amount of sort of, it's not a conspiracy in the sense that they didn't get on a morning Zoom call, right?
They didn't all say, okay, let's agree.
None of us will do it.
They were more like birds in a flying formation going to Florida.
They're not openly talking to each other.
Maybe they're getting signals from the bird flying to your right, but they're operating in a sort of unified formation.
So, to come back, the film shows how the police state is built, how it functions.
But the other type of person in the film is, I wanted to show a lot of ordinary guys who are going about their business.
And they feel the hot breath of the police state or what Orwell calls the boot stamping on the human face.
And a film can do this with unique power because it doesn't just tell you.
It shows you.
It takes you there.
And because there's going to be guys who go, Dinesh, you know, I'm not Trump.
And, you know, I didn't go in the Capitol on January 6th.
And I pay my taxes.
I'm a law-abiding guy.
Nothing's going to happen to me, Dinesh.
And I got to say, well, don't be too sure.
In fact, your premise is completely wrong.
People just need to look north to know that that's not the case.
You don't have to even have gone participated in the Ottawa protest.
If you donated to make political contributions to a, what I always highlight was a federally incorporated not-for-profit, you're on a list.
You're susceptible to having your bank account frozen.
So people think, it's never going to be me, I'm never going to be David Koresh at Waco.
And then lo and behold, it's some grandmother up in Alaska who came down to D.C. to speak her voice with her feet.
Hold on.
The example that we were just talking about.
Oh my goodness.
We were talking about the laptop story.
Oh yes.
Everyone's familiar who's watching now is familiar with that story.
But when I say like corruption doesn't require the briefcase anymore, it doesn't even require the emails because everybody knows what the collective intent is.
But there are overlapping players in these institutions that facilitate this migration, so to speak.
You highlighted some of them in the documentary.
The overlapping players who make their way from intelligence into the media.
Can you elaborate on that?
Yeah.
I mean, the apparatus of censorship is very interesting because, again, we are operating in a society where we've got a public sector and a private sector.
And the octopus of censorship stretches across both.
So that it involves academia, the media.
The digital platforms, non-profit groups, and the government.
And first of all, there's a lot of traffic between these places.
Academics end up in the Biden administration.
People leave the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.
Then they become lawyers for Twitter.
So we show all that in the movie.
But just to simplify it, an academic who studies disinformation, let's say at Yale, is making a list of the 500 greatest purveyors of disinformation.
These idiots are spending all their day...
You know, reading the tweets of people like you and me, and then they go, okay, you know, we got all these guys on the list, and the list goes over to the Biden regime, and they separated by topic.
So, you know, there are like 40 agencies involved.
So, if you're doing election misinformation, it goes to CISA, the cybersecurity group.
If you're doing health disinformation or misinformation, it goes to CDC.
So, you've got this massive network of organizations.
Now, they don't want to openly censor, because if they go to the digital platforms and threaten, So
So what I'm getting at is you've got this incestuous, symbiotic relationship between multiple organizations all toward the same objective, as you say, and unraveling this There was a video of the Election Integrity Project or Election Integrity Partnership with the EIP talking about basically saying the quiet part out loud how we're doing what the government can't do directly.
And people say, but they get comfortable with, if it's not, you know, if I'm not messing around, it's never going to come to me.
And then this is the old poem from World War II.
At first, they came for the union workers, and I said nothing.
Eventually, they come for everybody.
Something you flesh out in the documentary, which I think is a fascinating question, people think of police states, and they think of safe states.
I mean, I don't know what the crime rate above and beyond government crime is like in North Korea, but you presume it's going to be safe, and at the very least, they'll use all of these tentacles of power to ensure actual security, whereas...
You know, not that it's the end of the world in America, but in some cities it's pretty darn close.
How do you reconcile?
Or the argument is, if we live in a police state, which we don't because there's crime everywhere, they would use it to suppress crime.
What's the response to that?
Well, first of all, I'm delighted you bring this topic up because what I try to do in the documentary is break some new ground in raising issues that really aren't even on the horizon.
So one of those issues, for example, and we can talk about it if you like, is how does a police state corrupt an institution?
How do you get an FBI agent to smash into an old woman's apartment, wrestle her to the ground, pull her down the stairs, handcuff her, you know, pull her into the street where her neighbors are horrified, humiliate her like that?
How can you get a normal guy who has a family himself and kids and, you know, lives in a three-bedroom house to do that?
And so part of the genius of the police state is to bureaucratize those kinds of things and get good people to do bad things.
So that's one interesting issue.
I was going to say, my answer to that would have been get the good people to leave by enacting policies like...
Defund the police where you make it impossible for the good ones to do their job and all you're left with are the bad ones who are willing to do the dirty work.
So they do that.
But the other thing that they do, I think, which is very clever, is that they define very bad tasks, not in terms of the ultimate goal, which would make people recoil, but in an operational sense.
Let me give you an example.
The sort of Nazi equivalent, if you will, is you don't say we're killing the Jews.
We just say you're running the trains.
Your job is to make the trains run efficiently.
You're a trains guy, right?
With the FBI, the equivalent is this.
It's basically saying to the FBI guy, listen, you don't worry about the grandmother.
That's not your problem.
The courts will deal with that.
Your job is to make an arrest.
And the way we do that is we've got to go early in the morning because we need the element of surprise.
We don't want someone coming to the door with a gun.
So this is our procedure.
And if you follow this procedure...
You're showing that you're a good FBI man.
You're showing that you deserve a bonus.
You're showing that you recognize that our big threat is January 6th and not, say, child trafficking or, you know, ISIS in America.
Or the border.
Or the border.
Yeah, don't worry about the border.
We've got the border under lack of control, let's say.
And so this is how you retire with a pension.
This is how you are seen as a team player.
So think of all these just normal mundane motives that are being recruited for bad ends.
The question that you raised was about the border.
And how do you reconcile?
Not about the border, but a crime.
Crime in general.
Yeah.
Because, see, normally police states are safe, right?
You can't go in Beijing and go up to someone in the subway and start pummeling them.
You know, the cops will show up and beat you to a pulp and carry you away.
So police states normally promise safety.
The reason our police state doesn't do that, I believe, is our police state is a police state in the making.
It's a police state under construction.
Now, if we had a full-fledged police state, The police state, I'm fully convinced, will not only turn on these criminals, but it will turn on them with a vengeance because the police state won't need them anymore.
Right now, the police state needs one party, and this is the left, the Democrats, to help to build the police state.
And I believe that's why they have an open border.
Because think about it.
If you can let in 30 million people, let's just say over the next 10 years, you have altered the demographic and the political landscape of the country.
You have taken a country that is 50-50, let's say, until So now you have a strong enough political base that you can do kind of what FDR could do, by the way, between the 30s and 1980.
You have essentially, you're unopposed politically.
You've got a token opposition.
Except the Democratic Party then wasn't gangsterized, and it is now.
That's the big difference.
So that, to me, is why they have an open border.
And right now, the police state...
Police states are initially concerned with political criminals, not street criminals, because the political criminals endanger the police state and the street criminals don't.
That's why I think they're not too worried about crime in the cities.
What they're really worried about is parents objecting at school board meetings.
They really care about pro-life activists.
They care about what they call the MAGA types.
I mean, they've created, as you saw from that Newsweek article, a whole category of people.
I mean, the fact that they can do this in a free society so brazenly, where you try openly to lock up the leader of the opposition party.
Again, you know, if they had done it on, let's say they had said, okay, Trump, you know what?
You've held on to these classified documents.
You're too stubborn.
You never gave them back.
We have a single charge of retaining classified documents.
I'd be like, okay, let's look at the merits.
But when you have 90 plus charges, it's like, it's a shotgun, right?
We'll get him in D.C. If we can't get him, we'll get him in Florida.
If not, we'll get him in Georgia.
We'll get him in New York.
And if we can't get him on the criminal, we'll wreck his business.
I mean, this is like classic police state thuggery.
And the left can't see it.
But if it was happening in another country, let's just say it was happening in Poland to, you know, a guy named Tromsky, you know, the left would be like, that's an authoritarian state.
What it is, what I'm witnessing is it's the no true Scotsman fallacy, but applied inversely.
Like, it happens in Russia, where they lock up political adversaries, they lock up journalists.
And there they say...
Totally unjust.
It's the sign of a dictatorship.
It's happening here, and they say, well, it's justified because the journalist who I – Stephen Horn, who I just interviewed, who's going to be sentenced – I don't think he's been sentenced yet, but was convicted of being – At the Capitol Hill on January 6th, documenting it as an independent journalist convicted.
And they say it's totally fine.
He's guilty.
And when Biden goes after his political rival, if it were Russia, it would be authoritarian regime.
Here it's justified.
And it's the moral relativism that everyone justifies their tyranny to themselves because it's benevolent.
But, I mean, it's not that they don't realize it.
I think that they...
They like the power and think it would never be used against them as an individual so long as they keep saying, I love Big Brother.
I mean, one of the scary things in Solzhenitsyn's Gulag is he, and you have to see the supreme kind of effort that it took to do this, is he recognizes the tyranny in every human being and even in the prisoners in the Gulag.
Because you would think it'd be so tempting to say the prisoners in the Gulag are the clear victims.
And the Stalinists who put them there are the oppressors.
And Solzhenitsyn does say that.
But then he says...
Unfortunately, human psychology is such that if you were to take these prisoners, victimized even though they are, and get them to rat on other prisoners, they will do it.
So Solzhenitsyn realizes that this is a line that runs through every human heart.
And it's very insightful to me because it shows that there is a lot of pleasure in tyranny.
Think of the woman who goes up to somebody in a grocery store and like starts screaming at them to put on a mask, right?
That woman in an ancient society would be like the city busybody who would be looking inside people's bedrooms, you know, and rushing to the pastor to report on this is going on on this street.
It's a mentality that takes a certain schadenfreude, a pleasure in other people's misery, and in busting them, and in the fact that you are the virtuous person who has blown the whistle.
I mean, I guess we don't want to go over the entire documentary because it should be fresh when people go, but you've gone through a number of the biggest incidents.
You have the Hunter Biden laptop story in there, which I think everybody watching now knows about.
How does one go back from this?
It seems that there might not be any going back because it might be the gambler's loss paradox where everyone's, I've given up so much already, now I just have to rationalize my losses to myself.
But when people find out that you have secret FISA courts and FBI attorneys falsifying evidence and submitting I think it can be.
I think that we are...
At a stage where the alarm, sure, needs to be sounded, and that's the point of the movie.
But I do think that if you can get through to the ordinary American, and I think there are a lot of signals, and people do know that something is amiss.
In fact, the left, I think, was really counting on the fact that just simply indicting Trump...
See, in a normal environment, you indict someone once, they have to step aside, they have to resign.
It's going to be the end of their candidacy.
And if they don't, they're just basically a dead man walking politically.
But the fact that Trump has got 91 indictments and he's surging and he's like, one more indictment and my election is assured.
I mean, only Trump could say that, right?
It's just...
Trump is the guy that scares them at a level that is unbelievable, really.
And they, I think, are convinced that Trump is Hitler circa 1933.
And this is why they justify in their own mind.
It isn't just that they believe that they are fighting on behalf of true justice on the American way by stopping this authoritarianism of the right.
So there's a kind of paradox here because when you say to people on the left sometimes...
Are we becoming a police state?
They go, yes, we are.
Dinesh, that's because of Trump.
That's because of all you right-wingers who want to suppress gay rights and shut down abortion.
That would be a police state for sure.
Well, but that's the paradox of the impasse where when you let's I mean, just as an example, gender affirming care, both parties say they're doing it to protect children.
And when you have with Trump say both parties say they're doing it to defend.
I don't know how we get past the impasse.
And when I say two films, what is it?
Two screens, one film.
When Trump says 91 indictments, one more, I'll guarantee to win.
And then the other side says 91, that's how bad he is.
When that number reflects, on the one hand, the absurdity to some, but the legitimacy to others.
I don't know how you get back from that.
You know, the problem is, let's just say Trump was re-elected.
The problem is that, let's say Trump says, I'm going to shut down the police agencies of government and I'm going to remake them from the ground up.
And people are going to say, that would leave us totally, we'd be vulnerable, we'd be at the risk of...
Not only that, but they'll go beyond that.
They'll say, here comes Mussolini.
They'll say, this is exactly what Mussolini, they dismantled the machinery of government to make it an extension of his own personal megalomaniacal ambitions.
My point is the only way to do it for Trump or anyone would be you don't start by dismantling everything.
What you start with is A fact-finding mission.
And you bring out all the smoking guns.
I mean, even with the Biden scandal right now, if you could find...
Which one, though?
No, no, no.
I'm just talking about the collecting bribes left and right from countries all over the world.
You know, what's missing here is the check made out to Joe Biden for like $17 million.
But the point is, when you put the smoking gun out there, at some point, all the defenses fall apart.
And then the left is...
Well, yeah, he was right to take the bribe, you know, and that's the point at which they fall apart because as long as they have some line of defense, like their first line of defense is there's nothing wrong here.
They went with Biden.
I've never done, you know, I've never discussed my, then they were like, we can't say that anymore.
So now it's like, this is the villainy of Hunter Biden and Joe Biden loving father as he is.
They said if he's guilty of anything, it's guilty of loving his son too much.
His son, who they say deserves sympathy for being a drug addict and yet simultaneously It's insane.
I don't think they're even going to get to the point and say the bribe was justified.
They'll get to the point, oh yeah, the 10 million was for services rendered.
What were those services?
Who knows?
That's right.
No, it's...
The country has lost its moorings, I think it's fair to say.
And I think what I'm worried about is that there are too many Americans who are sort of like the antelope or the wildebeest on the Nature Channel.
And even though the movie comes along and goes, hey, listen, here's a predator.
It's in the trees.
It has its eye on this herd called America.
It's about to jump.
People go, no, Dinesh, it's the wind.
Or, yeah, maybe it's a predator, but guess what?
It's not going to land on my back.
So, we can keep grazing placidly.
We're okay.
It's that complacency.
And the complacency is kind of understandable because historically, the United States is a very innocent country.
By that I mean there's no experience of a police state.
Americans are a little bit like Huckleberry Finn, you know.
And Huckleberry Finn, it's like every day the world is new to him.
You know, he's like, slavery?
What?
You know, this kind of goofball innocence is a defining feature of America.
Whereas in other countries, there's a much more...
There's a cynical, but on the other hand, a much more realistic appraisal of danger approaching, whereas Americans tend to believe it'll never happen here.
It is fascinating because America's a youngish country and doesn't have the thousand years of architecture history, and for good and for bad, Europe does, and in that sense maybe hasn't learned some of the lessons.
I guess it goes back in some sense to the Constitution itself, and whether or not it has been...
Relativized to the point where people do not think they have any God-given inalienable rights.
And they think that even the individual can be sacrificed for the greater good.
The Constitution, as a Canadian now, I'm understanding...
How amazing of a document it was and to have been drafted at the time in the context at the time of people who were smarter and could see into the future because of where they came from.
And now we're living with the luxuries of the last 200 and some odd years and people say, well, maybe I don't need those rights because things are good now and they'll always be good.
In my opinion, no one says that.
Here's what people do say.
What people do say is, I need those rights, but I don't mind taking them away from someone else.
The Berkeley free speech movement.
They're like, free speech!
You know, John Stuart Mill quoting all these apostles of free speech.
But the moment they take over the universities, speech codes.
Let's shut down our opposition.
So this is a human tendency.
Because think about it.
Remember when Elon Musk took these leftist journalists and he banned them on Twitter?
I think it was for like one day.
One day.
Taylor Lorenzo.
Yeah, so these people went apoplectic.
They were insane because it's not that they relativize free speech.
They want free speech for themselves.
They cannot bear a society where they are shut down in the slightest, even for 24 hours.
So they became, they were quoting John Stuart Mill, you know?
And so I think that the way that...
That we, you know, Republicans, conservatives, we've got to realize that part of the way you teach the leftist lesson is you put their rights in jeopardy.
So, for example, if attorneys general in, let's say, Texas were to bring an indictment against Mayorkas for child trafficking, Criminal indictment saying, you are fully aware that cartels are bringing kids to the border.
They're with adults and it's not their kid.
And as soon as they come over into our side, these kids are basically put into a child trafficking, because where else are they going to go?
And the Department of Health and Human Services knows this, and it's occurring in Texas.
And so you're facing now 40 years in prison for what you're doing, and you just show up, and we're going to proceed with this.
And then suddenly the left will freak out, the use of politics, you know, and this is what is necessary.
I think the founders actually understood this.
Our ultimate security is not in a paper document.
It is in the rational fear that the majority and the minority in a society have of security.
And I've been floating, promoting, contemplating this idea as well when I look at Judge Chutkin in the Trump-DC case.
I say, at some point, why are people not calling for her impeachment where they've impeached President Trump twice, acquitted twice, but they invoke those rules, they apply those rules, and then it doesn't seem to be a two-way street when played lawfully.
I mean, I guess the question is why is that?
It's for two reasons.
One is that all these people on the left operate with a completely confident sense of immunity.
You saw the scenes just from yesterday, I guess it was.
Swarming protesters inside the Cannon building while a proceeding is underway.
So all the charges that apply to January 6th defendants would apply right directly to all these guys.
Let me stop you there.
It wasn't the Capitol building.
It was the Cannon building.
No, I said the Cannon building.
No, no, no.
That was one of the distinctions.
Oh, yeah.
I have not yet looked up the difference between the Cannon building and the Capitol.
Right, exactly.
There is an ensemble of Senate and House buildings and the Capitol is right in the middle of it.
But this is what I call...
This is really an Obama technique, right?
When Obama was always hit with something, he spins back a meaningless distinction like, well, we've got to understand the difference between ISIS and ISIL.
You're like, what is the relevance of that to what we're just talking about?
There is none, but it gives you a sort of patina of sort of intellectual sophistication.
So the left is going to try to rationalize this one.
But what interested me psychologically is if you watch the faces of the people protesting, I do not see in them the slightest hint of fear.
I'm going to be in solitary confinement.
Hunted down for a year.
Exactly.
Even though who's a Jamal Bowman guy goes and pulls the fire alarm, he didn't think for one minute that anything was going to happen to him.
He was just trying to get to vote quicker.
That's right.
Or he, what is he, a school superintendent?
He did not understand the meaning of the side.
He couldn't really comprehend it.
Barnes and I were talking about this one night, and I said, yeah, that was his excuse.
And he's like, well, where did he think the vote was?
Outside?
It's going to unlock doors internally.
They do that which they would prosecute others for with immunity, with impunity.
But the thing is this.
Maybe I'm going to be too goody-two-shoes.
I wouldn't want any one of them to go to jail for any extended period of time.
And so you're not going to get the release of the Jan Sixers.
You just have to promote the incarceration of the whatever day it was yesterday.
Or the Gaza supporters.
And then you're just doubling down on the injustice, but also doubling down on the division.
Well, absolutely.
So now we are at the point of the paradox of how you deal with institutions that have become the equivalent of the schoolyard bully.
The schoolyard bully comes in, he picks on little kids and he starts punching them.
So the little kids get smart and they go, "Listen, if we gang up on this guy, meet him in a dark alley, We can get him.
But then, of course, the objection is, well, then you're becoming like the bully.
Collectively, now you're stronger than the bully, so you are the bully, and you're mirroring the tactics of the bully.
And yet, at some level, you have to say, what else is it going to take to make the bully stop being a bully, if not the fear that he is going to face kind of his own treatment, that the very sort of sword that he has drawn might be turned on him.
So, I'm not recommending that we mirror the tactics of the language.
But I am recommending a stiffening of the spine of invertebrate Republicans to say we are not in a normal situation where you can be like Jimmy Stewart and the man who shot Liberty Valance where it's like, yeah, I've heard about these outlaws, but, you know, I've got my law books and, you know, I'm going to look up their offenses and see what statutes they violate and I'm going to go contact the sheriff.
You can say that if you're in a small town with a good sheriff.
But if you go out west in a covered wagon and you've got outlaws with long guns and they want to burn your homestead, rape your wife, kill your kids, and then you say, I'm not going to go for my gun because I'm just above that.
I'm a man of principle, Dinesh, and I just don't want to add to the cycle of violence.
No, there's a moral difference between the violence of the outlaw and the preventive violence of the guy who's protecting his own ranch and his own family.
I'm saying Republicans need to recognize, listen, we've got to fight with...
Sort of enhanced creativity with a greater fortitude.
And this film is totally fearless.
I mean, I had to, in a sense, apply my own doctrine, which is, listen, don't hold back.
Don't worry.
The FBI is going to be monitoring you.
I mean, I already had my case with the Obama administration.
I've been there, done that.
And I think, you know, their goal was to destroy my career.
I realized that right away.
I realized it's not about putting me in overnight confinement.
Quite honestly, I felt like I'm like an anthropologist.
I'm going to observe the natives.
I'm going to come out.
I'm going to learn a whole bunch of stuff.
The main thing is I cannot let them succeed.
If my career goes, which is what they want, they will have shut me up.
But if my career is bigger than it was before I went in, they will have lost.
So I have to make supreme effort to defeat them in that core objective that they had.
And I think I did.
I say you're a man on a mission.
And I see Marjorie Taylor Greene.
I don't even know if it was jokingly about yesterday's protest.
Arrest them all, give us the footage, and let's go hog on them under the pretext of the law like they did on us.
We talked about this before the show, but Douglas Mackey, Ricky Vaughn, sentenced to seven months in jail for that meme, which was an election interference scheme, according to the news.
And there was someone else, Ms. Christy Wong.
I don't know who she was, but I knew that someone else had done this exact same thing.
The video's still on Twitter.
Text in your vote, or go vote on November 9th.
She had gone full MAGA.
Well then, if they're not being prosecuted, we know the system's been weaponized, which we know, but then the question just becomes, get some people who are going to say, I'll do it.
I mean...
I have the jurisdiction.
Let's go after some of their players.
Totally.
I mean, I'll give you an example closer to home myself.
I was indicted, you know, under the campaign finance laws.
You gave $20,000 to a college friend of yours who was running for office, and that's above the campaign finance limit.
Okay.
Now, Rosie O'Donnell knowingly violated the campaign finance laws.
By giving, and not only giving to multiple candidates above the limit, but she spelled her name different ways and gave different addresses so that these could not be kind of coordinated by a computer and all traced back to her.
So there was malign intent, very obviously there.
And yet, again, she did it in the confidence, I will never be charged, and of course she wasn't.
So these blatant double standards have become so obvious that we now just have to realize that from the police state's point of view, it's not a double standard.
They're just protecting themselves.
Now, the other question, I'm glad I remembered it.
With the police state, you know, in this case, because you say it's a police state in growth, has not yet mastered the actual security part of it.
What do you make after having prepared this documentary of the argument that a police state doing what it's doing in terms of direction of its resources is neglecting the actual security of the state?
And so...
You can have actual violence that occurs because of the misdirection of the resources of the intelligence community.
Is it an infinite resource, or do you think there's any legitimacy to that argument?
Oh, no.
I mean, I think, for example, I mean, look at the Hamas attack, right?
It's an intelligence failure in Israel.
I'll leave that to the Israelis.
But it's an obvious intelligence failure for the U.S. We have massive resources devoted to these agencies.
And think about it.
After 9-11, they were given power to do what?
To follow these kinds of guys.
But I mean, this was, you know, Islamic radicals.
I mean, these Hamas guys were essentially operating out of the same al-Qaeda playbook that launched 9-11.
In fact, that's why people made comparisons between, this is Israel's 9-11, so to speak.
They have taken their eye off the ball, I think, very consciously.
I mean, you can see the videos of Christopher Wray, he's testifying to Congress, he's like, we believe that the greatest threat we face is domestic extremism.
So he's even publicly stating, we are moving away from chasing down, you know, Hamas, ISIS, Al-Qaeda guys, and we're looking for ISIS in America.
And we see that, for example, in Douglas Mackey, who makes a meme, or we see that in some grandma who strolled in the Capitol for 30 minutes and didn't do anything and then walked out and was chatting, you know, amiably with the cops while she was there.
This is, I mean...
But I'm doing on my podcast, you know, I'm going through Solzhenitsyn's Gulag and Solzhenitsyn time and time again describes the craziness that is at the heart of it.
And the problem is that there's no check on the craziness because the craziness now has enough institutional momentum that otherwise reputable people who are, you know, are echoing it one after the other as if like, did I hear you say that?
Are you actually agreeing with that guy?
And what is this?
Are we in a...
It's a lunatic asylum, and at times it feels like we are.
Well, the one legal mind, Lawrence Tribe, on the internet, talking about how removing Trump from the ballot is...
Not just justified, but the correct legal theory.
In fact, constitutionally required.
We're obligated to do that.
To protect democracy, we've got to keep them off the ballot.
So, this is the Orwellian doublespeak, right?
Because, no, Dinesh, it's not that we want to go after Trump, but, you know, no one's above the law.
And you've got to just say, wait a minute, isn't Biden above the law?
Aren't the 51 intelligence officials that were openly lying about the Hunter Biden laptop, misusing their position and their power?
Are they above the law?
Every time I think about that, and I go back to the weaselly words that they used, it bears the earmarks of Russian disinformation.
They didn't say it was Russian disinformation.
They just said it looks like it would have been Russian disinformation, knowing that it wasn't.
Weasels.
And how any of them still have a job and have not been themselves.
I don't know.
What would be the...
I mean, I could think of some creative legal recourses, but yeah, preposterous.
Preposterous.
And no, I think this is the...
And I think it was interesting what you said earlier about the fact that in the end, there is a connection to 2000 mules in that election interference and election rigging is part of the goal here, although in a different way.
It's not mules.
It's not that.
But what it is, is let's take the leading candidate of the opposition party.
And if we if indicting him isn't enough, we'll try to convince.
And one step further than that, even if all of that results in him getting more popular, let's gag him.
Let's have his trial during the election cycle and limit his speech under the pretext of protecting those...
The poor staff working for these corrupt judges.
I mean, it is election interference through the use of legal force.
I mean, I don't see it any other way at this point.
I think the problem is just that, you know, so many of us now have learned, and this is a good thing, that institutions that we trusted, you know, the men in the white lab coats.
Think of it.
For years you go to a doctor and he's like, let's do eight tests on you.
You never say, why?
What are these tests?
And what is each one going to cost?
You're just like, yeah, doc, sure.
And you better, I'm going to call in a prescription.
Just take it twice a day.
Sure.
You know, there's implicit trust that you're not being lied to and that this isn't just a mercenary operation in which the hospital is trying to make money by taking out your appendix.
But now suddenly you're like, is it?
Is it really?
Because you have seen one by one from the FBI to the CDC that these institutions are willing to become ideological weapons and they're also willing to brazenly lie.
I see.
The darkest doom pill that I've had of the last three years is they're willing to let people die and they're willing to lie about it.
I don't want you to get nervous.
I'm going to get too conspiratorial.
But in terms of some of the advice that they gave or did not give, it cost people their lives.
And they're willing to do it to promote their narrative or to double down on their mistakes, which they can't bring themselves to admit for whatever the reason.
That was a dark pill.
Although, back in the day, I remember asking my doctor, why do my kids need the chickenpox vaccine?
I got chickenpox.
It's not that big of a deal.
And they said, well, it'll reduce the risks of shingles as an adult.
And I said, well, what happens if someone gets chickenpox as an adult?
And lo and behold, I was also told it was to prevent flesh-eating virus from when you scratch and cause infections.
I mean, I'm glad you brought up the virus, though, because I think that if we think about some of the way stations of moving toward a police state, by and large, if you think about it, they are events of fear.
9 /11, COVID.
Also January 6th.
So mobilizing fear is something that the left has realized is politically very useful.
And I think they discovered this, interestingly enough, with FDR in the Depression.
Because FDR had this sort of ambitious program, the New Deal.
And the New Deal was going absolutely nowhere.
And it would have gone nowhere had it not been for the Great Depression when people were suddenly like, I don't have confidence in capitalism.
Wall Street has collapsed.
So now you're willing to do things that you otherwise wouldn't be able to do.
And Democrats were like, hmm, this kind of public fear...
Either real or cultivated.
And I think this is also the power of the climate change movement.
They're hoping that the climate change will serve the same because you can't always have a virus.
COVID came along at a beautiful time for them.
But the good thing about...
Came along.
Yeah, it came along.
One thing about COVID too is that a police state under construction has to do a lot of deception, right?
It cannot openly...
Like Stalin could come up to you or his agents at the train station and just arrest you.
No reasons given.
You're just on a list.
Too bad.
Come with us, right?
But Fauci can't come out and say, so what if I created the virus through...
I funded it.
So what are you going to do about it?
He can't do that.
So what does he do?
He goes, hmm...
How about, he goes, I don't want this to come back to me.
You know, even though we've been funding this, making viruses more lethal and more contagious research, so I need to have this be, have a natural origin.
Now, the good news is that because I am the dispenser of federal largesse, I've got all these world-class virologists who are getting millions of dollars from me.
How about if I kind of suggested to them that they write a paper, don't worry about your misgivings, put out a paper saying that the virus came from a I've just come across this remarkable paper with some of the world's leading virologists.
I mean, we're watching this staged...
Propagandistic event.
He cooked up the paper himself.
And my point is, this is the kind of deception that they do.
But the reason that they do it is that they don't have a full-fledged police state.
They're not at the Stalin point when they don't have to do it anymore.
They will get there eventually, but not if this film, and not if I, and not if you, and a bunch of us have something to say about it.
As you talked about the panic, and you said 9-11, COVID.
I was just...
Going by decades in my head.
Global cooling of the 70s.
Rock and roll, suicide, self-harm of the 80s.
You remember Y2K?
Totally.
The nukes were going to be going off.
Then you get 9-11.
You got the hole in the ozone layer that was all over the place.
Well, you're forgetting the food crisis and the Club of Growth, the Club of Rome, the dissipation of the ozone layer.
Remember that?
The hole and killer bees.
You remember killer bees were going to take over and kill everybody in America.
Now that I think about it, there's multiple crises per decade to keep people in a constant state of fear, which leads them to make the most improper decisions possible.
Yeah.
Look, the thing that gives me hope with a movie is two things.
One is that a movie can navigate around the normal shoals of censorship because it's its own medium.
It's in theaters.
You can watch it at home.
You can't be blocked.
That's the beauty of it.
And if I can repeat, policedatefilm.net is the place to get the tickets for either to watch at home or to watch in the theater.
But the other thing that a movie does is it's an experience.
I mean, in fact, you keep saying...
I don't want to give away the movie.
You can't give away the movie because it's kind of like, let's say you and I were talking about the Shawshank Redemption, right?
Should it prevent anyone from seeing that movie?
No, because nothing we said about it would give you any idea of the experience of watching that movie.
Well, if you told everyone he gets out at the end and then you kind of ruin it.
Well, I mean, you can ruin the plot in that sense, yes.
But I just think that the transforming experience of a film where if in a good film you come out and you're actually...
Not just intellectually, but even psychologically.
You're a little different than you were when you went back in.
That's the power of a film.
And the fact that you can do that in 90 minutes or 100 minutes, I think, is why this is such a great medium.
It's amazing.
So you've got Dan Bongino's in it, Julie Kelly has appearances.
Who are some of the other people?
Well, the FBI whistleblowers, Kyle Serafin and Steve Friend are in it.
By the way, our FBI, we do some recreations in the movie.
Someone will describe what happened to them, and we recreate it clinically.
So our FBI director, FBI bad guy is Nick Searcy, the actor who's played in dozens and dozens of movies.
And it's kind And we were talking to Nick Searcy and it just kind of passed through my head.
What about if we get Nick?
And, of course, he was totally game for it, and he does a marvelous job in the film.
There are lots of other people.
We've got DHS whistleblowers, and we've got Zach Voorhees, who was at Google, and basically talks about the way that Google alters the algorithms to...
Program human beings.
I mean, think about it.
Can anyone with a straight face say, yeah, we're not a search engine that gives you information that you're looking for.
Our job is to program the human race.
What they described in the movie, it was where they said we can basically predict your behavior.
We know you better than your wife and we can predict your behavior.
And then I'm thinking like, holy crap, this is minority report in real life.
And there's a part of me that says, look, I want you to stop criminals as well.
And if you see people are Googling all sorts of bad things, by all means, except absolute power corrupts and absolute power corrupts.
Absolutely.
When you know that they're not necessarily going to use it on the people who are looking up how to hide a body, how to how to find a kid.
But rather, I want to vote Trump.
And how do I donate to a trucker convoy?
Then you realize how these these tools for good can and will be weaponized when there's no limits and no checks and balance.
There's a scene in the opening pages of the Gulag Archipelago.
A woman at a train station.
She is met by a friend who says, get on the train because you're on the list.
They're going to come to get you.
And the woman goes, I got to go home and pack.
So she goes to her apartment.
Of course, they're waiting for her there.
She's arrested.
But Solzhenitsyn says, you know, he goes, that is human nature.
He goes, if she had only gotten on that train, she could have disappeared in the vast Russia and they would never find her.
And it occurred to me, not today.
Today, they would find her very quickly.
And so, this is a way in which technology now makes the kind of anonymity that could be taken for granted in the middle of the last century completely impossible today.
So, technology, an instrument of liberation in some ways, but also a very convenient tool of tyranny.
Well, I mean, it's exactly what RFK Jr. said, you know, analogizing it at least when he said Anne Frank could hide in an addict, and in today's day and age, there's no hiding, took flack and apologized when even I don't think he...
needed to apologize for that, but it's absolutely true.
And then you get into, I guess it's the final tool of a police state, digital currency, or just controlling what you can do, where you can, what you can buy, and, you know, predicating the necessities of life on compliance.
We're not there yet, and in fact, no society has gotten there yet, but Orwell got there.
In the last pages of 1984, they have this guy, Winston, who was a rebel.
They got him.
And they tell him, "Hey, Winston, we are going to make you believe that two plus two is five." And he goes, no.
He's like, what Winston's thinking to himself is, I'm not going to say that.
That's dumb.
You've captured me.
You've taken my money.
You've broken my relationship with the girl.
But I'm just not going to go there.
So they torture him.
And finally, he goes there.
And he goes, okay.
He goes, I admit it.
Two plus two is five.
And this is when it turns very interesting because the interrogator who's representing Big Brother says, oh, no, Winston.
We're not satisfied.
We're not going to let you go.
Why?
Why?
Because we know that inwardly you don't believe that.
You're saying two plus two is five because you want the pain to stop, but inside you still think it's four.
We need to get there.
We need to sort of break the inside of you so that you succumb not only externally, but inwardly.
And of course, that's the horrifying kind of climax of 1984 is in the end, Winston does succumb.
And then the famous closing lines, I love, he loves Big Brother.
I think it was with a gin-soaked tear runs down his eyes and he looks up at the smirking poster and says...
He's saying farewell to his humanity, really.
That's the meaning of that.
It's like a tear because I am, in effect, no longer a human being.
Amazing.
Now, we had a limited time, so I don't want to abuse of it.
Tell everybody, well, first of all, can I see if there's any questions in Locals?
For sure, let's do it.
And we'll tell everybody where to find you as I do this.
Yeah, the website for the film, that's the one-stop shop, and you should go there.
You can watch the trailer there.
There's a bunch of other stuff there.
It's policestatefilm.net.
Again, you can't get theater tickets at Fandango.
Don't go to the theater.
Policestatefilm.net.
Put in your zip code.
It'll pull up the theaters.
If you want to watch at home, there's a virtual premiere, Friday, October 27th.
And that weekend, the 28th and 29th, the movie will be exclusively for streaming on Rumble.
So if you want to watch on Rumble, and these days, of course, you can bring the Rumble app, watch on your big screen TV.
It's going to be very easy to order with a click.
And then the movie is also on my Locals channel, and in fact is free to annual subscribers.
Now, I don't want to be rude.
I'm going to look as we're doing this.
Your Locals channel is?
My Locals channel is dinesh.locals.com, but there's also a link for the film, and it's policestate.locals.com.
Policestate.locals.com.
Technical question about making a documentary like that.
How long does it take?
And how long does it take to edit after you've shot all the interviews?
I would say this film was about six months from start to finish.
And that's a breakneck pace.
My earlier films took longer to do.
We've just gotten really efficient at it.
It's hard to make documentaries on the right because if you're Michael Moore...
You only have to do one thing.
You make the film.
Everything else is done for you.
So Michael Moore goes to a studio.
He's like, give me $10 million.
They're like, here.
He's like, okay, I'll make the film.
And then he says, here's the film.
And then they go, we have you on The View.
And then you're on Bill Maher.
And then you're on The Today Show.
And then you're on Colbert.
So for conservatives, you need to do the legal work.
You need to raise the money.
You need to make the film and recognize what makes a film good.
I mean, a good...
A good nonfiction film, a good documentary, has all the same ingredients as a good feature film.
It has suspense.
It has an unfolding plot.
It has a climax.
It has characters.
It has subplots.
So, ultimately, a film is an entertainment, and you can't forget that.
Some conservatives want to do films just for messaging.
We put a lot of messaging in our films.
But the films are...
A film is an emotional narrative.
And then you have to market the film.
So if you can't do all those things well, you shouldn't make a documentary.
The documentary was actually a little longer than I thought it was going to be, an hour and 45, and it flies by when you...
I no longer have time or patience for fiction.
And documentary, to document the times and leave that bookmark, that...
That, for the world to see for decades to come, it's an important work, and for those who don't know of some of the stories in it, it's going to blow their minds.
Working with Bongino, I happen to have met him, and I know that he is the same in real life as he is.
Intense and wonderfully authentic.
What was it like working with Bongino?
It was really, really fun.
And the reason I thought about it was I thought, here's a guy who was an NYPD officer.
Here's a guy who was a Secret Service agent.
So we're making a film, Police State.
It's something that this guy knows about.
And I wanted to have guys who are describing the police state from a position of knowledge.
Like Kyle Serafin.
Kyle Serafin, FBI agent, and actually knows the FBI procedures in and out.
Knows what motivates The DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, is 20 times bigger than the FBI.
And in fact, a lot of the censorship, in fact, a lot of the political targeting is coming out of DHS.
We don't see it there because the only DHS we see is like the TSA agent.
So we think that's DHS.
That's only one part of DHS.
So the film unravels a lot.
I think it's important for people to sort of understand this police state because people have theories about it that aren't always quite right.
Our police state has a private and a public sector dimension both.
I have a theory also that at some point the Police state or the administrative state attains a certain critical mass where there is no going back.
When you talk about all of these people, like DHS being huge, bigger than FBI, bigger than CIA, you have all of these entities whose existence depends on the government, as we've talked about earlier, so it's a make-work project.
But on the flip side also, in order to solve the problem, you've got to convince all these people to go into the private sector and they'll be better off than sucking at the government teats.
And I don't think you can do that at a given point in time, and that's where you get sort of what I believe is the capture that we're witnessing in Canada, everything dependent on the government, and no one is free to break free of the shackles of the government.
Yeah.
And one of the themes, I'm glad you mentioned Canada, because one of the themes we touch on, we not in depth, but I wanted to go beyond police state because, and I raised the issue that I call police planet.
Why?
Because I noticed in COVID, it's happening in Canada, it's happening in New Zealand, in Australia, in Europe.
And there are also eerie parallels with other countries.
I mean, if you looked at the January 6 event and compared it to what happened, for example, in the Brazilian election, there's almost a eerie similarity.
And so I realized that you've got certain forces that are collaborating on the international front, sometimes through international agencies, sometimes not, in ways that we don't even think about.
I mean, think, for example, about how do you get somebody from deep in the bowels of Central and South America to show up at the exact designated spot on the Mexican border and, He's traveled 1,500 miles.
Through multiple countries.
Presumably, I don't want to say financed on the one hand, but fed.
Well, I mean, exactly.
There's got to be an infrastructure of health, an infrastructure of mobility, an infrastructure of food.
And it turns out that there is.
It turns out that there are people providing maps.
There are people telling you where to go.
There are people telling you how to get around places that you don't want to be.
There are people who tell you what to say to the border patrol agent when they ask you.
Like, I'm seeking asylum.
No, I'm not a poor guy looking for a better life.
I am fleeing persecution.
You know, in other words, you are being coached by people whose job it is to get you through.
And so, I'm not even, you know, there are some people I was...
We talked a little bit about Ann Coulter and she was railing about, you know, people coming are illegals and so on.
And I go, well, yeah, but here's the problem.
What do you do?
Can you really blame the illegal when you've got a Biden administration that is putting out the word across Central and South America that essentially there's an open invitation?
The border is porous.
The border is porous.
Enforcement of the law is virtually non-existent.
And even, I say, an impoverished life in America is...
Probably still better than the average life in many of the countries from which people are coming.
That's assuming that there are only economically motivated actors.
If they are ill-intentioned actors, then it doesn't matter if the life is of lesser quality here.
They've got a longer-term mission which people should be concerned with.
Not to mention the fact that now, of course, with the Hamas attacks, you have to ask the question, if you're Hamas, wouldn't you say, you know, it's going to be really hard to get a thousand guys into Israel?
You've got border checkpoints, you've got, you know, all the Israeli intelligence agencies, you've got the Israeli army patrolling the small country, particularly at the border.
Why don't we try to get at least that many people into the United States?
And if they did, how hard would that be?
Surely not all the guys that they would send would be on a terror list where they could easily be apprehended.
Lots of people are going to get through.
Presumably, they have already gotten through.
And the fact that the Biden administration doesn't say, all right, let's now close the border, shows you...
The priority and the importance that there is for them to keep that border open.
They don't care if it empowers the cartels.
They don't care if there's massive child trafficking.
They don't care if Hamas is coming through.
I think that, to them, is the key to long-term political success in the United States.
That, it ensures another generation of votes.
I say, like, in Canada, they're doing the same thing.
Just a little bit different.
You know, they want to double the population of Canada by the end of the century because if you can't convince people to vote for you, you can import the next generation of voters.
That and I also think that there is power to be derived from the chaos that is caused from the destruction.
So the more crime, well, we better disarm the law-abiding citizens because that'll somehow resolve the problem of crimes committed with unlawful procured firearms.
No, there's power to be gained from the madness.
This is the 21st century police state, because think about it.
By and large, police states are walled, right?
They have a wall.
North Korea.
The Berlin Wall.
China has, I mean, you have the Great Wall of China, but China has a wall in the sense that there's not free movement in and out of China.
Police states normally don't let you come in and they don't let you get out.
It never occurred to Hitler to say anyone is welcome in Germany.
Not at all.
And so it is an innovation of police states in this century to say that it can be to our political benefit to change the composition of our country so that we can actually create the police state that we're after.
Dinesh, it's probably premature to ask you what your next project is because you're still working on this one, or at least now you're in the most important phase, which is getting awareness out.
What do you have on the mental back burner for what your next project might be?
As is the case with, you know, writers and painters and so on.
I'm hatching three or four in my head.
I'll do a film for the election next year.
I don't quite know the focus just yet.
But for right now, if I can sound the alarm on the police state, this, I think, is probably the most important thing I could be doing right now.
You'll go from 2,000 mules to 2,000 Soros-funded DAs.
I mean, that's going to be the next.
Iteration of the election, the fortification.
Make sure you control who's on the ballot.
Make sure you control who can be selected.
And my goodness, that's the ultimate fortification.
I mean, you touched on the human trafficking a bit in this documentary.
Any thoughts of delving into that for a future one?
Possibly, possibly.
The challenge here was to explain, like, what does child trafficking...
Initially, when I proposed the idea, you know, my little film team was like, well, that has nothing to do with the police state.
So I thought to myself, and this is where the film does break new ground, is it makes connections that are not obvious to people.
And this is maybe a topic for another day.
Same with January 6th.
I didn't want to just recycle what people are saying about January 6th, the double standards, the biased courtrooms and juries and so on.
We have an insight where if you fully take the insight on board, the whole incident appears in a bit of a new light.
And I'll just give you a hint of what I'm talking about.
When the left talks about the fact that the Trumpsters went in that building to stop the process, the generally accepted assumption is that the process was the certification of the election.
But in fact, the process that was going on, that the Trumpsters had no motive to stop, and in fact they wanted it to continue, was the questioning of the election.
And one after the other, Ted Cruz, respectable Republicans were going to object to Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, all the swing states, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania.
It was that process that was in fact stopped by January 6th.
And, you know, raising the old qui bono, who benefits, that was not to the benefit of the Trumpsters.
In fact, it frustrated their ability.
It was completely to the benefit of Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats and the left.
So when people say, well, what is the left's motive for letting people in the building and trying to orchestrate this event to a degree and having people infiltrators who are egging it on?
Well, the motive was it shut down the questioning of the 2020 election once and for all and allowed you guys to establish a regime of censorship.
So anybody who raised questions, even legitimate questions, The quibono in that, I mean, it's the leftists who say, who benefited or pretend that there's no ulterior motive, clear as day, to allow that to have happened.
I think it's like almost a disingenuous questioning of why would anyone let that happen?
I had on Tarek Johnson, who was a Capitol Police sergeant, former.
And, you know, in his view, he's still much more forgiving than some of us more cynical types.
He said it was clearly allowed to happen so that it could be weaponized for whatever the reason.
Inexplicable as much as other security failings are inexplicable.
It was his view that it was allowed to happen.
And then you look at what happened over the next two years, and it was the pretext for censorship, prosecution, persecution, and some of the factors of a police state in full force.
Absolutely.
Dinesh, we'll end this now.
This was phenomenal.
Everyone, so go out.
It's going to be the 23rd, the 25th.
23rd and 25th in theaters.
Two days.
Policestatefilm.net.
Not.com.
.net.
Okay.
So you can get tickets there.
Friday is the virtual premiere.
We're doing it out of this fabulous studio in Las Vegas.
Tickets in the same place.
Policestatefilm.net.
And then starting Saturday and Sunday exclusively on Rumble.
No other platform will have the film.
And you'll be able to buy it on Rumble.
If you become an annual subscriber, police state That's the locals website to join my community.
It'll also be available that way.
And then streaming, DVDs, there'll be other ways to watch the film later.
But it's good to get out front on this because I think this film is going to get people talking and it's fun if you can see the film with like-minded people because you're going to have a lot to say about it.
Or even take a few lefties to see it and try to open some eyes and say, hey, now let's analyze what's going to happen in the next year accordingly.
It's amazing.
Thank you very much.
We'll do this again sooner than later.
Everybody watching at home, first of all, thank you, Dinesh, as always.
I'll be live tomorrow, live Sunday.
We didn't even get into...
Well, we touched on it, the Sidney Powell news.
I mean, there's so much news, it doesn't end.
We'll talk about it Sunday night on the Sunday episode of Viva Barnes.
There might be some other surprise guests.
We'll see about that.
Dinesh, thank you very much.
Anytime, please come back.
Love it.
Thank you.
Everyone else, sir.
▲
Export Selection