In this episode, we have a special guest on the show to talk about the dangers of government overreach and bureaucracy. Our guest is former Virginia State Police Chief D.J. O'Brien, who has been with us for a long time and is well versed in the topics we've covered in the past.
00:00:58.000And I have a very special show for you today.
00:01:00.000I think you're going to really enjoy the topics that we've covered.
00:01:03.000And let me just before we get too deep into this, let me just tell you a little bit about some of the stories that we've covered in the past that really tie in directly to what we're going to be talking about with our guest today.
00:01:13.000We've repeatedly discussed the negative impact of government overreach and bureaucracy.
00:01:19.000We've done it when we talk about all the three-letter agencies, right?
00:01:23.000When we talk about Attorney General Merrick Garland's letter about the school boards and all the extremists, these concerned parents in Loudoun County was one of the big ones that we all talked about, but these concerned parents at the school board meetings are extremists and Need to be treated as such.
00:01:39.000And then who can forget Joe Biden going after MAGA in front of the Nazi-esque background with all of the red kind of, you know, color behind him.
00:01:50.000But you have the President of the United States singling out essentially half the country and saying that these are people that we need to be worried about.
00:01:57.000This is something that needs to be dealt with.
00:02:01.000These kind of labels and these things get thrown around all the time and they set up a system where
00:02:08.000things can go very wrong very quickly.
00:02:10.000And I've talked to you a number of times about other instances in history where that's happened.
00:02:16.000In Nazi Germany, how they kind of laid the groundwork for calling the Jews the problem, right?
00:02:21.000And the solution being, well, these people are subhuman.
00:02:25.000They're causing all of our problems, and so therefore the atrocities are justified.
00:02:29.000Or if you talk about it in Cambodia with the Khmer Rouge, they did similar things to this.
00:02:33.000Like, these people are going to be the problem.
00:02:35.000We have to take care of all of the intellectuals who want to keep us from becoming This agrarian superpower that can rule the world or whatever other group you want.
00:02:43.000Anytime you other a group and make them subhuman where they are a threat to democracy during COVID.
00:02:50.000Those are people that if they go to a hospital, they should have to stand outside and die of a heart attack because somebody else who had the vaccine is taking care of themselves and they should be treated first.
00:03:06.000Sounds a lot more like communist China than it does the United States of America.
00:03:11.000And he said, Stephen, many times talking about this, that candidates that are running for public office, not just president, but candidates in general, need to be ready to answer the question on defunding the FBI.
00:03:23.000Would you defund the FBI with all that we know now and all that you're going to learn today about the FBI and some of the things that it's doing?
00:03:30.000We need to get rid of these agencies in their current form.
00:03:34.000And for a while we talked about reform and we just feel like we're way past the ability to reform.
00:03:40.000But our next guest has been, uh, unfortunately well acquainted with government overreach and has decided to release, uh, another movie, uh, that I think is going to be really interesting and pretty impactful, uh, and a lot of fun to watch, uh, other than it scares the hell out of you.
00:03:54.000you. But here here's some highlights of the new movie Police State.
00:03:58.000Chief Division Council on D O. J. Approved the no not breach.
00:04:16.000you We want the subject to be on display.
00:04:21.000Doing the walk of shame, full visual impact.
00:06:02.000When people come in, they're used to seeing studios where maybe it's a small room and somebody gets in front of a mic and they have a nice setup, but this is a sprawling complex, essentially, to do all the stuff that we do.
00:06:13.000We discuss stuff like this that will absolutely make your skin crawl.
00:06:16.000And then we do other comedy stuff where we have people dress up as film characters and make fun.
00:06:20.000And so we kind of, it goes the spectrum.
00:06:34.000You said you have around 700 theaters right now nationwide?
00:06:37.000Yeah, we've bought out hundreds of theaters, and the cool thing is if you go to the website, put in your zip code, boom, all the theaters around you will pop up, and then it's... I made the film for the theater, so it's really fun to see in the theater, but if you can't see it in the theater, then on Friday, October 27th, we have a virtual premiere where you can watch at home the full screening of the film, and then a live Q&A with Dan Bongino and me to follow, and it's all for the price of a movie ticket.
00:07:21.000Also, it'll be available on Rumble and other platforms and DVD after all of this is done, after the premiere and after the October 27th So tell us just a little bit about this film, right?
00:07:35.000So you've obviously dealt with this and I kind of alluded to that.
00:07:40.000Tell us kind of what made you think, okay, I need to make a film about this and really expose what's going on here.
00:07:47.000Was it your personal interactions or was it that plus more?
00:07:50.000No, I would say it wasn't my own personal case, even though I sort of got an early whiff of the police state.
00:07:58.000I gotta say that in my case, which goes back to 2013, a campaign finance violation, and I did exceed the campaign finance law, I gotta say that up front, but normally it's an offense for which you'd get a slap on the wrist, a community service, or a fine.
00:08:12.000Rosie O'Donnell did the same thing, essentially, and did get the slap on the wrist.
00:08:16.000Well, Rosie O'Donnell did something actually far worse.
00:08:39.000But in a blatant way and see that's what they're looking for is the intent to break the law which was not true in my case.
00:08:45.000I was giving money to a college friend and even when when my case came up I saw it as a one-off because I just made a film about Obama.
00:08:53.000You know, I know the guy is a vindictive narcissist and I thought, oh my gosh, I should have known there's a target on my back.
00:08:59.000He's going to unleash Eric Holder and his attack dogs.
00:09:02.000I didn't see my case then as being a prelude or a precursor to what would happen to Carter Page, Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn, of course now Trump.
00:09:12.000So I didn't see the police state coming with the rapidity that it has under Biden.
00:09:19.000I think the way I think about it is I flash back to when I first came to America at the age of 17 as an exchange student.
00:09:25.000This was actually in the very late 1970s.
00:09:28.000And as I learned about America, you know, I of course enjoyed the great abundance of America and the possibilities, the upward mobility.
00:09:36.000But I also learned that this country is great because it's got this bill of rights and you've got these enumerated rights which are not open for political negotiation.
00:10:31.000Stretching across the private and public sector, both.
00:10:33.000But the film brings it home to you, I think, in a way that nothing else can.
00:10:38.000Yeah, well, and you and I talked about one of my greatest fears off-camera.
00:10:41.000I'm not sure that I'm gonna tell everybody.
00:10:43.000But it revolves around this and unjust incarceration, so...
00:10:47.000Nobody come after me for that, but I want to read a quote from you really quickly about Police State.
00:10:52.000So Police State, this is the quote directly.
00:10:54.000Police State is a movie that I never wanted to make because I never wanted America to get to a point where a movie like this needed to be made.
00:11:04.000I feel like the animal that alerts the herd to approaching danger so we can take precautionary steps before it's too late.
00:11:11.000I think that's fair because I've realized that a lot of people that do stuff like you do, whether it's people who are out there speaking up on Google—we had Dr. Robert Epstein in here—kind of felt like the same way, and that guy's the furthest thing from a Republican that you can probably imagine.
00:11:28.000Supported Hillary Clinton was definitely somebody in, you know, Bernie's camp if Bernie would be the nominee.
00:11:34.000Joe Biden was somebody that he supported as well, but he saw something that would tear at the fabric of our democracy, right?
00:11:42.000Our democratic republic could not survive if A corporation could do something like this.
00:11:47.000Now, we've focused a lot on this show talking about those big corporations and the influence they have, and you say that this kind of is an intersection of all of these different things.
00:11:55.000It's not just the three-letter agencies and the government.
00:12:46.000Well, the goal here is to do what I think a documentary can do best, which is to raise a big question about society, to frame it in the correct way, which is to say to frame it in a fair and urgent way, To allow people to see for themselves and experience an unfolding storyline or phenomenon that really gets them to look into themselves and talk to others and think about it and then ask what can be done about it.
00:13:18.000So the film creates the awareness without which people don't act.
00:13:23.000So for example a lot of people are going to say You know, I'm not Donald Trump.
00:13:27.000I didn't go in the Capitol on January 6th.
00:13:30.000I didn't get into big fights with the cops.
00:14:09.000So anyway but my point is that that that we are moving we are hurtling toward a police state and and so the the line you quoted from me being an animal giving a warning too many Americans are like the antelope or the wildebeest that basically goes oh yeah I saw that too but it's just the wind Dinesh it's not a predator in the trees or maybe it is a predator but guess what I'm gonna hope it's not gonna land on my back maybe somebody else's back Yeah.
00:14:39.000So you want to raise the awareness not just of the Republicans, and we talked about this beforehand too, because I think the audience, like our audience certainly, this should not be a surprise to them, right?
00:14:50.000It'd be a very informative movie, but I see like a lot of head bobbing in the theater if a lot of our audience is there because they'll be like, this just connects, this lines up exactly with what we've been talking about.
00:15:03.000Are you trying to reach that broader audience?
00:15:05.000Because I think We believe that you have to have a broader audience.
00:15:09.000This can't be us just preaching to the choir the whole time, and I know the adage is that's how you get them to sing, and that's fine.
00:15:15.000You want to mobilize people, but at the same time, you have to let other people in this process know what's going on.
00:15:21.000How do you do that effectively and really get across the whole political boundaries?
00:15:27.000Well, sometimes it is harder to do than at other times.
00:15:30.000So with my last film, 2000 Mules, because the topic was election fraud, the movie came out at a time, this was a year after the 2020 election, when people were already dug in.
00:15:41.000And so a lot of people were like, I knew it!
00:15:44.000I'm going to see this movie and it's going to validate what I think.
00:15:47.000And then there were other people who were like, I'm not going to see this movie.
00:15:49.000And in fact, there were so-called fact checks on the film, bogus fact checks, but nevertheless, they were like, we've seen this film, so you don't have to, you know?
00:15:58.000And I'm sure a lot of people were like, yeah, I'm not going to watch that film because I already know that this was the safest and securest election in history.
00:16:07.000And the police state, on the other hand, I think can reach a much wider audience, because almost everyone has a factual awareness of the things I'm describing.
00:16:16.000I mean, let's look at what we're talking about.
00:18:32.000So he went there, had some footage, never went in, never violated, to my understanding, any laws that you would know, okay, well, I'm crossing a boundary and I'm making the choice to do that or not.
00:18:44.000He just was there, had some footage, and was showing some friends back at his bar, not his bar, but at a bar he frequented.
00:18:51.000And all of a sudden, a neighbor of his turns him in.
00:18:55.000So give us just a little bit of insight into that.
00:18:57.000Cause for me, that was one of the most average everyday American stories.
00:19:17.000You've got, you know, a 75-year-old guy who walks with a cane, and this is a guy who almost wanted to be there just to be part of a historic event, so to speak.
00:19:30.000He was intrigued by Trump, but he wasn't a full-scale Trumpster, and he certainly did not go inside the Capitol.
00:19:36.000But this comes back to what you alluded to a few minutes ago about informants.
00:19:40.000the idea of your neighbor and of course in police states your wife you know your
00:19:45.000kids are calling you in and so a neighbor calls him in but the
00:19:50.000remarkable thing isn't just that someone felt to do that you know that that
00:19:54.000little tyrannical impulse in all of us I'm gonna get this guy I'm gonna be you
00:19:59.000know it's the mentality that makes one want to be an apparatchik in a regime
00:21:29.000And look, that's one of the reasons that we got so frustrated with this whole, and I'm not going to derail on January 6th, but the January 6th hearings.
00:21:37.000And the Adam Kinzinger and, gosh, I'm losing her name, Liz Cheney, giving that credibility When it was really just political theater like it wasn't a real investigation and two republicans who wanted to I guess be at the cool kids table essentially gave something that should have had no credibility credibility and now not only do we feel like
00:22:02.000Maybe those guys that turned him in felt like, hey, that's justified.
00:22:56.000What Hillary's doing is the same thing that happened, for example, at Waco in the 1990s, which is, when you say that somebody's an occult, and you make them into being a complete weirdo, you're dehumanizing them.
00:23:10.000And the American people in the 1990s were horrified when they saw all those buildings burning at Waco, but they were like, well, it's not me.
00:23:25.000She's trying to turn the political opposition, she wants to dehumanize us as maybe a prelude or a leading up to incarceration and of course in the Nazi case it was also
00:23:40.000extermination so this can go down a very dangerous road dark road very dark very
00:23:46.000quickly and I and I you know we're you're always careful using the Nazi
00:23:50.000comparison right because people say that and I say well look I'm careful using it
00:23:53.000but it's one of the most instructive pieces of history that we have on how this
00:23:58.000can play out and if people are uncomfortable with that well let's go to the Khmer
00:24:02.000Rouge right I spent some time in Cambodia and Phnom Penh and I saw the
00:24:06.000killing fields I was Sam Waterton I think or I think that's his name the guy
00:24:10.000from now I'm forgetting Ah, Law and Order.
00:24:17.000He is in that movie, and they basically have a camp out in the rice fields, kind of in the countryside of Cambodia, and they bring a child up to the board, and there's stick figures drawn on the board of two, obviously, parents holding the hands of two children.
00:24:52.000Get your COVID vaccination above all else.
00:24:55.000Wear your mask and make sure that you close down your business above all else.
00:24:59.000And these other people will just drip.
00:25:01.000We'll keep dripping on these people so that eventually you think of them as being kind of these subhuman people.
00:25:07.000It happened In Nazi Germany the same way.
00:25:10.000It happened in Cambodia in pretty much the same way.
00:25:12.000It's happened in countries in Africa that have had these crazy, um, you know, the killing fields in the kind of the same way these people are subhuman.
00:25:22.000Uh, but, uh, before I get too far, I guess, down that trail, sorry, I just, uh, it's just, it really irritates me when people don't follow one of the most easy to follow lessons in all of history, which is Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
00:25:34.000Like read about the 1930s, what was going on.
00:25:37.000One of the things we do in the film with that is we use an analogy to the Reichstag fire.
00:25:43.000Now, again, when we're talking about the Nazis, there is Hitler circa 1933, and that's really where I think the examples are useful, because Hitler wasn't, quote, Hitler.
00:25:55.000I mean, in other words, you didn't have the Holocaust, you didn't have the final solution.
00:25:59.000So when we think of Nazi Germany, we tend to think about the death camps and so on,
00:26:47.000So the Reichstag fire is instructive historically because it shows how an incident, a real incident, can nevertheless be manipulated, used as a pretext for a widespread crackdown and suspension of civil liberties.
00:27:02.000So I think this is the relevance of January 6th.
00:27:06.000It's not that it wasn't an event, it was, but by manipulating the meaning of the event, and as you say, the terminology of the event, you can then justify, now we need to ramp up digital censorship.
00:27:19.000Now you can't even talk about a stolen election because, hey, guess what, you're one of the insurrectionists.
00:27:25.000And so January 6th in that sense becomes a pivotal, and I think for the first time in our country's history, In non-wartime, we have political prisoners.
00:27:35.000We've had political prisoners in wartime, and we can talk about that, but in non-wartime, I can't think of good examples of that, and January 6th, I think, will be seen historically as a very ugly first.
00:27:48.000It will absolutely, and you're talking like 17, 18, 20 year prison terms for people in the Department of Justice coming back for seconds now.
00:27:55.000I don't know if you read that recently.
00:27:57.000But that's something that should send kind of a chill down everybody's spine who's watching this.
00:28:02.000You can think what you want to think about what happened on January 6th, but you think they should be getting more prison time than a rapist?
00:28:09.000Let me make one further point on January 6th, because I think this gets to the heart of the false narrative.
00:28:18.000And I think this is an original point that is made in the film, namely this.
00:28:22.000According to the kind of January 6th committee's official narrative, the Trumpsters went into the Capitol because they were trying to stop an official proceeding.
00:28:36.000Well, according to the narrative, it was the certification of the election.
00:28:41.000But if you think about it, and if you pay attention to what was actually going on in that proceeding, that was not happening at all.
00:28:48.000There was an official proceeding, but it was a different proceeding.
00:28:51.000It was called contesting the election.
00:28:54.000And there were many Republicans, and I'm talking about mainstream Republicans, Ted Cruz and others, they were going to challenge Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, they were going to challenge the election in the swing states.
00:29:07.000That is the process that somebody wanted to stop.
00:29:20.000They wanted the questioning of the election to continue.
00:29:23.000And yet, the moment that you had January 6th, the Republicans were so sort of downcast and dejected that they came right back and they're like, OK, forget about all that.
00:29:34.000So January 6th was a bonanza for the left.
00:29:38.000And I think by twisting that history, we got the false narrative that has been one-sidedly promulgated by the January 6th committee.
00:29:47.000Well, so let me dive in kind of off of that, because you had a lot of people questioning whether there were feds involved with January 6th.
00:30:01.000You've got a very kind of charismatic president who has lost an election in their eyes, but has basically been cheated out of an election in most of his followers' eyes.
00:30:13.000We never really got answers as to how many federal agents were involved with that because there were people like Ray Epps and I know that some stuff has happened with him that was kind of a lightning rod for it because there's film there's footage of him saying we're gonna go to the Capitol and people are like Fed Fed this guy's a Fed right and he's seen there whispering to somebody right before they start doing so with these agencies Do you think that we should defund the FBI and some of the other agencies potentially?
00:30:40.000Let's start with the FBI and not lump them in with other people because you can think about this.
00:30:44.000And yes, please comment below and let me know what you think.
00:31:29.000An FBI agent at 5.30 in the morning smashes the apartment of a 70-year-old grandmother who, let's say, went into the Capitol for 15 minutes.
00:31:38.000Goes up to her, she resists, so he grabs her by the hair, twists her arms behind her back, puts the handcuffs on her, she resists some more, so he pulls her down the stairs, out into the street, her neighbors come out and gawk at her, they're like, oh my god, the woman is just absolutely destroyed and humiliated, so what would cause a nice guy, a decent guy with a family, lives in a three-bedroom house, to do this?
00:32:40.000He goes, when I come in, they just point and tell me, there's a bad guy.
00:32:45.000There's an enemy of truth and justice and the American way.
00:32:48.000Take out your long rifle, kill that guy.
00:32:51.000And so this guy is like a soldier, you know?
00:32:53.000So he defines his task as he is serving his country, he's doing a good job, he will get a bonus and a promotion if he carries out his duty.
00:33:03.000And his duty, as defined here, is take out that bad guy.
00:33:07.000So I think what happens with the police state is that you've got good guys who get the idea that, hey, the FBI is not that interested right now in child trafficking.
00:33:15.000They're not interested right now in even the old-style mafia stuff that made them famous.
00:33:20.000They're interested in domestic extremists.
00:33:25.000And if you want to be cool with the FBI, you want to be part of the in-crowd, you want to get a nice bonus at the end of the year, you don't want to be seen as a troublemaker, you want to retire with a nice pension...
00:33:41.000Your job is just to apprehend her and this is how we do it.
00:33:44.000Well and trust in the institutions that are here that have, I mean historically maybe they've never been completely trustworthy, but as Americans we have had a lot more trust in our institutions than we have in the last say 20 years.
00:33:57.000Some of the wool has been kind of pulled over eyes, I think for a long time, but now we're thinking like okay
00:34:02.000Wait a minute. Maybe we can't just give blind trust to this I remember you made me think of something like how do
00:34:07.000normal people end up doing horrible things?
00:34:09.000Well, it's happened. It happened in Germany in that example Do you think that they were a more murderous people like
00:34:16.000Innocent people men women and children No, they weren't more murderous than their neighbors were.
00:34:20.000It happened there for a very specific set of reasons, and it shows you that populations can turn into these very kind of evil things.
00:34:30.000I remember in high school I asked my professor, because he was talking to me about ancient history, his history professor, and he was talking about the Assyrians, and they would do public peelings and public disembowelments to keep people in line, these communities that they had conquered.
00:34:41.000And I just thought to myself, like, how do these guys go home?
00:34:44.000And he goes, no, I know, like these soldiers go home to their wife, they go home to their kids, and they've done these barbaric things to them.
00:34:50.000And he says, do you think they loved it?
00:34:53.000No, I don't think that that's the easy answer that we can just apply to everybody.
00:35:14.000It was the parking lot that was hit, and it was actually one of the missiles being fired by the Islamic Jihad, which is kind of, again, the basic name of jihad.
00:35:22.000Like, all of them are Islamic, and all of them jihad.
00:35:24.000They didn't really put a lot of effort into the branding there.
00:35:26.000They just kind of went with the most basic title.
00:35:28.000And you're seeing what happens is you're convincing people that this is in service to something greater than yourself, and these are the enemies.
00:35:39.000They're trusting in the Islamic leadership in Hamas, right?
00:35:42.000They're trusting, like, these are enemies of us.
00:35:44.000Trust me, this is what God wants you to do.
00:35:46.000The Assyrians are trusting in their leadership, saying, trust me, if we don't do this to these populations, they will try and overthrow us and kill you and your family.
00:35:54.000And so they put that on the chopping block.
00:35:56.000And I think what's happening right now In the United States is conservatives are the enemy because they don't care about you.
00:36:02.000Covid kind of laid some of the groundwork for that.
00:36:05.000And they're not interested in having free and fair elections.
00:36:09.000They're interested in installing a dictator in Donald Trump.
00:36:12.000And so in the film, you talk quite a bit about President Trump and what's been going on and kind of alluding to him in different parts of the film.
00:36:20.000With the FBI, we talked about maybe getting rid of that.
00:36:23.000Let me let me go circle back to that before I get to Trump, because that'll lead us down another path.
00:36:27.000If that's true, how do we get rid of the rot, right?
00:36:33.000You've got, like you said, probably a bunch of good people working at the FBI.
00:36:38.000Hardworking Americans that love their country, that want to serve their country, that aren't the bad guys.
00:36:42.000But you've apparently got a lot of people in positions of power that are wielding that power in a very corrupt way.
00:36:52.000This isn't, and I don't think you're here to say, just go watch the movie and be outraged with me and maybe tell a few of your friends about it, but it's a solution.
00:37:02.000I mean, the solution to the FBI is really the same as the solution to any institution that has been corrupted in this way.
00:37:12.000I mean, this would apply, for example, to a university faculty.
00:37:15.000If you think about how would you take over a university by the left, It is that they take over the key faculty committees that hire people, and so they're able to self-perpetuate.
00:37:27.000Then they're powerful enough that they get veto power over the president, so that even if the board of trustees goes, we got this business guy, we want to bring him in, they're like, no, he's not confirmed on the left.
00:37:38.000you know, find somebody else. So you have to dismantle that power
00:37:42.000structure. You don't have to... I don't think you have to burn the FBI
00:37:46.000building. That's not going to do anything.
00:37:47.000No. You have to identify the key areas. Also crime, Dinesh.
00:37:51.000No, no, no. Of course, you know what I mean.
00:37:55.000People are like, you know, we've got to take it down from the top to the bottom.
00:37:58.000No, what I'm getting at is what we need to do is identify where these corrupt centers of power are, dismantle those, and then create a healthy structure of incentives where people really want to do the kind of fair law enforcement work the FBI was set up to do.
00:38:12.000So in that sense, the institution can be reformed, but reform normally suggests just some kind of cosmetic change, like changing the director.
00:38:22.000You have to burrow down into the bureaucracy.
00:38:24.000A point about Hamas that really struck me was, I think this phenomenon about sort of boasting about your brutality is something that goes even beyond the Nazis.
00:38:38.000I mean, this seems ridiculous to say, right?
00:38:39.000Because people will say, you can't compare it to the Nazis.
00:38:42.000I think this is actually a comparison in favor of the Nazis, if I can put it that way.
00:38:46.000Because think about it, when the Nazis established death camps, Not the concentration camps, because concentration camps were labor camps.
00:39:07.000Because the Nazis didn't want to show it to the Germans.
00:39:11.000They were not, in that sense, proud of what they were doing.
00:39:14.000And so that is a little different from sometimes This terrorist exhibitionism that we see these days, where a terrorist group revels in the amount of carnage that they've caused, almost as if that is a measure of their effectiveness.
00:39:31.000And that is really what thrills the sort of terrorist lobby all over the world.
00:39:36.000Who would have thought Hamas could get into Israel with a thousand guys coming, you know, imaginatively from the sky, and then just, you know, having their way with them.
00:39:46.000It struck me that, you know, that even though the Nazi analogy can be overdone, in this case, we might even be seeing things that are, in some sense, worse.
00:39:54.000Yeah, well, and I think it's the crossing of all the things that we've been talking about are the intersection with that and, obviously, religion.
00:40:15.000Like we've talked about like taking it down to the studs.
00:40:18.000I think there needs to be something like that done with them to get an agency, because you need some kind of an agency to serve some of the functions, right?
00:40:27.000Because you've got investigating terrorism, you've got drugs and human trafficking, you've got a lot of legitimate functions that the FBI can serve, but you don't need the FBI.
00:40:35.000So my next question, I guess, will lead into Donald Trump.
00:40:43.000President Trump, he's leading in all the polls right now in the primary.
00:40:46.000Nobody's ever lost with the kind of lead he's had, right?
00:40:48.000We'll talk about a few things maybe that are potentials for him.
00:40:51.000If he gets back in and disbands the FBI, do you think the left is going to view that as a correction or as an authoritarian move?
00:40:57.000Meaning, the kind of disbanding that we've talked about, like, okay, we have to really dig down in and get the rot out of the FBI.
00:41:04.000Do you think they're going to see that as a correction or as, see, we told you, he's going to be authoritarian, he's never going to leave office again?
00:41:12.000The left will absolutely see it that way.
00:41:14.000They will see it as Trump is now wreaking vengeance on the people who tried to get him.
00:41:21.000And to some degree, I think that perception is going to be unavoidable.
00:41:26.000I'm actually not so worried about that right now.
00:41:29.000I'm more worried about the Republican psychology, the right-of-center psychology, that doesn't recognize the sort of peril that we are in as a country with regard to our basic rights.
00:41:43.000When it comes to the FBI, for example, I would say that one half of Republican members of Congress are going to be immediately frozen when you bring up the topic because they're like, wait a minute, we thought we were back the blue.
00:41:56.000How can we be back the blue and at the same time against the FBI?
00:41:59.000This is going to be too confusing a message for my constituents, Dinesh.
00:42:07.000What the FBI is doing is abusing its credibility and its prosecutorial discretion and the intelligence function it was set up to do.
00:42:18.000It's abusing all of that so there's nothing inconsistent with being back the blue and supporting law and order and then opposing the abuse of law and order.
00:42:28.000But Republicans in this sense are very reluctant to modify traditional positions that really go back to the Reagan era, but I think are obsolete today.
00:42:41.000The difference is, I don't know if you've seen the man who shot Liberty Valance, but In the beginning you got Jimmy Stewart and he's a goofball guy, he's a law and order guy, and he's like, I'm not going to be like these criminals, you know, I rely on my books and I'll call the authorities if I need to.
00:42:55.000Now if you're living in a peaceful town with a good sheriff and a good system, you can be that way.
00:43:01.000But if you go out in a covered wagon out west, and you're surrounded by outlaws with guns, and they want to burn your homestead and rape your wife and kill your kids, and you're like, I'm not gonna go for my rifle because I'm better than they are, I'm a man of principle, you know?
00:43:17.000You would be and nobody would even know what to say to you Yeah, and and so that's kind of what my film is intended to say is listen We are not in normal politics in America.
00:43:28.000We are seeing in a very short time Rights that we took for granted really since the founding being Seriously imperiled and the forces that are doing this.
00:43:46.000They're in government I mean, you're dealing with a very formidable combination of forces, so this is not even something that is fixed by an election.
00:43:55.000It's going to take an election, but a lot more.
00:43:58.000It's going to definitely take a lot more.
00:43:59.000And look, the only reason we get to do this kind of stuff and the only reason we exist is because of Mug Club, so do consider joining Mug Club for $89 a year.
00:44:16.000We've got the Hodge Twins doing a show now.
00:44:18.000We've got Mr. Guns and Gear keeping you informed on all of your Second Amendment rights and all of the different guns that are out there.
00:44:24.000But then we have our undercover unit, and we have a lot of the campaigns that we're kind of standing up To really fight back in a lot of ways, instead of just talking to you about this stuff, kind of like Dinesh, you know, like it's not just about talking about these issues and going, all right, I sold another book or I got another movie deal.
00:44:39.000It's about actually getting something done.
00:44:42.000And I think for us, we've, we developed Mug Club specifically because of the censorship, censorship that we've kind of fought through with big tech, specifically YouTube, right?
00:44:53.000dealt with a lot of things and we deal with it all the time, but it goes back to the Vox
00:44:56.000Apocalypse where Susan Wojcicki was talking about Steven and saying, he didn't break any
00:45:01.000rules but we're going to make some new rules so that that way it's taken care of and we
00:45:04.000can just kind of say he broke some rules.
00:45:06.000And so now he's demonetized and his reach is limited and he's throttled and he's got
00:45:10.000a strike on his account so he can't talk about the 2022 midterms because we had Carrie Lake
00:46:12.000Liberals, we showed you that clip a while back of the liberal billionaire, part owner I think of the Golden State Nuggets that came out and said, we shot the message because we didn't like the messenger.
00:46:26.000That he was talking about building a wall and we didn't like that he was talking about building a wall, so we didn't.
00:46:31.000And now we're dealing with all of the consequences.
00:46:33.000So you're starting to see people change a little bit.
00:46:36.000Even on the left, do you think what's happening with President Trump right now?
00:46:40.000First off, talk maybe just a little bit about what you think is going on here.
00:46:44.000And do you think that's enough of a wake-up call for people across the entire spectrum of Americans to maybe go, wait a minute, the deep state really is a thing.
00:46:55.000Well, I think that there are some people on the left who are... They're so...
00:47:02.000Discombobulated by the very name Trump.
00:47:05.000And this is because of the relentless engine of propaganda and indoctrination that they're not able to look at this issue objectively at all.
00:47:14.000In fact, the only way they would see it objectively is if you change the name of the country, and you change the name of the man, and you said, you know, in Poland there's this man, let's just call him Donald Trumpski, you know?
00:47:28.000The opposition party has arrested him, and he's the leading candidate of the other party, and they haven't just put a single criminal charge on him for something obvious like, oh, you know what, he was found with suitcases of money that came from, you know, that would actually be Biden.
00:47:42.000Yeah, I was about to say, you're describing someone else now.
00:48:21.000But when you have this blizzard of charges, this shotgun approach, where it's like, listen, you know, if we can't get you in D.C., we'll get you in Florida.
00:48:32.000If it's not a federal case, our Soros-funded state DAs will move in.
00:48:37.000If we can't get you in Georgia, you know, in New York, and if we can't get you on the criminal case, we'll wreck your business with a civil case.
00:48:44.000I mean, this is police state thuggery as naked as it comes.
00:48:49.000And I think it is because they do fear that Trump is the most dangerous opponent of the police state.
00:48:56.000I think it's because he is the least bound by political convention.
00:49:00.000You know, any other Republican will quickly fall into line if you say, you're not allowed to talk about firing civil servants.
00:49:08.000You know, you're not allowed to say that the Justice Department is an extension of the executive branch.
00:49:14.000You're not allowed to call up Kim Jong-un on the phone.
00:49:17.000If you go to a meeting you're supposed to- He's President!
00:49:43.000And he was really short, but he laughed a lot.
00:49:46.000I mean, Trump actually tells you what it's actually like to be in the room.
00:49:51.000And this is why I think there are people in this country who aren't actually all that political in their bones, but they identify with Trump because he has this kind of normal way of speaking.
00:50:04.000For a billionaire, kind of popular, very well-known worldwide guy, he kind of almost was going to say he has a little bit of an everyman kind of personality in some ways.
00:50:14.000Or at least he says things that he's, we're thinking.
00:50:17.000He says what we want Trump's dad used to say to him, you know, we're not Manhattan, we're Queens.
00:50:21.000locked you up. That kind of thing really resonated with a lot of people. It was like, that's
00:50:25.000right! Don't be nice, go after these people.
00:50:28.000Well, Trump's dad used to say to him, you know, we're not Manhattan, we're Queens. And
00:50:34.000this is really important because Trump, although he grew up rich, he grew up rich sort of in
00:50:42.000His dad had, you know, rent control, apartments, that he was, you know, they made money that way and Manhattan to them was a different place.
00:50:55.000So let me, we'll go right back to Trump in just a second, but of the other candidates right now, if let's just imagine a world where Donald Trump is not running for president in 2024, who else of the candidates that we have now would be capable or at least willing to go after the police state in your mind?
00:51:14.000In my mind, there would be, of the rest of them, only two.
00:51:27.000He was in here, we did an interview with him recently and that was how he did it.
00:51:30.000Yes, those are the two that I would think as well.
00:51:33.000So with Ron DeSantis, obviously because of his kind of track record as governor of Florida, we've been very, you know, we've had a lot of praise for Ron DeSantis until his campaign started and then he got a little bit It seems like he fell into the mold of past Republican candidates that kind of distanced themselves from Trump just a little bit and were like, ah, don't run away from what made you great as governor.
00:51:53.000He also did not defend Trump where it was completely appropriate to defend Trump.
00:51:58.000I think that was a serious judgment error.
00:52:00.000I also think that, you know, if I were Trump and I sailed through to the nomination, The first thing I would do, even though I don't think this is what Trump will do, is I would call Ron DeSantis.
00:52:14.000And I would tell him, Ron, I can bring the big personality and the charisma, and I'm maybe the guy that the Republican base and the country can identify with because I speak a normal language, but you do have a ruthless operational efficiency that you brought to Florida.
00:52:35.000that we need in the federal government. In other words, I'm going to ask you to go into the FBI,
00:52:41.000burrow into the bureaucracy, and root out the corruption.
00:52:45.000And then I want you to do that to seven other institutions. So DeSantis would have a
00:52:52.000But, so in other words, I guess what I'm saying is politically, I think that there's a complementary
00:52:58.000set of strengths that DeSantis and Trump bring to the table.
00:53:02.000And Vivek has a lot of strengths as well.
00:53:04.000And Vivek has done some of the things right that DeSantis hasn't, which is why Vivek has gotten more traction than one would have expected.
00:53:11.000Yeah, and he's seen kind of as an outsider.
00:54:02.000And I say this as someone who, I mean, I My political formation is in the Reagan era.
00:54:07.000I went to college at Dartmouth when Reagan was first running for president, and so it was that appreciation of Reagan as kind of an embodiment of American idealism, someone who understood the issues, but Reagan was a president when the main problem was abroad.
00:54:34.000Now we are in a kind of a domestic Cold War with a very no less sort of fanatical adversary to be honest and we need people who recognize that the world has changed.
00:54:47.000I mean it goes back really to even the Republican Party in the 1850s was completely incapable of recognizing the perilous situation facing the country.
00:54:58.000Part of the genius of Lincoln was that even though he came out of the moderate wing of the party You would almost say he was a kind of rhino in his own day.
00:55:07.000When he came to Washington, he recognized immediately that the Democratic Party had become gangsterized, and that the old tactics of Henry Clay-style compromises and constantly appeasing these guys was not going to work.
00:55:24.000And so Lincoln's view is... You could be describing the last 20 years right now.
00:55:41.000No, I mean, you take Mike Pence, and it's one thing, you know, I even agree with Mike Pence when he says, all right, I'm the vice president, my task on that day was sort of custodial and ceremonial, I don't think I had the constitutional authority to just push the election back to the states.
00:55:59.000But someone like that has got to address the larger issue, which is to say, was there systematic fraud in this election that needs some sort of attention?
00:56:12.000Maybe you're not the guy to do it, maybe that was not the time or the place, but to just say that one thing and then zip hunt.
00:56:28.000It's like, who is going to look at this?
00:56:31.000Who is going to look at this substantively?
00:56:34.000Not some local court that goes, hey, listen, you may or may not be right, but you should have brought this challenge before the election.
00:56:40.000And then if you brought the challenge before the election, hey, you may or may not be right, but listen, the election hasn't even happened, so why are you suing over imaginary crimes that haven't yet occurred?
00:56:50.000So this kind of evasiveness, I think, drove just the primal scream that became January 6th.
00:57:30.000Is you have to be aware of what's going on and engaged in that fight and that's I think what Donald Trump was saying as president saying look you're going to have to fight like hell to keep he wasn't saying take to the streets with weapons.
00:57:41.000He was saying get engaged in this process and you know you just listed out a lot of the challenges that were kind of the governmental issues like I have a problem with how the state is handling this election.
00:57:53.000You mentioned the Hunter Biden laptop as well and that alone, now that's the crossing of business and state where you get the state telling businesses this is Russian disinformation.
00:58:04.000There's obviously studies, I'm sure you've seen them too, that that would have changed the outcome of the election.
00:58:09.000Just that one thing alone, based on the polling that they've done, would have changed the outcome of the election period.
00:58:15.000None of the other cases needed to be brought.
00:58:17.000Now they're serious, and we need to get to the bottom of those things.
00:58:20.000But that is the scariest, I think, part for me, is that, like you said in your film, it's the state now kind of getting these private companies to do their bidding.
00:58:33.000X, thankfully, has been purchased by Elon Musk, and so it feels like a bit of a safe haven for free speech, even though it's not perfect, and I don't like that he put Linda Iaccarino in power there from NBC Universal days.
00:58:45.000But other places, like Google, still seem like the Wild West.
00:58:50.000They can kind of do whatever they want and manipulate elections.
00:58:52.000So I think in one of your interviews here with Zach, is it Voorhees?
00:59:05.000We've covered the three-letter agencies.
00:59:07.000Now we're getting into the business side of this.
00:59:09.000How do we deal with that section of it?
00:59:12.000And what did you find out, I guess, in doing so?
00:59:17.000If we had legislative power, which we don't have, because to do that you need both branches of both the House and the Senate, and you also need to have the presidency, you could very easily break up Google under the antitrust laws.
00:59:28.000I mean, Google is an obvious monopoly.
00:59:31.000You can argue whether Facebook's a monopoly, YouTube is not a monopoly, but Google is a monopoly.
00:59:38.000And, however, you can strike that down in one shot right now with the Supreme Court ruling.
00:59:44.000And there is, by the way, the case of Missouri v. Biden making its way up the courts.
00:59:49.000And the Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana, along with others, have exposed this censorship.
00:59:56.000And it's worth zooming in on it for a little bit.
00:59:59.000Because the censorship involves so many different institutions.
01:00:04.000You have some academic, and a lot of these academics have nothing better to do, so what they do is they monitor social media, people like you and me, and Stephen Crowder.
01:00:12.000And they go, okay, we're going to list the 50 greatest spreaders of disinformation in the country.
01:00:19.000OK, so let's just say, OK, Crowder is on the list.
01:01:44.000Well, the Supreme Court just needs to come in and say, listen, not only is government censorship forbidden, but censorship by surrogate is equally forbidden.
01:02:08.000But we also need institutions to act The courts, the Republican House, you know, certainly Republican governors, attorneys general, secretaries of state.
01:02:21.000And so what we saw in a lot of the last, you know, last few elections was maybe a move in that direction where we're getting more governorships and we're getting more control of state legislatures and saying, OK, hey, these changes can be made at the state level.
01:02:36.000So one of the things that you can do is to make sure that you are informed in state elections.
01:02:41.000Make sure that you're not just a every two year person where you're going to vote in the general and then you're going to vote to maybe do the midterms and see, you know, OK, I'm going to get ramped up about this every two years.
01:02:51.000That's the only amount of time that I can spend.
01:02:53.000And look, I know I'm asking a lot of you to go out and spend extra time that you don't necessarily have.
01:02:58.000I'm in the same boat other than I do this for a living.
01:03:00.000And so maybe it's a little easier for me to stay in tune with what's going on.
01:04:02.000If you don't like how the elections were handled, guess what?
01:04:05.000State lawmakers a lot of times were behind some of that stuff saying, okay, well, we'll go ahead and allow these mail-in ballots and we'll allow ballot harvesting and we'll allow all this stuff.
01:04:36.000And I think DuckDuckGo is one of the competitors to that, but most people that you know... So, if really what we're talking about is You've got this police state who is, you know, and we're waiting on cases to be decided, but I think that's what led me into what I just said is that I get so frustrated because it's like, aha!
01:05:12.000I want people to have some small wins along the way to keep them going for the bigger wins that we're waiting for in Supreme Court cases and things like that.
01:05:20.000One of the things just jumped in my mind and it's a little out of sequence because it goes back to the very first question you asked me about the film reaching out to people on the other side.
01:05:29.000I think one of the things the film does well is it tells you the genealogy, the origin of the police state.
01:05:35.000And this is a little bit of an embarrassment because the origin of the police state is not only bipartisan but somewhat Republican.
01:05:56.000And a lot of people, me included, I'm sorry to say, were like, okay, we don't just chase down these crimes after they occur, we got to stop the next one.
01:06:07.000Nobody wanted to be the victim of the next crime and everybody thought it was coming right around the corner.
01:06:12.000So let's give all this enhanced surveillance power and let's break down some of the barriers between intelligence on the one hand and criminal investigation on the other.
01:06:21.000Let's empower these police agencies off the U.S.
01:06:25.000government, but obviously with the intention of going after the foreign terrorist.
01:06:29.000In fact, going after people like these Hamas guys.
01:06:39.000Yeah, so what happened was that even though the police state traces its roots to the Bush era, I think that the politicization, the turning of the camera inward, the aiming it at domestic political opponents, it began under Obama and was ramped up dramatically under Biden.
01:06:59.000Well, I mean, it's still the J. Edgar Hoover building.
01:07:01.000You've still got the building named after a guy who was known for these kinds of tactics that we're talking about in a police state, like trying to convince Martin Luther King to kill himself.
01:07:10.000Like, it's just these really, really bad things.
01:07:13.000So that makes me think, like, man, was it always this way and it just had enough guardrails at the time to kind of keep it from going completely crazy?
01:07:20.000Or was it always crazy and we just never really knew about it because we didn't have access to social media and all the citizen journalism that we have today and all the people pushing back?
01:07:30.000And the reason I say this is, there's a big difference between a power-hungry megalomaniac like Hoover, who wanted to have kind of a personal, I've got something on everybody.
01:07:42.000But see, J. Edgar Hoover would never dream of interfering in the Nixon-Kennedy election of 1960.
01:07:48.000He wasn't trying to put his finger on the scale.
01:07:50.000He wasn't trying to tyrannically run the country from his back office in the FBI building.
01:07:58.000Frankly, he wanted to secure his own position in power, which is corrupt, but it's not the same as the ideological corruption that we're seeing now.
01:08:06.000Somebody made the same point about anti-Semitism.
01:08:09.000It was a former ambassador, David Friedman.
01:08:11.000He goes, listen, you can find anti-Semitism a lot of places.
01:08:14.000But he goes, if you want to find a full-scale ideology that justifies antisemitism, that commands support even in mainstream institutions, he goes, that's coming from the left.
01:09:11.000I don't know if there's actually a name.
01:09:12.000It's a movie that kind of functions as a documentary as well.
01:09:15.000There's so much more that you've put into it than just going and asking somebody questions and throwing some B-roll footage behind you, right?
01:09:22.000I love it when they're well done because they educate the audience, but how do you address people who say, okay, we're just going to buy another ticket to a movie, right?
01:10:02.000Storyline there is a movement toward a climax and you have a you want to leave the audience With a sense of enlightenment, but also galvanized to action.
01:10:13.000So those are some of the elements in putting a film together Now what motivates me?
01:10:19.000Documentary is a very hard genre and they're they're very very hard on the right.
01:10:23.000They're not so hard on the left here's what I mean if Michael Moore wants to make a film and What does he do?
01:10:29.000He goes to a studio, and he says, give me ten million dollars.
01:10:34.000He makes the film, and then, the moment he's finished, his job is done.
01:10:39.000The studio says, alright, you're gonna be on The View tomorrow, you're gonna be on Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher has you on, we got this, we got that, you know.
01:10:46.000So, what I'm getting at is, the only thing Michael Moore does, is the film.
01:11:04.000And even if you're able to raise money, you then have to figure out how do I make a good film.
01:11:08.000Really hard to do also because a lot of people on our side think films are just about messaging.
01:11:13.000And they're like, Dinesh, do some messaging.
01:11:15.000Make a film on the border, on Obamacare.
01:11:18.000And I'm like, how do I get people to get out of their home and get in a car and go to a theater to watch a film that's all messaging?
01:11:26.000But once you make a good film, you then have to market it.
01:11:28.000So what happens is, and you have to be really good at all those things.
01:11:32.000Now, the business model I developed going back to my first film, was I go to some investors, conservative investors who by
01:11:41.000and large are not used to funding films, they're used to funding elections, and I said, guys, if you
01:11:46.000give me some money, I will work really hard in the market to get it back to you so you can
01:11:51.000turn around and give it back to me to make my next film.
01:11:54.000In other words, I said, I'm going to call this recycled philanthropy.
01:11:58.000I'd like to make some money for you, but that's not important to you or to me.
01:12:02.000Our goal is the cause, but I'm trying to create a self... you know, I don't like being the guy who's hitting up people for donations all the time, so I want to create a mechanism in which I can produce a product in the market, then work really hard to return the investment to my investors in the full understanding that our job is to now Do it again.
01:12:25.000So that's really what's driving me and my complete focus is on on saving the country because, I mean, you've got to remember I came here at the age of 17.
01:12:34.000My whole life has been shaped by America.
01:12:36.000I've, you know, written books like What's So Great About America.
01:12:39.000If you ask me today, is America a free country?
01:12:42.000I would, I would want, I believe no, but I wouldn't want to say that.
01:12:47.000So we are in this very Awkward position, and those of us who are rah-rah American immigrants have some obligation, I think, to give back to the country that has given us so much, and that's what motivates me.
01:13:02.000Yeah, no, that's good, and I can see that.
01:13:04.000A lot of people that we talked to that didn't grow up here for some period of time and then came to America are just like, oh my gosh, Like, this is worth fighting for.
01:13:22.000Yes, right, and so she spots it very clearly.
01:13:24.000The refugees from Cuba, they spot it very clearly, saying, hey, this country is going the way of some of these other regimes, and you guys need to be a little bit more aware of what's going on.
01:13:35.000I mean if I can say one thing about Yeon-mi is every time I see her this is the thought that goes through my head that there's for a country in a situation like we are now there is a window of time.
01:13:49.000Yeon-mi actually has a book called While Time Remains which is to me a haunting title.
01:13:53.000Because what she's saying is the time is not unlimited because if the jaws of the police state snap shut Then, the only thing we can do is run, right?
01:16:00.000Eastern, but make sure you go and support this work.
01:16:02.000Go and support Dinesh in the theaters, and hopefully, Dinesh, you won't have to make many more of these.
01:16:08.000Hopefully, there'll be a lot of work that is done, and the problem will get solved, and we won't have to keep doing this, but as many as are necessary, we would always love to have you back.
01:16:17.000We'd love to talk about this and some of the success that hopefully you will have from this, but thank you for being with us today.