The Charlie Kirk Show - Staving Off the Death of the Republican Party with Dinesh D' Souza

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, today in the Charlie Kirk Show, conversation with my friend Dinesh D'Souza.

00:00:04.000 You guys are going to really enjoy it.

00:00:06.000 We dive into the future of the Republican Party.

00:00:08.000 What has surprised us about the Biden era and what exactly is populism?

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00:01:14.000 Dinesh D'Souza is here.

00:01:15.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:01:17.000 Here we go.

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00:02:59.000 Hey, everybody.

00:03:00.000 Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:03:02.000 With us today is the latest addition to the Salem Podcast Network alongside the Salem Radio Network, a friend of mine and one of the clearest thinkers and quite honestly, someone who understands the left better than anyone else, Dinesh D'Souza.

00:03:16.000 Dinesh, welcome back to the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:03:18.000 Charlie, it's great.

00:03:19.000 Good to be with you.

00:03:20.000 Your podcast is terrific.

00:03:21.000 I encourage everyone to check it out and to subscribe to it.

00:03:24.000 I don't say that about every podcast because usually I'm always telling people to subscribe to our own, but I really mean that.

00:03:29.000 Dinesh, can you help make sense of what is now basically the first two weeks of the Biden presidency?

00:03:36.000 What do we know today that was a little uncertain before he got sworn in?

00:03:39.000 What are we not surprised by?

00:03:41.000 And is there any good news at all?

00:03:44.000 Well, Biden was projected during the campaign as kind of a unifying figure, as somebody who would go beyond the divisiveness of Trump, somebody who would introduce a new tone.

00:03:59.000 And a set of new policies.

00:04:02.000 Now, what Biden has shown is that I think on the policy front, not so surprising.

00:04:07.000 He's really doing the things he said he would do.

00:04:10.000 And there are people who are surprised, some dismayed.

00:04:14.000 I saw a very odd social media post by a union that had supported Biden, claiming that he was, you know, a friend of the working man, another, oh, bitterly disappointed.

00:04:24.000 He's cutting oil jobs and our people are going to be out of work.

00:04:27.000 I'm like, really?

00:04:28.000 You're the guys who did this. 1.00

00:04:30.000 You're kicking your own butt. 1.00

00:04:32.000 And could you be so dumb as to not know this? 1.00

00:04:35.000 You enable this guy. 1.00

00:04:36.000 So I said, really?

00:04:38.000 Are you really all that shocked?

00:04:39.000 Now, I do think that the unifying rhetoric has turned out to be a ruse, an illusion.

00:04:44.000 What he really means is he wants, and the left wants, to unify against us.

00:04:49.000 That's right.

00:04:49.000 So they kind of envision an America in which everybody comes together and there is a Republican Party.

00:04:54.000 They're not saying they want a one-party state.

00:04:57.000 They want a Republican Party of their choosing.

00:04:59.000 It's really funny because it's almost like they want to get to pick the Republicans who represent the other side.

00:05:05.000 And they've decided that, like, Mitt Romney is just fine.

00:05:09.000 You know, the Cheney woman is okay, but no, Josh Hawley is unacceptable.

00:05:15.000 Ted Cruz is unacceptable.

00:05:17.000 Now, so far from Republican voters getting to choose who represents us, evidently we've got to turn to our political opposition to make our selections for us.

00:05:27.000 It's a very weird situation.

00:05:29.000 Yeah, they want their definition of unity is the absence of meaningful opposition, is an opposition that actually understands how they operate, that can organize, that can communicate effectively.

00:05:39.000 They want a controlled opposition, basically, that will do what they're told, that will go through the kind of motions of opposing, but will keep them in perpetual political power basically forever.

00:05:51.000 And that is why the Trump MAGA movement is such a threat to their power, which is why they're trying to do everything they possibly can to squelch it and to destroy it.

00:06:02.000 And so, Dinesh, can you walk us through?

00:06:04.000 It's been a couple of weeks, a lot of executive orders, a lot of jobs being killed.

00:06:08.000 Are you surprised by anything, or is everything just falling into place as you thought it would be?

00:06:13.000 No, I mean, I'm very dismayed by what is happening to America.

00:06:18.000 And I almost think that things are going to have to get a lot worse before they get better.

00:06:24.000 And what I mean by that is that, well, first of all, what I mean is that we can't tell people that this is a critical election.

00:06:31.000 The American dream hangs in the balance.

00:06:34.000 This is the most important election of your lifetime.

00:06:37.000 And then after the election, go, oh, we were just kidding.

00:06:40.000 The American dream is not hanging in the balance.

00:06:42.000 Things aren't going to be that bad.

00:06:44.000 Biden's going to turn out okay.

00:06:45.000 We'll get through this.

00:06:46.000 No, sometimes you don't get through it that well.

00:06:49.000 Sometimes there are important aspects of American exceptionalism that go down the tubes.

00:06:54.000 Sometimes people have to look around and see that things that they took for granted are being wrecked in front of their eyes.

00:07:00.000 And then they wake up and go, wow, I didn't really sign up for this.

00:07:03.000 I didn't see it going this bad.

00:07:06.000 And that's when you have a resistance.

00:07:08.000 You have uprising.

00:07:09.000 That's how Republicans are going to sweep the House and Senate if they do, is because people look around and they just don't like what they see.

00:07:16.000 Yeah, I think that's a good point.

00:07:19.000 And the Democrats' strategy currently seems to be: we are going to rule with an iron fist, change the way elections actually operate.

00:07:28.000 And it's irrelevant what the people actually believe through mass amnesty, through HR1, through the addition of states, through more Supreme Court justices.

00:07:36.000 They want to change the way we govern ourselves more than actually just change public policy, tax rates, or social benefits.

00:07:43.000 They want to change the way that we actually elect and appoint leaders.

00:07:47.000 Can you talk about the threat that that poses to our country?

00:07:51.000 Of if we do not fight or stand up against the actual infrastructure of how we appoint our leaders, that we could be in some serious trouble.

00:07:59.000 Well, when we look at periods of American history, we see that there are times when America has been kind of a one-party state.

00:08:06.000 So, when the early in the 19th century, when the Federalist Party essentially collapsed, Jefferson's party, the so-called Democratic Republicans, were the only party left.

00:08:16.000 And they were overwhelmingly the majority party, even though the Whig Party developed a little bit later until the Civil War.

00:08:25.000 Then, from 1932 to 1980, the Democrats were kind of a one-party state.

00:08:30.000 Again, you know, you'd have a Republican like Eisenhower who'd sneak in there, even Nixon.

00:08:35.000 But remember, they were kind of carried by the Democratic tide.

00:08:38.000 They offered only token resistance to Democratic and liberal policies.

00:08:43.000 So, the Democrats are very unhappy that from 1980 until now, America has had divided government.

00:08:50.000 Typically, one party may have the presidency, the other party has the Congress.

00:08:54.000 There's enough block and tackle that neither party can really do whatever it wants.

00:08:59.000 And they want that, you may almost call it Reagan interregnum to come to an end.

00:09:04.000 It would stretch from Reagan to Trump, and they would like to inaugurate a new era beginning now and continuing, let's say, for the next 40 years, in which the only type of Republicans are sort of Mitt Romney Republicans. 0.94

00:09:16.000 They're known to be graceful losers.

00:09:17.000 So, they kind of walk into the ring and then pretty much fall flat on their face at the end of the first round. 0.92

00:09:22.000 And the Democrats jump up and down and declare victory.

00:09:25.000 That's the kind of political version of America that they're after.

00:09:28.000 Right.

00:09:29.000 So, what do you think would be more effective?

00:09:30.000 The Republicans embracing the tactics of the Democrats and getting better at the machinery of elections and ballot harvesting?

00:09:37.000 Or do you think that we should fight and change the laws and ban ballot harvesting?

00:09:41.000 Which tactic do you think Republicans should take?

00:09:44.000 Both.

00:09:46.000 In other words, what I think is in the middle of the game, you always play the game the way it's being played.

00:09:51.000 Now, a good example, by the way, of how it is played that way is a California.

00:09:55.000 Republicans lost a whole bunch of seats in the midterm election because the Democrats did ballot harvesting.

00:10:00.000 And so, what the Republicans at this time in places like Orange County and in the Central Valley is: okay, listen, why don't we set up some ballot deposit boxes at gun stores, at churches, at places where conservatives congregate.

00:10:14.000 We'll do some ballot harvesting of our own, and we won a whole bunch of those seats back.

00:10:18.000 This was the case of the GOP playing the other side's game.

00:10:21.000 So, I see nothing wrong in doing that.

00:10:23.000 It's not inconsistent of us to do that.

00:10:25.000 It's not, it makes no sense to say, oh, we're better than that, guys.

00:10:28.000 Let them harvest.

00:10:29.000 We're not going to harvest.

00:10:30.000 Let them use the deep state against you.

00:10:32.000 We're never going to use the deep state against them.

00:10:34.000 You know, let them pack the courts.

00:10:36.000 We're never going to pack the courts.

00:10:38.000 If we concede to this one-sided apparatus, then not only will they win every time, but it emboldens them to do more because they know we're never going to do to them what they're doing to us.

00:10:48.000 And it's not illegal.

00:10:49.000 It's just using the laws on the books to try and win elections.

00:10:53.000 I mean, they break the law.

00:10:54.000 We are not talking about breaking the law.

00:10:56.000 It's just if you're able to ballot harvest, why shouldn't we ballot harvest?

00:11:03.000 In our fast-paced world, it's tough to make reading a priority.

00:11:06.000 At least it used to be.

00:11:07.000 At thinker.org, T-H-I-N-K-R.org, they summarize the key ideas from new and noteworthy nonfiction, giving you an access to an entire library of great books in bite-sized form.

00:11:18.000 Read or listen to hundreds of titles in a matter of minutes, from old classics like Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, to recent bestsellers like Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life.

00:11:28.000 I have used thinker.org at thinkr.org, and I really enjoy it.

00:11:33.000 So, go to thinker.org/slash Charlie.

00:11:36.000 When I'm driving to and from the studio after a long day of work, I just flip open a book on thinker.org, and you can do it at thinker.org/Charlie, and I try to learn something new every day.

00:11:46.000 If you want to learn something new and challenge your preconceptions, expand your horizons, go to thinker.org, T-H-I-N-K-R.org slash Charlie to start a free trial today.

00:11:59.000 Dinesh, I want to talk about just the future of the Republican Party and what's happening in real time.

00:12:05.000 We have the Liz Cheney types and we have Adam Kinzinger types that kind of want to purge the party, be that controlled opposition that you talk about.

00:12:15.000 Can you speak to the philosophical direction that you want to see the Republican Party go in?

00:12:19.000 This is something that people are wrestling with right now.

00:12:22.000 What is the political and philosophical direction you want to see us go in?

00:12:26.000 So if we flash back to 1980 when Reagan first ran, Reagan said, I am running on five big ideas.

00:12:35.000 The first idea is the idea of the individual.

00:12:37.000 So individualism, upward mobility.

00:12:40.000 Number two, the idea of the family.

00:12:43.000 The idea that the family is the nucleus of moral education for the young.

00:12:47.000 It's the best place to be raised.

00:12:48.000 It's within a family, not outside of it.

00:12:50.000 A third, I'm running on the idea of the church, the idea that the spiritual life is important and it's the source of our moral values.

00:12:59.000 Number four, the local community.

00:13:01.000 And fifth, the country, patriotism.

00:13:04.000 So if you think about those five themes, first of all, they're themes that most American dreams are built on.

00:13:10.000 They're widely popular, all five of those key ideas.

00:13:14.000 I don't see Trump as a departure from those ideas at all.

00:13:17.000 He might have emphasized one more than the other.

00:13:19.000 His language may have been different.

00:13:20.000 Instead of speaking, for example, of patriotism, Trump was a little more the rhetoric of nationalism of America first, but it's appealing to the same chords.

00:13:28.000 So the bottom line to remember, I think, Charlie, is that the traditional Republican Party, I'm not talking about the rhinos, but the traditional Republican Party and the MAGA movement are in sync.

00:13:38.000 They're different temperamentally.

00:13:40.000 They're different culturally.

00:13:41.000 They fight a little differently.

00:13:42.000 They speak a little differently.

00:13:44.000 Maybe some of them work at different jobs, but their values are not fundamentally different.

00:13:49.000 And therefore, it's, I think, imperative that we don't fork and move in separate directions because we'll be much weaker.

00:13:55.000 This is not a parliamentary system where two parties can ally together and form a ruling coalition.

00:14:01.000 This is a case where if you have a Republican and an OMAGA guy running against each other, we will lose the election pretty much every time, even in red states.

00:14:09.000 That's right.

00:14:10.000 So can you help us unpack what is populism and should the Republican Party embrace it?

00:14:10.000 I agree with that.

00:14:16.000 We've done a history of populism on our show, from William Jennings Bryan to Theodore Roosevelt to even some variations of Kennedy and Reagan.

00:14:25.000 They had some populist inclinations.

00:14:27.000 Is populism dangerous?

00:14:28.000 Is this something that we should run towards, or is this something that we should try to avoid?

00:14:33.000 Populism is a term that's a lot like nationalism.

00:14:36.000 And what I mean by that is that these are terms that, first of all, they have a left-wing and a right-wing application.

00:14:41.000 So today, for example, people identify nationalism with the right.

00:14:45.000 But Castro was a nationalist.

00:14:48.000 Mandela was a nationalist.

00:14:49.000 So was Gandhi.

00:14:51.000 So was Mao Zedong.

00:14:53.000 So these are people who did what they did in the name of their country. 0.56

00:14:57.000 Even Stalin.

00:14:58.000 Lenin was a little bit more of an internationalist, at least at the beginning, but Stalin was a vigorous nationalist.

00:15:03.000 His phrase was Mother Russia.

00:15:05.000 So nationalism is not ideologically by itself left or right.

00:15:10.000 Neither is populism.

00:15:12.000 So populism, by and large, you could almost call it a revolt of ordinary people who feel that some established structure is not responsive to them, is not working for them.

00:15:23.000 Again, you can see how this can easily come from the left or from the right.

00:15:28.000 To some degree, you could say Occupy Wall Street was a populist movement because it was ordinary people who felt like, I don't have anything to do with the stock market.

00:15:36.000 Somebody's making millions, if not billions of dollars.

00:15:39.000 It's certainly not me.

00:15:41.000 And this is a system that appears to be a money system rigged against me.

00:15:46.000 Now, you notice echoes of that on the left and on the right.

00:15:49.000 Now, the populism on the left and the right is different.

00:15:51.000 So, for example, I would say right now, in the context of this Reddit GameStop controversy, that Bernie Sanders doesn't like Wall Street because to him it's too capitalist.

00:16:02.000 I don't like Wall Street because it's not capitalist enough.

00:16:06.000 It breaks the rules of capitalism, it games the system.

00:16:09.000 It's too much of heads, I win, tails, you lose.

00:16:12.000 So, we're both sort of populist in a sense, but coming from a very different direction.

00:16:17.000 I think that's a great, I think that's a great analysis.

00:16:21.000 The question is: you know, what do we do with all this pent-up populist energy?

00:16:26.000 We know it's here, we know it's not going anywhere.

00:16:30.000 I think your description is correct where people are upset or dissatisfied with a pre-existing power structure that is disenfranchising them.

00:16:38.000 But I think we see, Dinesh, that people are increasingly distrustful of their institutions and that populist energy is not going away.

00:16:46.000 Smart Democrats are going to try and wield that.

00:16:49.000 Should Republicans do the same?

00:16:50.000 And if so, towards what policies?

00:16:53.000 Well, I think we need to integrate populism temperamentally, emotionally, as well as policy-wise into the Republican Party.

00:17:02.000 That's the key to the party's future.

00:17:05.000 By the way, our future, you know, for a long time, we protected these Wall Street tycoons.

00:17:09.000 And look, half of them have turned, more than half of them have turned their backs on us.

00:17:13.000 They've given oodles and oceans of money to Biden.

00:17:17.000 They even say things like, Yeah, Trump would have helped my pocketbook, but I'm voting my values.

00:17:22.000 This is Leon Cooperman, the billionaire investor.

00:17:25.000 So I'm sick of these people.

00:17:26.000 And I say to, I basically think, you know, they've turned our backs on us.

00:17:30.000 We should turn our backs on them.

00:17:32.000 Let the left deal with them.

00:17:33.000 If they think they've got friends in the Democratic Party, good luck. 0.57

00:17:37.000 Let's see if you can still keep your ranch and keep your yachts and keep your penthouse apartments because you're not going to get any help from us.

00:17:43.000 No, I think the Republican Party needs to be a party of the working class, white, black, and Latino, of the middle class, of middle class values.

00:17:52.000 It's got to speak in ordinary language.

00:17:54.000 I mean, part of what made Trump so remarkable is he was a billionaire, but he talked like a guy who worked in one of his own hotels.

00:18:02.000 And pretty much, it's kind of funny.

00:18:03.000 When I'd go to New York and I'd stay in any hotel, I would basically meet lots of little Trumps, guys who talked like him.

00:18:09.000 They even argued like him.

00:18:11.000 They had the same sort of reasoning and they didn't like to, you know, they had a certain dismissive attitude.

00:18:15.000 And so I saw the Trump personality ingrained in all these guys all over the city.

00:18:21.000 And I thought to myself, wow, they deserve representation.

00:18:24.000 They need someone who fights for them.

00:18:25.000 And that someone should be the Republican Party.

00:18:28.000 Yeah, I mean, it's almost as if Donald Trump, when he was walking job sites, they rubbed off on him and he became more like the blue-collar worker despite being a multi-billionaire.

00:18:42.000 And because of that, this is something that the ruling class detested.

00:18:48.000 They didn't like that he did not use all of the correct policy positions and arguments from the Ivy League schools.

00:18:54.000 And quite honestly, Dinesh, I think he liberated a lot of conservatives to think differently about issues.

00:19:01.000 A great example is in the conservative world, you know, back 10 years ago, we would never have a robust discussion ever about criticizing big tech or corporate interests.

00:19:13.000 I think President Trump liberated that conversation, or at least saying, hey, has every trade deal we've ever done been spectacular for the American worker?

00:19:22.000 And we were not even allowed to talk about that prior to Trump.

00:19:25.000 And in reality, it's more nuanced.

00:19:26.000 Like some have been good trade deals, some have been really, really bad.

00:19:29.000 And some have actually disenfranchised entire parts of our country.

00:19:34.000 And President Trump deserves such credit for that for changing the kind of conversation there.

00:19:39.000 And so we did a podcast about the gift that the Republican Party is missing.

00:19:43.000 And that is the, as I mentioned, the energy of the populist movement and it's growing.

00:19:47.000 And I completely agree with your observation and your analysis there.

00:19:50.000 What do we have to do to Nash to make sure, though, that all of a sudden that does not somehow manifest itself into a Leninist style revolution where we lose the principled conservative nature of things, where all of a sudden we're willing to forsake the separation of powers and checks and balances and what has made our country so exceptional.

00:20:09.000 How do we channel that energy properly directed while also keeping true to our constitutional republic roots?

00:20:15.000 Well, I've got a bunch of thoughts, but I'll just give one or two and maybe go from there.

00:20:20.000 The first thing I want to say is that one of the things that struck me about the Trump phenomenon was the fact that not only did Trump have this affinity for the working class, but the working class guy's affinity for Trump shows that the working class doesn't mind having elites and having leaders, and it doesn't even mind gold-plated apartments and it doesn't mind all this extravagance.

00:20:43.000 It doesn't mind Trump playing golf or Trump having a yacht, as long as they're convinced that these elites keep their welfare in mind.

00:20:51.000 That's such a good point.

00:20:52.000 And that's critical because it really shows, you know, we can't think of the Republican Party going down, going into the future without elites.

00:20:59.000 We need elites.

00:21:00.000 We need really smart guys.

00:21:01.000 We need smart lawyers.

00:21:03.000 We need constitutional scholars.

00:21:04.000 We need people we can put on the Supreme Court.

00:21:06.000 We need all that.

00:21:07.000 Now, the second point I want to make is that I do think that one of Trump's weaknesses is that he would state a position, but he wouldn't explain it.

00:21:17.000 It's almost like he assumed that you know where he's coming from.

00:21:20.000 And this applied even to things like he talked about Biden family corruption.

00:21:24.000 He'd say, you got a $12 million check from Moscow, but he didn't set the context and say, listen, basically, the Biden family has been a rip-off operation for decades.

00:21:34.000 And it's operated by taking family members as bagmen.

00:21:37.000 And there are disclosure requirements that apply to Biden, but they don't apply to the two brothers and the son.

00:21:42.000 So they're the ones with the suitcases of cash.

00:21:45.000 And when they bring it home, they all sit around the dinner table and split the loot.

00:21:49.000 Some goes to the big guy.

00:21:50.000 So then the American guy goes, Wow, is that what's really going on?

00:21:54.000 So, one of the benefits and one of the strengths of Reagan, and if we go back and watch, say, Reagan's Evil Empire speech in 1982, Reagan doesn't just denounce communism.

00:22:03.000 He lays it out.

00:22:04.000 He says why it's bad.

00:22:05.000 He gives a little bit of the history of it.

00:22:07.000 He quotes Solja Nitsen.

00:22:08.000 He kind of takes you into the gulag.

00:22:10.000 And that way people get it.

00:22:12.000 In other words, it's using the educational function.

00:22:15.000 Now, again, I'm not saying that Trump has to do this all by himself, but I'm saying that we on the right need it.

00:22:21.000 And if it's not coming from Trump, it's going to have to come from somewhere.

00:22:24.000 So you need Trump and you need the ordinary language, but you also need the educative function, particularly because this is not happening in the schools.

00:22:33.000 It's not happening in the media.

00:22:35.000 It's not happening in Hollywood.

00:22:37.000 So if we don't do it, who's going to do it?

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00:22:50.000 Gold is up more than 30% since March of 2020.

00:22:53.000 Silver surged more than 50% over the same period, reflecting the correlation among precious metals during the times of financial volatility.

00:23:00.000 But providing financial protection is not the only role that precious metals play in this fight.

00:23:04.000 Precious metals also have a broad application in the medical field that go well beyond the dental use most people associate with their value.

00:23:11.000 But providing financial protection is not only the role that precious metals play in this fight.

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00:23:19.000 As the China virus mutates, science will have to adapt its prevention methods accordingly and precious metals will continue to stay in demand.

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00:23:52.000 I really want to pick up on that one piece you said, where it's not about the abolition of elites.

00:23:57.000 That is a Marxist, egalitarian, Rousseauian view of the world.

00:24:03.000 I do not believe that.

00:24:04.000 Trump does not believe that, obviously.

00:24:06.000 And conservatives do not believe that.

00:24:08.000 Instead, it's: can we have better elites?

00:24:10.000 We know that certain people are going to be better at certain things, at music, at sports, at cultural production, at politics.

00:24:18.000 What's the process of how those elites actually come into a position of leadership?

00:24:23.000 How do we hold those elites accountable?

00:24:25.000 What is their incentive structure?

00:24:27.000 What are their motives?

00:24:28.000 And if those elites do something wrong, how do we replace them?

00:24:31.000 That's the question I think people have, because it's not as if people say that there should be no one in charge of me.

00:24:36.000 I think that's silly.

00:24:37.000 No one actually believes that unless you're a true Marxist who wants the complete and total abolition of hierarchies, where now we have a set of circumstances where you fail upwards, like Dr. Anthony Fauci, who's wrong about everything, always, and he gets promoted.

00:24:53.000 Joe Biden, who bumbles his way through any sort of sentence or policy position speech, and he ends up getting the highest office in the land.

00:25:04.000 I think that more than anything else creates this kind of populist anger.

00:25:09.000 And so, Dinesh, how do we get better elites?

00:25:12.000 How do we get better people in those positions?

00:25:14.000 And I think Donald Trump is one part of that.

00:25:16.000 And it's not just in politics.

00:25:19.000 You've been trying to do this in film.

00:25:21.000 And I think you've done a great job of this in film: where why is it that we have to be dependent on three movie house studios, Paramount, MGM, and whatever the Disney spin-off is?

00:25:31.000 You would know it better than I would to produce all of the content for our cultural consumption.

00:25:37.000 Can you talk about how we can get better elites?

00:25:41.000 Yeah, you have to remember that when there is success to be had, and this can be in politics at the top level, or let's take Wall Street or take Hollywood, it's going to attract some very bad people.

00:25:53.000 Lincoln actually talked about this when he said, how do we avoid the risk of a Napoleon using the political system to come to the top?

00:26:05.000 But their point is not to be a shepherd, but to be a wolf.

00:26:09.000 And in democratic politics, the wolf always comes disguised as a sheep.

00:26:13.000 In other words, the wolf never says, I'm a wolf that I'm here to eat you and be a predator and take everything you have.

00:26:19.000 The wolf uses the language of democracy.

00:26:22.000 I'm here for the sheep.

00:26:23.000 That's why I'm here.

00:26:24.000 Lincoln knew all this.

00:26:26.000 Same with Wall Street.

00:26:27.000 When you have oceans of money, huge piles of cash, you're going to get wolves of Wall Street who come collecting.

00:26:34.000 So what you need is, and the American founders are very good on this.

00:26:37.000 They were like, you don't need exhortations to virtue.

00:26:40.000 You don't need saying things like, we got to get better people running for office.

00:26:44.000 We got to get better people on Wall Street.

00:26:47.000 They realized the founders that this is going to have very limited impact.

00:26:50.000 You need institutional mechanisms that weed out the bad guys, that hold them accountable.

00:26:57.000 So take something as simple as this.

00:26:58.000 Nobody begrudges a Wall Street guy who says, listen, I'm going to acquire a detailed knowledge of American companies.

00:27:05.000 I'm going to be able to see which industries are coming up and which ones are going to go down.

00:27:09.000 I'm going to put money into the ones that are coming up, which will fuel those new ideas and new innovations and new companies.

00:27:16.000 I'm going to have my drones take photos of the malls in the parking lots to see where the customers are going.

00:27:22.000 This is called market research.

00:27:23.000 You're making educated judgments about the economy.

00:27:26.000 This is totally different from this, where you go ahead and put money in stocks, and then the next day you go on CNBC and you go, man, there's a lot of activity around these stocks, just the stocks you happen to own.

00:27:38.000 So you create a frenzy in which people start buying the very stocks in which you bought last week.

00:27:43.000 You make a pile of cash and then you go do it again the next week.

00:27:46.000 I mean, that's not, that's the kind of guy that is basically gaming the system.

00:27:51.000 And then they get really upset when people on Reddit are doing the same thing.

00:27:55.000 Hey, you guys are coordinating.

00:27:56.000 You're exchanging information.

00:27:58.000 You're telling people what stocks to buy.

00:28:00.000 Well, that's what you're doing on CNBC every day.

00:28:03.000 Not only that, they hire public relations firms, they write open letters against CEOs.

00:28:08.000 They do all sorts of things to bring down share prices.

00:28:11.000 And it's interesting.

00:28:13.000 I think the critique against short selling is one that is probably legitimate.

00:28:17.000 However, short selling in and of itself is not really the issue here.

00:28:22.000 For example, my friend Will Chamberlain mentioned this from Human Events on a previous discussion we had.

00:28:27.000 I thought it was a brilliant point.

00:28:29.000 I think you would like it, Dinesh, which is we actually thought of short sellers as heroes back in the time of the big short when they were shorting the housing market.

00:28:38.000 They were by definition contrarian.

00:28:40.000 They lost a ton of money when they were shorting the housing market until they didn't.

00:28:45.000 We looked at them as almost clairvoyant traders that were trying to get ahead of the curve.

00:28:51.000 Whereas now the short sellers are the opposite.

00:28:53.000 Now the short sellers are actually the predominant power structure.

00:28:58.000 Now the short sellers are the guys with the capital, with the resources.

00:29:01.000 And the contrarian were the people, were the people that were actually trying to drive up the price against the wishes of the short sellers.

00:29:08.000 And so the instrument itself of short selling is not necessarily where the criticism should be.

00:29:13.000 I know Elon Musk had some criticism towards it, and I think that there's some very valid concerns there.

00:29:19.000 But your point is well taken, which is that the anger is stemmed from people say, you can't manipulate our manipulated market.

00:29:26.000 Like, you do this all the time.

00:29:28.000 All the time, you guys are exchanging information with winks and nods, bringing prices down.

00:29:32.000 And also, a great example of market manipulation just based solely and purely on reputation is whenever Warren Buffett makes a serious stake in a company, it goes up artificially.

00:29:43.000 He knows this, by the way.

00:29:45.000 He knows that when Berkshire Hathaway, because of his proven record, makes a placement in any company, other retail investors are going to get behind Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway.

00:29:55.000 Because it's just the reputation.

00:29:55.000 Why?

00:29:57.000 It's like he must know something I don't know.

00:29:59.000 I'm also going to get behind it.

00:30:01.000 It's almost this herd mentality that immediately steps in.

00:30:03.000 How is that any different than someone on Reddit saying that, well, I think this is a good idea, and a couple million people get behind it.

00:30:10.000 So, Dinesh, what do you think the GameStop saga teaches us politically, if anything?

00:30:16.000 Well, I think what it teaches us is that we have to think of creative new ways to fight.

00:30:20.000 And the Reddit people are geniuses in this respect.

00:30:23.000 I mean, I agree with you.

00:30:24.000 Of course, there's nothing inherently bad about short selling.

00:30:27.000 It's making money on a stock that's projected by you to go down.

00:30:31.000 And people, of course, that's the same thing as making money on a stock that you project to go up.

00:30:36.000 But here's the key difference.

00:30:37.000 You know, if you bet on a stock and you say, I'm going to buy it at $10 because I think it's going to go up, and the stock plummets to zero, you stand to lose a maximum of $10.

00:30:48.000 The stock price can't go below zero.

00:30:50.000 But now look at the opposite.

00:30:52.000 Let's say you take a stock that's $50 and you're projecting it to go to $10.

00:30:57.000 And so you short it, right?

00:30:59.000 There is theoretically no limit to how high it can go and you're going to owe the difference.

00:31:04.000 So let's say the stock goes up from $50 to $500.

00:31:09.000 Well, you're $450 in the hole.

00:31:11.000 And if you're operating on borrowed, leveraged money.

00:31:13.000 So the Reddit people figured this out.

00:31:15.000 They figured out that the short sellers are immensely vulnerable because there's theoretically no limit to how much they can lose.

00:31:22.000 And so a financial crisis is created by making a stock artificially go in the opposite direction from what they're betting.

00:31:29.000 They're betting down.

00:31:30.000 If we can push the stock up, we can literally put these guys out of business.

00:31:34.000 And they came very close to putting massive hedge funds like Melbourne Capital out of business.

00:31:39.000 And they certainly gave them an incredible body blow from which I don't think they're going to be recovering very soon.

00:31:44.000 So Dinesh, can you comment on how the Biden administration, which is primarily funded from Wall Street, was quick to send in regulators, possibly make phone calls allegedly from Janet Yellen to these firms about how we have now seen, and this is something you've warned about, about how the Democrat Party has become a corporatist party more than a socialist party.

00:32:04.000 It seems as if the Biden administration was eager to try and defend these hedge funds, their activity and the collusion amongst all their different choices and their actions.

00:32:15.000 Yeah, I mean, on my podcast a day or two ago, I was just reading the speaking fees that were being paid to Janet Yellen, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, and then, of course, Citadel, the very hedge fund involved in this whole Reddit GameStrovers.

00:32:34.000 And what you notice is that they're paying massive single speech, $175,000, two speeches, $320,000.

00:32:41.000 Now, obviously, this is not based upon anything Janet Yellen is actually saying.

00:32:45.000 In fact, you can get what Janet Yellen is saying for free on YouTube.

00:32:50.000 So the reason that they're paying her is it's almost like a down payment, an advance payment saying, hey, this is somebody who could be in a very responsible position in government.

00:33:00.000 And at that point, we're going to make sure it's somebody who's going to return our phone calls, listen to what we have to say, and be very well aware that a great deal of money has changed hands in her favor and from our pocketbooks.

00:33:12.000 And we do expect some sort of return on that investment.

00:33:16.000 And in return, they now get special protection from the Treasury Department, the Securities Exchange Commission, and more.

00:33:26.000 And that little investment is just pennies on the dollar versus the type of benefit that they now get long term.

00:33:33.000 So Dinesh, I want to finish on this one particular topic here that has been, a lot of people have been talking about, which is just looking at the last year with the shutdowns, with the virus, with the pandemic and our reaction to it.

00:33:50.000 It's been a very difficult year for a lot of people.

00:33:53.000 And just you look at it, just about a year ago, the rumblings of the Chinese coronavirus were just starting.

00:33:58.000 I remember watching on TV a year ago, the week of the Super Bowl, when then Health and Human Services Commissioner Alex Azar came up and said the Chinese coronavirus does not pose a threat at all.

00:34:08.000 And now we know actually what happened.

00:34:10.000 Dinesh, just looking at this from a historical lens or even just, you know, just a philosophical or political lens, what do you think the biggest lessons of the last year have been?

00:34:20.000 What do you think we need to say we learn this that we did not know a year ago?

00:34:27.000 Well, what we learned is that the epidemic was deployed worldwide as a massive political weapon, almost a mother of all bombs to drop on the world economy.

00:34:42.000 Now, in America, its motives were twofold.

00:34:44.000 One is to wreck the Trump economy, which was a necessary prerequisite to getting Trump out of office.

00:34:50.000 I think Trump would have been invincible if he had the Trump economy of, let's say, February of 2020.

00:34:56.000 So they needed it.

00:34:57.000 It was a gift.

00:34:58.000 Jane Fonda called it God's gift to the left, and it was God's gift to the left in that respect.

00:35:03.000 But it was God's gift to the left in other respects.

00:35:05.000 It gave the left a chance to justify tyranny in the name of a virus.

00:35:10.000 So they were able to suppress fundamental civil liberties and do it over a fairly long period of time and kind of get people accustomed to being under control like that.

00:35:21.000 And they also got a taste of it themselves and they liked it.

00:35:24.000 So, when you look at somebody like Gretchen Whitmer, now the ordinary American doesn't see a tyrant. 0.97

00:35:28.000 She's kind of a pleasant-looking middle-class American mom.

00:35:32.000 You know, and when we think of a tyrant, we think of like some guy like Stalin with a toothbrush, mustache, and a big Cossack outfit, right?

00:35:40.000 But to me, if you think of Gretchen Whitmer, she's really a very ancient type.

00:35:43.000 I mean, in a small village anywhere around the world, 100 years, 300 years ago, she would be like the town, you know, nitpicker, you know, you know, and her husband would cross the street and run away.

00:35:56.000 Her kids would run away from her, and her neighbors would avoid her. 1.00

00:35:59.000 But she would only exercise her tyrannical domain over a small number of people. 1.00

00:36:04.000 But when you make her in charge of Michigan, suddenly she has the police at her behest.

00:36:09.000 Suddenly, this tyrannical impulse takes on a whole macabre aspect it didn't have before.

00:36:15.000 And so this is the 21st century face of Western tyranny.

00:36:19.000 It's not going to look like it does in China or Russia.

00:36:22.000 It has its own American component.

00:36:25.000 Gretchen Whitmer's part of it, and Cuomo's part of it, and so are many others.

00:36:30.000 Yeah, I think that's a good observation, especially in this last year, how quickly we have allowed tyranny to spread in our country and to not confront it.

00:36:40.000 You're starting to see some of these governors start to relax some of those draconian standards.

00:36:45.000 You're starting to see them disengage from some of these ideas.

00:36:50.000 However, I will say this, Dinesh, that I'm not sure the American people have fully learned our lesson here.

00:36:57.000 I think that there has been, and this is to my great disappointment, more people that enjoyed being taken care of than being free.

00:37:05.000 That safetyism had become the predominant philosophy or the dominant viewpoint of the average American.

00:37:14.000 And I think that we need to recognize that freedom is a value.

00:37:18.000 And if you do not communicate the need for freedom, what it actually takes, which is responsibility and to be aware and to be alert, well, then freedom very well will be taken away almost instantaneously.

00:37:29.000 Can you talk a little bit about that?

00:37:31.000 Well, I think that there are a few professions, the medical profession being one of them, the scientific profession more generally being another, where we are habituated to deferring to expertise.

00:37:43.000 I mean, just think about it.

00:37:44.000 Every time you go to see a doctor, he'll tell you something.

00:37:47.000 You never go, well, that's a very controversial statement.

00:37:50.000 Give me four reasons why you think that.

00:37:52.000 I'll give you three why you're wrong.

00:37:54.000 You know, we don't do that.

00:37:55.000 We just say, oh, yeah, okay, I'll take it.

00:37:56.000 Okay, give me the prescription.

00:37:58.000 So, by and large, this is why I was talking about the godsend: that nothing could have been better than a medical crisis where all you have to do is put out a bunch of guys in white coats.

00:38:10.000 And everybody goes, Yeah, that's what the doctor says. 0.84

00:38:14.000 So, this was that in that sense, very helpful to the left.

00:38:18.000 Now, I do think, though, that the fact that the government, in a weird way, showed its impotence, I think, in being able to really look after people.

00:38:26.000 I mean, just think about it.

00:38:27.000 You send a pathetic $1,200 check, another $400 later, you're promising another $1,200, but people have been a year. 0.91

00:38:34.000 I mean, if you had a small business, it's essentially rendered dysfunctional. 0.93

00:38:38.000 People, you don't have your employees.

00:38:40.000 It's very hard to get back on your feet.

00:38:42.000 And the government goes, Hey, here's your 600 bucks.

00:38:44.000 You know, you realize, you know, at the end of the day, it's only freedom, hard work, effort, entrepreneurship.

00:38:51.000 That's ultimately what's going to put food on our table and braces on our kids' teeth and make a better life for us and our families.

00:38:57.000 There's not going to be some pathetic, measly provision made by the federal government.

00:39:03.000 And even Governor Cuomo has said, quote, when I say experts in air quotes, it sounds like I'm saying I don't really trust the experts.

00:39:11.000 And he says, because I don't.

00:39:14.000 So that's an amazing thing to hear from Cuomo now that he's been liberated from the Trump administration.

00:39:19.000 I think the Democrats are going after Cuomo in a very serious way.

00:39:22.000 Dinesh, tell us about your podcast, how people can reach it.

00:39:25.000 I know you're working very hard on it.

00:39:26.000 Well, it's really fun for me.

00:39:28.000 And I, you know, it came out of COVID in a weird way, a silver lining, because before that, I was traveling half-time.

00:39:34.000 I was on the road, speaking here and speaking there, meeting with investors, making movies.

00:39:39.000 Very difficult for me to do a daily podcast.

00:39:42.000 So this forced me to kind of hunker down.

00:39:44.000 I'm trying to do a podcast that's very educational and also very varied in its content.

00:39:49.000 I mean, just today's podcast, you know, I talked about Wall Street.

00:39:52.000 I talked about Dostoevsky.

00:39:54.000 I talked about the idea of nihilism.

00:39:56.000 I interviewed a young woman who has been banned by Sephora as a cultural influencer, a Christian, and a patriot.

00:40:03.000 So I swing the whole gamut and I do little comedy sketches.

00:40:08.000 So it's a varied podcast.

00:40:09.000 It's a lot of fun.

00:40:10.000 It reflects my personality.

00:40:12.000 It's available on Spotify and Apple and audio.

00:40:15.000 And it's available in video on YouTube and Rumble.

00:40:18.000 And of course, also on Salem Now.

00:40:20.000 Well, I love that.

00:40:22.000 And we could do a whole nother episode on Dostoevsky.

00:40:28.000 I can never say it right, but I believe one of his quotes is: To live without hope is to cease to live, is one of my favorite quotes of his.

00:40:35.000 But everyone, check out Dinesh's podcast.

00:40:37.000 You're doing a great job, Dinesh.

00:40:38.000 Thank you for joining us today, Dinesh, and talk to you soon.

00:40:41.000 It's a pleasure.

00:40:42.000 Thanks, Charlie.

00:40:43.000 Thanks, Dinesh.

00:40:44.000 See you soon.

00:40:46.000 Thanks so much, everybody, for listening.

00:40:48.000 If you want to support our program, go to charliekirk.com/slash support.

00:40:52.000 Make sure you're subscribed to the Charlie Kirk Show and send us in your thoughts and feedback at freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:40:58.000 God bless you, everybody.

00:41:00.000 Speak to you soon.

The Charlie Kirk Show - February 02, 2021

Staving Off the Death of the Republican Party with Dinesh D' Souza

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