00:00:00.000Hey everybody, today in the Charlie Kirk Show, conversation with my friend Dinesh D'Souza.
00:00:04.000You guys are going to really enjoy it.
00:00:06.000We dive into the future of the Republican Party.
00:00:08.000What has surprised us about the Biden era and what exactly is populism?
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00:03:00.000Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:03:02.000With 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.
00:03:16.000Dinesh, welcome back to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:03:44.000Well, 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.
00:04:02.000Now, what Biden has shown is that I think on the policy front, not so surprising.
00:04:07.000He's really doing the things he said he would do.
00:04:10.000And there are people who are surprised, some dismayed.
00:04:14.000I 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.
00:04:24.000He's cutting oil jobs and our people are going to be out of work.
00:05:17.000Now, 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.
00:05:29.000Yeah, 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.
00:05:39.000They 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.
00:05:51.000And 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.
00:06:02.000And so, Dinesh, can you walk us through?
00:06:04.000It's been a couple of weeks, a lot of executive orders, a lot of jobs being killed.
00:06:08.000Are you surprised by anything, or is everything just falling into place as you thought it would be?
00:06:13.000No, I mean, I'm very dismayed by what is happening to America.
00:06:18.000And I almost think that things are going to have to get a lot worse before they get better.
00:06:24.000And 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.
00:06:31.000The American dream hangs in the balance.
00:06:34.000This is the most important election of your lifetime.
00:06:37.000And then after the election, go, oh, we were just kidding.
00:06:40.000The American dream is not hanging in the balance.
00:07:09.000That'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.
00:07:19.000And the Democrats' strategy currently seems to be: we are going to rule with an iron fist, change the way elections actually operate.
00:07:28.000And it's irrelevant what the people actually believe through mass amnesty, through HR1, through the addition of states, through more Supreme Court justices.
00:07:36.000They want to change the way we govern ourselves more than actually just change public policy, tax rates, or social benefits.
00:07:43.000They want to change the way that we actually elect and appoint leaders.
00:07:47.000Can you talk about the threat that that poses to our country?
00:07:51.000Of 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.
00:07:59.000Well, when we look at periods of American history, we see that there are times when America has been kind of a one-party state.
00:08:06.000So, 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.
00:08:16.000And they were overwhelmingly the majority party, even though the Whig Party developed a little bit later until the Civil War.
00:08:25.000Then, from 1932 to 1980, the Democrats were kind of a one-party state.
00:08:30.000Again, you know, you'd have a Republican like Eisenhower who'd sneak in there, even Nixon.
00:08:35.000But remember, they were kind of carried by the Democratic tide.
00:08:38.000They offered only token resistance to Democratic and liberal policies.
00:08:43.000So, the Democrats are very unhappy that from 1980 until now, America has had divided government.
00:08:50.000Typically, one party may have the presidency, the other party has the Congress.
00:08:54.000There's enough block and tackle that neither party can really do whatever it wants.
00:08:59.000And they want that, you may almost call it Reagan interregnum to come to an end.
00:09:04.000It 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.
00:09:46.000In other words, what I think is in the middle of the game, you always play the game the way it's being played.
00:09:51.000Now, a good example, by the way, of how it is played that way is a California.
00:09:55.000Republicans lost a whole bunch of seats in the midterm election because the Democrats did ballot harvesting.
00:10:00.000And 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.
00:10:14.000We'll do some ballot harvesting of our own, and we won a whole bunch of those seats back.
00:10:18.000This was the case of the GOP playing the other side's game.
00:10:21.000So, I see nothing wrong in doing that.
00:10:23.000It's not inconsistent of us to do that.
00:10:25.000It's not, it makes no sense to say, oh, we're better than that, guys.
00:10:38.000If 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.
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00:11:59.000Dinesh, I want to talk about just the future of the Republican Party and what's happening in real time.
00:12:05.000We 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.
00:12:15.000Can you speak to the philosophical direction that you want to see the Republican Party go in?
00:12:19.000This is something that people are wrestling with right now.
00:12:22.000What is the political and philosophical direction you want to see us go in?
00:12:26.000So if we flash back to 1980 when Reagan first ran, Reagan said, I am running on five big ideas.
00:12:35.000The first idea is the idea of the individual.
00:13:20.000Instead 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.
00:13:28.000So 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.
00:13:44.000Maybe some of them work at different jobs, but their values are not fundamentally different.
00:13:49.000And therefore, it's, I think, imperative that we don't fork and move in separate directions because we'll be much weaker.
00:13:55.000This is not a parliamentary system where two parties can ally together and form a ruling coalition.
00:14:01.000This 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.
00:14:16.000We've done a history of populism on our show, from William Jennings Bryan to Theodore Roosevelt to even some variations of Kennedy and Reagan.
00:15:12.000So 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.
00:15:23.000Again, you can see how this can easily come from the left or from the right.
00:15:28.000To 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.
00:15:36.000Somebody's making millions, if not billions of dollars.
00:15:41.000And this is a system that appears to be a money system rigged against me.
00:15:46.000Now, you notice echoes of that on the left and on the right.
00:15:49.000Now, the populism on the left and the right is different.
00:15:51.000So, 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.
00:16:02.000I don't like Wall Street because it's not capitalist enough.
00:16:06.000It breaks the rules of capitalism, it games the system.
00:16:09.000It's too much of heads, I win, tails, you lose.
00:16:12.000So, we're both sort of populist in a sense, but coming from a very different direction.
00:16:17.000I think that's a great, I think that's a great analysis.
00:16:21.000The question is: you know, what do we do with all this pent-up populist energy?
00:16:26.000We know it's here, we know it's not going anywhere.
00:16:30.000I think your description is correct where people are upset or dissatisfied with a pre-existing power structure that is disenfranchising them.
00:16:38.000But I think we see, Dinesh, that people are increasingly distrustful of their institutions and that populist energy is not going away.
00:16:46.000Smart Democrats are going to try and wield that.
00:17:33.000If they think they've got friends in the Democratic Party, good luck.
00:17:37.000Let'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.
00:17:43.000No, 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.
00:17:52.000It's got to speak in ordinary language.
00:17:54.000I 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.
00:18:11.000They had the same sort of reasoning and they didn't like to, you know, they had a certain dismissive attitude.
00:18:15.000And so I saw the Trump personality ingrained in all these guys all over the city.
00:18:21.000And I thought to myself, wow, they deserve representation.
00:18:24.000They need someone who fights for them.
00:18:25.000And that someone should be the Republican Party.
00:18:28.000Yeah, 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.
00:18:42.000And because of that, this is something that the ruling class detested.
00:18:48.000They didn't like that he did not use all of the correct policy positions and arguments from the Ivy League schools.
00:18:54.000And quite honestly, Dinesh, I think he liberated a lot of conservatives to think differently about issues.
00:19:01.000A 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.
00:19:13.000I 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?
00:19:22.000And we were not even allowed to talk about that prior to Trump.
00:19:26.000Like some have been good trade deals, some have been really, really bad.
00:19:29.000And some have actually disenfranchised entire parts of our country.
00:19:34.000And President Trump deserves such credit for that for changing the kind of conversation there.
00:19:39.000And so we did a podcast about the gift that the Republican Party is missing.
00:19:43.000And that is the, as I mentioned, the energy of the populist movement and it's growing.
00:19:47.000And I completely agree with your observation and your analysis there.
00:19:50.000What 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.
00:20:09.000How do we channel that energy properly directed while also keeping true to our constitutional republic roots?
00:20:15.000Well, I've got a bunch of thoughts, but I'll just give one or two and maybe go from there.
00:20:20.000The 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.
00:20:43.000It 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.
00:20:52.000And 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.
00:21:07.000Now, 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.
00:21:17.000It's almost like he assumed that you know where he's coming from.
00:21:20.000And this applied even to things like he talked about Biden family corruption.
00:21:24.000He'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.
00:21:34.000And it's operated by taking family members as bagmen.
00:21:37.000And there are disclosure requirements that apply to Biden, but they don't apply to the two brothers and the son.
00:21:42.000So they're the ones with the suitcases of cash.
00:21:45.000And when they bring it home, they all sit around the dinner table and split the loot.
00:21:50.000So then the American guy goes, Wow, is that what's really going on?
00:21:54.000So, 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.
00:22:12.000In other words, it's using the educational function.
00:22:15.000Now, 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.
00:22:21.000And if it's not coming from Trump, it's going to have to come from somewhere.
00:22:24.000So 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.
00:22:37.000So if we don't do it, who's going to do it?
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00:23:52.000I really want to pick up on that one piece you said, where it's not about the abolition of elites.
00:23:57.000That is a Marxist, egalitarian, Rousseauian view of the world.
00:24:37.000No 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.
00:24:53.000Joe 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.
00:25:04.000I think that more than anything else creates this kind of populist anger.
00:25:09.000And so, Dinesh, how do we get better elites?
00:25:12.000How do we get better people in those positions?
00:25:14.000And I think Donald Trump is one part of that.
00:25:19.000You've been trying to do this in film.
00:25:21.000And 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?
00:25:31.000You would know it better than I would to produce all of the content for our cultural consumption.
00:25:37.000Can you talk about how we can get better elites?
00:25:41.000Yeah, 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.
00:25:53.000Lincoln 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?
00:26:05.000But their point is not to be a shepherd, but to be a wolf.
00:26:09.000And in democratic politics, the wolf always comes disguised as a sheep.
00:26:13.000In 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.
00:26:19.000The wolf uses the language of democracy.
00:27:23.000You're making educated judgments about the economy.
00:27:26.000This 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.
00:27:38.000So you create a frenzy in which people start buying the very stocks in which you bought last week.
00:27:43.000You make a pile of cash and then you go do it again the next week.
00:27:46.000I mean, that's not, that's the kind of guy that is basically gaming the system.
00:27:51.000And then they get really upset when people on Reddit are doing the same thing.
00:28:29.000I 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.
00:28:40.000They lost a ton of money when they were shorting the housing market until they didn't.
00:28:45.000We looked at them as almost clairvoyant traders that were trying to get ahead of the curve.
00:28:51.000Whereas now the short sellers are the opposite.
00:28:53.000Now the short sellers are actually the predominant power structure.
00:28:58.000Now the short sellers are the guys with the capital, with the resources.
00:29:01.000And the contrarian were the people, were the people that were actually trying to drive up the price against the wishes of the short sellers.
00:29:08.000And so the instrument itself of short selling is not necessarily where the criticism should be.
00:29:13.000I know Elon Musk had some criticism towards it, and I think that there's some very valid concerns there.
00:29:19.000But your point is well taken, which is that the anger is stemmed from people say, you can't manipulate our manipulated market.
00:29:28.000All the time, you guys are exchanging information with winks and nods, bringing prices down.
00:29:32.000And 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.
00:29:45.000He 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.
00:30:01.000It's almost this herd mentality that immediately steps in.
00:30:03.000How 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.
00:30:10.000So, Dinesh, what do you think the GameStop saga teaches us politically, if anything?
00:30:16.000Well, I think what it teaches us is that we have to think of creative new ways to fight.
00:30:20.000And the Reddit people are geniuses in this respect.
00:30:37.000You 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.
00:31:30.000If we can push the stock up, we can literally put these guys out of business.
00:31:34.000And they came very close to putting massive hedge funds like Melbourne Capital out of business.
00:31:39.000And they certainly gave them an incredible body blow from which I don't think they're going to be recovering very soon.
00:31:44.000So 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.
00:32:04.000It 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.
00:32:15.000Yeah, 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.
00:32:34.000And what you notice is that they're paying massive single speech, $175,000, two speeches, $320,000.
00:32:41.000Now, obviously, this is not based upon anything Janet Yellen is actually saying.
00:32:45.000In fact, you can get what Janet Yellen is saying for free on YouTube.
00:32:50.000So 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.
00:33:00.000And 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.
00:33:12.000And we do expect some sort of return on that investment.
00:33:16.000And in return, they now get special protection from the Treasury Department, the Securities Exchange Commission, and more.
00:33:26.000And that little investment is just pennies on the dollar versus the type of benefit that they now get long term.
00:33:33.000So 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.
00:33:50.000It's been a very difficult year for a lot of people.
00:33:53.000And just you look at it, just about a year ago, the rumblings of the Chinese coronavirus were just starting.
00:33:58.000I 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.
00:34:08.000And now we know actually what happened.
00:34:10.000Dinesh, 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?
00:34:20.000What do you think we need to say we learn this that we did not know a year ago?
00:34:27.000Well, 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.
00:34:42.000Now, in America, its motives were twofold.
00:34:44.000One is to wreck the Trump economy, which was a necessary prerequisite to getting Trump out of office.
00:34:50.000I think Trump would have been invincible if he had the Trump economy of, let's say, February of 2020.
00:34:58.000Jane Fonda called it God's gift to the left, and it was God's gift to the left in that respect.
00:35:03.000But it was God's gift to the left in other respects.
00:35:05.000It gave the left a chance to justify tyranny in the name of a virus.
00:35:10.000So 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.
00:35:21.000And they also got a taste of it themselves and they liked it.
00:35:24.000So, when you look at somebody like Gretchen Whitmer, now the ordinary American doesn't see a tyrant.
00:35:28.000She's kind of a pleasant-looking middle-class American mom.
00:35:32.000You 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?
00:35:40.000But to me, if you think of Gretchen Whitmer, she's really a very ancient type.
00:35:43.000I 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.
00:35:56.000Her kids would run away from her, and her neighbors would avoid her.
00:35:59.000But she would only exercise her tyrannical domain over a small number of people.
00:36:04.000But when you make her in charge of Michigan, suddenly she has the police at her behest.
00:36:09.000Suddenly, this tyrannical impulse takes on a whole macabre aspect it didn't have before.
00:36:15.000And so this is the 21st century face of Western tyranny.
00:36:19.000It's not going to look like it does in China or Russia.
00:36:25.000Gretchen Whitmer's part of it, and Cuomo's part of it, and so are many others.
00:36:30.000Yeah, 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.
00:36:40.000You're starting to see some of these governors start to relax some of those draconian standards.
00:36:45.000You're starting to see them disengage from some of these ideas.
00:36:50.000However, I will say this, Dinesh, that I'm not sure the American people have fully learned our lesson here.
00:36:57.000I think that there has been, and this is to my great disappointment, more people that enjoyed being taken care of than being free.
00:37:05.000That safetyism had become the predominant philosophy or the dominant viewpoint of the average American.
00:37:14.000And I think that we need to recognize that freedom is a value.
00:37:18.000And 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.
00:37:31.000Well, 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.
00:37:58.000So, 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.
00:38:10.000And everybody goes, Yeah, that's what the doctor says.
00:38:14.000So, this was that in that sense, very helpful to the left.
00:38:18.000Now, 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.
00:40:22.000And we could do a whole nother episode on Dostoevsky.
00:40:28.000I 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.
00:40:35.000But everyone, check out Dinesh's podcast.