TRIGGERnometry - Why MAGA Is At War With Itself

00:00:00.840 Some of our politics has, in fact, become gangsterized.

00:00:04.600 I don't see anyone calling for self-restraint.

00:00:07.720 I take your point.

00:00:08.960 It doesn't work.

00:00:09.820 If you just take the punches lying down and you never fight back, that doesn't work.

00:00:14.160 But do you think this is going to work?

00:00:15.780 I think we now have a scorched earth president who just sort of doesn't care.

00:00:21.860 I first noticed that the left didn't want to debate, but I'm finding the right really

00:00:26.060 doesn't either.

00:00:26.780 I don't mean to make light of it, but essentially you could say that Candace and Tucker have

00:00:30.660 gone trans on us.

00:00:32.060 They have transitioned into something completely different.

00:00:35.200 I don't know a country in the world that has a stronger claim to title, Israel is checking

00:00:41.240 all the boxes.

00:00:42.740 What I find is that if you say this, which seems to me very straightforwardly convincing, you

00:00:49.900 make no headway.

00:00:51.160 What does that tell you?

00:00:52.020 That tells you that they want to be in that pit.

00:00:56.200 There's another agenda going on.

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00:01:49.680 Dinesh D'Souza, welcome to Chikinomchi.

00:01:51.840 Thank you.

00:01:52.420 Great to be here.

00:01:53.140 It's great to have you.

00:01:53.980 The question we really want to ask you is what the hell is going on in America?

00:01:57.780 That's going to be a fascinating conversation.

00:02:00.260 I mean, you know, New York, your financial hub looks like it's about to elect someone who's

00:02:05.380 very far left.

00:02:06.200 Equally, on the other side of the political spectrum, you know, things are moving in a

00:02:11.260 far rightward direction.

00:02:12.420 It looks like from the outside.

00:02:13.560 You might disagree.

00:02:14.560 We'll talk about that.

00:02:15.760 But before we get into all of that, tell us about you.

00:02:19.700 How are you here?

00:02:20.600 What's been your journey through life?

00:02:22.800 I was born in Bombay, India.

00:02:25.140 My dad was an engineer.

00:02:27.400 I grew up in a middle class family, speaking English, by the way, at home.

00:02:31.360 And I came to the United States 1978 as a Rotary Youth Exchange student.

00:02:38.160 I lived in Arizona, kind of on the Mexican border for a year with four different families.

00:02:43.920 I went to the 12th grade of high school.

00:02:46.340 So I came to America at an impressionable time.

00:02:49.880 And then a year later, I got into Dartmouth.

00:02:52.680 So I went to an Ivy League school in New Hampshire.

00:02:56.760 And then I became a kind of young Reaganite.

00:02:59.980 I came to Washington in the last part of the Reagan administration.

00:03:04.300 I worked in the White House with people like Pat Buchanan, Peggy Noonan, people like that.

00:03:10.060 And then I've spent about 20 years subsequent to that in conservative think tanks, the American

00:03:16.000 Enterprise Institute, about a decade, and then the Hoover Institution at Stanford, about

00:03:20.720 a decade.

00:03:21.920 And then in that period, mostly I wrote books.

00:03:25.900 I was also kind of a Charlie Kirk of a younger generation.

00:03:31.860 I spoke on campuses, hundreds of them, all through the 90s and the 2000s, obviously at

00:03:38.880 a safer time in America.

00:03:41.520 And, well, you never had to worry about that kind of thing.

00:03:45.460 And then I started making documentary films about a decade ago.

00:03:49.440 So I kind of wandered into that almost accidentally, but discovered that our culture is moving in

00:03:55.120 that direction.

00:03:56.320 And so although I keep up with the books and I still do some speaking, I'm also now a filmmaker

00:04:01.080 who never went to film school.

00:04:04.300 But it is a way to reach more people that would not be in a line at Barnes & Noble to have

00:04:09.920 your book signed.

00:04:10.560 So for that reason, I think it's a powerful, powerful vehicle for expressing ideas.

00:04:17.800 Well, so it sounds a little bit like you were an outsider who's now become part of the

00:04:23.060 country.

00:04:23.620 You've moved here, you're an American.

00:04:25.820 But I think people who've come from other countries like me and Francis to a lesser extent

00:04:30.340 in Britain, they always have a slightly better perspective on how things evolve over time

00:04:36.760 because they know that a different world exists.

00:04:39.740 So what have you observed in America over your lifetime here?

00:04:44.240 What do you see as kind of the pattern and how we've ended up to where we ended up?

00:04:48.740 I moved almost naturally into the Reaganite conservative orbit because I was exposed to

00:04:58.280 conservative ideas at Dartmouth.

00:05:00.200 I kind of fell in with a young gang of rebel right-wingers.

00:05:03.800 And I realized they're talking about stuff, you know, they have answers to things I didn't

00:05:07.760 even know were questions.

00:05:08.680 They were discussing Burke and Hayek and Solzhenitsyn.

00:05:12.880 And I'm like, who are these people?

00:05:14.760 And why are we, why are they important?

00:05:17.240 So I plunged myself into these ideas, Burke, and I realized, you know, it's not that I'm

00:05:22.820 becoming a conservative.

00:05:24.720 I already am.

00:05:26.060 This is a kind of intelligent articulation of things I've already believed.

00:05:30.420 And so it, as I say, was a kind of a natural fit.

00:05:35.220 Also, Reagan conservatism was very cosmopolitan.

00:05:39.560 It emphasized the universality of American principles.

00:05:43.340 So there was no awkwardness for me.

00:05:46.680 And in a way, I would say I grew into it.

00:05:50.980 Remember, I came to America by myself.

00:05:53.020 I didn't, a lot of people move with their families.

00:05:55.180 Most Indians in this country, for example, their families moved in the 60s and they were

00:05:59.340 either born here or they, or they moved.

00:06:02.560 And, and not to mention that they typically move into Indian neighborhoods like in New Jersey.

00:06:07.720 And so they're, they're very, they remain in a kind of Indian subculture.

00:06:12.980 This is not my experience at all.

00:06:15.220 I came alone.

00:06:16.600 I lived in places where, when I was at Dartmouth, I was hard pressed to see an Indian like for

00:06:21.580 six months, you know, there were very few on the campus, a lot more now.

00:06:26.140 So, so I think the big shift is from the Reagan conservatism to Trump and MAGA.

00:06:35.020 And of course, that occurred over the speed bump of the Bushes.

00:06:40.160 The Bush experience dislocated American conservatism and it was sort of reborn in a, a bit of a new

00:06:49.280 tone.

00:06:50.780 Now, I've been on board with all that.

00:06:52.840 Um, and I say that because a lot of my former colleagues at AEI and Hoover became dedicated

00:06:59.060 never Trumpers.

00:07:00.280 They still are people like Bill Kristol.

00:07:03.140 Um, so I know these people well, I wrote for their magazines.

00:07:06.580 Uh, I was really part of their orbit.

00:07:08.680 Um, but a Trump became a fork in the road.

00:07:12.060 They went one way.

00:07:14.000 I went a different way.

00:07:15.740 Uh, and they also interpreted the fact that I was making films as a kind of intellectual sellout.

00:07:22.300 They kept saying things like, well, Dinesh has just gone for the, you know, the big audience.

00:07:27.440 Um, but really what I realized was that people are reading less.

00:07:32.000 Um, and that I was trying in my earlier career to convince the kind of hypothetical man on the

00:07:38.240 fence.

00:07:39.300 Um, you could call it like Michael Kinsley at the new Republic or so Fred Barnes, someone

00:07:44.320 like that.

00:07:45.140 Uh, and I realized that those guys are, it's not worth the time really.

00:07:51.080 And there's a whole bunch of new people who don't know anything about the founding, don't

00:07:56.360 know anything about conservative principles, don't know very much about the roots of the

00:08:00.020 West, but they actually want to learn.

00:08:01.740 Um, I'm like, I'd rather address that audience.

00:08:04.920 And so it was quite a conscious decision to make a career shift, um, which did have the

00:08:12.340 effect of, of pulling me away from a lot of my old colleagues.

00:08:16.400 And Dinesh, you have got a quite a unique viewpoint because on the one hand, you're an immigrant

00:08:22.380 who came here from a completely different country at the age of 17.

00:08:25.340 Yet you've been here for a long time and you've seen the culture, but what you get is the benefit

00:08:30.440 of both insider and outsider.

00:08:33.920 Are we far more politically polarized than previous generations or is something that's

00:08:41.140 always existed and it's just come to the surface more because of social media?

00:08:45.920 No, I think that there is a, an important shift in the Reagan years.

00:08:51.980 I would say that my view of America was that you have, it's sort of like a debate between

00:08:59.160 two clubs.

00:09:00.260 You have the Republican club, sort of like the Rotary, and then you have the Democratic

00:09:04.620 club, kind of like the Kiwanis club.

00:09:06.620 And each club puts forward its ideas to the American people and they decide we'd rather

00:09:11.740 do go here.

00:09:12.620 We'd rather go there.

00:09:13.340 We'd rather have equality of opportunity or we'd rather have equality of outcome.

00:09:16.420 So, I had a more benign view of the political system.

00:09:21.240 Not only that, I would say that the key difference is that in the, in the Reagan days, the assumption

00:09:27.620 was that we, as Americans, had pretty much of a shared goal.

00:09:33.160 We disagree on the means.

00:09:35.360 So, if you were to ask Americans, like, do you think America should be strong?

00:09:39.960 Yes.

00:09:40.360 Do you think America should be prosperous?

00:09:42.240 Do you think America is an example to the world?

00:09:44.340 Yes.

00:09:44.620 Do you think our American founding principles are good?

00:09:47.700 Do you think that people would have a better life if they follow the Ten Commandments?

00:09:50.900 You know, you could go on like this.

00:09:52.100 By and large, you'd expect people to go, well, yeah.

00:09:54.580 Now, you might disagree if you are prosperous and you have a big pie.

00:09:58.320 How should you carve the pie?

00:10:00.020 But those are debates about the means.

00:10:03.500 I think the difference now, and part of the reason there's a bitter edge to our politics,

00:10:08.060 is that our goals are not the same.

00:10:09.900 And not only that, not only are they not the same, it's not just that we want to go to Maine

00:10:13.560 and they want to go to Chicago, it's that what we consider up, they consider down.

00:10:17.780 What we consider, you know, good, they consider evil.

00:10:21.240 And so, you have a case where it's a little difficult to know how to negotiate these differences

00:10:27.320 because they're differences about ends, not about means.

00:10:30.600 It's a really fascinating point.

00:10:33.500 And do you think part of it is social media, but also part of it as well is economic inequality?

00:10:39.840 If you have a group of people who feel for whatever reason they're never going to be able to own anything

00:10:45.940 or be part of that society, does it not make that portion of society more prone to political polarization and extremism?

00:10:54.620 Yes. I think that there is an economic dimension to this,

00:11:00.160 and then there is a sort of cultural, moral, and spiritual dimension.

00:11:03.980 Both are extremely important.

00:11:06.220 The economic part cuts more to the right.

00:11:11.980 By that, I mean you've got a whole generation now of young people,

00:11:14.880 people, and they believe, and I think with some legitimacy, that the system has betrayed them.

00:11:23.980 The system has lied to them.

00:11:25.900 The system does not have their priorities at heart.

00:11:29.300 The system is an insider system devised by elites for their own benefit.

00:11:34.280 And a lot of the rage, and I would say even some of the bigotry that comes out of young people

00:11:43.080 is a reaction to their parents, their pastors, their professors, the CDC lying to them,

00:11:51.420 the National Institutes of Health, the FBI.

00:11:55.120 You know, when you find one conspiracy after another kind of coming true,

00:11:59.620 you then become a sucker for conspiracy theories, however implausible.

00:12:03.680 And so that's one phenomenon.

00:12:06.440 I think there is an economic basis to that.

00:12:09.520 The cultural and moral basis, I think, is just as important,

00:12:13.660 which is to say that we have a deep cleavage between,

00:12:20.800 you could call it the ethic of identity and authenticity,

00:12:23.740 versus the idea of an external moral code,

00:12:29.400 by which you could use the Ten Commandments as a substitute for that,

00:12:31.980 the idea of social stability, social order.

00:12:35.700 So these two things are now at loggerheads.

00:12:39.140 And a lot of our culture war comes out of that.

00:12:43.580 And I would also say as well, and Constance and I talk about this all the time when we're here,

00:12:47.780 and look, we love America.

00:12:48.980 It's got so many things going for it.

00:12:50.920 It's a beautiful place, etc.

00:12:52.060 But the people here, I would argue, are conspiratorial by nature.

00:12:57.860 And I'm not talking about the left, although I'm talking about everybody.

00:13:01.540 Everybody, when you sit down with them, after a while, they go,

00:13:04.160 yeah, but you know who's really in charge?

00:13:06.900 Right.

00:13:08.000 Yeah.

00:13:09.000 Well, the thing about it is...

00:13:10.340 And they've all got different answers to that question, by the way.

00:13:12.620 But everyone has the question.

00:13:14.720 Yeah.

00:13:14.900 And I think the reason for that...

00:13:19.280 I mean, I'm more conspiratorial than I used to be.

00:13:22.320 And by that, I mean, you know, I took it as a matter of faith

00:13:28.600 that John F. Kennedy was shot by a guy from a mound with a shady background,

00:13:37.360 and there was a commission that looked into it.

00:13:39.700 And while all the details may not be known, you know, we know who did it.

00:13:43.640 Um, and, uh, but now I'm not so sure.

00:13:48.780 In other words, I'm open to the fact that, you know,

00:13:51.540 there was probably a lot more going on.

00:13:53.260 Watergate, um, which, again, I had a fairly straightforward view of.

00:13:58.260 Uh, I now have a more...

00:14:00.220 I have more complex suspicions about it.

00:14:02.780 But these are not...

00:14:04.780 These suspicions are actually grounded in a deeper knowledge

00:14:08.520 of how the system actually works.

00:14:11.500 I mean, I worked in the White House.

00:14:12.380 I thought I actually understood America's government.

00:14:14.340 But if you fast forward just my own experience to 2013,

00:14:18.640 five weeks after I make this controversial film on Obama,

00:14:22.220 and I admit I exasperated him because I went inside of his world.

00:14:27.420 I went to Kenya.

00:14:28.600 I went to his family homestead in a small village called Kogelo.

00:14:31.800 I had a conversation with his grandmother.

00:14:34.920 And she said, you know, that if you want to interview me,

00:14:37.800 you have to bring me a goat.

00:14:39.180 So in the film, you see me dragging a very unwilling goat

00:14:42.700 to the Obama homestead.

00:14:44.320 I found his brother in a slum in Nairobi.

00:14:46.720 So I annoyed him.

00:14:48.900 But nevertheless, just weeks after this film is a massive success in theaters.

00:14:53.200 Like the FBI is banging on my door, you know.

00:14:55.560 And they had apparently gone through my bank accounts.

00:14:58.320 They realized that I had given $20,000 to a college friend of mine,

00:15:03.360 just out of friendship, who was running for office.

00:15:06.760 They found that that violated the campaign finance laws.

00:15:10.000 And so they prosecuted me as a felon.

00:15:12.700 And so I'm sitting across in a conference table,

00:15:15.260 kind of like this one,

00:15:16.300 with top lawyers of the Southern District of New York.

00:15:19.080 And I'm realizing from this conversation that for this offense,

00:15:23.660 which I did exceed the campaign finance law,

00:15:25.660 but I didn't benefit out of it,

00:15:27.300 first-time offense, benign motive,

00:15:30.340 if these guys could have locked me up for 10 years for doing that,

00:15:33.780 they would have.

00:15:34.860 So that's a very sobering realization.

00:15:36.880 Because you suddenly realize,

00:15:38.900 you know, my old idea that these people are political opponents

00:15:44.760 or I'm a dissident, no.

00:15:48.760 The way they look at it, I'm an enemy.

00:15:51.300 And their job is to take me out.

00:15:53.560 And if they can do it, they will do it.

00:15:56.060 And of course, my case was so early on that I thought,

00:15:59.040 okay, this is a one-off.

00:16:00.200 Obama's a vindictive narcissist.

00:16:02.180 I'm a naive immigrant.

00:16:04.000 I should have known there's a big target on my back.

00:16:05.820 But sure enough, a few years later,

00:16:07.820 George Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Michael Flynn, Trump himself,

00:16:12.440 all of this became commonplace.

00:16:14.820 So you can see where the conspiratorial mindset comes from.

00:16:18.240 It comes from the recognition that some of our politics

00:16:21.120 has, in fact, become gangsterized.

00:16:23.360 That's not an illusion.

00:16:25.160 That's a reality.

00:16:25.660 Well, right.

00:16:26.320 And, you know, in many of those cases,

00:16:28.960 the people are guilty of the things that they're being accused of.

00:16:32.860 But, you know, I'm from Russia.

00:16:34.200 And in Russia, this is how it works.

00:16:36.040 It's like everyone has done something wrong.

00:16:38.620 And whether you get prosecuted for it

00:16:40.800 is not a question of have you committed the crime.

00:16:43.800 It's a question of, is it politically advantageous right now

00:16:46.620 for that crime to be dealt with?

00:16:48.260 I mean, you know, the left will say,

00:16:50.280 well, look at John Bolton right now.

00:16:51.580 Look at other things like that.

00:16:53.000 And that's a really staggering thing

00:16:56.660 that I think we as outsiders in this country are noticing.

00:16:59.440 It's just things are very, very, there is no, you know,

00:17:05.840 you're not going, shaking hands and going to the bar after the game type of thing.

00:17:10.220 Exactly.

00:17:10.720 The game is played by a very different set of rules.

00:17:13.080 And the rules are violent.

00:17:14.140 And increasingly, the rules are, you know, kill or be killed.

00:17:17.580 In 2008 to 2012, I did 10 debates with Christopher Hitchens on college campuses.

00:17:26.260 One or two were in big museums.

00:17:28.340 Every single debate goes the same way.

00:17:30.100 We go up there, knock down, drag out arguments over God and atheism,

00:17:35.520 witty insults flying left and right.

00:17:37.460 After the debate, I go down to the bar.

00:17:39.860 There's Hitchens and he's entertaining three or four people with quips.

00:17:43.200 I join them, you know, two bottles of wine disappear and we are on to the next stage.

00:17:49.280 Right.

00:17:49.560 And so there's a there's a collegiality and there is a kind of basic understanding

00:17:56.460 that we're both seeking the truth.

00:17:59.860 And and then a few years later, I publish a book.

00:18:04.640 I send it off to Hitchens.

00:18:06.380 He writes a blurb.

00:18:07.920 So this was the world that I came out.

00:18:10.080 Do you know, people of a younger generation, that sounds unrecognizable, unrecognizable,

00:18:14.540 unrecognizable.

00:18:15.860 And, you know, Hitchens is Hitchens, right?

00:18:17.880 He's he'll he'll write a blurb that has a double entendre.

00:18:20.600 It's very it's very witty, you know.

00:18:23.200 But nevertheless, that was there's a kind of underlying.

00:18:26.900 Do you want to read something that's wrong?

00:18:28.480 This is the best version of that.

00:18:30.420 Exactly.

00:18:31.200 Or Ganesh is the most intelligent advocate of a position that is inherently indefensible.

00:18:36.180 Yeah.

00:18:36.460 Like that, you know.

00:18:37.660 But that is that's changed.

00:18:40.600 That's gone.

00:18:41.180 That's gone.

00:18:41.780 And I think the dilemma of the Trump conservative is the following.

00:18:45.700 And that is that for a whole generation, conservatives and Republicans have by and large been the

00:18:51.360 party of the nice guys.

00:18:52.540 They've been the party of if you do it to us, we won't do it to you.

00:18:56.860 Why?

00:18:57.400 Because we're better than you.

00:18:58.540 So we stand on principle.

00:19:00.000 And so if you use the state to prosecute us when we come into power, we won't use the

00:19:06.580 state to prosecute you.

00:19:07.620 If you try to stack the court and take its nine members to 12 so you get an immediate

00:19:12.400 majority, when we come in, we won't do the same thing.

00:19:16.000 So the left, I think, took the lesson from that.

00:19:19.560 These are the most wonderful type of opponents to have because we can go scorched earth on

00:19:25.640 them and they are, on principle, unwilling to do the same.

00:19:31.000 So this is what distinguishes the Trumpster from the Reaganite.

00:19:34.300 The Reaganite has that position of, quote, principle.

00:19:37.000 And that's why you see people like Adam Kinzinger and John Bolton and even Bill Kristol, they

00:19:43.700 are right that in the old mode of thinking, the conservative would abstain.

00:19:49.420 Mike Pence comes out of that tradition and others.

00:19:53.520 But I think that the MAGA sensibility is we don't have any alternative but to pay you

00:19:59.600 back in your own coin because that is our only form of true deterrence.

00:20:04.420 We don't want to censor your free speech.

00:20:06.860 But the truth of it is, if you shut us down, we are going to teach you what it feels like

00:20:11.480 to be silenced.

00:20:13.100 And then you're going to be less likely to do that the next time you're in power, which

00:20:17.040 obviously will happen at some point.

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00:22:03.000 Well, forgetting the morality of that approach, because that's something we can definitely

00:22:06.980 debate.

00:22:08.440 Do you actually think this is an effective strategy?

00:22:11.180 You say it's deterrence.

00:22:12.900 I don't see deterrence at the moment.

00:22:15.360 What I see is mutual radicalization.

00:22:17.980 It's like, we told you Trump was a fascist.

00:22:21.000 Well, look at him behaving in a fascist way.

00:22:22.740 So when we come in, we have to shut these guys down even harder, because otherwise, both

00:22:28.040 sides will say, we're losing America.

00:22:30.720 And both sides, if you're a neutral observer, I'm not saying there's an exact equivalence,

00:22:36.000 because, you know, cards on the table.

00:22:38.160 I was relieved when President Trump was elected last year.

00:22:40.780 And we said this on the show, right?

00:22:42.840 But nonetheless, if you forget about President Trump and the people at the top, if you look

00:22:46.480 more broadly, the language is very similar.

00:22:49.620 If the other side get in, we lose our country.

00:22:51.640 And that's why we've got to go harder.

00:22:53.400 And everyone's going harder.

00:22:55.400 And I don't see anyone calling for self-restraint, which I take your point.

00:23:01.740 It doesn't work.

00:23:02.540 If you just take the punches lying down and you never fight back, that doesn't work.

00:23:06.920 But do you think this is going to work?

00:23:10.240 Yes.

00:23:11.820 Here's why.

00:23:12.680 I agree with you that there is now a political atmosphere that does not resemble democratic

00:23:21.100 politics as much as it resembles warfare.

00:23:24.140 Yeah.

00:23:24.500 Right.

00:23:24.900 Because in warfare, the basic assumption is you have to take the other guy down.

00:23:29.220 You have to put him flat on his back and the war is over.

00:23:34.020 And then he surrenders and you make the new rules under which you go forward.

00:23:38.340 That was obviously what happened, say, under the Civil War.

00:23:41.360 Now, if you look at American history, at the very beginning, there was a lot of religious

00:23:48.700 persecution going on.

00:23:51.000 There's a certain mythology about the pilgrims that they came for religious freedom.

00:23:54.480 I mean, they came for their religious freedom, but they were perfectly happy to establish

00:23:58.140 a very regimented system.

00:24:00.260 And they weren't the only ones.

00:24:01.460 So you had established churches.

00:24:03.940 Now, what was really going on was everybody was persecuting the dissidents within their

00:24:08.780 area of control.

00:24:10.220 So in some ways, you can see the resemblance to the atmosphere of what's going on now.

00:24:14.140 We're in the right.

00:24:15.000 Our opponents are wrong.

00:24:16.000 We have to squash them.

00:24:17.000 But what happened out of that is people then realized that this is actually a very awkward

00:24:22.640 way to operate.

00:24:24.200 Because if I move from, let's say, Boston to Maryland, well, the Catholics are in charge

00:24:29.520 over there.

00:24:30.200 Or if I move to Connecticut, it could be the Episcopalians or the Congregationalists are

00:24:34.380 in charge.

00:24:35.160 Things aren't going to be so pleasant for me.

00:24:36.900 So one way to understand our Bill of Rights is not as articles of faith, but as articles of

00:24:44.980 peace.

00:24:45.280 People over time realize that this mutual recrimination is actually a very painful way

00:24:50.980 to live.

00:24:51.960 All right, let's make a truce.

00:24:53.680 You agree not to persecute me.

00:24:55.720 I agree not to persecute you.

00:24:57.380 Let's write it down, right?

00:24:59.300 So that's how we get religious liberty.

00:25:01.720 Not out of some philosophical reflection on the importance of liberty, but rather out of

00:25:08.060 a kind of bitter tussle in which the religious liberty emerges as the only modus, the only

00:25:18.780 viable solution for living together.

00:25:20.920 So that sounds to me, correct me if this is wrong, but I'm just trying to pass what you're saying

00:25:25.960 in my head, that there will be a very painful period for America coming now.

00:25:31.780 We're in it already, but it's going to get more painful before it gets better, right?

00:25:37.420 Because you, I mean, you're already shooting each other.

00:25:40.480 You know, that's what's happening, right?

00:25:42.780 I mean, I think it's fair to say that most recently, most of the high-profile incidents

00:25:47.940 are left on right, but is it going to stay that way?

00:25:51.540 You know, I don't know, right?

00:25:53.560 Exactly.

00:25:54.160 There's no way to predict that there is an easy stopping point for all this because,

00:26:00.660 now, I would say that here is a key difference ideologically, and that is that the right

00:26:05.160 does not have a philosophy of assassination.

00:26:09.080 The left does.

00:26:09.780 So, the left's philosophy of assassination is this.

00:26:13.140 Our opponents are fascists.

00:26:15.300 They are on the verge of establishing a tyrannical, totalitarian regime.

00:26:21.160 Think of the rhetoric just even of no kings, right?

00:26:24.080 So, tyrannicide or overthrowing the king, and even the phrase, by any means necessary, kind

00:26:32.760 of tells you that there's no limit.

00:26:35.840 Any means necessary means any means necessary.

00:26:38.060 So, arguably, let's say the Charlie Crook shooter goes, I am merely drawing the logical

00:26:45.340 implications out of this philosophy, which is the mainstream point of view on the left.

00:26:51.940 Now, you can't find an equivalent philosophy on the right that would justify doing something.

00:26:56.580 I agree that it's possible that we would see political violence from the right end also.

00:27:01.180 And we have seen, right?

00:27:02.160 And we have seen some of it.

00:27:03.180 But it's not, it doesn't have this legitimation, right?

00:27:05.780 Yeah, for the moment.

00:27:07.120 For the moment.

00:27:07.660 But the problem is, is the more you do tit-for-tat reactions, what inevitably happens is it becomes

00:27:15.180 escalatory.

00:27:16.940 And then before you know it, there's going to be political assassinations on both sides.

00:27:21.380 Yeah, now, in fairness, I think that the mainstream MAGA and conservative position in America now

00:27:27.040 is not tit-for-tat.

00:27:28.480 In other words, it's not the Democrats have, you know, pallets or bricks to throw at cars

00:27:35.340 and citizens.

00:27:36.200 So let's go get our own pallets and bricks.

00:27:38.760 Let's find our own George Soros.

00:27:40.300 But the view of the right is, if you have these pernicious actions and even pernicious lies

00:27:49.700 in some cases, in some cases pernicious schemes to frame people, it's really important to punish

00:27:56.540 that, hold it accountable.

00:27:59.620 And so, for example, you know, Bill Barr went before Congress.

00:28:03.900 This was, obviously, some years ago.

00:28:09.080 And they said, you know, you are going after leading Democrats.

00:28:14.960 You are going after the Democrats.

00:28:16.280 You're making your office a political prosecution.

00:28:19.800 And Bill Barr goes, name a single Democrat that I've indicted.

00:28:22.940 And you couldn't name one because there wasn't one, right?

00:28:25.700 But after this long procession of indictments, not just of Trump, we're talking about people,

00:28:32.260 ordinary people, pro-lifers with rosaries, you know, 70 years old, getting long prison

00:28:37.500 terms.

00:28:38.740 The right has been a little radicalized.

00:28:40.780 And you can see why.

00:28:42.080 Because you're going after ordinary citizens.

00:28:45.160 It's not just, you're not just going after people and even going after me.

00:28:48.360 I mean, I have the means to fight back.

00:28:49.920 I have a top defense attorney.

00:28:51.640 You know, I spent half a million dollars defending myself.

00:28:54.100 But some January 6th guy who walked in the Capitol for 10 minutes because he was carried

00:28:58.780 by the crowd, you know, this guy's life is completely ruined.

00:29:01.660 To now, to the state, even after a pardon.

00:29:04.840 So who's going to pay for all that?

00:29:08.980 I mean, I'm very, I feel keenly the desire to have maximum accountability here.

00:29:17.840 Not necessarily recrimination, but to the degree that there's abuse of power, the abusers

00:29:24.580 need to be locked up.

00:29:27.520 Fair.

00:29:28.220 The thing that concerns me, Dinesh, is look, everybody sitting around this table is to

00:29:32.420 a greater or lesser extent a political animal.

00:29:34.800 We chose to get involved in this.

00:29:37.140 And when people say things about us or misrepresent us or criticize us in a manner that is deeply

00:29:44.020 unfair, there's a part of you that understands it because that's the nature of the game.

00:29:49.380 Politics has always been a dirty business from day one.

00:29:51.860 Who I worry about in all of this are the soccer moms, Dinesh.

00:29:55.920 The people who see the cohesion within their society, cultural, political, start to degrade.

00:30:03.980 And it affects ordinary people who are not political, but who are the very backbone of

00:30:09.080 America.

00:30:09.520 I agree.

00:30:11.780 Although I don't think that the main problem that those people face is so much, let's say,

00:30:18.840 political acrimony or political violence.

00:30:22.180 I think it is the actual economic and cultural dislocation of the society.

00:30:26.540 So in other words, sound policies, good ideas, getting economic growth churning again, getting

00:30:37.660 an educational system that actually teaches you stuff.

00:30:41.640 I mean, to me, going to Dartmouth was such a transformative experience.

00:30:47.300 You know, it was tennis courts as far as the eye can see.

00:30:51.320 It was libraries with like coffee and donuts open all night.

00:30:55.200 It was old books.

00:30:57.000 You know, it was so to me, it was an opening of the of the mind that I've never forgotten.

00:31:05.700 And all I'm one of the few people who got a liberal arts education and made a career completely

00:31:10.960 based on that.

00:31:12.100 Most of most Dartmouth guys, you know, they read Play-Doh and they read Dante and then

00:31:16.280 they go to work on Wall Street.

00:31:18.220 They don't read a book or they read very little since.

00:31:22.760 Dartmouth is more of a like a way station to a job as a lawyer or as a banker.

00:31:31.840 But for me, I've tried to retain that sense of wonder that I had as a teenager when I set

00:31:39.180 foot on the Dartmouth campus.

00:31:40.560 And yet I look at it now and I'm like, that experience that I had, I don't think is available

00:31:46.380 anymore.

00:31:47.360 No, it's not.

00:31:47.700 It's really a tragedy.

00:31:48.760 And a lot of kids are opting out because they know they're not going to get it.

00:31:52.860 So as someone who broke perhaps with your former colleagues and became a big supporter

00:32:00.060 of President Trump, how do you assess the first year of his presidency?

00:32:04.520 You mean this new term?

00:32:05.740 Yes.

00:32:06.280 Yeah.

00:32:06.900 So Trump two is quite different than Trump one.

00:32:11.100 And in fact, reflects exactly the shift that we've been talking about.

00:32:15.900 Trump one was basically the real estate guy comes to Washington.

00:32:22.700 He essentially says, I am the new CEO of America and I'm going to get things to really work in

00:32:29.620 a way that they haven't before because politicians have been running the show.

00:32:33.460 And he goes, I need some people to do what I want.

00:32:36.240 So generals are reputed to be people who take orders, tell them what to do, get it done.

00:32:42.380 OK, here's John Kelly.

00:32:43.360 He's my chief of staff.

00:32:44.520 He'll get it done.

00:32:46.460 Trump realizes soon enough that all the kind of affable political appointees who have come

00:32:52.300 up through the system are extremely self-serving and treacherous.

00:32:56.520 And they recognize that there are huge cultural prizes to be had by turning on Trump and stabbing

00:33:03.360 him in the back and leaking to the media.

00:33:05.800 And so Trump suddenly realizes that his first term, I mean, it's remarkable that he got some

00:33:11.160 good things done in that term because essentially he was sort of like Caesar surrounded by Cassius's

00:33:18.940 and Brutus's all around.

00:33:21.060 But I think he figured that out.

00:33:22.200 He realized that not only is there a very powerful cultural left and democratic establishment

00:33:30.320 against him, but there's a whole Republican establishment that would not be unhappy to

00:33:36.000 see his carcass dragged out of the Roman Senate to continue with the Caesar analogy.

00:33:43.420 So what happened is Trump weathered the storm of all the 90 plus charges and the attempts to

00:33:49.000 lock him up and the two assassination attempts.

00:33:52.520 And then I think he realized, all right, well, I am now in a completely different situation.

00:33:58.700 If you've seen Mel Gibson's movie, The Patriot, you know, in the beginning of it, Mel Gibson

00:34:03.520 is like a normal guy.

00:34:05.240 He's a farmer.

00:34:05.960 He doesn't really want to get involved.

00:34:07.260 He's mainly concerned with his crops.

00:34:09.360 But once you're subjected to a certain level of humiliation and abuse and degradation,

00:34:14.740 you're like, that's it.

00:34:18.080 That's Trump.

00:34:19.160 So I think we now have a scorched earth president who just sort of doesn't care.

00:34:26.440 And as a result, you're seeing an aggression that you never saw in the first term.

00:34:34.060 But I would argue it is a justified aggression.

00:34:36.960 I mean, on a personal level, I completely understand how Trump is that way.

00:34:40.500 That is the normal way to be.

00:34:42.900 And there was that moment at Charlie Kirk's funeral.

00:34:45.180 I was right up there with my wife in the front.

00:34:47.040 And, you know, Erica Kirk made this sort of marvelous profession of, you know, of agape,

00:34:53.420 Christian love.

00:34:54.260 I forgive the man who killed my husband.

00:34:58.760 That is a sort of a beautiful expression on the individual level.

00:35:04.000 But Trump comes right back and you could tell he had been wrestling with that because he

00:35:09.320 then blurts out, well, I don't wish my enemies, you know, the best.

00:35:13.140 I wish him the worst.

00:35:14.840 That's the more natural response.

00:35:17.300 And I think that reflects, call it, you know, Old Testament morality, if you want to call

00:35:23.320 it that, versus, you know, the Erica Kirk approach.

00:35:28.700 So how's Trump doing?

00:35:30.440 Well, I mean, to me, the tariffs are rocky waters.

00:35:35.080 I'm unsure about them.

00:35:36.540 As a lifelong free market guy, I have all kinds of anxiety about them.

00:35:41.860 I do recognize that our old trade policies have caused a lot of problems and have caused

00:35:46.220 a lot of problems for a particular large group of working class people in this country.

00:35:51.000 And I do think something needs to be done to address that group.

00:35:54.600 Many other groups, including my group, has benefited enormously from globalization, from free trade,

00:36:02.680 from the policies of the last 30 years.

00:36:05.300 But I've seen other people whose lives are very dislocated, whole communities wiped out.

00:36:10.500 Trump knows that.

00:36:11.720 So I do commend him for trying to do something about it.

00:36:15.180 And what he's trying to do is really turn a lot of economic wisdom on its head.

00:36:19.380 Will it work?

00:36:19.980 I don't know.

00:36:20.400 A lot of other things that Trump is doing, I think, are fabulous.

00:36:23.840 And so, in general, I'm very happy with Trump.

00:36:26.680 You know, I would give him an A- so far, and he's only just getting started.

00:36:32.260 And it's also, as well, I think part of the reason that he wants to move the manufacturing

00:36:38.000 base to the United States is because a lot of the blue-collar guys and girls who voted

00:36:43.280 for him, that was the core of the voter base.

00:36:46.220 But I also think he's very aware of the rising danger of China.

00:36:49.760 Yes, and I also think that his motive isn't just the voter base.

00:36:54.140 I think what he's realized is that a lot of the social values of a society are based upon

00:37:01.340 having a steady job, right?

00:37:03.340 So let's say, for example, you can achieve on the balance great economic efficiency by

00:37:08.980 wiping out a steel town and sending over those jobs.

00:37:12.660 Let's just say, hypothetically, for half the price to Indonesia or to China.

00:37:17.780 So on the balance sheet, you're doing great.

00:37:20.440 You are actually following free market ideology.

00:37:23.180 You're going, you're making the product where it can be made most cheaply.

00:37:27.120 And I come out of a whole economic tradition that goes, that's right.

00:37:30.420 That's what you want to do.

00:37:32.280 You don't want to pay farmers when you don't need farmers.

00:37:35.300 And technology can produce the crops.

00:37:37.060 If you can have the steel made more cheaply over there, let's do it.

00:37:39.760 But then what you end up with is you have a whole town of people sitting on the sidewalk,

00:37:45.840 you know, and fentanyl is a big problem over there and their kids are dislocated and the

00:37:51.280 civic structure has all broken down.

00:37:54.000 There are small businesses that supported, you know, the bowling alley and the Little

00:37:58.000 League have closed down.

00:37:59.480 And so you now have a, you just have debris.

00:38:03.140 And so, so bringing those jobs back is part of that cultural restoration, no less than

00:38:09.940 the economic.

00:38:10.560 To say nothing of the fact that when COVID happens, you can't import drugs from China

00:38:15.220 because they're, or masks or whatever, because they'll hold on to them.

00:38:18.260 Because when push comes to shove, countries believe in the national interest.

00:38:22.240 And we have a situation in Britain where we don't make our own steel anymore.

00:38:26.560 Now, how are you going to fight a war if you can't produce the very basics that you need

00:38:32.680 to manufacture?

00:38:34.020 We have net zero.

00:38:35.260 This is brilliant.

00:38:36.620 I mean, exactly.

00:38:37.960 How this was allowed to happen, even in critical industries, is a little unbelievable.

00:38:44.560 You, the trigonometry audience, understand how vital free speech is.

00:38:48.560 That's why we're proud to reintroduce you to our longstanding partners, Give, Send, Go.

00:38:54.880 We caught up with their founders at Jordan Peterson's Alliance for Responsible Citizenship

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00:39:47.880 The platform that doesn't just talk about free speech, it protects it.

00:39:56.800 Getting ready for a game means being ready for anything, like packing a spare stick.

00:40:01.600 I like to be prepared.

00:40:03.220 That's why I remember 988, Canada's Suicide Crisis Helpline.

00:40:07.140 It's good to know, just in case.

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00:40:19.940 The same thing is true in so many other sectors of life.

00:40:22.820 When I look at the universities, I say to myself, now, when I was a student, we had two groups

00:40:27.620 of people running the university, and I'm sure this was just as true at Oxford.

00:40:32.000 You had an older generation that I would describe as classically liberal.

00:40:36.920 They were not on the right.

00:40:38.000 They were actually on the left.

00:40:39.500 But they did believe in free speech, and they did believe in debate, and they believed in

00:40:43.100 academic standards.

00:40:44.660 And if you were to tell them something like, you know, we're not going to be teaching

00:40:47.520 Plato's Republic, they would have no tolerance for this kind of thinking.

00:40:50.740 Because they believed that there are great books, and people should read them, and people should

00:40:57.000 spend a lot of time immersed in this kind of stuff.

00:41:01.480 But there was a younger generation out of the 60s and 70s, and you could tell that those

00:41:06.640 people even dressed differently.

00:41:07.860 They were more bohemian in style.

00:41:12.200 They were much more casual in their rhetoric.

00:41:14.460 They didn't typically wear a jacket.

00:41:16.800 And I saw to myself, I said, you know, if you were to remove the older generation and

00:41:22.100 just move these guys into full control, this campus would look totally different.

00:41:27.120 That's exactly what happened.

00:41:28.080 The older generation retired, was phased out.

00:41:31.920 The younger generation insisted on ideological homogeneity.

00:41:36.480 So it replicated itself.

00:41:38.560 And it produced really something more resembling an indoctrination factory than a real debate.

00:41:45.140 Now, when I was at Dartmouth, the college was left-wing.

00:41:48.900 But there were probably two dozen conservatives on the faculty, including five or six outspoken

00:41:54.660 ones.

00:41:55.100 I could name conservatives at Harvard, Yale, Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, the law professor

00:42:00.560 at Yale.

00:42:01.500 And so the conservative students had mentors to gravitate to.

00:42:05.540 But all of that was wiped out in the early part of this century.

00:42:10.700 And so suddenly, the conservative became a complete pariah.

00:42:14.180 If you want to know, like, what was Charlie Kirk's accomplishment?

00:42:18.000 I think what it was, most of all, was not his brilliant oratory or his knowledge of issues.

00:42:24.660 It was really the fact that you had conservatives beaten down and humiliated, treated as the

00:42:30.640 sort of public enemy number one.

00:42:32.980 And then along comes an organization that basically says, you can be with like-minded people.

00:42:38.520 You can hear ideas from intelligent people.

00:42:40.800 Your point of view is not crazy.

00:42:43.300 And they were like, oh, my gosh, this is almost like a sanctuary, a refuge.

00:42:48.680 And that was what Turning Point provided and still does.

00:42:52.020 And just to go back to economics, because I'm glad we're talking about this, I think one

00:42:56.460 of the genuine criticisms you can make against Trump is his unwillingness to deal with the

00:43:02.160 deficit, which is one of the things Elon got so frustrated with.

00:43:07.080 Now, this is a problem that we've been dealing with since the Reagan years.

00:43:15.840 Reagan could not cut the government either.

00:43:18.120 Even though his ideology was completely about cutting the government, Reagan came to office

00:43:23.760 on slogans like, government is not the solution, government is the problem.

00:43:27.080 But I will tell you as an insider, one of the things we realized, it is what economists

00:43:32.340 call the public choice dilemma, which is just a kind of an esoteric phrase, but it means

00:43:38.160 something really simple.

00:43:39.460 If you take a government program that costs, let's say, $10 million.

00:43:42.420 And let's say you take the $10 million and you give it to one group, I'm going to call

00:43:48.220 it Planned Parenthood.

00:43:49.840 Planned Parenthood now will hire 10 lobbyists to protect that program, right?

00:43:54.300 Let's say that the money for this program comes from 10 million Americans who have all

00:43:58.420 contributed $1.

00:44:00.060 So the truth of it is, there is a much larger constituency for, let's say the program's not

00:44:05.880 working.

00:44:06.280 You want to stop it.

00:44:07.100 But the problem is this, Planned Parenthood applies concentrated lobbying pressure on

00:44:13.980 the Congress to preserve the program.

00:44:16.400 And then if we in the Reagan administration tried to mobilize the 10 million people who

00:44:21.920 funded the program, each of them only gave a dollar.

00:44:24.280 So we can't even get them to make a phone call.

00:44:26.500 So there is an inequality of pressure.

00:44:30.500 And so what we realized, which was somewhat devious, but nevertheless politically pragmatic,

00:44:35.300 is that there is no way to cut the program.

00:44:39.640 The only thing you can do is take the money from Planned Parenthood and give it to a pregnancy

00:44:44.660 center.

00:44:45.680 Why?

00:44:46.300 Because now you have created a new constituency on your side.

00:44:50.180 So that in effect, true, are you cutting the deficit?

00:44:53.960 No.

00:44:54.540 You are merely moving the money around.

00:44:56.260 You are merely moving the money from their gang to your gang, right?

00:45:00.900 And so at the end of the Reagan years, and there were massive successes of Reagan, right?

00:45:06.080 The Berlin Wall comes down, the Soviet Union collapses, Reagan restores American patriotism

00:45:11.840 and pride.

00:45:12.380 I've written a book on Reagan.

00:45:13.780 But nevertheless, on this count, you'd have to say that the Reagan project was a failure.

00:45:18.760 Reagan was unable to cut the size of the government at all.

00:45:22.660 Trump comes in, I think, and he knows this dynamic.

00:45:25.500 He recognizes intuitively that what you have is a structure of democratic government where

00:45:36.100 you have these imploring constituencies.

00:45:38.780 They have unfortunately become habituated to getting benefits.

00:45:42.500 The benefits are extracted through taxation from unwilling taxpayers, but they are also funded

00:45:48.680 by printing money through the Fed.

00:45:50.200 So Trump is like, I don't think he knows how to tackle that monster.

00:45:56.440 And I don't either.

00:45:57.640 So I don't blame him for not cutting the deficit or the debt.

00:46:03.320 His only solution, which would be my solution as well, is, listen, if you can make the economy

00:46:07.820 instead of growing at 2% or 3%, grow at 5% or 6%, that will actually make a serious dent

00:46:13.840 in the problem.

00:46:14.420 So I think Trump is betting, look, I would rather put my energy in lubricating the economy.

00:46:21.400 I'm going to get, you know, the United States has giant deposits of natural gas.

00:46:25.900 We are on, the world is on a technological frontier.

00:46:30.300 If we can open up those kinds of things, it changes the rules of the game.

00:46:34.640 And so I think Trump is betting correct, rather than essentially saying, look, the two big spending

00:46:39.800 items in the government are entitlements, Social Security and Medicare.

00:46:44.360 Republicans, at least in the past, have discovered that going after those two things is really

00:46:48.120 a good way of getting booted right out of power.

00:46:51.060 Well, Dinesh, you mentioned Charlie Kirk a number of times, and it was obviously, you

00:46:56.020 know, it was a horrific moment for this country and for America.

00:46:59.340 But actually, just globally, I thought it was just a horrific moment for the world.

00:47:04.260 And seeing that happen to a father of two young children, simply being killed because of his

00:47:11.740 political views, that was absolutely shocking.

00:47:15.620 And because of how shocking it was, there was a naive part of me that thought that this

00:47:21.920 might be a reset opportunity for everybody.

00:47:25.460 And I thought maybe the left will go, oh, no, we can't, there are some Nazis and they

00:47:33.020 have to be called out, but we can't call center-right people Nazis.

00:47:38.020 We can't throw around labels like fascists, because I've said it on this show a number

00:47:42.180 of times, we said it on Joe Rogan yesterday, if you keep calling someone, if I thought the

00:47:46.260 Nazis were here to invade, I'd pick up a rifle and go to the front line.

00:47:49.540 So when you call someone a Nazi, you are literally putting a target on their back.

00:47:52.900 And I also thought it might be a moment in which the right might reconnect around its

00:48:00.920 core values and core ideas and go, you know, we need to get together and challenge all of

00:48:07.060 this.

00:48:07.820 Well, what's happened is the exact opposite.

00:48:10.140 You know, the left is doubling down on all this stuff.

00:48:14.700 And on the right, you now have these very fringe voices who are saying, you know, a foreign

00:48:20.600 country assassinated Charlie Kirk and making up stuff about planes that left before the

00:48:27.060 assassination that proved that it, all of this crazy stuff.

00:48:31.200 You've been quite outspoken about all of that.

00:48:34.120 Talk to us about this whole thing.

00:48:36.900 The, yeah, I think that, look how strange it is.

00:48:43.420 You have, you had a militarization around Antifa, which became publicly evident over the George

00:48:51.060 Floyd riots.

00:48:52.060 That's the Antifa element.

00:48:53.740 There's the BLM element, which has somewhat subsided.

00:48:56.780 But what has taken its place is these violent trans rings.

00:49:02.260 I'm not talking about people who are trans.

00:49:04.180 I'm talking about people who think that the society is out to get them.

00:49:07.980 And so they go to training camps and they talk about doing martial arts or shooting people

00:49:13.600 or fighting with weapons.

00:49:15.540 Now, again, I don't think there's a lot of reasoning to be done with those people.

00:49:20.800 If you look at the Portland rioters, if you look at these Antifa militants, and if you look

00:49:26.260 at these trans terrorists, it's really important to sort of get to the bottom of it, excavate

00:49:32.640 exactly what happened.

00:49:33.760 And so there were some reports after Charlie Kirk's assassination that there was prior knowledge

00:49:39.020 of what was going to happen, that there were people in chats talking about, hey, something

00:49:42.820 really big is going to happen.

00:49:44.100 Not just big happen.

00:49:44.900 It's going to happen to Charlie Kirk tomorrow at so-and-so location.

00:49:49.020 Well, I mean, this would suggest, if not a conspiracy, at least prior knowledge of people

00:49:54.240 who knew that he was going to be going to be shot.

00:49:56.580 But just when the FBI, the authorities are sort of moving the crackdown on all this, along

00:50:06.240 from the right comes Candace Owens with this sort of idea that, hey, let's take a look

00:50:15.860 at these photos.

00:50:16.680 I see a pipe.

00:50:17.620 I wonder if a Mossad agent might have crawled through the pipe.

00:50:20.100 I mean, stuff that is just absolutely crazy.

00:50:25.760 Now, again, if she were to produce some substantial evidence, a single reliable fact that, let's

00:50:34.120 just say, contravenes the government's theory, and she says it couldn't have been that, because

00:50:41.300 take a look at this.

00:50:42.600 But the investigative style, although I admit it's from a certain point of view, it's like

00:50:48.800 irresistible to watch, because it's like listening to a well-trained philosopher who has completely

00:50:56.720 lost his mind and is now in an asylum and is giving you crazy discourse, but it's crazy

00:51:03.420 discourse that is embedded with witticisms and all kinds of, and you're like, you can't

00:51:10.420 turn away from it from a certain point.

00:51:12.320 Candace is actually quite magnetic in the way she presents information, and she has

00:51:17.800 a style.

00:51:19.080 It's an intellectual striptease, because she never puts her cards out and goes, here's

00:51:23.520 what I got.

00:51:23.960 She goes, okay, well, I got something.

00:51:25.760 Let me show you something.

00:51:27.100 You know, more to come tomorrow and more to come the day after that.

00:51:31.100 It's a little deranged, but there's something magnetic about it, right?

00:51:39.820 But look at the political effect and how pernicious it is.

00:51:42.340 It's taking attention away from the actual, not just the bad guy, but these ideological

00:51:49.260 bad actors that are embedded in our society.

00:51:54.220 And it's basically telling everybody, look over here, it's the Jews, or it's Israel, or

00:51:58.660 it's Mossad.

00:52:00.500 Now, you'd have to ask yourself, well, why would someone do that, right?

00:52:04.120 Or to look more broadly, take the phenomenon now, go beyond Candace and take the larger

00:52:08.360 phenomenon.

00:52:08.920 You've got a strange but pernicious alliance between the cultural left and the West and

00:52:16.300 radical Islam.

00:52:17.880 I actually wrote about this in a book that I published around 2006.

00:52:21.800 It was called The Enemy at Home.

00:52:23.840 I was reacting to Samuel Huntington's idea that there's a clash of civilizations between

00:52:29.280 us, the West, and them, meaning the House of Islam.

00:52:32.640 And my argument was, not exactly.

00:52:36.640 There's a division inside the West, and there's also a division inside of Islam.

00:52:41.280 And I said, not only that, but the cultural left is going to become strange bedfellows with

00:52:47.120 the radical Muslims.

00:52:48.100 This seems fantastic because the two groups have utterly different end goals.

00:52:52.700 And they cannot inhabit each other's world.

00:52:54.880 And not only that, but if they were in full control, they would come to blows.

00:53:00.660 But they are united against a common enemy.

00:53:04.120 And who is the common enemy?

00:53:05.840 Well, it's the Jews and Israel on the one hand, and it's America and the principles of

00:53:11.300 the West on the other.

00:53:12.260 So it would seem natural, unavoidable, that Jews and Christians, America and Israel should

00:53:18.560 come closer together in recognition of this obvious, nefarious alliance.

00:53:25.160 You know, let's call it, you know, I filmed the dragons.

00:53:27.440 This is like the devil's platoons.

00:53:30.360 All right.

00:53:30.700 Well, the good people need to come together.

00:53:32.280 So I can understand why the left is doing what it does, because it is an ideological war

00:53:41.900 against the Jews and Israel, no less than against Christians on the West.

00:53:46.620 What I don't understand is this movement on the right that is attempting to sever our connection

00:53:55.920 with Israel.

00:53:56.760 And I think in the process, undermining Trump, undermining MAGA, undermining America's national

00:54:02.760 interests, undermining the foundations of the West, which are Athens and Jerusalem.

00:54:07.500 But on top of all of that, strengthening radical Islam and strengthening the cultural left.

00:54:15.360 Hang on, but you say you don't understand.

00:54:17.200 Let me push back on that.

00:54:18.900 I think it's relatively simple to understand, Dinesh.

00:54:21.360 How so?

00:54:21.640 We all know smartphones are essential, but they've also become the ultimate surveillance

00:54:27.640 machines.

00:54:28.440 That's why we were so interested when former Trigonometry guest Eric Prince created the

00:54:33.220 UpPhone.

00:54:34.000 This isn't just another handset.

00:54:35.940 The UpPhone runs on unplugged OS, free from big tech ecosystems.

00:54:40.440 It comes with a firewall that blocks third-party trackers and gives you full transparency into

00:54:45.780 who's trying to access your data.

00:54:47.900 And it works straight out of the box.

00:54:49.380 I got one of these myself because I want to know my phone is serving me.

00:54:53.640 Not Google, not Apple, and not some faceless data broker.

00:54:57.220 And that's the point.

00:54:58.460 Your phone should serve you, not spy on you.

00:55:01.220 Check it out at unplugged.com slash trigonometry and use our code trigonometry for $20 off a

00:55:07.440 protective case with the UpPhone.

00:55:08.880 If you go along this way of like, the left have done this, they've done all these egregious

00:55:18.120 things, these tactics to silence and destroy, to play identity politics, to say if you're

00:55:23.240 white and male, you're bottom of the oppression pyramid, which means you're far less likely

00:55:28.400 to get a job, far less likely to progress.

00:55:30.480 It becomes socially acceptable, let's be honest, to demonize you, particularly if you're blue

00:55:34.520 collar and white and male.

00:55:36.520 You automatically become thick, stupid and racist.

00:55:40.120 Then why wouldn't you start to tribalize?

00:55:43.780 Why wouldn't you become conspiratorial?

00:55:46.660 Why wouldn't you go out and attack the people that you think have done you wrong?

00:55:51.080 Absolutely right.

00:55:53.740 So I do not blame the fractured, dislocated, angry young people who are responding in just

00:56:03.960 the way that you say.

00:56:05.300 I know why they're doing that.

00:56:08.320 But I do blame the pied pipers who are leading them to the precipice who should know better,

00:56:15.520 right?

00:56:15.820 Let me try a few other theories on you, because I don't think the explanation Francis gives

00:56:20.600 is fully here, because what it doesn't really explain is why there are certain people now

00:56:25.840 absolutely obsessed with the Jews, or why are they obsessed with Israel, because it's

00:56:30.160 not Israel or the Jews that caused the cultural disintegration that you're talking about.

00:56:35.120 They didn't take over college campuses 40 years ago and introduced all this anti-Western

00:56:39.760 crap.

00:56:40.060 I think there's a few things going on that I think are contributing as well.

00:56:47.860 One of them is, I wrote an article when Tucker Carlson went to Russia and interviewed President

00:56:54.500 Putin, which was called Tucker Carlson and the Woke Right, in which I basically said that

00:56:58.420 there is these sections on the right that have become very focused on victimhood and are

00:57:04.320 replicating some of the things we saw on the left in doing so.

00:57:07.280 And when you're focused on victimhood, you have to find someone who's victimizing you.

00:57:12.100 And at that point, Jews and Israel were not the thing.

00:57:15.560 And I said, you know, for now the label is globalists, and those sections of the right

00:57:22.180 keep talking about globalists.

00:57:23.880 But a globalist isn't something that you can visualize.

00:57:26.840 No one has, like when I say globalist, you don't, a picture of a person doesn't come into

00:57:30.980 your head.

00:57:31.340 So they were looking for somebody to be the scapegoat, the explanation that explains everything,

00:57:38.260 like the left's explanation of, well, everything is because of white supremacy.

00:57:42.580 Everything is because of institutional racism.

00:57:44.760 Everything is because of straight white men.

00:57:47.860 I think that's one thing.

00:57:49.140 The other thing is, once President Trump gets elected for a second term, in the overwhelming

00:57:55.160 fashion in which that happens, what does the media do, whose entire, new media in particular,

00:58:02.580 whose entire identity became, you know, it was the anti-woke coalition, of which trigonometry

00:58:08.240 was 100% a part of.

00:58:10.260 But once that collapses, like we don't really talk about wokeness very much anymore on the

00:58:14.900 show because it's kind of, I mean, I think it's overstating the case to say it's over, but

00:58:20.700 it's not the live issue right now, right?

00:58:23.800 We don't talk about trans issues, which we used to talk about because it's not the live

00:58:27.640 issue right now.

00:58:28.920 So if you are in a right of center media person or channel organization, you can either keep

00:58:38.320 beating, you know, you know, that meme of stop, stop, he's already dead, right?

00:58:42.360 That's not going to get you any views because beating up on the Democrats, I mean, don't even

00:58:46.900 know where they are anymore, right?

00:58:48.040 So you have to go, the incentive structure is, to go in a more conspiratorial, out there

00:58:55.420 direction.

00:58:55.940 Those are my two other bits that I'd put to you.

00:58:58.520 Yeah, I have a bunch of little things to add to that.

00:59:01.240 So the first one is that in the Reagan era, in conservatism, there was a certain, I would

00:59:11.680 call it the intellectual guardians of the tribe, people like William F. Buckley.

00:59:18.040 Reagan to a certain degree, but there were others serving Kristol.

00:59:21.620 And the idea here was that if you came in with like the poison of anti-Semitism, blatant

00:59:30.020 racism, you know, criticism of affirmative action, yes.

00:59:34.760 Calling blacks monkeys, no.

00:59:36.600 So if you did that, you were basically asked to leave the room and you were abolished from

00:59:45.200 the, you wouldn't be invited to conservative conferences.

00:59:48.320 You certainly wouldn't be a speaker.

00:59:50.040 It would basically be the end of you as a public figure.

00:59:54.120 So that's gone.

00:59:55.660 And it's gone, why?

00:59:56.820 Partly because we don't have a conservative intellectual class that performs that task.

01:00:04.500 And why don't we have that?

01:00:06.240 Well, partly because the mainstream of that class went never Trump.

01:00:10.400 And so when I look around for like, if I were to make a list of, let's say, 30 of my colleagues

01:00:18.000 from the Reagan days, I would say that probably about 25 of them went anti-Trump.

01:00:26.540 And they went to anti-Trump in different places.

01:00:28.740 John Bolton is a little different place than, say, Bill Kristol.

01:00:31.160 But nevertheless, they're by and large excluded from MAGA.

01:00:36.300 And what happened is, partly as a result of a cultural shift, MAGA produces a new type

01:00:41.400 of, a new type of pundit who is not, I mean, think of the distance between, say, Irving

01:00:50.460 Kristol and Tucker Carlson.

01:00:53.440 Tucker doesn't even purport to be knowledgeable about anything, right?

01:00:59.740 So as a result, what Tucker says is, I will develop a ventriloquist style.

01:01:05.480 I have strong opinions, but I don't want to defend any of them.

01:01:09.100 So I will set up a structure in which I bring in sources, often rather dubious sources, people

01:01:15.580 you've never heard of, you know, the nun with the mustache, some disgraced academic.

01:01:20.380 And what I'll do is I will ask sort of leading questions that, in which is embedded an answer,

01:01:27.340 my answer, but framed as a question, you then will blurt out the obvious implications of

01:01:35.940 the question, giving me the answer I expected.

01:01:38.520 But I will pretend to be thunderstruck by it.

01:01:41.180 It's an epiphany.

01:01:42.200 It's a new revelation.

01:01:43.820 People have been suppressing this kind of thinking for decades.

01:01:46.520 So this is a shtick.

01:01:48.660 It's a different shtick than Candace.

01:01:50.720 Candace's shtick is the Candace Intelligence Agency.

01:01:53.520 I'm like the world's greatest detective.

01:01:56.380 You know, I'm the Pink Panther of my time.

01:01:58.300 I'm deputizing all my viewers also to be detectives.

01:02:01.700 Feed me information.

01:02:02.900 We're going to crack the case.

01:02:04.740 There's a...

01:02:05.320 So to me, this is like an intellectual embarrassment because all my life, I've been an iconoclast.

01:02:12.320 I will take on ideas and I will try to dismantle them, but not in this way.

01:02:17.700 My ideas are things like this.

01:02:19.180 The, you know, the Dixiecrats all became Republicans.

01:02:23.700 And my strategy of challenging that is I go make an inventory of the 200 Dixiecrats.

01:02:28.220 I put them up on a movie screen and I say, all right, I'm now going to show you through

01:02:32.320 a movement of the mouse, which of these 200 Dixiecrats became Republicans.

01:02:36.640 Answer two.

01:02:38.460 So did the Dixiecrats as a group become Republicans?

01:02:41.200 No.

01:02:41.720 There's the empirical evidence right there on the screen.

01:02:43.800 You can check it out, you know, for yourself.

01:02:45.440 So when I see this almost parody of investigation, parody of scholarship, it's very unnerving.

01:02:55.680 Now, for young people, just as you said, there is a susceptibility to all this.

01:03:04.460 And also there's no easy check on it.

01:03:08.880 Like, for example, right now I'm in these big debates about Christian theology.

01:03:13.140 But I'm debating Christian theology with people who have, like, listened to two podcasts, right?

01:03:18.940 I've written three books on Christian apologetics.

01:03:21.300 I've thought about this stuff for 30 years.

01:03:23.540 But it's difficult to address people who say things like, Dinesh, open a Bible once in a while.

01:03:29.000 You might learn something.

01:03:30.540 I'm like, are you serious?

01:03:33.460 So, but our culture has had that leveling effect.

01:03:37.840 This guy who's watched two podcasts is on an even playing field with me.

01:03:43.200 Now, this would not have been the case in the Reagan years because that guy would not even be, that guy would not be speaking at a conference at AEI.

01:03:50.000 So there was a, there was a filtering structure that is now gone.

01:03:54.480 And look, there's...

01:03:55.340 And there are good things about that.

01:03:56.280 Well, that's right.

01:03:57.020 I was going to say that.

01:03:57.980 And I know you've tried to debate, Tuck.

01:04:01.400 And this is one of the other things that I do find strange because with some notable exceptions, quite a lot of these people don't engage in what used to happen, which is you come together and you have these debates and discussions.

01:04:15.840 But now I think the economic incentives aren't there.

01:04:18.660 You don't need to do that.

01:04:19.840 Like, if you're Candace, you just do your show and you make millions of dollars talking about how someone you used to call your friend, denigrating his legacy, in my opinion, and all of that.

01:04:30.220 But you don't need to go and engage in a debate.

01:04:32.300 There's nothing to gain, really.

01:04:34.020 Right?

01:04:34.480 And so everything gets siloed.

01:04:37.340 Right.

01:04:37.740 So if you look back, like, what was the motivation for Hitchens and me to debate?

01:04:41.320 We had nothing, in a sense, to—our reason for debating is that deep down, each of us thought that—like, this is what happened with me.

01:04:51.020 I turn on the TV and I see Hitchens, and he is debating a pastor.

01:04:55.720 Right?

01:04:56.220 And Hitchens is making witty Oxford Union jibes at this guy.

01:05:01.020 And this guy doesn't even know that he's being struck with these rapier thrusts because the pastor comes out of Divinity School.

01:05:07.940 You know, he accepts the authority of the Bible.

01:05:09.720 His argument is the Bible.

01:05:12.220 And Hitchens is speaking a secular language.

01:05:14.920 So I'm like, this is a disgrace.

01:05:17.780 I've got to write Hitchens and tell him, look, why don't you pick on someone who's not only your own size, but who will speak to you in your own language?

01:05:25.480 And Hitchens is like, well, that's great.

01:05:28.120 I'm up for it.

01:05:29.020 So we're both up for it.

01:05:30.500 And that's our motive.

01:05:31.400 Our motive is that deep down, we actually do believe in the power of ideas.

01:05:36.140 There's probably a little bit of narcissism that each of us thinks that we are like top-notch gladiators and we're willing to step into the arena.

01:05:44.140 Now, but you're right.

01:05:46.480 Like these days, if you say, hey, Megyn Kelly, hey, Patrick Bette David, why don't you invite Tucker and me to have this out?

01:05:54.660 And we'll do it in a very civil way, but we'll get to the bottom of it.

01:05:57.880 Even they become very skittish because everybody, it seems to me at least, is being strategic about how they approach all of this.

01:06:09.420 In other words, what's in it for me?

01:06:11.420 How is this?

01:06:12.220 How am I going to be positioned to be, as opposed to saying, hey, this would be great.

01:06:17.420 Wouldn't people love to sort of eavesdrop in on all this?

01:06:20.760 And now it can be done so easily online.

01:06:22.800 So even though the opportunities are much greater, the actual debate, as you know, I mean, I first noticed that the left didn't want to debate, but I'm finding the right really doesn't either.

01:06:35.140 Well, give me a small example.

01:06:36.560 I did a debate online with Nick Fuentes, partly because he was prancing around telling all his viewers and an increasingly large group of people, everybody's scared of me.

01:06:46.060 I'm alpha male.

01:06:47.580 He's like Ben Shapiro's scared of me.

01:06:49.580 He's like Charlie Kirk's scared of me.

01:06:51.220 Everyone's scared of him.

01:06:52.020 So I'm like, I'm not scared of you.

01:06:53.660 So I did this debate.

01:06:54.820 It went very well.

01:06:55.460 In fact, a lot of his young listeners were like, who is this guy?

01:06:58.120 And like, Nick is not doing as well as we had hoped.

01:07:00.080 And so all this stuff.

01:07:01.200 But my point is, as soon as I did that, I got a text from Charlie Kirk.

01:07:05.620 Dinesh, why, why, why?

01:07:07.640 The basic idea was you should not debate.

01:07:10.400 And you certainly shouldn't debate Nick Fuentes.

01:07:12.380 And you shouldn't give him any platforming or any recognition.

01:07:16.060 So again, Charlie was approaching it strategically.

01:07:19.820 Like, I'm the head of an organization, a youth organization.

01:07:22.420 I don't want Nick Fuentes to be sort of poaching on the.

01:07:26.200 So this is the prevailing mentality among the new punditocracy.

01:07:33.020 And it's also what I find incredibly frustrating, Dinesh.

01:07:36.820 As someone who comes from the left, I see part of the problem of the left was a cowardice,

01:07:43.000 if I'm being brutally honest.

01:07:44.500 That people on the left saw these radicals start to propagate these, quite frankly,

01:07:49.600 nonsensical, ridiculously toxic ideas, which would alienate huge swathes of the population.

01:07:55.400 Yet people were so scared of them and were so terrified of being exiled from the group that

01:08:00.520 they didn't challenge them.

01:08:01.820 And now I see people on the right doing the exact same thing.

01:08:06.540 I'm not going to name names, but we all know who these people are.

01:08:09.360 And we're just going, right.

01:08:10.560 So if that doesn't happen, then the exact same thing is going to happen as what happened

01:08:15.360 to the left.

01:08:17.380 Absolutely correct.

01:08:18.340 I mean, Tucker and Candace jumped into this arena with such a splash that all the conservative

01:08:28.000 pundits were like, I don't want to take that on because Candace is extremely vindictive.

01:08:35.820 Tucker has a huge following.

01:08:37.660 This will immediately put me on the wrong side with a lot of my own followers.

01:08:42.300 I might lose followers.

01:08:43.460 And as soon as I stepped into this arena, I basically started getting messages to that

01:08:50.480 effect.

01:08:50.780 Well, Dinesh, you make movies for the mainstream of the right of center audience.

01:08:55.800 You know, you realize there are a lot of young people who like might start, you know, hating

01:08:59.740 you or start calling you names, which, by the way, has happened, you know.

01:09:04.920 And but it's just foreign to my own mentality.

01:09:09.580 I don't even think like that.

01:09:10.860 Even when I make films, I never say I mean, I do make films by saying, is this a pressing

01:09:16.560 topic?

01:09:17.380 Is this an interesting path to go down?

01:09:21.800 But I'm very supply side.

01:09:23.080 I say to myself, when I came up with the idea of my film on Obama, for example, the prevailing

01:09:28.600 view was that Obama was a civil rights guy, kind of the modern reincarnation of Martin Luther

01:09:33.260 King.

01:09:33.460 I come along, I go, no, I think Obama, his his spirit, not his not his birthplace or anything,

01:09:39.740 but his spirit is third world.

01:09:41.540 It's anti-colonial.

01:09:42.940 It comes out of the hot winds of anti-colonialism in Kenya.

01:09:47.240 I mean, he has his own autobiography, dreams from my father.

01:09:50.440 It's all in there.

01:09:51.780 And so I go, I'm going to make a film about how Obama's real ideology is a third world

01:09:57.280 anti-colonialism.

01:09:58.360 Now, as soon as I said that, people were like, Dinesh, are you insane?

01:10:02.840 Are you going to make a movie on a topic so obscure as anti-colonialism?

01:10:07.660 Nobody even knows what that is.

01:10:09.300 Not only that, they think it's good because America was a colony of the British.

01:10:13.860 So I was, people tried to deter me on the grounds that this is not, this movie is not

01:10:18.940 going to succeed.

01:10:19.960 I paid no attention to it.

01:10:21.220 I make the movie.

01:10:22.380 It's the second most successful movie ever made, a political documentary after Michael

01:10:26.840 Moore's Fahrenheit 9-11.

01:10:28.360 So, so I've learned from my own experience to find things that are interesting and important

01:10:33.560 and just say them, just go for it.

01:10:36.520 And that's my approach right now.

01:10:38.300 And it's maybe naive in a more strategic era, but, you know, it's, it's stood me pretty well.

01:10:46.740 And, and every time I do this stuff, people like Charlie Sykes, you know, who's now, I

01:10:50.380 think he's with the Bulwark.

01:10:51.460 He's, he's a never Trumper.

01:10:52.460 Um, and, uh, he'll be like, this is a career ending move by Dinesh.

01:10:57.420 I'm like, I'm like, my career has been ending since 1992.

01:11:00.900 Yeah.

01:11:01.500 So, so I just don't worry about it.

01:11:03.580 Because when you were looking at the public podcast charts, I think it was Constantine

01:11:06.760 who pointed it out to me.

01:11:08.140 But number one and number two on the conservative podcast charts is Tucker and it's Candace.

01:11:14.380 And that is a pretty damning indictment on conservative political thought, isn't it?

01:11:20.220 Well, what it shows, I think, is that the, um, the type of people who listen to podcasts

01:11:30.940 and the type of people, for example, you find on X, um, are drawn to the, this kind of, um,

01:11:41.980 um, um, it's a certain type of political porn, isn't it?

01:11:45.540 I mean, um, it, it's these, it's Candace puts out a salacious incendiary allegation.

01:11:53.060 Um, it doesn't hold up and over time it becomes obvious that it's stupid, but she then replaces

01:12:00.100 it with another one.

01:12:01.000 Uh, and it's a never ending playing of these kind of nude cards, so to speak, on the table.

01:12:08.180 And apparently there's a virtually endless fascination for them because it's a new card.

01:12:12.560 It's like, it's not, okay, we've, we've played the Brigitte Macron card.

01:12:16.200 Now we're onto the who killed Charlie Kirk card and tomorrow it'll be something else.

01:12:20.220 Now, when people said to me, well, Dinesh, but didn't you speak at Blacksit?

01:12:25.020 Like, you know, aren't, didn't you and Tucker toured Australia last year?

01:12:28.600 Which is, we did.

01:12:29.600 Uh, I say to myself, look, um, my admiration for Candace and Tucker was developed on a completely

01:12:35.860 different basis.

01:12:37.380 Candace had stepped forward as like a young Black woman taking on affirmative action, taking

01:12:41.940 on DEI, uh, basically speaking to young Blacks about leaving the plantation to use, you know,

01:12:48.360 her own rhetoric.

01:12:48.960 And I'm like, that's fantastic.

01:12:50.460 That needs to be done.

01:12:51.440 She's very good at it.

01:12:52.100 Very good at it.

01:12:52.960 And no one else is doing it.

01:12:54.060 And she's the perfect messenger.

01:12:56.120 Uh, and so my admiration for Candace was based on that.

01:13:00.760 Tucker, you know, he was really good in COVID.

01:13:03.020 Uh, he was really good on Fox, his very memorable and kind of witty, um, uh, monologues.

01:13:10.880 Uh, he showed a lot of bravery, I think, in the way he handled the break with Fox.

01:13:15.420 But what's happened is that, you know, it's, it's, um, I don't mean to make light of it,

01:13:21.160 but essentially you could say that Candace and Tucker have gone trans on us.

01:13:24.780 They have transitioned into something completely different.

01:13:27.740 And now we're being asked to sign off on them, even though it's not the same Candace, it's not the same Tucker.

01:13:34.000 And I'm like, okay, I'm not going to get on this bandwagon.

01:13:37.900 Uh, I admired you for other reasons, but you apparently have become a different person.

01:13:42.880 You know, one of the other things that's happened, Dinesh, and this isn't just specific to the two people you're talking about,

01:13:47.380 but more generally, is you can no longer disagree with people's arguments or behavior without being accused of being a hater

01:13:57.220 or having some personal animus towards them.

01:14:01.480 For example, when I wrote that article about Tucker Carlson and the Woke Right,

01:14:04.560 I, I made very specific points about ideology and worldview.

01:14:09.500 I never made any personal comments about him or anything like that.

01:14:12.820 I've been on his, I was on his Fox show a number of times.

01:14:16.500 Uh, and I thought, you know, during the summer of BLM, he was the funniest comedian on TV.

01:14:20.740 He was brilliant.

01:14:22.340 But, but the, the difference now to me, it feels like is if I say Dinesh D'Souza is, you know,

01:14:30.180 I respect him for his work on this, but I don't agree with that.

01:14:33.740 I'm a Dinesh D'Souza hater, and I have to be called out.

01:14:38.380 And it's, this is no way to discuss ideas.

01:14:41.720 This is some sort of, this is another game.

01:14:45.000 It is.

01:14:45.720 I mean, I, I play by the old rules.

01:14:47.580 So what happened was, uh, Tucker had posed a question to Ted Cruz,

01:14:51.360 namely, are the Jews of today the descendants of the Jews of the Bible?

01:14:56.040 Interesting question.

01:14:57.360 The film, by the way, tackles some of this.

01:14:59.380 But I decided I'm going to do a one-on-one with Netanyahu.

01:15:02.580 And since Tucker specifically mentioned, like, Netanyahu's Jews, I'm like, all right,

01:15:06.640 I'm going to put it to Netanyahu.

01:15:09.160 Perfectly legitimate thing to do.

01:15:11.020 Netanyahu does an elegant sort of dunk on Tucker.

01:15:14.040 And I'm about to post a clip on, on social media of Netanyahu's comment.

01:15:18.320 So I think as a courtesy, I'm going to send it to Tucker because I don't want him to feel like ambushed.

01:15:23.760 Uh, it's, it's his question.

01:15:25.600 I'm putting it to the Israeli prime minister.

01:15:27.340 I texted Tucker.

01:15:28.320 Tucker sends me back an extremely annoyed text, um, basically accusing me of suggesting he's an anti-Semite.

01:15:38.200 I go, Tucker, I never said you're an anti-Semite.

01:15:40.800 I'm very careful about making that kind of, uh, allegation.

01:15:44.660 Uh, to me, um, an anti-Semite is somebody who holds the Jews and only the Jews to a standard that they won't apply to anyone else.

01:15:54.000 And if you do that consistently and systematically, then your motives are rightly suspect.

01:15:58.100 But I didn't even say any of this, uh, this is, this is more of the criterion spelled out in the film.

01:16:03.100 But I, I just said, I'm not doing that, Tucker.

01:16:06.140 Uh, and then he sends me some genetic study showing that the Jews of today are only 67% connected to the Jews of the Bible.

01:16:13.680 And, and again, uh, I'm thinking, first of all, would you do this with any other group?

01:16:21.020 I mean, would you consider, for example, saying that blacks don't really come from Africa?

01:16:24.280 Because let's do a genetic test on Whitney Houston, see what a percentage of black is, a non-black.

01:16:29.500 I mean, if you did it with any other group, there would be immediate outrage.

01:16:33.540 And Tucker knows this.

01:16:34.600 I mean, again, we're not talking about some goofball on social media.

01:16:37.800 We're talking about a smart guy who's been around.

01:16:40.080 I've known Tucker for probably 25 years.

01:16:42.180 So this is a savvy guy.

01:16:44.360 Uh, he does know what he's doing.

01:16:46.180 And this is a little bit of why I, I hold him to a higher standard is because I think he does know better.

01:16:51.400 So, um, but he becomes a very annoyed because I challenged this mode of sort of, you could call it genetic verification.

01:16:59.480 I say, listen, of, of all the groups that have been dispersed to the ends of the earth, as far as I can see, the Jews have kept a tribal identity more than any other group.

01:17:10.360 If you look and say, you know, Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, the Jews don't intermarry.

01:17:16.540 They, Shylock doesn't even want to go eat with the Christians.

01:17:18.720 And when his daughter runs off with a Christian, he's outraged.

01:17:21.900 I mean, this gives you a little window into how Jews as a group have preserved their Jewish identity, not to mention gone back to their ancestral homeland, revived the Hebrew language, um, and essentially recreated, at least to an observable degree to me, the world of the Bible.

01:17:40.380 It's observable if you walk around Jerusalem.

01:17:42.320 You feel like you're in the land of the Bible.

01:17:45.140 And, um, and then I also, of course, became very interested in the biblical archaeology and all of that that goes with it.

01:17:50.880 But, uh, but sort of Tucker and I have this break that, again, would normally be settled by saying, all right, well, look, this is a very interesting discussion.

01:18:01.900 As far as I know, it's never happened.

01:18:04.960 Let's do it on my show.

01:18:06.680 But maybe, as you say, Tucker is like, why would I want to have an informed critic on my show?

01:18:14.140 That might show me up.

01:18:15.460 That might show that I am actually far less of an authority and the man in control or know what I'm talking about.

01:18:22.600 I would much rather keep the structure I have, which is the, I might, the ventriloquist structure of having essentially submissive guests who echo back to me what I want them to say.

01:18:37.540 Uh, and I, I don't want to really veer too far from that.

01:18:40.140 And your film is about October 7th and Israel.

01:18:44.440 Why do you think there has been this level of focus on Israel in, uh, in Western political debate?

01:18:52.600 I think for young people, the, um, young people already think, or at least a lot of them do, uh, that this group of insiders or elites has its own racket going and they care about everybody, like, except me.

01:19:17.500 Um, I, the ordinary American, I, the working class guy, I'm like the very bottom of their list.

01:19:25.000 Is that unfair though, Dinesh?

01:19:27.120 Is that an unfair assessment of the situation?

01:19:30.840 When you look at the Rust Belt, when you look at comments like the deplorables, et cetera, et cetera, when you've seen how societies, particularly in the center of this country, have been allowed to go to seed, is that really an unfair criticism?

01:19:46.160 No, no, I, I'm actually stating it sympathetically.

01:19:48.920 I, I understand why people say those things, but what I'm saying is now imagine the Pied Piper who comes along and goes, listen, the reason that you have this predicament is because this whole American structure, which has a lot of bad elements.

01:20:04.100 It's got the police state, you know, it's got the cultural left, it's got academia, the media, Hollywood, but there is in fact a kind of super manipulator that is controlling all of these and that's Israel, right?

01:20:21.020 So, it's almost like Israel is being presented as the master key.

01:20:26.940 Now, now Tucker's backing off from some of this because I noticed that in his most recent talk in Indiana, he goes, well, there are some disagreements in MAGA over foreign policy.

01:20:37.700 I think we can all agree that America's interests should come first and that Netanyahu is a leader of a foreign country, as if that's just what we've been talking about.

01:20:45.700 In reality, I think the, the sort of the poison is not about that.

01:20:52.280 It's far worse.

01:20:53.800 It's essentially putting the Jews as the, as the master manipulators of the entire elite structure and a lot of young people buy into that.

01:21:04.160 What's, what's interesting about all of this is you have to be very, I don't mean this disrespectfully, but the word ignorant has a meaning, which is a lack of knowledge.

01:21:16.140 You have to be very ignorant to think that in an alliance of a, of the most powerful country in the world and a tiny country, which is dependent on that country for its security, that relationship could own, could be anything other than the powerful country getting its way.

01:21:31.320 99% of the time, like if a 25 year old White House staffer comes over to Britain, he, he's talking to people way above his level, twice his age, and they're all sitting there taking orders because America is the world's hegemon and Britain isn't.

01:21:47.720 And it's, it's inevitably the same with any other country with which America is in a, you know, in a kind of relationship of some kind.

01:21:55.200 America sets the terms, the other countries do, do what you want.

01:21:58.120 So it's a, it's a very strange trick that's being played.

01:22:03.960 That is part of it.

01:22:05.420 The part of it I don't understand is that even if you take the ignorant guy and you give him a very simple, coherent cure for his ignorance, he still resists.

01:22:19.280 I'll give you an example.

01:22:20.020 So I was on Matt Gaetz's podcast and Matt Gaetz goes, well, you spend a lot of time in your movie, Dinesh, Biblical Archaeology.

01:22:27.180 You're trying to show that the Jews have this ancient ancestral presence going back 2,000, 3,000 years ago.

01:22:33.540 He goes, so what?

01:22:35.040 He goes, the American Indians were here first.

01:22:37.180 Does this mean we got to turn over the whole country to them?

01:22:39.200 So I reply as follows.

01:22:41.700 I said, well, Matt, as far as I know, if you look around the world, I only know three ways in which you can get the title deeds to a country, any country.

01:22:51.400 First, you are the original inhabitant.

01:22:55.020 And that's one basis for making a claim.

01:22:57.960 The second, some sort of negotiation or treaty.

01:23:00.980 Someone gave it to you as part of a deal that was made.

01:23:03.440 And three, conquest.

01:23:04.660 I go, I don't know a single country in the world that didn't get its borders and its map out of one of these three ways.

01:23:12.960 I go, in America, quite honestly, there's a bit of a dispute because the Native Americans were here first.

01:23:17.840 So they get original inhabitancy, but the white man conquered it.

01:23:20.880 So conquest goes to the white man.

01:23:22.860 And so you could argue that there's at least some sort of a disputed title.

01:23:25.880 I said, let's apply this logic to Israel.

01:23:27.880 Number one, the Jews were there first.

01:23:30.220 They were the original inhabitants.

01:23:31.820 Check.

01:23:32.060 Check.

01:23:32.680 Number two, the United Nations at the end of World War II, by treaty, basically, or by negotiation, says, all right, Jews, you can have this.

01:23:41.480 Arabs, you can have this.

01:23:42.360 The Arabs say no.

01:23:43.400 But you have the check, the second box, a negotiation or treaty.

01:23:47.840 And number three, the Jews have fought multiple wars, 48, 67, 73.

01:23:52.840 I've held the land by conquest.

01:23:53.960 So I go, I don't know a country in the world that has a stronger claim to title, Israel is checking all the boxes.

01:24:03.040 Now, again, if someone is ignorant, they could go, well, that makes sense to me, or I can think of a fourth box, or I can.

01:24:12.700 But what I find is that if you say this, which seems to me very straightforwardly convincing, you make no headway.

01:24:22.120 The person who is ignorant doubles down.

01:24:25.300 And then they will start saying things like, who paid you $7,000, right?

01:24:31.720 And so what does that tell you?

01:24:34.360 That tells you that they want to be in that pit.

01:24:38.900 There's another agenda going on.

01:24:40.240 Yeah, there's another agenda going on.

01:24:41.840 They are emotionally committed to that ignorant position.

01:24:45.160 And what's been very interesting to me is with the ceasefire, which Trump and lots of other countries negotiated, but Trump was at the forefront of it, particularly when it comes to the public element of it, and the return of the hostages, which is a fantastic achievement.

01:25:04.940 We can all agree on that.

01:25:06.240 But the fact that all of these people who seem to be banging the drum day in, day out, demanding a ceasefire in Gaza, which I think we're all sympathetic to, nobody wants to see the loss of innocent life, and you go, but you did not celebrate this in any shape or form, that betrays something very fundamental about your outlook.

01:25:28.000 That's an exact continuation of the point I'm making, that they will state an objection.

01:25:32.780 We're concerned about the civilian losses of life.

01:25:37.160 That stops.

01:25:38.440 They go dead silent.

01:25:39.980 Not only that, but Hamas now begins to drag people out in the open, break your legs by hammering your legs with a stone or shooting someone in the street.

01:25:50.480 And remember, these are Palestinians.

01:25:52.220 These are the very people that these groups on the left and on the right have professed to be motivated by.

01:25:58.120 Anna Kasparin is like, whenever she goes on, you know, on Piers Morgan, she's like inconsolable.

01:26:03.440 She can't stop herself out of, you know, professed concern for civilian life.

01:26:08.120 And yet, suddenly, you find that she has nothing to say.

01:26:13.680 And this is, I think, the low deceitfulness of our age.

01:26:18.020 It's not that people say, you know what, I was wrong, or I'm relieved there's a ceasefire, or I made an error in this news article.

01:26:27.620 I'm going to admit it.

01:26:29.160 What they do is they go back and they stealth edit it, right?

01:26:32.660 And it's as if to say, I never made the mistake.

01:26:34.920 Go look right now.

01:26:35.700 See, it's all right.

01:26:36.660 Or what they do is they go dead silent.

01:26:40.040 They wait for the issue to pass so they can reemerge, sort of unchastened.

01:26:46.060 And again, this is just dishonest from the point of view of scholarship, right?

01:26:51.120 It's kind of like you published a paper.

01:26:53.820 You made these claims.

01:26:54.860 They're actually false.

01:26:56.360 It's up to you to go, you know, I got it wrong.

01:26:58.420 Here's why I got it wrong.

01:26:59.460 But I'm going to fix it, and I'm not going to make that mistake next.

01:27:02.660 If you don't do that, the dishonesty becomes habitual.

01:27:07.320 And I'm glad that you used the word dishonesty, because when I look at the situation in Gaza,

01:27:14.860 dispassionately, there is no way forward for that situation to be solved until you get rid of Hamas.

01:27:24.680 I think everybody can agree with that.

01:27:27.060 Most Middle Eastern countries agree.

01:27:28.760 Yeah.

01:27:29.300 Until you get rid of Hamas.

01:27:30.940 There is simply no way you are going to have peace in that region.

01:27:34.620 But how do you get rid of them?

01:27:36.600 Because they're not going to want to go off their own volition.

01:27:39.000 They're not going to go, you know what, actually, we've still got 20,000 people,

01:27:43.500 however many soldiers we've got.

01:27:45.140 We're going to put down our weapons, and we're all going to become organic, vegan farmers.

01:27:49.100 That is simply not a reality.

01:27:50.900 So I guess the question is, how do you solve a problem like Hamas?

01:27:56.540 Let's fill out the problem a little bit more.

01:27:58.560 Hamas does have a lot of civilian support and allies.

01:28:05.440 Normal civilian families in Gaza have stashes of weapons.

01:28:09.160 It's not entirely a case, even though, even though I will say even, you know, Hamas has human shields.

01:28:16.080 And the picture that gives you is the Hamas guy, like, grabbing these civilians and sticking them in front of us, you know, shoot, you know.

01:28:22.320 But the truth of it is, there are a lot of civilians, maybe because they've been propagandized over 20 years, they shelter Hamas.

01:28:30.200 They are willing human shields.

01:28:32.540 You will have moms who say things like, I've given two sons to Allah, and you expect her to say, I've got two more, so I'm not ready to.

01:28:39.540 But no, she means, I am ready to give two more.

01:28:42.700 I'm going to give them all.

01:28:44.100 So there is a...

01:28:46.320 And I also feel it's fair to say as well, Dinesh, so there are people going, you know, if Hamas come in, point a gun at your head and go, you were going to stand here in front of, what are you going to do?

01:28:55.840 There's nothing you can do.

01:28:56.780 I mean, look at how they're punishing dissidents now in the street.

01:29:00.480 And then there you have a global jihadi movement that doesn't wake up actually sweating about the Palestinians, but does see Hamas as part of its global jihad.

01:29:11.580 It's one tool, right?

01:29:14.060 So they have their own reasons for keeping this festering.

01:29:18.340 So even if Hamas decided, you know, to dismantle the global jihadi operation, which has much wider ambitions, right, they want to infiltrate Australia and Canada and Europe and the United States, and that doesn't go away.

01:29:33.300 So I'm very hopeful about what Trump has done, but I'm also very conscious of the magnitude of the task ahead.

01:29:41.140 And you'll be aware, as many Americans increasingly are, that Islamist extremism has become a very big problem, particularly in Europe.

01:29:50.060 It's interesting that right as actually it's being solved across the Middle East and places like the UAE and Saudi Arabia, it is now rising in Europe.

01:30:00.560 What about America?

01:30:01.920 Do you guys feel that that issue is under control here?

01:30:05.400 Are you safe?

01:30:07.400 Absolutely not.

01:30:08.360 I think that Europe is almost a case study of having largely succumbed to massive radical Islamic infiltration, taking over towns and suburbs.

01:30:28.380 We're seeing glimpses of that in the United States.

01:30:30.880 This has been, I have to say, something like a 30-year project, because even in a red state like Texas, you'll suddenly just notice a proliferation of mosques.

01:30:41.080 You'll suddenly notice that you've got all these Islamists running for school board.

01:30:46.800 You suddenly notice that they're trying to create 100 Ilhan Omars.

01:30:53.200 So, the prospect of a United States of Islam, which would have been unthinkable even a few decades ago, I think is a real danger that people should be aware of.

01:31:09.400 It hasn't come here yet to the extent of Europe, but is there any doubt that it's going to?

01:31:15.080 Dinesh, great speaking with you.

01:31:18.080 We're going to head over to our sub stack where people can ask you their questions in a second.

01:31:22.360 But before we do, we always end the same way, which is by asking what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be.

01:31:28.540 Before Dinesh answers a final question at the end of the interview, make sure to head over to our sub stack.

01:31:33.620 The link is in the description where you'll be able to see this.

01:31:36.860 What are some areas the Trump administration can improve upon after the first year in power?

01:31:43.620 And what are some criticisms you would have?

01:31:46.920 What do you think conservatives misunderstand most about the concept of freedom?

01:31:50.920 And what do progressives misunderstand most?

01:31:54.060 Quick reminder, thank you to CyberGhost VPN for sponsoring this video.

01:31:57.820 A top tier VPN for two bucks a month.

01:32:00.580 Click the link in the description to get their special offer.

01:32:03.180 Well, I think that there is the issue of how do you put the MAGA house in order.

01:32:14.000 That's a challenge on the right.

01:32:17.020 The challenge on the left is, or from the left, is the red-green alliance, which has now come to full fruition.

01:32:26.940 Mamdani is sort of a walking embodiment of it because he embodies both sides of it.

01:32:32.720 There's a leftist side of him, which views all these different groups as constituencies.

01:32:39.940 I've got the blacks over here, the Latinos over there, the feminists over here, and then I've got the radical Muslims over here.

01:32:46.220 So, on the one hand, he is a traditional kind of leftist.

01:32:53.320 But on the other hand, he does bring in the Islamic element.

01:32:57.740 Now, the important thing to realize is that if Sharia ever comes to America, it will not look like Bin Laden or the Taliban any more than if communism ever came to America.

01:33:09.560 It would have a Stalin trench coat or, you know, or a toothbrush mustache.

01:33:15.080 These things will come here in American accents.

01:33:20.560 If Sharia comes to America, it will look more like Mamdani or Tucker Carlson.

01:33:24.320 It will be all-American.

01:33:26.200 It will be homegrown.

01:33:27.740 It will be suave.

01:33:29.380 It will be social media savvy.

01:33:31.160 It will have pink cheeks.

01:33:32.260 And then Tucker's going to have a bow tie.

01:33:33.880 So, as a result, Americans are not, like, they're not looking for that.

01:33:40.280 It's almost like the thieves are showing up at your house, but they don't look like traditional burglars.

01:33:44.920 They aren't in masks.

01:33:46.160 They've actually come to the front door.

01:33:47.960 You know, they want to be let in.

01:33:49.020 They're like, wait, is this where the dinner party is taking place?

01:33:51.800 And you're like, there may be some misunderstanding.

01:33:53.700 Oh, no.

01:33:54.340 I mean, can we just come in?

01:33:55.540 And so, alerting America, see, the thing is, Israel, the reason Israel is so good in fighting radical Islam, in my view, Israel's on the front line, right?

01:34:07.040 It's kind of like when you live in a bad neighborhood, you learn to look over your shoulder.

01:34:10.400 You become very survival-oriented.

01:34:12.380 You become very lean.

01:34:13.400 You become very tough.

01:34:14.760 America has had a kind of spectatorial distance from all this, the luxury that, well, yeah, we did have 9-11, but by and large, this kind of thing, we have not seen here.

01:34:25.960 And as a result, Americans are slow to wake up to it.

01:34:30.760 Dinesh, thank you very much.

01:34:31.840 Follow us on over to triggerpod.co.uk where we ask Dinesh your questions.

01:34:37.320 Many of us were driven away from the Democratic Party by woke excesses like racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism.

01:34:44.280 What are conservative leaders doing to minimize the racist, sexist, and anti-Semites in the Republican Party?

01:34:55.540 And I'll see you next time.

01:35:09.180 Bye.

TRIGGERnometry - October 26, 2025

Why MAGA Is At War With Itself - Dinesh D'Souza

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