Are We Becoming The Socialist States Of America With Dinesh D’Souza – Today’s America is much different then it was fifty years ago. Are we now the Socialist States of America? What can we do to stop this? Join us today to hear our amazing guest, Dinesh D’Souza.

Air Date: 10/05/2020

Guest: Dinesh D’Souza

On-air Personalities: David Barton, Rick Green, and Tim Barton

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Transcription note:  As a courtesy for our listeners’ enjoyment, we are providing a transcription of this podcast. Transcription will be released shortly. However, as this is transcribed from a live talk show, words and sentence structure were not altered to fit grammatical, written norms in order to preserve the integrity of the actual dialogue between the speakers. Additionally, names may be misspelled or we might use an asterisk to indicate a missing word because of the difficulty in understanding the speaker at times. We apologize in advance.

 

Rick:

Welcome to the intersection of faith and the culture, it’s WallBuilders Live. We appreciate you joining us today, I think you’re going to enjoy today’s program as much as any we’ve had in quite some time. Dinesh D’Souza is with us today. This is going to be so cool. I am excited to have Dinesh. I’m a big fan of Dinesh D’Souza, have been since I was 19 years old. You’ll hear a little bit about how I first discovered Dinesh as we jump into the interview, but he was with us at Patriot Academy.

Our national patriot Academy was virtual this year, and so we were able to pipe in Dinesh D’Souza to speak to the students and we wanted to share that with you here on WallBuilders Live. By the way, WallBuilders is not only the intersection of faith and the culture, it’s the place where you get a perspective on the issues of the day that is a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective.

My name is Rick Green, I’m a former Texas legislator and America’s Constitution coach. And I’m normally here with David Barton, America’s premier historian and our founder and WallBuilders and with Tim Barton, national speaker and pastor and president of WallBuilders. But today it’s going to be all Dinesh, so we’re going to dive right into that interview with Dinesh D’Souza at Patriot Academy.

Very quick break right here at the beginning of the program. When we come back, it’s Dinesh D’Souza for the rest of the day. Stay with us, you’re listening to WallBuilders Live.

BREAK

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Rick:

So listen, guys, this one’s really cool for me, because when I was your age, I know I sound like your parents now, it’s like well, [inaudible 02:33]? No, when I was your age, 30 years ago, I cannot believe it’s been that long, but 30 years ago, I was 19 years old, and I went to something called the conservative student conference in Washington DC, put on by young America’s foundation. And it was a great experience. I mean, it’s actually part of what created Patriot Academy because in my mind, I came home going, hey, I’m not the only young person that thinks about this stuff. Hey, it’s cool to be a conservative. I’m not as weird as I thought I was. So that interaction with other young conservatives was very important for me at 19 years old.

But one of the main speakers there that week at only 26 years old was Dinesh D’Souza and he had just written his book in liberal education, and he had a great impact on me even then at 26 years old. I have not read all of your books Dinesh, but most of them, and if we were in my office, I’d be pulling them off the shelf and showing everybody what’s so great about Christianity, what’s so great about America, your book on Ronald Reagan. I mean, the list goes on and on, and certainly the books of the last few years, hugely influential in the culture and now United States socialism. You wrote this before all the chaos right now, so you saw this coming long before and I’ve seen you speak on it even in the last few years.

So whatever you want to talk about, man, I do want to say, your wife Debbie is amazing. She’s got brilliant taste, because she chose to have me speak for her group when she had the spirit of Republican women. So that was a brilliant decision. But then she chose to marry you, which is probably a little bit more important of a decision. At any rate, tell Debbie hi from all of us at Patriot Academy. Ladies and gentlemen, the one the only Dinesh, oh, I forgot the movies as well, all kinds of fantastic movies the last few years, and a new one coming out later this year. Dinesh D’souza, it’s all yours, brother.

Dinesh:

Rick, thank you for that introduction. I’m thrilled that we go way back to my old mischief making days. And let me begin by saying that I’m a young Reaganite from the 1980s, and that was a kind of a kinder, gentler America, if we can put it that way. A political debate was somewhat more civil. We had bias in the media and in the universities, but nothing like what we are dealing with now.

The Democratic Party and the Left, I think have become more gangsterized in the last decade or so, and so we’re facing a certain kind of ruthlessness of attack on all fronts. Our economic beliefs, our freedom of speech, our freedom of religion, and the kind of things that we hold dear, I mean, the kind of things that attracted me as an immigrant to come to America in the first place, it seems to me, a lot of this hangs in the balance.

So I asked myself often, what is the end goal of the Left? Why are they doing this? They’ve got all these paramilitary gangs on the street, and they’ve got the deep state, the police agencies, the government, the IRS, the FBI, the CIA, they mobilize those against political opponents. But all of this is means, so what is the end, what is the end? And I think the end is some form of socialism.

Now, it isn’t the socialism that Marx had in mind in which the working class overthrows the capitalist class. This is socialism married to identity politics, so I call it identity socialism. And so my book the United States of Socialism is an effort to sort of lay out what this new socialism looks like. Because I don’t think it’s a socialism that can simply be defeated by saying, wow, socialism never worked before, so it’s not going to work now. The Left is trying something that is actually genuinely new.

And the reason I do the movies is, a book is an argument, whereas a movie is an emotional narrative. The Left is really all about narratives. Even if you look at what’s happened with this George Floyd business, and I’ve been sort of watching these new videos that throw a little bit of a new light on things, but nevertheless, they’ll take an incident and they will create a narrative, which is a narrative is not a fact, it’s an interpretation of facts, that tells a story. And our side is often very good at trying to counter with facts, but a fact can’t defeat a narrative, you need a rival narrative. And a lot of my movies are aimed at doing that.

So we’ve made a film, really strong movie, very powerful called Trump Card. We were going to release it this week, this weekend in 1,000 theaters, but of course, most theaters are still not open, so we can’t do that. So we’ve made a decision to release the movie in video on-demand, because that is the only way that people all over the country can see it on any device, I mean, computer, phone, TV, whatever. So we’ve decided for the first time to go straight to video on-demand, because we want a very large number of Americans to see this movie because it’s very eye opening, and it’s a different kind of messaging than you’ll get from typically Trump or the campaign or the Republican National Committee.

Rick:

Speaking of your movies, you had a great opening, and I can’t remember now which one it was, but it’s the opening where you have George Washington riding on the horse and get shot. And it’s what if George Washington had died? I remember having lunch with John Solomon and him describing to me the creation of that opening. Why are you so rare? Like, why is our side so bad at doing the narrative, at telling it? Well, you’re great at it. But we have so few like you that do that so that we can win against the narrative. We do just try to show facts and data and it doesn’t work against those narratives. We need more like you and is why I want to try to inspire some of these young people to go into the arts and go into entertainment and do more of that.

Dinesh:

Well, I think the reason is that it’s very difficult on our side. If Michael Moore makes a movie, he goes to a studio, they give him $10 million, he makes the movie, which is his only job. And then he’s booked on The View, The Today Show, Good morning, America, Bill Maher, he has an automatic entree to the media to market this movie, and he’s on Oprah, all this kind of stuff.

On our side, it’s the opposite. If you want to make a movie, you have to start with drawing up a business plan, and that takes legal skill. Then you have to go to donors and ask them to give you money, which is hard to do if you haven’t already made a movie, so you got to convince them to do it, then you have to show the skill of being able to make the movie, which is itself extremely difficult.

And I say that because for a lot of people on our side, the Christian side, the conservative side, we want to use the movie as a sort of a speech making platform. And so typically, conservative and Christian movies are very didactic, lots of bloviation a lot of commentary. But a movie is an entertainment. In reality, people go to movies because they want to be entertained.

And so if you make a movie that is emotionally powerful and entertaining, you can smuggle all kinds of information into it. But if you fail in that area, then you’re dead in the water. And then the fourth thing is do you have to market the movie. So the point I’m just trying to make is that the reason is difficult on our side, is you have to actually have four different sets of skills that typically don’t go together in the same person. You have creative guys who are really good at making a movie, but then they can’t raise $1. And then you have guys who know how to make a movie, but they don’t know how to market it. So it’s only when you put all the elements together that you can make this work. And the infrastructure for doing it, I guess, this is my point exists on the other side, and has not been developed on our side.

Rick:

Yeah, yeah, it’s much easier for them. Even with just an idea, they can put it into their infrastructure that’s already there and it gets done, where on our side, you’ve got to do all of it. What’s the most important lesson for us to learn right now, to avoid socialism? What have we got to convince people of, whether it’s through the narrative or just plain fact, especially these young people that they’re getting the onslaught of these communist ideas that are cloaked in feel good slogans? How do they combat that? What do they need to know to know this is a fight they’ve got to be willing to engage in?

Dinesh:

I think that the biggest obstacle to defeating socialism comes from the temperament of our own side. And by that, I mean that we are the party if I may put it this way of the nice guys. We think that we operate by a sort of genteel code of civility. And the other side is fully aware of this and exploits it to the hilt. In fact, they rely on our tendency to knife our own guys, which were actually really good at. And they are so confident in the strategy that they’re actually shocked when it doesn’t work. If I can use a kind of blatant example.

The left was really expecting with Stormy Daniels, that they would say, look at this perverted Stormy Daniels not though they don’t think she’s a pervert, she’s perfectly fine. Most of them are more perverted than she is. But they know that we do. So they’re ideas that let’s shove Stormy Daniels up there, and then the Republicans and the Christians will all make a circle and knife Trump, and then we can just sit back on the sidelines and laugh our heads off because our strategy has worked beautifully.

And 9 times out of 10, I have to say it does work beautifully, because they can count on us to do that. They also can do tactics against us that they are 100% confident that we will never do against them. So they’ll use the deep state against us, we won’t use the deep state against them. They will have Supreme Court Justices who ignore the Constitution and just promote the agenda of the Left. They’re confident that when we put our Justices up, they will simply abide by the Constitution and go with the kind of, you may call it neutral reading of what the document says.

So in other words, we will appoint umpires to the court and they will appoint players. Their players are going for an outcome, our umpires are just trying to call the shots as they see them. So in every case, they have Antifa, they can knock down our statues, they know we won’t knock down their statues.

So you can see, in case after case, they are absolutely sure that they can intimidate us into complete submission. And we will just stand by and stupefied amazement and let it happen, and this is in fact what Republicans do. Unless we act differently, it’s almost like unless we recognize what Lincoln recognized in the 1850s that the Democrats have become kind of gangsterized, and that even moderate people have got to recognize when they are in immoderate situations, they will just run over us as they’re sort of doing now.

Rick:

It sounds like we need more of a warrior mentality that we don’t realize we’re at war, and so we’re not thinking like that, the other side has been for a while. And I guess that’s why they hate Trump so much because he has been willing to fight fire with fire and it doesn’t bother him.

Dinesh:

Right. But he’s got people who are trying to defeat him on his own side. I mean, he’s got people who don’t like the fact about him that he’s got the warrior mentality. They want to take away his Twitter. They wanted to stop hitting back when somebody hits at him. So this is a kind of tendency that we have that and I understand it. Look, I would much rather we live in the 1980s, and we had CNN which had crossfire with two sides, but we operate as if the world has not changed.

I mean, today’s a perfectly good example. Look at the way that for example, Lindsey Graham treat Sally Yates versus the way the Democrats treat Attorney General Barr, they treat him as a criminal. If he starts to speak, they shut him up. They attack him from start to finish. They don’t do any niceties at all. Where’s Lindsey Graham thinks he’s some sort of courtly Southern gentleman, he’ll spend 15 minutes praising her record and tell what wonderful person she is and thank her for a service to the country. For the Democrats, this is all absolute nonsense, and they don’t waste one minute on it, and we seem to spend half our time doing it for what purpose, I really don’t understand.

Rick:

I yeah, we even saw that in Cruz’s hearing when the Senator from Hawaii literally walked out with unwilling to say anything negative about Antifa, like you said, the Ag Barr hearing exactly the same thing. So how do we get more of a warrior mentality then?

Dinesh:

Well, this is where the young people come in, because I think that the problem is that, for example, the typical Republican congressman or senator is a product of a sort of different culture, and it’s almost like they don’t know what hit them. And so right now, for example, and you think about it, we have paramilitary gangs in our streets that are essentially taking down the symbols of America. And if we let them do it, they will take down the Washington monument and the Statue of Liberty, and we’ll be like, whoa, what happened, you know? And what happened is basically, the party of wimps, namely us stood by on the sidelines and didn’t do anything. That’s the fact of the matter. We let it happen. So I think a lot of this depends on us.

I mean, my wife, Debbie, whom you mentioned earlier, once said to me, she said, how is it the case that even when we are in control, we’re never in charge? I mean, how is it possible right now that we control the presidency, we supposedly control the court, we have one of the two branches of Congress, you would think we’d be running everything, but in fact, we’re like up against the wall, explaining ourselves. They set the agenda, we react to what they do. We’re defined by what goes on CNN, even though CNN has virtually no audience. So think of the power that they have in our minds, and how important it is ultimately for us to liberate ourselves from that kind of control.

Rick:

That seems to be this, we want to be loved thing. It’s almost why the evangelical church is so neutered right now and buying into the virtue signaling instead of fighting back against it, because they are so convinced you have to be loved and liked. Is that part of it?

Dinesh:

I think the sad truth is that we are more concerned about the appearance of virtue than virtue itself. When you say people want to be loved, I don’t actually think it’s even so benign. I think ultimately that the Left, we are cooperating with the Left goal, which is to make us into worms. So to make us into worms means for us to be governed by fear.

If you want to think about what virtue signaling really means, you have to think about, I was in a couple years ago, in Nuremberg, and I was watching some historical footage about the Nazi salutes, and just families, good families flying the swastika flag off their balcony. And I thought to myself, why are they doing that? I think he’s actually like gung ho, Nazis, Heil Hitler, but I mean, Hitler is not even there. So why are they doing it? And I realized why they’re doing it. What they really meant to say is, I’m a coward. I do not have any stomach for going up against these people. They are much tougher than I am. I am in fact, a worm. And so my point of putting up the swastika flag is not that I believe in any of it, it’s rather I’m not going to make trouble. You want me to march in lockstep, I’ll be happy to do it.

So when you look at this virtue signaling, that’s what these people are saying. They’re saying that they’re wimps, that they can be pushed around, that they have no genuine convictions of their own, and the appearance of virtue is far more important to them than virtue itself.

Rick:

Let’s talk about candidates that would fight socialism and have a warrior mentality but aren’t perfect. Obviously, Trump fits into that category, but there are others for senate and even local rep or even commissioner. One of our students ask, we tend to look for perfection, and if we find one flaw in a candidate, we write them off. There’s no such thing as a perfect candidate, it’s what we try to tell people. But the other side is more than willing to accept the flaws to get the agenda. How can we think more like that?

Dinesh:

I would put it a little bit differently than that. It’s not even so much that it’s a matter of the fact that people have flaws. It is that private character and public leadership are actually somewhat distinct. I’ll give you an example that doesn’t even involve character flaws.

So for example, let’s compare Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Now, George H.W. Bush was a genuine war hero. He had flown battle missions in World War II. He was a decorated military hero. Reagan made World War II movies in Hollywood during World War II. That was the extent of his war record. Yet, if you said Reagan and Bush marching out with a group of 100 Marines, the Marines would go berserk if they saw Reagan. They love Reagan. They like Bush. They respected them, but they love Reagan.

So think about it. Here’s a paradox. From a military point of view, Reagan was the inferior guy, Bush was the actual war hero. But Reagan projected martial leadership far more effectively than Bush. And what that shows is that private character, in this case, the military record, and public projection of leadership, are actually two different things.

Rick:

Oh, yeah, that comes back to part of what we try to teach here is communication skill, as well as actually having the convictions. You got to have both and be able to be effective at it. Let’s see, I was going to grab a couple of the other questions from the students. Actually, somebody is pointing out the governor, South Dakota, Kristi Noem who’s been so great on the Constitution on the whole COVID thing. Are there any others like that that you see out there in the country and say, yeah, that’s what we need more of, that’s kind of the farm team that understands the fight and has a warrior mentality? I think Kristi Noem does. Any others that you could pick up?

Dinesh:

Well, I mean, I see flashes of it all over the place. I mean, I think the Republicans, for example, really toughened up during the Cavanaugh hearing, they recognize what was at stake. We would have lost that fight if it wasn’t for a kind of a Republican pushback. So we are now much more on to them. The same happened with impeachment.

There was a show of fire from some of the Republicans in the house, that was downright awesome. But this is not, by the way, confined to political leadership. We have also lost the culture. I mean, it’s amazing how we have left the high ground of academia, the media, not just Hollywood, but the whole entertainment industry. I mean, the Left is able to push us around in the country music field. Country music conservatives are scared to come out as conservative.

So what I’m getting at is that they have been able to you may say, in fact, even what were previously conservative precincts of the culture, my stepdaughter, Debbie’s daughter goes to Texas A&M, conservative school. Not anymore. Not when you count the faculty. So here’s a right wing institution that has been basically penetrated by the Left and I’m talking about the real Left, not sort of moderate Liberals, not Michael Dukakis, I’m talking about Black Lives Matter, Antifa types are a presence at Texas A&M.

So, we have done a horrible job in allowing this to happen, and so we need leadership, not just at the electoral level, but we need leadership in the media, we need intellectual leadership. I mean, just think about it. Can you name 10, conservative intellectuals that are actually doing anything useful today? You’re really hard pressed to do it. I can name off the top of my head one, Victor Davis Hanson, and then maybe two or three others. But how can you have a movement representing half the country that doesn’t seem to have a brain?

Rick:

Defunding the Left, how do we do that? In our own dollars that we spend, where we send our kids to school, what do you tell people to do there?

Dinesh:

Well, this is a problem that is not just at the purchasing level, but also at the supply level. So for example, one way I think that we can defeat the universities is by creating new forms of online education that are of a world class quality, but cost a fraction of what it costs to go to college today. That would basically be essentially the invention of the academic iPhone that would make all existing education obsolete. It wouldn’t obviously end the universities overnight, but it would essentially create a momentum toward a completely different platform for education.

But eyesight hasn’t created that. I mean, it’s really disgraceful that all the major digital platforms, from Twitter to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, I mean, they’re all owned by the Left. So look at the control that they have over us as a result of doing that. So ultimately, it’s not just a matter of boycotting, because I think boycotting is the weakest tool. If you really, by the way, I mean, if you want me to be sort of ruthless about it, and if there’s a left wing company and you want to destroy that company, you don’t do it by boycotting their product, you do it by going on their website and reviewing all their products negatively. That’s what the Left does, by the way.

If they don’t like Costco, they’ll go on the Costco website, and they will take a Costco, grill a Costco barbecue, a Costco pair of pants and tell you why all of them suck. So what they’re doing is they’re taking companies whose online businesses half their business and they destroy their websites. This is 100 times more effective than saying I won’t shop at Costco. Who cares!

Rick:

That’s good. Okay, I love the education idea as long as we can have Professor Dinesh D’Souza teaching half of those classes that we put them through. Dinesh, you’ve been great, man. Thanks for staying a few extra minutes with me. Tell Debbie, howdy. We’re going to send out notes on the book and where to get it.

Dinesh:

Absolutely. The book is United States of Socialism, the movie is Trump Card up. Hey, guys. I really enjoyed sharing some ideas with you. I hope I haven’t disturbed you too profoundly, and I hope it’s some food for thought. Bye, guys.

Rick:

Alright, folks, we are out of time for today. That was Dinesh D’souza, you were listening to him at Patriot Academy with the students sharing with them some of the insight that is so important for our culture today. I’m so thankful for what Dinesh does, with the books, with the movies, with the influence that he has on the culture. He’s fighting the good fight and we are blessed to have him on our side.

There is more at our website, wallbuilderslive.com. That’s where you can get archives of the program. We’ve actually had several of these special guests that had attended Patriot Academy with us a few weeks ago. We’ve had them on WallBuilders Live over the last few weeks and we’ll have more coming up in the near future including Matt Walsh, and Allie Stuckey and some others. So we hope you’ve enjoyed those. We hope you’d like to enjoy more of them. You can do that at our website, wallbuilderslive.com.

Be sure to make a contribution while you’re there. We’re a listener supported program and whether you do a few dollars a month or a one-time contribution, however you’d like to do it, we sure appreciate you coming alongside us and helping us to speak truth and influence the culture in a positive way. Let’s do our part in saving America’s constitutional republic.

Thanks so much for listening today. You’ve been listening to WallBuilders Live.