Transcript: Why MAGA Is At War With Itself – Dinesh D’Souza on TRIGGERnometry

And then in that period, mostly I wrote books. I was also kind of a Charlie Kirk of a younger generation. I spoke on campuses, hundreds of them, all through the 90s and the 2000s, obviously at a safer time in America and where you never had to worry about that kind of thing.

And then I started making documentary films about a decade ago. Kind of wandered into that almost accidentally, but discovered that our culture is moving in that direction. And so, although I keep up with the books and I still do some speaking, I’m also now a filmmaker who never went to film school. But it is a way to reach more people that would not be in a line at Barnes and Noble to have your book signed. So for that reason, I think it’s a powerful vehicle for expressing ideas.

The Outsider’s Perspective

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So it sounds a little bit like you were an outsider who’s now become part of the country. You’ve moved here, you’re an American. But I think people who’ve come from other countries, like me and Francis, to a lesser extent in Britain, they always have a slightly better perspective on how things evolve over time because they know that a different world exists. So what have you observed in America over your lifetime here? What do you see as kind of the pattern and how we’ve ended up to where we ended up?

DINESH D’SOUZA: I moved almost naturally into the Reaganite conservative orbit because I was exposed to conservative ideas at Dartmouth. I kind of fell in with a young gang of rebel right wingers. And I realized they’re talking about stuff. They have answers to things I didn’t even know were questions. They were discussing Burke and Hayek and Solzhenitsyn. And I’m like, who are these people and why are they important?

So I plunged myself into these ideas, Burke. And I realized, it’s not that I’m becoming a conservative, I already am. This is kind of intelligent articulation of things I’ve already believed. And so it, as I say, was a kind of a natural fit.

Also, Reagan conservatism was very cosmopolitan. It emphasized the universality of American principles. So there was no awkwardness for me. And in a way, I would say I grew into it. Remember, I came to America by myself. A lot of people move with their families. Most Indians in this country, for example, their families moved in the 60s, and they were either born here or they moved. And not to mention that they typically move into Indian neighborhoods, like in New Jersey. And so they remain in a kind of Indian subculture.

This is not my experience at all. I came alone. I lived in places where, when I was at Dartmouth, I was hard pressed to see an Indian for six months. There were very few on the campus. A lot more now.

From Reagan to Trump: A Conservative Evolution

So I think the big shift is from the Reagan conservatism to Trump and MAGA. And of course, that occurred over the speed bump of the Bushes. The Bush experience dislocated American conservatism, and it was sort of reborn in a bit of a new tone.

Now, I’ve been on board with all that, and I say that because a lot of my former colleagues at AEI and Hoover became dedicated Never Trumpers. They still are, people like Bill Kristol. So I know these people well. I wrote for their magazines. I was really part of their orbit. But Trump became a fork in the road. They went one way, I went a different way.

And they also interpreted the fact that I was making films as a kind of intellectual sellout. They kept saying things like, “Well, Dinesh has just gone for the big audience.” But really what I realized was that people are reading less and that I was trying in my earlier career to convince the kind of hypothetical man on the fence, you could call it like Michael Kinsley at the New Republic or Fred Barnes, someone like that.

And I realized that those guys are not worth the time, really. And there’s a whole bunch of new people who don’t know anything about the founding, don’t know anything about conservative principles, don’t know very much about the roots of the west, but they actually want to learn. I’m like, I’d rather address that audience. And so it was quite a conscious decision to make a career shift, which did have the effect of pulling me away from a lot of my old colleagues.

Political Polarization: Then and Now

FRANCIS FOSTER: And Dinesh, you have got quite a unique viewpoint, because on the one hand, you’re an immigrant who came here from a completely different country at the age of 17, yet you’ve been here for a long time and you’ve seen the culture, but what you get is the benefit of both insider and outsider. Are we far more politically polarized than previous generations, or is something that’s always existed and it’s just come to the surface more because of social media?

DINESH D’SOUZA: No, I think that there is an important shift in the Reagan years. I would say that my view of America was that you have, it’s sort of like a debate between two clubs. You have the Republican Club, sort of like the Rotary, and then you have the Democratic Club, kind of like the Kiwanis Club. And each club puts forward its ideas to the American people, and they decide, we’d rather go here, we’d rather go there. We’d rather have equality of opportunity or we’d rather have equality of outcome. So I had a more benign view of the political system.

Not only that, I would say that the key difference is that in the Reagan days, the assumption was that we as Americans had pretty much of a shared goal. We disagree on the means. So if you were to ask Americans, do you think America should be strong? Yes. Do you think America should be prosperous? Do you think America is an example to the world? Yes. Do you think our American founding principles are good? Do you think that people would have a better life if they follow the Ten Commandments? You could go on like this. By and large, you’d expect people to go, well, yeah.

Now you might disagree. If you are prosperous and you have a big pie, how should you carve the pie? But those are debates about the means.

I think the difference now, and part of the reason there’s a bitter edge to our politics, is that our goals are not the same. And not only that, not only not the same, it’s not just that we want to go to Maine and they want to go to Chicago. It’s that what we consider up, they consider down. What we consider good, they consider evil. And so you have a case where it’s a little difficult to know how to negotiate these differences because they’re differences about ends, not about means.

Economic Inequality and Extremism

FRANCIS FOSTER: It’s a really fascinating point. And do you think part of that is social media, but also part of it as well is economic inequality? If you have a group of people who feel, for whatever reason, they’re never going to be able to own anything or be part of that society, does it not make that portion of society more prone to political polarization and extremism?

DINESH D’SOUZA: Yes. I think that there is an economic dimension to this, and then there is a sort of cultural, moral, and spiritual dimension. Both are extremely important.

The economic part cuts more to the right. By that, I mean, you’ve got a whole generation now of young people, and they believe, and I think with some legitimacy, that the system has betrayed them. The system has lied to them. The system does not have their priorities at heart. The system is an insider system devised by elites for their own benefit.

And a lot of the rage, and I would say even some of the bigotry that comes out of young people is a reaction to their parents, their pastors, their professors, the CDC lying to them, the National Institutes of Health, the FBI. When you find one conspiracy after another kind of coming true, you then become a sucker for conspiracy theories, however implausible. And so that’s one phenomenon. I think there is an economic basis to that.

The cultural and moral basis, I think, is just as important, which is to say that we have a deep cleavage between, you could call it the ethic of identity and authenticity versus the idea of an external moral code by which you could use the Ten Commandments as a substitute for that, the idea of social stability, social order. So these two things are now at loggerheads, and a lot of our culture war comes out of that.

America’s Conspiratorial Nature

FRANCIS FOSTER: And I would also say, as well, and Konstantin and I talk about this all the time when we’re here. And look, we love America. It’s got so many things going for it. It’s a beautiful place. But the people here, I would argue, are conspiratorial by nature. And I’m not talking about the left or the right. I’m talking about everybody. Everybody. When you sit down with them, after a while, they go, “Yeah, but, you know, who’s really in charge?”

DINESH D’SOUZA: Right? Yeah. Well, the thing about it…

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And they’ve all got different answers to that question, by the way, but everyone has the question.

The Shift Toward Conspiratorial Thinking

DINESH D’SOUZA: Yeah, right. And I think the reason for that, I mean, I’m more conspiratorial than I used to be. And by that, I mean, you know, I took it as a matter of faith that John F. Kennedy was shot by a guy from a mound with a shady background. And there was a commission that looked into it, and while all the details may not be known, you know, we know who did it. But now I’m not so sure.

In other words, I’m open to the fact that, you know, there’s probably a lot more going on. Watergate, which, again, I had a fairly straightforward view of, I now have more complex suspicions about it. But these suspicions are actually grounded in a deeper knowledge of how the system actually works.

I mean, I worked in the White House. I thought I actually understood America’s government. But if you fast forward just my own experience to 2013, five weeks after I make this controversial film on Obama, and I admit I exasperated him because I went inside of his world. I went to Kenya. I went to his family homestead in a small village called Kogelo. I had a conversation with his grandmother, and she said, you know that if you want to interview me, you have to bring me a goat.

So in the film, you see me dragging a very unwilling goat to the Obama homestead. I found his brother in a slum in Nairobi, so I annoyed him. But nevertheless, just weeks after this film is a massive success in theaters, the FBI is banging on my door. They had apparently gone through my bank accounts. They realized that I had given $20,000 to a college friend of mine just out of friendship who was running for office. They found that that violated the campaign finance laws, and so they prosecuted me as a felon.

And so I’m sitting across in the conference table, kind of like this one, with top lawyers of the Southern district of New York, and I’m realizing from this conversation that for this offense, which I did exceed the campaign finance law, but I didn’t benefit out of it. First time offense, benign motive. If these guys could have locked me up for 10 years for doing that, they would have.

So that’s a very sobering realization because you suddenly realize, you know, my old idea that these people are political opponents or I’m a dissident. No, the way they look at it, I’m an enemy. And their job is to take me out. And if they can do it, they will do it.

And of course, my case was so early on that I thought, okay, this is a one off. Obama’s a vindictive narcissist. I’m a naive immigrant. I should have known there’s a big target on my back. But sure enough, few years later, George Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Michael Flynn, Trump himself, all of this became commonplace. So you can see where the conspiratorial mindset comes from. It comes from the recognition that some of our politics has in fact become gangsterized. That’s not an illusion, that’s a reality.

Selective Prosecution and Political Advantage

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And, you know, in many of those cases, the people are guilty of the things that they’re being accused of. But, you know, I’m from Russia, and in Russia, this is how it works. It’s like everyone has done something wrong. And whether you get prosecuted for it is not a question of have you committed the crime. It’s a question of is it politically advantageous right now for that crime to be dealt with.

I mean, you know, the Left will say, well, look at John Bolton right now. Look at other things like that. And that’s a really staggering thing that I think we as outsiders in this country are noticing is just things are very, very. There is no, you know, you’re not shaking hands and going to the bar after the game type of thing. The game is played by a very different set of rules and the rules are violent. And increasingly the rules are kill or be killed.

The Lost Era of Intellectual Collegiality

DINESH D’SOUZA: 2008-2012, I did 10 debates with Christopher Hitchens on college campuses. One or two were in big museums. Every single debate goes the same way. We go up there, knock down, drag out arguments over God and atheism. Witty insults flying left and right. After the debate, I go down to the bar, there’s Hitchens and he’s entertaining three or four people with quips. I join them, you know, two bottles of wine disappear and we are on to the next stage.

And so there’s a collegiality and there’s a kind of basic understanding that we’re both seeking the truth. And then a few years later, I publish a book, I send it off to Hitchens, he writes a blurb. So this was the world that I came out.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Do you know people of a younger generation? That sounds unrecognizable.

DINESH D’SOUZA: Unrecognizable, unrecognizable. And you know, Hitchens is Hitchens. Right. He’ll write a blurb that has a double entendre series. It’s very witty, you know, but nevertheless, that was, there’s a kind of underlying.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You want to read something that’s wrong. This is the best version of that.

DINESH D’SOUZA: Exactly. Dinesh is the most intelligent advocate of a position that is inherently indefensible. Yeah, like that, you know, but that is, that’s change.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s gone.

The MAGA Response: Fighting Fire with Fire

DINESH D’SOUZA: That’s gone. And I think the dilemma of the Trump conservative is the following. And that is that for a whole generation, conservatives and Republicans have by and large been the party of the nice guys. They’ve been the party of, if you do it to us, we won’t do it to you. Why? Because we’re better than you. So we stand on principle.

And so if you use the state to prosecute us when we come into power, we won’t use the state to prosecute you. If you try to stack the court and take its nine members to 12 so you get an immediate majority when we come in, we won’t do the same thing. So the left, I think took the lesson from that. These are the most wonderful type of opponents to have because we can go scorched earth on them and they are on principle unwilling to do the same.

So this is what distinguishes the Trumpster from the Reaganite. The Reaganite has that position of, quote, principle. And that’s why you see people like Adam Kinzinger and John Bolton and even Bill Kristol. They are right that in the old mode of thinking the conservative would abstain. Mike Pence comes out of that tradition and others.

But I think that the MAGA sensibility is we don’t have any alternative but to pay you back in your own coin, because that is our only form of true deterrence. We don’t want to censor your free speech, but the truth of it is if you shut us down, we are going to teach you what it feels like to be silenced and then you’re going to be less likely to do that the next time you’re in power, which obviously will happen at some point.

The Question of Mutual Radicalization

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, forgetting the morality of that approach, because that’s something we can definitely debate, do you actually think this is an effective strategy? You say it’s deterrence. I don’t see deterrence at the moment. What I see is mutual radicalization. It’s like we told you, Trump was a fascist. Well, look at him behaving in a fascist way. So when we come in, we have to shut these guys down even harder.

Because otherwise both sides will say we’re losing America. And both sides, if you’re a neutral observer. I’m not saying there’s an exact equivalence because, you know, cards on the table, I was relieved when President Trump was elected last year and we said this on the show. Right. But nonetheless, if you forget about President Trump and the people at the top, if you look more broadly, the language is very similar. If the other side get in, we lose our country.

And that’s why we’ve got to go harder and everyone’s going harder. And I don’t see anyone calling for self restraint, which I take a point. It doesn’t work. If you just take the punches lying down, you never fight back. That doesn’t work. But do you think this is going to work?

Politics as Warfare

DINESH D’SOUZA: Yes. Here’s why I agree with you that there is now a political atmosphere that does not resemble democratic politics as much as it resembles warfare.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yes.

DINESH D’SOUZA: Right. Because in warfare, the basic assumption is you have to take the other guy down, you have to put him flat on his back, and then the war is over and then he surrenders and you make the new rules under which you go forward. That was obviously what happened, say under the Civil War.

Now, if you look at American history, at the very beginning, there was a lot of religious persecution going on. There’s a certain mythology about the Pilgrims that they came for religious freedom. I mean, they came for their religious freedom, but they were perfectly happy to establish a very regimented system. And they weren’t the only ones. So you had established churches.

Now what was really going on was everybody was persecuting the dissidents within their area of control. So in some ways you can see the resemblance to the atmosphere of what’s going on now. We’re in the right, our opponents are wrong, we have to squash them.

But what happened out of that is people then realized that this is actually a very awkward way to operate because if I move from, let’s say, Boston to Maryland, well, the Catholics are in charge over there, or if I move to Connecticut, it’s going to be the Episcopalians or the Congregationalists are in charge. Things aren’t going to be so pleasant for me.

So one way to understand our Bill of Rights is not as articles of faith, but as articles of peace. People over time realize that this mutual recrimination is actually a very painful way to live. All right, let’s make a truce. You agree not to persecute me, I agree not to persecute you. Let’s write it down. Right. So that’s how we get religious liberty. Not out of some philosophical reflection on the importance of liberty, but rather out of a kind of bitter tussle in which the religious liberty emerges as the only modus, the only viable solution for living together.

A Painful Period Ahead

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So that sounds to me, correct me if this is wrong, but I’m just trying to pass what you’re saying in my head that this, there will be a very painful period for America coming. Now, we’re in it already, but it’s going to get more painful before it gets better. Right. Because you, I mean, you’re already shooting each other. You know, that’s what’s happening.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I mean, I think it’s fair to say that most recently most of the high profile incidents are left on right. But is it going to stay that way? You know, I don’t know.

The Philosophy of Political Violence

DINESH D’SOUZA: Right, exactly. There’s no way to predict that there is an easy stopping point for all this. Because now I would say that here is a key difference ideologically and that is that the right does not have a philosophy of assassination. The left does.

So the left’s philosophy of assassination is this. Our opponents are fascists. They are on the verge of establishing a tyrannical totalitarian regime. Think of the rhetoric just even of no kings. Right. So tyrannicide or overthrowing the king. And even the phrase by any means necessary kind of tells you that there’s no limit. Any means necessary means any means necessary.

So arguably, let’s say the Charlie Kirk shooter goes, I am merely drawing the logical implications out of this philosophy, which is the mainstream point of view on the left. Now, you can’t find an equivalent philosophy on the right that would justify doing something. I agree that it’s possible that we would see political violence from the right end also.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And we have seen. Right.

DINESH D’SOUZA: And we have seen some of it, but it’s not, it doesn’t have this legitimation. Right?

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah, for the moment.

DINESH D’SOUZA: For the moment.

FRANCIS FOSTER: But the problem is the more you do tit for tat reactions, what inevitably happens is it becomes escalatory and then before you know it, there’s going to be political assassinations on both sides.

DINESH D’SOUZA: Yeah. Now in fairness, I think that the mainstream MAGA and conservative position in America now is not tit for tat. In other words, it’s not. The Democrats have, you know, pallets of bricks to throw at cars and citizens. So let’s go get our own pallets and bricks. Let’s find our own George Soros.

But the view of the right is if you have these pernicious actions and even pernicious lies in some cases, in some cases, pernicious schemes to frame people, it’s really important to punish that, hold it accountable. And so, for example, you know, Bill Barr went before Congress, this was obviously some years ago, and they said, you know, you are going after leading Democrats. You are going after the Democrats. You’re making your office a political prosecution.

And Bill Barr goes, name a single Democrat that I’ve indicted. And you couldn’t name one because there wasn’t one. Right. But after this long procession of indictments, not just of Trump, we’re talking about people, ordinary people, pro lifers with rosaries, you know, 70 years old, getting long prison terms. The right has been a little radicalized.

And you can see why, because you’ve gone. You’re going after ordinary citizens. It’s not just. You’re not just going after people. And even going after me, I mean, I have the means to fight back. I have a top defense attorney. You know, I spent half a million dollars defending myself.

But some January 6th guy who walked in the Capitol for 10 minutes because he was carried by the crowd, you know, this guy’s life is completely ruined to now to the state, even after a pardon.

FRANCIS FOSTER: So.

DINESH D’SOUZA: So who’s going to pay for all that? I mean, I’m very. I feel keenly the desire to have maximum accountability here. Not, not necessarily recrimination, but to the degree that there’s abuse of power, the abusers need to be locked up.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Fair. The thing that concerns me, Dinesh, is, look, everybody sitting around this table is, to a greater or lesser extent, a political animal. We chose to get involved in this. And when people say things about us or misrepresent us or criticize us in a manner that is deeply unfair, there’s a part of you that understands it, because that’s the nature of the game.

Politics has always been a dirty business from day one. Who I worry about in all of this are the soccer moms, Dinesh, the people who see the cohesion within their society, cultural, political, start to degrade. And it affects ordinary people who are not political, but who are the very backbone of America.

The Impact on Ordinary Americans

DINESH D’SOUZA: I agree. Although I don’t think that the main problem that those people face is so much, let’s say, political acrimony or political violence. I think it is the actual economic and cultural dislocation of the society. So in other words, sound policies, good ideas, getting economic growth churning again, getting an educational system that actually teaches you stuff.

I mean, I’m so. To me, going to Dartmouth was such a transformative experience. You know, it was tennis courts as far as the eye can see. It was libraries with like coffee and donuts, open all night. It was old books. You know, it was so to me, it was an opening of the mind that I’ve never forgotten.

And I’m one of the few people who got a liberal arts education and made a career completely based on that. Most Dartmouth guys, they read Plato and they read Dante and then they go to work on Wall Street. They don’t read a book or they read very little, since Dartmouth is more of a way station to a job as a lawyer or as a banker.

But for me, I’ve tried to retain that sense of wonder that I had as a teenager when I set foot on the Dartmouth campus. And yet I look at it now and I’m like, that experience that I had, I don’t think is available anymore.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, it’s not.

DINESH D’SOUZA: It’s really a tragedy.

Assessing Trump’s Second Term

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And a lot of kids are opting out because they know they’re not going to get it. So as someone who broke, perhaps with your former colleagues and became a big supporter of President Trump, how do you assess the first year of his presidency?

DINESH D’SOUZA: You mean this new term? Yes. Yeah. So Trump 2 is quite different than Trump 1 and in fact reflects exactly the shift that we’ve been talking about. Trump one was basically the real estate guy comes to Washington, he essentially says, I am the new CEO of America and I’m going to get things to really work in a way that they haven’t before, because politicians have been running the show.

And he goes, I need some people to do what I want. So generals are reputed to be people who take orders, tell them what to do, they get it done. Okay, here’s John Kelly. He’s my chief of staff. He’ll get it done. Trump realizes soon enough that all the kind of affable political appointees who have come up through the system are extremely self serving and treacherous.

And they recognize that there are huge cultural prizes to be had by turning on Trump and stabbing him in the back and leaking to the media. And so Trump suddenly realizes that his first term, I mean, it’s remarkable that he got some good things done in that term because essentially he was sort of like Caesar surrounded by Cassiuses and Brutuses all around.

But I think he figured that out. He realized that not only is there a very powerful cultural left and Democratic establishment against him, but there’s a whole Republican establishment that would not be unhappy to see his carcass dragged out of the Roman Senate. To continue with the Caesar analogy.

So what happened is Trump weathered the storm of all the 90 plus charges and the attempts to lock him up and the two assassination attempts. Then I think he realized, all right, well, I am now in a completely different situation. If you’ve seen Mel Gibson’s movie “The Patriot,” you know, in the beginning of it, Mel Gibson is like a normal guy. He’s a farmer. He doesn’t really want to get involved. He’s mainly concerned with his crops.

But once you’re subjected to a certain level of humiliation and abuse and degradation, you’re like, that’s it. That’s Trump. So I think we now have a scorched earth president who just sort of doesn’t care. And as a result, you’re seeing an aggression that you never saw in the first term. But I would argue it is a justified aggression.

I mean, on a personal level, I completely understand how Trump is that way. That is the normal way to be. There was that moment at Charlie Kirk’s funeral. I was right up there with my wife in the front and, you know, Erica Kirk made this sort of marvelous profession of, you know, of agape Christian love. I forgive the man who killed my husband. That is a sort of a beautiful expression on the individual level.

But Trump comes right back and you could tell he had been wrestling with that because he then blurts out, well, I don’t wish my enemies, you know, the best, I wish him the worst. That’s the more natural response. And I think that reflects, call it, you know, Old Testament morality, if you want to call it that, versus, you know, the Erica Kirk approach.

So how’s Trump doing? Well, I mean, to me, the tariffs are rocky waters. I’m unsure about them. As a long, lifelong free market guy, I have all kinds of anxiety about them. I do recognize that our old trade policies have caused a lot of problems and have caused a lot of problems for a particular large group of working class people in this country.

And I do think something needs to be done to address that group. Many other groups, including my group, has benefited enormously from globalization, from free trade, from the policies of the last 30 years. But I’ve seen other people whose lives are very dislocated, whole communities wiped out. Trump knows that.

So I do commend him for trying to do something about it. And what he’s trying to do is really turn a lot of economic wisdom on its head. Will it work? I don’t know. A lot of other things that Trump is doing I think are fabulous. And so in general, I’m very happy with Trump. You know, I would give him an A minus so far. And he’s only just getting started.

Manufacturing and National Security

FRANCIS FOSTER: And it’s also as well, I think part of the reason that he wants to move the manufacturing base to the United States is because a lot of the blue collar guys and girls who voted for him, that was a core of the voter base. But I also think he’s very aware of the rising danger of China.

DINESH D’SOUZA: Yes. And I also think that his motive isn’t just the voter base. I think what he’s realized is that a lot of the social values of a society are based upon having a steady job. Right. So let’s say, for example, you can achieve on the, on the balance, great economic efficiency by wiping out a steel town and sending over those jobs, let’s just say hypothetically, for half the price to Indonesia or to China.

So on the balance sheet, you’re doing great. You are actually following free market ideology. You’re going, you’re making the product where it can be made most cheaply. And I come out of a whole economic tradition that goes. That’s right. That’s what you want to do. You don’t want to pay farmers when you don’t need farmers and technology can produce the crops. If you can have the steel made more cheaply over there, let’s do it.

But then what you end up with is you have a whole town of people sitting on the sidewalk, you know, and fentanyl is a big problem over there and their kids are dislocated and the civic structure has all broken down. There are small businesses that supported, you know, the bowling alley and the little league have closed down. So you now have a, you just have debris.

And so, so bringing those jobs back is part of that cultural restoration, no less than the economic, to say nothing.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Of the fact that when Covid happens, you can’t import drugs from China because, or masks or whatever, because they hold onto them. Because when push comes to shove, countries believe in the national interest. And we have a situation in Britain where we don’t make our own steel anymore. Now, how are you going to fight a war, if you can’t produce the very basics that you need to manufacture.

FRANCIS FOSTER: We have net zero.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: This is brilliant.

DINESH D’SOUZA: I mean, exactly how this was allowed to happen even in critical industries, is a little unbelievable.

The Transformation of American Universities

DINESH D’SOUZA: The same thing is true in so many other sectors of life. When I look at the universities, I say to myself, now, when I was a student, we had two groups of people running the university. And I’m sure this was just as true at Oxford. You had an older generation that I would describe as classically liberal. They were not on the right, they were actually on the left. But they did believe in free speech and they did believe in debate and they believed in academic standards.

And if you were to tell them something like, you know, we’re not going to be teaching Plato’s Republic, they would have no tolerance for this kind of thinking because they believe that there are great books and people should read them and people should spend a lot of time immersed in this kind of stuff.

But there was a younger generation of out of the sixties and seventies, and you could tell that you could. Those people even dressed differently. They were more bohemian in style, they were much more casual in their rhetoric. They didn’t typically wear a jacket. And I saw to myself, I said, you know, if you were to remove the older generation and just move these guys into full control, this campus would look totally different.

That’s exactly what happened. The older generation retired, was phased out. The younger generation insisted on ideological homogeneity. So it replicated itself, and it produced really something more resembling an indoctrination factory than a real debate.

Now, when I was at Dartmouth, the college was left wing, but there were probably two dozen conservatives on the faculty, including five or six outspoken ones I could name. Conservatives at Harvard, Yale, Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, the law professor at Yale. And so the conservative students had mentors to gravitate to.

But all of that was wiped out in the early part of this century. And so suddenly, the conservative became a complete pariah. If you want to know, like, what was Charlie Kirk’s accomplishment? I think what it was most of all was not his brilliant oratory or his knowledge of issues. It was really the fact that you had conservatives beaten down and humiliated, treated as a sort of public enemy number one.

And then along comes an organization that basically says, you can be with like minded people, you can hear ideas from intelligent people. Your point of view is not crazy. And they were like, oh, my gosh, this is almost like a sanctuary, a refuge. And that was what Turning Point provided and still does.

Trump and the Deficit Challenge

FRANCIS FOSTER: And just to go back to economics, because I’m glad we’re talking about this, I think one of the genuine criticisms you can make against Trump is his unwillingness to deal with the deficit, which is one of the things Elon got so frustrated with.

DINESH D’SOUZA: Now, this is a problem that we’ve been dealing with since the Reagan years. Reagan could not cut the government either, even though his ideology was completely about cutting the government. Reagan came to office on slogans like, government is not the solution, Government is the problem.

But I will tell you as an insider, one of the things we realized. It is what economists call the public choice dilemma, which is just a kind of an esoteric phrase, but it means something really simple. If you take a government program that costs, let’s say, $10 million, and let’s say you take the $10 million and you give it to one group. I’m going to call it Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood now will hire 10 lobbyists to protect that program.

Let’s say that the money for this program comes from 10 million Americans who have all contributed $1. So the truth of it is, there is a much larger constituency for, let’s say the program’s not working. You want to stop it. The problem is this. Planned Parenthood applies concentrated lobbying pressure on the Congress to preserve the program.

And then if we in the Reagan administration tried to mobilize the 10 million people who funded the program, each of them only gave a dollar, so we can’t even get them to make a phone call. So there is an inequality of pressure.

And so what we realized, which was somewhat devious, but nevertheless politically pragmatic, is that there is no way to cut the program. The only thing you can do is take the money from Planned Parenthood and give it to a pregnancy center. Why? Because now you have created a new constituency on your side, so that, in effect, are you cutting the deficit? No, you are merely moving the money around. You are merely moving the money from their gang to your gang.

And so at the end of the Reagan years, and there were massive successes of Reagan. The Berlin Wall comes down, Soviet Union collapses. Reagan restores American patriotism and pride. I’ve written a book on Reagan. But nevertheless, on this count, you’d have to say that the Reagan project was a failure. Reagan was unable to cut the size of the government at all.

Trump comes in, I think, and he knows this dynamic. He recognizes intuitively that what you have is a structure of democratic government where you have these imploring constituencies. They have unfortunately become habituated to getting benefits. The benefits are extracted through taxation from unwilling taxpayers, but they are also funded by printing money through the Fed.

So Trump is like, I don’t think he knows how to tackle that monster, and I don’t either. So I don’t blame him for not cutting the deficit, the simple or the debt. His only solution, which would be my solution as well, is, listen, if you can make the economy, instead of growing at 2 or 3%, grow at 5 or 6%, that will actually make a serious dent in the problem.

So I think Trump is betting, look, I would rather put my energy in lubricating the economy. I’m going to get, you know, the United States has giant deposits of natural gas that we are on. The world is on a technological frontier. If we can open up those kinds of things, it changes the rules of the game.

And so I think Trump is betting correctly, rather than essentially saying, look, the two big spending items in the government are entitlements, Social Security and Medicare. Republicans, at least in the past, have discovered that going after those two things is really a good way of getting booted right out of power.

The Assassination of Charlie Kirk and Its Aftermath

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, Dinesh, you mentioned Charlie Kirk a number of times. And it was obviously, you know, it was a horrific moment for this country and for America, but actually, just globally, I thought it was just a horrific moment for the world. And seeing that happen to a father of two young children simply being killed because of his political views, that was absolutely shocking.

And because of how shocking it was, there was a naive part of me that thought that this might be a reset opportunity for everybody. And I thought maybe the left will go, oh, no, we can’t, we can’t. There are some Nazis and they have to be called out. But we can’t call center right people Nazis. We can’t throw around labels like fascists.

Because I’ve said it on this show a number of times. We said it on Joe Rogan yesterday. If you keep calling someone, if I thought the Nazis were here to invade, I’d pick up a rifle and go to the front line. So when you call someone a Nazi, you are literally putting a target on their back.

And I also thought it might be a moment in which the right might reconnect around its core values and core ideas and go, you know, we need to get together and challenge all of this. Well, what’s happened is the exact opposite. You know, the left is doubling down.

DINESH D’SOUZA: On all this stuff.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And on the right you now have these very fringe voices who are saying, you know, foreign country assassinated Charlie Kirk and making up stuff about planes that left before the assassination that proved that all of this crazy stuff. You’ve been quite outspoken about all of that. Talk to us about this whole thing.

The Dangerous Alliance and Conspiracy Theories

DINESH D’SOUZA: Yeah, I think that, look how strange it is. You have. You had a militarization around antifa which became publicly evident over the George Floyd riots. That’s the antifa element. There’s the BLM element, which has somewhat subsided. But what has taken its place is these violent trans rings. I’m not talking about people who are trans. I’m talking about people who think that the society is out to get them. And so they go to training camps and they talk about doing martial arts or shooting people or fighting with weapons.

Now, again, I don’t think there’s a lot of reasoning to be done with those people. If you look at the Portland rioters, if you look at these antifa militants and if you look at these trans terrorists, it’s really important to sort of get to the bottom of it, excavate exactly what happened.

So there were some reports after Charlie Kirk’s assassination that there was prior knowledge of what was going to happen, that there were people in chats talking about, hey, something really big is going to happen. Not just big happen, it’s going to happen to Charlie Kirk tomorrow at so and so location. Well, I mean, this would suggest, if not a conspiracy, at least prior knowledge, people who knew that he was going to be shot.

Just when the FBI, the authorities are sort of moving to crack down on all this, along from the right comes Candace Owens with this sort of idea that, hey, let’s take a look at these photos. I see a pipe. I wonder if a Mossad agent might have crawled through the pipe. I mean, stuff that is just absolutely crazy.

Now, again, if she were to produce some substantial evidence, a single reliable fact that, let’s just say, contravenes the government’s theory, and she says it couldn’t have been that, because take a look at this. But the investigative style, although I admit it’s from a certain point of view, it’s irresistible to watch because it is, it’s like listening to a well trained philosopher who has completely lost his mind and is now in an asylum and is giving you crazy discourse.

But it’s crazy discourse that is embedded with witticisms and all kinds of. And you’re like, you can’t turn away from it. From a certain point, Candace is actually quite magnetic in the way she presents information. And she has a style. It’s an intellectual striptease because she never puts her cards out and goes, here’s what I got. She goes, okay, well, I got something. Let me show you something. You know, more to come tomorrow and more to come the day after that. It’s a little deranged, but there’s something magnetic about it.

But look at the political effect and how pernicious it is. It’s taking attention away from the actual, not just the bad guy, but these ideological bad actors that are embedded in our society. And it’s basically telling everybody, look over here, it’s the Jews or it’s Israel or it’s Mossad.

Now you’d have to ask yourself, well, why would someone do that? Or to look more broadly, pick the phenomenon. Now go beyond Candace and take the larger phenomenon. You’ve got a strange but pernicious alliance between the cultural left in the west and radical Islam.

I actually wrote about this in a book that I published around 2006. It was called “The Enemy at Home.” I was reacting to Samuel Huntington’s idea that there’s a clash of civilizations between us, the west and them, meaning the House of Islam. And my argument was not exactly. There’s a division inside the west and there’s also a division inside of Islam.

And I said, not only that, but the cultural left is going to become strange bedfellows with the radical Muslims. This seems fantastic because the two groups have utterly different end goals, and they cannot inhabit each other’s world. And not only that, but if they were in full control, they would come to blows. But they are united against a common enemy.

And who is the common enemy? Well, it’s the Jews and Israel on the one hand, and it’s America and the principles of the west on the other. So it would seem natural, unavoidable, that Jews and Christians, America and Israel should come closer together in recognition of this obvious, nefarious alliance. You know, let’s call it I filmed the Dragons. This is like the devil’s platoons.

All right, well, the good people need to come together. So I can understand why the left is doing what it does because it is in an ideological war against the Jews and Israel, no less than against Christians on the West. What I don’t understand is this movement on the right that is attempting to sever our connection with Israel.

And I think in the process, undermining Trump, undermining MAGA, undermining America’s national interests, undermining the foundations of the west, which are Athens and Jerusalem. But on top of all of that, strengthening radical Islam and strengthening the cultural left.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Hang on, but you say you don’t understand. Let me push back on that. I think it’s relatively simple to understand, Dinesh.

DINESH D’SOUZA: How so?

FRANCIS FOSTER: If you go along this way of the left have done this, they’ve done all these egregious things, these tactics to silence and destroy, to play identity politics, to say if you’re white and male, you’re bottom of the oppression pyramid, which means you get far less likely to get a job, far less likely to progress. It becomes socially acceptable, let’s be honest, to demonize you, particularly if you’re blue collar and white and male, you automatically become thick, stupid and racist. Then why wouldn’t you start to tribalize? Why wouldn’t you become conspiratorial? Why wouldn’t you go out and attack the people that you think have done you wrong?

DINESH D’SOUZA: Absolutely right. So I do not blame the fractured, dislocated, angry young people who are responding in just the way that you say. I know why they’re doing that. But I do blame the pied pipers who are leading them to the precipice, who should know better.

The Rise of Victimhood Politics on the Right

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Let me try a few other theories on you, because I don’t think the explanation Francis gives us is fully here. Because what it doesn’t really explain is why there are certain people now absolutely obsessed with the Jews. Why are they obsessed with Israel? Because it’s not Israel or the Jews that caused the cultural disintegration that you’re talking about. They didn’t take over college campuses 40 years ago and introduced all this anti-Western crap.

I think there’s a few things going on that I think are contributing as well. One of them is I wrote an article when Tucker Carlson went to Russia and interviewed President Putin, which was called Tucker Carlson and the Woke, in which I basically said that there are these sections on the right that have become very focused on victimhood and are replicating some of the things we saw on the left in doing so.

And when you’re focused on victimhood, you have to find someone who’s victimizing you. And at that point, Jews in Israel were not the thing. And I said, you know, for now, the label is globalists. And those sections of the right keep talking about globalists. But a globalist isn’t something that you can visualize. No one has, like when I say globalist, you don’t, a picture of a person doesn’t come into your head. So they were looking for somebody to be the scapegoat. The explanation that explains everything, like the left explanation of, well, everything is because of white supremacy, everything is because of institutional racism, everything is because of straight white men. Think that’s one thing.

The other thing is, once President Trump gets elected for a second term in the overwhelming fashion in which that happens, what does the media do? Whose entire new media, in particular whose entire identity became, you know, it was the anti-woke coalition of which Trigonometry was 100% a part of. But once that collapses, like, we don’t really talk about wokeness very much anymore on the show because it’s kind of, I mean, I think it’s overstating the case to say it’s over. But it’s not the live issue right now.

DINESH D’SOUZA: Right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: We don’t talk about trans issues, which we used to talk about, because it’s not the live issue right now. So if you are in a right of center media, personal channel organization, you can either keep beating, you know, you know that meme of stop, stop, he’s already dead. That’s not going to get you any views because beating up on the Democrats, I mean, don’t even know where they are anymore. So you have to go. The incentive structure is to go in a more conspiratorial out direction. Those are my two other bits that I put to you.

The Loss of Conservative Intellectual Gatekeepers

DINESH D’SOUZA: Yeah, I have a bunch of little things to add to that. So the first one is that in the Reagan era in conservatism, there was a certain, I would call it the intellectual guardians of the tribe. People like William F. Buckley, Reagan to a certain degree. But there were others. Irving Kristol. And the idea here was that if you came in with the poison of anti-Semitism, blatant racism, you know, criticism of affirmative action, yes. Calling blacks monkeys, no.

So if you did that, you were basically asked to leave the room and you were abolished from the, you wouldn’t be invited to conservative conferences, you certainly wouldn’t be a speaker. It would basically be the end of you as a public figure. So that’s gone. And it’s gone. Why? Partly because we don’t have a conservative intellectual class that performs that task.

And why don’t we have that? Well, partly because the mainstream of that class went never Trump. And so when I look around for, like, if I were to make a list of, let’s say, 30 of my colleagues from the Reagan days, I would say that probably about 25 of them went anti-Trump and they went to anti-Trump in different places. John Bolton is a little different place than, say, Bill Kristol. But nevertheless, they’re by and large excluded from MAGA.

And what happened is partly as a result of a cultural shift, MAGA produces a new type of pundit who is not, I mean, think of the distance between, say, Irving Kristol and Tucker Carlson. Tucker doesn’t even purport to be knowledgeable about anything. So as a result, what Tucker says is, I will develop a ventriloquist style. I have strong opinions, but I don’t want to defend any of them.

So I will set up a structure in which I bring in sources, often rather dubious sources, people you’ve never heard of, you know, the nun with the mustache, some disgraced academic. And what I’ll do is I will ask sort of leading questions that, in which is embedded an answer, my answer, but framed as a question. You then will blurt out the obvious implications of the question, giving me the answer I expected, but I will pretend to be thunderstruck by it. It’s an epiphany. It’s a new revelation. People have been suppressing this kind of thinking for decades.

So this is a shtick. It’s a different shtick than Candace. Candace’s shtick is the Candace Intelligence Agency. I’m like the world’s greatest detective. You know, I’m the Pink Panther of my time. I’m deputizing all my viewers also to be detectives. Feed me information. We’re going to crack the case.

FRANCIS FOSTER: There’s a…

DINESH D’SOUZA: So to me, this is like an intellectual embarrassment, because all my life I’ve been an iconoclast. I will take on ideas and I will try to dismantle them, but not in this way. My ideas are things like this. The, you know, the Dixiecrats all became Republicans. And my strategy of challenging that is I go make an inventory of the 200 Dixiecrats. I put them up on a movie screen, and I say, all right, I’m now going to show you through a movement of the mouse, which of these 200 Dixiecrats became Republicans? Answer: 2.

So did the Dixiecrats as a group become Republicans? No. There’s the empirical evidence right there on the screen. You can check it out, know for yourself. So when I see this almost parody of investigation, parody of scholarship, it’s very unnerving.

Now for young people, just as you said, there is a susceptibility to all this. And also, there’s no easy check on it. Like, for example, right now I’m in these big debates about Christian theology, but I’m debating Christian theology with people who have listened to two podcasts. I’ve written three books on Christian apologetics. I’ve thought about this stuff for 30 years. But it’s difficult to address people who say things like, Dinesh, open a Bible once in a while. You might learn something. I’m like, are you serious?

So, but our culture has had that leveling effect. This guy who’s watched two podcasts is on an even playing field with me 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 AI. So there was a filtering structure that is now gone.

The Death of Debate Culture

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And look, there’s good things about that. Well, that’s right, I was going to say that. And I know you’ve tried to debate Tuck 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. But now I think the economic incentives aren’t that you don’t need to do that. Like if you’re Candace, you just do your show and you make millions of dollars talking about how someone used to call your friend denigrating his legacy, in my opinion, and all of that. But you don’t need to go and engage in a debate. There’s nothing to gain, really.

DINESH D’SOUZA: Right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And so everything gets siloed.

DINESH D’SOUZA: Right. So if you look back, like, what was the motivation for Hitchens and me to debate? 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. I turn on the TV and I see Hitchens and he’s debating a pastor. And Hitchens is making witty Oxford Union jibes at this guy. And this guy doesn’t even know that he’s being struck with these rapier thrusts because the pastor comes at a divinity school. You know, he accepts the authority of the Bible. His argument is the Bible and Hitchens is speaking a secular language.

So I’m like, this is a disgrace. 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. And so, and Hitchens is like, well, that’s great. I’m up for it. So we’re both up for it. And that’s our motive. Our motive is that deep down we actually do believe in the power of ideas. 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.

But you’re right, like these days, if you say, hey, Megyn Kelly, hey Patrick Bet-David, why don’t you invite Tucker and me to have this out? We’ll do it in a very civil way, but we’ll get to the bottom of it. Even they become very skittish because everybody, it seems to me, at least, is being strategic about how they approach all of this. In other words, what’s in it for me? How is this, how am I going to be positioned to be, as opposed to saying, hey, this would be great. Wouldn’t people love to sort of eavesdrop in on all this? And now it can be done so easily online.

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. Well, give you a small example, 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. I’m alpha male. He’s like, Ben Shapiro is scared of me. He’s like, Charlie Kirk scared of me. Everyone’s scared of him.

So I’m like, I’m not scared of you. So I did this debate. It went very well. In fact, a lot of his young listeners were like, who is this guy? And like, Nick is not doing as well as we had hoped, and so on all this stuff. But my point is, as soon as I did that, I got a text from Charlie Kirk. Dinesh, why? Why? Why? The basic idea was you should not debate, and you certainly shouldn’t debate Nick Fuentes, and you shouldn’t give him any platforming or any recognition.

So, again, Charlie was approaching it strategically, like, I’m the head of an organization, a youth organization. I don’t want Nick Fuentes to be sort of poaching on the. So this is the prevailing mentality among the new punditocracy.

FRANCIS FOSTER: And it’s also what I find incredibly frustrating, Dinesh, as someone who comes from the left. I see part of the problem of the left was a cowardice, if I’m being brutally honest, that people on the left saw these radicals start to propagate these, quite frankly, nonsensical, ridiculously toxic ideas which would alienate huge swathes of the population. Yet people were so scared of them and were so terrified of being exiled from the group that they didn’t challenge them. And now I see people on the right doing the exact same thing. I’m not going to name names, but we all know who these people are, and we’re just going, right? So if that doesn’t happen, then the exact same thing is going to happen as what happened to the left.

The Cost of Speaking Out

DINESH D’SOUZA: Absolutely correct. I mean, Tucker and Candace jumped into this arena with such a splash that all the conservative pundits were like, “I don’t want to take that on because Candace is extremely vindictive. Tucker has a huge following. This will immediately put me on the wrong side with a lot of my own followers. I might lose followers.”

And as soon as I stepped into this arena, I basically started getting messages to that effect. “Well, Dinesh, you make movies for the mainstream of the right of center audience. You know, you realize there are a lot of young people who might start hating you or start calling you names,” which, by the way, has happened.

But it’s just foreign to my own mentality. I don’t even think like that. Even when I make films, I never say… I mean, I do make films by saying, “Is this a pressing topic? Is this an interesting path to go down?” But I’m very supply side.

I say to myself, when I came up with the idea of my film on Obama, for example, the prevailing view was that Obama was a civil rights guy, kind of the modern reincarnation of Martin Luther King. I come along, I go, “No, I think Obama, his spirit, not his birthplace or anything, but his spirit is third world. It’s anti-colonial. It comes out of the hot winds of anti-colonialism in Kenya.” I mean, he has his own autobiography, “Dreams from My Father.” It’s all in there.

And so I go, “I’m going to make a film about how Obama’s real ideology is a third world anti-colonialism.” Now, as soon as I said that, people were like, “Dinesh, are you insane? Are you going to make a movie on a topic so obscure as anti-colonialism? Nobody knows what that is. Not only that, they think it’s good because America was a colony of the British.”

So people tried to deter me on the grounds that this movie is not going to succeed. I paid no attention to it. I make the movie. It’s the second most successful movie ever made, a political documentary, after Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

FRANCIS FOSTER: So…

DINESH D’SOUZA: So I’ve learned from my own experience to find things that are interesting and important and just say them. Just go for it. And that’s my approach right now. And it’s maybe naive in a more strategic era, but it stood me pretty well.

And every time I do this stuff, people like Charlie Sykes, who’s now, I think he’s with the Bulwark, he’s a never Trumper, and he’ll be like, “This is a career ending move by Dinesh.” I’m like, my career has been ending since 1992. So I just don’t worry about it.

The Podcast Charts and Political Discourse

FRANCIS FOSTER: Because when you were looking at the podcast charts, I think it was Konstantin who pointed it out to me, like, number one and number two on the conservative podcast charts is Tucker and it’s Candace. And that is a pretty damning indictment on conservative political thought, isn’t it?

DINESH D’SOUZA: Well, what it shows, I think, is that the type of people who listen to podcasts and the type of people, for example, you find on X are drawn to this kind of… it’s a certain type of political porn, isn’t it?

I mean, it’s these… Candace puts out a salacious, incendiary allegation. It doesn’t hold up, and over time it becomes obvious that it’s stupid. But she then replaces it with another one. And it’s a never ending playing of these kind of nude cards, so to speak, on the table.

And apparently there’s a virtually endless fascination for them because it’s a new card. It’s not, “Okay, we’ve replayed the Brigitte Macron card. Now we’re onto the who killed Charlie Kirk card.” And tomorrow it’ll be something else.

Now, when people said to me, “Well, Dinesh, but didn’t you speak at Blexit? Didn’t you and Tucker tour Australia last year?” Which we did. I say to myself, look, my admiration for Candace and Tucker was developed on a completely different basis.

Candace had stepped forward as a young black woman taking on affirmative action, taking on DEI, basically speaking to young blacks about leaving the plantation, to use her own rhetoric. And I’m like, that’s fantastic. That needs to be done. She’s very good at it, very good at it. And no one else is doing it. And she is the perfect messenger. And so my admiration for Candace was based on that.

Tucker, you know, he was really good in Covid. He was really good on Fox, his very memorable and kind of witty monologues. He showed a lot of bravery, I think, in the way he handled the break with Fox.

But what’s happened is that, you know, it’s… I don’t mean to make light of it, but essentially you could say that Candace and Tucker have gone trans on us. They have transitioned into something completely different. 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. And I’m like, okay, I’m not going to get on this bandwagon. I admired you for other reasons, but you apparently have become a different person.

The Problem with Modern Discourse

KONSTANTIN KISIN: 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, but more generally, is you can no longer disagree with people’s arguments or behavior without being accused of being a hater or having some personal animus towards them.

For example, when I wrote that article about Tucker Carlson and woke right, I made very specific points about ideology and worldview. I never made any personal comments about him or anything like that. I’ve been on his… I was on his Fox show a number of times and I thought, you know, during the summer of BLM, he was the funniest comedian on TV. He was brilliant.

But the difference now, to me, it feels like, is if I say “Dinesh D’Souza is, you know, I respect him for his work on this, but I don’t agree with that,” I’m a Dinesh D’Souza hater and I have to be called out. And it’s… this is no way to discuss ideas. This is some sort of… this is another game.

The Tucker Exchange

DINESH D’SOUZA: It is. I mean, I play by the old rules. So what happened was Tucker had posed a question to Ted Cruz, namely, “Are the Jews of today the descendants of the Jews of the Bible?” Interesting question. The film, by the way, tackles some of this.

But I decided I’m going to do a one on one with Netanyahu. And since Tucker specifically mentioned Netanyahu as Jews, I’m like, all right, I’m going to put it to Netanyahu. Perfectly legitimate thing to do. Netanyahu does an elegant sort of dunk on Tucker.

And I’m about to post a clip on social media of Netanyahu’s comment. So I think as a courtesy, I’m going to send it to Tucker because I don’t want him to feel ambushed. It’s his question. I’m pointing it to the Israeli Prime Minister.

I texted Tucker. Tucker sends me back an extremely annoyed text, basically accusing me of suggesting he’s an anti-Semite. I go, “Tucker, I never said you’re an anti-Semite. I’m very careful about making that kind of allegation.”

To me, an anti-Semite is somebody who holds the Jews and only the Jews to a standard that they won’t apply to anyone else. And if you do that consistently and systematically, then your motives are rightly suspect. But I didn’t even say any of this. This is more the criterion spelled out in the film. But I just said, “I’m not doing that, Tucker.”

And then he sends me some genetic study showing that the Jews of today are only 67% connected to the Jews of the Bible. And again, I’m thinking, first of all, would you do this with any other group?

I mean, would you consider, for example, saying that blacks don’t really come from Africa because let’s do a genetic test on Whitney Houston, say, see what a percentage of black is and non-black. I mean, if you did it with any other group, there would be immediate outrage. And Tucker knows this.

I mean, again, we’re not talking about some goofball on social media. We’re talking about a smart guy who’s been around. I’ve known Tucker for probably 25 years. So this is a savvy guy. He does know what he’s doing. And this is a little bit of why I hold him to a higher standard, is because I think he does know better.

But he becomes very annoyed because I challenge this mode of sort of, you could call it, genetic verification. I say, “Listen, 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.”

If you look at, say, you know, Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice,” the Jews don’t intermarry. Shylock doesn’t even want to go eat with the Christians. And when his daughter runs off with a Christian, he’s outraged. 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 and essentially recreated, at least to an observable degree, to me, the world of the Bible.

It’s observable. If you walk around Jerusalem, you feel like you’re in the land of the Bible. And then I also, of course, became very interested in the biblical archaeology and all of that that goes with it.

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. As far as I know, it’s never happened. Let’s do it on my show.”

But maybe, as you say, Tucker is like, “Why would I want to have an informed critic on my show that might show me up, that might show that I am actually far less of an authority and man in control or know what I’m talking about? I would much rather keep the structure I have, which is the ventriloquist structure of having essentially submissive guests who echo back to me what I want them to say, and I don’t want to really veer too far from that.”

Israel and Western Political Debate

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And your film is about October 7th and Israel. Why do you think there has been this level of focus on Israel in Western political debate?

DINESH D’SOUZA: I think for young people, the young people already think, or at least a lot of them do, that this group of insiders or elites has its own racket going and they care about everybody except me. I, the ordinary American. I, the working class guy. I’m like the very bottom of their list.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Is that unfair, though, Dinesh? Is that an unfair assessment of the situation? When you look at the Rust Belt, when you look at comments like the deplorables, etc. 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?

DINESH D’SOUZA: No, no, I’m actually stating it sympathetically. 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… it’s got the police state, you know, it’s got the cultural left, it’s got academia, Hollywood. But there is in fact a kind of super manipulator that is controlling all of these, and that’s Israel.”

Right? So it’s almost like Israel is being presented as the master key. 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. I think we can all agree that America’s interest should come first and that Netanyahu is a leader of a foreign country.” As if that’s just what we’ve been talking about.

In reality, I think the poison is not about that. It’s far worse. It’s essentially putting the Jews as the master manipulators of the entire elite structure. And a lot of young people buy into that.

The Reality of International Relations

KONSTANTIN KISIN: 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. You have to be very ignorant to think that in an alliance of the most powerful country in the world and a tiny country which is dependent on that country for its security, that relationship could be anything other than the powerful country getting its way 99% of the time.

If a 25 year old White House staffer comes over to Britain, 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. And it’s inevitably the same with any other country with which America is in a kind of relationship of some kind. America sets the terms, the other countries do what you want. So it’s a very strange trick that’s being played.

The Challenge of Willful Ignorance

DINESH D’SOUZA: That is part of it. 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. I’ll give you an example.

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. You’re trying to show that the Jews have this ancient ancestral presence going back 2,000, 3,000 years ago. He goes, so what? He goes, the American Indians were here first. Does this mean we got to turn over the whole country to them?

So I reply as follows. 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. First, you are the original inhabitant, and that’s one basis for making a claim. The second, some sort of negotiation or treaty, someone gave it to you as part of a deal that was made. And three, conquest. 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.

I go, in America, quite honestly, there’s a bit of a dispute because the Native Americans were here first, so they get original inhabitants, see? But the white man conquered it, so conquest goes to the white man. And so you could argue that there’s at least some sort of a disputed title.

Let’s apply this logic to Israel. Number one, the Jews were there first. They were the original inhabitants. Check. 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. Arabs, you can have this. The Arabs say no, but you have the check, the second box. A negotiation or treaty. And number three, the Jews have fought multiple wars, ’48, ’67, ’73, have held the land by conquest.

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 now. Again, if someone is ignorant, they could go, well, that makes sense to me. Or I can think of a fourth box. But what I find is that if you say this, which seems to me very straightforwardly convincing, you make no headway. The person who is ignorant doubles down, and then they will start saying things like, who paid you $7,000? Right. And so what does that tell you? That tells you that they want to be in that pit.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: There’s another agenda going on.

DINESH D’SOUZA: Yeah, there’s another agenda going on. They are emotionally committed to that ignorant position. They dig in.

The Ceasefire Silence

FRANCIS FOSTER: 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, we can all agree on that. 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.

DINESH D’SOUZA: That’s an exact continuation of the point I’m making, that they will state an objection. We’re concerned about the civilian losses of life. That stops. They go dead silent. 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. And remember, these are Palestinians. These are the very people that these groups on the left and on the right have professed to be motivated by.

Anna Kasparian is like, whenever she goes on, you know, on Piers Morgan, she’s inconsolable. She can’t stop herself out of professed concern for civilian life. And yet suddenly you find that she has nothing to say.

And this is, I think, the low deceitfulness of our age. 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. I’m going to admit it. What they do is they go back and they stealth edit it, right? And it’s as if to say, I never made the mistake. Go look right now. See, it’s all right. Or what they do is they go dead silent. They wait for the issue to pass so they can re-emerge sort of unchastened.

And again, this is just dishonest from the point of view of scholarship. Right? It’s kind of like, you published a paper, you made these claims, they’re actually false. It’s up to you to go, you know, I got it wrong. Here’s why I got it wrong. But I’m going to fix it, and I’m not going to make that mistake next. If you don’t do that, the dishonesty becomes habitual.

The Hamas Problem

FRANCIS FOSTER: And I’m glad that you used the word dishonesty, because when I look at the situation in Gaza dispassionately, there is no way forward for that situation to be solved until you get rid of Hamas. I think everybody can agree with that.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Most Middle Eastern countries agree.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah. Until you get rid of Hamas, there is simply no way you are going to have peace in that region. But how do you get rid of them? Because they’re not going to want to go off their own volition. They’re not going to go, you know what? Actually we still got 20,000 people. Whoever, how many soldiers we’ve got, we’re going to put down our weapons and we’re all going to become organic vegan farmers. That is simply not a reality. So I guess the question is, how do you solve a problem like Hamas?

DINESH D’SOUZA: Let’s fill out the problem a little bit more. Hamas does have a lot of civilian support and allies. Normal civilian families in Gaza have stashes of weapons. It’s not entirely a case, even though, even though I will say even, you know, Hamas has human shields. And the picture that gives you is the Hamas guy, like, grabbing these civilians and sticking them in front, you know, shoot, you know. But the truth of it is there are a lot of civilians, maybe because they’ve been propagandized over 20 years, they shelter Hamas. They are willing human shields.

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. But no, she means I am ready to give two more. I’m going to give them all. So there is a…

FRANCIS FOSTER: 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 are going to stand here in front of. What are you going to do? There’s nothing you can do.

DINESH D’SOUZA: I mean, look at how they’re punishing dissidents now in the street. 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. It’s one tool, right? So they have their own reasons for keeping this festering.

So even if Hamas decided to dismantle the global jihadi operation, which has much wider ambitions, right. They want to infiltrate Australia and Canada and Europe, the United States, and that doesn’t go away. So I’m very hopeful about what Trump has done, but I also very conscious of the magnitude of the task ahead.

Islamist Extremism in the West

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And you’ll be aware, as many Americans increasingly are, that Islamist extremism has become a very big problem, particularly in Europe. 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. What about America? Do you guys feel that that issue is under control here? Are you safe?

DINESH D’SOUZA: Absolutely not. I think that Europe is almost a case study of having largely succumbed to massive radical Islamic infiltration, taking over towns and suburbs. We’re seeing glimpses of that in the United States. 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. You’ll suddenly notice that you’ve got all these Islamists running for school board. You suddenly notice that they’re trying to create 100 Ilhan Omars.

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. It hasn’t come here yet to the extent of Europe, but is there any doubt that it’s going to?

Final Thoughts: The Red-Green Alliance

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Dinesh, great speaking with you. We’re going to head over to our substack where people can ask you their questions in a second. 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?

FRANCIS FOSTER: Before Dinesh answers a final question at the end of the interview, make sure to head over to our substack. The link is in the description where you’ll be able to see this. What are some areas the Trump administration can improve upon after the first year in power? And what are some criticisms you would have?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: What do you think conservatives misunderstand most about the concept of freedom? And what do progressives misunderstand most?

DINESH D’SOUZA: Well, I think that there is the issue of how do you put the MAGA House in order? That’s a challenge on the right. The challenge on the left is, or from the left is the red-green alliance, which has now come to full fruition. Mamdani is sort of a walking embodiment of it because he embodies both sides of it. There’s a leftist side of him which views all these different groups as constituencies. I got the blacks over here, the Latinos over there, the feminists are over here, and then I’ve got the radical Muslims over here. So on the one hand, he is a traditional kind of leftist, but on the other hand, he does bring in the Islamic element.

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, it would have a Stalin trench coat or, you know, or a toothbrush mustache. These things will come here in American accents. If Sharia comes to America, it’ll look more like Mamdani or Tucker Carlson. It’ll be all American. It’ll be homegrown, it will be suave, it’ll be social media savvy. It’ll have pink cheeks. And then Tucker’s gay will have a bow tie.

So as a result, Americans are not like, they’re not looking for that. It’s almost like the thieves are showing up at your house, but they don’t look like traditional burglars. They aren’t in masks. They’ve actually come to the front door. You know, they want to be let in. They’re like, wait, is this where the dinner party is taking place? And you’re like, there may be some misunderstanding. Oh, no, can we just come in?

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? It’s kind of like when you live in a bad neighborhood, you learn to look over your shoulder. You become very survival oriented. You become very lean, you become very tough. 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. And as a result, Americans are slow to wake up to it.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Dinesh, thank you very much. Follow us on over to triggerpod.co.uk, where we ask Dinesh your questions. Many of us were driven away from the Democratic Party by woke excesses like racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism. What are conservative leaders doing to minimize the racist, sexist and anti-Semites in the Republican Party?

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