The Eric Metaxas Show - #154 - Dinesh D’Souza

Episode Date: July 8, 2026

Today On The Eric Metaxas Show, Eric talks with Dinesh D’Souza about the preliminary hearing in the Charlie Kirk murder case, the evidence against Tyler Robinson, Candace Owens’ claims, malignant narcissism, birthright citizenship, the Supreme Court, election fraud, America 250, the founding, and whether America can recover the vision of the Founders.⭐ ORDER NOW:Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World📕: https://a.co/d/0ir3NlapTODAY'S SPONSORS:🛏️ MyPillow — Save BIG with code ERIC: https://www.mypillow.com/☀️ Honest, fast, and free Medicare plan guidance: https://askchapter.com/metaxas/

Hey there, folks. It's Wednesday, the 8th of July. And I want to tell you exactly what happened 250 years ago today. But before I do that, I want to announce that in a moment, any second, the great Dinesh D'Souza, with a name like Dinesh D'Souza, I tell you, it's like the great kazoo. voiced by Harvey Cawman. Deneh is going to just appear. It's like, Bing, he's going to be here. and we're going to talk about news of the day, I guess. Tomorrow we have James Lindsay on the program, and I believe... We have the Clavens coming up and Rod Martin as well. Rod Martin, my gosh. And then you and I recorded some stuff yesterday about the culture, so I don't know.

We'll have to figure out how we put this together. But today, in a moment, Bing! uh, Dinesh D'Souza is going to appear magically. It's a lot like, uh, author Jonathan Kahn. He would often materialize in the TBN studio that we had. I don't know if you remember that. It was like a puff of smoke. And then like sort of like a cord hit, you know.

A few announcements before Kizu pops, pops, uh, or Jonathan Kahn or Dynash or whoever, it's going to be Dinesh. But before Dinesh comes on, uh, which he will any moment, I want to see. say, and this doesn't seem possible, but tomorrow you and I will be in Las Vegas, and should the Lord Terry, we will at 5 p.m. be having dinner, drum roll please, with Rich Little. I just want to say, there are people for whom that will be great news and other people say, what, who? Let me tell you something. There's a comedy legend.

There's nobody that really can top Rich Little. Rich Little in the 70, just yesterday, okay? I was looking on Instagram yesterday and I'm, you know, I'm like, I follow a billion like kind of retro sites or whatever. It is the thing pops up and it is the credits to a 1970, It might have been 73 episode of Chico and the Man. And in the credits for Chico and the man, the theme song is sung by Jose Feliciano.

In the credits, it says, and special guest star, Rich Little. So yesterday, after I found out I'm having lunch with Rich Little tomorrow, which is Thursday in Las Vegas, I'm on Instagram watching a Chico and the Man credit thing, and it says special guest star. So he was everywhere. There's certain people that were everywhere in my childhood. It didn't matter what show you were watching.

Rich Little would show up. So I don't know what other shows he guest starred on, but he definitely guested it on Chico and the Man, starring Jack Albertson and Freddie Prince, Sr., who killed himself at age 24. that's what early success does to some people. It's horrifying, actually, to think about that, that he was like a huge star at age 20. And he was actually on these Dean Martin Roasts, which is maybe how he met Rich Little and then invited him.

You've got to come on the show. So anyway, tomorrow, Chris, you and I should the Lord Terry, we always have to use that as a caveat. Should the Lord Terry, we will be having dinner with Rich Little and I just, he's 87, but he does a show three nights a week in the horseshoe lounge in one of the casinos there. So he's still working. He does a 70-minute show three days a week. It's not going to be while we're there.

That's the only reason we could have dinner with him because his show is, let's see, I guess it's, I think it's Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday night. So tonight he's doing his show. And I, again, if, unless something goes wrong with our. flights or with whatever we're having dinner with Rich Little. So we're going to be reporting on that, I guess, on Friday. Yeah, and he's a master of impressions. And, you know, we only met him once briefly, but maybe to kind of play with him in the spirit of his many talents, I could do an impression of you at dinner and you could do an impression of me at dinner and we could see if we can

fool him. I'm the only person alive who can say that I've had drinks with Frank Gorson, at Sardes. Wow. The Riddler from the Riddler, right, from Batman? Yes. But Frank Gorshan was, I mean, far more impressive, I think, than his, well, I shouldn't say more impressive, but equally impressive as his appearance as the Riddler in the 60s Batman series.

He was an impressionist that I would say, other than Rich Little, I can't think of anybody. So Frank Gorshian was doing a one-man show on Broadway. It must have been 2000, I don't know, four, five, something like that. And Suzanne took me for my birthday. And we went backstage afterward. And I chatted him up amazingly. And we had drinks at Sardis sometime later. Wow.

That's another story. But that's a very, and Sardis is a New York institution. So it's a very New York story. Right. The restaurant we're going to meet Rich Littlatt is not a New York institution. It's not even a Vegas institution. It's a hole in the wall. But I guess he likes it.

When you're 87, you get to say, I want to eat there and people will meet you there. So that's going to happen. As I said, in a moment, Dinesh Jesus is going to come on. But before Denexia comes on, I want to say, in case I've never mentioned it, I've written a book called Revolution, the birth of the greatest nation in the history of the world. And almost every day, I'm thinking about, hey, what happened 250 years ago today? So on July 8th, 250 years ago, the Declaration of Independence was read aloud in Philadelphia. I have to say it's very difficult for us to try to imagine what would it be like to hear those words for the first time.

The whole thing, it would have been a little surreal, I think, for people because there's no context. We've got too much context, so we can't really hear it afresh. We've heard it a billion times that we know all about it and we know that we won the war and we know we know everything. They knew nothing. They're hearing it for the first time. Imagine your ears hearing this for the first time July 8th. It had never been publicly read before, but it was read publicly in Philadelphia, also in Trenton, New Jersey and in Eaton, Pennsylvania. I think there were three public readings of it.

on July 9th tomorrow it was read Washington got a letter on the night of July 8th so tonight 250 years ago he gets a letter from John Hancock the president of Congress saying this needs to be read aloud it was a copy of the declaration needs to be read aloud to the troops so on July 9th tomorrow 250 years ago tomorrow at 6 p.m. George Washington had the declaration read aloud now you kind of wonder who read it aloud. I've never read an account of who was charged with reading it aloud to the troops assembled. I mean, there must have been several thousand troops assembled down on, you know, what's today, you know, near Bowling Green, way downtown. But we know that after it was read aloud, a contingent decided, let's tear down the statue of King George III, which was right on Bowling Green.

There's an ellipse there today. The fence is there today. You can touch the fence today, and you can realize that within that circle, that ellipse, I should say, that oval ellipsoid was a 4,000 pound gigantic 15-foot-tall equestrian statue. I write about this, of course, in my book Revolution. If you've not ordered a book yet, folks, please order the book as soon as possible. Before we run out again, I... anyway, I hope we don't run out soon. But I do think that it's vital that we know this history.

So I'll be sharing about it on this program, you know, until they forced me to shut up. But the fact is that these American troops who had just heard, these New York troops who had just heard the Declaration of Independence, they tore down the statue of King George III. So a 4,000 pound, 15 foot tall, gigantic, monumental, statue covered in gold. They tore it down. They had axes and hammers and ladders and ropes. And they tore it down. And they then hauled it with an ox cart. Imagine how heavy this is. I mean, try to imagine moving something that's 4,000 pounds. They put it on an ox cart. They took it down to the East River. They put it on a ship, I'm sure using block and tackle. They hauled it up the sound to Norwalk,

where they offloaded it in Norwalk. And then on Ox Carts took it north. They stopped overnight in Wilton, Connecticut, where by now actually the head had been cut off in New York. I should say that. The head had been cut off. And the head was spirited up to what is today, Washington Heights. There was a Patriot Tavern.

And they stuck it on a pike, on a pole. So eventually the British retrieved it and sent it to England. But this is all in my book. But the rest of the statue, other than the head, this gigantic horse and everything, it spent a night in Wilton, Connecticut. They cut the tail off. Somebody who wanted a piece of history cut the tail off of the horse.

It was recovered in a swamp about a hundred years later, I think. It's in my book. I don't have it in front of me right now. And you can see the tale in the New York Historical Society. I still haven't had time to visit it, which tells you. you how crazy my life is. So that's true. The rest of the statue, of course, was brought up to Litchfield, Connecticut. I'm trying to think of the name Oliver Wolcott's foundry. They melted it down into 42,000 musket balls, which were used against King George's troops. So his body was melted down

into musket balls to be used against his own troops. That is a true story. The statue was torn down July 9th, so tomorrow, 250 years ago. I just find this stuff so, so fascinating. And I, I love the idea that the head was severed. So the head, this guilt lead head was taken up to this, to this tavern in what, again, West City, Washington Heights, so the northern part of Manhattan and put on a pike. And some of the British discovered this. And so they sent somebody overnight, they grabbed it, they stole it, they buried it. And then when they took over Manhattan Island, then a couple of months later, they retrieved the head and shipped it to England where I'm trying to think somebody, I suppose it's in England today. I just find the whole thing kind of crazy.

So that's all true. That's all true. And that's it. That's amazing. What kind of machine rental from Home Depot do you have to put in for it to be able to cut the head off of a statue like that? That seems impressive. I was thinking about that. I think they used saws. But imagine trying to cut lead. I can't. With a stock or axes. I mean, it's not like they were trying to do a pretty job. I think axes, you know, but you're just trying to dig at lead.

Yeah, no, I can't. I can't imagine. You know, that's kind of nuts. So, all right, I know we have Dinesh coming on here soon. So before that, I want to tell everybody, I'm going to be in Las Vegas tomorrow and Friday. I'm going to be in Prestonwood Baptist Church. in Dallas this Sunday. I'm going to be interviewed by Pastor Jack Graham at two services. I spoke with him earlier today. He's going to be interviewing me, which is a lot more fun than preaching. I enjoy

preaching. No, no, no. I, so I'm going to be interviewed in Dallas at the two services at Prestonwood Baptist. That's this Sunday. Next week, I have to look at my crazy calendar. Next week, I guess I come back from Dallas. And then next week, I'm going to be, or the following weekend, I'm going to Maine. I'm speaking in Augusta, Maine and Camden, Maine. If you

look at my schedule, folks, go to Ericcontex.com if you want to see my schedule. But I'm speaking in Maine. I haven't been to Maine in, I don't know, five or six years. On the 22nd, July, 22nd, I'm going to be in Los Angeles, doing a bunch of events. After Los Angeles, I'm going to be in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

Then we're going to London. I probably said all this many times, but I just have to say it's just, it kind of doesn't stop. It just doesn't stop. It's absolutely crazy. It's crackers. It's crazy. Okay, I think we've got to Nash. Hang on a second, folks.

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571-421-1-2-5-3. That's 571-4-2-1-2-3. It's time to find the clarity you deserve. Hey there, folks. I think I just said that Dinesh would be popping on, and here he is popping on. Dinesh, welcome back. Eric, a pleasure. Thanks for having me on. Well, it's a lot to talk about. Today, in case anybody is scoring at home, today is Wednesday, the 8th of July. I mentioned it earlier in my introduction. There are many things we can talk about in terms of what's going on on the news. But at the top of the list, unfortunately, I guess, is this murder trial. Our friend Charlie Kirk was murdered at the end of last year. And the trial

is going on right now. I don't have much to say about the trial, perhaps. you have something you want to say. Well, it's a preliminary hearing, and so you don't have the full parade of evidence that you'd have in a trial. But you do get a preview of what the trial is going to look like. And right away, we see that this is a straightforward case with a tremendous amount of evidence. I mean, evidence coming from the alleged perpetrator, from his mother who identifies him, in the videos from his dad who turned him in,

from the bullet casing, which was still in the gun. You know, part of it for me is I haven't gotten too involved in the Candace Owen shenanigans, but I just, as I watched the trial, I'm trying to view it almost comically or tragically through the lens of a die-hard candacite, you know, because everything being said, contradicts what she's been saying.

She even says that it's not even Tyler Robinson in the videos, even though his own mother says it is. She says he was never on campus, even though video shows him on campus before and during and after. Let me ask you, Dinesh, what do you make? Because this is always the ultimate question. What in the world is with this woman, Candace, Owens. I mean, it's, I've never been as baffled by anything as I am by, by the phenomenon of this

woman, Candace Owens. I mean, she seems to be either demonically possessed or, I mean, I'm not joking, right? It seems completely otherworldly. Her, her, her ability to spin facts and confuse, evidently, hundreds of thousands of followers. It's, it's completely misdifestified. to me? Well, there is a, and there's a bunch of videos on this, by the way, on YouTube. The phenomenon is called malignant narcissism. And the basic idea here is that the malignant narcissist lives in a world in which the whole universe is constructed for your benefit. And not only that, but particularly if anybody runs afoul of that, you relentlessly try to malign and destroy them because not to do that is to ultimately rupture your own preposterous self-perception.

Now, if you apply these sort of traits of malignant narcissism, let's remember Candice had a kind of ugly break with TPSA, as she's had an ugly break with others, but certainly with TPSA. Nevertheless, I think she thought that she was the true kind of heir of Charlie Kirk, the sort of twin of Charlie Kirk, she's implied that both of them are sort of celestial beings that have some transcendental features in common. And all of this sounds to you and me a little crazy, a little unhinged, but it is not unhinged inside of the perverted world of malignant narcissism. So without trying to, quote, diagnose Candace Owens, I do think that this phenomenon very closely explains her behavior. Well, I mean,

If that's true and it sounds right, then it means, I would guess, it means that her world eventually has to unravel. Eventually, this catches up with her. Maybe it's already catching up with her. Or, you know, is it possible that there are enough messed up people to provide her with an audience for whatever it is she's spinning? Part of it, I think, Eric, is that the conspiracies of the past, you know, several years, many of them have proven to be right. And so conspiracy theorizing has gone into a kind of twilight zone domain. And you can always interpret evidence, however persuasive, as further examples of the depth of the conspiracy. In other words, not only in.

is Mossad in on it, not only is Egypt and the Macron's in on it, but now the judge isn't on it and the prosecutors. And guess what? The defense also, why? Because the defense could call Candice Owens, right? She could get everybody off. She could get Tyler Robinson right off the hook, but they haven't contacted her, even though she's supposedly the world's most knowledgeable person about this case. So this is what happens when you let conspiracy thinking run a mock. it incorporates even counter evidence to show how truly Byzantine the conspiracy really is. Well, it's just, it's so awful that we're living. I mean, I, you know, I think you can corroborate that in our lifetime, we've never seen anything like this.

There's something really particularly sick about this phenomenon right now. And you could throw, you know, not just, Candice Owens, but Tucker Carlson into the mix, that there's something going on right now that is, I would say, particularly disturbing, hard to fathom. I wonder what will happen with this trial. Do you know anything about you? You said this is a preliminary hearing, so what does that mean exactly? Well, a preliminary hearing is to convince the judge that there is probable cause or sufficient evidence here to take this to a full trial. quite obviously there is. So it's a formality. It is, it's basically a way of saying, hey, listen, we've got enough here to call a full-blown trial. And you do this not by producing

every witness, but by producing enough to show the judge, guess what? You know, we've got good reason to think this guy did it. And that's what this hearing is about. Should we move on to the subject of birthright citizenship? Yeah, I'd like to, I talk about this in my current show this week, and it's, I've been trying to think about the issue of why we have this kind of divide. And I mean divide among the conservatives, right? The reason that we lost the case is because two conservatives, at least two, defected over to the other side and sort of made common cause with the liberals. So why is there this kind of rift on the court over something like birthright citizenship? And I argue that the answer is

that all the justices on our side, all of them, from Alito to Barrett to Chief Justice Roberts, are kind of trapped inside of an interpretive framework. And the interpretive framework is what you can loosely call original intent jurisprudence, right? You know all about this. It's the basic idea is that you've got to look at what the Constitution says and look at what the original framers meant. And that's how you resolve constitutional cases. Now, notice what you don't do. What is the judge not supposed to do? And that is the judge is not supposed to look at consequences. The judge is supposed to look at text and context or intent. And I argued that this is actually flawed because on birthright citizenship, what is the worst thing

about it. Is the worst thing about it like the language of the Constitution or what the framers meant? We know what they meant. They actually meant to give citizenship to the sons and daughters of black slaves. That's what they meant. The actual language of the Constitution, the 14th Amendment here, is a little ambiguous. Each side can read it one way or the other way. But my point is the really bad thing about birthside citizenship is the way in which this is being roundly abused by from Guatemala and Honduras and elsewhere, and Chinese millionaires who are dispatching Chinese women to have kids in America that go back and live in China. In other words, the consequences are what's truly atrocious. And yet, if you look at the conservatives, none of them can say,

we can't allow this because the consequences are bad. They have to say, we can't allow this because the Constitution says, well, this is what the framers meant. And I guess what I'm saying is we have a form of jurisprudence that has to blind itself to consequences, and that's not a good idea. Well, I want to make sure that I understand this correctly. I thought that, I mean, I understand the idea of consequences, but I guess it still seems to me that if the people who originally wrote this understood that what they were doing was to give the children of slaves citizenship, how is it an original?

reading. It's not clear to me that they, they seem to be wriggling in a certain direction to get that reading. I don't know. I just don't understand how, you know, why is it that Alito and Clarence Thomas can see this clearly? I don't remember who else. Well, it's just, it's Justice Roberts and Barrett on the other side with Kavanaugh sort of taking a middle position, right? So I'll now play the role of Roberts and Barrett. And what they would say is that it's very clear from the context of the 14th Amendment that there were certain people who were exempted from this birthright citizenship. No one denies, for example, that if you're the French ambassador to America and you have a kid, that kid is not a U.S. citizen. No one denies that if an invading army comes

to America, their kids don't become citizens. No one denies that if an invading army comes to America, no one denies that if you are a foreign diplomat of any kind. But what Thomas and, I'm sorry, what Amy Coney Barrett and Justice Roberts say is that the case of an illegal who has kids here is not the same as those. It's not the same as those. Well, think of a family, for example, that's been here for 20 years, right? And they have a kid here. That kid does not owe an allegiance to any foreign country, and neither do the parents.

here, the kid is born here. He probably doesn't speak Spanish, let's just say. So the idea is how can you say that this kid who has no place to go and doesn't even, you can't send him back to Mexico because he doesn't speak the language there, how can you say that this kid has, quote, a foreign allegiance? And that's really, the examples that come out of the 14th Amendment tend to deal with foreigners in America. And I guess what Barrett and Roberts are saying is that these people don't match that category. All right. But I mean, You've just made the point. If it's somebody who has been here 20 years illegally and they have a kid, it's not the kid's fault.

I get that. But that, in other words, the whole idea is when you say 20 years, we get the idea because, ah, they've been here 20 years, even though they're illegal. But when somebody comes here on a visa or somebody comes here and has a baby, that's not the same thing. That family clearly is not from here. So why would Roberts and Barrett, why would they stretch this? It seems tenuous. It seems intentionally tenuous on their part. Right.

So this comes back to my point. What Roberts, and I think you could persuade Roberts and Barrett to go the opposite way. But the way to persuade them is like this. You'd have to say to them, hey, Roberts and Barrett, you don't need to invoke some overarching textual principle. Let's make a pragmatic distinction between people who've been here a long time and quote, birth tourism, which is what you're talking about. You're talking about birth tourism, right? So maybe the Constitution does allow birthright citizenship in some cases, and in other cases, birth tourism, that's not allowed. So the point is, I guess what I'm saying

is as a result of 30 years of Reaganite conservative jurisprudence, our judges, that they need to articulate some broad constitutional principle and then just apply it no matter what the consequences. And what I'm saying is, no, take the consequences into account, make distinctions in between cause and effect. There's a big difference between immigrants who've been here 30 years and a Chinese millionaire dispatching a Chinese woman to have kids over here. Why can't you take those consequences into account? And that would make for, I think, Think of the British common law, Eric. You know, judges basically would say things like, well, if I rule like this, what are the effects?

What kind of effect is this going to have on your family? What effect, what kind of messages it's saying to society? So it's very normal in, you could call it, common law jurisprudence to look at consequences. It's not simply a matter of articulating some general principle and then blindly applying it, even when it produces manifestly destructive effects. I'm just fascinated by it's almost like they're being pious or something. Like they cannot deal with the reality. They have to be fussy and pious in making these really ridiculously originalist or ridiculous.

They're taking it, they're taking this good idea and they're stretching it to a breaking point. I saw an interview, I saw an interview recently with Amy Coney-Baird, very revealing because she was asked about her. are you a conservative? Like, are you a Catholic? And she basically said, yes, I am. But then she said, very strikingly, but you know, that doesn't have anything to do with how I rule on the court. Like what? Excuse me? What she was really saying is that she has learned, and I think she's learned this from the Federalist Society and from a bunch of conservative institutions, that her job is to sort of remove herself from herself, to then look at the text of the Constitution, and excavate the original meaning, almost as if she's doing this from Mars, and then apply that

principle to the situation. And her job is not anything else than that. Now, so I think this is very telling, right? Because none of the liberals do this. You think that, you know, Eleanor Kagan would go, or Esoterioio would go, you know, the fact that I'm a woman, the fact that I'm a lesbian, the fact that I'm a leftist, has nothing to do with how I rule on the court. On the contrary, I think they would even say it has everything to do. That's why they got on the court. Well, I guess this is a tricky thing, because in other words, I would say that you don't want to stoop to do what the liberals are doing because, in fact, they are legislating from the bench. So you don't want conservatives to say, well, now we're in, we're here, we're going to legislate from the bench. It doesn't seem

to me that's what we're talking about. It seems to me that in this case, they are, as you say, by, I mean, I like the idea of them understanding my job is to call balls and strikes. It is not to worry about what's going to happen in the future. My job is to call balls and strikes. But in this case, I mean, the whole idea of the case being brought was because people are gaming the system. So to not be thinking about that, that people are taking advantage of the language, they're playing a game. It seems to me that we were looking to them to recognize this and to do something about it. And they basically said our hands are tied, we can't.

And look at the parallels, Eric, between this case and the election fraud cases that came out of 2020, because exactly the same mentality was at work. A lot of people were saying, in effect, the court, courts in general, but especially the Supreme Court, please look at this. Please investigate the substance of these. accusations. If they're inaccurate, if this was all on the up and up, we're willing to accept it. And what do the court basically say, on procedural grounds, we won't do that. You don't have standing to bring this case because you should have brought it before the election.

Or if you brought it before the election, that's too early. The election hasn't been called yet. Why are you bringing the case now? Why don't you wait for the outcome? So what courts did, every single one of them, by the way. There was not a single court in the country. that investigated the merits of the allegations of election fraud, all the so-called 50 cases or 60 cases were every single one of them dismissed on procedural grounds. Well, I mean, I remember at the time thinking the same thing. I thought, are they doing this because they're worried about the effects of a ruling and they're worried there's going to be rioting?

And so they say, so we don't want any trouble. So we're just going to back away. whereas I said, it's your job to call balls or strikes. And not to say, like, if we call a strike, if the guy is struck out, everybody in the stands is going to charge the field. We have to just say, we're not going to call balls or strikes. I mean, that seems to me part of the calculus here, that they're picking and choosing when they want to call balls and strikes.

I think that's true, although that is called looking at consequences in the worst possible way, right? In other words, I'm not going to investigate this case because if I conclude that the election was stolen, and by the way, the election being stolen means the country has been stolen for four years, you know, this may upset some people and they may start demonstrating outside the court, and therefore we're not going to do it. I mean, this would be the most abominable type of abdication and cowardice. So, but anyway, we're talking about the birthright citizenship case,

and I guess what I'm saying is I think that there is. is a way refrained to make headway with the court. But what I think the Trump administration needs to do is to present a clear birthright tourism case because that way the court can maybe make a more narrow ruling, which is not ultimately declaring the meaning of the 14th Amendment, but just saying in effect, this is a scam. Do you suppose that they're preparing that? I mean, when could that happen? is that we have to wait a year, I'm assuming.

For sure, because, you know, as you know, the way this works is you've got to file the case. It's got to make its way, kind of snake its way up the court from a federal court to an appeals court and then to the Supreme Court. Yeah. So would it be your guess that somebody is preparing something like that? Well, I mean, I certainly hope so. This is a case where it's up to Todd Blanche. It's up to the strategy being pursued in the DOJ. There's such a Byzantine operation over there.

They do some things really well. They leave other huge things untouched and undone. So figuring out what their strategy is and when they move and when they choose not to move. I mean, we talked a moment ago about election fraud. They have every opportunity to investigate fraud in the 2020 election. Now, they raided in Fulton County. They've got all the data. I'm assuming somebody's looking that stuff over.

But there's probably also political debate, right? Some people are probably saying, listen, why don't we leave this stuff behind. It's in the rearview mirror. We're way past 2020. So all these pragmatic types of arguments also come into play. So let's see how it comes out. Goodness. I think we have to deal with the election fraud. I believe you may have made a film about that. I believe I might have been in that film. If we don't deal with this as a nation, I don't know how we can go forward. To me, it is the most cynical, scandalous thing to say, nah, elections get stolen. Shut up. Let's move on. I can't imagine that President Trump would want to do that. And I think that he is enough of

a narcissist in the good way, right, to say, no, no, no, I won in 2020, and we have the evidence, and we need to present the evidence. I think it would be good for America. I hope that that's, in fact, what's happening, which brings us, Dinesh, to the subject of America 250, what I call the supercentennial. This is an extraordinary milestone in our history. And for me, it is a moment where we get to think about who we are, what we've been, how we've strayed from our original vision, how we can get back to the original vision. As you know, I've written a book about the revolution. To me, it's very important that we take this moment to really think about who we are, what America really is, because we have strayed very far. What is your sense

of this moment? I feel an odd ambivalence about it. And I say an ambivalence. this kind of mirrors my career in general. I mean, if I look at my career over the first, like, 20 years of it, I was very much a defender of American patriotism in an unqualified way. I wrote my book, What's So Great About America? And if you listen to me in those days, I would articulate an American set of principles that seemed to be almost without defect, the only revolution that succeeded. Now, since then, and particularly since my case with the Obama administration, we see, and we see this all around us in the culture, we see many aspects of American life that are quite broken. None of us can confidently say that the United States will dominate the 21st century the way

it did the 20th. And why is that? Is that because there is some defect in the founding? I'm reluctant to think that. but the other possibility is also alarming. And that is that in some way, America has detached itself in a fundamental way from the founding. And the founding is there almost as an historical resource available to us, but kind of ignored by us, by our institutions, I mean. And so that's the exploration that I think needs to happen, where we affirm the greatness of America.

but at the same time we explore what is it that has gone wrong in our society at the spiritual level, at the cultural level, at the political level. Because I think that, you know, if MAGA make America great again means anything, it's recovering our moorings, right? Getting ourselves back on our feet, becoming the America that we once were and potentially can still be again. Well, I would agree with you. I mean, I think it's crucial.

I keep saying we're in the third existential crisis of our history. We are in an existential crisis. If we do not prevail, if we do not fight the enemies of America or the enemies of the founder's vision of America, who are, of course, inside the tent at this point, we lose everything. And we've been losing it. I mean, what happened to you, it's so horrifying to me. I can hardly talk about it, that that could happen in America. America. And I guess so my hope is that enough Americans are waking up, that those who were

imprisoned for J6, that those who have been subject to these injustices would be willing to fight or would be willing to talk about their injustices so that others could fight on their behalf. If we don't do that, you know, when you just mentioned the election, I don't know, we didn't begin as a cynical nation. And I think that that kind of cynicism is antithetical to the founder's vision. The beautiful idea of us as a shining city on a hill as a group of people who are going to try this experiment in self-government, there's nothing cynical about that. It's beautiful.

But I think we've kind of descended as can happen into a cynicism and corruption or winking at corruption. And if we don't deal with that, we will lose the republic. And so I have a lot of reason to hope based on what I've seen. But at the same time, we're in a war, just as Washington, George Washington was in a war in 1776. It was not over in 1776. So there's much to be done. You know, Jefferson and Hamilton had a big argument about a national bank. But what's striking about that argument is that they were both arguing completely from the premises of the Constitution.

basically Jefferson says to Hamilton, like, show me where it says in the text that you can have a national bank. And Hamilton says, well, I admit it doesn't say it, but it does imply it. So the Constitution has explicit powers, and it also offers implicit powers that are the powers, quote, necessary and proper to do the things that government is established for. But the fact of it is neither of them say something like, well, you know, the Constitution is outdated, or the Constitution is a living document that changes its meaning. from day to day. So even if you fast forward to the Civil War,

it's remarkable the reverence that both sides have for the founding. And both sides are really arguing that they're right and that the founders, where they alive, would agree with them. But the mutual reverence for the founding, and not only that, but north and south in 1860, Eric, were not all that different from each other. They disagreed on one big issue. which is the extension of slavery.

But they agreed on a whole bunch of other things. If you look at our countries divide, our leadership divide today, it is a divide almost across the board. It is far more comprehensive and radical than the divide that separated the north and south on the eve of the civil war. So for these reasons, I think you're right that this is a particularly precarious moment for America. and so my 250th celebration is just tempered by that awareness. Do you have any hope or any realistic hope that some of these things that we've seen,

I mean, a stolen election for one thing, what actually happened on January 6th, that this would come out, that there are people in the administration who are working on this? Well, I think that you need to produce facts that are so demonstrable that even the other side can't deny them. We're hoping for that, of course, with the Charlie Kirk trial, that even the worst of the kind of deniers will look at that and go, well, yeah, this guy did it. He did it for these reasons. And similarly, so I think that we're in an age where a lot of information is going to our side from one set of channels and to the other side from a different set of channels. And so they don't hear us. We don't really hear them.

And we don't have a common source of debate or information that the way we did even in your early career and mine, when despite the, disagreement between left and right, there were common arenas of conversation where we could talk to each other and those seem not to exist anymore. Well, I mean, that's if you're talking about the public sphere or the cultural sphere. But I mean, these things can be, you know, adjudicated in courts of law. So it doesn't really matter what the New York Times thinks if the law says this is what happened. Right. And similarly, they can be adjudicated in the political sphere. The problem is our political sphere is so evenly balanced that there's plenty of room for each side to go. Well, see, we're right.

If Republicans were to have, you know, a 40-seat majority in the House and over 60 senators and the presidency, this would force a lot of people on the other side to go, well, why is the ultimate jury, which is the American people, going this way or going that way, if the truth is not to be found on that side? So I do think that these things have a way of sorting themselves out, but it's rather precarious in the meantime. Dinesh, where can people find your program? My show is a weekly show. It's called Dinesh. It's on audio and video, the usual places. I put it live on X, YouTube, Rumble, also in audio on Google and Spotify. Well, that's easy to find.

Dinesh is the name. Dinesh, my friend. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure. It's finally here, our second annual mega sale. This sale only comes around once a year, so take advantage of the best offers ever while you can. For example, save 50% on our Giza Dream Bedsheets as low as 2998. And for the first time ever on TV, my pillow mattresses and my pillow mattress stoppers as low as 99.98.

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