The Eric Metaxas Show - #65 - Dinesh D'Souza

Episode Date: February 25, 2026

Today On The Eric Metaxas Show, Eric sits down with Dinesh D'Souza to unpack the growing fracture on the right, the Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens blow-up over Israel, and why Dinesh says Venezuela, Iran, Qatar, and media double standards all connect to a bigger propaganda war.

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Restrictions apply. See terms at sportsbook.fandul.com. Gambling problem? Call 1-800 gambler. Hey, the folks, welcome back. Welcome to the Eric Metaxus show. I have guests on this show, some of whom have their own shows, not called the Eric Mataxis show, because that's my name and that's my brand. But for example, today we have on my friend Dinesh D'Souza, who has a show on Dinesh. What do you call your show? Well, Eric, somewhat surprisingly, I decided to call it Dinesh.

possibly for some of the same reasons that you decided to go with the Eric Metaxa show but you know it's a weekly show I was doing a daily podcast I'm now kind of doing a kind of a highly produced once a week

and I've just done two episodes the third one the new ones coming out this week and so exciting stuff I'm very excited about it but with all the other Dineshes out there you didn't feel like you needed

to clarify which Deneh? You know, Eric, when I was in Israel last year doing filming, I was at Magdala, where Mary Magdalene is from Magdalene, and there's a priest, an Irish priest who runs that place, and he's giving me a tour, and he goes, well, what's your name? And I go, Dinesh. He goes, all Indians are named Dinesh. So, you know, there are not a whole lot of Denehs around here, maybe in Texas, but there are a lot of Dinesh is in India. And I might want to think, harder about distinguishing myself from them. There are a lot of metaxuses in Greece.

Maybe not as many as there are Dinesh's in India, but I get the idea. But yes, here, you know, you're just, you're like Sting, like Cher, like Madonna, just one name that said people know who Dinesh is. We don't have to, you know, give you a last name. Okay, so the show is Dinesh. It's once a week, and people can find it everywhere. Fine tobacco products are sold. Exactly. Well, it's on YouTube and X and Rumble, and it's in audio on Apple and Spotify. So the usual places.

Okay. You were born in Mumbai, India. Yes. In those days, was it called Bombay? Right. Yes. And what the Indians did is they changed a number of the British names. Now, funnily enough, they changed it, Eric, into names that really sound like the old names. So Bombay is now Mumbai, Calcutta is Kolkata. So it's kind of comical because they're trying to Indianize the names, but they don't dare to give it a completely new name. I'm always fascinated with this.

And you know, you and I are around the same age. And we remember it's kind of interesting, the politically correct movement. I remember, you know, in the 80s, when you were supposed to pronounce Nicaragua, Nicaragua. Like there's certain, you know, kind of shibboleths, right? And so we're going to change McKinley, Mount McKinley to Denali. And it's that kind of whatever that is.

And it only applies in certain directions. And I realize that why would I say Nicaragua, when I say I'm going to Athens, I don't say I'm going to Athena, because the Greeks say Athena, when I'm flying to Berlin, I don't say I'm flying to Berlin. It is interesting how certain cultures, they're kind of, they're fussy about it. Absolutely. We don't say Paris. We don't say, you know, Venetia.

We say Pennis. So we use the Anglicize name. And yet, I think this is part of this kind of, the left is very attentive to sound. They're very attentive to the way in which words convey certain sort of ideological spin. And so they're big on this sort of thing. And I think this was part of that project, starting in the 1960s, to sort of get us more familiar with the kind of third worldization of our language. It's funny.

I wasn't going to bring this up, but it reminds me, because I have a book coming out in the American Revolution, it reminds me that I watched Ken Burns' series on PBS, The American Revolution. and I was just astonished, astonished. I mean, if he had made this in the 90s, it would not have been nearly as politically correct. And he pulls it in the direction.

You would think that the story of the American Revolution is mostly about the displaced Indians, the American Indians, the Native Americans, whatever you want to call it. And he always refers to them as the Lenape and the Sioux. And the way, you know, he goes on and on, no, no. And I thought, the left, I mean, you're kind of an expert on this, which is why I want to touch on it, but

it is a, it's a fascinating thing when you wrote your book about Obama, the roots of Obama's rage, and talking about the anti-colonialism, I mean, it's really this leftist view that has changed the culture of the West, certainly America. Trump has pushed very hard against that. He renamed Donali back to McKinley and all kinds of great stuff. But this idea somehow that even in telling the story of the American Revolution, it has to be hugely about these native tribes. It's just so bizarre. It's like something we would make up, except this is what PBS just aired. Well, there's a purpose behind all this.

And that is we know that the old Marxist categories of the capitalist class versus the proletarian class, stuff doesn't really work in America. And so we have a transposed version of it. The victims are not the working class. They are the blacks, the women, the Hispanics, the Native Indians. And so the project of looking through the entirety of American history, by the way, leaving huge lots of it untouched. The United States in the 19th century, for example, is the pioneer of these massive inventions. In fact, a bigger sort of communications revolution than even the one we're living through now, this is unmentioned in the history books. The United States becomes the largest economy in the world in the late 19th century,

unmentioned in the history books. And so what you have is this highly twisted, narrow lens through which things are interpreted, but it's all aimed at fortifying the contemporary ideological distinction. between the victims who are supposed to be the good guys, and then the white male heterosexual, who, as we all know, is the villain of the tale. That is the story, and it's just, it's absolutely extraordinary. And then, of course, if you happen to be white or male or whatever,

then the best you can do is hand-wringing, writhing in some kind of guilt. And that's basically what the left has done today. All of these unhinged people blowing whistles recently, in Minneapolis. These are white privileged suburban women who somehow feel that, you know, they can exercise their privilege by blowing whistles and stopping law enforcement from doing what we, the people elected, the executive branch to do. Well, this is the way you get your certificate of absolution.

There's only one way. The way is to become an ally. as they call it, of the trans, or you become an ally of the LGBTQ, or you become an ally of the anti-colonial cause. And the way you do it is you not just dye your hair blue and put tattoos all over your body, but then you show up and start yelling at the ICE officer

who's coming to round up a pedophile. So this is the peculiarity of our time. We're living through very strange times, Eric, and it's kind of interesting to try to step out of them. It's hard to do that, but to diagnose the maladies of our own age. I was going to say, I really didn't, I didn't think we would see anything quite like the madness we have been seeing on so many levels. The rise of Islamal fascism, the aggressiveness of the Islamists, that is something that it's absolutely astonishing to me. And what it really boils down to, because we're already touching on it, is the lack of cultural common.

confidence of those in the West to say, no, that's wrong. This is what we stand for. I mean, in Great Britain, they said, you know, Wilberforce said, and other figures that these are our values. And so they go into India and they see Sati. They see the live women being burned on the funeral pyre with their dead husbands. And they took a stand against that. They said, we have values. We're going to stand against that. We believe in this. If you don't believe, even anything, you can't stand against anything. And those evils just continue. And in a way, that's what's happened in Europe and it's happening to some extent here on the left. It's difficult to process. I think part of the problem, Eric, here is that we also become paralyzed,

I think, by a false understanding of our own liberties. We think of our liberties, and might say we here, I mean in general in the West, we see these liberties as procedural. And so what happens is, for example, come the radical Muslims and they go, listen, we want to buy 5,000 acres of land in Texas. We want to create a massive madrasa for Muslim boys. And you can't oppose us because, after all, you believe in the free market, don't you? And you believe in private education, don't you? And you believe in religious freedom, don't you? And so they, in a sense, travel on the passport of our own liberties. Now think about it this way. If you or I were to go to the United Arab Emirates, for example, and say, listen, you've got a bunch of mosques around here.

We want to build the largest church in the Middle East right here in UAE. Will you let us do that? They would say no. And we say, well, you believe in religious freedom. You've got a bunch of mosques. And why can't we go ahead and build our church? They go, that's because we're a Muslim country. We just don't allow that kind of thing around here.

We're the bosses and we make the rules. So they are not paralyzed by any kind of procedural argument. Their argument is this is the kind of society we want. And yeah, you can have a church, but it's going to have to be subordinate to the mosques that we have because we are basically a Muslim society. We do not feel confident in giving that exact same answer to them when they make the identical demand.

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That's savinglifeisrael.org. Well, you know, in my research on the revolution, I'm fascinated how dramatically explicitly unapologetically Christian the whole thing was. But one of the values of Christian faith, and I think the Enlightenment helped us to clarify this a little bit, is that we do believe in religious toleration to some extent. That's the issue, right? To some extent. So yes, if you're Jewish and you want to live in America, we will allow Jews to live here. If you are an atheist, you want to live here. If you're a Muslim, you want to live here.

We have a kind of broad tolerance, but it seems that over the decades, we have been pushed over the line. And that that's really what we're trying to figure out right now. How do we make these distinctions? Obviously, it has something to do with assimilation. You can come here and say that you're a Muslim, but you can't believe in Sharia law.

You can't treat your wife like a dog. you can't marry a 12-year-old or a 10-year-old. We have our values. And if you are not willing to go along with that, well, then you can't be a part of our free society. But most people in power aren't willing to push back very hard. Very true. I mean, you see this even.

I live in a fairly red state of Texas. And what you find is that the Muslim populations have grown quite large in some of the suburbs. And so in some of these districts, Republican politicians need Muslim votes to get elected. And so they're going to be very reluctant to say anything that is going to run afoul of their Muslim constituents. And this includes, by the way, in some cases, denouncing Sharia because, hey, look, it's true. I believe that there is a distinction between traditional Muslims and radical Muslims. but by and large, Sharia is a fairly central concept in the Quran.

You're not going to find a Muslim who will flat out repudiate Sharia. Now, you might have a Muslim who says, listen, non-Muslims don't have to abide by Sharia, but Sharia is a pretty big deal in Islam. It really is a conundrum to me because you have this nightmare brew of corrupt politicians willing to do or say whatever to keep power. I've been grieved to see New York now has a 33-year-old Jew-hating Muslim mayor who took his oath of office on the Quran. I mean, that alone ought not to have been possible to take your oath of office on the Quran. You know, why not take your oath of office on mine cumpf? Like, can we use any book?

Any book you choose? It's absolutely astonishing. Where do we draw the line? How do we draw these lines? Well, before we draw the line, we should become a little bit more, I would say, like the Muslims. This is a surprising maybe statement to make. But let's look at this way, Eric. I mean, if you compare the typical Christian in America with the typical Muslim, the typical Muslim has not lost the fire of the original revelation.

There's a commonality between Islam and the 11th century in Islam now. One good indication of this, by the way, is in Islam, you don't find the sort of educational class distinctions regarding religion that you see in Christianity. By our knowledge and Christianity, you find somebody who, you and I are exceptions to this, but when to an Ivy League college, they're less likely to be practicing Christian. You look at people who are in the upper echelons of society, they're less likely to be devout. So you have this kind of inverse relationship between education and income and let's say religiosity. In Islam, no. The rich Muslim is just as likely to be devout as the

poor guy. The educated Muslim just as likely to be fanatical as the non-educated Muslim. So in some ways there are things we can learn from Islam and we might need to learn them if only to be able to resist some of these radical Muslims. Well, it seems to me that there is a shift happening that there is revival and there's there are people among the elites who are serious Christians. I can think of a young man who is now in Congress in Texas who graduated from Dartmouth, for example. I know that you graduated from Dartmouth, Dartmouth. I am seeing figures on the rise out there who do give me hope, who do seem to understand what we're talking about. That's true. I do think that to be,

you could almost call it the 60s lifestyle has played itself out. And there's a whole generation of young people who have, in a sense, been the experimental subjects of that ideology. They don't like it. And so even though their lives are actually quite messed up, many of them, at least there is this dawning recognition that, listen, people in traditional societies have lived differently for thousands of years. and even though they've had so much less, they appear to have had happier, more meaningful lives. And so this whole revival of interest in the old, old architecture, old music,

the old sense of small communities that are more intact. All of this is very encouraging to see. And I hope that people continue to build on this. Well, part of where we are as well, and I wanted to get to this with you, is we're seeing a crack up in some parts of what is maybe called the Bright. I don't know what to call it anymore. But the phenomenon of Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson,

how do we process this, Dinesh? You've been a brave voice in speaking out against them. What do you make of it? I mean, I have to say it's very hard for me to process that someone that I thought of as a good guy, Tucker Carlson, could have swerved so far off the road. I try to process this. What is the explanation?

What's your sense of what is actually happening? Number one, it is quite clear that Tucker and Candice are completely different people in terms of their beliefs than they were before. You can see this in their almost singular obsession with Jews and with Israel. it looks like they are rearranging the rest of their belief system around this. So radical Muslims used to be bad guys, but now since they're against the Jews, they're not so bad after all. Maduro was a horrible socialist dictator in Venezuela, but guess what he's allied with Iran? He doesn't like the Jews either. And so we need to reassess Maduro.

So it is a fact that we are dealing with a different Tucker or different Candice. And so many people whose admiration for Tucker, and Candace came out of an earlier generation, an earlier era, a force to acknowledge we don't have the same thing, right? It's a little bit like, you know, if your dad kind of comes out and has a secret family or declares that he's really a woman, you know, you've lost your dad. It's just not your dad anymore the way that you've grown up with the guy, and you have to struggle with it, and I can understand why a lot of us are like trying to

figure all this out. The second thing is, you know, this explanation for the U-turn is, it's not your responsibility, Eric or mine, to figure it out. It is Tucker's responsibility to give the explanation, right? If Whitaker Chambers goes from being a radical communist to being a radical anti-communist, you and I don't have to ask, what happened to Whitaker Chambers? Whitaker Chambers needs to write his book called Witness 500 pages and say, this is what happened to me.

This is my self-examination, my accounting for how I changed my mind. We've gotten nothing of the kind either from Tucker or from Candice, and that alone is very significant. Well, that's a very important point. And when you say we've got nothing of the kind, why do you suppose that is? Is it because they themselves don't know? I think it's because the explanation is, I would put it this way, it's not intellectual. An intellectual explanation would be something like this. I, you know, I used to really like Israel. I was kind of a Zionist myself. And then I discovered A, B, and C, and D. And I used to be unremittingly hostile to the Muslims after 9-11,

but then I visited Qatar and I saw this and I saw that, and this caused me to change my mind. So I think that the explanation is not of this nature. And so because if it were, Tucker's a very eloquent fellow. He could easily write up, do a short book, or give a 40-minute special episode of his podcast and just lay it out and say, this is basically what caused me to change my mind.

You won't do that, though, if the reason for changing your mind is completely different. I think this is, by the way, what's fueled speculation. He's being paid by Qatar. He's possessed by a demon. I mean, we are fumbling for explanations because the normal explanation doesn't seem to work. It's certainly baffling.

Qatar. He said to Ambassador Mike Huckabee that, you know, how many Christians are there in Israel? How many Christians are there in Qatar? Never mentioning that the Christians in Israel have, you know, full rights as citizens, whereas the Christians in Qatar are, they're like guest workers. I, you know, they're, I mean, talk about that because does he not know this? Is he an apologist for Qatar? so that he's just not going to even mention this? It is an open secret in India that you have lots of women who are go to the Middle East to do menial jobs to make the kind of money that they can't possibly make in India. And not only are they treated badly in terms of being second-class citizens, they are all treated as potential prostitutes. In other words, the Arab community looks on these women as easy prey

because they're vulnerable, they're in a new society, and even more than that, they know that an Indian woman, for example, in the Middle East, can't go to the cops because basically if it's the word of a non-Muslim against a Muslim, the Muslim always prevails. These are kind of the accepted sort of civic doctrines of living in that region.

So for Tucker to either not know this or pretend like he doesn't know this is really very shameful. and the Christian aspect of it is one dimension of it, but it's wider than that. Well, I mean, it's tremendously shameful. It's despicable. It's amazing to me. You can tell, Dinesh, like, I can't process this, the lunacy of it,

that he would say this stuff. I mean, I guess somebody said that he's bought a home in Qatar. I don't, I'm just absolutely baffled, cannot fathom, first of all, why he would do that. I know he has beautiful homes on the coast of Maine. and in Florida. What is, I still, I always try to process this to try to make some sense at least

so I can explain to myself what's going on there. It's incomprehensible. Yeah, I think what's happening, Eric, is you're trying to make sense of a double standard, right? There is a double standard. For example, Tucker berates Huckabee on the issue of the president of Israel being on Epstein's Island,

even though the guy was never in Epstein's Island. And nevertheless, Tucker is like, pressing Huckabee about this. Now, there are prominent figures in the Arab world who are in the Epstein files in a very unsavory context. Tucker would never press them or he doesn't, when he's interviewing the figures in the Middle East, he doesn't press the Arabs. Hey, listen, you're in the Epstein files.

Hey, listen, your well-known business colleague is in the Epstein files. So what I learned many years ago is that when you see these enduring double standards, there's always a single standard behind it, which makes sense of the double standard. So it means that when we identify a double standard, we're looking in the wrong place. We're applying a neutral criteria. You know, it's kind of like saying to the Democrats, hey, listen, we notice that you're very indignant when Trump does something, but you were not indignant when Obama did something far more, right?

And their point is, yeah, that's because everything Trump does is bad and everything Obama does is good. And that's our single standard. So applying a neutral lens doesn't really work because that's not how they think. Well, what you're really, it seems to me like you're being too nice. What you're really describing is wickedness. This is a wicked thing that Tucker is doing, unless I'm missing something. Well, he has to be, I mean, we know him well enough to know, he's smart enough to know that this is causing a lot of disruption on the right, and particularly among young people. Somehow, kind of under your nose and mind over the last couple of decades, a lot of young people have been sort of seduced into this kind of vehement public hatred of Jews and of Israel.

Tucker's decided to become, in effect, the influential Pied Piper of this group. It's not good for the GOP. It's not good for Trump. It's not good for America. I think Trump is quite aware of this now. There have been some indications that Trump and Tucker, there's a fissure that's developing there over this exact issue. So it's hard for me to believe that Tucker is like, oh, you know, Tucker does like to do the wide-eyed thing. And he even did it. He's done it a number of times. He did it apparently with Yoram Hosemi.

He's like, I don't understand why anybody would say I'm an anti-Semite. And Yoramazone is like, Tucker, every Jew, like, alive on the earth thinks you're an anti-Semite. So can it really be the case? that you are so clueless that you think that every single living Jew is like on the wrong side of this, and they're not very good diagnosticians of anti-Semitism. So I think with Tucker, you have to say that doesn't, something is really off here in a profound way. Well, in his interview with Ambassador Huckabee, he brought up this lunatic conspiracy theory that I keep hearing that the Jews of today are not the actual Jews.

It's some Kayserian mafia. I mean, it's one of the most preposterous things ever because it doesn't make, on the surface, makes no sense. Why would people want to hijack the identity of the Jews to reap all the benefits of being murdered in the Holocaust? I mean, none of it makes any sense on any level. He even dared to say, like, what about B.B. Netanyahu? Isn't he his family's from Poland?

And it's like, well, yeah, what do you think? Where did the Jews go? They went to places like Poland. Have you not heard about that, Tucker? Again, it just beggars the imagination to see what he has read or what he knows and why he feels that he should even be talking about this at a level of such ignorance. It's scary to me. Well, this has a very sinister history, Eric, as you know, better than most. and that is this whole complicated and question of like who is a Jew.

I don't know if you know this. I filmed this for one of my movies' Death of a Nation. The Nazis had a meeting to discuss the application of the Nuremberg laws. And they had to consider the question, who is a Jew? They even investigated how the Democratic Party in the American South decided who is black, because they knew that there was segregation. the South. And so they had one of the Nazis basically report to them on like, how do these Americans figure it out? How do they decide who's black? And they learned about the one drop rule.

And so, you know, the Nazis basically ultimately decided that the one drop rule was too harsh. They decided that they would go with a softer rule, which is essentially three Jewish grandparents. So in other words, if you had two Jewish grandparents, you might not qualify. You need three Jewish grandparents. So what I'm getting at is this kind of genetic dissection of what makes you a Jew. It's obviously being peddled in a different form, but it does have a pretty troubling history, to put it mildly. It's really, it's just, it's all astonishing. It's all astonishing. I just can't believe we're at a point where we're discussing this, but by God's grace, we will get through it. I'm hopeful that we'll get through it, but it's

in large part thanks to voices like yours, Dinesh. We're basically at a time, but I'm just so grateful for your clarity. You help a lot of us process the madness through which we're slogging at this point. Any final points

before we go, and I want people to remember your new show, Dinesh. Yeah, I mean, I'm excited to mention, Eric, I'm working on a project in biblical archaeology, the most important findings in biblical archaeology, I will confess. I was partly launched into all this by reading your book,

The End of Atheism, and I was like, and then when I went to Israel, I was able to see a good deal of it for myself, so I'm now fully plunged. There you go, is Atheism? You wouldn't be referring to this book, would you, Dinesh? That is indeed what I'm referring to, Eric, and I think it's really helpful for you to actually show the book

so I can verify that that's the one we're talking about. It is indeed. but I want to thank you for being, I mean, you are my impetus for a bunch of things that I think about this being one of them. So this will be, I'm doing this in collaboration with Prager, you,

it'll come out in the fall. I'm actually going to Israel to do some filming at these archaeological sites in April. So just to mention that in addition to my weekly show, I've got a biblical archaeology project that is right up your alley.

Well, listen, I get so excited about this, the more the merrier, because this is where we are now. Science is pointing to God. Archaeology is pointing to the Bible as history. We need to get most people in Western culture to acknowledge this. I think it's part of this wave of revival that is happening. All of this evidence is just pouring out.

And so I'm thrilled that you're working on that. Again, Dinesh, just grateful for you. God bless you. Thanks for coming on today. Hey, thank you, Eric. I don't like alarmism. I don't like fear-mongering. I especially don't like people who profit from panic. But I do believe in telling the truth, especially when the markets are reminding us how fragile things are. Over the last few weeks, we've all watched the volatility, stock swinging, confidence-shaking, long-estanding assumptions, suddenly looking less solid.

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