The Ricochet Podcast - Thoughts and Prayers

Episode Date: December 3, 2015

In the wake of the shooting in San Bernardino, we get into the “thoughts and prayers” debate that broke out last night after the NY Daily News published its provocative front page. Then, Dinesh D���Souza joins to discuss his new book Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party and get into detail about his experiences while... Source

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Growing your business. Whether it's communications or security, Innovate has you covered. Visit Innovate today. Innovate. The IT solutions people. Hello, everyone. Our thoughts and prayers are not enough. I'm not going to get, I don't know what's going to happen here.

I don't have any information on that. They don't understand what you're talking about. And that's going to prove to be disastrous. And what it means is that the people don't want socialism. They want more conservatism. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and John Gabriel sitting in for Rob. I'm James Lileks and our guests today are Dinesh D'Souza and Gary Kasparov.

Let's have ourselves a podcast. There you go again. Make another hash mark on the cell wall. This is Ricochet Podcast number 284. We're brought to you by Harry's Shape, of course. You know, overpaying for drugstore razor blades is a bad habit. You ought to break it. Make the smart switch to Harry's.

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We've got coupon codes coming up. And we're brought to you, of course, by Ricochet.com. Usually this is where Rob intercedes and says what he has to say. He's legally gone this week, so we're going to hand it over to me. I'm going to spare you guys, John and Peter, the trouble of having to reproduce Rob's fine, heartfelt, to-the-point message for people to join Ricochet and just remind them a couple of things. One, if you're listening to the podcast, obviously you're simpatico with the frame of mind we have here, center-right, sensible, sane. And if so, why don't you help keep this thing going? Make sure that Ricochet is not only here for the 2016 election, but the 2020 and all those

after that by joining up. It's less than the cup. It's less than the price of a cup of Grand Marnier poured over ice every seven, nine weeks or something. I forget the exact metric. Whatever it is, it's inexpensive. Now, if you're a previous member, you can go to Ricochet.com slash membership and use the coupon code REJOIN and you'll get two months free. And for you podcast listeners, you'll get 30 free days, 30 of Ricochet.

If you go to Ricochet.com slash membership and use the coupon code JOIN. So join or rejoin. Either way, come to Ricochet and learn and have fun and meet friends and interesting people like the newly slimmed down John Gabriel sitting in for Rob and Peter Robinson. Good day, gentlemen. You know, let's talk about it. Let's talk about it. John, you go first. I offer my thoughts and prayers for everyone here and the podcast. That was the thing. We're still getting an information.

And by the time this airs, it might have changed a little bit. from attacking evil white male Republican NRA members who are responsible for this to all of a sudden say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's not judge an entire group of people by just the acts of a couple of lone wolves, a large group of lone wolves. So, yeah, it's kind of – it's just tragic. What do you say? John, I have to admit – first of all, I'm conscious that some people will be listening to this a few days from now. But I have to admit we've had a couple of tragedies, a shooting at the Planned Parenthood clinic and then last night a bigger shooting in San Bernardino. Which are you talking about? Oh, this one is the San Bernardino shooting. OK. And I actually – I think the Planned Parenthood shooting was the day after Thanksgiving and I was enjoying my holiday and mercifully avoided a lot of that coverage.

You missed that one. Yeah. And so what do we know as of this hour? I have to confess here in California – you're an hour ahead of me in Phoenix. I haven't looked at the newspapers yet. I would think the news in California doesn't happen earlier in Arizona. No, but I get up a little later, James. As a representative of the future, I'll tell you what I know. Still, the count was 14 dead, 17 wounded right now, two killers, a husband and wife. The man was born in Illinois, I believe, and the female was born, I think the last I read, was in Pakistan.

And he had traveled to Saudi Arabia to meet her and marry her. They had, this was a very sweet family vignette. They have a six-month-old baby whom they dropped off at grandma's house before going on their shooting spree. So they're still trying to figure it out. Motive? No motive yet? They don't have it nailed down. But yeah, it just broke over Twitter as we began this podcast. Sources say that the shooters may have been radicalized. So that's good to know. I heard last night that they were wearing GoPro cameras, which indicates a desire to upload. And again, that doesn't necessarily mean jihadi extremism. There was that fellow who killed the television reporter and filmed it with the intention of getting YouTube hits.

But it's one thing to add into the mix. Peter, surely you saw yesterday a great and some say necessary corrective to the platitudinous desire to send thoughts and prayers. It just infuriated people that some people were sending thoughts and prayers. Why? People themselves who had previously tweeted out that very sentiment were now suddenly turning against it. As en masse, the left rose up to say, no, no, no, no, no. You can't do that if you support policy X. Is this a righteous call out of hypocrisy or is this some point that they're just dropping the mask and saying forget about it?

We don't believe in this guy guy. I mean, it beats me, but I don't understand what the impulse, how the impulse can be arise from anything else than a kind of lack disintegration or evaporation of ordinary, one ordinary American virtue of sheer neighborliness. In the world of the internet, we tend to extend it to people we haven't met, to people on the other side of the country. But that's what it is, just a kind of American neighborliness, wishing well, my thoughts and prayers are with you, combined with, of course, the ever so slightly, day by day, ever so slightly more aggressive atheism in which we, the atheists, control the center of the culture and we are pushing you bit by bit by bit, you believers, off to the margins. We decide what is normal.

We decide the protocols of etiquette and good manners. We decide what is and isn't neighborly and you go off and be your own weird little cult. So some combination of those two. On the list of problems we're facing today, that strikes me as pretty close to the bottom with ISIS hacking off heads and people who seem to have been radicalized right here in San Bernardino County, right here in California in San Bernardino County. But it's outrageous and serious. Come the revolution, it will be on the list of things we set right. Well, if you look at the Daily News cover that everybody's been tweeting around, which is a fascinating little, I think, first admission. They crossed a bit of a line here. God isn't fixing this, they said, in white type on black. And then they have this as a subhead.

As the latest batch of innocent Americans, that's in red, are left lying in pools of blood. Cowards, that's in red, who could truly end gun scourge, that's in red, continue to hide behind meaningless platitudes. Okay. All right. So then let's end this gun scourge, shall we? Let's do it. Let us have a politician on the left come out and say that the only way, because this is the truth, the only way you're going to end your gun scourge is to get rid of all of them. And in order to get rid of all of them, you either have to dispose of the Second Amendment or wave a pen by executive fiat and make some wonderful new precedent whereby the Constitution no longer applies because enough is enough. And then after a year has gone by and the people have not turned in all their firearms, what we will have to do, have to do, if you want to end

the gun scourge is to go house by house into every room and closet and under the bed of every single dwelling in America and confiscate what you find. If that is what you want, say so. And even so, admit that even after you have done this, there will be 100 million guns you missed and there will be more coming in from Mexico. And it will take two or three decades perhaps for those to shake out of the system. And in the meantime, there will be more gun scourge. If that's what you want because that's the only thing that can possibly even begin to start to do what you want to do, then say it and put it out before the American people. Otherwise, tell me what you want to do, then say it and put it out before the American people. Otherwise, tell me what you want to do. Tell me what law, what regulation, what fine tweaking of the innumerable codes exist today would have prevented this and will make sure that it doesn't happen in the

future. My thoughts and prayers are with you as you attempt to come up with something that will answer that question, because there is no easy answer. So that's what everybody's, I mean, yesterday, the left went right to guns and the right, you know, blamed the guns and the right. Well, what did the right do? The right said, we have a problem, perhaps with a particular ideology, but you can't get a great surge of emotion out of people by saying that. That's – you have to fix something right away and that takes laws. That takes the god of government to which they are in endless thrall. Yeah. The Daily News, which I have open in front of me now, the Daily News coverage – what's happening – the Daily News is collapsing.

The newspaper hasn't made money in years and years and years. Its market in New York is shrinking. It seems to me that what they're doing here is simply making a decision the way certain cable television outlets have already made decisions. The New York Post in the New York market has the conservative end of the market and the Daily News, which used to be a generalist newspaper, sort of left of center under Mort Zuckerman, the owner, the real estate mogul. But now they're making a decision. They're just going to go hard left.

That's all this is. There's nothing intelligent about it. There's nothing clever about it. They're just changing their marketing strategy. The death of a once great newspaper. It used to be the slogan – I don't think it was ever written down anywhere. But in New York journalism, the old slogan, the unwritten slogan of the Daily News used to be, tell it to the McSweeneys. The Stuyvesants already know. There was a kind of wonderful

populist touch. You'd appreciate that, James. Wonderful populist touch. We're the newspaper for the working people. Of course, those days are all gone. Yeah. Well, it was tweeted out with great effect all across the country, not just something that was limited to the boroughs because people agreed with it. People thought that this was something that was necessary to say. And it was interesting following the little tweets around it to people who are lawyers, actual lawyers, saying, would it be as ethical to kill all the members of the NRA board as it would to bomb the Nazi Reichstag? As though, A, there's a comparison, and as though, B, the Nazis actually met there. They didn't.

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holiday. And now we bring to our first to our microphones here, our collective whatevers, be they phones, the computer monitors, Skypes, whatever. Dinesh, welcome. He's a best selling author, pundit, and filmmaker behind Obama's America, On Making the American Dream. You've heard him on Dennis Prager.

Perhaps you've seen him on the lecture circuit. We welcome him to the show to talk about his new book, Stealing America. Dinesh D'Souza, how are you today? Good to be on the show. Hey, Dinesh, Peter here, Peter Robinson. Listen, I'm looking at your website and I'm enjoying just the top third of the website, Stealing America. Picture of your new book. The book is called Stealing America. And the one sentence description is this.

The latest book by Dinesh D'Souza explores what his experience with criminal gangs taught him about the Democrats. Close quote. Dinesh, I see you have lost none of your punch and fight. Peter, you know what? Apparently this year of mandatory psychological. At LiveScoreBet, we love Cheltenham just as much as we love football. The excitement, the roar and the chance to reward you. That's why every day of the festival we're giving new members money back as a free sports bet up to

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18plusgamblingcare.ie. Counseling and re-education has not taken because I'm as undaunted as ever and in fact have tried to convert this rather distressing experience of mandatory confinement with

a bunch of pretty hardened criminals into a learning opportunity. Okay, so we'd better begin. And I've got James Lilacs and John Gabriel on the line, both of whom want to get in here. We'd better begin just by laying down the basic facts. Wendy Long and the New York State Senate race, take it from there briefly, just so we establish that. Just so we establish what you're doing with criminal gangs. Yeah, my heinous crime was to exceed the campaign finance laws or limits by giving $20,000 to a college friend, Peter, of yours and mine, Wendy Long. And this is something that happens quite

often in elections. It's normally handled as a civil matter. But in this case, I was prosecuted to the hilt. The Obama administration wanted to send me to federal prison. A Clinton appointed judge instead gave me eight months of overnight confinement in a facility, a private facility, but overseen by the Bureau of Prisons. And overnight confinement meant what? You had to turn yourself in at 5 p.m. each evening and couldn't leave until 9 the next morning or something of that nature?

Yeah, something of that nature. Technically, I was allowed to get out to work. But ironically, a white-collar federal prison is mainly white-collar guys. You know, it's nonviolent offenders. The confinement center, which was in Southern California on the Mexican border, had the whole gamut of criminals from drug smugglers, coyotes, armed robbers, rapists, the whole gamut. So as a result, I found myself in an exceptionally hoodlum-ish environment and was for the first time in my life exposed to how these criminal gangs operate, what their scams are, how they pull off their heist. And I began to think politically as a consequence of that. So actually, I have to admit, you've got me here. I thought I knew the story, but did

you actually, so you had your meals with these? How much interaction did you have with some coyote who'd been smuggling people over the border or some drug dealer who'd been carrying, what do they call them, mules, some drug mule who'd been carrying drugs in over the border? What kind of contact did you have with them? Well, Peter, I had tremendous contact with them because all of us, there were 120 of us in this facility, and most of them were there for three to four months. So they turned over every three or four months. I was there for almost a year, an eight-month period, and we slept in an open dormitory on bunk beds. So in the very beginning, as you might imagine, I was quite intimidated. I kept to myself. I didn't want to get in the middle of various groups and gangs. But after about 30 days, I said to myself, gee, you know, I'm kind of like an anthropologist in a strange land here. Let me try to learn about this criminal subculture and try to know what they were up to and what they were like. Certainly, you could say it was broadening my understanding of America because

I've lived all my life in this country in the rarefied world of intellectual discourse and think tanks and universities, the Reagan White House. So this was another side of America, very, very instructive for me. All right. And what did you learn about this side of America. Very, very instructive for me. All right. And what did you learn about this side of America and Democrats? Well, initially, I went in with the Shawshank Redemption notion that these guys would all profess their innocence. But I realized after a while that they had a more interesting kind of common thread. And the common thread was, we're guilty, we did it, but we are the small fry. The big fry are out there. The big fry are never pursued by the system because they actually control the system. And this is a big, this to me was a big kind of revelation. Now, I remember reading an anecdote

in Augustine's City of God, in which he talks about Alexander the Great and the pirate. There was evidently a pirate raiding the high seas. Alexander summoned the man and basically said, where do you get this crazy idea of boarding ships and taking people's stuff? And the pirate said, I got it from you. The pirate said, you know, I've got one boat, and so you call me a pirate. You've got a big navy, and you've got a big army. You conquer whole swaths of territory, and that's what gets you entitled to be called an emperor. And then Augustine comments, he basically says, gangs are small kingdoms, and kingdoms are nothing more than big gangs. He's referring to the Roman Empire. And so I began to think, wow,

this is really interesting. I've never thought of politics this way, at least not in America. And that was the trigger that got me into this book. Dinesh, I have to say, before I turn this over to my colleague here, John Gabriel, you have to have been the only person in that facility who said to some coyote or drug mule, oh, yes, yes. I recognize what you're saying. I read about it in the city of God. Well, you'll be actually surprised, Peter. There are some very self-taught people in prison who I saw one guy while I was in my bunk bed. I look over and he's reading Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. And you're the guy who's been in prison for 20 years, which is about how long it would take me to get through that book, by the way.

But so Dinesh, can I, I'm sorry, I keep saying I'm going to let, and I will let John, but did you, it sounds almost as though you found something in these criminals that was likable, something almost admirable, and more than simple native cunning. Am I right about that? Am I responding correctly to the undertone? It's a very, you know, it's a very mixed picture. I mean, there are a lot of very bad guys, obviously, who go to prison. There are people who do very ruthless things that, and they do it without feeling that twang of conscience. There are people who are habituated to violence of a kind that you and I would just find unbelievably shocking. So in no sense would

I say that this is a good group of people. No. On the other hand, these are also people who have endured and seen terrible things very often from their childhood. Some of them are actually victimized by the system. And what I mean by that is not that they didn't do anything, but rather the prosecutorial plea bargain system essentially gave them a deal that they couldn't refuse. I used to believe in college and in civics class that innocent people very, very rarely go to prison, but I think that's clearly not the case. There are quite a few innocent people in, very rarely go to prison, but I think that's clearly not the case. There are quite a few innocent people in prison, unfortunately. So yes, I learned a lot about the

prison system. It forced me to revise some of my thinking on this subject, but most importantly, it caused me to look at politics in a somewhat more Machiavellian way. Hi, this is John Gabriel. Welcome to Ricochet. And we've read your books. We've seen your great films. They've been very, very successful. The book's title is Stealing America. I have a suspicion who's stealing America, looking at the grinning pair on the cover. But why don't you explain to us who's stealing it and what do you think their motives are behind that? Well, you know, we tend to think of politics as some kind of an idealistic debate. The Republicans stand for freedom and the liberals stand for justice.

We believe in equality of rights and they believe in equality of outcomes. So we constantly are arguing as if politics were a philosophy seminar. Now, part of what I'm saying in this book is, no, there's another way to think of things, and that is that America represents the greatest accumulation of wealth ever created in the world. The whole wealth of America. I don't just mean the federal government. I mean the assets of the entire country. Now, what we are seeing, what we have seen in the last seven years, is under Obama, the federal government extending its control, and I don't just mean the government's control, I mean Obama's control, over private institutions,

banks, investment houses, hospitals, the whole healthcare industry, now increasingly the energy industry, with the free college idea they're moving into education. Automobiles, Obama can fire the head of General Motors. So this is an attempt to, you may say, colonize large sectors of the private economy and bring it under the control of these progressives. So by stealing America, what I mean is appropriating the wealth and power of America. The progressives don't create this wealth. They're not trying to actually figure out how to drill oil in Midland, Texas. They'll let the people in Midland drill the oil, but then they want to figure out how they can get control over the wealth generated by that drilling.

They get to wet their beaks. Now, one question I have is we look at the Clintons and so much seems like not only we want government to be larger, but they want the personal accumulation of wealth. What do you think the motive is of Obama and Hillary and other leading figures in the party? Do you think they're trying to steal America for the government as a concept for progressivism or is it more personal graft? Yeah, that's a, that's an excellent question. And first of all, I would say that Obama and the Clintons are in a very different league than earlier Democrats. I mean, no one believed, for example, that Jimmy Carter or Reagan or earlier Truman came to office in order to gain money, to get rich. Now, people scorned Hillary when she said we started out broke,

but it is true that the Clintons had no money when they got into politics, and they have gone at warp speed from zero to several hundred million dollars, and their foundation has even more. I think there's an important difference between Obama and Hillary. Obama, his goals, I think, are ideological. He wants to rebalance the wealth and power of the world. He wants to shrink the wealth and power of the United States. So his goal is ideological. His gangsterism is a gangsterism of means. So, for example, he's happy to skirt the immigration laws, ignore what the courts do, ignore what the Congress says. Hillary, on the other hand, I think represents a gangsterism of ends. And by that,

I mean, Hillary wants to be, to put it bluntly, the mafia boss of the United States. She's different than Bill in that Bill's appetites were limited by the circumference of his personal needs and ambitions. Whereas Hillary, I think, wants to literally run everything. And so for Hillary, there's a sense that if you criticize her, you're an enemy, you've got to go on a list. She wants to mobilize the apparatus of government on her behalf. So I think with Hillary, we're seeing an escalation from Obama to possibly something even worse. Hey, Dinesh. James Lilacs here. There's not just the money angle, though. There's also the desire to fundamentally transform America. I mean, there's really no money in it for you to say we want to change the economic, racial, socioeconomic

profiles of the cities. But yet, as Stanley Kurtz has been writing in National Review, that's one of the things that HUD wants to do. They want to make all communities diverse, and not just racially, but economically, and so forth. What's the motivation there if it isn't the desire to change the country into a sort of ideal version of what the transnational progressives in Europe are attempting to create? Yeah, I don't deny that there is an ideological component, but I think it is much less than we have previously thought it to be. So, for example, one of the advantages of all this ideological reorganization is it essentially puts these planners and bureaucrats in charge of things.

Remember that America is a society that was created to empower the entrepreneur. And the entrepreneur is someone who moves on his own, creates new wealth, new products, and puts them out in the market. And so the most successful people in this country through our history have been entrepreneurs. I believe that there's a secret war going on under the surface between the entrepreneurial class on the one hand and a very powerful other class of people. Now, this is not just the community organizers, but it also has powerful people in academia and the media. Now, remember, those guys don't create any products. They don't make iPhones, for example. But what they're doing is they're basically saying that we are the smart people in the society, and we think that the wealth and power of America should be at our disposal. Now,

not all of them get financial rewards out of it. I mean, why does an ordinary run-of-the-mill professor at Bowdoin College, you know, mindlessly support Obama and Hillary? I think he does it for the same reason that poor whites fought on the Confederate side in the Civil War. The poor whites didn't own slaves, so why'd they do it? They did it because it empowered them. It made them part of a racial hierarchy in which the dumbest, stupidest white guy was on top of the most intelligent black guy. And so similarly, academics like to have a society in which they, the academics, are prestigious, are powerful, are writing reports that the government then listens to. So they've become part of this empowered new

class. Wow, Dinesh, you just explained everything. Modern American academics are 19th century dirt farmers. Wow. You just don't let up. Hey, Dinesh, Peter here again. Another couple of questions for you. Have you seen the Daily News cover today? It's being tweeted around. It concerns the shooting in San Bernardino County, which is sort of your neck of the woods where you were incarcerated. Have you seen that cover? I have not seen it yet. In huge letters, it said, God isn't fixing this. And it has photographs, tweets, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Paul Ryan, Lindsey Graham. Every one of them has tweeted something like, our thoughts and prayers are with the victims. And then the subhead reads, as the latest batch of innocent Americans are left lying in pools of blood, cowards who could truly end the gun scourge continue to hide behind meaningless platitudes. Close quote.

So within – I don't know what the deadline was for the Daily News in this cover yesterday, but it had to have been pretty quickly. We had a shooting in San Bernardino County and they went to guns, but they went to guns with a particular virulence. What do you make of that? Yeah. At LiveScoreBet, we love Cheltenham just as much as we love football. The excitement, the roar, and the chance to reward you. That's why every day of the festival, we're giving new members money back as a free sports bet up to 10 euro.

If your horse loses on a selected race, that's how we celebrate the biggest week in racing cheltenham with live score bet this is total betting sign up by 2 p.m 14th of march bet within 48 hours of race main market excluding specials and place bets terms apply bet responsibly 18 plus gambling care.ie in this also with uh with obama i mean With Obama, I mean, with no information coming out, you have Muslim suspects. You have something that clearly isn't run-of-the-mill lunatic behavior. First of all, crazy people don't come in couples. So this was a collaboration. It clearly was planned.

So even though the early signature of it showed that it couldn't just be written off in the normal way, sure enough, these guys are out the gate right away saying that there was... And I think part of this shows, I mean, even with Obama, the cluelessness of that guy. He was in Paris after the Paris shootings, and he basically goes, mass shootings only happen in the United States. This is while blood is still in the streets or drying on the streets of Paris. He goes, mass shootings only happen in the United States. This is while blood is still in the streets or drying on the streets of Paris. He goes, mass shootings just happen in the United States. So I think what's going on here is we're seeing with climate change, with gun control,

these are actually mechanisms that have become part of the arsenal that the progressives are using to establish the kind of control that they want over the population. I don't know of any other way to understand it. The imperviousness to facts and evidence suggests that something deeper is at work. Right. You mentioned control. A couple last questions. You've got to go on and sell Stealing America. But you and I both have kids in college. I've met your daughter. You've met at least one of my kids. Here's the question, if I can frame it. When I was at Dartmouth, we were both at Dartmouth. When I was at Dartmouth, my parents, I just, I realize now looking back that my parents had a certain ease

about where I would go after college. America was fundamentally good. Fundamentally, it was open to youth. They weren't terribly concerned about where I would get a job, how I would be able to make my – in other words, they were willing in a certain sense quite at ease about simply releasing me into the United States of America. Now, your parents were Indian. You had quite a different experience. But here's what I note with people our age who have children going through college now. That attitude is – among the parents isn't quite the same. Much more concerned about the children and part of the reason is that the country isn't as safe and it's not criminals who are the problem particularly. It's that the government itself has become predatory.

That kids who believe what we've raised our kids to believe, some simple piety, some simple sense of decency, are now, those values are under attack. The effort to make money, get a job, get started in life, put some money aside, raise. All of this is in one way or another under attack in a way that it wasn't when we were undergrads. Am I making that up or do you sense it as well? No, I think that you very accurately describe when we were students. I mean, I unhesitatingly shifted my major at Dartmouth from economics, which was sort of my parents' choice, to English. Now, my parents couldn't understand that, but it was because I, like you, Peter, believed that, look, I'm in an Ivy League college.

It doesn't actually matter if I major in sociology or English. If I'm a smart guy and willing to learn and I've got a good liberal arts education, I'm going to figure out what I want to do in life, and America will make room for me to do that. And actually, I've seen that fulfilled in my life, my American dream. Now, interestingly, when I got into confinement, I sort of saw the other America, people whose American dreams have been dashed. And some of them actually did not deserve to be dashed in that way. And they have no way to recover. I mean, for me to go, I'm a writer. So for me to go into confinement, it's basically book material. But for a doctor who goes into confinement, you know, that guy can't practice again. His life is ruined. He's got to figure out he's got to go

do something else with his life and watch. So my point is, yes, I think we're living in a different country. I think that by force, I've seen some of that other America. Now, this is the America to some degree that progressives want. It's not an America that has accidentally come our way because of globalization or something. It's the remaking of America that Obama promised and has to some degree delivered. Right. Last question then, Dinesh. The book, again, is Stealing America. It is by the inimitable Dinesh D'Souza, Stealing America. Last question. We're in the presidential season already. Do you have a choice? Which of the Republican candidates at least best understands what we're up against? You know, Peter, I'm staying out of that for the reason that I'm making a big movie for next summer.

It's going to be a secret history, not just of Hillary, but also of progressivism and the Democratic Party. I'm very eager that the film be an independent effort and not be seen as an extension of the Rubio campaign or the Cruz campaign. So I'm staying out of the inner-Nissan Republican argument and focusing on what the Democrats are up to. All right, then can I get you to comment on Woodrow Wilson?

I'm drawing you into presidential politics, but of a century ago, should Princeton chisel his name off its buildings? Well, Woodrow Wilson was actually, on the whole, a very bad guy. And he is a very bad guy in the sense that he was a very bad Democrat, in the same way that Andrew Jackson was a very bad guy and a very bad Democrat. Now, part of the sleight of hand of the liberals is to take the crimes of the Democratic Party and blame them on America. America did this. Well, America didn't do this. You did this.

You know, slavery was the official ideology, not just in the South. The Northern Democrats in the middle of the 19th century resolutely protected slavery. And so part of what I want to do in this movie is retell the political history of America, a history in which the Democratic Party has actually perpetrated horrendous crimes against Native Americans, against blacks, segregation, Jim Crow, sterilization, the sympathy at times for fascism. And so all of this has now been swept under the rug and been hung, if you will, on the neck of America, as if the country did it when actually they did it.

Well, that movie will be coming to a theater near you, we hope, soon next year, and we'll see it. And when it comes out, we'll have you on the show to talk about it again. Thanks for joining us on the podcast today, Dinesh D'Souza. Stealing America is the book. Pick it up for Christmas. Dinesh, a pleasure. Thanks for joining us. Hey, I really enjoyed it.

Bye, guys. Thank you. Bye, Peter. You know, every time we talk about this fundamentally transformed America and we talk about how the progressive spirit abroad in the land wreaks these changes, I mean, it's odd. I live in a place in a neighborhood that is physically indistinguishable from what it was 30, 40 years ago, and yet so much has changed. And it's as though you look around and it still is the country you know and love but there's something in the atmosphere it's almost like dark matter you know the scientists posit that it must exist but they just absolutely can't find it and i feel sometimes like that's the way american politics are suffused with a strange thing you can't actually see but you know has to be there

because of the influence that it exhibits now dark matter of course is different than than black holes stephen hawking's this week i believe is coming out with a new theory of black holes that has been plaguing him for an awful long time because he can't figure out, nay, they can't figure out, all of these guys, exactly how to reconcile Hawking's earlier posits about black holes with the idea that matter can't be destroyed. Where does the information reside? In other words, on the event horizon of the black hole and then radiated out as radiation.

What's inside one of those things? You never know. I know it's inside my black hole folder in SaneBox, though, in my email. That's nothing. There's nothing there. Oh, thank goodness you brought it back down to Earth. I had no idea where you were going, James. When you have a SaneBox black hole, here's what happens.

You drag a letter over to it, and it's not like you can see it on the event horizon forever. No, it goes right in and it's gone. That's what I love about it. It's just you don't want to hear from somebody anymore. It goes in that. SaneBox is a way to make your email just that. You know you're having these conversations through email. You're talking to somebody and you go back and forth and you got some new ideas.

And before you know it, you've got a fan or a friend or a colleague or a customer and lots of ideas. But then the emails go from 100 to 500. And before long, you've got just thousands of messages and you've no time in your email to sift out the conversations worth having. If that sounds like your life and it's everybody's life who relies on email, then SaneBox might be your cure. SaneBox does the sifting for you. Okay? It diverts the trivial stuff that separates into a separate folder so all that's left are the emails that matter.

They've got features like one-click unsubscribe. Bye. Out of here. And the ability to snooze non-urgent emails. You'll save countless hours and increase your email productivity by 25%, they say. More for that from me. That's more time than you can spend engaging your audience and writing better emails. Now try it yourself.

Two free weeks of SaneBox. Visit SaneBox.com slash Ricochet to start your trial. No credit card needed. And after that, Ricochet listeners, which would be you, get $25 off a membership. And that's the deepest discount you'll find anywhere in the known world, including the interior of dark black holes. Again, it's S-A-N-E-B-O-X slash Ricochet. We would move along now, would we not, to our next guest, Garry Kasparov. He spent 20 years as the world's number one ranked chess player.

In 2005, he retired from professional chess to lead the pro-democracy opposition against Vladimir Putin, and he ran for the presidency of Russia in 2008. In 2012, he was named chairman of the Human Rights Foundation, succeeding Vaclav Havel, and he's been a contributing editor to the Wall Street Journal since 1991. His 2007 book, How Life Imitates Chess, has been published in 26 languages. He lives in self-imposed exile in New York with his wife, Dasha. And his new book is Winter is Coming, Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped. Welcome to the show, Mr. Kasparov. In your book,

you say that Putin, pure evil, a fascist more dangerous than Kim Jong-un and Islamic State combined. Tell us a little bit more about that. Putin's capacity to seed destruction around the world is not compatible to ISIS, Korean dictators, or even Iranian mullahs. And he has no other choice but to stop chaos and conflict everywhere he goes because his domestic propaganda these days is based on Putin's image as the defender of Mother Russia against endless enemies. And finding enemies, it's vital for Putin to secure his power in Russia. Gary, it's an honor to have you with us. This is Peter Robinson. Your book, of course, is Winter is Coming.

Here's a question. If I could stand back from the present moment just a little bit, why is it that the liberal impulse in Russia, the liberal democratic impulse in Russia, is always so strong and yet so ineffective. We all had enormously high hopes that democracy, that the democratic impulse in Russia, the liberal impulse, would finally find its feet. And it didn't work. Why? I don't think we have time to talk about the entire Russian history. Not a thousand years, I'm sorry. 1905 or 1917, of course, the Bolsheviks' takeover was a disaster, not only for Russia, but for the entire world because communism has been spreading death, destruction and poison ideology for decades to come.

And after the collapse of communist state and the victory of the free world in a cold war, we all had great expectations. And it's August, you shared them yourself. Absolutely. You can just read my book, you know, and I was not hiding, you know, my joy and joy of millions of my compatriots seeing, you know, the end of the Soviet rule and the, as we thought, the end of KGB when the statue of the founder of KGB, Felix Dzerzhinsky, was brought down in the central square in Moscow. There were many mistakes made.

And I'm not here to spread the blame and just saying that, you know, we have to look for the United States, Europe or elsewhere. Naturally, Russia was not ready to get rid of its criminal past. And now we understand that without decommunization, or you may say, decagabization of the country, so uprooting the evil that has been ruling Russia for decades, we were doomed. And it was not accidental, as I explain in the book, that less than nine years after the celebration in August 1991, we saw a KGB lieutenant colonel taking over Kremlin in year 2000. And his first action as president of Russia was to restore Soviet anthem, thus sending, I would call, a Freudian message about his true aspirations. So if I may ask one more question, I know James Lilacs wants to get back in

and John Gabriel, who's also on the line. But here's the question. You will hear it said in answer to your thesis that Putin is dangerous and must be stopped. You will hear it said, look, if you take the long sweep of Russian history, Putin is just one more thug. He's not as bad as the communists because he doesn't have a unified ideology, which is well understood by the people and by the armed forces. He's got this hodgepodge ideology. He's pasted together. It's a little bit of communism. It's a little bit of old mother Russia. It doesn't make any sense. And furthermore, he's playing a much weaker hand. The Russian

economy is brittle. It's narrow. It's based entirely on extractive industries. The price of oil is down and likely to stay down permanently. This guy won't last forever. And when he – all we have to do is wait him out. How do you answer that? No, naturally he's going to die and I could probably bet that he will not die from just a biological cause. So there could be outside interventions. As every dictator, you will face a brutal end. But the question is, what price we're willing to pay for waiting and delaying our action

and expecting Putin's Russia to deteriorate and to dissolve. The difference between Soviet Union or modern China, both were communist totalitarian dictatorships, ideological dictatorships. And Putin's Russia today is that Putin's Russia is the full-blown one-man dictatorship. It means there's only one man who makes all the decisions. There's no checks and balances, as they existed somehow in Central Committee of the Communist Party, in Politburo, where you had different factions, you know, vying for influence and always looking for kind of a compromise. So Putin's only strategy of survival is to create more and more conflicts and wars. And that's why I would argue that every day he stays in the office, every week, every month, we could see more brutalities, not in Russia anymore, because he ran out of enemies in Russia, but elsewhere. And you shouldn't think that Syria

is the end of the story. And let's not forget that the Syrian crisis was very much caused by Putin's support to the butcherous regime of Bashar al-Assad and Putin's support of Iranian terrorist regime. And expecting that Putin could be, if not an ally, but kind of a neutral force in the Middle East or elsewhere, it's making a grave mistake that will cause many, many lives. And Gary, this is John Gabriel. One thing, looking at this from America, we've seen different presidents, different world leaders fall into Putin's hands, into his ends, doing exactly what he wants. We saw George W. Bush saying that he looked into his eyes, he saw his soul. Later in the Bush term, he kind of figured out that maybe all was not well.

But then Obama, when he was up for re-election, said, you know what, I'll have more flexibility after the election. What causes American leaders and also Western leaders, we had the French president visit Moscow recently, what causes them to just give in to Putin when, as Peter says, he does have a very weak hand? Now, I agree Putin has a very weak hand, but in poker, it doesn't mean whether you have a weak or strong hand. OK, it helps to have a strong hand, but if you know how to bluff and if you know how to read your opponents, you could win even having a pair of five against a full house. It's very important that you can raise the stakes, expecting opponent to fold the cards. And I will go just, you know, one president, you know,

earlier, I mean, Bill Clinton, even probably, you know, Bush 41, the last year, at a time when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War was over. And in my view, what's happened is that America that had very consistent foreign policy from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, you know, fighting the existential enemy that was the Soviet Union and the communist ideology. And while this foreign policy could deviate, but always within the range, suddenly, you know, with the disappearance of the Soviet Union, this foreign policy was no longer relevant and nothing replaced it. So instead of having a consistent policy, the United States more or less worked like a pendulum.

Bill Clinton did very little. Bush 43 did too much. Obama has been doing nothing. And it created a very strange impression of the United States abroad. And every president, you know, followed his own, you know, ideas. And while I believe that, you know, Bush was misled by Putin's savvy hand, a KGB hand who knew how to sell himself, and he also looked at Bush, W's eyes. Obama, contrary to George W., had his own ideology, and he was not lying in 2007, 2008, campaigning for presidency.

And he was telling the truth again in 2012 when he said he would be more flexible. And when he was trashing Mitt Romney, who suggested that Russia was the American number one geopolitical foe. Obama believed, and I think still believes, that America's global influence was an ultimate evil. And if you could remove America from the global stage, it could help to sort out all the problems. And he was there with an olive branch, you know, ready to hug and kiss every dictator. And he did it. OK, except North Korea. But he still has 14 months to go. Gary, Peter Robinson again.

The book is Winter is Coming. Why Vladimir Putin and the enemies of the free world must be stopped. One more question from Peter Robinson. And it's this, Gary. The role of the United States, why isn't it up to Angela Merkel and the Europeans to confront Vladimir Putin in the Baltic and the Ukraine? Why isn't it up to the Saudis to confront him in the Saudis and the Turks, to confront him in Syria. In other words, how do you answer the argument? A lot has been asked of the United States ever since the Second World War to police the entire world.

We've just had a catastrophe, a long, decade-long catastrophe in Iraq and Afghanistan. And now here comes Gary saying, nope, you're not done yet. You've got to stand up to Vladimir Putin. And the answer, and how do you answer the reply, you're asking too much of us. Let others handle it. Oh, you can ignore it. Al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan in 2001 were far away. And this 19 terrorists caused more damage, killed in 2001 at 9-11, killed more Americans than the entire Japanese fleet

after many months of preparation in 1941 at Pearl Harbor. And today, naturally, with all these modern communications and new technologies, they could cause even more damage. And we could see that the terrorists now adopting new strategies by doing smaller things, not necessarily at the iconic places. It's all about leadership because, yeah, you can say that policeman needs – it's a timeout. He has to go to the vacations. Now what happens when policeman is not on the beat? And America is the only country that can lead the free world, and we are facing new challenges.

And American leadership was a factor that guaranteed the containment of communism and eventual victory over the evil empire. But the evil hasn't disappeared. It was buried for a while under the rubble of the Berlin Wall, but eventually it sprouted and it's threatening us from every hole it can find. And expecting Europeans that used to live under the American umbrella for so many years, decades, to lead these days, it's before naivety. America can create coalition. And definitely the Europeans and I believe Japanese will have more appetite to actually rally in this coalition, fighting the global evil because we can't feel safe. Neither us nor our families, our businesses, our social contacts. We all will be threatened by dictators,

terrorists, and thugs because the world is getting smaller every day. But someone has to lead this coalition. And as long as America keeps leading from behind, we'll see more and more terror spreading around. James Lalix, you're up in the wintry steps of Minnesota. If America leads, yes. Well, when we don't, things happen, and we look weak, and people take advantage of it. We read in the news almost every week that there's some probe, some feint, some investigation by the Russian military to see what our capabilities and our responses will be. They'll fly over Finland. They will send ships over the Internet cables. And, of course, we had the situation with Turkey having downed their jets.

So everyone looks at these things and saying, oh, no, a provocation. Let's stand down. Let's not do anything foolish. Well, what are Putin's parameters in this? Is he just simply doing what he is doing under the belief that there will be no consequences? Or is there a recklessness here that doesn't really care what the consequences may be of his needling NATO wherever it seems easy to stick the pin in. Putin's recklessness is just a confirmation of his desperation because he must create problems elsewhere, outside of Russia, because Russian economy is such in terrible shape and for him to preserve his image as a strong leader, he has to come up with a good story,

actually a mythology. That's why if you listen to Putin's propaganda machine, to Russian TV, read Russian media, America is still number one enemy. It's an existential enemy. And for Putin, it's very important to address Obama as an equal to demonstrate that he, Putin, is the only one who can confront America and not even to pay attention to American subordinates like Turkish President Erdogan. And all these provocations, it's a natural tactics of every dictator, every thug, testing the resolve of the civilized world. And Putin will keep doing that because dictator doesn't stop until he's stopped. And for Putin, creating more and more tension internationally, it's the only algorithm of survival. The book is Winter is Coming, Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped. Gary Kasparov, when you are returned to Russia and Putin is overthrown and you are installed as the democratically elected leader of a new free Russia, don't forget us and please come back on the podcast.

Yeah, I'll be delighted. If it happens, I will give you a first call. Gary, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. It's very difficult just to convince people who believe that you can hide behind two giant oceans. And what's happened yesterday I think is another demonstration. Unless you confront the evil at its source, you will not be safe. Defense is futile these days. Unfortunately, I'm not happy to see America's troops being sent overseas, but I'm afraid it's going to happen.

All right. Good good and by the way just you know you mentioned 10 years of these wars and a disaster in Iraq in 2008 Iraq was stable yes

this is something that people don't want to remember and of course you know the liberal press in this country ignores the fact

that ISIS that was called Islamic State IS has been totally destroyed in 2007 2008 during the surge and also a very smart policy of making alliance with Sunni Arab tribes in the West Iraq. Well, the first step to defeating evil is to A, admit that it exists and then B, have the courage to name it. And you have. And we thank you for that. Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. And it's also about

when it's a strategy, the strategy is not defeating ISIS. It's a wish list. Strategy is something viable, a number of viable steps that you can suggest as getting to the goal. But first you have to, as you said, name the

enemy, name the problem, and then tell me your goal. What is your goal? Containing ISIS, you know, negotiating with Putin, protecting Israel. So far this administration failed even to, of course, to name the enemy, but also to explain, you know, its goals in the region. Well, you've named them in your book, and we advise everybody to buy it

or to give it as a Christmas gift. Thank you for being with us on the podcast today, sir. Uneasy lines they had that wears the crown they always say about Putin. You keep reading, of course, that he knows that he has to keep the gangster state going because the minute that the money guys and the oligarchs and the rest of them don't feel

as if he can protect their interests and their property anymore. Out he goes. And I'd like to think that whatever compensations and glory's power have, there's got to be that nagging feeling at the back of every dictator's head that worries about the day when finally somebody comes and it's up against the wall. So what do you do? Do you end up walking the corridors at night? Do you drink yourself to sleep? Do you medicate yourself to sleep? It's hard to see a man. Vladimir Putin having a glass of warm milk so he can go to the rivers of Leith. But whatever, I guarantee, whatever thoughts are swimming behind that guy's twitching eyelids as he goes through REM sleep contemplating the dream world in which he lives, it's not as good as the sleep you're going to get in a Casper. Never. Not even possible. No matter where you are in the world or how much lucre you got, I'm sorry, there's just no simply

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and use the coupon code ricochet at your checkout and we will sleep better knowing that you did. And we thank Casper for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. Well, gentlemen, that's that was a lineup. That was a great set of Kasparov is a fascinating man.

I mean, it's just... Is he ever. And you would like to talk on and on and on about the Russian character, Russian history, how it led to this. And Russophiles in the audience, I'm sure, enjoyed that as well. Actually, what I wanted was a little advice on when to castle. That one has always thrown me.

Yeah, exactly. Or whether or not – how he feels about the commemorative Star Wars chess sets that are probably flooding out there right now. I'm always amused come Christmas time when there's all these Star Wars ornaments that you find in the store. Like a Darth Vader to hang on the tree. Okay. The Death Star to hang on the tree. An enormous piece of military technology capable of destroying

planets and killing billions of people hanging on a bough for the season of peace. I don't quite... Well, the Death Star is an excellent way to silence that elf on a shelf. That thing creeps me out. Any way we can get rid of it is great. Well, after hearing about world wars and rumors of wars and stealing America and horrible things in the news, let's talk about food because I'm very

hungry after this diet I've been on for three months and I am in the mood for many things, one of which is one of my favorites, probably my favorite fast food, Chick-fil-A. And Olive, one of our Ricochet members, had a great post that we promoted to the main feed. Oh, Olive, the other reindeer, yes. Yes, exactly. And well, she just talks about Chick-fil-A. We had this spate of liberal mayors saying, oh, we hate Chick-fil-A. They're on the wrong side of the same-sex marriage issues. But she has a report from New York City. She says, remember when Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who's in a spot of trouble now, said that Chicago wouldn't welcome a certain chicken sandwich restaurant? Or when Boston's mayor did the same thing,

saying there's no place for your company in Boston? But in spite of liberal outrage over an executive expressing his views on marriage and sexuality, the hateful bigots at Chick-fil-A opened a restaurant in Manhattan. And are those right-thinking liberals boycotting this evil franchise? I know they aren't. There are lines going around the block. Nobody can get in there. It's harder to get into than the hippest restaurants with the celebrity chefs. John, I call BS. All of I call BS. And let me tell you why. Every one of those people

who's lining up at a Chick-fil-A is nothing but a tourist, okay? They're out-of-towners. They're the bridge and tunnel set. They're people who come into Manhattan to look at all the gloss and all the glitz, and all they can do is go to their stupid little knuckle-dragging fast food crap like Chick-fil-A. These are the people who at Times Square go to Guy Fieri's restaurant, okay?

Guy Fieri's stuff and have the hot mustard drizzled all over some onion rings and think that's cuisine. Not a native New Yorker is standing in line, I guarantee you. Native New Yorker wouldn't have anything to do with that bigoted, hateful, miserable company. No, I took my daughter to Chick-fil-A actually. And here's the thing. This is the world in which we live. My, my,

my daughter has many friends who have same sex couple parents. There's, there's, I remember for one girl in the back seat saying to the others, you guys, you got it easy. You have two moms. I have three. I just said with this said with this tone of, um, and so it's like, I take my daughter to Chick-fil-A because it's a good chicken sandwich and we're out and having fun and she was curious. And I'm thinking, what if this gets back to her friends' parents? What are they going to think of me? And I probably already think whatever they think, but isn't that an odd world in which to live, to have in the back of your head the idea that if my friends – if my daughter's friends' parents find out which fast food restaurant I went to, I may be regarded as the epicenter of hate in this – why?

They may no longer allow for playdates or for carpooling. Well, I think it's great that even in New York City, you know, which is a town built, especially the media culture on virtue signaling, that people just don't care. They're waiting in line. They're friends driving by, seeing them waiting in line at Chick-fil-A because chicken trumps politics in my world. Peter, you've been silent.

No, no, Because I'm fascinated. I'm looking at the texts that are going up in the chat room, the Ricochet chat room, and everybody is now posting the location of their favorite Chick-fil-A, the one in West L.A., bluest of the blue in America. The Chick-fil-A in West L.A. is packed all the time. I love this. And it's right across the street from an In-N-Out burger. OK. Well, boys, quite a show from criminal gangs in the Democratic Party to Vladimir Putin. How's that? I've been

practicing up on my Russian, James. To the ever, to the ceaselessly complicated life of James Lilacs. Not bad enough that he has a French brother-in-law. Oh, no, no, no. His daughters, friends, family, lives worry him. No, they don't worry me. I just – there are so many externalities now these days to living a life that you just – you never know where the next dart is coming from. But so far, so good. And we say that because we're wrapping the things up

and we don't want to make any more mistakes. We apologize for nothing this week because it's been all great. We thank the Yeti for keeping the show together. Sometimes it's like the wheels are just spinning off in all directions, but he's there with a crescent wrench and keeps us going down the road. By the way, you're going to want to go to, I'm sorry, what's the name of the site? Oh, Ricochet.com.

That's right. Go to Ricochet and use those coupon codes, join or rejoin, and you'll find yourself back in the thick of it, commenting away as you please. And of course, the podcast was brought to you by Harry's Shave. Oh, the best. Casper's Metris, the best sleep.

And SaneBox.com, the best way to manage your email. All these wonderful opportunities can be yours at reduced prices by using that ever important coupon code Ricochet. And of course, you've got a couple of shekels left over and the seasons are coming for gift giving. The Ricochet store has got full cool Ricochet swag

so I'm just saying. We hope that Rob will be back next week, but if he isn't we'll welcome John because it's always great to have John Gabriel on the podcast. Peter, see you then. And everybody else, we'll see you in the comments at Ricochet 2.0. Thank you, gentlemen. I've got to run because I'm reading John's post, My Weight Loss Secrets Revealed. You provoked it.

You provoked it, Peter. You provoked me by losing all that weight and making everybody else look bad. All the rest of us middle-aged guys. Okay, boys. Next week. Bye-bye. See you. See you. here I don't mean a big reduction in the price of beer

but all the people that you made in your image see them starving on their feet cause they don't get enough to eat from God can't believe in you

Dear God, sorry to I'm needing you. Dear God, sorry to disturb you, but I feel that I should be loud and clear. We all need a big reduction and a mouth to tease. All the people that you made in your image sit around fighting in the street. Because I can't make it in you. Did you make disease and the diamond blue Did you make mankind after we

made you And the devil too Ricochet! Join the conversation. I can't believe.