Dinesh D’Souza on Trump Card Documentary & Democratic Socialism

the biggest threat to america today in my opinion is the domestic loss of confidence in the idea of america how did we get here i mean think about why the soviet union collapsed it was not blown up it collapsed because it lost its morale it lost its reason for being what is the true motive to want to lead american to socialistic ideology they have inculcated in them that capitalism is unjust typically us watching other countries being divided but today it's other countries watching america saying what the hell is going on the same people who say things like trump is a dictator trump is an authoritarian are the kind of people who love trump the false message is believed to be true because of the enormous power of the media who do you really trust on media when i did the obama documentary i was you know taking on the most powerful man in the world a socialist society is a society of misery and tyranny we're gonna have drones monitoring your movements if you don't wear a mask we want your neighbors to kind of call in on you i mean think about this these are the staple moves of a socialist country the only question is when something has been tried 25 times across two-thirds of the world and failed every single time what makes you think it's going to succeed now if america becomes socialistic who wins who loses everybody loses in the end [Music] so my guest today is dinesh de souza he's a new york times bestseller he's written many books at the same time he's produced some extremely controversial documentaries that have done well uh one in 2012 called obama's america which the budget was two and a half million it did 33 plus million dollars another one was 2014 called america imagine the world without her then 2016 was hillary's america then 2018 was death of a nation and the latest documentary that's coming out called trump card which i had a chance to watch myself it's not come out yeah by the time this video comes out hopefully you'll be playing at a theater near you with that being said dinesh thank you so much for being a guest on valuetainment uh my pleasure looking forward to it so dinesh how did we get here you know you're an immigrant i'm an immigrant you came from bombay i came from iran it was a dream for us to come to america i came here with this idea that my life's gonna change the day i come here i remember the day i landed in america was november 28 1990 but it seems like a lot of people who are from here see a different america that you and i see how did america get here i'd begin by saying that the immigrant has a different perspective by virtue of being an immigrant so we've grown up in other cultures and what that means is that when we come to america we use a kind of comparative standard we compare america to the country we came from and we realized that america is very different in some ways quite unique uh it offers possibilities to the ordinary guy that other countries even countries of europe simply don't offer and not to the same degree and so we are excited by this it it makes our journey and the hardships that are involved in making that journey worthwhile even though we have to sort of start again start from scratch um but what we don't realize is that we have come into an america that is divided and that native-born americans have big arguments about america itself now their arguments are more insular because most of these americans have never lived elsewhere they have no basis of comparison they have no other country to uh to measure america against and so what do they do they come up with what i call the utopian standard so the utopian standard is a world for example in which no one has any prejudice no one judges anybody for any reason everybody has not only equal rights under the law but the same opportunities to succeed in life now most people in the world would laugh if you said these things because they know that life is not like that we are all dealt a deck of cards in terms of intelligence and strength and speed and looks and all kinds of things and we accept that as the given of life but the one of the peculiarities of america is that americans don't they pretend that the world can be sort of made anew um and the argument inside of america is something that immigrants are a little startled by because we find americans arguing about questions that aren't even questions in our mind at least not initially and my own work has been caught up in all this i i think that my political views and my perspective very much shaped by the fact that i am an immigrant i started out as an outsider i've now of course lived most of my life in america but i viewed with great interest and excitement uh this internal debate in america about america so what uh what caused you to want to write the uh to want to produce the documentary trump card i mean there seems to be a you you seem like i know you're in april baby my dad's an april baby you seem very systematic in your approach 2012 2014 2016 2018 2020 and it's typically election year where you come out with a documentary it's been going on every two years and then your big ones come out during election year of presidency but why uh go from the title of death of a nation uh or hillary's america in 2016 to now trump card uh to to call the documentary or trump card and have it be around trump yeah it was a decision i had to think about because i have an accompanying book that is out now called united states of socialism and that was the initial kind of working title for the movie uh i think if bernie sanders had been the democratic candidate it would be a natural title for the film when biden got the nomination i began to rethink a little bit now i consider biden to be a creeping socialist whereas bernie is kind of an explicit socialist so biden is moving in the socialist direction it's no secret that he's embraced many of the positions of bernie but there are some americans who don't see him that way so i didn't want to make a film where i say united states of socialism people go what the heck you you know bob biden's not a socialist i also realize that the guy who defines the political debate by the way not just in america but in the world is trump there's something about trump that animates people one way or the other you know in in the play julius caesar shakespeare writes that caesar was the kind of colossus who almost stands astride the entire world it's all about him it's all about caesar and i think right now it's all about trump uh and so trumpcard in that sense i think jumps right kind of with both feet into the middle of the debate and that's why we call the documentary trump card i love the cover by the way your picture on the cover is great but when i was watching it i'm like you know i think this was produced with the thoughts of sanders was going to be the nominee not biden because i love the way this uh uh the the the the flow of stories on how you went about it uh from the original stories to bernie sanders honeymoon in moscow and explaining the gentleman who was latino with conservatives the angles you took it was very very interesting and you know the the some of the characters you brought obviously very very controversial character the gentleman that told his story with barack obama's experience back in the days that got a few people killed and some say that's the biggest conspiracy theory where they don't even give it any credence some say it is but again i like the way you were going about the storytelling but would you say today because the one question i always want to ask people who are in your world and this is what they do for a living they have to you know they study the topic of uh politics economy news what's taking place what is our number one enemy today meaning if i am an immigrant i came to america based on an idea that i saw in movies and what i read in books that you come to america you can have any religion you want you can't be controlled i can start a business i can be a millionaire a billionaire or just a guy that just had a regular job and runs a small liquor shop making 80 grand a year and i get to do whatever i want to do but i control then i can have opinions i don't like the president i like the president and he got a bunch of these amendments that we signed up for that brought us to america what is the biggest threat to america today the biggest threat to america today in my opinion is the uh domestic loss of confidence in the idea of america and in the american dream because to me the american dream and what that um reflects what it represents is the core of america so a dream is really about the future a dream is about a better life for me later than i have now a better life for my children than i had and that is this american sense of things getting better and the second part of that is it includes a dream of responsibility because who's going to make it better you are you're going to be the architect of your own future and that is an exciting idea but for some people it's a little bit of a scary idea the notion that you're in the driver's seat of your own life now when america was founded uh there was uh slavery had been going on on this continent for 150 years uh we forget this because it all seems like it's all in the past but the founding was in 1776 and the british had introduced slavery in the americas more than a hundred years earlier so this is what the american founders were confronted with that slavery was embedded into society it had been supported by the british crown what do you do about it how do you create a union when you have uh states that are meeting in philadelphia and slavery is legal in all of them so the american founders realize if we decide in advance no slavery well no one's gonna join no state will will join the union so the american founders decided look let's create a union that is anti-slavery in principle but that tolerates slavery for a time until we can build the political support to overthrow it that's the american founding that was the architecture of the american founding but the view i'm giving you now is not the mainstream view the mainstream view in the universities that's taught in the schools that comes from the left is that slavery was the poison that has destroyed the american dream why because we've never gotten over it that slavery and the idea of racism that is kind of the cousin of slavery continues to be uh invisibly present inside of every aspect of american life so this is kind of why the george floyd killing was so um created such an uproar why because nobody you know people didn't look at it and they could have looked at it and said listen the lesson of the george floyd killing is that we have a bad cop now maybe there are other bad cops and we got to go find them and get rid of them but of course the solution to bad cops is naturally good cops but you notice that the left didn't go there they went in a completely different direction namely defund the cops you know so the assumption of that is that all cops are bad now how can all cops be bad uh the answer is because american society has this built-in racism that somehow almost like a virus infects all cops um and so this larger narrative i think if it is widely believed by the american people creates an internal demoralization a loss of confidence if you will i mean think about why the soviet union collapsed it didn't actually collapse because it was attacked it was not blown up it was it collapsed because it lost its morale it lost its reason for being same with south africa by the way south africa had this apartheid structure in the 1980s it collapsed because the south africans themselves the white south africans couldn't believe in it anymore uh and i fear that that is a fate that may one day await america but not if not if i have a say about it so so let's talk about that so socialism here's here's a question i got for you i don't know what angle you'll take with this one here is you know one has to believe that even the people today that are running who are campaigning based on some socialistic ideology or philosophies these are not dumb people they know socialism doesn't work i mean it's not like even the people that are supporting socialistic ideology no it doesn't work which means if you're sitting there and saying i'm running to become a president my name is joe biden i think bernie sanders wants socialism i think he thinks it's what it works but i'm not talking about sanders i'm talking about a biden i'm talking about when hillary ran i'm talking about you know elizabeth warren some of these folks know this thing doesn't work aoc she's team sanders fine let's set her aside with sanders if they know it doesn't work and they know that could be one of the biggest threats to america long term what is the motive to get behind it is it just to get their names in the history books to say check i became a president is it because somebody behind closed doors has threatened them that if you don't go behind this campaign or else is it because a soros is trying to lead to an agenda to turn this into a communistic or socialistic nation what i'm trying to find out is they know this doesn't work what is the true motive to want to lead american to socialistic ideology the true motive is that um they are a kind of person that um well let me put it slightly differently america is divided into two kinds of talented people um the entrepreneurial type is the type that makes things uh entrepreneurs by and large create things they build things they they make something new but there's a second type of person uh this person is best represented by the university professor but it's a broader type lawyers are a lot like this clergymen are like this journalists are like this these are kind of people of words you and i are people of words now we don't actually now we do create products i create books i create movies which is a celluloid product but by and large i live in the world of words okay um academics and people who live in the world of words academics and journalists often think that they are the truly smart people they are the most important people in the society and if they look at a guy for example who owns a franchise of let's say 10 mcdonald's or runs a pest control business they consider that guy their social and cultural inferior and yet in a capitalist society in a free market society it may well be the case that a professor of romance languages that say princeton earns 150 000 a year whereas a guy who never finished college and is running a pest control business is pulling in 500 000. so the professor thinks this is outrageous this is in fact an assault on merit people like me are smarter and we should be actually running the society so this is the kind of person who is attracted to socialism not because they're attracted to the full ideology it's not that they embrace the full marxist doctrine of it they just realize that in a planned society which has year plans which has the government running things people like them will be in charge so elizabeth warren for example thinks that she could run the banks better than the banks can run the banks it's simply not true bernie sanders honestly thinks that he can run the energy industry better than all the guys in texas who dig holes in the ground those are guys who get their fingers dirty um they are familiar with technology they know how to get oil out of the ground bernie sanders has absolutely no idea i don't even think he knows what fracking is but somehow he thinks that i'm a smart guy it can't be that hard uh and wouldn't it be better instead of having all these wildcatters running around digging out oil in the ground and hurting the environment doing whatever they want wouldn't it be good to have a rational planning process that governs all of that so these guys in that sense it is the combination of the attraction of power and the honest belief that people like them are better at running this society than the people who are running it now yeah but that still doesn't answer my question what i'm what i'm trying to find out is let's let's focus on a biden and let's focus on obama okay when obama first got elected the threat was oh this guy may be a communist you guys got to be careful because you know his uh father when he wrote the book about his father and you know mother and the influence that he had in his life growing up and van jones when he was first van jones used to be linked to a comment oh my gosh this guy may be a communist i don't want to go any guy got elected okay i mean he did some stuff but obama wasn't as scary as people thought he was going to be right i would say even as somebody that's fiscally conservative registered independent people thought he was going to be a a lot a lot of people were worried about what he was going to do fundamentally changing things now you got a sanders he is fully fundamentally on a complete opposite side aoc fully on a whole different side like bernie sanders probably doesn't think that obama did enough like he should have done this and he should have done that and secretly he probably feels disappointed with the amount of uh social programs that obama came up with or didn't come up with right what i'm trying to what i'm asking here is the following i'm trying to find out for myself and maybe this is a selfish question i'm asking the world knows socialism doesn't work the world knows communism doesn't work the world knows you can't show a product that was developed from that system even all these countries like russia and china eventually said dude we got to get to this capitalism system to get people to own businesses and have identity and all this other stuff what is the motive to get the only country left in the world that's the leading country in the philosophy of capitalism if this thing goes a lot are going to follow why why would you drive the initiative of socialism knowing that doesn't work what is the motive behind that it's got to be more than the professor's thinking the fact that the plumber's making 500 000 without a degree it's got to be bigger than that what's the motive it operates on many levels that that's just one level here's another level you've got all these young people and they are uh they are actually living in the middle of technological capitalism but they're a little bit like the fish that is not really conscious of the water because the water is all around them so their world includes uber and iphones and airbnb and gps now none of this would have come without technological capitalism right if you had left it up to the post office for example they probably wouldn't even have thought of overnight mail it took outside age private companies like ups and fedex and then then the post office goes oh wow you know even though the airplane's been around for 100 years you know we can still do that we can do it now so they got but no innovation comes out of government per se or very little um but for a lot of young people they take all this for granted they never think about how did they how did all these things come to be they didn't magically fall out of the sky what is the system that produced them they don't think about that rather what they think about is simply this they they have and i think their professors are very complicit in this have inculcated in them the honest belief that capitalism is unjust and in fairness i have to say that the defenders of capitalism don't do a good job in explaining why it is just not just why it is efficient just so for example if a guy makes something uh let's just say let's just take me as an author for example now if i write a book and i publish it and it happens to be during the great depression and nobody buys the book the book is let's say a failure and then 10 years later the economy recovers and is doing better and i issue the same book and it's a massive success think about it's the same book in terms of the merit of it i've released the same product but in one environment it's unsuccessful in another environment i'm a millionaire so the ordinary guy looking at that goes well how can a system be just when the same product in two different environments produces a completely different outcome so this what happens is young people are raised to believe that there's something completely arbitrary about the rewards of capitalism and therefore they become vulnerable to the argument hey why don't we have a different organization maybe socialism in the old sense doesn't work but it is partly you know the american optimism that says we can find a way that's going to make it work we're going to find a way that will leave all the problems of the past behind and so for example one common thing you hear politicians say is we don't want authoritarian socialism you know we don't want the socialism of mao and lenin and stalin we're not going there we want democratic socialism and so if you listen to aoc or bernie sanders they almost never use the word socialism without the adjective democratic yes why because they believe that democracy this idea of popular consent gives more legitimacy to the idea of socialism so they're trying to create in in fairness they're trying to create something of a new type of socialism that hasn't existed before the only question is when something has been tried not once or twice but 25 times across virtually two-thirds of the world and failed every single time what makes you think it's going to succeed now well so okay so socialism capitalism if america becomes socialistic who wins who loses well everybody loses in the end because a socialist society is a society of misery and tyranny um the this seems a little hard for americans to believe my wife is from venezuela and so she talks about how in venezuela today if you walk into grocery stores and this has been true now for almost 20 years the grocery store is completely empty uh all it has is like a hundred bottles of ketchup empty shelves uh so even if you have money you can't buy anything now if i were to say this to americans they they give me a funny look like this is this is ridiculous this is hard to believe but interestingly under coronavirus we just got a little small preview on a temporary basis of what socialism would look like on a permanent basis and the other thing we saw in the coronavirus was a kind of this is the beginning of an attack on civil liberties and by that i mean things like we're going to have drones monitoring your movements if you don't wear a mask we want your neighbors to kind of call in on you i mean think about this is these are the staple moves of a socialist country you know report on your parents uh and you'd never think you'd see this in america but we've seen little glimmers of it in america in the last several months yeah and you're seeing uh the exit is taking place right now with elon musk saying listen i'm gonna move my tesla corporation and build the trucks and all these other things out of austin and even a podcaster like rogan said i'm just leaving austin myself as well i'm not going to stay here i'm going to go out there and you know whatever part of texas that rogan's going to be moving to but he's leaving california because they're both extremely frustrated what's going on with california you know the the concept of capitalism is two things becomes the enemy the few protected by the majority minority protected by the few so if you're part of the few that's creating the jobs and you're very wealthy and you've done very well you can be bullied by the majority how are the few protected by the majority i guess the question i'm trying to ask is the following so in a sales organization and a company that expands sometimes companies that are in sales they flatten out because they want to recognize everybody because they're afraid of losing sales people so for example imagine i'm running a real estate company i got a 100 realtors i have to say well you know johnny's also doing good bobby's also doing good great job larry great job jackie great job mary and competition goes away so then the guy that's killing it he's doing 20 50 of the production he said i'm going somewhere else because i need the proper recognition but sometimes the 82 agents who are not the top producers complaining about the one guy can drive the one guy away to say i can't be here you guys are not realizing i'm here six a.m i'm leaving nine i'm working on the weekends you guys are not you're bringing in two deals a month i'm bringing in 10 deals a month how can i be protected here my question for you is this the few who are willing to work their tails off and create jobs and constantly innovate and take this to the next level how are they protected by the majority in america so they aren't and i think you've now touched on maybe the heart of the problem and it applies by the way way beyond the economy it applies in politics it applies in in every high school when i was in school uh we had in in this was in india i was in high school in india i went to college in the united states we had a system of ranking which literally meant that in my class which had 50 students in it they would give you grades and they would tell you who's first in class and who's second and third all the way to fifty so the dumbest guy in class knew that he was the dumbest because he was number fifty right did everybody dates like that i think still today it's like that now uh the point i wanna make is this naturally a system like this produces discontent among all the people who are at the bottom and if a teacher were to come along and say listen i want to abolish this ranking system i in fact i don't want to have any grades at all everybody's going to get the same grade all the people who are in the middle and the bottom are in support of that system because it benefits them it does not benefit the people who work hard and get better ranks and grades because their achievement is devalued and so here's the question to ask which group is bigger the people at the top who are doing well or the larger number who would much rather pull the standard down and the answer is the larger number it's always bigger now in a school which is run by let's just say an enlightened group of of educators they're going to say listen we need to keep some form of a ranking system we may not have necessarily exact ranks but we need grades we need certain forms of distinction so people are motivated to work hard same with the corporation in a profit-making company the ceo is going to say i don't care if jill and tom and dick and harry feel demoralized i need to encourage salesmen who are going to actually make the sale i need to create an environment where everyone has a chance but the people who succeed are recognized now here's the point in politics however it's the opposite you were asking earlier about people like biden so it's dawned upon people like biden and people like elizabeth warren that the people who truly create wealth is a small group in society whereas the people who actually want more of that wealth that would rather see the wealth spread around is a larger group in society so if to put it differently the the writer bernard shaw once said any government that robs peter to pay paul can always count on paul's vote and so interestingly our politicians have figured out you take an elon musk what if i were to say let's just take away half of his money and give it to 10 000 people who will then be the beneficiaries of that obviously there's one guy who's going to be opposed elon musk and they're going to be 10 000 people who go yeah give it give it that's a more just system i vote for that so in although this is a very crude example in some ways it captures the heart of what democratic socialism is all about it's all about confiscating from the wealth creators and giving to people who are not as well off not because they're needy not because of social justice but because that's how you get their political support so what can the few do to be protected by the majority the few incredibly have only one defense in a democratic society i mean from the founders point of view there's a constitutional defense so the constitution was set up so that the majority cannot raid the few but the problem is that even our constitution is open to interpretation and so our constitution has not proved as strong a barrier to people confiscating wealth in this way so the bottom line is the few can only do one thing they have to convince the many that this is not a good thing so in other words the few have got to convince the american people that a mass ripoff of the few it will ultimately hurt the many also yeah so not easy to do yeah not easy to do because the many have an immediate gain by rating the few and the few have to make an argument that's kind of a long-term argument that listen if you come and rob my house i'm not going to want to make new stuff and there aren't going to be new innovations and new products and ultimately you will suffer uh but the many if you're short-sighted are not going to look at that and go wait a minute i'd like to get the free stuff in the beginning i'll worry about the other problem later that's that's a tough argument to win for the few though because the the few have to you have to realize the majority are not turned on by the words of responsibility accountability you know you have the choice to change your life and make it better that's unattractive to a big community you know the the you know i have i was having a conversation with one of our guys yesterday and we're having lunch and this guy's in real estate and he tells me about one of the guys who he worked with whom i've known for 20 years and i've watched this guy one of the most talented guys i've ever seen in my life and he was a talented bunch of the friends maybe even more talent than everybody and then everybody but he always used the challenges he faced in his life with his mom with his dad with his family with his girlfriend with his wife with everybody on why he's not winning it was always an element of blaming somebody else and what was a very proven tactic was constantly crying and getting people to feel guilty for him feel bad for him and it was a mechanism to say man that's why i feel so bad for him i feel so bad for him i feel so bad for him and most people don't have a rebuttal to that i don't know what to say i don't know and then i just sat down with this guy and i said listen man you fooled people your entire life how difficult your life's been i just have to tell you man your life has not has been as difficult as that guy as this guy's as that how come they're winning and we're all friends how can you say that what can i say no i say i just think you're finding in out to validate why you're not willing to be held accountable work hard and be responsible that's a lot of pressure on you you want to be able to have an out and you don't like that kind of stuff and that friction of just dealing direct you know he doesn't like that kind of a conversation i don't think uh i think there's a community that doesn't want somebody to say it's your fault i don't i don't think there's a community that wants to say why don't you do something about it why don't you pick up a book and read about it so again i'm thinking long term i'm thinking if you're creating an environment of wanting to develop disciplined people what are you going to do you're always going to have a community that's going to say it's not fair you're making too much money you're doing this you're doing that how does the few get protected by these guys by the way going back to the indian system uh india system of one to fifty how how did it work out are they still doing it and if it is what was the energy was everybody like oh my gosh i'm ranked 29th i'm gonna try to beat this guy on b27 what was it like did they work better together did they not work together was it more individualistic did people team up together to do homework together to me in the top five how did that dynamic work well when i was in school you know like any system it had mixed effects it's true that there were some people at the very bottom and they're like i don't care you know in other words many of them would say i don't care about school i want to i just come to school to play marbles in recess or i come to school to play cricket i don't care about academics etc uh i when i was um young i was typically in the group that was fifth or sixth in class um so i was a smart kid but i wasn't that smart i wasn't at the top of my class and i remember i once went to my dad and i said you know look at these guys who are who are one two and three i said are they a lot smarter than me because i i don't seem to i'm not even close to being able to catch them and my dad goes well you know son they they actually work a lot harder than you do and i go well you know i study for an hour or two a day after school he goes that's it he goes they study for four to five hours a day after school after school in addition to school and i was initially i thought my dad was joking and so i talked to these guys who were my friends and i kind of kind of asked them these questions and i realized my dad was right they worked twice as hard as i did so this motivated me and i go okay that's it you know i'm going to improve my study habits this is ridiculous um so i began to compete so i know in my own case my psychology was such that having a system that was competitive not competitive in a mean-spirited way just competitive in the sense that they they take all your grades and all your your school marks as they call them and they add them up so there's no there's no subjectivity in it either your first or your second or your third this is simply a math kind of a math phenomenon and i be and i realized i had to work harder and immediately i began to see my scores improve and and being able to come to america was the result of that effort i would not have been chosen as an exchange student to come to america if i didn't if i wasn't motivated to pull myself up into the top ranks of my class that helped me get the scholarship to get to america which helped me to go to an ivy league college and help build my career so my point is the motivation to succeed i think is very important and we don't want to lose that in america in the name of sort of coddling the self-esteem of everybody is that how the system's always been in india or is that a recent thing no i think it's been that way for a long time now under the british when india was a colony of the british the british had a meritocratic system for the indians but it had a sort of a you could call it the colonial ceiling you know we talk about the glass ceiling so an indian could rise but only so far you could be a civil servant but you can't rise above a certain level and this is actually what created a lot of discontent a lot of the indian independence leaders came out of that they hit that ceiling and they were like ouch and then they realized listen we have to create a different society so the british in a way were really stupid because had they created a system where the indians could keep rising this would have allowed the indian independence leaders themselves to rise within the british system one of those leaders wrote a book years and years ago called the unbritishness of british rule in india and his argument was that the british are not applying their own principles of merit and freedom and openness and opportunity they're not letting the indians if you will have a piece of the pie and he was saying that that's all we're asking the british to do be more british allow us to have some of the same opportunities you make available to your own countrymen but the british wouldn't do it and i think this is part of the reason they got kicked out by the way that's just fascinating period i know it has nothing to do with your documentary or what the work you do is no wonder india is producing some of the best engineers around the world on at iit and 40 000 kids apply and barely any of them get into the school it's such a competitive environment i was there a couple years ago i spoke at iit with the arundati bacharia and divyang turaki a bunch of these other uh billionaires and i had a great time i just i got tours i went to the slums i went all over the place and the one spirit i did feel was a lot of competition and anytime i feel a spirit of competition you just know the future looks bright if there's a lot of competition because innovation is going to be taking place uh thank you for sharing that with us you know the one thing you mentioned your wife being venezuelan and you know in the documentary i believe you and her were speaking to one of the best uh marksmen that we have and she was incredible at the way uh uh at what she was doing they were telling a story about how hugo chavez and venezuela had a tv show i still can't believe that tv show did he really have a tv show where he would go around in the city cameras following him he would take apartments away in homes away and give it to poor people is that really a tv show that he had yes the the theme that we develop in the movie is we show the parallels between venezuelan socialism and some of the approaches to socialism that the left is pursuing in america and one of those of course is to demonize the rich uh and to expropriate expropriate simply means to confiscate to take away the possessions of the rich now in america we proposed to do this elizabeth warren bernie sanders they proposed to do this through confiscatory taxation so very high tax rates and unbelievably you have people in america talking about tax rates of 70 75 which think about it means you make a dollar you keep 25 cents and you give them the rest and that's only federal taxation now in venezuela it's a little bit more blunt or blatant and so ugo chavez who um now dead but ugh is the former dictator he's now succeeded by his vice president maduro ugo chavez had a television show called hello presidente uh hello mr president and you'd see him walking down the street and he'd have a bunch of aids with him and he'd say listen you know take a look at that story who owns that one and the aides would go oh you know that's that's some jews they they own it he goes okay expropriate it and literally his guys would go in the store and throw the people out right then right there uh and then he'd say what about that store who owns that who owns that business and they'd say well that's one of your political opponents expropriate it so they go in there throw the people out so this kind of thing is in a way you could almost call it the the true face of socialism uh now no one in america will want to do it this way why because it looks bad um if you have democratic socialism you've got to convince the people that you are on the site on the side of truth and justice and the american way so if you do any bad stuff you've got to do it behind closed doors um but it's the same thing it's expropriating the hard-earned money and wealth of other people it represents their blood sweat and tears abraham lincoln by the way put it beautifully 150 years ago he summarized it this way you work and i eat and he was actually talking about slavery and lincoln said that the essence of slavery is it's theft one guy does the work and another guy steals the product of his labor but what lincoln might have been very disheartened to realize is it's still going on you know uh uh the i have a big community of venezuela's in the company i was trying to reach out to maduro to do an interview with him and you know was very technical i believe his opponent the president i always have a hard time pronouncing this name gaido uh gaido that i said right yeah he agreed and we were trying to orchestrate a meeting together but uh the part that you know concerns me is here's a bunch of venezuelans who left venezuela who don't believe in what maduro and hugo chavez did these are regular people that wanted to have a better career they love their country they love their land but they come here and they're supporting many of the same candidates who have similar belief system as they did there now i'm not saying everybody you you and i both know it's not everybody yes for every 100 story i got 20 stories of people that say i just want business i want i'm at this i know all those stories but the majority of them even though they escaped socialism even though they escaped the motto that they had they still somehow are loyal to it why do you think that is i think that the majority of venezuelans probably see the light in other words they recognize they recognize the signs of socialism here they it looks all too familiar to them and they immediately rebel against it but you are quite right that there are some including some powerful um venezuelans who don't see it at all now part of the reason they don't see it is they are making the wrong type of comparison to let's give you an idea there have been riots that have been going on in several american cities right now uh people setting fire to the federal building in portland and so what does the government do well first of all the us government is in its usual fashion extremely tolerant of all this if you try to do this in india you would get shot i mean there's no question that by this time they would have called out the military and people would be getting shot so very few countries will put up with this but now but in america you do so the police are basically shooting pepper and putting in you know a tear gas spray but they're not harming the rioters they're letting the riders do what they do um but from the optical point of view what do you see and let's say you're a venezuelan in america you see a country in which the regime the government is unleashing the cops uh on these protesters now the protesters are left-wingers many of them are socialists but if you are to ask yourself which is you know which is the government and which is the protesters they identify with the protesters because they think oh wow in venezuela the people who are protesting the regime are the anti-socialists they don't realize that in america you know the situation is flipped that what's really going on is that the socialists are the ones doing writing they're breaking the law and they're not breaking the law because anybody's oppressing them no one's done anything to them it's not like in it's not like in venezuela where the regime is taking their wealth taking their homes confiscating their property you know none of that's going on these are people who want to create some sort of revolutionary overthrow of the system uh we're trying to impose law and order but for a venezuelan they could basically say well look that's the maduro regime that's the chavez regime unleashing the cops and the protesters so this is a i think a complete misunderstanding of what's going on and that's the downside of being an immigrant sometimes when you're an immigrant and you haven't been here long enough and you haven't paid close attention you're going to make a quick analogy between what happened over there and what happened over here and suddenly you're going to say things like oh you know the trump administration are the mullahs you know and so you haven't thought through the ways in which america is a different kind of society and protest has a different meaning here yeah it's going to be very interesting because uh most of them that i know uh they're hard workers they're good people family oriented conservative beliefs you know they want the right values and principles they just kind of want to be left alone to go to work but i can't comprehend how they don't see some of the philosophies that some of these politicians are having by the way you'll hear the saying you know we want scandinavian model of socialism not necessarily what happened with venezuela what what are some things that we don't know about the scandi scandinavian socialistic philosophy that i think will shock people once they find out how the model really works i think there are a couple of uh points that need to be made here because the scandinavian model is the only socialism that you'd have to say to some degree it does work um i don't claim that the scandinavian model is a failure it works if you are willing to accept its strength and its weakness now its strength is that the scandinavians are capitalist in creating wealth although they are socialist and distributing it so this is an important distinction because in creating wealth the scandinavians are not socialists they don't like in in venezuela one of the first things that maduro did was he appointed socialist bureaucrats to run the venezuelan oil company now venezuela is the largest oil reserves in the world more than saudi arabia but it takes technical expertise to get that oil out why because it's in the orinoco oil belt it's a certain type of thick oil that has to be liquefied before you can sell it in the world it takes a lot of technical expertise is my point uh chavez fired all the technical experts and brings in like bernie sanders types you know to run the oil company well needless to say he runs the oil company into the ground it hardly produces any oil anymore um now the scandinavians don't do that the scandinavians are a very entrepreneurial society they encoura look at all the scandinavian companies that are doing well in the world so they have low corporate taxes they have no minimum wage you can hire and fire people for any reason they have less regulation than in europe and in america um they don't have any of these um no no inheritance tax i think norway is the only scandinavian country that has a wealth tax so overall and the scandinavians do not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs now they do have a big welfare state but they make everybody pay for it they have what's called the vat tax that is the value added tax 25 on consumption and remember that a vat tax any economist will tell you falls heavier on the middle class and on the poor than it does on the rich because middle class and poor people spend more of their money more higher explain that can you can you explain that so so if i'm making four thousand dollars a month versus i'm making fifty thousand dollars a month why does the vet the uh tax the consumption tax hurt the four thousand dollars a month versus a fifty thousand dollar a month person because if you're making four thousand dollars a month you're going to spend probably two to three thousand dollars a month on consumption items you needed to live uh and so as a result you're paying 25 of a tax on that now the rich guy is probably spending more than you but he's probably spending five to six thousand dollars a month on consumption so he's paying more in dollar terms but proportionately he's paying a lot less because he spends a smaller fraction of his money on consumption that's why the tax falls heavier on their lower classes i think it's very important for people to realize it because even the scandinavian economist explained that in your documentary to say that you if you if you decide to come here yes it may be socialism but it hurts the lower income people more than it does to higher income people because you're paying a consumption tax much higher than the others and that was very good visual that was given there for people to know the math on how it works now the socialism that sanders and aoc are pitching and presenting are they presenting a socialism of that model and can it work in u.s if not why not well it would work in the u.s i think to a degree if you were honest about it so for example in scandinavia if you make sixty thousand dollars in norway or sweden you pay a fifty percent tax rate so it's really simple you make sixty thousand dollars or seventy thousand dollars write a check for thirty five thousand dollars and send it in now no democratic politician in the united states will stand up and say this to the american people because they know that the american people would have a heart attack if you were to tell them that they have to send half their income straight off the top into federal taxes so what they do is they have a different model i call it the millionaires and billionaires model they tell the american people we're going to give you all these welfare state benefits but here's the good news you don't have to pay why because we're going to catch these other guys these millionaires and billionaires and what's kind of funny about this too by the way if you look at the early bernie sanders he always railed against millionaires and billionaires but then when he became a millionaire he stopped suddenly he only talks about billionaires so if you listen to him now he rarely says millionaires why because he has three homes so any millionaire program would apply to him so what he's done is he's ratcheted it up and so now he's giving the people the illusion that look i'll catch people like elon musk i'll catch people like jeff bezos i'll make them pay for your house i'll make them pay for your college education so ultimately this is not the scandinavian model the scandinavian model is don't demonize the rich don't demonize us successful we are all in the same boat if we want to have welfare state benefits the cost of that has got to be distributed over the whole society yeah it would be very interesting now here's a question for you uh dinesh you got a family i i saw your daughter in there i think you have three kids one of your own a two-step but you have three kids of your own um the question i like to ask when we're having lunch with our guys is you know my family left iran we went to germany if germany was so amazing we wouldn't have come to america we would have just stayed in germany because germany's opportunity was great but my family decided to bring us to america what needs to happen in america for you to say you know what i'm out what needs to happen in america for you to say i'm out and if it does get to that point where would you go to that would be a second option to america well um i don't know where i would go to and i've probably come along enough in life that i i wouldn't make the move uh i would stay in america in part because i think that america would is still kind of worth fighting for so even if america in my view kind of went down i would probably still stay on the ship now um and i would do it in pure gratitude for what the country has just done for my life over most of my life i do see an attack on the very principles that i came to america to be part of so in some sense there's an attack on that america and um and i'm worried about america because the american dream is fragile it's fragile in the sense that it it relies upon people who believe in it the founders said something very interesting i think it might have been uh ben franklin uh or madison i don't remember now but they said something the effect that that the american republican form of government relies upon the moral character of the people and if that moral character is eroded or lost then the system doesn't really work now by moral character here they're not talking about religious views and they're not talking about theological beliefs they're talking about things like the work ethic they're talking about things like the the centrality of family and and the family as an incubator of those human values we learn more in the in the educational institution called the family than we learn even in school so the founders thought that this infrastructure is really important for the country to continue to be successful that's what made america successful but we have to keep those institutions to be successful in the future i think that the verdict is kind of up in the air which is to say i i wouldn't bet sort of one way or the other uh but i continue to have confidence and that america will pull through well so so just to push back a little bit then what my interpretation of what you're saying is that all these documentaries that make someone be afraid of what's going on with america they shouldn't really be that concerned because even the executive producer a person that's making all these documentaries doesn't think it's going to get that bad where you would want to move your family elsewhere is that a fair assessment well the problem for moving is is twofold one is i feel like a patriotic obligation not to do that but the second is i also don't know where to go because uh when you when you say that the term american exceptionalism refers to what's unique about america so let's talk about what that is for a minute you know um when my mom um now dad but when my mom was in her 70s she came to visit america we were driving um on the highway and she saw a sign on the side of the road adopt a highway and my mom looked at it and she was like what is that adopt a highway what are they talking about and i go well you know it's this program in america where a private group um the rotary club or some group can adopt the highway and they agree to clean the highway and kind of keep maintain the highway and my mom was like why would anyone do that she couldn't understand why anybody would think of adopting a highway what nothing could be more ridiculous to her than the concept of adopting a so there's something in the american character that takes on this public obligation of cleaning a street a road uh and private individuals are willing to devote time to do that that's a very american thing you know or if you take a typical american family with three kids it's not surprising that one guy is um you know working as a engineer in google uh and another guy is selling real estate and a third guy is pumping gas at a gas station now think about that in india if you said that people would give you a funny look like how strange in the same family are you telling me one guy is in the upper mobile class and the other guy's pumping gas but in america that's normal in america it's normal for people's fate to be completely different even though they come from the same family they're in the same they've had the same upbringing and the same socialization um so in america you have mobility people move up the ladder but people also move down the ladder and uh so all of these are the distinctive characteristics of america now you don't find them even in europe i'm very familiar with europe i'm very familiar with indians in europe so an asian indian who's in london will tell me things like you know i'm very successful but i can even but i'll always be a pakistani i'll always be an indian in london in other words i can't actually become an englishman i mean i can say i am but i'm not going to be i'm not going to feel 100 british but i feel 100 american and that tells me that america allows the outsider a full membership which other countries don't offer in other words it's difficult for a turk to become a german for an algerian to become a frenchman for a pakistani to become an englishman uh and again that's that's something unique about america so if we lose that where am i going to go and become a full member of that club i can't do that in new zealand i'm tempted to go some to some far away place but i don't know what faraway place would would recreate if you will what i came to america to experience is there any possibility that america can lose all of those things that you just talked about i think that that possibility is low but it is not um it is not zero um and what that means is that that's you know you were mentioning the documentaries i make the films in order to to fight the trend i make the films in order to educate people uh for most of my career i was a writer and a speaker and then i realized i'm reaching a fairly large circle my books are selling well or best sellers and so on but i'm only reaching a certain type of person uh when i make a movie i stand in the back of the theater and i see all kinds of guys in there whom i would never see like waiting to buy a book in barnes noble so the the beauty of movies is that they uh reach a wider audience but also a movie appeals to the head and the heart uh when you said earlier that you know that i tell these stories that's what a movie is a movie is a narrative which tells stories that help people not only to understand but also to see for themselves uh what the world is like and what the world can be like yeah but what i'm saying is if if a hillary clinton would have been elected in 2016 instead of a trump it's fair to say you wouldn't been pardoned and for that twenty thousand dollar thing that you were arrested for and you got a felony for and they have it on your wikipedia which many others have done and no no one's ever gotten arrested and gotten a felony for you'll probably still be doing time which means the next time around that a person who is against trump's camp is elected you're probably going back to prison so so the and again i'm i'm just saying i'm only saying this to say then that makes other people who are wanting to be vocal about making content and documentaries to say i don't want to go to prison i'm okay let somebody else like the next take the responsibility and if he's willing to go do time forward more power to him i don't want to do it i'm going to be okay living my regular life so it's a form of shutting people up so you know maybe the question will be a different kind of a question to ask you say dinesh is not the millionaire today say dinesh hasn't produced many different documentaries three of them which have done 10 million plus dollars which if i'm a business guy looking at your stuff the only one that broke even is death of a nation everything outside of that you're bringing back a minimum of 150 percent to uh 1200 percent return on money so somebody gives you a hundred thousand dollars for the documentary i'm making somewhere between 250 000 to 1.5 million dollars if you come to me as an investor to invest into your documentary you kind of know what you're doing only one of them broke even right that's your history three out of four have been profitable so if you're not today's dinesh if you're the 32 year old dinesh with 28 000 in your checking account i don't know what you had at 30 times just kind of put things into uh numbers out there if you're the 32 you're trying to find your way you haven't yet broken the mold people don't yet know you you're working very hard you got some money here and there but less than a hundred thousand dollars and if if crap were to hit the fan would you consider if all the basic values that brought me and you here would you consider leaving and looking at other options well i would i would think twice about um going into um making these kinds of documentaries because they strike directly at very powerful people and um and i probably didn't realize when i did the obama documentary that i was you know taking on the most powerful man in the world i mean i knew it in the abstract but i didn't know what the ramifications of it are and by that i mean i'm not even just talking about obama but somebody for example could be sitting in the justice department this would be the holder justice department and go you know that guy just made a film that bashes the boss why don't we start looking at his tax returns why don't we see if we can get his bank statements and see if we can find something in there that he did that we can go after him for let's teach him a lesson and the lesson is exactly not even for him because he probably will get a good lawyer he'll probably be able to figure out a way the lesson is for all the young dinesh's out there to send none the message so the important thing here is this by the way i know i've always known that if you make this kind of a film in india you will get your legs broken okay so if i were to make a film about the most powerful man in india uh i would have to be very careful to make sure that goons wouldn't come to my house and and break my legs if not kill me um but um many people have the belief and i did too that that won't happen in america that in america you can take on the most powerful guy and you can say whatever you want and you can say it in the public square and there's free speech in this country and sure if you did something wrong the government will go after you but you're going to get the same penalty as anyone else who did the same thing so let's just say for example you're speeding on the highway yes you're going to get a fine but it's not fair they try to put you in jail for two years because you exceeded the speed limit that's not equal justice under the law and that's kind of my complaint about my case is not that i did exceed the campaign finance law but i didn't get a penalty that is commensurate with what i did with what other people have gotten for doing that so that's the point is it's been disheartening to see that in at least in the political sphere equal justice under the law sometimes gets pushed aside uh and fighting to restore that is to me one of the greatest priorities that we have now so you don't have another country like you wouldn't say singapore or panama or anything else you've not done the investigation to know if there was a second or third option for america like you know how time magazine does a article in 2012 and it's a united states of texas i think it's a title of the arctic i don't remember the exact title maybe united states of texas and it shows the fact that uh for every two people that go to texas from california one comes from texas to cal uh california you know two go from california texas one come from texas to california they're showing all this data and why people are leaving california okay so then that led to a lot of other lists here's the top stage to be in usa today there's an article the war state on american taxes is california 50 50th place 42nd is new york best is tennessee florida ranks here texas is eight and you're seeing all these lists well a business owner is going to sit there and say why am i going to stay in california pay the 13.3 or the 15 on pain over here i'm going to go to texas i'm going to go to florida i'm going to go to a different place i think the part where we're getting close to is competition creates opportunity and if competition creates opportunity i do think the days of students come into america and taking classes and getting a degree and the days of wanting to stay and not leave have gone to let me take what i learned here back to my country it's no longer oh my gosh let me stay here a lot of people around the world are concerned about if america is going to stay the same or not because they're just watching a level of division it's typically us watching other countries being divided but today it's other countries watching america saying what the hell is going on over there with the level of division that's why i ask you the question what would be some of the other alternatives if america if the idea of america didn't work where would someone go to well it's a completely um different question to ask me um you know when i have uh i'm now in my 50s i've got family here as to put the same question to sort of 17 year old dinesh you know so if i was if i go back to when i first came to america and there are a lot of indians who are in that position now and as you say a much larger percentage of them go back why well partly because india got rid of socialism india moved away from socialism india today is is one of the most pro-american countries in the world um you talk to an ordinary indian on the street what do they like about the world they like america they like what america stands for they're trying to bring that to india india is trying to have the american dream not the indian dream there's no indian dream but the american dream so a lot of indians feel that in this atmosphere where i have my own culture my own cuisine of chicken tikka masala my family my neighbors why would i make that journey and go someplace else i'd rather get educated there if i have to but i'll i'll come back home so i understand and respect that choice my brother works for a shipping company that's based in singapore it's a nice life in singapore uh if you want to be you know follow the law and be anonymous and have a prosperous life and have nobody interfere with you now political dissent is a little problematic but if you stay out of politics and do your own thing you can have a nice life in singapore no doubt about it um but uh it's not a choice for me but the very fact that we're having this kind of discussion is kind of telling i don't think we would have had this discussion 25 years ago because there would be no such debate we would we would recognize that america is is unique and does certain things and we'd recognize that if we want those things there's no better place to be than america but the very fact that we're questioning it now suggests to me that we have seen some erosion of that american dream it'd be interesting for a state in america to say look you guys are going a direction we don't want to go to we're just going to distance ourselves and you know be our own country and uh you know for example a state like texas to say we're just kind of going to do our thing we don't know what the hell you guys are thinking about let us separate before things get a little bit weirder here but uh yeah i think people i think people are starting to ask options about alternatives today and i think it's a very important thing for everybody on the left and the right to realize that some people are going to consider leaving and some of them are going to be the job creators in a country around the world just like america because i think the idea of capitalism only lasts about 100 years here's what i mean by when when a person becomes rich you create wealth i'm your kid say i learned all your hard work hypothetically so i watched that and my dad worked his tail off he was oh my gosh it was constantly working fine i pick up some of it one of your kids is gonna resent you maybe you weren't around he was never on my practice he was never so you're gonna have one your kids that's gonna resent you and one of your kids is gonna go and work as hard as you but the grandkids or the great grandkids one of them is going to say i don't want to work like you i don't care about being a millionaire i don't care about all that other stuff and they're going to be have everything handed to them then eventually the concept of hard work and you know industrious and all this other stuff goes away because somebody eventually got the handouts in the family the grain kid or the great grandkid that gets the handout screws up the entire legacy of the family right i look at that if america was a family you know the original founders created this great country and all this other stuff and that money capital hasn't worked 100 years 250 years from 1903 1910 1920 now we're like well let us use the money let's introduce taxes all this other stuff so i don't know i don't know what direction this is going to go you know the one thing i do want to ask you about is i had john perkins on yesterday i don't know if you know who john perkins is he's the author of the economic hit man maybe you remember the first book that he wrote economic hitman sold a few million copies in 39 different languages and he wrote the new one and i had him on i asked him a lot of different questions i said what's the business model of what you did as an economic hit man when you worked for a company that worked directly with the nsa here's what he said he said i would go to a country that had natural resources and here's what i would do number one we'd set up a meeting with the pm or the ministry of finance he says we'd have the meaning number two i tell them look i represent xyz how about if i go to world bank and i raise five billion dollars it's a loan to you with that loan we get gmg whoever whatever big company to come and build a plant here and create jobs for you you pay that 5 billion loan and on top of that any of your kids if they want to go to harvard yale brown will receive them we'll give them full ride scholarship don't worry about it and we'll give this much money to your brother to your cousin to your sister will take care of them then they say very interesting then they say by the way if you say no to this i just want to remind you what happened to john doe the leader of indonesia and to such and such the leader of colombia look what happened to these i'm just not saying we're going to do that to you but look what happened to them because they said no so what would you like to do then the person's coordinator saying okay i'll do it the two people that said no to him they were killed everybody else said yes to him then eventually they come in they build the infrastructure the country's paying the loan they default on the loan then the country comes in and says we're going to take away your oil we're going to take away this and we get the resources right that's what he calls the economic hitman okay the question i asked is how much of that business model is being used from a china to people like mcconnell and biden how much of a model like that is being used of economic hitmen that are coming and saying we'll give you one and a half billion dollars to this venture capital fund and pay 50 000 a month on xyz or we understand your wife's father owns a big construction company you know wink wink just don't bash us a lot leave us alone let us do what we're doing how much of that is being used today against american politicians not the other way around well the answer is um a lot and we see this um this is what the ukraine scandal was all about involving the biden family think about it we're not even dealing with russia or china we're dealing with a small country ukraine and what does ukraine do the moment that joe biden has made the point man for ukraine the ukrainian energy company called barisma immediately puts hunter biden his son on the board and starts paying hunter biden and his partner a hundred thousand dollar eighty three 000 a month 83 000 and this is a guy with no background in energy no background in the ukraine so what's going on here is that in other countries where corruption by the way is is normal they realize that when you are dealing with america you cannot give money to joe biden because if you give money to joe biden he has to declare it he's under all kinds of of requirements to declare but his brother james biden is not his other brother frank biden is not and his son hunter biden is not so other countries are smart enough to figure out listen don't do deals with joe biden it's going to be corrupt and we're going to be involved in a major corruption scandal do deals with family members of american politicians obviously we can then expect favorable treatment from those politicians so this is a very dirty business um and part of the reason they get away with it is that the american politicians are willing to play along and so we've seen in america politicians grow enormously rich from politics this never used to be the case by the way i mean fdr was a rich man so were the kennedys but nobody would claim that uh you know that jimmy carter got rich from politics nobody would claim that that um ronald reagan got rich from politics or even truman but we have seen the net worth of the clintons basically went from zero to 200 million dollars of the bidens zero to a hundred million dollars al gore has a hundred million dollars and again the point to make is that you know it's one thing if these guys started a business they made a product that no one thought of they were very successful with some new innovation but no they've done none of this they've produced nothing what they've done is they have sold access to their political connections and they're making they're doing it for a big wad of cash so this is an example of how america is now becoming more like the rest of the world which is to say corruption is a normal way of doing business the business of politics let me ask you this other question so which is kind of along the lines of that uh uh there are assassinations which is a kennedy a lincoln an attempt on reagan and uh uh one many many years ago that most people don't know about it's been four of them three of them successful one of them wasn't right there is the you know various uh traditional when i say traditional is what's happened it's assassination you come you take someone's life and boom this person's too controversial lincoln you're not allowing us to make money you're hurting us because these slaves are allowing us to do a lot of other things listen we don't like you you're the first republican president we got to take this guy out uh hey john f kennedy we kind of don't like what you're doing and you guys want to go from oil standard to gold standard and feds and all this other stuff look you're gonna hurt a lot of us we're not cool with that we got to do something over here hey you know ronald reagan what are you doing with all this other stuff you're dealing with hey you can't be doing this okay let's just say those assassination attempts were made what what are some other methods of assassination that doesn't have to do with killing a president and the reason why i'm asking this question is because sometimes and i know this is going to sound like a strange comment to make sometimes a direct assassination is a lot less painful on the legacy than a another method of assassination from you being somebody that studied history of what the games that are being played politically what are some methods of assassination that could take place with our existing president well you've actually said something very profound which is that assassination weirdly tends to improve your historical reputation um kennedy for example was in for not even two years i don't believe uh and we the whole myth of camelot you know assassination created the myth of the kennedys the legend of the kennedys if you will uh to some degree that's also true of lincoln lincoln was very controversial when he was president he barely got um elected uh and then his re-election was also a big open question until you know until he went some military victories right before election day um and it was assassination that turned lincoln into sort of the the legend that he he became now i think today the more common technique of going after someone is ultimately to blacken their name uh to use what can be called the deep state and i want to be precise about this because i'm not i'm not talking about any kind of conspiracy theory so we have in america these police agencies of the government let's name some of them the fbi the cia the doj the department of justice uh the irs so these agencies are set up to do something which is to neutrally and fairly enforce the law so for example you think of the fbi as as tracking down criminals but what if you could get some criminals into the fbi at the top level so that instead of being thugs on the street you have thugs with badges thugs running the very agency that is supposed to go after the thugs now this is a very dangerous situation because now they have the power of the badge and the power of arrest and the power of of the authority to indict and they can go after their political opponents so this would be a form of i would call it political assassination because it's not intended to kill you but it's intended to destroy your career destroy your credibility um maybe put you into handcuffs but put you out of commission i think to be honest my own case was intended somewhat like that it was not ultimately intended to you know they don't they don't necessarily want to lock me up they want to discredit me they want me not to be a public figure speaking out they want to isolate me from my own supporters and fans and that is the purpose of this political hit so we've seen more of that in recent years a very disturbing trend the corruption of the police agencies of government at the high level now the ordinary fbi agent is fine he's just doing his job just like the ordinary cop is doing his job for the most part but when it's corrupt at the high level it's very important to root that out okay so you got political assassination character assassination what other models are there financial assassination uh and that is that can be done by and large through the mechanism of the lawsuit so for example let's just say you're a business guy a company will come to your so a left-wing organization will come to you and say listen you've got to give a million dollars to black lives matter and you go why they go because if you don't we'll accuse you of being a racist or we will file a civil rights lawsuit against you so what happens is companies live in the terror of not only the actual financial cost of the lawsuit but also the reputational cost that will make you stigmatize will put a scarlet letter on you if you will and so it turns you into a coward you basically go okay well here's the check you know you fill in the amount or what do you want me to say i'll take a knee i'll do this so all of this is is a sign of people and when fear governs a society people are turned into worms i mean you've seen this in iran um and it occurs in many other countries in the world intimidation is used as a regular tactic to keep the citizenry cowed cow means you're up against the wall and you won't dare to do something that will that will cause trouble for the people in power so we got political character and financial and by the way part of the financial could also be taxes and irs which we've seen that as well but you know the reason why i'm asking this is you know you're seeing a lot of that but you're probably seeing them more today than ever before and one has to know if you get into politics this is you know for the risk that you could see so if they can't there seems to me the there seems to be this desire that we have to do whatever we can to get this man out of the white house whatever we can to get this man out of the white house when i see that i didn't see that with george w bush i didn't see that with bill clinton on a second term i didn't see that with obama on his second term yeah just kind of yeah well you know we got to make sure romney wins no he lost okay bill you know bill o'reilly and uh dennis miller went on a tour talking about what happened or jon stewart and bill o'reilly were debating oh no we got to get you know bush out because you guys got to be careful about what happens yeah okay i'll go fine no problem but it wasn't like this what is it about trump that is gotten people that passionate to get them out is it because trump's gonna do something on second term with this q anon that you're hearing about a you know secret organization ran by two military former generals that are gonna bring out the deep state is it because of what you're hearing about with epstein that maybe some things are going to be revealed that two politicians video which elaine maxwell that if it comes out is it because roe v versus wade is it because of you know obamacare is what is what is the biggest thing where you're seeing this level of passion to say we got is is it fear is it something we don't know what do you think it is you know i i think it's it's a very um the reason it's so strange the phenomenon you're describing um we call it trump derangement syndrome you know this kind of virus of of um losing your mind when the name trump comes up what makes it even doubly strange is many of the people who suffer the most acute cases of trump derangement syndrome were massive donald trump fans in the old days in other words the same people who say things like trump is a dictator trump is an authoritarian are the kind of people who love trump when trump would show up on larry king and trump was on the apprentice and rappers were writing songs about trump and trump was you know there with al sharpton marching down you know fifth avenue so the irony about trump is it's not that he's an unknown guy who's like come out of nowhere and and people are really scared this is a guy who's been a staple of american popular culture for 30 years he's been a figure that most of us i mean people in america have grown up with trump right and and there's something very all-american about trump i mean even his weaknesses are very all-american he's got a he's like that kid who grew up in queens where you know even if you are some unimportant guy if you attack him he has to attack you back you know he's he's just got that scrappy new york personality which is so recognizable to anyone who lives in the city um so this is trump he he is who he is um and i think that americans didn't expect a guy like him um and he does threaten a lot of the conventional ways of doing business in america and doing politics in america uh even in the republican party this is the the the source of the so-called never trump movement it's republicans who thought that they had figured out a kind of a comfortable way of doing business and it's almost like bringing in a new ceo into a company who comes in and goes the reason we've been losing money is a lot of you aren't doing your job and i'm going to be shaking things up from the inside and immediately there's an effort to get rid of the guy because he poses such a lethal threat to all the comfortable you know nuclei of power that have established himself all the competing fiefdoms go oh wow you know here's a new guy in charge and we got to push him out before he does any more damage i wonder if it's just that that's what i wonder i wonder if it's just that because to me that happens all the time so the new ceo comes he fires a bunch of people he brings his own team the old guys work and still stay in contact with the employees that are working at the home office and they bicker and [ __ ] and some people still have some kind of a control and then eventually they're over it because they have new problems and a year later two years that everybody moves on right but this is different i mean you have to agree that this isn't just a guy coming in to i don't know i i i don't know i don't know what it is and uh you know i'm a business guy i'm not a guy that's in the world to know everything to really dig deep and investigate to know what really is the reason why people are so afraid of him what is it you know are we gonna find out on the second term i don't know i don't know what's going on over there but i'm uh i'm just curious curious you know what it is well the surface explanations don't make sense because you listen to people who say on msnbc you know trump is an authoritarian i'm thinking wait a minute trump is bashed on every platform every second of every day right if you tried to do that to say mussolini what would happen to you first of all goons would show up at cnn they would beat everybody up and shut the place down that would be the end of it one time you do it and then that's the last time but with trump it's not the case i mean with trump people are speaking out with no fear people are rioting with no fear people are pulling down public monuments with no fear so whatever trump is he's not an authoritarian um and um so i think you're right there is something deeper going on something that is a combination of i mean i think you mentioned some of the factors roe versus wade that's part of it because there is a worry that the court the balance of the court will shift i don't think it's going to shift that much at least not not anytime soon look at the way that that roberts for example has now taken on the kennedy role of being the swing vote so it's not obvious that the court is going to dramatically swing one way or the other it's kind of precariously in the middle which it has been for 25 years uh but trump gets him in a way nobody does um he has an effect on people that it has almost has to be seen to to be believed yeah i uh um i uh we were invited we went to the mar-a-lago event that he had a few months ago and where you know the president was the prime minister of brazil that got the coronavirus that same event we were there ourselves and when you see him you see the energy off-camera slightly different than on camera the way he tells the story you know he knows how to win the crowd and when i went there i took people that were against them we took seven guests and we went there you know just to kind of see how people would view it and uh you know very interesting personality who he is very i mean i read ordered a deal 20 years ago 19 years ago and i said what a great book yeah i got a bunch of copies that i've had for years prior to him being president i would always give it away to my guys hey learn how to negotiate read this book but uh i don't know you know to me i just think he needs way more secret service than other presidents have needed in the past i don't know and i think you know i um yeah my family had a meeting with him uh last november and uh it turned out to be a 45-minute meeting um and it was very illuminating because my wife said to him something like she said you know mr president she goes you're attacked so viciously in the media an ordinary person would be completely demoralized would go under his desk you know how do you take it you know um and we kind of expected trump to laugh it off and go well you know i enjoy it it's hilarious i love bashing these people and so on but no he was he actually said the unexpected thing he goes well guys you know he goes i gotta tell you just between us it it gets to me he goes you know because i'm working he goes i'm working really hard for the american people he goes we just did this operation against kasim solomoni he goes this very difficult operation it was carried out to perfection he goes but these guys won't give me any credit for anything whatever i do must be bad if i recommend a drug it's got to be the drug that doesn't work if i do an operation it's got to be the worst operation ever and so i think he said at the end of the day it's it's a little you know it does get to me and i for us it was a it was seeing a vulnerable side of trump that we didn't quite expect and i know my wife was a little startled by it uh and a little moved by it yeah you know but but i understand that and i i can fully see that but at the same time if you bring in that new york uh attitude and you cannot be surprised if that's what's happening you just cannot be surprised if you're just going after people as quickly as fast as you are with twitter and non-stop you just have to if you're bullying the bully you're you're still hurting the the other bully that you're bullying his ego is going to get hurt then it's just gonna be counseling back and forth you know you punch somebody they're gonna punch you back so it's non-stop gonna happen but uh you know dinesh uh the last thing i was gonna ask you is you told a story in the in your documentary about saulinski back in 1970 i think george um senior boy senior was given the talk and you know protesters were coming in saying hey what's the best way for us to protest and i'll let you tell the story but uh that is a pretty riveting story if that's an accurate story so what happened when these protesters when i had a meeting with saul lindsay and by the way for some people that don't know who he is maybe you can elaborate on who he is that gave that advice so lelinski was a political organizer you can almost call him the original community organizer he was a an inspiration to both barack obama and hillary clinton obama when he graduated from harvard law school went to work for the olinsky organization hillary clinton wrote her thesis on alinsky so this is a figure that has had a huge impact through his influence on other powerful people and the story is described in the biography of welinsky by an olinsky supporter it was about how clever alinsky was in doing political sort of dirty tricks and in this case what happened is that george w h w bush the father was giving a speech at the united nations uh and a group of leftists from the 60s came to olinsky and they were like why don't we hold up signs that basically equate george w bush with like the ku klux klan um and alinsky was like well that's that's a very crude and stupid thing to do and of course you can do it but it's unimaginative here's something more clever what about if you guys go out to a to the local store and buy some white sheets uh why don't you come dressed up as ku klux klansman yourselves and then when george h.w bush starts speaking you have all these signs and you jump up and down and you go were with bush kkk supports bush this is much more effective because when it when it's seen in the media well people will see images horrific images of people and white hoods supporting bush this will do far more damage to bush's credibility than a group of hippies carrying signs equating bush so so basically alinsky was proposing creating if you will a theater a political theater in which you you you manipulate the imagery uh to send a false message but the false message is believed to be true because of the enormous power of the media how how accurate is that statement and how has it been verified that that actually was stated well it is an uh i believe the source of it is sanford horwitz book called let them call me rebel which is a this is a progressive leftist writing a full length the only full-length biography of olinsky and i believe that is the source i've documented it and footnoted in my own work but i believe from memory that that is the source of that particular anecdote if you could send that to me i'd like to put the link below because to me that is just uh uh i mean divisive but at the same time uh a model that we're seeing a lot of today as well which it kind of gets the average person to sit there and say who do you really trust on media like who do you really believe in media when you see different things like who should i trust do i trust people on the right do i trust left do i trust tucker do i trust anderson do i trust mata do i trust hannity who do i trust it's very tough right now for the average person i'm not talking about for the person that already has a political affiliation and they've done a lot of reading and due diligence i'm talking for the 60 70 voter that doesn't follow politics says i don't know who i trusted it's a very very weird time well dinesh thank you so much for being a guest on valuetainment folks i'm going to put the link below to uh his book uh united states of socialism and dinesh do we have a set date on when the documentary will be coming out it's been announced for august 7th but as you know things are in a little flux with the theater so we're in close consultation with the with our distributor to figure out the best timing and the best way to release this movie but it's going to be coming out soon it's going to be coming out this summer we're gonna put the link to the documentary as well at the bottom for you to know exactly what data to be released i just watched it and uh i highly recommend people watching and make your own opinion about what's uh being said in there in the documentary it'll definitely make you think uh on what is taking place today finish i'll give you final thoughts before we wrap up we are a divided country uh we're divided over very fundamental issues i think it's a time for the ordinary citizen to be more involved and more informed than normal just for the reason you just said which is to say that these days we can't automatically take for granted the information that's put out there a lot of it is manipulated some of it is flatly untrue and so documentaries like mine are aimed at helping you to think in a new way about what's really going on very cool dinesh once again thank you for being a guest on that team appreciate your time my pleasure so what was your biggest takeaway from this interview knowing which way he leans politically what was your biggest takeaway specifically when we talk about socialism against capitalism or the indian educational system the ranking of where you're ranked or you know different methods of assassination political financial and uh uh character uh what was your biggest takeaway i want to hear your thoughts and if you watch today's interview and the concept of socialism you're saying i want to know more about socialism i sat down with a professor who is a very very well-known professor the top marxist socialistic professor we have in america richard wolff and we had a friendly debate if you've never watched it i highly recommend you watch this debate he and i had and if you've not watched my sit down with roger stone because he talks about the manipulation of politics and how it works out if you've not watched this click over here and if you've not subscribed to the channel please do so thanks for watching everybody take care [Music] bye

Channel: Valuetainment

Views: 3,975,231

Rating: 4.8603315 out of 5

Keywords: Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneur Motivation, Entrepreneur Advice, Startup Entrepreneurs, valuetainment, patrick bet david, Dinesh de Souza, Trump card, Politics movies, Dinesh de souza movies

Id: zBVMHtVLNcI

Length: 91min 43sec (5503 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 02 2020