Dinesh D'Souza - Liberty University Convocation

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>> DAVE RUBIN: He's an author, a filmmaker, a former policy advisor to Ronald Reagan. >> LARRY KING: He's a best-selling author, political commentator, and filmmaker. >> SEAN HANNITY: Joining us now, the best-selling author, creator of “Hillary's America” >> KING: He's been described as an influential conservative thinker – >> RUBIN: A guy who really, really doesn't like Hillary Clinton – >>KING: He's quite accustomed to navigating controversy surrounding his work. >> ALL: Dinesh D'Souza – He’s Dinesh D’Souza – Dinesh D'Souza - >> DEBBIE D'SOUZA: Hi, everyone. My name's Debbie D'Souza – Dinesh’s wife. We're newlyweds. We've been married almost 7 months, and I have the awesome privilege of introducing to you Dinesh this morning. But I wanted just to mention a couple of things that maybe you don't know about Dinesh. So he's really, really funny, and I always encourage him to maybe tell some jokes and stuff, because he's super funny. The other thing is he makes the most amazing oatmeal, and yeah, you probably didn't know that. Mr. intellectual is also a really good cook. So, everyone, without further ado, my husband, Dinesh. >> DINESH D'SOUZA: Wow. Look at this. I'm honored and thrilled to be here. It's been a couple of years since I spoke in this venue, and I'm here to talk to you at a very critical time – not only in the state of this country, but also a very critical time for us as Christians, because there comes a time as a Christian when you realize that you live in a very flawed world, and both on the international front and on the domestic front you're dealing with flawed people. In foreign policy, when I worked in the Reagan White House many years ago, it was kind of a dismaying realization for me that when you look at the world, you always want to choose the good guy over the bad guy. But many times you realize that in the world you are not dealing with that kind of a choice. You're choosing between the bad guy and the really bad guy, and the question then becomes, what do you do? How do you stay true to your principles? Do you embrace the lesser evil to expel the greater evil? Is it morally permissible to ally with the bad guy to eject the worse guy? Historically we have done that. America has done that. We allied with Stalin, remember? Because another bad guy, Hitler, posed a greater threat at the time. So that is one of the conundrums of foreign policy. In embracing a lesser evil, are you nevertheless embracing an evil? But now some of those foreign policy conundrums have come right home to us here in America where, in politics, we recognize that we have flawed candidates, and we are flawed too. I think as Christians we should always remember that the line between good and evil is not between us and them; it is a line that runs through every human heart. Now, that being said, how do we think about this moment in American politics? I just want to give you my own take on it. I came to America at the age of 17. I remember looking out of the airplane and seeing the skyline of New York as the plane descended on JFK. I remember seeing the statue of Liberty in the background, and I knew right away that my life was going to be different from that moment on. I intuitively realized that I was going from the margin of the world—in my case a small town on the outskirts of Bombay, India—to the center. And I also recognized that in America there was such a thing as an “American dream.” India doesn't have a dream. No other country has a dream, but this American dream is a dream, not just of economic opportunity or success, but it's ultimately a dream where you can be the architect of your own destiny. America is a country where you can be in the driver’s seat of your own life, in which your destiny is not given to you; it is constructed by you. When I first came to America, I longed for ladders of opportunity in which a guy like me who arrived with 500 dollars in my pocket could make my own life and make a better life. And my politics is based on that; it's the politics of the ladder-of the ladder. Now I want to fast-forward 25 years in which I found myself standing in a courtroom, and I heard someone bark out the phrase, "United States of America" versus Dinesh D'Souza. And I've got to tell you, as an immigrant, that sends a chill down your spine. I was being indicted and prosecuted by the Obama administration for exceeding the campaign finance laws, which I did do. I gave $20,000 of my money to a college friend of mine who was running for the senate in New York. There's a campaign finance limit. I went over it; I broke the law. But, you know, interestingly, justice is not just a matter of whether you broke the law. It's also a matter of does the penalty fit the crime. Do other guys who did the same thing get roughly the same penalty? Now I was sentenced to 8 months locked up, overnight, in a confinement center on the Mexican border under the supervision of the Bureau of Prisons of the Obama administration. Right about the time my case was making its way through the court, another guy-this fella's name was Singh Chatwal – an Asian-Indian guy. We Asian Indians are here to specialize in the campaign finance violations area. Well, in any event, this dude gave $180,000 in straw donations to Hillary Clinton and a whole group of democrats. He was also found guilty of witness tampering, and he openly boasted of corruption. This guy goes before a judge—no prison, no confinement, so I experienced, first hand, what I want to call progressive justice. And you'll forgive me for thinking that it was kind of an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. Why? Because I couldn't help but suspect my real crime was a movie that I had made just a few months earlier about one Barack Obama. I went to Hawaii. I went to Indonesia. I went to Kenya. I put myself into Obama's world, and quite honestly, I upset him. Now on social media people go, oh Dinesh, what makes you think the President of the United states, he's a very busy guy, what makes you think he pays one moment of attention to you? Well I wouldn't have thought he did, except shortly after my movie came out, vituperative attacks on me by name began to appear on a website called barackobama.com. The attacks were unsigned, but if you payed attention to them, if you watched them in their kind of pomposity, indignation, and incoherence, they bore the unmistakable signature of the narcissist who currently occupies the White House. Now, I tell you this, because when I walked into this confinement center, when I walked into the lockup you might say, I discovered that this wasn't white-collar criminals; this was a whole gamut of bad guys – attempted murderers, drug smugglers, coyotes- the whole gamut. And I was in a dormitory with 120 hoodlums, sleeping on bunk beds. I got to say, initially I was kind of scared. Most of the guys – we were on the Mexican border – most of them were Hispanic. There were a bunch of blacks; there were a bunch of whites. Everybody was in a group or gang. And the Hispanics alone were in mini gangs. The American-Hispanics are called South Siders. They had their own gangs, and the Mexicans had their own gangs. So it was kind of a dicey situation. You didn't want to talk to this guy, because that guy may want to kill you. I did briefly contemplate the idea of starting my own gang—the Asian Indian gang, but I didn't want to be the sole member. After a little while, though, I got the idea. I said to myself, you know, I'm actually in a very unusual place. I've seen in my life the American dream. These are people whose American dream is broken. Why don't I get to know them? I'm a conservative in an environment where conservatives never go. I mean I'm not likely to walk down the hall here and see Charles Krauthammer or George Will, so let me talk to these guys, and let me learn what I want to call the ideology of the criminal underclass. Now my previous familiarity with this topic was limited to two viewings of the Shawshank Redemption, in which I had the idea that all criminals insist that they never did it. They're innocent. But as I talked to these guys over eight months, read their case files, I realized that their view is actually somewhat different and more interesting. Their view is, hey, we did it. We're guilty, but we are the small fry. We're the stupid criminals. That's why we're here; we got caught. The big fry are still at large. The big fry never get caught. In fact, the system doesn't even go after them. Why? Because they run the system. They're too well-connected in the system. And then my mind went forward to having his little rendezvous with Loretta Lynch on the tarmac. He went to Obama, signaling to his boy James Comey, and signaling over to Lynch. Hey, Hillary's my girl. I'm turning over the baton over to Hillary. Lay off Hillary. This is the way justice operates at the very highest levels. So, I began to think in a fresh way about politics, and that's what I want to give you a glimpse at this morning. You know, my old view of politics was very idealistic, as yours may be now. We think of politics as a debate. The liberals believe this, and the conservatives believe that. The Republicans are for liberty, and the Democrats are for equality, and blah, blah, blah. Now the truth of it is, from the point of view of your criminal underclass, human nature is not motivated by debate. People, human beings, ever since the fall, have always been motivated by other things including inquisitiveness, and greed, and lust, and hatred, and envy, and revenge. And if those are, in fact, the motives of human nature how can they be exempt from politics? How can we ignore them in the political horizon? So I want to look at politics with a little grittier eye this morning to see not just what is it that people say. I want an America, and blah, blah, blah. I want to look at what is it that the people who are in it want? What are they after? And I want to focus particularly on progressivism. The world is very noble-sounding. Progress, who's for, who's against progress? Well the Republicans are supposedly against progress, but what is the definition of progress? What do the progressives want? Well, I want to suggest to you that what they want is to steal America. Now what does that mean? How do you steal America? I'm not talking about stealing the three trillion-dollar federal budget. I'm not even talking about stealing the GDP, the gross domestic product, about $17 trillion. I'm actually talking about people who have their eye on the whole wealth of the country, and that means all the land, and all the buildings, and all the companies, and all the furniture in your home, and your big screen TV, and your college fund, and the money in your parents' retirement funds. All of it, if you add it up, in America it's about $75 trillion. It's one big pile of dough, and the thieves of America are very interested. Now, they don't want to create that wealth. When the progressives talk about all this, sometimes people think they're socialists. They're not socialists. They're way too lazy to be socialists, because socialists historically believe in nationalization. Let's go nationalize the oil industry. Let's go down into midland Texas, and we're going to drill in the ground and get the oil out ourselves. Can you see Bernie Sanders doing that? I mean Rip VanWinkle who was basically sleeping on his neighbor's couch for 20 years. He's not going to do it, or Hillary, or Obama. They want the guys in Midland to go get the oil. You get it. You take it out. You put it into barrels. You label it, and then we're going to come in and take it over. We'll tell you what to do with it. This is stealing the wealth of America. Now. Now, in order to steal the wealth of America, it's not just enough to have the makers and the takers. People think, oh dear, we're reaching an America where the takers outnumber the makers. They're going to outvote us in November. No, actually there aren't enough of them to do that. In order to sell this—this is a very special kind of theft—the progressives have to sell America on a story. It's a story about social justice and injustice, and it's got to be a story in which they are the good guys, and the Democratic Party is the party of the good guys. It's the party of the little guy, of the outsider, of minorities, of women, of African Americans. It was the party that delivered Civil Rights. This is basically the story of the Democratic National Convention. What's pretty remarkable about this story is it goes largely uncontested. And yet, this story is a complete and total lie. This is the theme of my latest movie, “Hillary's America,” which is out in DVD this week, and the accompanying book, “Hillary's America,” which I believe is available here today. The Democratic Party, amazingly enough, is the party that threw the American Indians off their land and did the Trail of Tears. The Democratic Party is also the party that for 50 years vigorously defended slavery. Now, after the Civil War, the Democrats realized that their hands were stained with blood, and that it would look bad for them to be seen as the party of slavery. And so they redefined the whole debate to make it a North-South debate. The Democrats redefined the debate, so they said, oh yes, the Civil War was between the anti-slavery North and the pro-slavery South. But if you study this even a little bit, you know, first of all, that most Southerners did not own slaves and most Confederates did not own slaves. And the Northern Democratic Party, led by Steven Douglass, protected slavery with the same zeal and the enthusiasm as the Southern Democrats. So the slavery debate was not between the North and the South; it was, in fact, between the anti-slavery Republican Party and the pro-slavery Democratic Party North and South. So here we get a hint at how the Democrats have been ingenious at covering up their historical crimes. How do they do it? They figure out a way to put the blame on somebody else. It wasn't us; it was the South. It wasn't us; it was the white man. It wasn't us; it was America. America did this. America did that. Well, wait a minute. If America did it, it would still be going on. Obviously some Americans did it, and other Americans stopped them. Now, once slavery ended, the Democratic Party became the party of segregation, Jim Crowe, and the Ku Klux Klan. Every segregation law in the south, and there is no exception, was passed by a Democratic legislature, signed by a democratic governor, and enforced by democratic sheriffs and authorities. The Democratic Party used the Ku Klux Klan as a terrorist arm of its own political machine. I quote here the progressive historian Eric Foner, who says that the KKK was for 30 years, quote, "the domestic terrorist arm of the Democratic Party." End quote. It was a confederate general, Nathan Bedford Forrest who was a delegate to the DNC who started the Klan. And then Republicans passed a series of laws outlawing the Klan until a democratic president Woodrow Wilson revived the Klan in the early 20th century. How did he do it? He showed a pro-Ku Klux Klan movie to his cabinet in the While House, and this led to a Klan revival not just in the South, but also in the Midwest and the West. And the Democrats – who hate to talk about any of this — you notice that they have rather deftly left it out of a lot of history books, but when they are forced to admit it they go, “Well yeah gee, but you know what? We did the Civil Rights movement. Don't you know that that was Lyndon Johnson? We take credit for that. We did that one.” Except they didn't. If you want to, you can simply check. These days it's beautiful; you can do this in one minute on your phone. Look at the roll call vote on the Civil Rights Movement of the ‘60s. You will discover that proportionately more Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Bill of 1968 than Democrats. If the Democrats had been the only party in the Congress, none of these laws would have passed. And the main opposition to Civil Rights came from the Democratic Party. And at this point, the progressives say, “But haven't you heard about the big switch? Don't you know that the two parties switched sides?” Now the whole concept that the two parties switched sides is a little strange. It's a little bit like saying, just one day, all the cops decided to become robbers, and all the robbers decided to become cops. I mean, on the face of that it's unlikely, but is it even true? Did the racist Democrats in the ‘60s become Republicans? Well, the beauty of this is that, in the movie, I decide to count. And so I made a list of all these racist Dixiecrats, and then I simply noted how many of them became Republicans, and I came up with the answer. I'm not very good at math, happily it only required one hand. The correct answer is one: Strom Thurmond who used to be a Dixiecrat; he became a Republican. All the other Dixiecrats stayed. They remained in the Democratic Party, and a very telling symbol of this is that in 2010 when Robert Byrd died. Robert Byrd, by the way, was a longtime member of the Ku Klux Klan. He said it was the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan who motivated him to get into politics, and yet he was called “the conscience of the Senate.” Hillary made a video talking about how he was her mentor. Obama and Bill Clinton went to his funeral, and Bill Clinton discussed his involvement in the Klan, and made this statement. He said, in effect, don't be too hard on old Robert Byrd for being in the Klan. You had to be in the Klan in order to advance in the Democratic Party. You had to be in the Klan. You just had to. Now this is the actual history of the Democratic Party. Women's rights—we hear all this talk about women's rights right now. The Democratic Party historically is the party that fought to block women's suffrage for 30 years. They fought it in Congress where they lost. Then they fought it in the states where they lost again, and if you think that all of this is somehow ancient history, the remarkable thing is that many of the horrible features of the old slave plantations we still see today in the inner city. Ramshackle dwellings, broken families, widespread illegitimacy, a huge amount of violence that's necessary to hold a place together—everybody gets a meager provision. You get food. You get healthcare, but nobody gets ahead. No one gets a good education. The old Democrats used to say “slavery is a school of civilization.” Well, it's not a school from which the slaves were ever allowed to graduate. And similarly today, in the inner city everyone is dependent, and that's why they vote democratic, but how many people actually get up and leave? How many people actually climb up those ladders of opportunity? Not a lot, and the Democrats don't mind it a whole lot that way, because they continue to get the vote. They have created a politically profitable dependency. And this brings me now, fast-forward, to what's going on right now. Many people say, “I need to vote against Hillary Clinton, because she's going to be Obama's third term.” But I think if you watch Obama and Hillary, you realize that these are two very different people. Obama at the end of the day is an ideologue. His ideology, to my way of thinking, very wrongheaded. In my movie about Obama that I made four years ago-2016, it's an eye-opening movie to watch now, because I made all these predictions about Obama. I said Obama will double the national debt—check. I said Obama will weaken the influence of America in the world—check. Obama will undermine our allies and strengthen our enemies—check. By the way, this is not a matter of opinion. We have allies – we had allies in the Middle East. Mubarak was our ally in Egypt; he's gone. Gaddafi wasn't our ally, but we were in business with him; he's gone. Our enemies Assad and Syria; he's still there. The mullahs in Iran; they're stronger than ever. We seem to be funneling money to them. So this is who Obama is. His ideology, as I said, it's destructive. It's pathetic, but poor man, he believes it. He thinks he's making the world better. The Clintons are very different. They're not like Obama. They're, at the end of the day, the Clintons are more like Bonnie and Clyde. Guys, we need here a spirit of satire. If you want to understand the Clintons, you've got to crack open Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. You will meet in that book two scam artists called the duke and the dauphin, and these guys are basically running rackets throughout the South, trying to con gullible people into believing that they are apostles of virtue. The Clintons have been doing this since Arkansas. Now I just want to recall to —some of you are a little young, so you'll have to read rather than remember-but I'm talking about the last days of the Clinton administration. What was going on in the last six months? Three notable activities were going on. First, they were renting out the Lincoln bedroom for cash. Number two: they were literally going through the White House and lifting curios out of the cabinets, taking paintings from the walls, Norman Rockwells, and sending them over to Chappaqua. The Secret Service had literally to get in a car and drive there to get half of that stuff back. And the Clintons were selling pardons to big-time felons, racqueteers, and tax cheats. They put out the word that if you're a felon—this was before my time, so I couldn't put in for it—just, just just let us know how much you're willing to pay to get your felony stricken. They were doing this, and if you say well, that was Bill, let's fast-forward to Hillary. When Hillary becomes Secretary of State this was a very profitable moment for the Clintons. Why? Well, you can track it. Bill Clinton's lecture fee went up from $150,000 $ 600,000 as soon as Hillary became Secretary of State. This is to give a 20-minute speech. Now do you think that people are paying $600,000 to hear Bill give you the same rubbish that you can listen for free online? No, they're not paying him for a speech. It's a kind of a bribe. It's kind of a down payment for something that the giver—and, by the way, we're not talking about American givers only. We're not just talking about Goldman Sachs; we're also talking about foreign entities, foreign governments. The giver wants something, and so they pay Bill Clinton to speak—step one. Step two, Hillary now delivers the something that the donor wants. So in a very specific case there a group of billionaire Indians. They wanted Hillary to change her position and support the Indian nuclear deal. Hillary was against it, but once Bill began to be invited to India, and money began flowing his way, Hillary had a change of heart. She switched her position. She supports the Indian nuclear deal. Step three, millions of dollars now flow to the Clinton Foundation. Step one, step two, step three. This happens again, and again, and again, and again. I could give you ten examples of it off the top of my head, and the Clintons admit it! They admit step one; they admit step two; and they admit step three. They merely deny that steps one and three are related to two. In other words, we took the money. We did the deed, and we took money, but the taking of the money at the beginning and the end was not the reason we did the deed. Those are independent. Now guys, you weren't born yesterday. We have elected crooks in America before, but we didn't know they were crooks in advance. With Hillary we know. So. Now, what will Hillary's America look like? I grew up in a country run by gangs. If you saw that movie Slumdog Millionaire, you get an idea. Gangs run the slums. Gangs run politics. People go into politics to make money. This is new in American politics. Think about it. We've had rich presidents before—JFK, FDR, but they were rich before they came to the White House. By Hillary's own words, we started out dead broke, and the Clintons have gone from dead broke to $300 million of personal net worth. Not the foundation—that's $3 billion. How do you go from zero to 300 million dollars on a government salary? That's a very interesting subject for an academic paper. Think of it. The Clintons did not invent the iPhone. They haven't started a business. So what product were they selling in order to make all this cash? And the dismaying answer, the unavoidable answer, the one answer the media cannot say it that they were selling American foreign policy. They were selling access to the government and to power. And the media isn't saying this for the same reason that the media isn't talking about the history of the Democratic Party, and the reason that they can get away with it is that the left dominates academia; they dominate Hollywood, and they dominate the press – the three big megaphones of our culture. You can put out a lot of disinformation, because even if somebody else knows differently, if you don't have a big enough megaphone, no one's going to hear you. And look, I've been American politics now for 25 years. Media bias is not new. Even Reagan had to contend with it in the 1980s. But the degree of it has reached scandalous proportions. Every day I watch my television, and I marvel at the media huffing and puffing to drag this crooked hag across the finish line. Now, what does, what does the thoughtful Christian, what does the person that recognizes that Hillary is bad news, but nevertheless has a sense of dignity, of decency, of self-worth do in this bizarre situation? How do you handle the situation with Hillary when her opponent has his own flaws? What do you do? What do you do? You are kind of in the position of the abolitionists of the 19th century who were the only people who were pure-hearted about slavery. The abolitionists believed that slavery was inherently evil and should be stopped now. And the abolitionists even today are like lamps, of beacons, of moral inspiration. But it's also true when we look back, that the abolitionist politically were completely ineffective. The abolitionists by themselves could accomplish nothing, and did accomplish nothing. Why? Because being principled, they found no path – they had no path, at least initially, to convert the principles into practice. Their intentions were pure, but their activities were worthless. In fact, at their meetings most of them spent a lot of time doing things like burning the Declaration of Independence, burning the Constitution, blaming the founders for allowing slavery in the first place. Now, who ended slavery if it wasn't the abolitionists? Slavery, what happened, was ended not by the abolitionists. It was ended by the Republican party. It was when the Republican party won the election of 1860 – a coalition that included abolitionists, but was not led by one. Abraham Lincoln, throughout his life, denied that he was an abolitionist. His position wasn't “no-slavery, but I will stop slavery from expanding – the extension of slavery. So the point I want to make is when we think about morality, there are intentions, and there are consequences. And, quite honestly, morality involves both. Now the problem with having pure intentions and riding a moral high horse about them, is that those pure intentions can actually produce terrible consequences. And so, for example, if someone goes, all right. I normally would vote for a Republican, but on-principle I'm going to stay home in November. I want to say to such a person. You are actually casting your vote for Hillary Clinton. You're doing that. Now, you may want to do that. You may think, I'm willing to do that. You may not care, but you need to know that a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote to swing the balance of the Supreme Court virtually, irrevocably against us. A vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote to not only permit, but bring in federal subsidies for abortion. A vote for Hillary is a vote to put religious, already precarious, into a much more endangered position, because the checks and balances that would normally block the government are themselves being eroded. And you are voting for a regime in which justice becomes increasingly discretionary, as I found terrifyingly in my own case in which there were dozens of FBI agents unleashed to get my bank statements, my tax records, read all my books cover to cover looking for a single line that could be used to incriminate me. My sentence, bizarrely enough, included mandatory psychological counseling. Think about that. This is for giving a campaign contribution. I mean I wasn't Jeffrey Dahmer. I didn't put bodies in the refrigerator. And yet, as in Cuba, as in the Soviet Union, I'm going to government-ordered counselors, supposedly to reeducate me. But I’m not reeducated. I'm unrepentant. In Hillary's America I think it is an illusion to believe we as conservatives or as Christians can retreat into our private spaces, drive our pick-up truck to school or to work, pray in church, and they will leave us unmolested. They will not do that. They have no intention of doing that. And in a democratic society as Christians, think about it, how did we lose the media? Not enough of us got involved. How did we lose academia? Not enough of us went to those schools. How did we lose Hollywood? Not enough of us make movies. We gave up that territory, and then we pretend to be shocked when they use their power to beat the heck out of us. And the same is true in politics. American politics since Reagan has been balanced. This ship is likely to go one side up, and it's going to be a very different America. And it's going to be a very different America for you and for me. Have you seen the latest WikiLeaks emails? In them you see the kind of bigotry that the Democrats will indulge in privately against Evangelicals, against Catholics. When you listen to it you ask yourself this question: Would they ever say that about a Muslim? Never. So there is a selective prejudice in our society. It's already there. It's already in the culture, but to import it to the highest level of politics. And for—it's one thing if it happens anyway, and we fought it, and we lost, but for us to collaborate with it, to make it easy, to make it happen – this is why the English phrase was invented "asking for it." For us to do that, in my opinion, is to ask for it. Look. I don't want to tell you what to do. Frankly, I know what I'm going to do. I can't vote, because of my conviction on the campaign finance issue I'm not allowed to vote, but I urge you to think critically. I urge you to weight the options. I ask you to think about the American dream handed down to us from generation to generation, and ask, what can you do to preserve, protect, and defend that dream? In the immortal words of the ‘60s – I'll close with that saying from the 1960s: “If not now, when? If not us, who?” Thank you very much. >> FALWELL: All right, Dinesh has his book right over here. He'll sign it, and are you going to go down and sign books? Okay, so he'll be right here to meet as many of you as possible. I hope you have a great day and a great weekend. Thank you.
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Channel: Liberty University
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Length: 42min 33sec (2553 seconds)
Published: Fri Oct 14 2016
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