SHOCKING: Protestors try to battle D'Souza over Trump’s wall, fail miserably

hush and I am president of the college Republicans here at Dartmouth on behalf of our organization I would like to welcome Dinesh D'Souza class of 1983 back to Hanover it seldom occurs that prominent conservative alumni returned to Dartmouth because of the hostile campus culture towards these alums we are grateful to Dinesh for offering to speak with us tonight the Dartmouth College Republicans firmly believe in a core principle on which this country was founded that people have the right to their views and the freedom to express them we also hold dear the American tradition of political civility and polite discourse mr. D'Souza will speak followed by a question-and-answer session we encourage difficult questions but ask that you be respectful although we recognize the right to protest attempts to disrupt this event and prevent our speaker from expressing himself will not be tolerated and will be met with consequences from the college we would like to thank the college staff safety and security officers and everyone here at Dartmouth who helped to make this event possible we would also like to thank the young America's Foundation for its sponsorship of this lecture and on that note this lecture is part of young America's foundations exclusive ten campus tour the dinesh d'souza tour fake history debunked the generous anonymous sponsors of this lecture tour asks that we share the following statement explaining why it is important that you hear from Dinesh D'Souza tonight here is their statement students deserve to receive an education based on unbiased facts not revisionist history sadly too few students today benefit from a robust understanding of the ideas and events that shape our world because too few schools offer perspectives that challenge the leftist world new this is not education it's in doctrine ation and it's not just unfair to students it is dangerous we are alarmed that today's young people are taught to believe that freedom the great protector against tyranny should be forfeited in pursuit of the progressive agenda we are sponsoring this ten campus lecture to give you the opportunity to consider ideas that may not be taught and may not even be tolerated on your campus you will be hearing from Dinesh D'Souza one of today's most intelligent articulate and courageous scholars we are pleased to partner with Dinesh and young America's Foundation to reach thousands of young people to inspire you to pursue knowledge challenge leftist misinformation and advance freedom and prosperity for all matin i'ts lecture inspire you to never stop learning now for some information on mr. D'Souza born in Mumbai India Dinesh D'Souza came to the United States as an exchange student and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College in 1983 since then D'Souza has had a prominent career as a writer scholar and public intellectual and has also become a renowned filmmaker his most recent film death of a nation was released August 3rd 2018 in over 1,000 of theatres across the country to the dislike of critics but the praise of audiences he earned a 90% audience approval rating on Robert Rotten Tomatoes one of the one of D'Souza's favorite venues for debates and speeches has been college campuses during the past 25 years he has appeared at hundreds of colleges and universities and has spoken with hundreds of thousands of students in these live settings D'Souza has been named one of America's most influential conservative thinkers by the New York Times magazine the world affairs council lists him as one of the nation's 500 leading authorities on international issues and Newsweek cited him as one of the most one of the country's most prominent Asian Americans we're now going to watch a short video and then mr. D'Souza will come on stage [Applause] [Music] he's a man of a searching and versatile intellect he is a man who can bridge cultures and understands history and scholarship and politics and theology and philosophy this week is an author a filmmaker a former policy advisor to Ronald Reagan mr. Dinesh D'Souza [Applause] 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 I grew up in a different world actually a world without America and although I grew up without a phone without television without hot water we had a car but if you looked down the floor of my car you could see the ground he's been described as an influential conservative thinker he's a best-selling author and political commentator and filmmaker the great man dinesh d'souza a patriotic man no longer would I say that I live in a rarefied world of intellectual debate I've seen the upside of America and I've seen the downside of America but at the end of the day I wouldn't trade the United States for any other country at the end of the day Lucien's and four american government may have dimmed but my enthusiasm for this country burns brighter than ever thank you very much ladies and gentlemen Dinesh D'Souza [Applause] thank you very much Wow I am can you hear me okay okay I'm really thrilled and excited to be here my alma mater it was seems forever that I first set foot on the Dartmouth campus at the age of 18 and quite truly it changed my life a lot of who I am and a lot of the way I think was believe it or not shaped here and I want to share with you talk to you in a candid way about some of the big issues that I think are shaping our country I'm especially thrilled to be here with my my wife Debbie oh where are you right here debbie is latina from Venezuela and has seen a once prosperous country and an oil-rich country a country that once actually had political diversity and political debate we essentially run into the ground by policies that are perhaps not unfamiliar to us here in America and and on this campus I'm also glad my daughter Danielle is here she's class of 2017 and here we are and we have some dissenters outside and I would be happy to engage those ideas as well in the question and answer session I want to think in my talk about walls not just the wall but walls in general and walls in the context of some larger questions that have to do with identity and belonging and who gets to be inside the wall and who gets to be outside a wall and and why I remember when I first showed up at Dartmouth this was actually yesterday I looked around and I thought to myself wow this is such an incredible open campus I don't see any walls it's really easy to just stroll on the campus and then I realize that that's actually not true and anyone who thinks that true isn't really looking hard because Dartmouth has much higher walls than Trump wants to build and those walls are actually controlled by the admissions office the wall has to do with who gets to be a member of the Dartmouth community and that wall is jealously guarded and limited to a thousand students every year excluding more than ten times that number that want to come in perhaps more and this this wall is guarded so diligently and ruthlessly that to my knowledge and the entire history of the college that has not been single person who has jumped the wall and what I mean by that is it possible for somebody who is not a Dartmouth student to sneak into Dartmouth take courses for four years and leave with a Dartmouth degree it turns out to my knowledge that is completely impossible it has never happened and that means that this wall is protected far more savagely jealously and determinately when any wall that we could possibly put around this country any wall with the be put would necessarily be porous this wall as far as I can tell is completely opaque I want to start by talking a little bit about poetry and then I'm going to pivot to the politics and I want to talk about poetry for the simple reason that we have connected with Dartmouth a poet a poet I have to say of some subtlety who talks about walls and talks about Walden in a kind of complex way and in a way this is a very nice a portal to thinking about wolves in general it gives us if you will a little bit of a an aesthetic vantage point we can learn from Frost's New England toughness his realism his skepticism his willingness to see things for more than one angle I discovered frost at Dartmouth and to me he was just a completely refreshing contrast with Romantic poets like Wordsworth whom I was more familiar with all this talk about daffodils and all this talk about the beauty of nature but what about the deer its leg caught in the tendrils of nature what about the vicious beauty of nature what about the harshness of nature and frost had this ability to capture that too but reading Frost is kind of tricky as I discovered myself here on campus one of the first poems I learned about in connection with frost was of course the famous or perhaps infamous poem about the road not taken a very self-congratulatory poem I took the road less traveled by and that has made all the difference in short I'm just a super fantastic guy I made the tough choices that have made me into the remarkable personality that I am is this actually frost message in the poem this was the message I took when I first read the poem and yet reading the poem again and again and then with some guidance from a campus Virgil if I can say so you begin to pay attention to the poem and that's what I want to suggest for a moment let's pay attention to the poem verse two then then took the other he's looking down two roads he says just as fare the other road is just as fair and then the key lines though as for that the passing there had worn them really about the same in other words he looks down the first road he looks down the other Road and the two roads are the same he can't tell the difference it's not a less travel road it is the same and what that means is that the poem really is about the difficulty of choice the poem is really about the fact that life has to be lived forward but knowledge in a sense only obtains backward when you graduate from Dartmouth you decide am I gonna go to law school or become a poet am I going to become an engineer or am I gonna work on Wall Street and which life is gonna be better for me and for us to saying you don't know the roads are worn about the same I think it was Hegel who said that the owl of Minerva flies by night but which Hegel meant that we only understand history in retrospect only looking back and we assign meaning to history but meaning invisible to the people who actually live there they couldn't see it and so it is with us looking back we go wow I made the right decision oh I made the wrong decision but for you at the time there is actually it is very difficult to know and so ironically the skepticism of the poem cuts against the naive reading and this is frost this is kind of the way he does it and so with that by the way of preamble I want to turn to fought Frost poem mending wall' kind of a strange title for a poem mending wall' and the poem on the face of it is about why walls are terrible this is the point of view of the narrator of the poem something there is that doesn't love a wall what so something he doesn't say implying that it's something rather vague a feeling I just don't like the idea of a wall and we can all sympathize with that I'm telling you as an immigrant who has been on both sides of the wall I totally get it there's something in me that doesn't love a wall and yet the poem ends on the opposite note the last line good fences make good neighbors uttered not by the narrator but by the other guy the non narrator you may say the target of the narrator and throughout the poem the narrator is railing on the other guy he's a brute he's a savage and all the while the he's railing the other guy is putting up parts of the wall in between there are two properties and the other guy doesn't say a lot and the narrator continues to blow v8 walls are bad you're a savage but you notice something that he never does he never actually tries to stop the wall from being built he does nothing to actually knock the wall down and something else he doesn't do he never claims that he has any rights on the other side of the wall at no point as the narrator ever say you know what I have the right to come and take the fruit off of your trees I have the right to come and eat out of your refrigerator I wouldn't mind climbing into bed with your wife all of this all of this is the you may almost say this is the unspoken script of the poem the only objection to the wall that the narrator seems to have is he just doesn't like the notion of a wall it offends him somehow it offends a kind of universalism that I would argue is built right into the American experience is built right into the Declaration of Independence all men are created equal not all Americans all men so there's a universalism asserted there but notice that this notion that all men are created equal is itself an American idea I don't find it than anybody else's charter of emancipation and so you have American exceptionalism United to American universalism in a very interesting way and I think that is really the heart of our debate tonight Frost likes to talk about coming at the truth sort of slantwise his term slantwise and I think that's a very good way to think about our political debate because here we have Trump a very different character than Frost I will have to admit Frost is grumpy taciturn philosophical Trump is Trump he is as my wife says a bit out there and yet we have to remember the Trump is playing a very different role than frost frost if you will as the poet if you will you can call him a philosopher poet Trump is a statesman a leader if you don't like the dignity of that term a politician but this distinction is of critical importance because and this may not be very obvious when you're on campus but it's very obvious when you're out in the world at some point the necessary skepticism of thought has to give way to the necessary dogmatism of action and what I mean by that is that at some point it's not enough to say on the one hand and on the other hand something there is that doesn't love a wall good fences make good neighbors well are you gonna build the damn thing or no at some point you gotta go you got to decide you've got to move you got to take a decision and if you decide not to do it that's your decision and so Trump is out there making a case for the wall and yet on the face of it his case is manifestly inadequate Trump says we need to have wall for three reasons one drug traffickers two violent criminals and three sex traffickers we have to stop in other words the bad guy now that argument by itself may be true or may not be true but it's clearly insufficient because the wall may stop those people but it would certainly stop a whole lot of other people - let's call them the good guys people who just want to come here for a better life for themselves and their families and the world would clearly do that - so the real case for the wall can't just talk about the bad guys it also has to consider the case for stopping some good guys on the other side of the debate you've got all the people who say the Trump hates immigrants now this argument that Trump hates immigrants relies on making a very squid-like confusion between the immigrant and the illegal notice abuser all illegal immigrants illegal illegals are not actually immigrants illegals are people who essentially want to jump the line to jump the line there is a big line and there are some people and I would put myself in this category who were born a very long ways away from America quite frankly we don't have a Rio Grande that we can come to rashing across or ditch that we can tunnel under to get to America we actually have to get here by a very circuitous and lengthy route it costs a lot of money it costs a lot of Tears and sometimes it takes a generation and yet why does our welfare count less then somebody who happens to be just across the border who basically says I don't care about this line I'm gonna jump it and because I am a tragic humanitarian figure I'm gonna rely on the goodwill of the other side of the people on the other side of the line to sacrifice not them but Dinesh who's too far away to get here this way and I'm gonna do that in the name of humanity so so you can see right away that there's a complexity here America actually has a pretty generous immigration policy we let in about a million legal immigrants a year I wouldn't object to increasing that number and we set rules for what kind of immigrants we want I don't like those rules the rules as I see it are dumb quite frankly I happen to have come to America alone as an exchange student in fact I only got my visa here at Dartmouth I took the tray the Montreal or up to Canada I got an extension that's how I was able to stay in this country and so the point I'm trying to make is that the rules family unification which is perhaps the centerpiece of our immigration policy if I had really worked at it over the last 35 years I could have probably brought a hundred people to America under family unification it was intended to be for people to bring their spouses but the way it works is something like this I sponsor my wife I sponsor my parents they sponsor my other siblings they sponsor their wives they sponsor their parents and this is how the game is played and everybody who has been through or near the process knows it it's a scam it's a scam it's not what the law was meant to do so we have a broken immigration system that is actually not what we are debating here before I jump into the immigration debate in the wall' debate head-on I want to ask a different kind of question why do people actually want to come here what does it mean to come to a to America in a weird way this question is a question that points directly to what can be called American exceptionalism because American exceptionalism is the reason people want to come there's something about America that makes it a magnet for people around the world and if I were to say in my own life what that magnet was it actually wasn't material prosperity most people think it's odin ash Wow he's lived a Horatio Alger story he's have been successful in America well my dad was a chemical engineer my mom was a housewife I grew up without great luxury but not lacking for anything my life in America is it materially better than it was in India yes but that is actually not a radical difference my life has changed more in other ways if I stayed in India where I was born chances are very high I would have become an engineer like my dad or a doctor like one of my uncle's chances are I would have married a woman of my identical economic and socio-economic and perhaps caste background chances I would have a whole set of views on a bunch of topics that could be easily predicted in advance and would be not very different from what my dad believed though my grandfather and what I'm trying to say is my destiny would to a large degree have been given to me by coming here to Dartmouth my horizons widen by coming here to Dartmouth I realized wow this is a place where I can write if you will the script of my own life I can be in the driver's seat of my own future I can do things with my life that would simply be unavailable if I were to stay put where I was now this belief that became implanted with me here at Dartmouth contradicted a doctrine that I was simultaneously taught at Dartmouth a doctrine that's very powerful today it's the doctrine of you may call it cultural relativism it's the philosophical underpinning of the idea of diversity and what is cultural relativism mean it means very simply that no culture is better or worse superior or inferior to any other all cultures are equal and yet this notion of cultural equality once again tempting as it is to believe I realized it's manifestly untrue to my own life why because every immigrant is a walking refutation of cultural relativism every immigrant is voting in the most decisive way possible I mean think about it were born into a certain world this is our family this is our school this is the only world we know we're attached to it we can't not be attached to it well I guess this is what they call hate speech I gotta be more careful you think I'd be sling I'd have been slinging insults since I walked in here no the point I'm trying to make is we're all attached to our own and for the immigrant not the refugee but for the immigrant of voluntarily move from his or her own culture to another culture is a very powerful statement that from my point of view I am making a decisive judgment that this other culture that I'm moving to is better better for me than the culture that I'm leaving it's a vote if you will in the most meaningful way possible against the doctrine that all cultures are equal because the fact of the matter is of all cultures were truly equal nobody would ever leave home now America is a country that works but it's part we're thinking about what is it about America that works well when when I talked to a friend of mine in India he's been trying to come to America for almost 20 years now and he has never been able to do it and finally I said to him I said why are you so eager to come to America he goes to mesh I want to move to a country where the poor people are fat and this is part of what's great about America it's American abundance it's American prosperity it's actually what we take for granted it is it is the prosperity that actually enables one to entertain ideas of socialism why because socialism seems to make sense when there is so much abundance that's why in Ocasio Cortez's memo she can say we want to provide entitlements for people even if they are unwilling unwilling not just unable but unwilling to work you have to be a really rich country to even think crazy thoughts like that but it's American abundance that makes that possible now let's turn from American abundance and what's attractive about America to immigration and let's think about the way in which immigration has really changed in this country and by that I mean we often talk about immigrants but we never talk about what kind of immigrants what kind of immigrants years ago I read a sociologist who made a very provocative claim he said the quality of an immigrant who moves from country a the country B is directly proportional to the distance traveled to get from country a to country B kind of a startling observation but his argument was it has nothing to do with the race or ethnicity or even the socioeconomic status of immigrants the basic idea is that the longer the distance you have to go to go to another country the more entrepreneurial creative dogged persistent hard-working you have to be to pull it off and so in general a country can count on immigrants who come from a long distance way to actually be the kind of immigrants of the country probably really wants we never talk about what kind of immigrants we want if you go to Australia or Canada other countries to take immigrants there's a burning debate who do we want what kind of people do we want here and very often that debate is very pragmatic we here in Australia need nurses let's learn a bunch of nurses that's what we want we want entrepreneurs we want people who have a lot of cash let's let those people in in America we we sort of repress that debate and I think this is important because as a country it's worth thinking honestly and politically about what kind of immigrants we want now a few years ago I got into some kind of a minor fracas with the Obama administration resulting in a in a brief incarceration it was a garden-variety case to quote my prosecutor my fellow Indian Preet Bharara but it was a heck of a garden-variety case because it resulted in a garden-variety presidential pardon and a garden-variety firing of freed barrera but nevertheless here we are and in the course of this of my penance my penance had many dimensions to it one dimension to it was I to undergo psychiatric examinations to steer my thoughts in a more hospitable direction months later I was pronounced by the judge to be incurable on that point and my other penance was to teach English to non-english speaking Latinos for the most part and in one of these classes I was asked this question which is to say what is the main division in America between the two political parties and it was asked in the context of someone who was I'm not even sure legal or illegal to be honest but someone who wanted to become an American and they were asking what is the real difference from our point of view an hour in this case included me how did the two parties differ as you see it someone who's been in America someone who sort of looks at the political system what's the difference and it was very hard for me to say because here's not somebody to whom I could refer to the Constitution or Publius or the Federalist Papers or any of that here's someone who wanted me to talk on a different level completely and so I answered this way I said look in America as I understand it we have two parties two sides one I'm going to call the party of the latter and the other I'm going to call the party of the rope the party of the ladder is a party that believes that America is represented metaphorically by a ladder of opportunity and that the government has a role and the role is to hold the ladder and hold a ladder here means to protect our constitutional rights it's our job to climb and how high we get how far we advance in life is going to largely depend on how we climb not exclusively on us it's going to depend in part on our industry our creativity our intelligence but it's also going to depend on chance but your fate if you will on the ladder is largely not entirely but largely up to you and this is the party of the ladder I actually agree with this philosophy the other party I'm going to call the party of the rope and the party of the Rope operates some more differently it's more like this you have a building and it's a tall building and you have a group of people on top of the building and they're the ones looking down at all the poor immigrants down there and the people on top of the building say hey guys we really don't believe in the ladder in fact we think the ladder is luan illusion there are no ladders really in America when you look hard enough however do not despair because we are going to be letting down a rope your job for a creature hang on to the rope do nothing else we will pull you up now when I first heard about this or thought about things this way I thought to myself wow the rope is far more attractive than the ladder why because in a ladder you actually have to climb in the Rope you'd basically do nothing except hold on but it also occurred to me that with the rope you are dependent on the people who are holding the rope if they let go down you go and not only that but if you actually do a little bit of empirical checking and you really pay attention at what's happening not just in our inner cities but in the Latino Barrios of America and the Native American patience you notice something remarkable that the people who are being pulled up by the Rope never seem to get to the top of the building they are pulled up and then the people on top hold suspending you in midair in which you are long distance back from the ground too far to jump and yet your advancement appears to be halted and it crosses your mind that maybe the people on the top of the building have no intention of pulling me up because if they were to pull me up I would become one of them I would dust myself off and walk off and that's not what they need they've got me right where they want me and now we have to ask the question what are they doing this for what is the point of holding people in this suspended abeyance and the answer of course is that what you want out of them is the one thing that they have the power to give you poor though they are lacking prospects though they are lacking food perhaps though they may be or healthcare they do have one thing that costs them nothing that is to you everything and that is their vote and so as long as you can consolidate their votes you've got them where you want them so in my view not only is this the ideological fork in America but you can actually see two types of immigrants who respond to the incentives that are offered on both sides of the aisle there's one type of immigrant who says I'm the immigrant of the ladder I don't actually want ropes I'll pull myself up just hold a ladder just protect my rights and I am counting on America to offer the freedom the opportunity for me to make my way and if I fall flat on my face that will actually be my doing and there's another type of immigrant who goes Wow we have things kind of rough over here I didn't even know there was a country where all I've got to do is hold on to a rope they're telling me I don't have to work in fact they would rather I not why because then my dependency on them is greater and my vote for them more reliable and this is a bargain that I'm actually willing to make what does my vote cost me nothing and so if I can get a set of meager provisions of food and housing and health care it may not actually be a very good life but it's a life nonetheless and it's perhaps a better life and I have here so I'm gonna go for it and so what you have here is not only to reciprocal to an ideology on this side that if you will is pulling but you also have immigrants of two different types who are pushing and and which ideology prevails is going to determine what kind of immigrants we get in America are we going to get immigrants of the ladder or are we gonna get immigrants of the rope now I want to say a word I'm almost out of time I want to leave time for questions just gonna say a word about the Democratic Party and this is motivated by the notion that progressive historiography which is mostly what I would say we all learn what I learned suppresses the complicity of the Democratic Party in the great crimes of American politics it is hardly an exaggeration to say that most of the things for which Democrats indict America or Republicans or the white man or even the South were not done by America or the white man or even the south but we're actually primarily driven by the Democratic Party itself it's the accuser who is actually guilty of the crime it's the guy who poisoned the waters who's pretending to show up as the water commissioner now to prove this would actually take more than I can possibly do here but I'm just going to sum up by saying that the Democratic Party is without dispute in this country's history the party that promoted slavery segregation Jim Crow racial terrorism the Ku Klux Klan and it was the main party in opposition to the civil rights laws of the 1960's I have documented this and rather excruciating detail but I want to leave you with this a single tidbit that to me illustrates the degree to which even those of us in this room educated smart having gone to the best schools and are here at one of the best schools but nevertheless don't know things because they're not in our textbooks and we're not told them so in 1860 the year before the Civil War I would point to the Democratic Party and what its its complicity in slavery by the way Democrats north and south and inevitably on campus someone would say to me but Dinesh you've got realized that this is a very simplistic argument you're pointing your finger in one direction surely there's a lot of blame to go around and this is the kind of thing that I would say my career exists to crush which is the attempt ultimately to evade the issue by backing up and throwing if you will a squid-like cloud of obfuscation over the whole matter there's plenty of blame to go around actually no and the proof of it is that in 1860 the year before the Civil War no Republican owned a slave I pause not no Republican leader owned a slave it's my contention that no Republican in the United States owned the slave and that means that all the slaves in the entire country four million of them at the time were owned by Democrats now that's hate speech if you're looking for it but it's no no it's not just hate speech it's it's a scientific statement in the sense that it is it opens itself to what Papa calls refute ability refute ability all you have to do is give me the names of three Republicans who own slaves and I would have to take it back but to this date three years after I first made this claim not a single valid counterexample has surfaced and what does that tell you that tells you that there's not plenty of blame to go around that slavery was one-sidedly promoted by one party and opposed by the other party do you know that every segregation law in the south from the beginning to the end was passed by a Democratic legislature signed by a Democratic governor and put him to effect by Democratic officials and that there's not a single exception to that rule and yet these facts that I'm telling you now do not appear to my knowledge in a single textbook they do not appear on the History Channel or on NPR they're not in Wikipedia if you type it in there and why not they're true but they have been suppressed by progressive historiography what I'm trying to say is that history somebody made it and the somebody's who made it found inconvenient facts that they thought it better not to say or not to emphasize and part of my education if you will as an immigrant has been to open my eyes to all of this and to see as with Frost the repressed truth that goes unsaid that is perhaps more important than what is said on the surface my life was changed by Dartmouth and I hope your lives will be too this is a great institution and that's why I sent my daughter here it's an institution whose strength depends on free debate open discussion thoughtful consideration I may be wrong I may be right but I think you'll agree that I've tried to speak in an open spirit saying saying calling it as I see it and not engaging in any kind of wanton hatred or antagonism toward anybody intellectual diversity is very important and I hope that you will become partly as a consequence of this it's ruthless defenders standing up for it against those who would use a certain kind of very powerful social intimidation no it's not George Orwell it's not a boot stamping on your face it's more the soft despotism that Tocqueville talked about that pushes you up against the wall that makes it awkward and embarrassing for you to defend even your most cherished beliefs and my suggestion my advice my exhortation is resist that pressure and in resisting it you will be freeing the space for others ultimately bringing down walls is most important in the intellectual sense because the bringing down of the intellectual wall is the opening of the American mind thank you very much thank you whoa ladies and gentlemen we will commence questions and answer the line we'll start over there Griffin if you could wave your smile and wave thank you you will come up to this X you'll stand there I will hold the mic you may ask only one question no follow-ups must be in the form of a question once you are done you shall return down this aisle unless you sit in these three rows thank you hi Dinesh it is uncomfortable for me to be here because I don't necessarily identify with a lot of the politics that you support I do think what you do is brave just because a lot of people would try to make you be quiet and so whether or not I agree with it doesn't really matter the rope that I climbed and used was five years of service the United States Armed Forces right so the ladder you reference to me is hidden behind a couple of barriers that not everyone has access to I wouldn't be here getting this education if it weren't for that rope and so that's anecdotal I just wanted to say thank you for what you provided us you might have asked you a question what when you join the army you gave them something in return for what they gave you why would you count that as a rope instead of a ladder um because the idea of military service being mandatory in some places and not mandatory and others to some people it can act as a welfare program I've seen people consider it such and so not everyone has the opportunity to join the military based on medical issues or other things so that again they don't have access to the thing that I did but my question for you is more based on discourse in a climate right now with what's going on outside and what can happen in here the word bigot being thrown around how do we maintain a level of intellectual discourse that keeps conversation happening instead of not happening and then how do you also because you've made mistakes that you admit to how do you check yourself and then do you have people in your life that check you when you make mistakes yes I think that the whole experience that I went through with regard to or my case and forced confinement I found myself in a totally different world I had been used to the rarefied world of political debate in fact I thought of American politics as a debate we've got these two sides and it's kind of like a great clash of ideas and it's frankly only by seeing politics from the other side in fact in some cases from behind bars and seeing other people with me locked up and realizing look I'm a controversial political figure I'll land on my feet when I get out of here these people's lives are completely destroyed their American dream is actually gone and my American Dream will probably come back I couldn't at that time anticipate the phone call I received when I was in my office this past May which is hello this is the White House operator hold the line for the president the United States that's a good call to get and and I held the line and it was Trump and and he was in a very trumpian mood and by pardoning me he gave me my American dream back but it what I'm saying is their journey very eye-opening very introspective you only have to be locked up with a bunch of guys who are in for their coyotes drug smugglers murderers rapists sleeping next to you and talking to every day to realize my life has actually taken a bowi thean twist here and I have to learn from that and the best I can do is come out better at the other end of it so I've tried to do that now the other part of your question is this use of the word bigoted you've got to be very careful because when I was here at Dartmouth I was I was a freshman here in the aftermath of what's called the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and it was all these guys were like free speech free speech free speech and we supported them our newspaper on campus was partly modeled on the Berkeley barb that was behind this kind of activism it's only later I realized that when those guys take control they will immediately start suppressing the speech of others in other words they don't actually believe in free speech they believe in free speech for them bigot is a very loaded term and because it has real sting and applies to real people there's an effort to try to pin it on people see like these guys were walking out they're too lazy to debate with me they're not going to I mean they are because I'll tell you why hold on look I'm here I'm here and the standards that this institution upholds for you to say that they're lazy is kind of I'm not saying that they're lazy people I'm simply saying that they are not willing to do the intellectual work to stand up face to face with me look if I said those things on those posters and if I believed them and if they're all true this is a slam dunk against me all someone has to do stand up here quote my own words back to me in the complete confidence that I would have no rebuttal right and crush me and I'm saying they can't do that and they're not going to or if they will I'm actually anticipating that and waiting for it but it hasn't happened yet so I'm just saying that the enemy of free speech is not me the enemy of free speech are the people who would rather have that I never came that they never would have to have that kind of debate that they would win this confrontation by default now with me here they're not gonna win it by default I'll give you that and if we I'm very happy to go into it but I'm just saying if you want the debate to occur let it occur but I'm not the one that makes you awkward I'm not the one intimidating you you you've been squirming the whole time you've been talking to me and I'm just saying they're the reason for it acknowledge that I'm you're being respectful I'm not saying that I'm saying that the discomfort that you started confessing you said I'm feel very awkward being here I'm saying who's making it awkward for you is the College Republicans making it awkward for you are they making it I think the idea that everyone in this room is so polarized is what makes it uncomfortable because I a kewpie a space somewhere in the middle was lazy on your behalf and interrupting this was lazy on their behalf so that's my question about responsible understood and I will try I'm going to try by example to do that tonight okay thanks for coming I'm sorry but I'm just a little confused you started off by talking about Dartmouth and intellectual diversity then you moved on to discuss walls and their philosophical backing then you talked about your experience so was you touched on a large number of topics and you didn't touch you touched not a lot of them lightly but none in details so my question is was your goal here to change minds by putting forward a concerted arguments if so what was it and do you think you might change more minds by saying on it by standing on a singular topic I recognize that a talk like this is in an is it an awkward position because the stuff that I'm going to say to you you're probably going to hear only once the other side is bombarding you every day if I make an argue if I want to cover a certain ground let's just say say a word about the Democratic Party say a word about walls say well I'm going to have to do a little bit of intellectual leapfrogging just to be able to introduce ideas that I only get one shot at sharing with you so I could have chosen to do a very close reading of a Frost poem or discuss purely the let's just say the glitches in current immigration policy but if that's the only conservatism you get this year I feel like I would be doing you a disservice there's so much I want to say that a little bit like a fire hose I've got to give a fuse courts in different directions look I have innumerable YouTube videos that that zoom into these topics I've written books on them my I've done two books on the history of the Democratic Party alone so there's more there what this talk I'm hoping will be is to use Kant's phrase of prolegomena an introduction a gateway to ideas that I hope you'll check out for yourself okay points on civil action within the millennial generation so you talked about the party of the ladder and the party of the rope so what do you think we as the college generation can do to make sure their ladders not broken the difficulty of the ladder a difficulty by the way recognized by the founders and recognized by observers in America like Tocqueville is that it is sustained not only by the strength of the ladder but by the inner strength of the people who are climbing the ladder if the guy who's climbing the ladder becomes discouraged and says I can't climb a ladder he's gonna be tempted to move over and hold on to the Rope the appeal if you will of the Rope is the appeal to sloth it's an appeal to helplessness it's an appeal to ultimately freeze yourself into a life of helplessness in which you not only come to see yourself as a victim but you relish it victimhood actually becomes your identity and this I think is the moral tragedy of the Rope is it crushes your soul it takes souls that are actually capable enterprising and creative and instead of building their creativity it squashes them it demoralizes them I mean this is not I may be seem to be talking in metaphor but literally one day just drive the Pine Ridge Reservation Indian Reservation in South Dakota and look and you will see the philosophy of the rope played out just drive a barrio in South Texas Debbie grew up in the Rio Grande Valley people live by the Rope you can see it and you can see that their souls have been flattened and in a way if the creative life has been drained out of them and the only self-respect that they have is ultimately to say that the reason I am in this miserable state is somebody did it to me to which my answer is yes somebody did do it to you that somebody is the Democratic Party this will be our last question of the night hey Dinesh thanks for coming out so near the end of the talk you discussed the historical legacy of the Democratic Party and one thing that's often brought up and I apologize in advance cuz I'm not very knowledgeable at the topic the one thing that's often brought up when discussing the horrid historical legacies of either party is a sort of party shift that's occurred over time say since the Civil War - now do you think that the your idea of the historical legacy of the Democratic Party and maybe even the Republican Party fits in with that ideological shift that occurred between the Civil War in the present so the question is a very good one and has to do with the fact that was there a big switch between the parties typically the people who say this argue that since the 1960's in response to the civil rights movement the parties if you will swap platforms and the proof of this is very simple that the racist Dixiecrats I define a Dixiecrat as somebody who joined the Dixiecrat party or voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 65 and the Fair bill of 68 so this is a Dixie crack the deep the racist dixiecrats became Republicans now this is an empirical question did the racist Dixiecrats become Republicans in my last movie death of a nation I say let us count and up on the screen go the 150 or so names of the racist Dixiecrats and they're all there and then we count how many of the racist Dixiecrats became Republicans and the correct answer that question is - in the house one guy Albert Watson in the Senate one guy Strom Thurmond and all the other races dixiecrats lived and stayed and died in the Democratic Party they are lionized to this day and their buildings in Washington DC named after them so the fact of the matter is that there was no big switch yes blacks did switch from from Republican to Democrat but they did that in the 1930s in response to the economic promises of FDR and the New Deal that had nothing to do with race it was an economic proposition through and through so the what I'm getting at is that things are known to us as intelligent people that are not true and this I think puts a lot a lot of intellectual pressure on us and on me because when I say things on campus people look like me like he's crazy why because that's not in the History Channel and that's not in Wikipedia and that's not what my professor said and that's not what I read in Barnes & Noble and the reason I like to bring these things down to empirical particulars is because they're checkable my greatest allies we live in a time where you can check on your phone so pull out your phone pardon me it's okay let it go I'm gonna we're gonna okay tell me has in fact shown you all the statistics that you claim are untrue what'd you say about the Southern Democrats is not unknown I am in fact an immigrant like you I come from the same country that you come from and I I am NOT here to debate Democrat versus Republican I am simply disappointed because you are producing facts that are simply not true they want and you are not and you are not historian for example the party realignment there you should just go check your own Twitter page this has been believe me I have yes so I buy so have I I can see that you're been missed okay let's pause we need to situate when you're talking because you're making you're making references here that need to be brought out there is a historian at Princeton named kevin Cruz and Cruz and I have been having a kind of a Twitter fight if you will about Dixiecrats now Cruz plays a very sly game he counts as Dixiecrats people who are not Dixiecrats and so if I say to him only to racist Dixiecrats became Republicans he goes what about John tower what about Jesse Helms what about Trent Lott and my response is don't be an idiot we're talking about Dixiecrats none of those were I'm hold on it's not his research he is he has written one book on white flight in Atlanta hold on hold on guys hold on hold on I I think what he's trying to say is that somewhat like the illegal you want to jump the line hold on hold on - out don't heckle me one second first of all first of all I was the person who said let her speak no I didn't cut her off okay all right hold on I'm gonna do one more thing I'm gonna do one more thing and that is is there anybody who's in the audience that wants to ask me a question about the posters on the campus because I if they do I'm happy to directly address I obviously can't address there was a kind of a blizzard of things out there some of them actually not even said by me but nevertheless if anyone wants to take a shot I think it's kind of a nice way to close the evening if one person wants to ask a question related to oh this guy okay he's ready and we'll we'll pick him as a representative of the resistance okay go for it go for it for a while I want to read you a quote kind of forward on society's talking about in Princess Peach they brought with them courage ambition and the values of family neighborhood work peace and freedom and then you're gonna talk about how I originally get such a great and I just doesn't make a very great again I'm wondering what your own former boss would say about you so the question is quoting Reagan my hero and a lot of the reason I became a conservative about how immigrants are entrepreneurial hard-working pro-family and the question and I just want to I just want to excavate the Buried assumption the question how disappointed your former boss would be in you now now I would submit that nobody would ask a question like that who actually was listening to what I said tonight I actually believe that immigrants are hardworking industrious entrepreneurial I said I would like to see the number of legal immigrants to this country increased I would like to see our immigration policy modified to take far more of those kinds of immigrants my position on immigration is thoroughly and completely Reaganite now what gets me is when I hear things that revolt against what I know and also against common sense and so there are things that people will sometimes say like immigrants created this country and built this country true but only partially true because that distinction confuses actually two groups that are not the same immigrants and settlers settlers colonizers if you will colonizers okay let's call them colonizers colonizers here's the important thing colonizers create why are you shouting don't hold on it's not we can do we can have a whole debate on that but let me let me address your point colonizers create the country that immigrants want to come to think of that paradox right there in other words if the colonizers were such horrible guys and have got such a botched up job of creating this country why on earth today do immigrants from all over the world still want to come here why do we even have to talk about a wall in the knowledge that if we didn't have a wall half the world would come here what was it about those colonizers despite their colonization that was so powerful that 150 years later the country that they made is still the magnet for the world so immigrants like me will jump over fences stand in lines pay a lot of money abandon our families to come to the country the colonizers made now were alright let's make this the last question in fairness and I will have extended the time go for it it's your the mic is yours yes I I'll try to answer that as best I can the condition of the American Indians historically we have to look at it twofold historically and today historically it was the Indian Wars the broken treaties by the white man the Wounded Knee the battles the massacres it was also a plethora of diseases that spread through the Indian population brought by the white man and that decimated the American Indian population no no that's not true there's a debate about Jeffrey Amherst and there's a controversial episode there but look diseases there's a book by I recommend to you by the historian William McNeil it's called plagues and people's it talks about how massive populations have been death made it historically by diseases brought by outsiders for example the Black Plague in Europe killed one third of the entire continent brought from Asia unintentionally now I'm not gonna say that's genocide because genocide implies a deliberate intention to exterminate an entire population that's why the use of the term genocide is very irresponsible in your part in this case because you don't think so you think that you think and and and I'm gonna ask you now for your evidence that there was a conscious intention to wipe out the Indian Indians as a people chapter and verse [Music] [Music] [Music] so Eleazar Wheelock leaves Yale and comes up here into the woods of New Hampshire to set up a college to Christianize and educate the Native Indians are you saying that he wanted to exterminate them right but for a moment because because see part of part of education is making distinctions right let's say I word it let's say I believe as a Christian that your life would be infinitely better than it is if you became a Christian and in that sincere belief I read the Bible to you and I start proselytizing you I'm not Adolph Hitler you may not go for it you may think that I'm calling you but you can't deny that my motivation is actually to save your immortal soul and what I'm getting at is that for you than to say this is genocide and not be able to even back off from that even though we're looking at a very specific case where you know there's no evidence to support your position but you're so dug in ideologically that it would like twist your mind to admit look there's a law it's a long distance from Eleazar Wheelock to Hitler and yes and and trying to convert somebody even if it's ultimately going to mean changing their culture even if you think that that's a bad idea it doesn't mean that they thought that and it doesn't make them into an evil caricature that you're trying to make out now I think we should do that and I think that the most harmful effect today if you look at the Indian Reservation and I've actually spent time on the Indian Reservation when I lived in Arizona I got a pardon know when I lived in Arizona I got an up-close look at American Indian reservations for a whole year and here's what I want to say the tragedy of the American Indian today is the abject sense of hopelessness and dependency and you cannot deny that dependency is cunningly exploited by a political party that harvests 90% of its vote so on the Indian Reservation there's a book you should read that talks about the Indian Reservation it's just called the rez the rez and the guy starts off by saying on the Indian Reservation he goes there is no Starbucks there's no 7-eleven there are not even any billboards there are no ads for medical doctors in other words it's a place defined by desolation and he goes and interestingly the people who run it want it that way and that's the point I want to stress it is that that we are dealing with a new kind of oppression very different in the Chi you're you're fighting the oppression if you will of the 1600s you're still mad about Columbus right and what you aren't doing is actually going on a reservation and seeing what it is about those people's lives you know things like we could use some elementary sanitation on the reservation and it would be really nice if people weren't being shot at night without any cops showing up and it would be really nice if there were some jobs actually available and companies that would have incentives to come here and why isn't any of that happening and who's blocking it and why yes it is but it's alas gonna be a topic for another day I want to thank you all for coming it's really been fun thank you very much [Applause]

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Rating: 4.8799539 out of 5

Keywords: Dinesh, DSouza, Hillary, Clinton, Barack, Obama, Donald, Trump, Hillarys, America, Documentary, Movie, Filmmaker, Author, Speaker, Fox, TheBlaze, Breitbart, Newsmax, Hannity, Kelly, Election, Pence, Kaine, Schweizer, Benghazi, State, Department, Emailgate, Rush, Limbaugh, Politics, Republican, Democrat, Party, GOP, DNC, RNC, Reince, Independent, Swing, Debate, Christianity, Capitalism, Patriotism, Progressive, Kings, College, NYC, Policy, Communism, Socialism, Conservative, Prosperity, Racism, Illiberal, Education, Lynching, Palin, Voight

Id: j9PAAlJV3pk

Length: 76min 33sec (4593 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 16 2019