Dinesh D'Souza Calls Out Tucker and Candance Owens

0:00Konstantin Kisin:I've bought two mattresses in my entire life. Both times I walked into a shop, lay on it for about four seconds and thought, yeah, that'll do. Genuinely world-class decision making, which is crazy because you spend a third of your life on the thing and most of us buy one the way you'd buy a toaster. Today's sponsor is Avocado Green Mattress. Certified organic mattresses. No polyurethane foam anywhere near them, just natural materials and they're handmade. The bit that actually got me is you don't have to buy it blind. Avocado has real showrooms plus retail partners across the US. So you can go in, lie down properly, not for four seconds, and work out if it actually suits you before you pay for it.

0:39Konstantin Kisin:They're not everywhere yet, so check the store locator for what's actually near you. Avocado products are made, not manufactured, and thoughtfully crafted with real materials to deliver lasting comfort and support. You can experience them in person at an avocado showroom or a premier retailer near you. Or shop online at avocadogreenmattress.com slash trigger to check out their mattresses and furniture sale. That's avocadogreenmattress.com slash trigger. avocadogreenmattress.com slash trigger. Right, I'm going to level with you. I'm not a gamer, even though I look like one. I'm not going to pretend I've been grinding through RPGs between recordings, or that I have strong opinions about which Final Fantasy was the best one.

1:22Konstantin Kisin:I think it's Japanese and I think there's a sword. That's genuinely everything I know. But our social media guys showed me this app and I genuinely thought, that's quite clever. It's called Snacksy. Basically, game publishers need new players and they're willing to pay to get them. Snacksy just passes that money onto you. You play games you were probably going to play anyway. You own coins and you cash them out for real rewards. PayPal, Amazon, Netflix, gift cards. If you prefer gaming credit, you can redeem for PlayStation, Xbox, Steam and Nintendo, or cash out your Ineba wallet. I've got no idea what that means.

1:56Konstantin Kisin:Actual money, not just points that expire. It takes a few minutes to set up. You open the app, swipe through the game offers, pick something that looks decent, play it, earn, redeem. That's the whole thing. There's a sign-up bonus worth up to$10 if you use our link, which is in the description of this episode. That's S-N-A-K-Z-Y, SnackSync. Click the link in the description to get started. And when you sign up, use the code TRIGGERPOD. That's T-R-I-G-G-E-R-P-O-D to claim your$10 bonus. And the app is mobile only, so click the link from your phone, not your laptop.

2:37Francis Foster:Dinesh, you mentioned Charlie Kirk a number of times, And it was obviously, you know, it was a horrific moment for this country and for America. But actually, just globally, I thought it was just a horrific moment for the world. And seeing that happen to a father of two young children, simply being killed because of his political views, that was absolutely shocking. And because of how shocking it was, there was a naive part of me that thought that this might be a reset opportunity. for everybody. And I thought maybe the left will go, oh no, we can't, there are some Nazis and they have to be called out, but we can't call center-right people Nazis.

3:24Francis Foster:We can't throw around labels like fascists because I've said it on this show a number of times. We said it on Joe Rogan yesterday. If you keep calling someone, if I thought the Nazis were here to invade, I'd pick up a rifle and go to the front line. So when you call someone a Nazi, you are literally putting a target on their back. And I also thought it might be a moment in which the right might reconnect around its core values and core ideas and go, you know, we need to get together and challenge all of this. Well, what's happened is the exact opposite. You know, the left is doubling down on all this stuff.

4:01Francis Foster:And on the right, you now have these very fringe voices who are saying, you know, a foreign country assassinated Charlie Kirk and making up stuff about planes that left before the assassination that proved that all of this crazy stuff. You've been quite outspoken about all of that. Talk to us about this whole thing. The, yeah, I think that, look how strange it is. You had a militarization around Antifa, which became publicly evident over the George Floyd riots. That's the Antifa element. There's the BLM element, which has somewhat subsided. But what has taken its place is these violent trans rings.

4:48I'm not talking about people who are trans. I'm talking about people who think that the society is out to get them. And so they go to training camps and they talk about doing martial arts or shooting people or fighting with weapons. Now, again, I don't think there's a lot of reasoning to be done with those people. If you look at the Portland rioters, if you look at these Antifa militants and if you look at these trans terrorists, it's really important to sort of get to the bottom of it, excavate exactly what happened. And so there were some reports after Charlie Kirk's assassination that there was prior knowledge of what was going to happen, that there were people in chats talking about, hey, something really big is going to happen.

5:30Not just big happen. It's going to happen to Charlie Kirk tomorrow at so and so location. Well, I mean, this would suggest, if not a conspiracy, at least prior knowledge of people who knew that he was going to be going to be shot. Just when the FBI, the authorities are sort of moving the crackdown on all this, along from the right comes Candace Owens with this sort of idea that, hey, let's take a look at these photos. I see a pipe. I wonder if a Mossad agent might have crawled through the pipe. I mean, stuff that is just absolutely crazy. Now, again, if she were to produce some substantial evidence, a single reliable fact that, let's just say, contravenes the government's theory, and she says it couldn't have been that, because take a look at this.

6:29But the investigative style, although I admit it's from a certain point of view, it's like irresistible to watch because it's like listening to a well-trained philosopher who has completely lost his mind and is now in an asylum and is giving you crazy discourse. But it's crazy discourse that is embedded with witticisms and all kinds of, and you're like, you can't turn away from it from a certain point. Candace is actually quite magnetic in the way she presents information. And she has a style. It's intellectual striptease because she never puts her cards out and goes, here's what I got. She goes, OK, well, I got something.

7:12Let me show you something. You know, more to come tomorrow and more to come the day after that. It's it's a little deranged, but it is there's something magnetic about it. Right. But look at the political effect and how pernicious it is. It's taking attention away from the actual, not just the bad guy, but these ideological bad actors that are embedded in our society. And it's basically telling everybody, look over here, it's the Jews or it's Israel or it's Mossad.

7:46Francis Foster:Now, you'd have to ask yourself, well, why would someone do that? Right. Or to look more broadly, take the phenomenon now, go beyond Candace and take the larger phenomenon. You've got a strange but pernicious alliance between the cultural left and the West and radical Islam. I actually wrote about this in a book that I published around 2006. It was called The Enemy at Home. I was reacting to Samuel Huntington's idea that there's a clash of civilizations between us, the West, and them, meaning the House of Islam. And my argument was, not exactly. There's a division inside the West, and there's also a division inside of Islam.

8:27And I said, not only that, but the cultural left is going to become strange bedfellows with the radical Muslims. This seems fantastic because the two groups have utterly different end goals. And they cannot inhabit each other's world. And not only that, but if they were in full control, they would come to blows. But they are united against a common enemy. And who is the common enemy? Well, it's the Jews and Israel on the one hand, and it's America and the principles of the West on the other. So it would seem natural, unavoidable, that Jews and Christians, America and Israel, should come closer together in recognition of this obvious, nefarious alliance.

9:11You know, let's call it, I filmed the Dragon's Pro... This is like the devil's platoons. All right, well, the good people need to come together. So I can understand why the left is doing what it does, because it is an ideological war against the Jews and Israel, no less than against Christians on the West. What I don't understand is this movement on the right that is attempting to sever our connection with Israel. And I think in the process, undermining Trump, undermining MAGA, undermining America's national interests, undermining the foundations of the West, which are Athens and Jerusalem. But on top of all that, strengthening radical Islam and strengthening the cultural left.

10:01Konstantin Kisin:Hang on, but you say you don't understand. Let me push back on that. I think it's relatively simple to understand, Dinesh. How so? If you go along this way of like, the left have done this, they've done all these egregious things, these tactics to silence and destroy, to play identity politics, to say if you're white and male, you're bottom of the oppression pyramid, which means you're far less likely to get a job, far less likely to progress. It becomes socially acceptable. let's be honest, to demonize you, particularly if you're blue collar and white and male, you automatically become thick, stupid and racist.

10:38Konstantin Kisin:Then why wouldn't you start to tribalize? Why wouldn't you become conspiratorial? Why wouldn't you go out and attack the people that you think have done you wrong? Absolutely right. So I do not blame the fractured, dislocated, angry young people who are responding in just the way that you say. I know why they're doing that. But I do blame the Pied Pipers who are leading them to the precipice who should know better, right?

11:15Francis Foster:Let me try a few other theories on you because I don't think the explanation Francis gives is fully here because what it doesn't really explain is why there are certain people now absolutely obsessed with the Jews. Why are they obsessed with Israel? Because it's not Israel or the Jews that caused the cultural disintegration that you're talking about. They didn't take over college campuses 40 years ago and introduced all this anti-Western crap. I think there's a few things going on that I think are contributing as well. One of them is, I wrote an article when Tucker Carlson went to Russia and interviewed President Putin, which was called Tucker Carlson and the Woke Right, in which I basically said that there is these sections on the right that have become very focused on victimhood and are replicating some of the things we saw on the left in doing so.

12:05Francis Foster:And when you're focused on victimhood, you have to find someone who's victimizing you. And at that point, Jews and Israel were not the thing. And I said, you know, for now, the label is globalists. And those sections of the right keep talking about globalists. But a globalist isn't something that you can visualize. No one has, like when I say globalist, you don't, a picture of a person doesn't come into your head. So they were looking for somebody to be the scapegoat, the explanation that explains everything, like the left's explanation of, well, everything is because of white supremacy. Everything is because of institutional racism.

12:43Francis Foster:Everything is because of straight white men. I think that's one thing. And the other thing is, once President Trump gets elected for a second term, in the overwhelming fashion in which that happens, what does the media do whose entire, new media in particular, whose entire identity became, you know, it was the anti-woke coalition, of which trigonometry was 100 % apart. But once that collapses, like we don't really talk about wokeness very much anymore on the show because it's kind of, I mean, I think it's overstating the case to say it's over, but it's not the live issue right now. Right. We don't talk about trans issues, which we used to talk about because it's not the live issue right now.

13:28Francis Foster:so if you are in a right of center media personal channel organization you can either keep beating you know you know that meme of stop stop he's already dead right that's not going to get you any views because beating up on the democrats i mean don't even know where they are anymore right so you have to go the incentive structure is to go in a more conspiratorial out their direction. Those are my two other bits that I'd put to you. Yeah, I have a bunch of little things to add to that. So the first one is that

14:04in the Reagan era, in conservatism, there was a certain, I would call it the intellectual guardians of the tribe, people like William F. Buckley, Reagan to a certain degree, but there were others serving crystal. And the idea here was that if you came in with like the poison of anti-Semitism, blatant racism, you know, criticism of affirmative action, yes. Calling blacks monkeys, no. So if you did that, you were basically asked to leave the room and you were abolished from the, you wouldn't be invited to conservative conferences. You certainly wouldn't be a speaker. it would basically be the end of you as a public figure.

14:52So that's gone. And it's gone. Why? Partly because we don't have a conservative intellectual class that performs that task. And why don't we have that? Well, partly because the mainstream of that class went never Trump. And so when I look around for like, if I were to make a list of, let's say, 30 of my colleagues from the Reagan days, I would say that probably about 25 of them went anti-Trump. And they went to anti-Trump in different places. John Bolton is a little different place than, say, Bill Kristol. But nevertheless, they're by and large excluded from MAGA. And what happened is, partly as a result of a cultural shift, MAGA produces a new type of pundit who is not, I mean, think of the distance between, say, Irving Kristol and Tucker Carlson.

15:53Tucker doesn't even purport to be knowledgeable about anything, right? So as a result, what Tucker says is, I will develop a ventriloquist style. I have strong opinions, but I don't want to defend any of them. So I will set up a structure in which I bring in sources, often rather dubious sources, people you've never heard of, you know, the nun with the mustache, some disgraced academic. And what I'll do is I will ask sort of leading questions that in which is embedded an answer, my answer, but framed as a question. You then will blurt out the obvious implications of the question, giving me the answer I expected, but I will pretend to be thunderstruck by it.

16:39It's an epiphany. It's a new revelation. People have been suppressing this kind of thinking for decades. So this is a shtick. It's a different shtick than Candace. Candace's shtick is the Candace intelligence agency. I'm like the world's greatest detective. You know, I'm the Pink Panther of my time. I'm deputizing all my viewers also to be detectives. Feed me information. We're going to crack the case. So to me, this is like an intellectual embarrassment because all my life, I've been an iconoclast. I will take on ideas and I will try to dismantle them, but not in this way. My ideas are things like this.

17:18The Dixiecrats all became Republicans. And my strategy of challenging that is I go make an inventory of the 200 Dixiecrats. I put them up on a movie screen And I say, all right, I'm now going to show you through a movement of the mouse, which of these 200 Dixiecrats became Republicans. Answer two. So did the Dixiecrats as a group become Republicans? No, there's the empirical evidence right there on the screen. You can check it out for yourself. So when I see this almost parody of investigation, parody of scholarship, it's very unnerving. Now, for young people, just as you said, there is a susceptibility to all this.

18:02And also, there's no easy check on it. Like, for example, right now I'm in these big debates about Christian theology. But I'm debating Christian theology with people who have, like, listened to two podcasts. I've written three books on Christian apologetics. I've thought about this stuff for 30 years, but it's difficult to address people who say things like, Dinesh, open a Bible once in a while. You might learn something. I'm like, are you serious? So, but our culture has had that leveling effect. This guy who's watched two podcasts is on an even playing field with me. Now, this would not have been the case in the Reagan years because that guy would not even be, that guy would not be speaking at a conference at AEI.

18:48So there was a filtering structure that is now gone. And look, there's...

18:54Francis Foster:And there are good things about that. Well, that's right. I was going to say that. And I know you've tried to debate, Tuck, and this is one of the other things that I do find strange because with some notable exceptions, quite a lot of these people don't engage in what used to happen, which is you come together and you have these debates and discussions. But now I think the economic incentives aren't there. you don't need to do that. Like if you're Candace, you just do your show and you make millions of dollars talking about how someone you used to call your friend, denigrating his legacy, in my opinion, and all of that.

19:28Francis Foster:But you don't need to go and engage in a debate. There's nothing to gain, really. Right. And so everything gets siloed. Something we've learned doing this show is that people's thoughts about a given issue often depend on where they get their news. That's why we use Ground News to see how the same story is reported across the political spectrum.

19:48Konstantin Kisin:For example, take the story about Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson signing an executive order creating so-called ice-free zones. Follow along at ground.news slash trigonometry. Using Ground News straight away, we can quickly see that the story is being covered by sources across the board, but with more coverage from outlets on the right. Scrolling down the page, Ground News allows us to easily compare the headlines. We can see the Chicago Sun-Times, which is on the left, focused on the city's decision to declare municipal buildings ice-free. Meanwhile, The Hill, a centrist newspaper, simply stated that Chicago's mayor signs ice-free zone executive order.

20:30Konstantin Kisin:But the New York Post on the right went with, White House blasts sick Chicago mayor for aiding illegal immigrant killers. Same news story, completely different takes. Ground News compiles these divergent perspectives in one place.

20:45Francis Foster:Another feature we use heavily at Trigonometry is the Blind Spot Feed, which highlights where coverage is lopsided, lets you compare bias across the political spectrum, and shows what's being emphasized or ignored. If you care about getting to the truth by seeing things from all angles, Ground News is essential. Go to ground.news.trigonometry and get 40 % off their unlimited vantage plan. That's the plan we use. That link again is ground.news.trigonometry.