Glenn sat down with Dinesh D'souza today to get his take on Obama's emotionless response to the terror attacks in Paris. Why is it that Obama gets passionate and riled up about the police, Syrian refugees and gun control, but not people losing their lives at the hands of Islamic extremists?
D'souza also had some interesting thoughts to share while talking about his new book, Stealing America: What My Experience With Criminal Gangs Taught Me About Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party. Listen to the audio or read the transcript below.
Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.
GLENN: Dinesh D'souza. Number one best-selling author. New book. Stealing America: What my Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me About Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party. Dinesh, welcome to the program. How are you, sir?
DINESH: Glenn, always a pleasure.
GLENN: Can you explain to me -- when I watched Barack Obama, and I assume you saw him in Turkey this week.
DINESH: Yes.
GLENN: When America and everybody's heart was breaking -- and this is our ally. This is France. This is one of our strongest allies.
And everybody -- the emotion was -- was pouring out and I've never seen Barack Obama more Ben Carson like. You know, he spoke and it was -- and it was like and, you know, this was -- this was a really bad setback. There wasn't any emotion there. It was -- there was no outrage. There was no -- there was no passion.
DINESH: He was reading from his tax return, in effect.
GLENN: Yes, did you see that, and can you explain it?
DINESH: I saw that. And I actually noted the astonishing contrast with Hollande. In fact, Hollande started out a lot like Obama. He's been actually very receptive. He's been condemning earlier Islamophobia and so on. But the moment there's blood on the street, Hollande sounds like Winston Churchill. He starts using the language of civilization against barbarism. He says things like "we will be merciless." Obama, on the other hand, sounds like Obama. And I think this is actually an indication of modern progressivism. Because I think we saw it similarly with Hillary in Benghazi.
And here's what I mean. These guys appear to be annoyed when there is a foreign policy crisis. A little bit -- they feel like that's a distraction. Why are you bothering me with that? I've got more important things to do. So one reason I wrote this book, Stealing America, is my argument is the progressives are busy domestically stealing the wealth of America. That's what animates them. That's what motivates them. They do get animated when they are blocked from doing that by Republicans. But, on the other hand, all this other stuff happening abroad is no more interesting to them than thieves who are robbing a bank would be interested in news reports that the overall security -- external security of the bank is threatened or that there are bad macro economic effects from stealing from a bank. They're looting the bank, and that's what they care about.
GLENN: So when he's bringing in the Syrians, he's not passionate about the security of the United States. But, boy, is he passionate about bringing the Syrians in?
DINESH: Yeah. And he's passionate about making the point that there should not be a distinction between Islam and Christianity. Notice that his voice gets a certain emotionalism in condemning those who say that, for example, Syrian Christians are less likely to become Islamic radicals than Syrian Muslims. I mean, you'd think that it would be obvious that a Syrian Christian would be less vulnerable to the siren call of Islamic radicalism. But for Obama, that is an offensive, annoying, irritating thing to say. And he'll attack it. That's what gets him charged up.
GLENN: Pat, do you have the speech where he said Christians have a responsibility, and Muslims have to do this and, you know, ask why their kids are being indoctrinated. Do you know that? From the speech on --
PAT: Is it the one where he was talking about there shouldn't a religious test.
GLENN: Do you have that one? Yeah.
GLENN: Listen to this. I want to get your opinion on this. If this is the right cut. Do you have it?
PAT: Or do I have it? Let me see.
GLENN: Okay. You look for it.
PAT: Yeah.
GLENN: Is there a -- a stealing of America happening with the Syrian refugees?
DINESH: Well, just if I could make a point on this religious business, imagine if there were a group of Christians somewhere in the world who are very pious and very serious about their faith and in the name of their faith were committing massacres, were committing bombings, were engaging in mass violence, do you think Obama would show one minute of reluctance to call those Christian extremists --
GLENN: No. Not at all.
DINESH: Of course not. So there's a double standard here. And behind every double standard, there's usually a single standard. And so it seems to me that Obama's single standard is he's got this systematic preference for Islam over Christianity. And it exposes itself in the very differential way in which he treats the two faiths.
GLENN: Well, he also says that we shouldn't jump to any conclusions. Yet, I don't have all the facts and the police acted stupidly. I don't have all the facts, but we -- we know what happened in Ferguson. I don't have all the facts, but we have to act now because there was another shooting today.
I mean, he is quick to assign the blame everywhere. But he always comes out after one of these events and says, "Now, wait a minute. Let's slow down. Let's not be crazy and let's not do anything rash because you always make mistakes."
DINESH: Yeah, I think that's right. Obama is the most animated when he is attacking Republicans, conservatives, and Christians. Those are the three groups that really get his goat.
Foreign policy threats to him, he always takes a statesman-like, above-the-fray stance. Now, the stealing America that you asked me about, I think, is an escalation from what liberalism was about before. By an escalation, what I mean is we're now seeing an effort on the part of the progressives to put their hands, not just on the wealth of the government, the $3 trillion in the federal budget, for example, but to extend the control over all the wealth of the private economy. We've seen under Obama, for example, major industries. Banking insurance, automobiles, health care. Now increasingly energy. They're trying to establish federal control over the private sector.
GLENN: When I saw the -- you know, the president was out to talk about global warming and yet another scheme. And it was -- what is it? $14 trillion a year this scheme for global warming. All I could think of was, "You're just stealing the wealth. That's all you're doing."
DINESH: Yeah. I mean, Obama doesn't know or care whether the earth is getting hotter or colder. He has no idea. But he sees it as a wonderful opportunity in order to make headway in the stealing America project. Part of what I learned in the confinement center, Glenn, was we tend to look at these as arguments, as debates.
GLENN: Hold on just a second. I want to explain. When he says I was in the confinement center. You want to talk about taking lemons and making it into lemonade. Correct me if I'm wrong, you got the premise of this book by being incarcerated, and you were in jail with hardened criminals and thieves and murderers and rapists and everything else. And you're like, I recognize this as the Democratic Party.
(laughter)
DINESH: Well, I began to learn the way they operate.
GLENN: Right.
DINESH: They would give me a sales pitch, and then they would say, "Well, that's our pitch. If we're trying to rob a house, we need to get the homeowner to lift the latch off the door. So we've got to sweet talk him into doing that. Now, the moment he lifts the latch off the door, we can kick in the door and go in." But the pitch creates the element of momentary trust that allows the scam to go forward.
So I now begin to see that what happens in American politics -- Obamacare, this whole business about Obama giving you rebates on your college loans, these are all wonderful scams.
I mean, let's look for a moment at this college thing. Obama says to young people, "I'm going to forgive your college loans or I'm going to make it not required for you to pay them back. I'm going to give you free college." Now, think about that. How is he going to do that?
Well, the federal government has to pay for it because nothing is free. You have to pay professors and pay for buildings and so on. So Obama and the government doesn't have the money, so they're going to borrow from the national debt. The national debt is going to go up. Who is going to pay that national debt? Who is going to inherit it? The same young people who were the beneficiaries of Obama's munificence. So what Obama is really doing is he's taking money from young people, from their own future earnings or from their own back pocket and giving it to them.
But he's making himself into the philanthropist. Obviously it's not his money. It's their money. So it's not even robbing Peter to pay Paul; it's robbing Paul to pay Paul.
GLENN: Unbelievable.
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