Greetings Earthlings! Welcome to the Roseanne Bar podcast. I have such an interesting show today because I have a fantastically interesting guest and I'm very excited.

I watched his film last night. He's a great filmmaker and a great thinker and a great American citizen. Dinesh D'Souza, hi!

Hey, it's great to be here and kind of surreal experience for me to be sitting next to you.

And thank you.

Thank you.

Yeah, I want to go right into watching your film, which is called Police State, right?

Yes. I came to the country to the United States in 1978 as a teenager and I was exhilarated by American freedom, opportunity,

but also these unalienable rights. And there they are in the Bill of Rights, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, right to assemble, right to petition the government for grievances, equal rights, equal justice under the law.

And so here we fast forward to now and I realize suddenly, whoa, all these rights have come into jeopardy.

And the pretext might vary. You know, it's 9-11, it's due to COVID, it's due to January 6th, but whatever the rationale, the movement is in the same direction toward the extinguishing of our liberties.

And that's why the startling question, which really I couldn't have made, I couldn't have asked 10 years ago, are we becoming a police state? That's the theme of the film.

Well, I love the film I wanted to say because I want to thank you for giving us a cohesive timeline because I think that that's very much missing and I think that it's missing on purpose because they don't give us the, what's the word, Jake, when things go in a certain order?

It's sequential, yeah. We don't have a sequential memory of how things start slowly and then keep going in small steps.

And you have made that very clear in the movie and I think it's very needed for people in order to wake them up so they see how their rights are being eroded and how dangerous that is.

Yeah, this, this police state has a genealogy, a storyline, it has a starting point and I was trying to think about where that starting point was.

I had to research this for the film, is it go back to like Watergate, is it go back to the days of Jay Edgar Hoover, who was kind of a freak, you know, and like to keep file, secret files on people, Martin Luther King and other people.

This is go back to Ruby Ridge and Waco, those incidents from the 1990s, one under Bush, one under, under Bill Clinton.

And I think the real turning point is, is the years of George W. Bush after 9-11.

And this is a little awkward to say because although the police state is being driven by the left today, it has bipartisan roots.

Because after 9-11, there were many people, I'm sorry to say me included, who said, okay, you know, we got these bad guys, these Islamic terrorists that want to kill us, we're going to have to give the government these enhanced powers.

And there were people then who warned Ron Paul being one of them.

Yeah.

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