actionable. the girl. did not exist well the republic again i'm larry king in new york times best selling author denise d'souza joins me here in studio his latest book is entitled america

imagine a world without her he is co-writer and director of a documentary by the same name which will be out july's said good then we'll see some clips from that during the program why why why this title because i am an immigrant to america and from india i grew up in bombay i came at this country at the age of seventeen i've written twelve books this is my thirteenth book and i realized as i look back on them i've written books in education civil rights capitalism they're all in some ways about america because as an immigrant i think i i have a dual perspective i see america from the inside i've grown up here i went to college here but i also retain a little bit of that outsider feeling of america in which i'm always comparing america to other cultures to the rest of the world and i think that dual perspective informs all my writing and the idea of a world without her would would leave the world well we have a tremendous space between the oceans well we're right now that. it would be

a giant of the indian ocean there are different ways for america not to exist so if a meteorite hit the continent and vaporized thousand years ago there would be no america but here is another way if a british sniper had shot george washington and the american revolution had gone down there would be america the land mass there be people here but we wouldn't have an american revolution the american constitution this america would not exist be canada we'd be canada or if hitler got the atomic bomb remember hitler had the most sophisticated bomb project on the burner highs and berg he would have dropped it and america would not be the way it is now so the reason i'm asking these questions is i'm thinking forward what would the future look like if america begins to recede in importance to me as an immigrant it's a terrifying idea why because america has meant so much in the world america is something very special in history a new sort of form of government a new lifestyle a new american dream nobody else has a dream the way we do in america and as an immigrant that's what i came here for

and it's sad for me to see that this america this dream i think is shrinking a little bit today haven't we overcome some of our faults we've overcome hopefully racial bias we've overcome inequality for women we've created in that lure a pretty great place and where you see the diminishing where were we not great first of all it's important to remember the things we overcame weren't our things so for example slavery was going on all over the world right there was slavery in india slavery in china greeks and romans had slaves american indians had slaves long before columbus so what is a uniquely american is not slavery was uniquely american it's a word the only country to fight a big war in which six hundred thousand people died to get rid of slavery nobody else has done that i mean we overcame it right and the reason we did that is because right from the beginning there was the principle of all men. were created

equal so even though it wasn't being practiced it was nagging on the american conscience and ultimately a whole bunch of white guys who didn't have slaves went to their deaths to end slavery as an institution or some current issue so much as to revisit with them show clips over you i imagine is more books coming from you to me out of a slowdown the book is america imagine a world with our souls are going to be a major motion picture documentary obvious now this is new for me i did the film twenty sixteen which is about obama's history in it and i thought look obama supported it interesting and so is hillary but the big topic here is america and what is america meant to the world so the new film is called america and it's it's out in theaters for the july fourth independence day weekend good timing good timing well good disability also if you can include parts of the book too what are your thoughts on the release of the prisoner in exchange i think is just a terrible idea and the question i'm thinking about is why would someone do that

you know you have these hardened taliban commanders and there are clearly guys who have been captured in shooting wars against america they're very anti-american now you might say that's a price worth paying to get an american back and i understand that but israel those are all the time israel does that all the time the thousands and we exchanged prisoners with the nazis i mean this is part of this is part of the practice of all the unusual well i think what's bad about it in this particular case is that they that the soldier that they're bringing back seems to be similar to the taliban in his view of america another was here is a guy who was apparently a desert or here's a guy who apparently caused other americans that we don't know yet we don't know we don't but they don't i don't we don't know all the facts we will know them as they all come out but i'm just saying going on what we know this looks like a very questionable deal i think part of the there's a bigger picture here and that is under obama you've seen american interests we can around the world look at the middle east america. you couldn't do one thing in the

middle east without america having a big say so but recently it seems like from egypt to the arab spring you have one by one american allies like mubarak not a perfect guy by any means yeah a dictator but in getting rid of the bad guy you always want to make sure you avoid the worst guy you know poor jimmy carter helped to get rid of the shah and the shah had a secret police but look we got khomeini so from the frying pan into the fire america has had a nightmare in iran for thirty years because of the khomeini revenue over using going to iraq was correct i think in retrospect that was a mistake and i certainly think you can't say i was going in for weapons of mass destruction there aren't any to me that's unconsciously a little obama so much and not level bush well they did this i think i think the iraq invasion was a mistake now afghanistan is a different deal and i think with obama he does he came in and he seemed to understand the distinction in fact he campaigned he said iraq is a bad war gana standards and more troops go to the water but look the taliban those

are not good guys they're not good guys not only in their foreign policy but they they are the most radical muslims in the world and radical islam is probably the most illiberal force in the world today so i don't understand why we don't recognize that with that in afghanistan we are dealing with a serious problem and we need to deal with it to obama's statement that america is a hammer all problems aren't. i came of age in the reagan years and if you remember reagan had something called the reagan doctrine now the reagan doctrine is this we do not fight for other people's freedom they fight we help so when the mujahedin and afghanistan were fighting the push the soviets out we didn't send hundreds of thousands of troops we just and some advisors we gave them some stinger rockets to shoot down soviet helicopters so i think america should be careful in committing the use of force but we should be a friend of liberty around the world in today's republican party where would reagan

be. i think reagan would it would be a tea party he would be he would be baffled because i think the republicans today are really out of it in fact they're in a little bit of a huddle here how do we take back this segment you know the left is the recognizes that this is a much broader argument about america so the left is marching through education academia the media hollywood influencing young people and so shifting the goalposts of the culture meanwhile the republicans i think are fighting in one corner of the battlefield so part of what i'm trying to do i'm a think tank i used the been mainly writing books but the reason i'm making movies as i said listen i want to join this big american argument i want to get out there talk to ordinary people and so films are a way to reach millions of people are you a very unruly and deal i'm not very obama because i sort of understand obama i mean to me. obama and i have traveled opposite paths i'm a third world guy who's i'm braced america obama is an american born guy that's

where the birth of the wrong is born here but because of his dad and his unique background growing up in hawaii indonesia his multiple trips to kenya i think he is a brace to sort of a third world issue of global ideology so the two of us have sort of got in the opposite direction i admire i'm going to make him the american leader says i different philosophy has a different philosophy i never say that he hates america or that he was is the he wants american politician in iraq i would he want to shrink here i would anybody want to power to sure i'll tell you why let's say i'm a believer and sit on my obama obama believes in global justice so obama believes that the west got rich through colonialism invading and occupying these poor countries obama says why should america which has five percent of the world's population enjoyed twenty five percent of the world's wealth why should we have so much energy why should we use so much health care what right do we have to tell other countries what to do so i think what obama would like to see he's not trying

to destroy america. he's just trying to make america a normal country like greece or uganda one country at the big dining table of nations now to me that's bad because i like america to be the sole superpower i don't see the commerce of the world's oceans traveling smoothly without the u.s. navy sitting there to make sure that pirates don't get on board. that way you're going to have the world disliking you and if the world does like you you don't get support when you need support it's a small world it's a small lead you need to china's and you need you need the you need europe you need asia you need that you couldn't i couldn't agree more but i think that we need to exercise both soft and hard power and what that means is we need to make friends wherever we can but we also need to be tough so for example china is modernizing its military china is building up its nuclear arsenal if i was america i would say all right let me make friends with india and japan and korea to block the rising

power of china so it's one thing to say we all want to be happy friends it's another thing to say there are powerful forces in the world that are coming up and america needs to protect its own interests we resume our version of d.-day member very well because i was eleven years old. you call it one of the triumphs of america's so-called greatest generation you write the greatest generation failed in one important respect it couldn't produce another great generation i was it supposed to do that well was it responsible to produce another general well then though i wouldn't say it was its responsibility to me what i what i love about the greatest generation wasn't just a one world war two it's what it did after that because lots of people would have fought world war two the japanese attacked us it's not surprising we got into it but we rebuilt japan and germany after the war that is unprecedented the romans would never have done that and i was truman it was true in the us through a minute other than which conservatives opposed the pose of the times. it would be

wrong to do that yes alive all right well i think that was a mistake because this rep you know we see a small glimpse of it even later not ganna stand where american planes are bombing these taliban targets but dropping food and i'm like wow you know what what other empire does this you know consider the fate of civilians on the other side so the point i want to make about the greatest generation was it was created by the depression and world war two it was a generation form that hardship so i understand in the fifty's when america started doing well these people said let's give our kids everything they wanted but the problem was you then create the spoiled brats of the nineteen sixty is the clinton generation so when i compare the world war two generation with the sixties generation i'm going with a world war two generation war with the bestselling author until my good. after the us. in two thousand and nine barack obama was asked do you believe america is unique do

you believe in american exceptionalism obama said yes but then he added something odd he said i believe america is exceptional in the same way that the brits believe britain is exceptional or the greeks believe greece is exceptional so in a sense obama was under carter and his previous answer because obviously if everyone thinks they're exceptional the implication is that no one really is so american exceptionalism which the founders believed in has become controversial in our time i think what's fascinating about this debate about american exceptionalism is that today on the right and the left both sides of american exceptionalism the differences are the conservatives believe america is exceptionally good while the progressive to the obama types believe america is especially bad.

join me. in park and finance for kerry interview and much. only on bombast and. i love america. i kills this country unlike millions of immigrants i've been blessed by my life. this country does something truly amounts of you to write the script the thrill.

that was a clip from the new documentary america magine a world without her based on this book it opens by the way in july the co-writer and director that film is dinesh d'souza he's my guest the book with the same name is out now i've been called you denise should stay in the shop polish side ok but i didn't bet it affect your to think about calling yourself to me and i'm so you know that my my middle name is joseph and my friends once said to me you can't write books with names like didn't asher denise nobody knows no one can pronounce that use your middle name but i find actually using my real name it's more memorable you recently less month you pled guilty to a charge you use straw donors to make a twenty thousand dollar legal contribution why did you want to plead guilty why did you do that i was a complete idiot my friend oh did you do well tell you my friend wendy long was running for the senate in new york city and i told her wendy please don't run you have no chance to win gillibrand. again jill ryan was the incumbent with

a lot of money so in any event what i did was i gave twenty thousand dollars to wendy long above the campaign finance i love to give ten thousand for a couple i gave twenty thousand more i had no bad intentions i was swamped i should have set up a pac there are ten legal ways to do it i just did something really stupid and so i pled guilty to it and i'll get my lumps for it but you won't be able to vote i'm just going to have to use my influence to convince others to vote yes it's terrible i was an immigrant i never thought i'd be in this position and i know i must say that i do i am more worried that with the obama guys and i'm not talking about my case as i look around the landscape my partner jerry molen who is the producer of cinders list and jurassic park right after we made the film twenty sixteen boom he gets approached by the i.r.s. investors get approached by the i.r.s. such an oops don't mean yeah this is all bad stuff because i don't think to be honest this is not a liberal democratic or a republican thing i don't see clinton doing this i don't see jimmy carter doing it

there's a certain sense in which when you have control of the government you shouldn't be using it as a weapon against your critics but you did wrong what i did do wrong and i admit it do you think you might go to jail i think i might i hope i don't and i'll make the case for why shouldn't i haven't done this obviously before twenty thousand assumes mind again do you complete deal can't you well the other thing about it is you know the election laws are there for corruption and usually when people do this stuff they're bundling they're trying to get something out of it there's some quid pro quo there's none of that in this case i was misguided effort to help a friend meeting with prosecutors i've already met with them they're sort of out to get me i would have to say my my confidence is really more in the judicial system and in the judge and he is the one who decides my fate and then do you some years back you said same said some marriages don't work because marriage does not civilized men women do. but now you see the tide going the other way the tide is definitely going the other way it's wrong with i don't really know i mean i have to say historically this is completely untested you know there have been historically

marriage has been in so many different forms polygamy has existed in many known cultures incest you know the ancient egyptians and so on gay marriage is new and its impact on society and kids completely unknown so we're sort of in uncharted territory here i can see how we got here the point i was making in that quip and it's only a quip was to say listen but the reason that men behave themselves is not because they are married it's because of the civilizing influence of women and women have a way of transforming men and that's all i was saying that gay marriage doesn't do that so we'll have to see i mean i'm open to the idea of what's going to happen we're just going to watch you care but there's a real as you see it as a religion that is tied to the tide is in and the reason i think the tide is in this because what the gay movement has done very effectively is piggyback on the civil rights movement so in the civil rights movement essentially the argument was that race is the painted face right that race is not something that tells you anything about the inside of somebody and so race established

a nondiscrimination principle allowing other groups to piggyback on it and say well yeah well many blacks resented well blacks are very comfortable about this because they is not the new black for the way they see it all right let's do some political things do you have a favorite republican in the mix i don't in fact i've been a little bit alarmed at the quality of the republican candidates over the past twenty years it seems to me the party has been in that in picking strong candidates to run against the democrats it's a big country they exist but some other not being fielded it must be something about the process that's not quite another they're like if the tea party has. so a candidate who might be able it's a good jeb bush he might not be able to win the primaries i do think that in this year i was at the republican leadership conference of speaking to a couple of my. ago and i've noticed a new awareness pick if you will the most conservative candidate who can win so not pick the most conservative candidate period but pick the most conservative

candidate when your mind is that those electable i don't know because i think hillary would be a very formidable candidate she's the historic first woman running. i don't really know i spoke i've been focusing my energy on issues and a little bit on obama and the democrats in my book and my film i really focused on the power of the progressive movement as this develops since the one nine hundred sixty s. i've been sort of neglecting the conservative side i guess you feel to lose a definite run i think it's you very likely to remember that she's you know i think an instant question with hillary is is she more like bill or is she more like barack so i think a lot of americans are hoping that she's more like bill so they're going to get bill or e but if you from agree bill was a pretty good president i agree bill was a pretty good president i think he was a good guy and of course he was a he was a patriot and america did very well in the ninety's i think that being said hillary ideologically is probably closer to obama than she is to the bill you think she was an effective secretary of state i think that she was an effective secretary of

state but she was an effective sekret of state under a bad leader so in other words other words as an effective secretary of state would carry out the mission that is just like an effective commander in the military will carry out a mission but it needs to be a good mission in order for for it to leave us better off so yes he she failed oceans and she she she succeeded in getting the right she succeeded operationally so little bit look if i were to say reagan succeeded you know in arming the contras right but if you think arming the contras was a bad idea his success won't matter to you in fact you'll count it as a failure in the big picture that's kind of my point i think obama's foreign policy has been very bad for america america is weaker today than it was when he took office but hillary has i think been effective in carrying out his wishes one of the areas the republicans appear weak is an immigration. and some progressive george bush's strategy change the immigration laws you are an immigrant yes your party behind the germans you know i think that the i think the both parties are wrong on

this i think the devil we have both parties are wrong in this because the democratic party is undiscriminating in its idea of let everybody and in fact there's even a scandal now about the idea of going to other countries and telling people listen if you show up with your kid they have to let you in you know you're helpless case and so on so that and the lawlessness on our border i was down of the border larry just about two months ago and talking to a border guy he was saying look with today's technology look at the n.s.a. surveillance we have great surveillance we can see people coming off them over the border and he said i went to my supervisor and i told him our cameras are recording all these guys coming up the border and the supervisor goes move the cameras meaning we don't want to show the american people what we're allowing the happen so this is bad stuff now the republicans i think where they're mistaken is this is a country built by immigrants immigrant spirit is totally american so i what i do is i would be very pro immigrant but i would want entrepreneurial immigrants who

love america who want to be part of the israelis people coming in want to come in they want to succeed no no no no they're coming in for stuff but there are two ways to get stuff one way to get stuff is to work for it and earn it on the other way is simply to become eligible for it so we have become we're now a strange society we're a welfare magnet but we're also an entrepreneurial magnet on how to. do it like every other country in canada sits around and says you know what we have too few doctors let's take more doctors we need more nurses we need more people to invest money and start new businesses so you you're right the immigration laws so you're taken in a million immigrants a year but you're choosing the immigrants you want but image was the republicans look bad on the issue they look very bad on the issue and part of you'll notice in the book and in the film it's a film told by an immigrant to champions immigrant virtues and by the way the left's attack on america i see as an. attack on immigrants because when the left says you know you took the country from the indians who took the country from the indians not the rich one percent not the guys living in mansions on the east coast

it's poor immigrant penniless settlers who went out west they had no land and years there's a vast country they fought the indians they took the land who took half of mexico from the mexicans and then durrance irish guys who went down south they fought the mexican war so the left is kind of disingenuous they're saying we're attacking the one percent no you're attacking the immigrants with one hundred feel about the the concept of the second amendment how do you read it i can read it my way you can really do well my way i don't know i mean that's that's a strange one for me i grew up in a society where no one has guns if you basically want to conduct a robbery you have to use your kitchen knife. as logical to me seems logical to me but i also come to this country and i look at it and i study it historically i recognize this is a settler country it's a pioneer country the guys who went out west there was no police to protect them they need guns they don't need them now they well. they would argue with you about they would argue that having a gun is a big deterrent for someone who's going to pull a gun on you i interviewed the head of scotland yard once he could not believe the

american did get a handgun he saw no use for the modem i have and it was inconceivable to him. wouldn't we be better off if there were no him guns not made you don't get one there were those nice women those can get them we can't get them you can't get them there are no handguns that would be a wonderful idea but that would be like saying wouldn't the world be better off if nobody had a nuclear bomb yes it would yes yes but that's a fantasy because even if we were could do that the knowledge of how to make a bomb exists and so the guy who made gree bombs would then be king of the world but the world is very unsafe when you outlaw something and no one has it but a few guys can get it because then those guys have power over everybody else so for example if china had three as three hundred nuclear bombs as they do roughly about now in that kind of world it's very dangerous for america to go down to three hundred because in a for a strike they could wipe out most of ours start thinking like that well then iran's

israel's got nuclear bombs we've got to have nuclear bombs correct so then you see if you are innocent of the bombs we better have nuclear bombs so everybody has to say we didn't move your arms and soon you have a war with nuclear bombs and when you have that someone's going to shoot it off would be a good guy to correct and so you know that's absolutely right you know that since the cold war that the american military plays war games every day every day to think about what those contingencies look like i'm terrified by the power that science has given us to obliterate the play by the way not just nuclear bomb chemical weapons there are so many technologies today you wish that you could turn away human nature not only do that but somebody is will doing something somewhere yeah are you there for the mystical person mr m congenitally an optimist but i'm also a realist and so you know if you look at the cover this book you see an interesting side you see the statue of liberty and you see there's a storm that's kind of pulling it apart but the torch is held up by it so there's

a foreboding element to it but hey i'm not giving up on america the group we're been a williams i asked him once if he was an optimist or pessimist he said of course. i'm a pessimist i'm smart. thank you danette it's my pleasure great having you with us to be on the show the book is america magic a world without air it's out now and the documentary with the same name hits theaters in july my thanks to dinesh for joining me on politicking from my views of the i want to hear from you join the conversation on my facebook page share your thoughts on the other like living at king's things easy to say that's all for this week's politics.

was a. very hard to take. that that would make her look. like. the perfect.