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July 15, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
57:37
COME AND TAKE IT! Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep132
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An exclusive interview with Texas Governor Greg Abbott.
I'm going to ask him how he's going to pass the voter integrity law and also whether he's got some handcuffs ready for the runaway Texas Democrats.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The Biden administration is doing all it can to fight against not just new voter integrity laws, but also audits in Arizona, in Georgia, possibly an upcoming audit in Pennsylvania, all trying to do a sort of check on what happened in the 2020 election.
them.
And there's a group in Georgia that has, as a result of pressing for information, been able to obtain what it calls provable, provable evidence of fraud.
Now, Trump is all over this.
He just issued a statement.
The news coming out of Georgia is beyond incredible.
The hand recount in Fulton County was a total fraud.
They stuffed the ballot box and got caught.
We will lose our country if this is allowed to stand.
And Trump's spokesman, Liz Harrington, has been putting out really almost by the hour kind of these bombshell images.
Whistleblower takes photos of stacks of supposed mail-in ballots, but they don't have any creases.
She goes, never in an envelope.
And they look like they were all photocopied.
She also says, here are some ballot batch sheets.
And she has photos. She goes, showing unanimous, 100 to 0, 150 to 0, 200 to 0 for Biden.
Extremely fishy.
And then she says, there are a bunch of votes in Fulton County counted more than once.
The same vote. Now, of course, we saw some of this right in the aftermath of November 2020, and all of it seemed to sort of vanish, kind of go nowhere.
Why? Because it was by itself sort of anecdotal.
There's a case here, there's a case there, but what does it sort of add up to?
But what it adds up to, according to Liz Harrington, after doing the math, she says, Biden's margin of victory shrinks by 2,525 votes.
Now, Trump lost Georgia by 12,000 votes.
So even if what Liz Harrington says is true, this would not be enough by itself to overturn Georgia.
But I think the point that is being made here is that The audit so far has only looked at a tiny portion of the ballots.
It's just the hand recount.
And right away, what you see is documented serious problems and, in some cases, as this group says, approvable fraud.
The group, by the way, is called Voter GA, Voter Georgia, Voter And these are the people who pressed to get all this information and also pressed the Georgia Assembly to make this information public.
Interestingly, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, very left-wing, kind of the New York Times, if you will, of Atlanta.
And they have an article on the front page.
Some ballots initially double-counted.
So you have acknowledgement, even by the left.
And then in the article, the discovery of identical ballots provides evidence to back up allegations of problems.
Problems here is kind of a code word for fraud.
Problems. But then it says, but on a relatively small scale that had no bearing on the final certified count.
I think this is more wishful thinking than anything else.
The AJC, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, is basically saying that this by itself doesn't settle the case.
But the question is, is there more here and how much more?
Now, let's get into the weeds of this a little bit because...
Fulton County, we're talking about mail-in absentee ballots, and upon looking at these mail-in absentee ballots, voter Georgia says, they were, quote, riddled with massive errors and provable fraud.
They looked at Fulton County's hand count audit, which was, by the way, held November 14th and 15th, 2020, and they found, quote, a whopping 60% error rate.
Think about that. When you have a 60% error rate, that means that more than half the ballots hand counted are being miscounted.
Let's look at some of the details.
I'm now just going to read because I want to make sure this is completely accurate.
Of a batch, there were 1539 batch files which contained 100 mail-in ballots each.
923 of these files, which is 60%, contained votes incorrectly reported in the official November 3, 2020 results, as compared to the reported audit totals.
At least 36 batches, representing 4,255 mail-in ballots, were redundantly added into the audit results.
Including extra vote totals of 3,390 votes for Biden, 865 for Trump, and 43 for a third candidate.
Now, Voter Georgia says, listen, this is, quote, not simply a case of errors.
Why? Because Voter Georgia found, quote, seven falsified audit tally sheets containing fabricated vote totals.
So, to give you an idea...
Here are these, the seven batches of ballot images had votes that totaled 705 votes.
554 went for Biden.
140 went for Trump.
That was the actual votes.
So this is from an urban area.
Not surprisingly, Biden is ahead.
He gets 554.
Trump gets 140. But when they made the audit totals, this was the result.
This was the votes actually tallied.
850 for Biden, zero for Trump.
So they altered the totals, giving all the votes, including Trump's votes, to Biden.
Now, let's keep going.
Fulton County also failed to include tally sheets for 100,000 ballots, of which more than 50,000 were mail-in ballots.
And they claim that they don't have them, or at least they don't have them at hand.
They've not produced them.
And... And there were 200 Fulton County mail-in ballot images containing votes.
They had votes, but these votes weren't even counted.
So on the one hand, you have votes that are counted wrong, and on the other hand, you have votes that were cast, but were not even included in the count.
Now, all of this, I think, is a sharp contradiction to the Georgia Secretary of State, a Republican, Brad Raffensperger, who said, Oh, this was a very secure election.
There's no mismatch.
The recount that occurred essentially corresponded precisely with the original count.
So this was a clean election in Georgia.
And we're beginning to see that in Fulton County, that was manifestly not the case.
Manifestly not the case.
So all of this, to me, indicates the need to probe further, to dive deeper, to really turn stones over and look under them.
Now, I realize that the left and the media are trying to create this false sense of unanimity.
Oh, this has already been decided.
Oh, this has been counted many, many times.
But what they're doing that is to lull us into a sense of complacency.
And sadly, I find that not Republican voters, because Republican voters appear not to be fooled by any of this.
We saw what we saw.
We saw the anomalies around the election.
We're not convinced. But some Republican leaders, and this would be all the way from Mike Pence down, you know, are so quick when the left kind of converges on a narrative to throw in the towel, to surrender, to go along, to submit to that narrative.
And so it is really impressive that you've got independent groups, voter integrity groups, Pressing for this information so we can find out in 2020 what truly happened.
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Make sure to use promo code DINESH. Joe Biden rushed to Pennsylvania recently to give his thunderous oration about democracy and how the Republicans are threats to democracy.
The reason he did this, by the way, I think, in part, is to try to head off, to forestall, to block a Pennsylvania election audit.
So there's an audit underway in Maricopa County, Arizona.
There are people looking at Fulton County in Georgia.
And the state senator, Doug Mastriano, is driving a demand for an audit in Pennsylvania.
This is what Biden is hoping to try to prevent.
Now, interestingly, it's a very disturbing letter that Trump just released.
It's from William McSwain, who was U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
I just want to read a couple of lines from this letter, because it shows that our problems are not just with the other party, but some of them are with our own party.
Attorney McSwain says that the 2020 election was, quote, a partisan disgrace.
He points out that even before the election, the state attorney general, a Democrat, Josh Shapiro, declared that Biden was going to win Pennsylvania.
Kind of a shocking statement right on the eve of an election by the chief official, the chief...
A legal official who is supposed to sort of supervise the integrity of the election, announcing the result in advance.
And then says William McSwain, And he says, as part of my responsibilities as U.S. attorney, I wanted to be transparent with the public and investigate fully any allegations.
And then he says this, Attorney General Barr, however, instructed me not to make any public statements or put out any press releases regarding possible election irregularities.
I was given a directive to pass along serious allegations to the state attorney general for investigation.
The same state attorney general who already declared that Trump could not win.
So, in other words, here's William Barr, the attorney general of the United States, telling McSwain, listen, don't put out anything on election fraud.
Don't even investigate it.
If you get any complaints, pass them along to the Democratic attorney general of the state who...
Barr should have surely known, was going to essentially toss those allegations in the trash.
So here we have something disturbing on a number of counts.
Many of us thought that Barr was a great improvement when he came in as Attorney General over Jeff Sessions.
But it seems like on this issue, Barr was not on our side, at least not even willing to really seriously investigate.
There's no evidence he himself did any investigation at the federal level.
Now, let's come back to State Senator Mastriano.
He has demanded that a number of counties provide evidence so that there is a chance to examine the vote totals.
And Mastriano, by the way, went to Arizona.
He observed the audit process going on over there.
He was actually impressed by it.
He said, yeah, we need to do this in Pennsylvania.
And I'm now quoting him from a local paper.
He goes, it's distinct from an audit or a forensic audit.
It's a deep dive, just like we saw in Arizona, but even deeper.
He says it takes a hard look at software, machines, scanners, in addition to looking at all the ballots themselves to see if they were hand-filled in or copied by a machine.
So it's a scientific approach to get to the bottom of what happened.
Now, right away, the Pennsylvania Attorney General is trying to block this.
And so he sent a letter to all these counties saying, listen, do not turn over your machines to State Senator Mastriano or his team.
Don't do that because if you do that, we're not going to cover the cost of replacing those machines.
So it's an intimidation tactic here, trying to prevent these counties from turning in their machines.
And in fact, at least one county, this is the Tioga County, has said, listen, we've got an instruction from the attorney general, we can't really give you our machines.
All of this is going to be fought out in court.
But Mastriano, he says, look, it's a Republican Senate.
I've got the votes.
We're going to push ahead with this.
And we're going to get it.
We're going to issue subpoenas if we have to.
We're going to take this to court if we have to.
But we're going to stay with this.
He says, quote, It would defy logic to assume that an election with the kinds of drastic changes we saw.
Now, what's he talking about?
In the 2016 election, the number of mail-in ballots?
263,000. In the 2020 election, 2.7 million.
So more than a tenfold increase in the ballots that were initially just mailed out and then received by mail.
So there is good reason to want to look at this carefully.
And I think the significance of all of this, by the way, quite honestly, none of this is, I think, going to mean that Biden's going to be pushed out of office.
But what it does mean, if true, is that we weren't dreaming about 2020.
All the things we saw, the simultaneous stopping of the counts, The evidence from various hearings where people said this went wrong and that went wrong and I saw this and I saw that.
We weren't dreaming about all that.
The left is trying to give this narrative where they tell us, hey guys, listen, you know, all of this has been looked at.
Tons of people have looked at it.
Courts have looked at it. No, in most cases, courts have essentially dismissed these cases on procedural grounds.
Saying things like, well, you should have sued before the election.
And if you sued before the election, well, the election hasn't even occurred.
Why are you suing now? You've got to wait for the crime to be committed before you make your case.
So, courts have by and large shown this kind of great timidity in stepping into this area.
But whether or not the courts do something about it, we at least want to know something about it.
We want to know what really happened.
We want to know that we weren't dreaming after all.
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Or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. Afghanistan is falling apart, and there's very little that the United States at this point can do about it.
Now, there were points in the past where better leadership, a better fighting strategy could have prevented this.
I just saw on social media a clip from CNN, a very disturbing clip of Taliban Rounding up a group of Afghan troops, basically saying, surrender, surrender, and the Afghan troops do surrender, and then the Taliban shoots them all.
Just boom, boom, boom. And this just shows you the barbarity of warfare on the ground in these countries.
This is what we're dealing with.
And it seems, in retrospect, almost criminal when I think of the United States fighting with one hand behind its back.
You can't pursue these guys.
You can't do this. You can't do that.
All these idiotic rules being imposed from above by morons like, you know, General Milley.
These are political generals.
They're buffoons. They're probably sitting around there reading their critical race studies manual as all this fighting is going on.
They don't support their own troops.
Their idea of military training is to take a bunch of ROTC cadets and put them in high heels so they can experience what it's like to be a woman.
So this is where we're facing the terrible consequences of this kind of nonsense.
Now, America's top general, Austin Miller, just got out of Afghanistan himself.
He boarded a helicopter.
And he took off.
But in taking off, he made a very interesting statement.
He goes, what is this guy running for local office like in eastern Pennsylvania?
Does he really think that this kind of absurd statement is, oh, the Taliban is going to be like, yeah, you know what, this guy's right.
It's against the will of the people.
They don't care about the will of the people.
They're trying to take the country by force.
If you haven't figured that out by now, you shouldn't be the top general in Afghanistan.
And then here's U.S. Marine General Kenneth McKenzie, who's based in Florida.
He's running the Florida so-called Central Command.
And he's telling the Afghan troops, you can count on our support in the dangerous and difficult days ahead.
How? With U.S. troops leaving?
What kind of support can they really count on?
Apparently, the Afghans who were killed by the Taliban, they radioed for support, but no support came.
They wanted air cover, but no air cover came.
When Marine General McKenzie says that the Taliban are seeking a military solution when they should be seeking a political solution.
Again, I'm almost speechless when I hear this kind of gobbledygook.
Nobody seeks a political solution when a military solution is at hand.
If the Taliban can win straight out, Why on earth would they want to sit around the table and say, oh, listen, you know, the Tajiks, the Northern Alliance, we're going to give you this, we're going to give you that.
No, they want it all.
And they're in a position to take it all.
And so to hear these U.S. military people speaking like tin pot politicians...
This is, to me, extremely frustrating.
Here's one more line that continues this kind of torrent of stupidity.
If the Taliban prevail, this is again General McKenzie, I think we're going to expect a return to medieval standards here in Afghanistan, particularly in the domain of women's rights, human rights, education, and so many things.
From the Taliban's point of view, none of this is medieval.
They see this as an alternative modernity.
They don't think women should be educated.
So, yes, this is a kind of American way to describe the problem, but that's not going to be how the Taliban see it at all.
Now, the Taliban are playing a kind of real politique.
They've reached the border of China.
And in general, they're allies with the Uyghur militants, who are, by the way, the enemies of China.
But the Taliban are smart enough to say, hey, listen, China, we're not going to be infringing on Chinese territory, and we're not going to be supporting the Uyghur uprising in China.
Why? Because the Taliban want to be allies with China.
And China is all in on this.
China has basically declared that they're trying to create a sort of tripartite, a three-way alliance between China, Pakistan, and the Taliban.
So Islamabad...
Kabul and Beijing coming together.
And I think that is, in fact, what is going to happen.
So this cannot be interpreted strategically as other than a defeat, a political defeat, a military defeat for the United States.
The Afghan war, by the way, has cost us 2,400 troops.
We have held the Taliban at bay for 20 years since 9-11.
But it looks like those medieval characters decided to wait it out in the mountains.
One of their sayings is that you have all the clocks, but we have all the time.
The time has run out for the United States.
I think the time is also running out for the Afghan army, for the Afghan troops.
And we're going to see the Taliban back in power, now allied with China, in Kabul.
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So guys, with so much going on in Texas, I'm really thrilled to have Governor Greg Abbott join me on the podcast.
Governor Abbott, thank you so much.
It's a real pleasure to have you and at such a crazy and busy time.
Let me start by asking you about these runaway Texas Democrats who boarded private planes and skipped town.
Now, what is going to happen next?
because it looks to me like they're going to try to wait out this legislative session, probably try to return after it's over. What is your plan for thwarting their runaway plan?
Sure. Well, I'll answer your question, but...
But first, Dinesh, I think we need to all admit that the fact that Texans would run away from a fight would be kind of the most un-Texan thing to do.
Hmm. Since the very beginnings, Texans have always stood the ground and they fought for the principles that they believed in.
But this is a case where Democrats, they're not standing here in Austin, Texas, engaging in debate for which they were elected to do and voting on issues and trying to convince others to make modifications to laws and fighting for where they stand.
And instead, they cut and run.
They're not doing the job. They have abandoned their job.
And as a result, I think that their constituents are going to be very unhappy because their constituents, they have to go to work every single day.
And if their constituents were to leave their job, got unhappy, and try to make a statement, whatever the case may be, their constituents would not be getting a paycheck.
And yet, these legislators who are up there on some taxpayer junket in Washington, D.C., they are getting paid.
But to answer your question, The power that the governor has in Texas, for your viewers who may not know, we have a legislative session every other year that lasts 140 days.
It ends at the end of May.
And because of the long period of time between sessions, the governor has the capability of calling a special session anytime the governor chooses that lasts exactly 30 days.
We're in a special session right now that will last 30 days, that will end On its schedule in early August.
And I will be able to call session after session after session after session.
So here's the point. And that is this is a futile exercise on the part of the Democrats who have left the state because this issue is going to be raised in a session when they return to Texas, whenever that may be.
And they're going to have to vote on this at that particular time.
And so this is all gimmickry right now.
But also, the way things happen is that there's what's called a call on the House.
What that means is the House of Representatives has issued a call that empowers a sergeant of arms to work with the Texas Department of Public Safety to arrest and bring to the Capitol.
The members who have absconded off to Washington, D.C. The only challenge about that right now is that the jurisdiction for the reach of the Texas Department of Public Safety ends at our borders, which is why the Democrats had to flee outside of the state knowing that they had to leave the state to escape the jurisdiction of the Texas Department of Public Safety.
When they return to the state of Texas, if they return to the state of Texas, they will be brought to the Capitol and the House of Representatives has the power to keep them locked into the House chamber until they step up and cast votes on the issues that are on the special session agenda.
Now, Governor Abbott, you mentioned earlier that this is a kind of a non-Texan behavior on the part of the Democrats, appealing, you may say, to their sense of honor.
But let me pursue that angle for a moment because, you know, in the January 6th protest, we heard that those people were doing something terrible because they were disrupting an official proceeding.
In other words, they were not letting the democratic process take its course, that they were, I guess, for a few hours delaying that process.
And this was presented as sedition, anti-democratic behavior of the highest order.
I realize that the Texas Democrats didn't storm the Capitol.
They chose a different road, which is to skip town.
But isn't the effect kind of the same?
Namely, here you've got Texas.
You've got a democratically elected group of representatives and senators.
They're engaged in a legislative session called constitutionally by the governor.
And the Democrats are disrupting that session and behaving in an undemocratic way.
Didn't Biden himself in his speech talk about the fact that, listen, the losing side in an election needs to accept the result.
They've got to acquiesce in the will of the majority.
So although the media is portraying some of the Texas Democrats as heroes, aren't they in fact acting in an anti-democratic fashion?
Right. As you know, the mainstream media perpetuates exactly what President Biden said, and that is that the losing party needs to acquiesce and just work as best they can within the paradigm that exists.
And of course, the Democrats in Texas are not doing that.
Dinesh, I can give you a better example of what this relates to.
One thing that the Democrats in Texas are trying to do in Washington D.C., they went to Washington D.C. to try to get the Democrats in Washington D.C. to end the filibuster so that the Democrats would vote on the federal-based election law.
So here's the hypocrisy.
The Democrats in Texas are using a filibuster to go to Washington D.C. to try to end a filibuster.
That's the epitome of hypocrisy.
When we come back, I want to dive into the voter integrity law that seems to be the motivation for the Texas Democrats to do that little runaway act.
We'll be right back. Thank you.
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I'm back with Texas Governor Greg Abbott, and we're talking about the Texas Democrats.
Governor Abbott, let me talk about what the Texas Democrats are so exercised about, namely this voter integrity law.
Now, as you know, President Biden in Pennsylvania gave a kind of tempestuous speech in which he presented these voter integrity laws as being a kind of attack on democracy.
He implied that these laws taken together pose the greatest threat the country has faced since the Civil War.
He said that's not hyperbole.
Now, setting aside the obvious hyperbole of it, talk about the Texas voter integrity law and talk about how it tries to achieve the simultaneous goals, which I heard you yourself say, making it easier to vote and harder to cheat.
Let's go into some of the specifics of the law.
I'll do that, but first I have to point this out, and that is you kind of candy-coated what the president said.
What the president really did, he once again engaged in name-calling.
He used the phrase racist.
He said Jim Crow too.
But remember, this is the very same president who just a few months ago We're good to go.
It increases voting rather than decreases voting.
Let me explain how. Texas already has 12 days of early voting.
We are adding more hours to vote during those early voting days, including the opportunity for anybody who wants to vote to get paid time off from work.
To be able to go vote.
So it's far easier to vote under this new law in Texas than it has ever been before.
The only thing, Dinesh, that we are really cracking down on is a bipartisan issue.
And that is, in Texas as well as in other states, it is far easier for people to cheat during the mail-in ballot process.
Don't take my word for it.
Take the word of a federal judge appointed by Barack Obama who wrote any legal opinion after evaluating all the facts in Texas.
That voter fraud occurs in Texas in abundance with regard to absentee ballots.
Part of the proof of that in a different case was that the Obama administration sent down FBI agents and a U.S. attorney in the state of Texas to investigate and to prosecute people in South Texas who were using cocaine to buy absentee ballot votes.
Voter fraud is real.
It must be stopped. It occurs most often in the mail-in ballot process.
We're very simply trying to ensure the sanctity of the ballot box with regard to mail-in ballots.
Now, Biden seems to think that anything that makes it, quote, harder to vote is inherently racist because presumably, at least this would seem to be the premise, that blacks and Latinos don't know how to get IDs.
Blacks and Latinos don't know how to vote on any day other than a Sunday.
So you get sort of all these ideas that...
Any provisions that increase the burden of voting automatically are an attack on the democratic process itself.
What is your take specifically on the voter ID issue?
Why is it that voter IDs are not racist?
Well, first I can tell you that What has happened in Texas disproves that thesis that's being articulated not only by President Biden, but all the Democrats and the mainstream media, because Texas did pass almost 10 years ago a voter ID law in the state of Texas.
And let me tell you what happened after voter ID became law in Texas, and that is voter participation increased among everybody, including racial minorities.
So as opposed to hindering the ability of racial minorities to go vote, they voted in even greater numbers after voter ID was put into place.
And so this is just one amongst all the false narratives that the Democrats try to oppose just because they want to try to seemingly keep open avenues that would allow them to cheat in the voting process.
Do you think, Governor Abbott, there's a second motive apart from the idea that cheating is helping them to get across the finish line?
And this other idea is simply the fact that the Democrats are trying to either distract attention from other issues that are a problem for them, or alternatively, that they're losing support among critical groups.
Trump, for example, made headway among African-American males.
You know about the South part of Texas where Latinos who have been habitually Democratic are now starting to move toward the Republican camp.
So the signs are not all that good for the Democrats, and maybe they believe that if they can nail down and control the process, they will have less to fear at the ballot box in 2022 and 2024.
Dinesh is a very insightful point, because here's the reality.
Whenever the Democrats are losing on an issue, they start playing the racist card because they think somehow the racist card is going to gain them support.
You pointed out the reality in Texas, and that is in South Texas along the border, which has traditionally been Democrat territory in this last election, President Trump We've got a record percentage of votes in the Rio Grande Valley along the border area that I've never seen any other Republican president ever get.
And the reason why President Trump got so much vote down there is because, for one, they support a secure border.
Two, they support the energy jobs that exist down there.
But three, they support the principles and values The President Trump stood for.
Every single election, I've always gotten at least about 45% or more of the Hispanic vote in the state of Texas.
As you pointed out, African Americans are realizing that the party that stands for economic opportunity is the Republican Party.
And so, yes, Republicans are making gains among all demographic groups.
And so the only thing that Democrats can cling to is, say, racism, racism, racism, hoping that it will disrupt the gains that Republicans are achieving.
Governor Abbott, let me ask you one more question.
I've been seeing that Kristi Noem and others are talking about sending people to Texas to help on the border with the wall.
There's been some talk about Texas having its own wall.
Is that a real possibility?
Can Texas, in fact, build a wall and keep illegals out?
Or is it the case that federal law somehow overcomes that and the Biden people can do whatever they want, regardless of what you try to do to stop them?
Texas is building its own wall.
The Biden administration can do absolutely nothing about it.
We have Texas state property that's on the border.
We have private property that's on the border and private property owners who are cooperating with the state of Texas.
We are already in the process of aggregating mile after mile after mile on which the border wall can be built.
We have the Texas Facilities Commission that's working to hire a program manager to oversee this process.
They will be going out and Offering requests for proposals, for bids that come in.
We have already, even before the formal process has begun, a lot of good offers to build the wall.
You will see that that wall is going to be built and built a whole lot faster than what people realize.
This is absolutely awesome. Delighted to hear it.
Thank you, Governor Abbott, for joining me.
It's been a real pleasure. Thank you, Dinesh.
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I spoke a few days ago about the city of Charlottesville pulling down the Robert E. Lee monument, and I talked about why that filled me with a certain sense of ambivalence and even sadness, because although Robert E. Lee fought in a bad cause, the cause of the Confederacy, he was nevertheless a largely good and in some ways even great man.
He was certainly a great man. But that was actually not the only monument that was yanked down by the city of Charlottesville.
They also voted, and apparently this was almost a casual vote.
The vote itself only took about a 20-minute discussion.
They also took down another monument, and this was the monument to Lewis and Clark.
Lewis and Clark Were two seasoned explorers.
They were commissioned by Thomas Jefferson to make a transcontinental journey across the United States.
Remember, most of America at that time had been unexplored, had been unmapped.
And Jefferson's idea, an idea motivated partly by discovery, but partly by the desire to have knowledge of a continent that America was expanding into, filling out, you might say.
And these guys were moving into unknown territory, hostile territory, and they were men of extraordinary bravery.
Some years ago, I read...
Stephen Ambrose, the historian Stephen Ambrose's book called Undaunted Courage, which was, I think that was the book about the Lewis and Clark expedition.
But in any event, I was struck by something that Ambrose said in the context.
Of discussing Meriwether Lewis, the leader of the expedition, Ambrose said, you know, if I were ever in a desperate fight, and there was only one man that I could choose to be alongside me, I would choose Meriwether Lewis.
This was a guy of almost incomparable savvy, bravery, but also judiciousness.
He had to deal with Indian tribes.
He had to negotiate.
He had to talk his way.
He had to figure things out.
He had to deal, of course, with the harshness of nature.
So we're talking about real heroes of American history.
So why pull down their monument?
Well, it turns out the reason is the following.
The monument has Lewis and Clark standing upright, and then bending down, kind of ducking halfway, is a woman named Saka Jawa, who was their native Indian tracker.
Now, first of all, it's not that surprising that a tracker, someone who's supposed to look at footprints, footprints of animals, footprints of Indians, is going to be portrayed as bending down because that's what a tracker does.
But yet, ignoring that, And simply looking back at history through the lens of today, you have all these woke activists who go before the Charlottesville Council and say, wait a minute, this is kind of racist.
Why? Because you've got Lewis and Clark and they're standing upright, and then you've got this Native American woman who seems to be, quote, bowing down.
Well, she's not bowing down, but she seems to be somewhat in a subordinate position.
So this, as I say, is not just a misreading of the sculpture itself.
But look, let's just say that Sakajewa is in a, quote, subordinate position.
She wasn't a subordinate position.
She was only the tracker.
It's kind of like saying if you're describing a military general and you have soldiers that are shown around him and the soldiers are shown of more diminished stature, that would be normal.
You would show Napoleon on his horse.
Yeah, but that's because the soldiers are subordinate to their general.
So, what you have here, I think, is just an attempt by the left...
To superimpose kind of 21st century prejudices onto history.
So an attempt to sort of make history into wishful thinking.
Somehow as if to say that if you make a sculpture of the Lewis and Clark expedition, you've got to portray Saka Jawa standing alongside Lewis and Clark of the same dimensions.
I mean, that would be a falsification of what that expedition was all about.
History is not, in fact, some kind of a self-esteem booster.
It's a record and a depiction of actual events.
What we're getting here from the left is history as delusion, history as propaganda.
And ultimately, again, it's a diminution of the heroism of Lewis and Clark.
You have great figures of our history, people worthy of our admiration, who nevertheless are being pulled down by people who neither appreciate them nor understand them, or are even, in a sense, morally qualified to be shining their shoes.
So, Mike Lindell has been texting me as I'm doing the podcast.
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Pivot to the towels. So I guess I need to get with the program and talk about the towels.
Well, the good thing about the towels is you can never have enough towels.
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What's so great about the great books?
Why do we read them?
Why do we study them?
Why, as conservatives, do we seek to conserve this canon?
The word canon here referring to the sort of collection of these great books.
Now, there are people who have tried to give broad definitions of greatness that apply across the board to classic works.
But I want to make the case for the great books by looking in particular at one of them, and one that's a little controversial, a little difficult to say what's great about it, and that is Herman Melville's classic, Moby Dick.
Now, at the first glance, Moby Dick is kind of a puzzling work.
There are whole chapters that appear to be not even a normal type of fiction at all.
They deal with things like practices of the whaling industry in Boston, described in excruciating detail, all kinds of minutiae about ship construction.
It almost seems at some point you're dealing with some sort of technical manual.
Like, why am I reading this?
Is this supposed to be some sort of a classic?
Melville has discussions of the price of whale oil and how under different conditions it varies.
So what is this guy doing in this very strange book, Moby Dick?
When Moby Dick first came out, by the way, it was not recognized to be a classic.
It was thought to be kind of an interesting work written by a specialist in sort of whaling practices in Boston.
But it turns out that Moby Dick was later appreciated to have sort of lasting value, which I think it does as well.
Now, first thing to realize is that Moby Dick has behind it a sort of myth.
And the myth is the great story of the Odyssey.
The Odyssey is Homer's great work.
Remember, Homer wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey.
And the Odyssey is a journey at sea, a journey taken by the hero Odysseus, who was known to be sort of the smartest and the most crafty of the Greeks.
Now, why was Odysseus taking this journey at all?
Well, the Greeks, as you know, this is the story of the Trojan War.
The Greeks went to war with Troy, and they defeated Troy, and they sacked Troy.
But in the process of sacking Troy, they committed some horrible atrocities.
They raped a woman named Cassandra.
They killed King Priam, even though he had sought refuge in a temple.
They threw...
Hector's young son from the battlements to his death.
Absolutely horrific atrocities.
So according to Homer, the gods were very angry and the gods told the Greeks, listen, war is one thing, but this is not allowed.
This is a kind of blasphemy.
And so you're going to pay for it.
And so Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks, when he went home, his wife Clytemnestra had basically taken up with another man and the two of them conspired to kill Agamemnon.
That's how his life ended.
Odysseus was condemned essentially to be lost at sea.
That's the story of the Odyssey.
He was 20 years away from home.
In fact, when he gets home, his wife is being surrounded and plagued by all these crazy suitors.
And that's the story of the Odyssey, which is a story for another day.
But this is the sort of necessary backdrop for Moby Dick because Moby Dick, although a different kind of story, is intended to be an epic, but an American epic. So not an epic that simply talks about, you may say, the kind of myth in the sense of something imagined. There's some debate even today whether the Trojan War even occurred or whether this was in fact an invented story.
But what Melville wants to say is that whaling practices in Boston are real.
There are whaling ships and they're built like this and they're all about the money and it's a commercial enterprise.
And so Moby Dick is really the story...
About a central figure, a very bizarre guy named Ahab.
He is made the captain of a ship called the Pequod, and he's sent on an expedition, a whaling expedition.
But you discover early on that Ahab has no interest in the expedition.
He doesn't really want to go where he's being sent.
In fact... He's a man on a mission.
His mission is a very personal mission.
He has suffered amputation.
In fact, he has lost one of his legs because it's been bitten off by a sperm whale, a huge gigantic whale named Moby Dick.
And Ahab says, I don't care about the mission.
I'm going to go get my revenge on Moby Dick.
I want to catch this malevolent whale.
I want to teach him a lesson.
I want to harpoon him and send him to his death.
I want to punish him for what he's done to me.
And the remarkable thing is that Ahab is not only...
Obsessed in a maniacal way with this quest, but he recruits the entire team, the entire staff, the crew of the Pequod, and he says, you've got to be in it with me.
You've got to be as obsessed as I am over Moby Dick.
And now Ahab's chief mate, his first officer, is a guy named...
By the way, that Starbucks is the inspiration for Starbucks.
Starbucks coffee is named after this guy, Starbucks, a character in Moby Dick.
And Starbucks is a very humane guy.
He's a Christian. He's a sensible guy.
And he tells Ahab, he goes...
Don't be ridiculous.
What's all this talk about trying to go after this malevolent whale?
Whales aren't malevolent.
A whale is basically a kind of dumb creature.
That whale didn't know what it was doing when it bit off your leg.
So let it go, man.
And so Starbuck even makes the point that Ahab is in a sense engaging in a sort of blasphemy.
He goes, because listen, this whole idea of ascribing evil motives to a creature like a whale, It's almost as if you're sort of blaming God for His creation.
God made whales. God made the natural order the way it is.
You're rebelling against the natural order and of locating in it things that are not in it.
To which Ahab gives a very interesting reply.
He says basically that the dumb features of this whale, the kind of featureless exterior of the whale, is a mask.
He goes, behind this mask is malevolence.
There's wickedness, and that wickedness is what's done this to me.
Look at my leg. It's gone.
I see it every day when I wake up.
There's no leg there.
Now, who did that, says Ahab.
He goes, yeah, maybe it was the whale.
He goes, maybe it was nature.
He goes, or maybe it was God.
And he goes, and if it's God, I don't care.
I'm going to be striking out a God.
In a very telling line, Ahab says something like, I'd strike at the very sun if it did this to me.
So you have here with Ahab this sort of unquenchable, unconquerable will to go after Moby Dick.
Now, this is a story narrated by a guy named Ishmael.
The famous opening line of Moby Dick is, Call me Ishmael.
One of the most famous lines in literature.
It's comparable to the opening lines, for example, of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities.
It was the best of times.
It was the worst of times. The opening line of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.
And Ishmael, very interestingly, is a normal guy.
He's in it for the money.
He wants to go on the whaling expedition.
And yet, he becomes captivated by Ahab.
He's captivated by the mission.
It's not his mission.
Moby Dick hasn't bitten off his leg.
But somehow, Ishmael is drawn by the power of Ahab's spirit.
And he, in a sense, is on board with the Enterprise.
He too now wants to go get Moby Dick.
And in a very telling passage, Ishmael talks about the men of the land versus the men of the sea.
He says the men of the land are sedentary.
They're like me. I'm sitting here doing a podcast.
He goes, they're chained to their desk.
These are people, by and large, who have obligations.
They have routines. They have daily duties.
He goes, no, but the men of the sea aren't like that.
They like the open sea.
They don't know what's going to be over the horizon.
They don't know what's under the water.
These are people who value uncertainty, adventure, the experience of the sublime, and they're willing to give themselves to that the whole hog.
They're 100% in.
And I think this is really the secret to Ahab's appeal.
Ahab in that sense represents not just revenge, but the sort of unconquerable will.
Now, at the end of the story, poor Ahab, I mean, he harpoons the whale.
But a whale is a whale.
You know, it's not clear whether he gets the whale.
And in the end, he gets caught up in the harpoon and Moby Dick drags him to the bottom of the ocean.
Moby Dick goes under the water.
Here I'm reading, the line runs afoul, catches Ahab around the neck, and he's silently pulled from the boat down into the depths.
So he comes to a bad end.
But I think the point of Moby Dick is that Ahab's spirit endures.
And I think for us, this is in some ways an inspiration because it shows that in difficult times it is necessary for us to have a little bit of Captain Ahab that dogged, never say die. Come what will.
We're going to stick with the task.
We're going to fight to the end.
I think this is a spirit that to some degree the left has.
But we need a little bit more of it on our side.
We need a little bit of Captain Ahab.
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