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Oct. 18, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:32
BUSTING THE COURT PACKERS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep198
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Joe Biden appointed a special commission to, well, recommend packing the court, and the commission appears to have come back with a draft saying, don't pack the court.
This is a, well, this is an ineptitude of, you may almost say, Republican proportions.
I'm going to review a Walmart racial indoctrination program for employees, part of the woke corporate phenomena.
Marine Lieutenant Colonel Scheller has beaten the system.
I'll tell you how. Debbie joins me to talk about the Adams family, John and Abigail Adams, and I'm going to conclude my discussion of John Adams by showing how he sought to foster virtue in the new American Republic.
Like this is the Dimash 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.
Very good news on the court packing front.
I don't think it's going to happen.
Now, for several months now, justices on the court, this actually began with Ruth Bader Ginsburg saying she didn't think court packing was a good idea and nine was a perfectly good number.
Subsequently, Justice Breyer.
Now, let's notice that these are two very left-wing progressives on the court coming out against the idea of packing, and partly because they both have argued it'll destroy the independence of the judiciary.
Conservative justices have also been having their say recently.
Samuel Alito, Justice Clarence Thomas, and also Amy Coney Barrett, all of them making perhaps a different kind of argument, but arriving at the same destination.
Namely, the court is not a partisan body in the narrow sense.
Of course, it's political in that it's part of the political structure of our government, but it works, in a sense, separate from and to some degree against.
It protects rights against the majority.
That's what it's there for.
Now, Biden put together a commission that many people even called it the Court Packing Commission because they were so certain that it was going to recommend some form of court packing.
The degree of packing, the pace of change, this was probably up for discussion and argument.
But that the commission would come out and say, hey, let's pack the court, seemed almost indubitable and seemed for sure.
There were a couple of token conservatives on the commission, but in no way did they make up the majority.
And this was almost like, you know, having a sort of a Romney and a Murkowski, so they're there just to give some bipartisan legitimacy to what would end up being, it seemed, a progressive and a left-wing recommendation.
But, this is a huge but, the commission has released its kind of preliminary They're not the final results, but they, being preliminary, they're sort of an outline of where the commission is going.
And they've released also, I mean, this is admirable.
They didn't just put out, here is where it came out.
They released 200 pages of discussion materials in which it's very clear that when they're considering various issues, and they're not just considering the issue of the number of justices on the court, They're considering issues like should there be term limits on the court?
They're considering other types of issues like should the court's jurisdiction over certain types of issues be limited?
Should the court not be able to pronounce on certain types of issues?
They also consider whether there could be Proposed a legislative veto over certain types of court decisions, particularly with legislative supermajority.
So they're considering a pretty broad menu, and it's very clear from these discussion pages, which I've only thumbed through so far, that they give a kind of thorough and detailed summary of the arguments from both, and in some cases more from all sides.
So this is a commission that is taking its work seriously.
And the remarkable thing is, from their preliminary conclusions, they are against court packing.
Now, if the final report comes out strongly against court packing, I think this will intellectually blow up the groundwork.
I mean, I think this is Biden's own commission telling him not to do it.
Of course, it raises the question of, is it possible?
I'm just thinking out loud.
Is it possible that Biden wanted or the Biden people wanted this outcome?
It seems to me obvious that if they wanted to get a court packing recommendation, you know, just stack the commission with court backers.
But although there are progressives and liberal scholars on the commission, it appears that not merely the conservatives, but a number of the liberals Have concluded that this is too dangerous.
We don't want to go there. We don't want to create a court that is a mere reflection of public opinion.
Let's remember the court is expected to stand where necessary against public opinion.
Quote,"...the risks of court expansion are considerable, including that it could undermine the very goal of some of its proponents in restoring the court's legitimacy." And then it points out that polls show that a majority of the American people oppose court expansion or court packing.
So really what the commission is arguing here is that the people who want to pack the court always say, well, listen, this court is illegitimate.
It's too partisan. We want a nonpartisan court.
Therefore, let's pack the court.
And what the commission is saying is, wait a minute, if you pack the court by stacking it with, for example, Four more liberal justices to give the Democrats an immediate left-wing majority, you are further degrading the partisanship of the court.
Regardless of whether or not the court is partisan now, it's going to be nakedly partisan if you do that.
Now, the commission appears to be more sympathetic, although not entirely so, to the idea of having term limits.
But even then, and this is not an idea, by the way, that I'm strongly against at all, the term limits would be something like 18 years.
When you're appointed on the court, you're appointed for a period of 18 years.
Let's remember, this would apply to Democratic and Republican nominees alike.
There would obviously have to be some debate about when you start and that sort of thing.
But in principle, the idea of having justices serve for a certain designated and fairly long, as we can see, term, I think is not inherently a bad thing.
The left is sort of screaming about all this, and that tells you that this is good for us.
This report is a disappointment to anyone who hoped for a hard-hitting effort to address the Supreme Court's deep troubles.
Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse.
Brian Fallon, Executive Director of the Demand Justice.
This is the group that's, by the way, been trying to lobby Justice Breyer.
Please step down. We need to appoint someone in your place right now.
So this clown says, this was not even close to being worth the wait.
He goes, this paralysis by analysis.
So think about it. He's claiming that analysis here is a form of paralysis.
Is what you would expect from a commission made up mostly of academics.
He wants a commission made up of someone else.
What? Gay rights activists and trans activists and BLM? You want that kind of a commission?
You're going to have legal scholars on a legal commission that's looking at the future of the Supreme Court.
Sherilyn Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
By the way, she's on the commission.
But she too is wailing about the commission.
And then here's Slate Magazine.
Biden's Supreme Court Commission walked straight into the legitimacy trap.
Now, I was reading this article in Slate to see what their critique of the commission really is.
And it's basically that, quote, that the commission doesn't seem to recognize that, quote, the court is working to subvert democracy.
And I sort of chuckled when I read that because I thought...
Wait a minute. What they mean, of course, is that the court is working to not simply be in sync with the democratic majoritarian process by going against what the majority wants on certain issues.
The court is, quote, subverting democracy.
But we don't have a system of direct democracy in that sense.
We have a system of majority rule consistent with minority rights.
And who's going to protect these minority rights if not the court?
So the court, in that sense, is serving democracy, serving constitutional democracy by striking down majority rule when it is inconsistent with the Constitution.
So you see the utter incoherence of what Slade is arguing.
They're arguing for a conception of government utterly alien to the one that we have.
And they don't seem to even understand what the purpose is of having a Supreme Court in the first place.
Anyway, whether this is by Biden's design or ineptitude, the fact of the matter is we have a Biden commission that appears to be throwing its weight against the idea of packing the court.
And for that, I think we can all be grateful.
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this company, which is by the way headed by a white man, his name is Doug McMillan, he makes by the way $22 million a year, It has a nine-member board that runs Walmart.
Eight of these nine members are white.
There's just one guy who's Asian Indian.
He's a technology officer, a guy named Suresh Kumar.
Now, why would a company that is kind of white at the top, run by this guy, Doug McMillan, want to go woke?
I want to argue it's precisely for this reason.
In other words, what seems paradoxical actually makes complete sense.
The reason Walmart is going woke is because the CEO and the top guys who are white and who are making tons of money We're good to go.
Is they browbeat those very poor employees and subject them to racial indoctrination because they have to take fictitious blame for crimes they never committed, all under the guise of fighting systemic racism.
Frankly, if there's systemic racism at Walmart, it's coming from these guys at the top.
They're the ones who should step down.
They're the ones who should resign.
But rather than resign, they're like, no, no, no, no, no.
We're on the woke side.
We're going to browbeat the rest of you in order to protect our privileges and make you take the brunt of it.
So not only are these guys being poorly Not only are they perhaps being mistreated in the workplace, but now they have to listen to mind-numbing sessions of racial indoctrination that demonize them morally.
You're a white guy, you're evil, even though you did nothing.
Nevertheless, so this is the sick game that is being played throughout corporate America, and I'm sorry to say that Walmart has joined this disgusting operation.
Once again, the Walmart cover is blown by Chris Ruffo in City Journal.
He talks about a program that began in 2018, Walmart in conjunction with the Racial Equity Institute.
This is a Greensboro, North Carolina operation, you know, based on critical race theory.
More than 1,000 employees.
I've been trained in this program, including a lot of the top brass.
So the premise of it, and you see right away from the premise that you're dealing with absolute nonsense, the United States is a, quote, white supremacy system, the country, the whole country, designed by white Europeans from maintaining, quote, white skin access to power and privilege.
That was the point of creating the country.
And whites are therefore subjected to, quote, racist conditioning that indoctrinates them into, quote, white supremacy.
Now, first of all, when you make these kind of broad accusations, the question becomes, well, let's see some evidence of this.
Let's see some evidence of this indoctrination.
Well, obviously there is none.
So they resort to what can only be called patent absurdity.
They say things like, let's list a bunch of qualities that denote whiteness.
Let's see what those are. Quote, individualism.
Quote, objectivity.
Quote, defensiveness.
So when you're attacked, if you become defensive, hey, listen, don't call me a racist.
That's evidence that you actually are a racist.
Power hoarding. Objectivity.
Oh, sorry. The worship of the written word.
So, in other words, the idea that we can write things down and they're a little more clear than when we just say them, partly because other people can read them and interpret them.
All of this is promoting white supremacy, thinking it's damaging to people of color.
And they say that these racial minorities, when they're subjected to such things as objectivity and written arguments, they, quote, have lowered self-esteem.
They have lowered expectations.
They develop feelings of self-hate.
Now, let's think of what these companies are doing here.
These companies have been practicing affirmative action for a generation now.
They've been elevating people who are less able than others just because of the color of their skin into positions.
Naturally, those people are not as good as their peers because they have been promoted on more limited abilities and more limited performance.
And so they develop a feeling of low self-esteem.
Maybe I'm not as good as everyone else.
Well, probably because that is a guaranteed result produced by affirmative action.
So what happens now is that when minority employees feel the sense of anger or rage or a feeling of inferiority, it's not blamed on the policy that caused it.
It's blamed on white supremacy and it's blamed on the history of the country itself.
Whites are supposed to, quote, accept guilt and shame.
One of the phrases that I thought was particularly amusing, white is not right.
White is not right. And so this stuff is going on, I think, in depressing fashion across the country.
I'm sure that employees are taking it because they don't have a choice, but they're not happy about it.
And once again, I hope that they recognize that this is being pushed, well, it's being pushed by their corrupt bosses, who, as I say, don't want to talk about their salaries.
Hey, Doug McMillan, what are you doing for this company, besides having meetings every day, that entitles you to make $22 million a year?
Who are the guys on the corporate board, perhaps appointed by you, that have assigned to you this gargantuan salary?
Explain to us why you're making, you know, a thousand times the salary of an organization.
They don't want to do any of that. Oh, no, no, no.
I'm woke. Let's all sit down, hold hands and start talking about white privilege.
So, this is a terrible thing that's being done and the workers, the ordinary guy, is made to pay the price to cover for, if you will, the perks and privileges of the people at the top.
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You remember Marine Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller.
This is the guy who went public and spoke out against the ineptitude of the generals in the wake of the botched Afghan operation.
This is a guy who was not afraid to call out the military leadership.
This was in the immediate aftermath, let's remember, of 13 U.S. servicemen being killed in Afghanistan, a completely preventable disaster.
And so the American public was watching appalled as the Biden administration was handing over lists of Americans and Afghan allies to the Taliban, giving the Taliban control over Kabul while the U.S. Government maintained control just of the airport, shutting down the Bagram Air Force Base.
I mean, just one calamitous, almost deliberately horrible decisions, one on top of the other.
And so this poor guy, Stuart Scheller, goes, what's up?
I mean, I'm being held accountable for what I do.
Why don't we have some accountability at the top level?
A question that I think all of us are asking.
And so, sure enough, they lock this guy up, throw him in the brig.
They're trying to go after him in a trial.
And, you know, the judge, Glenn Hines, this is a military judge, by the way, takes a look at the case, and I think he got the picture.
And so what he does is he goes, yeah, you know what?
We can't have military people who are insubordinate, who call out the military as a top-down operation.
And so he fines Lieutenant Colonel Scheller $5,000.
And he says, look, the Secretary of the Navy can decide whether he gets an honorable discharge or a general discharge under honorable conditions.
Now, the defense that represented Scheller is delighted.
They go, we're happy with the sentence.
It was an appropriate reflection of what Lieutenant Colonel Scheller did.
And I think the defense was exuberant for two reasons.
One is, of course, that the military was trying to sort of really teach this guy a lesson.
They were hoping for a severe penalty, but they didn't get it.
But more importantly, the judge actually criticized the government.
He goes, first of all, the Marines were leaking information about this guy and about this case to a military publication.
He goes, this is terrible.
This needs to be investigated.
So he didn't demand an investigation, but he said, the judge said, This is something that should be looked into.
And second, he spoke out about the severity of the pre-trial confinement.
Here's a guy awaiting trial.
Is it really necessary to lock him up?
Why? What was the reason for that?
So this is, I think, a good outcome.
Because what it shows is that the judge realized that this was a kind of political hit.
On a marine who was reacting admittedly outside the bounds, but doing so under understandable conditions.
If only this kind of framework could be applied to January 6th, we'd have a lot better and more reasonable and fairer outcomes, I would say.
Now, when I heard that this guy had been fined $5,000, I was about to pay it myself, but then I actually looked up, I remembered that there was some sort of a GoFundMe to raise money for Marine Lieutenant Colonel Scheller, and I found out that this campaign has raised $2 million, which is great, because the way I look at it, I'm not a math major, but Here's Marine Lieutenant Colonel Scheller.
He gets $2 million. He owes a $5,000 fine.
$2 million minus $5,000.
He's still net up $1,995,000, which is to say that this is, on the balance, a big win for Scheller and a big win for our side.
And it's a big win for our side only because it's a blow to a woke military that was trying to punish this poor guy excessively, For what he did and this attempt to go after him does not appear to have succeeded.
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I don't know if you've heard of Boston Pride, but Boston Pride is the largest LGBTQ organization in the New England area.
Every year, these are the people who would organize a massive kind of rainbow or gay pride parade in Boston, and they've been doing it for many, many years.
And as a result, they've become, I don't know if you could call it a mainstream institution, close to a mainstream institution.
In the New England area.
But, kind of incredibly, Boston Pride is no more.
The organization has dissolved itself, kind of like the Soviet Communist Party did in 1992.
They abolished themselves.
Now, why they did that is a story to itself, and it's a story quite well told in the magazine Quillette.
And so I kind of want to go through some of the details because I've been talking the last couple of days about how there are internecine identity politics wars developing on the left.
So not only are they going after the right, but once they go after the right, they then turn on themselves and start basically attacking each other.
And to be honest, it's a little bit amusing for us on the outside to watch because it couldn't happen to a more deserving group of people.
So what happened is that...
In 2015, as a result of the Obergefell decision, gay marriage was legalized.
And Boston Pride, in a sense, had won one of its greatest victories.
The state was required to issue marriage licenses, and so there was a kind of celebratory mood at Boston Pride.
But this is when they were sort of ambushed by a group of Black Lives Matter activists who basically said, quote, It's time for the LGBTQ community to basically adopt the racial agenda.
I'm not quoting from the activists who had a statement.
They go, it's the duty of the entire LGBTQ community to stand united and prove that all our lives matter.
You've got marriage. What do we have?
So the basic idea here is enough of your agenda.
Take up our agenda. And they wanted a Pride board to be as diverse as the community.
They were objecting to the fact that the parade was held in downtown Boston, which they said is an area that, quote, excludes communities of color.
And so Boston Pride is right away now on the defensive.
Things get worse in the next year, 2016, because Boston Pride chose a police officer, a guy named Anthony Imperioso, as the parade marshal.
And of course, since the Black Lives Matter activism was, you know, defund the police, the police are the problem, they were outraged that a police officer was leading the parade.
Now, of course, Boston Pride pointed out, listen, we've actually got good relations with the police community, with the corporate community in Boston, so we don't have any reason to exclude these people from the parade.
So you have a clash here over the presence of a police officer.
2018, another activist group, this is called No Justice, No Pride, is angry because the Israeli consulate was present at the march.
They were angry that there were a number of corporate sponsors of the march.
The activists, of course, who are beleaguering Boston Pride are anti-capitalist, and so they're objecting to the fact that the Pride march has been sort of corporatized.
It's got all these sponsors.
It's become... It's not, in other words, on the activist cutting edge.
And so they demanded that all the Boston Pride directors resign en masse.
Now, the Boston Pride directors were trying to meet the demands of these different activist groups.
In fact, at one point, they shelved all their events and they hired a consulting firm Run by two guys, Judah Abija Dorrington and Laverne Saunders.
So they bring in these outside consultants.
They say, listen, help us to figure out a way to accommodate all these racial demands on us.
And then, of course, a new set of demands began to emerge.
The trans people said, basically, we're not going to march in Boston Pride.
We're going to have a trans resistance march against Boston Pride.
Because Boston Pride needs to do all its events that are basically embracing, if you will, the trans cause.
A cause, by the way, that you should know is controversial in the gay community because...
Because in the gay community, the idea is, hey, listen, I'm gay because I am this way.
This is not something I've, quote, chosen.
This is not just merely an option.
This is the way that I am.
So these battles go on and on.
And finally, Boston Pride realizes there is kind of no way forward.
Every attempt to sort of accommodate the BLM activists and the trans activists only leads to more demands And leads to more criticism.
And so even a partial surrender to these groups is not enough.
So finally, the woman who was running Boston Pride basically said, listen, enough.
I'm out of here. Her name was Linda DeMarco.
She says, I'm going to resign as board president.
I can't basically fix this.
These are people kind of at each other's throats.
And then finally, the other board members decided, listen, we can't fix it either.
We're in the same position. And so essentially, New England's largest LGBT parade is now kind of in limbo.
The organization that put it on is gone.
All the sides, by the way, are calling each other vile names.
They're accusing each other of being extremists, of being immoderate, of not listening to reason.
And the thing is, I think they're all right.
They're right in what they say about each other.
Of course, they're not right in the pompous opinion they hold of themselves.
They all think that they have...
They are in the right and everybody else is wrong.
And so this is a spectacle.
I mention all this and I'm essentially relaying the reporting from Quillette because it's a little metaphor for what will happen to America if we submit completely to this woke ideology.
The first battle is, of course, against the heterosexual white male.
But even after that guy is put to the side, then all the different minority groups start fighting with each other.
They start tearing each other apart because, after all, all of them want to be at the top All of them want to be the ultimate victim.
All of them are claiming the highest rank of intersectionality.
They're not just discriminated against.
They're two-furs and three-furs.
And wait a minute, I'm a four-fur, meaning I'm four-fold victim of discrimination.
So it's actually a tragic and in some ways a comic spectacle.
And I, for one, from the outside, I'm sort of enjoying it.
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Interesting reports in the New York Times and elsewhere that in Haiti, 17 Christian missionaries have been kidnapped en masse in one shot by a notorious gang.
I don't know if they've been kidnapped for ransom or just kidnapped out of a sense of vendetta.
But these 17 missionaries, they're mainly Amish and Mennonite and Anabaptist missionaries.
The group is called Christian Aid Ministries, and they're in Haiti.
And, you know, let's pause here for a moment and recognize that Haiti is a kind of a disheveled country in chaos.
It's always been in chaos, but it's in even more chaos since the assassination of the president, Jovenel Moisey.
This is a guy who was killed.
They still haven't solved the murder.
You now have rival factions in Haiti.
Everyone basically claims, you know, you killed him.
No, you killed him. No, you killed him.
And so as a result, there's a jostling for power.
And the result of it is that these marauding gangs now run the streets, particularly in Port-au-Prince, the capital.
And so, you know, it's a little reckless for these missionaries to come sauntering in.
There's a reckless audacity.
Now, I'm sure the missionaries thought, listen, we're doing the Lord's work.
We recognize that carries risks.
And so I understand the bravery of what they're trying to do.
But at the same time, they're in an environment where this kind of thing does happen and happen frequently.
Now, the gang that has kidnapped them is called the 400 Mawozo.
So it's apparently a notorious gang.
They kidnapped five freaks and two nuns earlier this year.
So this is their MO. This is what they do.
They also, by the way, kidnap businessmen.
They kidnap police officers.
Kidnapping is kind of what they do.
And so I'm thinking to myself, A, these are the Haitians, by the way, that we're letting into the United States.
These are the people showing up at the border.
And of course, the Biden State Department in its kind of very characteristic mode, these are mostly peaceful people.
These are people just looking for a better way of life.
And it could be that some of the people who come are fleeing this kind of violence and disorder, but it could also be that some of them are perpetrators of it.
And I don't think we have any way to know the difference.
There's no vetting system that we have that can track who these people were in Haiti, what they did in Haiti, and what their lives were like, and whether or not they pose a real danger to America or not.
And yet here they are showing up all over the country.
They're put on buses. They're put on planes.
There are thousands of them already here with more on their way.
The other thing that's striking is that when they go to the Biden administration, The press does to find out what's going to happen to these guys that are now kidnapped.
The answer is, well, we don't really know.
So this to me was as startling as anything else because it's pretty clear today that if you are a U.S. citizen in the Biden era and you go to another country, you're kind of on your own.
This used not to be the case.
It used to be the case that the U.S. consulate would be on your side, could be counted on to use U.S. influence, soft power and unnecessary hard power.
If these are people being held and there's a way to free them and get them out, let's do it.
But no, the Biden people don't think that way.
We saw very clearly in Afghanistan that their view is, hey, if we are left behind, we'll try to send you an email and perhaps give you some guidelines about how you might be able to find your way out.
But it's kind of your responsibility, not ours.
And the same attitude here.
So this is a real turn.
It is an undoing of American exceptionalism because something that Americans, perhaps uniquely in the world, could count on Is something that we can't count on any longer, at least not with a Democrat in the White House.
Inflation is getting hot, hot, hot right at the highs of the last couple of decades, and now the Democrats are trying to push through another massive spending plan, $3.5 trillion.
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Guys, as I've been talking the last few days about John Adams...
Debbie's been scouring and learning more about the Addams Family and reading some of the letters between John and Abigail Addams and giving me these sort of Delightful and interesting tidbits.
Let's begin by, talk a little bit about their daughter and her misfortune.
So this being, October being National Month for Breast Cancer, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, October.
You know, we all wear our little pink ribbons.
I've had friends succumb to breast cancer.
So I've been, you know, this has been an issue for me for a long time.
I was really surprised when I found out that their daughter, Nabby, had breast cancer.
She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1810 and underwent a radical mastectomy In 1811, unfortunately, the cancer had spread.
As you can imagine, they didn't have any kind of technology, nor did they have any kind of anesthesia back then.
So you can only imagine the pain and torture that that poor woman went through.
And they were doing primitive bleeding and other sorts of treatments.
So anyway, despite surgery, cancer took over her body, and she died at the age of 48.
So John Adams and his wife Abigail...
They had a lot of personal tragedy, and this was one of them.
She was 48 years old, left behind children.
So this was a very sad chapter in their life.
Let's talk about the relationship between John and Abigail.
Because they were very close.
They had, I mean, a barrage of letters between them.
Over a thousand letters.
Over a thousand letters.
Over a thousand letters between them.
But this also shows that this was a marriage in which John Adams was often away, right?
He was away in In Philadelphia, he was away in Washington, D.C. He was away in Europe as a diplomat.
So for months at a time, he was gone.
He'd come back for a short time.
He's gone again. So strangely, letters become...
Their relationship, yes.
And they would always say, my dearest friend.
That's how they would address their letters.
They both would. They both would, my dearest friend.
But what people maybe don't know, unless you really have studied Abigail Adams and what significant role she had in the founding, she played a very significant role in his political life.
And I don't know that he would have become vice president and president without her.
Because she had a discernment that he alone did not have.
And she would advise him on this person and that person.
And a lot of times in their letters, she would say H, Mr.
H, which is Hamilton, right?
Mr. J, Jefferson.
And so she really, I think of all these men, she really enjoyed speaking with and Conversing with Jefferson because intellectually, you know, she was right there with him.
She was a very smart woman.
And even though she didn't have any formal schooling, she was just really smart.
She was very savvy. Jefferson was, of course, the great rival of Adams.
They had a very bitter fight in 1796, which Adams won and became the president.
But they had another bitter fight in 1800, which Jefferson won and went on to two terms.
Yes. But you said that Abigail sort of admired Jefferson, maintained cordial relations, even when his relations with Adams were frayed.
Right, right. Because she always thought that he was in it for the right reasons.
Whereas with Hamilton...
Well, read what she says about it.
Oh, yes. So basically, she says that Hamilton...
Is a man as ambitious as Julius Caesar?
And his abilities would make him dangerous if he was to espouse a wrong side.
His thirst for fame is insatiable.
So she kind of knew that he was in it for himself, that he was extremely, he was a narcissist, he was very ambitious, and so she kind of, you know, let him know.
I mean, the interesting thing about Adams was Adams was a man, you know, incorruptible, but he was also, in a way, a little vain, a little blind, right, to other people.
He was extremely naive about people.
He really never really understood what made them tick, but she did.
And she guided him and advised him.
And actually, I wanted to read something that was really amazing.
This is when John Adams became president.
And he was just bombarded with all this stuff.
I told you this morning that I was kind of intrigued by the whole White House thing when Washington moved out of the White House.
And John Adams moved in.
It was like the whole place was a dump.
I mean, they had no china, they had no linens, they had no carpets, no chairs, nothing.
And John Adams goes in there and he's like, oh my goodness, what have I done?
I mean, and here's the guy earning, you said $25,000 a year.
So he was really taking a pay cut being president.
But he couldn't tell anybody.
He didn't want to tell anybody.
But he confided in her.
And of course, you know, war was about to break out with France and I mean all of this stuff.
So anyway, so he writes her and he says, I must go to you or you must come to me.
I cannot live without you.
So he was saying this to Abigail and And then here at the bottom, he says, the times are critical and dangerous, and I must have you here to assist me, he told her.
I must now repeat with a zeal and earnestness, I can do nothing without you.
And here's a woman who is not only raising a family, but managing a farm, doing the family finances, and also trying from a distance to keep her eye on what's going on in...
In watching it. Yeah, so she really, she really was, you know when they say the woman behind the man?
Hint, hint. Well, I mean, she knew that in that era, she couldn't, you're like, trying to, trying to move quickly on.
I think you're trying to convey that some of these qualities, some of this naivety about human nature is also...
That too, and also just, you know, the ideas that I feed my husband that go unnoticed, you know, those kind of things.
I'm like, oh my goodness, Abigail, wow.
Are you saying that my trenchant observations and you go, wait a minute, what more?
What are we talking about this morning and didn't I drop that idea?
Yes, yes. Well, that does occur.
So anyway, so reading about Abigail and her relationship just kind of, you know, reminded me a little bit about ours.
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I'm going to conclude my discussion of John Adams following on my discussion with Debbie about the Adams family.
By talking about how Adams wanted to Make sure that America was not just a republic of freedom, but also a republic of virtue.
Now, Adams had a sort of skeptical view about human nature.
In some ways, it extended even to the new country, America itself.
In fact, he says, there is no special providence for us.
We're not a chosen people that I know of.
Or, if we are, we deserve it as little as the Jews.
In other words, it's no special talent that puts America, you may say, on the world stage.
And then he says, in a little different mood, we're engaged in the best cause that ever employed the human heart, yet the prospect of success is doubtful, not for want of power or of wisdom, but of virtue.
Now, Adams took a remarkably skeptical view even of the other founders.
He considered Jefferson to be a little bit of a sly, slippery character and not averse to slandering him in private and then, you know, in public disclaiming it.
Jefferson also was conveniently unavailable from Adam's point of view.
Whenever there was a great danger or a great challenge, where's Jefferson?
He's nowhere to be found!
Adams arrives in Europe.
He's ready to get to work.
He wants to convince the Europeans to get on the American side, the French in particular.
He's chasing down Franklin.
Franklin is nowhere to be found.
Finally, he sees Franklin.
He's having his portrait painted by a French painter.
And Adams considers Franklin to be a bit of a fraud.
In fact, he says this guy...
Yeah, and also Franklin's strategic, one time he sees Franklin, he's like an aristocrat, another time he sees him, he's got like hay sticking out of his hat, he's like a country bumpkin.
So these strategic disguises, which I think Franklin thought were the essence of diplomacy, this is how they're described by Adams, quote, they are some of the grossest impostures that have ever been practiced upon mankind since the days of Muhammad.
So Adams considers Muhammad a fraud, and he considers Franklin to be a fraud in the Mohammedan manner.
Adams, let's remember, was thoroughly straight-laced, and he was a devout Christian.
He was rigorously fastidious in his personal life, but he also knew that you couldn't expect that of everybody else.
He also knew that just to appeal to moral exhortation, be a better person, It's not going to do it.
And so for Adams, the way to secure virtue was to structure the government in such a way that it would bring out, you may say, the best in the citizens.
So virtue is the product of a properly constructed government.
I'm quoting Adams. It's the form of government which gives the decisive color to the manners of the people more than any other thing.
Mostly he wanted people to be alert.
The fact that politicians were conniving, and politicians would not hesitate to tyrannize over them.
Sound familiar? Adams thought people were too gullible in thinking that, oh, because I've elected a representative, this guy's not going to watch out for me.
He's going to act in my stead.
But Adams knew that that was in fact not the case.
He wanted to attract people to government who were ambitious but also on the side of virtue.
And Adams actually had an interesting scheme for doing this.
He proposed that there be what he called public titles of distinction that would recognize people of outstanding, quote, valiant, virtuous, or learned men.
People's accomplishments would be sort of publicly recognized By titles of distinction.
Now Jefferson, Adams' political opponent, said, well, Adams is a secret aristocrat.
Adams is trying to bring back aristocratic titles because, of course, there were coats of arms, coats of honor, the whole idea, he's a marquee, this guy's a count.
And so Adams was accused of that.
But Adams didn't mean those kinds of hereditary family titles.
What he meant was titles of personal distinction.
In other words, Adams was calling for a kind of meritocracy.
And he thought... That if the government too is meritocratic, it will attract people who are ambitious, but who want to distinguish themselves by doing things on behalf of the people, not just from themselves.
Now, we're a very long way, I'm sorry to say, from Adams' sort of high standard of civic and public virtue.
I think if this crusty New England farmer were here today and looked around, he would just absolutely be repelled and appalled by what has happened to America.
But nevertheless, perhaps it is the case, even in this, I would say, largely degraded culture of fake virtue, virtue signaling as we call it, going back and looking at Adams, looking at Abigail Adams, looking at their life, not just their private life, but their public life, it gives us an idea of how important it is to protect The public honor and also protect the public interest.
How important it is to get a certain type of person to come to government.
The type of people today I think that stay away from government.
America needs to find its way back to the course on which the founders, like Adams, so wisely and so deliberately placed us.
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