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Jan. 29, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
46:08
BORDERLINE INSANITY Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep757
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Coming up, I'll discuss Joe Biden's scheme to conceal his border insanity by claiming to be the guy who's taking action to secure the border.
I'll review the surreal jury verdict in E. Gene Carroll's lawsuit against Trump, arguing it signals a massive breakdown of law that imperils us all.
Texas House GOP candidate Wayne Richard joins me.
We're going to clarify the stakes and the great divide between the MAGA Republicans and the party establishment.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
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Debbie and I had a really nice weekend getaway.
We fled to warmer climates.
And I mention this because I think I've gotten a full shade darker.
I think I might be almost as brown as Nikki Haley now.
Honey! No, she's been talking about how she's, she talked about how she was teased every day for being brown.
Yeah, I don't know about that.
I figured that the reason I haven't been teased is I'm not quite as brown as Nikki Haley, but I think now I am.
No, you're not.
So I'll have to wait and see if I'm being teased.
What you are is you are bit all over from mosquitoes that didn't get me.
They only got you. Debbie's noting that, yeah, I did, oddly enough, get a string of...
I was a victim of a mosquito attack.
A mosquito invasion.
A mosquito invasion, exactly.
And in any event, it was a really nice getaway, but I'm glad to be back.
And there is very interesting stuff going on at the border.
Now, I want to emphasize that even though we're hearing from the left that Texas is defiantly refusing to do what the Supreme Court said, that is not the case.
So let's refresh.
The Biden administration wants to keep the border open.
They're doing so using a false premise.
And that is that all these people coming in are potential refugees seeking asylum.
Now in the past our asylum laws were very strict.
They applied mainly to communist countries if you are not a demonstrated victim of tyranny.
For example, you fled in a boat from Cuba trying to get away from communist tyranny.
Alright, you're a refugee and you qualify as a refugee.
But now what's happening is tons of people are coming to the border and all they do is they say, I'm applying for asylum, I'm a refugee.
They've been coached to say this, by the way, by the Red Cross.
They've been coached to say this by various NGOs, non-governmental organizations.
They've been coached to say this by left-wing immigrant groups, so-called.
And they've been coached to say this by the Biden administration itself.
And then the Biden administration goes, well, you could be a refugee, and we're going to let you into the country, give you a court date, and we expect and hope that you will show up then.
In the meantime, you're kind of on your own, but you might qualify for certain types of taxpayer-funded benefits, and 8 million people have come into this country under this bill.
This bogus pretext or this bogus application or non-application of a provision in the law.
Texas has had enough, and the governor, Abbott, belatedly decides, all right, I'm going to take Eagle Pass, which is federal land, I mean, is, sorry, Texas land, and I'm going to put fences up so that we can't have We're good to go.
The national officials from cutting the wire.
So we want you, the Supreme Court, to lift that injunction so that our people can go in and cut the wire.
And the Supreme Court, I think wrongly, but nevertheless with the consent of Chief Justice Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett, said okay.
We are going to lift the injunction, which means that the prohibition on the federal government cutting the wire is now removed.
The federal government can in fact cut the wire.
But the important thing to realize is that there's nothing in this case that says that Texas cannot continue to put up wire, that Texas, in fact, the decision is completely silent on what Texas can or cannot do.
And so Governor Abbott's decision to keep putting up the wire is lawful.
Why? Because he argues, and I think rightly, that I've declared an invasion in Texas.
There is an invasion clause that allows me to take this kind of action to secure the border, to protect Texans, their lives, their livelihood, their safety.
And so I'm acting completely within my responsibilities.
True, the federal government may think that they are in charge of the national border, and there's a case pending before the court that hasn't yet been adjudicated about this.
But the real issue is what can be done in the meantime.
Now, the very good thing is that 25-plus states have come to the side of Abbott, and this is important because I think if it was only Texas, Biden might have been tempted to take an extreme measure like, I'm going to nationalize Texas.
I'm going to do a federal takeover of the Texas National Guard, which happened, by the way, in the 1960s, or was it the late 50s, when Eisenhower did this.
He nationalized the Arkansas.
The Arkansas Guard.
And this was on behalf of civil rights laws.
We don't need to go into the details of that case.
But I think that Biden would have been tempted to take this extreme measure.
Now, the measure itself would be extremely risky, politically risky, because it would be a showdown with Texas, an armed showdown.
You'd have Texas National Guardsmen.
you'd have to have the US military show up and force the Texas lawmen to step back or step down.
This would be not just national, probably international news everywhere, but people would see what's going on at the border.
And I think that's what Biden would have to really think about in an election year.
Does he want people to see what people are already seeing?
But this would put it right in their faces that there have been 8 million people who have entered the United States and it's all part of a cynical long-term plan by That's why they're doing it.
They don't mind the child trafficking.
They're, in a sense, operating like two edges of scissors with the cartels, and just a downright horrific situation.
But the fact that 25 other states have come to the support of...
Texas, I think, makes Biden's actions in this regard impossible.
Why? Because what's he going to do?
Nationalize the guard in 25 states?
I mean, this would be such a shocking move that it would throw the whole issue of federalism open and probably cause a convulsion around the country that would be legal, that would be constitutional, that might even be civil, where people are basically...
Choosing between their allegiance to their state and their allegiance to the country, this would be a little bit of a wrecking ball, I think, for our delicately balanced federal system.
And I think because the Biden administration realizes that, that's not really something they can do.
They've decided, all right, let's try to strong arm the Republicans into a, quote, bipartisan deal.
And then the issue is off Biden's back because he then goes, well, look, I worked it out with the Republicans.
Both sides kind of came to an agreement.
And now, you would think that the Republicans would laugh in Biden's face and say, listen, this nonsensical notion that you have to make a deal with us to give you the authority to secure the border, there's a complicated plan that's apparently being discussed.
Essentially, it boils down to—and I'll go into the details about this as the days go on—as the The bottom line of it is Biden goes, if the number of people coming over exceeds $5,000 a day, boom, it comes to a complete stop and we don't take any more applications and we start sending people back.
So it has the fakery of being a tough law, but it's not.
It's actually much weaker than our existing immigration law.
In fact, it legitimizes 5,000 illegals a day.
That's the horrific part of it.
And when Biden says, and he's been putting out all these posts in effect saying, I'm just waiting for this bipartisan bill to give me the authority to act and on day one I'll be taking action.
He can take action now.
There's nothing to stop Biden from sealing the border.
He has the ability. He has the means to do it.
The Border Patrol is more than ready to do it.
He doesn't want to do it, and that's the only reason that the border is open is that the Biden regime, maybe it's Biden, maybe it's all the people, the junta that's running the country, those guys are responsible for keeping the border open.
And so all this business about the left is like Republicans are showing some reluctance to go through with this deal.
Republicans should not touch this deal.
This is a bad deal.
But... No surprise, there are Republicans led by Jim Lankford of Oklahoma who are playing footsie with the Biden administration and saying, well, you know, we're here not simply to score political points.
We're here to find a policy solution.
The policy solution is the existing law.
The problem is the flouting of the existing law.
And this needs to be put before the American people to decide if they want, do they want the country to be swamped and swarmed and invaded in this way?
If the American people want it, that's what they're going to get.
But if they don't want it, and I suspect and I believe strongly they don't want it, even Democrats, rank and file Democrats don't want it.
So this is a panicky effort by Biden to prevent this lethal issue that could blow things up for the Democrats in a big way in an election year.
He wants to get it off the table.
And guess what?
Republicans might be the ones to help him to do that.
Now, fortunately I saw a very strong statement by Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House.
Remember, any bill, bipartisan or not, has to pass the House and the Senate both.
Passing the Senate is not enough.
The Democrats could actually pass it in the Senate with just a couple of Republican votes.
Why? Because they have a majority.
But they can't pass it in the House.
And Mike Johnson has basically said, no dice.
We're not doing this.
And this is going to be, I think, really important for the House to hold firm on this.
Because I think there will be some folding in the Senate.
The Senate is certainly not made up of tough-minded Republicans across the board.
So they'll be able to get it through the Senate.
They must be stopped in getting it through the House.
There'll be a lot of media pressure.
We're trying to solve the problem.
Let's put the country over partisan objectives.
Trump only wants this issue unresolved because it's an election year.
No. This is a self-consuming This is a self-inflicted crisis.
An invasion of a sort, but it's an invasion.
Imagine a country being invaded where the head of that country is facilitating the invasion.
That's the peculiar situation we have here.
That's why Republicans should not put up with it.
This is a malevolent administration whose objectives remain as malevolent as ever.
Let's not play footsie.
Let's not play ball with these guys.
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If you think our justice system has gone off the rails, I agree, and I bring you as corroboration the case of E. Jean Carroll versus Trump.
Now, E. Jean Carroll is somebody who, many, many years after the fact, said that Trump raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room.
I mean, just stop to think about that for a moment.
Trump's view is, I don't know this woman.
I've never seen her. I've never met her.
She might have been in some line once to take a picture with me.
But apart from that, I have no recollection of this at all.
And E. Jean Carroll is an unusual person, to put it mildly.
She went on CNN with Anderson Cooper and talked about how she has these rape fantasies and how they're actually a good thing.
She paints trees and rocks in her yard blue.
She has a cat named Vagina, a dog named Tits.
This is all just small, gives you a little window into the very bizarre individual things.
Named E. Jean Carroll.
She also has a whole series of extremely questionable posts on X. I'm just going to read a few.
There's no such thing as a slut.
Only sexual geniuses.
E. Jean Carroll.
How do you know your, quote, unwanted sexual advances unwanted until you advance it?
Think about that.
E. Jean Carroll. It's not the most beautiful woman.
No, no. It's the woman who makes the least mistakes, who seduces the most men.
E. Jean Carroll. What can be done about the penis?
It gets large when you want it small and stays small when you want it large.
What? And she goes on in this mode.
Now, you might say that for somebody who is so, as we say these days, whacked...
Why couldn't Trump blow this case out of the water by simply introducing all this evidence at trial?
And the short answer to that is the judge wouldn't let him.
Think about it. You have a case, you're being sued for defamation because Trump was railing against what he saw as a complete witch hunt from an absolute nut job.
And so he says all this, and then she sues him.
And the judge is such a partisan that he engineers the trial in such a way that counter-evidence that would show we're dealing with a lunatic here.
This woman seems, I mean, think about some of the people who made charges against Kavanaugh.
I'm not even talking about the main accuser, but some of the others were like, oh yes, you know, all these outrageous allegations and as soon as people began to find out the circumstances, they realized...
This individual is a loon.
And sure enough, in the Kavanaugh case, there was at least one person who had made these allegations who later just said to a journalist, I made all this stuff up.
I didn't want the guy on the court, so I just concocted these stories.
And so Trump wanted to make the saying, this is a political hit.
It's a political hit, by the way, funded, well, orchestrated by people like George Conway.
This is Kellyanne Conway's ex-husband.
He's the one who urged E. Jean Carroll to file the suit.
And Reid Hoffman, one of the founders of LinkedIn, by the way, turns out also to be one of Nikki Haley's big supporters.
This is, by the way, a leftist and a Democrat.
So he is anti-Trump.
I think that's why he's supporting Nikki Haley.
And this is a guy who also bankrolled E. Jean Carroll's lawsuit.
And all of this would be relevant for a jury to know.
But guess what? This particular jury, which awarded an absurd $83 million to E. Jean Carroll, a verdict that will surely be appealed.
And I think the real basis for the appeal is exactly this.
You cannot have a trial where one side is just disabled from producing evidence.
But that was the case here, and that's why I think Trump is likely to prevail.
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Feel the difference. Guys, I'm really happy to welcome a new guest to the podcast.
His name is Wayne Richard.
He's the GOP candidate for Texas, I guess it's District 66.
What's HD? House District 66.
There we go. His website, WayneRichardForTexas.com.
He's a small businessman. He's a former radio host.
He's been a conservative activist for years.
I actually met him a week or a couple of weeks ago at a fundraiser for Brandon Gill in the Dallas area.
You can follow Monex at StandWithWayne.
Wayne, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
It was fun to meet you at the Brandon event.
That was very cool.
And I think you rightly noted that the star of the show was not Brandon, but my granddaughter, Marigold Gill.
Yes. A beautiful, beautiful little baby.
No doubt about that. Well, thank you.
Let's talk, Wayne, about the border, the biggest issue, I think, in Texas now.
An apparent standoff between the Governor Abbott on the one side backed up by more than 25 states and All standing with Texas on this.
And on the other side, the Biden administration, which has been threatening Texas, giving Texas deadlines to take down this wire around Eagle Pass and essentially allow the Biden administration to let people in.
Where do you think this is?
Well, first of all, It seems to me a little late in the day for Governor Abbott to take this measure.
It seems to have been pretty effective to have forced the issue.
The Biden people are now talking about trying to make a deal with the Republicans.
Why do you think this was not done two years ago?
That's a very good question, Dennis.
You know, I'm running for House District 66, and when I have an opportunity to speak to various people here that will be voting in this upcoming election, I make that comment to them.
I said, you know, our current rep has been in office for eight years, and now they're suddenly acting as though they're out there trying to protect the border for the first time.
You know, we've seen this going on forever.
When I ran eight years ago, it was an issue for me as a candidate.
It was the first time I ran 18, 14 years ago, actually.
A border was a major issue.
And back then, it was just a trickle of people coming across the border.
And at the time, there was a majority of Hispanics.
They were coming over the border to look for a better life.
I mean, it was true. But today, the border's being used for a way to invade our country.
You know, a lot of people think it's an invasion.
I say we've been occupied at this point in time.
It's taken much too long for Governor Abbott to step up.
I mean, we've had the fentanyl crisis that we've been looking at now for the last couple of years.
People are dying in Texas.
People are dying all over the United States as a result of this.
It's an attack from China.
You know, the fentanyl is actually created in China and then it's brought across by the cartel.
This is a war that's taking place in Texas and it affects the entire United States.
Wayne, while I agree and understand the gravity of the term invasion, here's my problem with that term.
And it is that normally an invasion occurs without the consent of the party being invaded.
And in other words, let's just say, for example, one country invades another.
In this case, we have a Biden administration that has, I don't think it's right to say they found a loophole, but what they've realized is that if you can coach every illegal to say the word asylum, then there's a provision in our immigration laws that allows you to apply for asylum.
And then administratively, if they decide, well, we're going to let you stay in the United States until you're Court date, which may be a year or two years, even longer into the future, you've effectively entered the country.
And my point is that this is by the design of the Biden administration.
So is it fair to use the term invasion?
It's not as if outsiders are invading us and we're like, no, no, no.
That may be the way ordinary Texans feel.
But sad to say, it's not the way our federal government feels, is it?
I would challenge that thought.
What's the purpose of an invasion?
An invasion is to conquer a nation.
And what's happening right now, from a political perspective, and you could say from a military-type perspective, I mean, when you look at history, you look at China and the opium dens, China was overcome by an influx of drugs into the country.
We're seeing that here in the United States.
In addition, from a political perspective, everyone understands that the goal of the Biden administration is to bring in so many Hispanics and people that'll turn the tide and they'll all vote Democrat.
So if they bring in these illegals and they give them the right to vote in local and national elections, it changes the political landscape of our nation.
It changes who we are as a society.
That's the objective of an invasion.
Change the society, overtake the country, the nation.
And that's their objective, especially here in Texas.
You know, everyone understands that, you know, we've seen California go for Ronald Reagan.
It was a Republican state. Now it's Democrat-run.
They brought in illegals to switch that over to a Democrat state.
Now it's a cesspool.
They're trying to do that here in Texas as well.
We're the last Republican bastion in the nation.
And if they're successful in turning Texas blue, we'll never have a Republican president ever again.
The two-party system will cease to exist.
It'll simply be a Marxist-Democrat policy moving forward at that point in time.
So once again, I challenge that thought that it is an invasion, and we have been occupied.
I mean, if they were to turn around, and right now, today, we have, what, 370,000 come across the border in December?
370,000 illegals.
I mean, it's unbelievable.
It's unsustainable. If suddenly the Democrats gave them the right to vote, it would change politics here in Texas overnight.
Absolutely. Well, yeah, I think the only thing I was trying to say is that this was an invasion not only condoned but to some degree orchestrated by the government of the United States itself.
I mean, that's what makes it a very peculiar type of invasion.
Now, let me ask you about the standoff.
The Biden administration has been giving Texas deadlines, which Texas has been ignoring.
They seem to think that they have a Supreme Court decision on their side.
But as I understand it, all that the Supreme Court decided to do was lift an injunction that allows the Biden administration to cut the fence. It doesn't require Texas to do anything. The Supreme Court never said, Texas, you may not put up more wire, or Texas, you have to do this, or Texas, you have to do that. So the people who think that Texas is somehow flouting the Supreme Court's decision are absolutely wrong.
Do you agree with that analysis?
And moreover, what would you do if you were in the legislature or if you were the governor and Biden says, I'm going to send federal troops down there to make sure that you bow to our will?
This is a classic state-federal issue.
And the Constitution is very clear.
The states have a right to protect themselves from an invasion if the federal government fails to do so.
370,000 people coming across.
We don't know who they are. They're military-aged men.
It's an invasion. Once again, we discussed the primary component of what we want to identify this.
What is it called? It's an invasion.
Texas has a right with the invasion clause, once again, invasion, to protect the citizens of Texas.
And as a secondary route, we're protecting the United States as a whole.
If I were governor, I would have implemented these type of procedures a long time ago before it got to this point.
But I think that the battle between the state and the federal government, it's going to happen today.
Unfortunately, Biden has a perspective that he thinks that he can push forward his plans, keep the gates open, allow them to cross.
Texas and the nation and our Border Patrol people that are down there right now all agree that it's time to stop this invasion, to stop this influx of military-aged men coming into our country, and Texas is going to hold strong.
Abbott will not give up, and I just pray that it doesn't get to the point where Biden attempts to nationalize or federalize our National Guard because if he tries to do that to us or Florida where the governor said they'll send troops, they'll send supplies to Texas as well, it'll be escalated to a point where...
It could become a heated battle at that point, and we don't want that to happen.
We simply want to protect Texas from the invasion.
I mean, wouldn't he have to federalize the National Guard of 25 states?
I mean, in effect, just doing it to Texas would not seem to be adequate.
This would be a situation that would far surpass the civil rights era where There was a precedent for this where Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard.
Of course, the difference there was that had to do with segregation.
Here we're dealing with a national government that is openly flouting the immigration laws that were passed by Congress and that are in place today.
We talked at the beginning about the sort of delay in taking this step.
And I'm assuming that there are Republicans in Texas and around the country who are still a little squeamish about provoking this kind of a showdown with the federal government.
And that brings me to the second question I wanted to ask you, besides the border, what do we make about this fissure in the Republican Party, which I take it is not an ideological fissure, because I'm guessing that pretty much all Republicans think the border is a scandal, and what the Biden administration is doing is scandalous.
However, one group of Republicans thinks, okay, it's time to take action, you know, let's keep putting the wire up.
Whereas there's another type of Republican who goes, well, let's not rock the boat.
Let's not provoke these guys.
Let's see if we can work out a deal.
I mean, you see this being replicated on the national level because Biden is trying to work with some Senate Republicans to figure out a deal.
That would allow up to 5,000 people to come daily.
I mean, outrageous saying that, you know, if we pass this deal, you'll now give me the power to do something about the border as if he doesn't have that power right now.
But talk about this fissure in the Republican Party.
Do you see it?
Does it affect your race?
And how do we bridge it?
Yes, I do see it.
There is definitely a divide in the Republican Party.
It's where the phrase rhino comes from.
Republican by name only.
Here in Texas, we have a Speaker of the House, Dave Thielen, who is a, we refer to him as a rhino.
He is for open borders.
You know, in Texas, the Republican platform calls for all committee chairs to be held by Republicans because we're a majority.
That's in our platform.
And yet Dave Thielen, our Speaker, assigns Here in Collin County where I'm running, the five representatives all voted to impeach Attorney Joel Ken Paxton.
They call themselves conservatives, and yet Ken Paxton's the most conservative attorney general Texas has ever had, probably here in the United States as well.
And they call themselves Republicans.
I call them rhinos.
How can you impeach an individual that's fighting for Texas and fighting for the United States 60 lawsuits he's filed against the Biden administration and wins many of them?
They claim to be conservative, and yet they fire or attempt to fire The Attorney General.
They're rhinos. So it's impacting Texas politics as well.
So each of those five representatives that are running here in Colley County are all being primaried.
The individual that I'm running against voted for the impeachment process.
And I'm a law and order type of a guy.
And they did not follow due process.
Due process, you know, it's a bill of rights.
It's a constitutional right.
I'm innocent until proven guilty.
The House of Representatives basically claimed that they were acting as though they were a grand jury, but they did not follow the laws of Texas to be a grand jury, to be sworn in and testify under oath.
That never took place.
And yet, many of the House of Representatives in Texas voted to impeach Ken Paxton with absolutely no testimony, nothing being sworn to in testimony.
As soon as it got to the Senate, it became very clear.
It was all rumors and innuendos.
So the individuals that voted against Ken Paxton, that's our target.
Those are the ones that we consider to be a rhino.
They're not voting the way the constituents here in Texas want.
We want the border closed.
We want it all done immediately.
And yet they're down there playing games for years now, never get anything done.
And then every two years we have an election and they put mailers out saying, I worked so hard to close the border.
I'm working for you. They did absolutely nothing each year progressed to this point.
So the divide is between conservative Republicans and liberal Republicans.
Many of them, we say they should just have a D, a Democrat, next to their name and not call themselves Republican.
However, they're in Republican districts, so they present themselves to be a Republican, even though they don't align and abide by the conservative Republican platform that we put together here in Texas every two years.
I mean, I gotta say that I see this also in Brandon's race.
You've got a bunch of guys running for, and to listen to them, they all sound one more conservative than the next guy, but it's a rhetorical posture for the election.
And if you look back at their record, you realize it's softer than their rhetoric.
And so it puts, in a way, the voter in a very awkward position.
You're hearing all this rhetoric.
You go, oh yeah, this guy sounds exactly like what I believe.
But it's no guarantee that if you elect that guy, he's going to carry out the agenda that he professes.
And I think this is a real problem in the Republican Party.
Wayne Richard, thank you very much for joining me. I'd love to have you back sometime.
Follow him on X, at StandWithWayne, his website, WayneRichardForTexas.com.
Thank you very much for having me on.
You have a great day. I'm launching on a new book discussion today.
And after I finished C.S. Lewis's very slim volume called The Four Loves, I was kind of thinking about what I should do.
And in fact, I told Debbie, all right, well, I think what I'm going to do is a...
Insights into Western philosophers, and I'm going to begin with the pre-Socratics, all the way through the classical philosophers, on to the medieval philosophers, on to the early modern philosophers, into the 19th century, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, into the 20th century, sort of great...
Thinkers of philosophy from the beginning of time.
And then I realized that if I do that, it's probably going to take me pretty much most of 2024.
And I thought, well, before I launch into that, maybe I'll do a couple of shorter things and then undertake this massive project, which I'm excited about doing.
But I told Debbie, maybe I can do Harry Jaffa's book, a classic work called Crisis of the House Divided.
It's actually an in-depth and careful study of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
And these debates are important in itself.
They offer a window into the critical issue that caused the Civil War.
There's a lot of debate today of what caused the Civil War.
Was it cultural differences between the North and the South?
Was it that the South was free trade because it wanted to sell cotton to Europe and the North wanted all these tariffs.
So were tariffs the real reason for the war?
There's a guy named Di Lorenzo who argues this passionately and argues that slavery had little or nothing to do with it.
But it's also too simple to say the Civil War was merely about slavery.
Yes, it was. But what about slavery?
What was the real issue?
Was it abolition?
Actually, no. But how did all this come about?
And the beauty of the Lincoln-Douglas debates is that they occurred two years before the Civil War.
Abraham Lincoln from Illinois Lincoln was a lawyer in Illinois, spent most of his life in Illinois.
He wasn't born in Illinois.
He was actually born in a slave state, Kentucky.
And his family moved north to Illinois.
And Lincoln, who had been a lawyer and a congressman, decided to run for the Senate.
Against Stephen Douglas, who was the favorite, much more famous at the time than Lincoln, thought to be a potential presidential contender in a way that Lincoln at that time was not.
It's very ironic that just two years later, it was Lincoln who made his way to the presidency.
And in fact, his main opponent in that race in 1860 was none other than Stephen Douglas.
So, Douglas was the Democratic nominee and it was a very weird year, 1860, because there was a third man in the race.
Essentially, the Democrats nominated two people.
The Northern Democrats had Stephen Douglas and the Southern Democrats appointed a guy named Breckenridge and really that's how Lincoln won.
The Democratic vote got split.
Lincoln did not get a majority but he got a plurality and he had enough electoral votes to put him over the top in 1860.
But the Lincoln-Douglas debates were not in the presidential election.
They were in the Senate election in Illinois.
And a young scholar, well not young anymore, in fact the late Harry Jaffa, wrote this book about the early 1950s.
So the book is in fact 70 years old, but it's recognized by scholars to be a truly great work.
And part of the reason it's so good is it takes an approach that has become very rare in our culture today.
It takes the approach of treating the debate as a debate.
It treats the debate as two serious people, intelligent people who have strongly different points of view.
And what the author here, Harry Jaffer does, is he kind of goes into the head of Douglass.
And then he goes into the head of Lincoln.
And so the first half of the book is called The Case for Douglass.
And Jaffa, as eloquently as he can, makes the case for Douglas.
He doesn't try to refute him.
He doesn't try to say, oh, he falsely claimed this, this was misinformation.
Not at all. He recognizes that Douglas is an extremely able contender, that his views have a lot going for him.
Historical arguments, philosophical arguments, arguments about the nature of democracy.
And so in this study, we're going to be treated to something that's kind of a treat, I think, namely a fair examination of sharply opposed points of view.
Think of how scarce this has now become in our culture.
And then the second half of the book is the case for Lincoln.
It will emerge by the end of the book that Harry Jaffa is very much on the side of Lincoln.
But he's not on the side of Lincoln by prejudice.
He's not like, I'm going to show why Lincoln was right.
It is that through the book and through the examination of the arguments and counter-arguments, Harry Jaffa also plays juror and adjudicates these arguments and tells you why he thinks at the end That the Lincoln position is not only intellectually stronger, but is right, is the true position to hold.
And so this book is a book that I first encountered after I graduated from college.
This was back to 1983.
Many people think my political education began at Dartmouth and to a degree it did.
I was part of the Dartmouth Review and we were part of a little rebel band of conservatives.
I was exposed to conservative ideas, but not really in the classroom.
My classroom education was a liberal education in many ways, philosophy, history, literature.
But it wasn't until after I graduated that I realized, you know, I don't know enough about American political thought.
I've been exposed to Locke, Machiavelli, the European thinkers.
And so I went to the Claremont Institute where Harry Jaffa was kind of the reigning scholar.
There were a bunch of young scholars around him who were the teachers of this program that I was part of called the Publius Fellowship.
And that's when I first encountered...
Crisis of the House Divided. It's a book that had a big impact on me and over the years I have, well I can't say read it all the way through again and again but gone back to it to look at particular sections or points again and again and of course it has also deepened my knowledge of but also appreciation of Abraham Lincoln.
I myself had heard a lot of back and forth about Lincoln and Lincoln was a tyrant.
Lincoln suspended habeas corpus dinesh, and so he violated the Constitution.
There's a libertarian school of thought that holds that Lincoln was the founder of the welfare state.
Why? Because the government had to expand during the Civil War.
Well, yeah, but it contracted after the war.
We didn't even have an income tax until the 20th century, so blaming Abraham Lincoln for the temporary escalation of the government between 1861 and 1865 for the prosecution of the Civil War Seems to me a little bit stretched.
But nevertheless, I didn't learn a lot of these things until I went to Claremont and began to be exposed to the thought of Abraham Lincoln.
And one way that happened was through this great debate called the Lincoln-Douglas debate.
So when we pick it up tomorrow, I'll go through the introduction of this book and talk about the way in which the book adopts Well, the author, Jaffa himself, calls it the Thomas Aquinas mode of argument.
And I'll tell you about that tomorrow as we dive into Crisis of the House Divided.
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