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Feb. 2, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
47:32
IRON MAN Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep761
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Welcome to my show!
And what's going to come of the idea of planting chips inside people's heads?
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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.
I'm calling this podcast Iron Man.
And the Iron Man in question is none other than Donald Trump.
Now, when I use this phrase, Iron Man, what I mean is that Trump has a very abnormal psychology.
Debbie is the one who picks the little thumbnail photo that goes with the podcast, and we have the Trump mugshot.
Debbie was kind of joking and saying that, you know, for most people, a mugshot would be...
A matter of disgrace.
And in fact, this is what the left was hoping for Trump.
He'd have a mugshot. There's his mugshot.
That's Trump. Look at him.
He's a common criminal.
But Trump is sort of, with his defiant look, his mugshot is...
And certainly in his mind, something to flaunt, something to be proud of, something to make posters about and icons about and use as a fundraising tool.
And there are people who are, I think I just saw, who was it?
Lil Pump, the rapper who just put the mugshot on his leg and put it out to his 14 billion Instagram followers.
The mugshot has become a cause celeb.
And this is the point that I saw a post that got me thinking about this particular episode, this particular segment, and they were like, what a state the country has come to.
Here's a man who's facing 90-plus criminal charges.
Here's a man who's being on the verge of having his business taken away from him, at least in New York.
Here's a man who just faced a A charge of having assaulted a woman and defamed her on top of it, E. Jean Carroll.
And yet this man is not only a contender, he's not only going to be a party nominee, but he may well be the leading candidate to be the next president.
And this guy on the left was just saying, this is a reflection of the moral debasement, that terrible state of the country that this could even be so.
Now, I think that the reason it is so, of course, is that people see through the BS. They see the fact that, look, you got all these indictments, but where's the substance to the indictments?
Did Trump even do what, let's say, Fannie Willis did?
With Fannie Willis, it's pretty easy to understand.
She gets romantically involved with a married guy, so she's having an affair, and in the course of the affair she funnels government money that's under her control and appoints this guy to a powerful position for which he is not an expert, he's not really qualified, and then he spends the money on him and her.
That's a pretty easy corruption to understand.
Where's the Trump corruption that is equivalent to that?
Where did Trump take money under the table?
There's no allegation even of that.
All the Trump cases, one after the other, have a certain surreal superficiality to them.
They are highly debatable.
He inflated the value of his assets.
Well, who got hurt? Well, no one really, but he still did.
Or something like...
Well, he didn't rape E. Jean Carroll, but he somehow assaulted her.
He must have done something. Why else would she be so upset?
And then after that, he defamed her by calling her names, even though she calls them names all the time.
And then on and on it goes.
So people see through it.
But the interesting thing to me is not even the fact that people see...
Past all this and through all this, but the fact that Trump puts up with it all and doesn't go into the fetal position, he doesn't go under the table, he's not defeated by it, which a normal person I think would be.
I'm usually a little bit in the Trumpian mode.
And during my case, Debbie would sometimes marvel at the fact that I took not only a wry, but an even humorous view of the whole situation.
But I wasn't facing 91 criminal charges.
I was not facing spending the rest of my life in prison.
And so I sometimes say to myself, you know, what would the psychological effect be on me?
And the answer, pretty devastating.
Most Republicans are chased out of office for doing...
Hardly much less.
Look at Nixon. He was basically facing one charge.
Not even the charge that he ordered the Watergate burglary.
Only the charge that he knew about it and tried to cover it up and then tried to get the CIA involved to sort of deflect attention away from it.
And for that, Nixon collapses.
He resigns in disgrace.
Everywhere you go, Nixon's scarred by Watergate.
Nixon himself, I think, was personally affected by all that, even though Nixon maintained his composure, wrote important books after all that.
Nevertheless, if you just contrast Nixon with Trump...
You see that Trump is a whole different character, and I think this is what drives the left insane.
They can't understand why, after firing not one javelin, not two, not three, but their entire arsenal, here is Trump still standing, and not only standing, but forging ahead, and as the leftist on social media himself admitted, potentially the next president of the United States.
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Debbie and I are here for our Friday roundup.
And what's on your mind today?
So, a lot of things are on my mind.
But the one thing I want to talk about are my boots.
You know, when you met me, that's all I wore.
You were a regular... Cowboy boots all the time.
Because you know, and I just, I found this out at my uncle's funeral, really.
I, you know, they're, they like to go back and do ancestry and all of that, but I didn't realize that my DNA, half of it anyway, with my mom, right?
I'm like a ninth generation Texan because my uncle Leo was an eighth generation Texan.
And I'm the next generation.
So nine. So I am very deep rooted in the state of Texas, I have to say.
Well, the interesting thing about your ancestry is that they give you typically a sort of an ethnic and racial breakdown.
So it's like you are, you know, 10% black, you have 13% American Indian, it's that type of breakdown.
And then the white, of course, a lot of it traces to Europe and Spain.
But... What you're talking about now is a regional breakdown.
And regionally, even though you have Spanish ancestors, you also have American Indian ancestors, and they lived in that region of now Texas.
In fact, initially it wasn't even Texas, for time immemorial, for generations and maybe even centuries.
Yeah, centuries. Yes.
So in that sense, you have roots in the Rio Grande Valley that are very old.
Very old. And this is one reason why I couldn't live in California.
And I brought you to Texas.
Because I'm a Texan.
I mean, I've been a Texan since the age of 10.
And I'm 58.
So 48 years of being a Texan, that's a long time.
That's almost half a century. One of the things I've noticed, and I've sort of been a Texan in the sense of having a Texan driver's license for, what, five or six years now, thereabouts, is there is a kind of Texan spirit or Texan psychology that is unique.
And a good symbol of this is that in any other state, you live in that state, but...
It's not that important to you.
You could live in another state and it wouldn't be a big deal.
The fact that Texas has its own pledge, I think, is highly revealing.
Yeah, we pledge allegiance to the Texas flag, of course.
But the other thing is that, you know, I have that, I know we could become a country if we really wanted to be.
Or even look at the Border Patrol.
Oh no, it was the Texas National Guard.
Yeah. Today.
Posted, come and take it.
Oh, yeah. They had the come and take it flag right under the Texas flag.
And so, think of the kind of attitude that goes behind that.
Yeah, it's kind of like, even yesterday, we had Dan Patrick on the podcast, and he's like, we were ready.
If they were going to cut the fence, we were going to build up more fences at the same time, and faster than they could cut it down.
I mean, this is the Texas flag.
Right. Well, we're being invaded.
Texans are being invaded.
And, I mean, obviously America is being invaded, but you know what?
They're coming in through Texas.
Well, not only that, but other people have a more fatalistic attitude.
Like, you know, this is a problem.
There's nothing we can really do about it.
And, you know, the senator from Georgia, Colton Moore, was at the airport.
I think it might have been the Atlanta airport.
He notices a whole bunch of illegals being guarded by...
An American soldier. And he's like, who are these people?
Why are they in a private room?
Why is a soldier standing outside?
They're like, who are you? He's like, well, I'm a state senator from Georgia.
I'm just trying to figure out what's going on at the airport.
So this has become...
They're taking over airports, schools.
They actually have closed schools down and up north to house these people.
Police stations, hotels, many hotels have closed down just so they can house these people.
It is a problem. It is a huge problem. And as Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said yesterday, it's not even just about criminals coming in.
It's how are we going to pay for all these people?
It's horrific. Now, let's pivot a little bit.
We've been talking about the invasion, at one sense, at the border.
On the other hand, you've got all these trouble spots brewing abroad.
Middle East, yes.
And you were making the point that...
This is not an accident.
This happens predictably, predictably when Democrats are in office.
So let's look and see if that's true.
What's the case to be made when Democrats are in office, all hell breaks loose?
I was a little girl. I was 10 when Jimmy Carter was president.
And as a 10-year-old, I was like, how could he be so naive?
That was my first thought.
It's like, how could he So dumb.
How in the world did he let Iran explode like it did?
I mean, how did he do that?
How did we have all of those hostages?
Why did they take them hostage?
What was it that they were seeing in Jimmy Carter that they decided, you know what, we're going to take these hostages because this guy is really dumb.
What was it? So that, okay, is the beginning of my knowledge, because obviously I was a child, but every time it seems that we have Democrats in office, we have to come in and clean it up.
Because what people don't understand is that 9-11, although it came in after, you know...
Under Bush. Under Bush.
He was cleaning up.
That was actually a part of the Clinton...
Era. This is a key point.
And what you're talking about is the fact that these acts were...
It occurred because of a lack of responding to earlier attacks.
Yes. And so, in 1995, Khobar Towers, the bombing in Saudi Arabia of the Khobar Towers.
Then you had the attack on the U.S. embassies in Africa, Nigeria, I believe, I forget where else.
And then you had the bombing of the USS Cole, 1998 or 1999.
And essentially, the United States did nothing in all three cases.
Exactly. Even though a giant hole is blown into a U.S. military vessel.
And so I think the radical Muslims were like, well, why don't we just ramp it up?
Now, interestingly, their timing occurred under Bush.
And then let's look at Obama.
Fast forward to the next Democratic president.
We have Benghazi. The Arab Spring.
Benghazi. I mean, come on!
The collapse of Mubarak, a U.S. ally in Egypt.
And the Iran deal.
The Obama was sending pallets of money, remember, to Iran.
And now Biden, the disgrace in Afghanistan.
And there was a quiet period, and that was the Trump period, right?
Because Trump basically was like, yeah, don't even think about it.
Don't even go there, right?
And they didn't go there. Instead, they patiently waited.
And, you know, to be honest...
I'm not really sure how much of a role they also played in the election, but they definitely didn't want Trump to be president.
They definitely didn't. Because this wouldn't be happening, folks, right now.
I mean, we had an interesting exchange with Trump, and this part of it I've seen Trump say publicly, so I'm not divulging any confidences.
But he makes the point that he would repeatedly say to people, whether it's Kim Jong-un or whether it is Putin, he would say to them basically, you know, don't do that.
Why? Because if you do that, I'm going to bomb the heck out of Moscow.
I'm going to bomb the heck out of North Korea.
And then Putin would say to Trump, you wouldn't do that.
And Trump goes, yes, I would.
And then Trump comments to us and he says, even if he only believed that 10%, it was enough to deter him.
He may not be sure.
He might think Trump won't do it.
But that is what's called peace through strength.
That is what's called...
That is called making a threat that has some credibility.
Obviously, if you make a threat...
Like Biden makes threats. Don't do that.
Don't go there. Look, it's like the parent that lets the kid get away with it, right?
The kid's going to keep doing it because they know...
The parents are, I'm going to spank you.
You do that again and I'm going to spank you.
Well, guess what? The kid does it again.
Does he get a spanking? No.
So... It's the same.
The kid realizes it's an empty threat and the same is true.
So whichever parent the child is more afraid of, right?
Let's just say, theoretically, right, that it's the dad because the dad is very, he yells at the kids, right?
But he never spanks the kids.
He never does it.
He threatens, but it's enough to actually scare them, right?
Right. And so they're going to be a little bit more afraid to do anything under the dad than they are the mom who always threatens to spank and never does.
Well, I mean, the best approach, of course, is to administer an early spanking that is really harsh.
Yes. Right? Because once you've done that...
Yeah, they know... Then you don't even have to yell.
Yeah, no. I mean, when I think back to my parents or even my dad or my grandparents, they relied on what I would call the look.
Oh, yeah. In other words, you're sitting at the table and you're about to do something and you look at them and you get this look and you're like, I better not do that.
Yeah. Because you remember...
Yeah. What happened the first time you tried to take them on.
So maybe it's the look from Trump giving these people, right?
But the look is, I mean, this is where I think Trump's actions with Soleimani and so on were very significant because Trump showed, I will actually do it.
Yeah, and he did. And he did.
And so they were like, okay, this is a guy who actually does carry these things out.
And then, of course, there's Trump's unforgettable type of commentary where he doesn't just do it, but he then goes on and gives a kind of a running commentary like, he died like a dog, you know.
This kind of thing, which is unprecedented for a world leader to do and is very much in the Trumpian mode.
Let's talk about Fannie Willis.
Yeah, trying to stop Trump.
Think of that. This very woman that is trying to...
We were talking about just how unbelievably stupid these two people are.
Oh my goodness. Well, remember I showed you the photo of, I think her name's Jocelyn Wade.
This is Nathan Wade's wife.
She's gorgeous. Really?
She's beautiful! I was like, dude, what are you thinking?
You know? Gorgeous woman.
So it must be, I think, on his part, I mean, it must be.
Compare her to Fanny Willis. We don't know the details up close, but the simple truth of it, it probably is a power play on his part.
No, I think so. He's an opportunist.
I think he used her. And he realizes, because, I mean, look at Fanny Willis.
She's kind of rotund.
She speaks with a kind of lisp.
She's a little weird. There's something a little abnormal about her.
I don't know about that. But what I do know is that the wife that he left, the wife he had, was gorgeous.
And Fannie Willis is nothing but...
Are you saying the wife would not be a good spokesman for the fat affirmation movement?
Oh, stop it. No.
No, okay. She definitely...
She's not that. But look at the colossal...
I mean, the colossal recklessness of judgment.
Fannie Willis is in this case.
It's bound to come under immense scrutiny.
Now, she probably thought the media is going to give me a pass.
They're not going to be checking me out.
But you have not only Trump, but you have 18 or 19 other defendants.
Well, speaking of one of those defendants, he countersued her.
So, Michael Roman...
Michael Roman is the guy who found out about this.
We were talking a little bit about how that might have happened and you made a good point.
Someone probably tipped him off.
Somebody in the office. Because like you say, when something like some hanky-panky is going on like this, there are going to be people who observe it.
Or they observe that something's up, even if they don't know exactly what.
And so, someone gets tipped off and probably Michael Roman then goes, time to hire a private detective.
Yes, yes. To start getting receipts.
And he has a phenomenal attorney, Ashley Merchant.
She's the one that filed that countersuit.
So now, it looks like Fannie Willis is subpoenaed to testify that About the improper spending and relationship.
So, good luck with that.
There have also been a couple of other ways in which this plot thickens.
There was a case involving apparently one of her other subordinates who was engaged in corruption, and she was told about it.
And what she does is she listens, she pretends to be sympathetic to the person reporting it, And ignores it.
No, she fires the person reporting it.
So, some days or a few weeks later, that person is moved out, not the person who is actually engaging in the corrupt behavior.
Yes, because she's corrupt. So, it looks like this is a den of corruption, right?
There's a fount of corruption going on here.
And this is the woman, again, think of the pot calling the kettle black.
This is the woman saying that Trump is the one who's corrupt.
And she's the one.
Yeah, the corruption is much more obvious in the Fannie Willis case than it is in the Trump case.
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Debbie and I came across one of the really weirdest stories we've seen in maybe months, maybe even years, and you probably heard about it.
This is the guys who are watching the Kansas City game, Kansas City Chiefs, and they're in Kansas City, and somehow that night, three of the guys go outside, three of them, and all freeze to death.
And we were... The reason this catches my attention is just because of the sheer, on the face of it, implausibility of it.
Now, one guy gets drunk, staggers his way outside, locks himself out, is now on the porch...
Can't get back in.
Can't get back in, and then slumps down, and the alcohol takes over, he passes out.
That can happen, right?
Mm-hmm. I think we were saying that that's very odd to happen to two guys, let alone three, because if it happens to one guy, the second guy grabs him, you go next door, you bang on the door, somebody lets you in.
So, how is it possible for three guys to end up as corpses?
And this has caused some people to...
To suspect that they were murdered or that there was some intentional...
So let me back up.
So there were five men watching this Kansas City cheapskate.
At one guy's house.
At one guy's house.
One of the men left.
Right. Okay? Now, according to that man, the three men that were frozen were still awake at like one or two in the morning.
They were watching Jeopardy or something, right?
Yeah. But he was able to leave and didn't know anything else.
Apparently, the three men that were found outside dead were outside and the owner of the house was in his room.
According to one of the guy's girlfriends or fiance, she kept calling him because she couldn't get a hold of her boyfriend, right?
Or of her fiance. So, kept calling him and he wouldn't answer the phone.
He would not answer the text.
Nothing, right? So, she got very obviously agitated and wanted to know what happened.
So, the next morning, she goes over and breaks into the house, right?
And she finds nothing, obviously, inside, but when she goes outside in the backyard, she finds the three men.
Well, where was the owner of the house at this time?
He apparently was upstairs, like, passed out.
He was in the house. He was in the house.
Yeah, he was passed out.
But, so apparently...
And now there's footage of another neighbor from across the street videotaped the owner of the house getting handcuffed.
So this is not a story that's out really, but apparently the police got there.
Lots of police. Not just a couple of cars, but many.
This is after they found the men, yes.
So they go in there, they arrest or apprehend the owner of the house, put him in handcuffs, and were questioning him, right?
And so the neighbor had no idea what was going on.
He had absolutely zero idea.
So... So they're questioning him and everything.
And then they let him go. But he does go to the police station, as does the fiancé.
And then I guess they take the bodies, right?
So the bodies are frozen.
They can't do an autopsy because they're frozen solid.
So anyway, at that point.
And according to the reports, the autopsy is going to take weeks and weeks to find out what it is.
So I was like, okay, this is really strange.
My theory, and I like to come up with these theories, as you know, we love to watch these crime shows and stuff, is that, and it's come out, the stories have come out that the owner of the house, who was an HIV chemist, Okay.
That he was also a drug addict.
In fact, he checked himself into a rehab center yesterday, I believe, right?
So, my guess is he gave these guys some concoction of something, but not maliciously.
Like, he didn't try to kill them.
Right. But they were all taking drugs and could be, and I don't know, fentanyl could have been a part of this concoction.
As you know, fentanyl kills you immediately.
Right. So it could be that these guys, there's also drugs that make you feel like you're on fire, like inside you're burning up, right?
It could be that these guys felt really hot and they needed to get out.
And they got out.
Exposed themselves to the extreme temperatures.
Yeah, because they weren't wearing their jackets.
Right. The jackets were inside the house.
So they went outside to escape this heat from internal heat, right?
They went out.
And my guess is they passed out.
And at that point, they got hypothermia and died.
That's the only thing that explains why they didn't go, oh my gosh, we're outside and it's really cold, bang, bang, bang, bang, because they had to have passed out.
I don't think there's any other explanation.
Yeah, and also, there were some insinuations early on that maybe this was a deliberate action, that he locked them out.
It doesn't make any sense.
He invites his friends over, they're watching a game, and they're watching Jeopardy.
And it could be And it could be, too, that the owner himself passed out, and that's why he wasn't answering the phone.
But the only difference was he passed out inside, and these guys went outside.
Very, very weird.
All right, let's talk about something equally interesting, although maybe with a little more profound social implications.
Elon Musk and the issue of Neuralink.
So apparently, you have a guy who, this is the first human to have a chip implanted in his brain, but it is a chip that promises to have a remarkable capacity, right? So talk a little bit about this was an operation that took place last Sunday and what they're aiming what they're going for is people who have Disabilities they are paraplegics. They can't move
They cannot direct external objects like they can't walk over to the TV and flip on the remote or type on their computer or what are carry their phone Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
That does this. I mean, what I find interesting about all this is that, you know, it gets to the fundamental issue of the brain and the mind being able to...
You remember the famous experiments that were done going back to the 1980s and 90s where you'd have these psychics and you'd have these magicians and they would say, with my brain, I'm going to bend a spoon.
Yeah. They weren't like Johnny Carson, right?
Mind benders. Yeah. You'd have a spoon and he'd say, look, I'm not going to touch the spoon because there's one thing to touch it and bend it.
I will bend the spoon with my mind.
And I know that, Randy, there's this guy who's like a magician buster.
Yeah, yeah. And he goes around saying, you can't do that.
This is a scam.
Isn't it the same guy that thinks mediums, psychic mediums are scams?
That's right. Same guy. The same guy.
So, I view this against the background of all that.
But it also... I mean, I think with new forms of technology, we're always filled with a simultaneous exhilaration and anxiety.
But I don't think that's new.
That goes back to the telegraph, the telephone, the automobile.
These new technologies are going to transform society.
We know that. And we're a little uneasy about the ways in which they will do that.
Well, I mean, it's scary because obviously these chips implanted in these people are for the good, right?
They're for the good. But what if they do that for the bad, you know?
Right. But who's the they?
You mean a dictator or some kind of centralized?
Yeah, I mean, some kind of tyrant.
Or the government gets the idea that if they can plant chips in everybody's brain, then you have a robotic population.
Yeah. What if you can control people by just implanting a chip in their brain?
I mean, there's a movie, I can't remember the name of it now, but I was like intrigued by it on Apple TV. Remember, I watched like two seasons of it where people have a chip in their brain and they do not remember.
When they're at work, I forget the name of it.
Oh, goodness. Anyway.
Oh, right. When they enter the complex.
When they enter the complex, they do not remember their life.
Outside. Outside. And when they're inside the job, that's all they know.
When they leave the job and go into their life, they don't remember the inside of the job.
And the reason that they did that is apparently they're doing something nefarious in that company and they don't want these people to know.
Here's some of the details.
Neuralink is not the only company doing this.
Apparently, there's another company that's also involved.
This means that this is a type of technology that is coming down the pike.
Do you think Neuralink is a good stock option?
I don't know about that. But look, they are recruiting patients with quadriplegia.
There was some controversy. Apparently, they tried to do this to a monkey in 2022 and the monkey died.
Oh, no. Wait a minute.
Wait a minute. The monkey died?
The monkey died. But look, it is in the nature of clinical.
It reminds me of that thing we saw with the doctor that was putting in the larynx, the fake larynx.
Right, but this is a case where this is why you do animal experiments.
Well, how many animal studies did they do where no monkey...
Well, they say Neuralink has been working to using implants to connect the human brain to a computer for half a decade, but obviously they're doing animal experiments.
This article doesn't say how many and so on, but...
But they were ready for...
But they apparently have gotten FDA clearance for human clinical trials.
Okay, so this person that got operated on a week ago, almost a week ago, how's he doing now?
Do we know? Well, they say that so far he's doing fine.
But let's remember, even in the problematic case that we saw, the doctor proclaimed that the patients were doing fine, and they weren't.
But let's assume, I mean, I think the interesting thing here is to assume that this works.
If it doesn't work, look, we're going to have...
Clinical trials that will fail, and the whole thing will come to a halt, because it'll be like, this doesn't really work.
But I think what the dystopian possibilities we're considering is if it does work, it opens, because then, as you know, as it happened with plastic surgery and so many other things, it begins as reconstruction.
Constructive surgery. It can become abused.
It becomes something completely different.
Yeah. And it becomes a mass market phenomenon.
Imagine people who are, you know, I've got to take the SAT next year.
Why don't I get a chip in my brain?
It's going to help me to give quicker answers.
But the chip in his brain is only going to give the output that he gives it.
So it's not like I'm going to put a genius chip in my brain and I'm going to take the SAT. Well, I'm just saying if it is an app, you know, it will have the calculating abilities of the internet.
Oh. It'll be like artificial intelligence.
It will have the ability to answer questions, solve problems, and presumably deliver information.
This may be good because aren't people just becoming dumber and dumber?
You were saying it was like that movie.
What's the name of that film where people become?
Idiocracy? Idiocracy.
So maybe we all need chips in our brains so we can become smarter, like our founding fathers.
Hmm. I do a live weekly Q&A every Tuesday,
8 p.m. Eastern. No topic is off-limits.
I've also uploaded some cool films to Locals, documentaries, feature films.
2,000 Mules is up there and also the new film Police State.
If you're an annual subscriber, you can stream and watch this content for free.
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So check it out. Here's my channel, dinesh.locals.com.
I'd love to have you along for this great ride.
Again, it's dinesh.locals.com.
I intend today to complete my summary of the basic division between Lincoln and Douglas as a sort of overview before we plunge in depth into the case for Douglas and the case for Lincoln, which will give us a much deeper understanding of those two men and also a lot of other things going on in America in the 19th century.
Now, Lincoln had conceded, a very important concession, that slavery was in the United States a necessary evil.
And what do we mean when we call something a necessary evil?
We mean one of two things.
We mean either that it is an evil that has It existed for a long time, and we find it in our midst, and therefore we cannot get rid of it all at once.
This is often the case.
You come into, let's just say you're a politician, you come into office, there's something bad that's going on, and you'd like to root it out, but you are not able to do it immediately.
You've got to sort of put up with it for a while.
And that's part of what Lincoln is saying.
The founders allowed it, the country had put up with it, And so it is a necessary evil in that sense.
A second way that something can be a necessary evil is it's an evil compared to the alternatives.
Jefferson at one point suggested that, look, we've got all these slaves and it's not a good thing that we have them.
But it's also not a good thing for us to let them go.
Where will they go?
Are they ready to be full citizens?
Can we treat them as equals in this country?
So Jefferson was very pessimistic that there could be a short-term and maybe even a long-term solution to slavery.
In Jefferson's own phrase, I think a very arresting phrase, we have a wolf by the ears, I think he said, or by the tail.
We sort of dare not hold on to him.
He's a wolf. But on the other hand, we dare not let him go.
And that was Jefferson's view of slavery.
And Lincoln, to a degree, shared it.
Lincoln, to a degree, recognized that we got this.
It's been around.
We don't exactly know what to do with it.
But Lincoln always emphasized that because something is a necessary evil...
It is still an evil and this is a key point.
A necessary evil doesn't become good because of the pragmatic necessity of having it.
It remains an evil.
You still want to as your objective continue to devise ways to minimize it To reduce it, ultimately to eliminate it.
And this, by the way, is something that Jefferson himself had said he was committed to doing.
Jefferson at one point, very strikingly, said that emancipation is the goal.
And Lincoln, of course, shared the same goal.
Now, the core of Lincoln's position is a simple recognition that a man has a right to rule over a horse or a donkey, but in morality and in truth, a man does not have the right to rule over another man.
At least not without his consent.
So, we see here that Lincoln recognizes the importance of consent, but he's applying the doctrine of consent to the individual level.
If you grab me off a boat, put me into a slave auction, hold me by force, you don't have my consent.
So, you don't have... The right as an adult to rule over me in that way.
That is the evil of slavery and that is the starting point for any discussion.
And the application for Lincoln is going to be in this case that while we put up with slavery where it exists, we don't want to introduce And evil into new places where it does not exist.
This is why the argument over the federal territories becomes so critical, because the federal territories are new.
They don't have slavery. So it's one thing to say we got it, we're stuck with it.
It's another thing to say we're going to introduce it where it doesn't exist at all.
Now we turn to Douglass and the core argument for Douglass.
And Douglass' point of view is that the issue of slavery is very similar to the issue of like a master and a servant.
Douglass is going to say, I'm not in favor of this.
I'm not championing masters ruling over servants.
But masters do, in fact, rule over servants.
And you, Abraham Lincoln, admit that we've got this in the southern states.
And you also admit that you don't intend to do anything about it.
So this is obviously a tolerable relation that exists in the country.
And now our question becomes, what do we do with the new territories?
And Douglass goes...
There are people in the country that want to introduce slavery into the territories.
They want these territories to be slave states.
There are other people that want these territories to be free.
They don't want them to allow slavery at all.
And so Douglass goes, what is a way that people in a democratic society where you have these kinds of differences, not just over slavery, really over anything, What do you do?
And his answer is, you vote.
You put it up to the people in the territory to decide, because it's their territory.
They're the ones who are going to be living with the consequences of their decision.
So Douglas goes, isn't it a fact that we allow states and territories to make rules about husbands and wives?
Whether they're equal or unequal rules.
The rules may say that wives may or may not inherit property.
The rules may say that husbands can rule over wives or that there's going to be egalitarianism or they can both inherit or that if they both die, the property goes equally to the children.
Who decides about rules between parents and children?
The states. The territories.
Who decides about the civil and criminal codes?
If you're caught robbing or stealing a horse, what your penalty should be?
The states. So the states are deciding all these key questions, and Douglas goes, why don't we just add slavery to the list?
In other words, why do we need a uniform code for the entire country?
Why don't we let...
The other questions are moral questions.
Wouldn't you agree that theft is a moral question?
Wouldn't you agree that the overall criminal code deals with moral questions?
That the family is a moral issue and the relations between husbands and wives and children has a moral component to it?
So if you're going to entrust the states and the people in those states and territories to make those decisions for themselves, why can't they decide about slavery?
Douglas is going to say...
Just because I allow the state to make a rule that says, for example, that we're going to be harsh on criminals or light on criminals, it doesn't make me pro-criminal.
It doesn't even make me anti-criminal.
I'm simply for the jurisdictional right of a territory or state to make these decisions.
Here's... Here's Douglas.
We ought to extend to the Negro race and to all other dependent races all the rights, all the privileges, and all the immunities—this is the so-called privileges and immunities clause of the Constitution—which they can exercise consistently with the safety of society.
Notice that there is a reservation here.
Douglass is saying that no, we don't have to put up with a revolt that's going to overthrow society, but consistent with the safety of society, the privileges and immunities clause does apply to blacks.
It does apply to, in the old vocabulary, Negroes.
Humanity requires that we should give them all these privileges.
Christianity commands that we should extend those privileges to them.
But then, Douglass says, in a very interesting turn, the question then arises, what are those privileges?
And what is the nature and extent of them?
My answer is that this is a question which each state must answer for itself.
And then lest anyone think that Douglas is some kind of a fire-breathing pro-slavery man, he goes, I'm a Northern Democrat.
I live in a free state.
Quote, we in Illinois have decided it for ourselves.
We tried slavery, kept it up for 12 years, and finding it was not profitable, we abolished it for that reason and became a free state.
So, Douglas is saying, Illinois is a perfect test case that individual states can be trusted to do what is good for the people, and he means, of course, the majority of the people.
I mean, here we come to a very interesting point, which is that whenever you have a large group, Ideally, you'd like to have decisions by unanimity.
You'd like to ask everybody in the group, what's good for the group?
And if everybody decides, then there's no dissent.
So there's no question of a power struggle between the people who want to do this and the people who don't want to do it.
But in practice, you can almost never get this kind of unanimity.
And so what you have in society is a surrogate.
A different way of determining whether you should do something or not.
Majority rule. And that means that if you have 10 guys who want to decide, should we go here, should we go there, and you vote, and you get 6 to 4, you're going to have 4 unhappy people.
And you're going to have 6 guys who decide, alright, let's do it.
And the 4 have got to go along with the 6 also.
And the 4 agree, alright, we'll go along with the 6.
Why? Because A, we had a chance to vote, and B, even though majority rule, It may not be the best way.
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