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Feb. 8, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:49
HEARING HIM OUT Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep765
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Coming up, Tucker Carlson's interview with Putin dropping this evening, and I'll make the case for why we should hear Putin out.
Rona McDaniel looks like she's going to exit the RNC. I think it's time to clean house at the RNC and perhaps some other places in the Republican Party.
And Attorney Christina Bob joins me.
We're going to talk about the Colorado case before the Supreme Court today about keeping Trump on the ballot.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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There are two very interesting things going on today and I don't mean to, in comparing them, I don't mean to imply that they are of equal importance.
One has high constitutional significance.
It has huge implications for the 2024 election.
The other is interesting.
It's entertaining. It's got social media in a fluster and in a tizzy, but it is not in the same league.
But nevertheless, I want to talk about both.
Now, the first one, of course, is the Supreme Court making a decision over whether Colorado has the right to throw Trump off the ballot.
And this has wide ramifications.
If Colorado can do this, Maine is going to do it too.
Hawaii has a bill making its way through that could do it also.
Red states are going to retaliate against Biden.
There is going to be no end to it.
I have Christina Bobb, who is an attorney for Trump.
She's going to come on and we're going to delve into this issue and the constitutional basis that Colorado is invoking to the court.
Thank you. I want to talk in this opening segment about the other issue that's dropping today, and that is Tucker Carlson's interview with Putin.
Now, this has turned out to cause quite a ruckus.
It started out with people on the left blasting Tucker.
He's a traitor. He's Putin's man.
He's an asset of Putin.
Why else is he in Moscow?
And, of course, Tucker has been sort of...
Playing along in a very cagey way with all this, putting out little videos of Tucker's in a store and he's eating ice cream, or Tucker's walking around talking to Russians on the street, and then people go, those aren't ordinary Russians, those are Putin's men, you know, who are...
Putin giving Tucker propaganda.
And finally, MSNBC, I believe it was, trotted out Hillary Clinton.
Oh yeah, Tucker's a fool.
Tucker's a useful idiot of Putin.
And now, interestingly, there is a segment on the right...
That agrees with this.
And that has been echoing the media critique of Tucker.
And our friend Sebastian Gorka, for example, hates Putin and has basically been enraged.
In fact, has in some cases gotten into a battle with some of his own supporters and followers by saying that this is in fact a surrender to Putin propaganda.
That this is going to be a...
A pro-Putin sort of love fest with Tucker and it is based upon the complete illusion that Putin is our friend, that Putin is the good guy, if you will, in the Ukraine conflict.
Whatever you think about the amount of money that we're giving to Ukraine, Putin is not, this is Gorka arguing this, he's not the good guy.
He did invade Ukraine and we should not be participating in Putin puffery, so to speak.
Now the way I look at it is that under normal circumstances I would say, look, Putin's a thug.
He's a bad guy and we should apply extreme skepticism in interviewing him and in listening to the interview.
In other words, the interview should be, and I hope it is, kind of a tough interview in which you press Putin up against the wall and have him answer and account for his actions.
Not just his actions in Ukraine, but his suppression of dissent, his jailing of opponents, Khodorovsky, jailing Navalny, and all of this needs to be put out there.
Now when you put it out there it's gonna come back at you and Putin is a smart guy.
I mean Putin's no Biden, right?
Biden can't do a one-hour interview if you press him with skeptical questions, but Putin can and Putin's gonna hit back.
Putin's gonna say in fact he was interviewed about a year ago, I guess it was, and he did hit back.
Somebody goes, why do you jail Navalny?
Putin goes, well why'd you jail the January 6th protesters?
He goes, you had 450...
At that time, it was 450 ordinary citizens who walked into your capital, raised a bunch of questions.
You're jailing them one by one.
Aren't you jailing dissenters?
And you're accusing me of jailing one guy?
So Putin has that intellectual suppleness, rhetorical skill.
I think this is actually why the media is a little freaked out, because they know that Putin is not a dummy.
Putin's no Biden, like I say.
Putin will make his case.
And the question is, does he have a right to make his case?
Is it journalism to let him make his case?
And my answer to that is an unequivocal yes.
I feel especially strongly about this because we have been getting no real journalism on the issue of Ukraine.
I mean, we have been getting...
I don't even know what to call it.
I don't know if you've seen the clip of the journalist from CNN interviewing Zelensky.
This is Zelensky from Ukraine.
And this is the most sickening, groveling type of interview ever.
I don't even know what to call it.
I'm going to call it, and Debbie's going to freak out here a little bit.
It's like fellatio journalism.
Because honestly, honey, what I'm talking about, it is utterly the most debased, groveling type of...
Honey, that's okay. A lot of people probably don't know what that word is.
Oh, Debbie goes, let's hope that nobody knows what that means.
Look it up. That's why we have Google these days, fellas.
In any event, the point is, we don't have any idea of what the real debate is over Ukraine.
Why? Because you don't want to interview Putin?
Alright, well, let's have a skeptical interview with Zelensky.
But can you think of one?
I can't. I don't believe it's even happened.
And so, we are at a time when, in a sense, the media has become an extension of regime propaganda.
The media is echoing, essentially, the Biden administration.
Now, people go, well, Dinesh, Putin's a liar.
Okay, Putin's a liar. Biden's a liar too.
Biden lies every single day.
In fact, he lies with such tiresome regularity that we can kind of predict his lies as his mouth begins to move.
So at least we'll get some new lies from Putin, which will be more interesting.
They're not lies we've already heard.
So the idea that we don't want the American people to be subject to propaganda and lies doesn't really work because we are subjected to that every single day.
Moreover, what happened to adversary journalism?
Let's remember, going back to Vietnam, the defining characteristic of the American media is supposed to be holding power accountable.
And holding power accountable here doesn't mean...
Exclusively, holding power accountable in other countries.
Because, in fact, American journalists have limited leverage over other countries.
They have more leverage over what happens in this country.
And so, let's just go back to the Vietnam War.
It wasn't the job of American journalists to, quote, hold Ho Chi Minh accountable or hold the Viet Cong accountable.
No, it was to hold the Johnson administration accountable.
Hold General Westmoreland accountable.
That's the meaning of adversary journalism.
Well, it looks like adversary journalism is dead.
Or to put it differently, the only adversary journalism that we have in America today is let's be adversarial to the adversaries of the Democratic Party.
Let's be adversarial to the adversaries of the Democratic President who is in office right now.
His enemies become our enemies.
We'll be adversarial to them.
And so we'll be adversarial to Putin.
We'll also be adversarial to J.D. Vance and Josh Hawley because they are adversaries politically to Joe Biden.
But we will do suck-up journalism for Biden.
We will do suck-up journalism for Democrats.
We'll do suck-up journalism for Schumer.
And anybody who's a friend of the regime, let's say Zelensky, he gets the suck-up journalism treatment as well.
So... What's he doing?
He's basically breaking the mold.
And I think this is a good thing because, again, let's go back.
Were there interviews with Khomeini during the hostage situation and when he first came to power in Iran?
Yes. Yes. Were they interviews with Bin Laden?
Yes, I remember Bin Laden being interviewed by Peter Arnett of CNN, by John Miller of Time Magazine, by other journalists.
So there's plenty of precedent for hostile forces being interviewed by American journalists.
Putin himself has been interviewed multiple times.
So the objection here is that Putin is being interviewed in a way that's going to allow Putin to make his case.
And I say, bring it on.
Let's keep an open mind.
Let's listen to the case.
I think we've been sold a lot of propaganda on Ukraine.
It's not to say that Ukraine isn't a victim of invasion or injustice, but we're not getting the full story.
And it would be kind of interesting to hear, I'm eager to hear, what Putin has to say about it.
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The Republican Party quite clearly is suffering a real crisis of leadership.
Or to put it somewhat differently, the real crisis is the lack of leadership.
And we're seeing this on many fronts.
Kevin McCarthy, I think, was on the balance a poor leader of Republicans in the House.
Happily, he's out of there.
And very much in the manner of a poor leader, what does he do?
He then mobilizes the resources that are at his disposal, the money he's raised over the years, to go after the people who got rid of him.
He now wants to primary them, teach them a lesson, it's kind of vendetta politics, and that's really all that seems to motivate this guy, which tells you right there that you're dealing with a very petty guy.
Now, Things don't look a whole lot better in the Senate.
Mitch McConnell.
I used to have a more positive view of McConnell, and a little part of me wants to think that that old McConnell is still around, but I'm not sure that he is.
McConnell these days has been acting in an extremely counterproductive way.
Case in point, McConnell actively pushes this bill, a bill that seems designed to funnel all this money to Ukraine and sell out the country on the border as a worthwhile price in McConnell's view to pay for it.
And leaving aside the merits or the lack of merit, the demerits of this very bad idea...
Isn't it interesting that you've got the minority leader in the Senate, and you got, what, 49, is it 49 or is it 50?
49, I guess, Republican senators, and McConnell can only get the votes of four of them.
So when the border bill goes up, he's got four guys, including poor, you know, hapless James Lankford, who, by the way, is still idiotically defending the bill as if to say that he knows something that nobody else knows, as if the rest of us can't read the bill.
No, it doesn't mean that.
No, it doesn't mean that.
Well, what are you doing here?
I mean, you're telling us what it means.
I mean, are you more literate than we are?
You have a deeper capacity.
What did you do with this build?
You have to hold it up to the light, squeeze lemon juice on it, read it upside down, the things in there that we can't see.
So the point here is that McConnell, I think, and I'm seeing an emboldened Mike Lee, an emboldened Ted Cruz, and they're basically now saying something that they haven't said before, which is, it's time for McConnell to start thinking about exit.
McConnell is not really an effective leader.
In fact, he's hurting the Republican Party and it would be good to have somebody else take the reins.
In general, I agree.
Now, Rona McDaniel.
It's been announced in multiple places that Rona McDaniel is quitting.
There's been some discussion of the two candidates who might be vying to replace her.
Apparently one of them is her choice, which I think is going to be like the kiss of death.
That guy is like, please don't endorse me, Rona.
You know, zip it up and so on.
Support me secretly.
But the point is, from what I've seen from Rona McDaniel...
I'm not 100% sure that she is quitting.
I think that she probably is, but her statements are ambiguous.
Like, we're going to see what happens after South Carolina.
And, you know, I don't want to discuss that.
I'm fully engaged in the battle in South Carolina and also fighting all these voter fraud lawsuits that she claims the RNC is fighting.
By the way, part of what seems to have sealed Rona's fate is some excellent articles by red state Jen Manlar exposing the fact that these people waste money on floral arrangements and limousines.
And what Jen Manlar did, which was very useful, was she compared the spending of the RNC and the DNC on the same items, the same line items.
Okay, you think it's normal to spend $70,000 on flowers?
Let's see what the DNC did.
Oops much less you think it's normal to spend four hundred thousand dollars on limousines. I'm just These are my numbers, not the actual numbers.
Let's look at what the DNC did.
Oh, much less. So, this kind of side-by-side comparison, I think, sealed the deal.
It showed a lot of people that the RNC is not only ineffective, it's grossly wasteful, it's Marie Antoinette let them eat cake.
And so, this is why people are holding back their contributions.
And this is ultimately why the RNC is in trouble.
It has horrible leadership.
Now, I know there are people out there going, it should be Scott Pressler, it should be Harmeet Dhillon.
I don't know who it should be, but it should be somebody who not only committed to reversing course for the RNC, but someone committed to the fight that we are in now that can effectively take the fight to the Democrats.
So I hope that Rona McDaniel is in fact going to quit and I hope we get someone a lot, a lot better.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast my friend Christina Bob.
She started out in the Marine Corps with a legal career.
She then became an investigative reporter.
She worked for One America News Network.
She then worked in various law firms.
And she is now an attorney for President Donald J. Trump.
We're here to talk about, well, Trump's legal issues, but particularly the Colorado case, which is before the Supreme Court pretty much as we speak.
Christina, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
By the way, I want to mention your new book, which I've been looking forward to for about, well, for a couple of years now, and it's out, and it's incredible.
It's called Stealing Your Vote, the inside story of the 2020 election and what it means for Trump.
to come back to that because I think that a lot of these cases, as you know better than anyone else, are a form of election interference, right?
Clearly an obvious effort here to get Trump off the ballot.
And this is before the Supreme Court.
Now we're talking at the exact time that the court is hearing this back and forth.
And I want to begin by asking you about something that Clarence Thomas just posed in the questioning And he goes, is there any precedent for this?
In other words, even if you go back to the Civil War, is there a single case where a state...
Decided on its own that we will define insurrection.
We will then conclude that this particular guy was guilty of insurrection.
And on that basis, we will keep him off the ballot.
Has this ever occurred?
Has this clause of the Constitution ever been applied, ever, in the way that you want it to be applied now?
And apparently, the attorney for Colorado was like, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh...
No answer, because there is no answer, is there?
Yeah, no, there is no answer.
I thought Jonathan Mitchell did a good job of laying out President Trump's position.
The main issue really being, does Section 3 of Article 14, I'm sorry, the 14th Amendment, apply to the President of the United States?
It's very specific in the language about which officers it applies to, and it does not list the President or the Vice President for a The president and the vice president aren't part of that language.
I was surprised to hear it come from her, but she did lay it out pretty well.
Christina, what is that reason?
Why is it sensible to frame that clause, which does prohibit people who engage in insurrection from running for the presidency?
Why would it exempt the president and the vice president?
Well, there are a couple of reasons.
The one that Justice Brown Jackson laid out that I thought was really the historic reason is when they drafted it, the framers of that amendment were concerned about insurrectionists from the Civil War worming their way back up into federal office through the state.
And so what they were limiting, they were limiting senators and they were limiting members of Congress, people who are elected by one state.
What they didn't want was they didn't want the South to have all of their members of Congress as insurrectionists and then worm their way into the federal government and basically overthrow the federal government that way.
They were not concerned about the president or the vice president because that is elected by the entire nation and everyone has a say in it.
And there's not really a threat to one person taking over the entire country with one office.
Even in the president or vice presidency.
And so that isn't really a threat as an insurrectionist.
Their rationale really was they wanted to prevent the southern states from kind of tricking the nation into overthrowing the government.
That was the purpose of that amendment and that's why they were specifically excluded.
And Justice Brown actually laid that out very well.
I don't know that she agrees with it, but she spelled out the argument quite well.
part at the end of section 3 where it appears to give Congress and only Congress, because it doesn't speak about the states at all, the power to, you may say, legislate around this clause.
So Congress, for example, can decide that even if someone engaged in an insurrection, as a factual matter, that Congress can grant an amnesty.
And so Congress, for example, did pass laws apparently in the late 19th century, basically saying that there were people who were on the Confederate side in the Civil War, but now they were allowed to participate in politics the same as everybody else.
So the enforcement of this provision...
Appears to be in the hands of Congress and not to the discretion of individual states.
Is that a potential way for the Supreme Court to rule?
Namely to say, hey listen, look, there is a clause right here, but the factual matter of whether A, there was an insurrection, B, did Trump do it?
That's up to Congress to determine and not the Secretary of State of Colorado or even the Supreme Court of Colorado.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
The argument is that Section 3 is not self-executing.
So if you go in order of the way that the argument has been brought, the first one, first of all, it doesn't even apply to the President of the United States.
Second of all, it's not self-executing.
You need Congress to pass legislation to say how that clause is supposed to be Can this go through the court?
Can a judge determine that this person shouldn't be on the ballot?
Can a Secretary of State determine that this person shouldn't be on the ballot?
The amendment is very clear that Congress has to legislate how it is executed.
It's not something that anybody with any authority in any state can just argue.
And so, yes, that is basically the second argument down on the line.
There are binding precedents, both in the Supreme Court and through lower courts, that no, the states can't do that.
The states can't just on their own come up with this rule, and that's the way that it has operated since the early 1800s.
So, yeah, I mean, I have said multiple times on national television that I thought that this would be a 9-0, a unanimous ruling, because the law is so clear on this.
Listening to the argument, and, you know, it's very deceiving when you listen to oral arguments at the Supreme Court, because the whole point is to hash out the issues, right?
So just because there are hard questions asked doesn't necessarily mean that a justice is leading one way or another.
I mean, it was a good discussion.
There were good questions asked, and the left-leaning judges were raising some good points.
Like I said, Justice Brown-Jackson, I thought she raised a good point for our argument.
But, you know, we'll see how it goes.
I don't know that it'll be 9-0, but I do think this will be a decisive victory for Donald Trump.
I mean, also, Christina, just to complete the discussion of the arguments, it seems to me another argument, which is, I don't know if it's a constitutional argument, but it's certainly a kind of...
We live in an age of metaphor.
So people, for example, use the word insurrection very loosely these days, right?
Biden's border policy is an insurrection.
The suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop was an insurrection.
Normally, when you think of a word like insurrection...
And obviously this was legislated in a very specific context, right?
The firing on Fort Sumter, you know, Gettysburg, 600,000 people dead.
That was the insurrection that they were talking about.
They were not talking about 200 guys moseying into the Capitol for 30 minutes or two hours, demanding that their congressmen listen to them.
So whether or not Trump incited that, we're talking about an entirely different meaning of the word.
And so here's my question.
When you have a word in the Constitution, like insurrection, I'm assuming that there's not infinite interpretive subjectivity to it.
Just like even subjective terms in the Constitution take cruel and unusual punishment.
I mean, can a state decide that if somebody is incarcerated for one day, that that constitutes cruel and unusual punishment?
Presumably, the meaning of cruel and unusual punishment doesn't extend to that degree.
You can't just stretch it that much.
So, is that an issue here?
Is the Supreme Court able to say, listen, it's kind of crazy to let...
To decentralize the meaning of the word insurrection, let everybody who decides that there was an insurrection, according to their definition of the term, gets to throw the leader of the rival party off the ballot.
I mean, there's no end to this, is there?
No, and you raise a really good point.
We actually have a mechanism in our courts to handle the very issue that you're raising about, is he guilty of insurrection or not?
It's called our criminal justice system.
Here in the United States, we presume innocence until proven guilty.
And so what they're trying to do is presume guilt and force him to defend his innocence.
And President Trump's attorney, Jonathan Mitchell, actually raised this.
He said what they're demanding to do is It's extra-constitutional.
It's outside the bounds of the Constitution.
The Constitution did not put these limitations on anyone who wanted to run for office.
They put a limitation on whoever's guilty of insurrection from holding office.
Well, Donald Trump hasn't been found guilty of insurrection.
Not only has he not been found guilty, he hasn't been charged with insurrection.
So it's not even plausible that he could be guilty of this.
In our normal criminal justice system, that's the way the American justice system works is you're innocent until proven guilty.
They haven't even charged him with this, but they're trying to presume guilt on something that they haven't even charged him with.
So that issue was raised.
They're hashing it out now.
And I think that's a pretty clear one.
Like, he's not even charged. How can you presume he's guilty?
And surely, if there was enough evidence to convict him, Jack Smith would have charged him.
So, yeah, I mean, that's how we're supposed to solve it, but it's not the way they're doing it.
I mean, isn't it just reasonable that let's just say that the court says, yes, Colorado, it's up to you to factually determine what's an insurrection, and it's up to you to decide if you can take him off the ballot, even though you're a blue state and he's running on the red platform.
I mean, it seems to me that there will be at least one, if not multiple, red states that We then say, all right, well, listen, we think Biden's guilty of an insurrection, insurrection according to our definition.
We make a factual determination to that effect.
And then Biden's off the ballot.
And then, I mean, doesn't our whole electoral system disintegrate when either side gets to throw the rival party guy off the ballot?
I mean, the Supreme Court must be aware of this, right?
Surely they're aware of this.
And yes, it does.
I mean, we have 27 states with Republican governors right now and 23 states with Democrat governors.
Now, I haven't done the math on the Electoral College, and certainly, you know, the secretaries of state may be slightly different than the governors for the parties.
But we basically split.
I mean, at that point, because look at what Joe Biden's doing with the border in Texas.
I mean, he's in a standoff with the state of Texas at the moment.
You're going to have states say that Joe Biden's ineligible.
And it's going to make our electorate system fall apart, which is why I think it's so clear that this will be a Trump victory.
They can't do this and expect our government to continue to function the way that it has.
This is so unheard of.
It's so out of the box, so out of the ordinary, that it would completely disintegrate elections as we know it.
Christina, how do you think this is going to come out?
I'm assuming that you're fairly confident that the sort of the six Republican nominees.
will be solid on this and even Roberts even the fact that he's been a bit of a waffler on certain other issues will not waffle on this one.
Now it would obviously be good to get at least one, ideally all three, of the liberal justices because that would just put the issue to a bed, shut the left up on this matter. Based upon, there's a little bit of tea leaf reading in here, My tea leaf reading is that Elena Kagan is a little more sensible than, say, Sotomayor.
How do you, if you were to just sort of read the justices, the three liberal justices in particular, how do you think they're going to come out?
Yeah. Um, like I said, I thought that this would be a unanimous ruling.
I still think that's possible.
Um, yeah, I always get nervous judging based off of hearing the arguments, but it was interesting in the oral arguments, they were focused more on states' rights, which I, at least when they were dealing with Jonathan Mitchell, President Trump's attorney, do the states have the right, if he were guilty of insurrection, do the states have the right to take this step?
And so, uh, I don't know if there, you know, sometimes the Supreme Court comes out with an opinion that Totally different than we expected the rationale to be, but the decision is the same.
He's on the ballot, but for a totally different reason than we all expected.
Sometimes that happens. So I do think it's going to come out at least 6-3, probably 7-2.
I think Kagan may join us.
Then, like I said, even Justice Brown-Jackson, she very well articulated the historic precedent for the purpose of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
So... I don't know.
Just playing wild cards, I'll say 7-2.
Not sure which of the three at this point.
I'll back off my unanimous decision just a little bit, but I don't even think it'll be 6-3.
I think it'll be at least 7-2.
Christina, let's talk about your book, Stealing Your Vote, the inside story of the 2020 election, what it means for 2024.
We've talked enough that I know we're on board with the various ways in which the 2020 election was stolen.
Some of it was a brazen voter fraud.
Some of it was unleveling the playing field.
It was kind of a combination of tactics.
Now, it looks like in 2022, the left went in a slightly different direction, particularly in Maricopa County.
It's like, whoops, our machines aren't working on Election Day when the Republicans, as it turns out, are coming out to vote.
Yeah. What is your diagnosis for 2024?
I mean, they might be getting pretty nervous at the polls that show that Trump is not just sort of running even, but he seems to be like pulling away from Biden, despite the fact that he's facing 90 plus criminal charges.
So this is a little bit of freak out time.
I mean, it's only some months away from the election.
What is your forecast about what they're likely to try to pull off this year?
And is there a way to stop them?
Well, I think they are very scared.
I think they know they don't have the rigged election locked in the way that they did in 2020.
And I think they're very scared about it.
And the reason I think that is because look at all the crazy things they're trying to pull in the courts.
They're trying to take him off the ballot.
They're trying to indict him for things that look a lot like insurrection but are not quite insurrection.
They're indicting him for things that are designed for corporate entities destroying documents and not actually anything to do with the government.
They're indicting him on the document scandal that he actually had a right to those documents when Joe Biden didn't, and then they're letting Joe Biden go.
I mean, they're still outlandishly outing themselves as these crazy Marxists, and I don't think they actually want to do that.
I think they're doing it because they're scared about the election, and they know that they don't have the lock-on with COVID. They don't have the lock-on You know, the element of surprise that nobody is paying attention.
People are paying attention. But if Americans really want to secure their election, regardless of what happens with any of the trials, make sure you get involved.
The key to this is everybody being involved at your precinct and county level, because it's not going to get cleared up at the state level.
We can see that. It's certainly not going to get cleared up at the federal level.
So it gets cleared up county by county, precinct by precinct.
And if you're sitting there going, you know, I don't like what's happening in my state, then get involved in your county because we need everybody involved, everybody involved in your county to clean this up.
And what you're saying, Christina, which I agree with completely, is that when the ordinary citizen goes, well, what can I do?
You know, I'm not an organizer of the rules and so on.
I don't decide whether there'll be mail-in drop boxes or not.
Well, what you can do is, if at all possible, become a poll judge, become a volunteer.
If you can get your eyes on the process...
You can say, I've done my part to minimize voter fraud and keep the process safe.
Guys, check out Christina's book, Stealing Your Vote, The Inside Story of the 2020 Election and What It Means for 2024.
Christina, Bob, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you so much.
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I'm continuing my defense of Stephen Douglas as part of a discussion of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
Now, let's be aware that what we're doing is we're going in-depth in making Douglas' arguments for him and kind of with him.
And these are arguments that ultimately will be challenged by Lincoln, but we're getting Douglas' – we're putting as eloquently as we can Douglas' side of the debate.
And in doing this, it's helpful to understand, by and large, the full spectrum of the parties that are debating on the slavery issue.
So let me outline really the four positions that were out there and that all had significant support.
On the far end, you have the abolitionists.
Slavery is an abomination.
We don't care if slavery has been approved by the Constitution.
To heck with the Constitution.
Burn the Constitution. Slavery is wrong because of a higher law.
It is wrong by nature.
It is wrong according to God.
This is the position of John Brown.
It's the position of the abolitionists and Frederick Douglass as well.
And although Frederick Douglass later changes his mind about the Constitution.
But nevertheless, this is the abolitionist position.
It's important to realize that this position was held by a tiny minority of people, even in the North.
Now we come to the position of the Republican Party, the mainstream Republican position, Abraham Lincoln's position.
Slavery has been allowed by the founders to exist in the South.
We're going to leave it there.
Slavery, however, should not be allowed to push into the territories.
New territories are being added to the Union, and we're not going to allow slavery.
Congress is going to forbid slavery from going there, and the states have no say in the matter.
Why? Because these territories are entering as federal territories.
they're joining the Union and the Union, the country as a whole, has a right to decide what's going to happen to those new territories which over time can become states.
So that's the Republican slash Lincoln position.
Then you have the Douglas position.
The Douglas position is actually pretty close to the center because it's an attempt to harmonize the positions of the North and the South.
And Douglas' position is basically this, slavery can exist in the South where it already is there and where Lincoln doesn't disagree it should remain.
The free state should continue in the North, including Douglas' own state.
Douglas is in favor of Illinois remaining a free state.
But Douglas goes with the new territories as they decide whether they become states or not.
They decide for themselves if they want to have slavery, yes or no.
It's a matter of choice, not personal choice, not individual choice, but the choice of each territory and each state.
So, it's kind of the democratic solution, if you will.
That's how Douglass saw it.
And then, further on the other side of the spectrum is the sort of, let's call it the hardcore Southern position.
the hardcore southern democrats led by John C Calhoun, the senator from North Carolina, and Calhoun's position is this, not only do the southern states have every right to have slavery, but they have every right if their slaves escape to northern states to get them back. That's the fugitive slave law. Moreover, no territory can be closed off to slavery.
A slave master should be free to take their slaves to California, free to take them into western territories, and they are property over there, no less than they are property in South Carolina.
And so Calhoun is making the full-throated, virtually positive, good defense of slavery.
Slavery is good for the master, and in a way, good for the slave.
Now, this seems a little crazy.
Calhoun's view was that slavery is a school of civilization.
Slavery is a way to take people who are barbaric, who do not have any of the ingredients of civilization, let alone the habits of democratic participation.
And Calhoun's point is that these are inferior people.
And so they're going to have to do the inferior jobs.
Calhoun says we have to be humanitarian about it.
Masters should be kind to slaves.
He goes, I am. I'm a master.
I'm kind to my slaves.
Now, it's important to realize that even though Calhoun is a Democrat and Stephen Douglas is a Democrat, they are not on the same page at all.
Stephen Douglas attacks Calhoun, and he basically says that Calhoun, by the extremism of his pro-slavery position, is actually harming the Democratic Party and harming the country.
What Stephen Douglas says is that, Calhoun, listen, you are trying to force the Northerners who don't like slavery to give back your slaves...
No. We have to have a system in this country where we can agree to disagree.
And that means that the northerners are just as free not to have slaves as the southerners are to have slaves.
And moreover, as we go out into the western territories, we'll let those people decide if they want to, quote, go north or go south.
They can choose if they want to be northerners for this purpose or southerners for this purpose.
It is up to them.
In other words, shouldn't the decision of any democratic principle be decided locally by the very people who are going to live under it?
Or, says Douglas, are we really going to let people in one state who are going to have to live with the consequence of a decision, let that decision be made by somebody else for them?
Slavery is a really bad idea.
We decide it's not good for you to have slavery.
And Douglas is like, what? You don't get to tell the people of Colorado or tell the people of California what's good for them.
They decide what's good for them.
That's the whole meaning of constitutional democracy.
So you can see here that Douglas' position, even though today Lincoln won the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln was elected the president two years later, you know, so historians today, because of hindsight, they go, since things came out in favor of Lincoln, Douglas must be a fool, Douglas' arguments must be shallow.
Not necessarily, and they weren't seen that way at the time.
There were a lot of people to whom what Douglas was saying, in fact, what I'm saying now on behalf of Douglas, was not only the absolute common sense of the matter, but was the moderate position to hold the country together.
Now, does this mean that Douglas' only interest was in quote, holding the country together and not ultimately in ending slavery?
No. And this is really where Jaffa, and this is to Jaffa's extreme credit, which is to say Jaffa shows that That Douglass II had kind of an anti-slavery vision, no less than Lincoln.
It differed from Lincoln's.
It was not the same way of getting there.
But Douglass II had a way of getting there.
And what is Douglass' way?
Well, Douglass' way very simply is this.
Expansion. Expansion.
Why? Expansion.
Because look, you've got the plantation south, which had slavery.
That was already the case.
But as the country was opening up to the west, you are going to have new states.
New states, Texas, of course, had joined the union.
But then further west, California, obviously Oregon, ultimately, of course, Washington State, and so on.
And Douglas knew, as everybody knew, that those states, first of all, they were not hospitable to slavery at all.
Why? Really two reasons.
One is... We're good to go.
Who was populating those states?
Who was moving there?
Who was actually setting up shop in those states?
Answer, immigrants.
In other words, the people who were pushing out west tended not to be the established northeasterners and it tended not to be the established southerners.
Those guys sort of had it too good.
They already had cities.
They already had streets.
They already had homes.
So, it's not easy to convince some guy who's living in Hartford, Connecticut, listen, you know what?
Sell your house.
Go out west where you'll need a gun.
No. The people who are willing to do that, some Irish guy who came off the boat, who came out of the potato famine, who was running away from a country where he's starving to death, and he's like, I'll go.
So, The immigrants, the German immigrants, the Scandinavian immigrants, the Irish immigrants, these were the people who were making their way out west.
And guess what? These were free labor guys.
These are guys who wanted to work for a wage.
This is not a slave population.
This is a free immigrant population.
And remember, at that time, there was really no such issue as illegal immigrants.
The country was opening itself up.
It needed a lot of new people.
And so people were free to come.
It was very easy to get to the United States.
It was very easy to go out west.
There were incentives for you to go out west.
There was land to be had and so on.
So here's the point from Douglas's point of view.
Douglas realized, guess what?
This delicate balance of the free states and the slave states, 13 apiece, is going to be changed.
As the new states entered the Union, and California, by the way, had already entered the Union around 1850, Douglass realized the balance is going to tip decisively in favor of the free states.
And so here's Douglass' argument.
Do you really want to fight a civil war over slavery now?
When? If you just hang tight...
Go along with slavery.
It's okay. If people want it, let them have it.
But guess what? The long-term trend is bound to be away from slavery.
As free states join the Union, and as new states join the Union, they're going to want to be free states because they're agricultural states, they're not plantation states, they're populated with immigrants.
We're going to have the free states now dominating the unfree states, and slavery will become obsolete without a war.
So, Douglass' point, and in some ways his accusation against Lincoln is, you are going to draw the bloody sword and bring the country to blows in which Americans are going to be killing each other and slaughtering each other and you're going to destroy the South in a terrible war.
Now, Douglass didn't say any of this.
What I'm doing is I'm projecting out Douglass' argument.
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