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Feb. 12, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
52:53
WHO’S IN CHARGE? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep767
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Coming up, I'll spell out the dilemma for the Biden White House, which is either admit that Biden's a virtual imbecile who lacks the mental capacity to stand trial and take responsibility for his actions, or insist that Biden is all there, in which case he deserves to be criminally indicted by Biden's own DOJ. I'm also going to reveal the significance of Vladimir Putin's remarks from his Tucker Carlson interview.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
This is the opening line of the novelist Saul Bellow's great work called Herzog.
Saul Bellow, of course, the winner of the Nobel Prize.
His son, Adam Bellow, a good friend of mine, was my editor of a number of the books I've written over the years.
And, um...
However, this is how the novel begins.
I think it's one of the great opening lines of literature.
We think of famous opening lines in literature, the opening line of A Tale of Two Cities, It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times, opening line of, of course, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.
Here's the opening line of Herzog.
If I'm out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.
Now, this line is a witticism.
It is funny.
Why? Because here's a guy who says, hey, if people think I'm nuts...
I'm okay with being nuts.
Obviously, no one in reality is okay with being nuts, and Moses Herzog's point is, I'm not really nuts.
I'm a real smart guy.
It's just that I'm a nonconformist.
I don't see the world the way other people do, and so they wrongly consider me to be out of my mind.
Imagine if Herzog were to actually say, if I've lost my mind, I'm totally fine with that.
I raise all of this because I got thinking about the opening line of Herzog when reading Robert Herr's report on the mental state of Joe Biden.
Because Joe Biden's philosophy appears to be, if I'm out of my mind, it's alright with me.
And this is also the philosophy of the left, because they sort of know that Biden is out of his mind, and it's alright with them.
They're okay having a retard or a mentally incapacitated guy or let's just call him an old man with a really bad memory who doesn't really know what's going on.
Doesn't really quite remember.
I mean, hers details were in the report pretty crushing.
It's one thing to say Biden doesn't remember what he did on his 49th birthday.
That was not it.
Biden didn't remember when he was vice president.
Recently, a few years ago, he didn't remember when he stopped being vice president.
He couldn't remember even within several years when his own son died.
Now, Biden keeps talking about how traumatic that was, and you would think he would have that date riveted in his memory.
Even people who are suffering from dementia, people who are losing it, will often forget peripheral details, but remember essential ones, particularly ones that are called to mind frequently.
Their neurons are used to spitting out these little pieces of data, these little factoids, if you will.
But no, Biden couldn't tell.
Not just the day or the month.
He couldn't tell within several years.
And this is obviously extremely disturbing.
I think her was kind of shocked by it.
Now, people in the White House aren't shocked by it.
They know the guy's a vegetable or close to it.
And the media isn't shocked.
They know also. Everybody seems to know it's a kind of open secret that the country is being run by somebody other than Biden, some kind of unelected junta, and think of how disturbing this is in a constitutional democracy.
We're not even able to name the gang that's running the country.
It's power without responsibility, and yet there it is.
But, for Robert Herr, this was a sort of discovery.
Whoa! We have a guy who's so incapacitated that Robert Herr goes, even though he willfully held classified documents.
So that's against the law.
He broke the law.
He willfully broke the law.
All the elements are there to prosecute him.
But we're not going to prosecute him because we don't think that he even has normal adult recall.
We don't think he's in a mental condition to stand trial.
And the jury would see that.
This is Robert Herr's reason for not prosecuting Biden.
Now there are people on the left, all over social media, Democrats, that Herr exonerated Biden.
No, he didn't. Or her didn't say that Biden was willful in retaining documents.
Here's this guy, Victor Shee.
This guy is just a, he's a sort of a democratic robot.
And he just regurgitates the nonsense that he gets from the DNC and from the left.
Hey, meet the press.
You should apologize to your viewers for misinforming them.
You claim that special counsel's report concluded Joe Biden, quote, willfully retain classified documents.
And then he goes on to say when the report said the opposite.
So I'm like, what? Am I missing something here?
I go back to the report. I look at the executive summary.
Page 1. This is one of the first words in the report.
I'm quoting. Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.
So, all of this stuff about the fact that he didn't willfully do it is simply not supported by what the special counsel says.
It was CNN of all people doing a fact check on Biden's response to the report.
Where Biden delivers lie after lie.
Biden says, first of all, he didn't willfully withhold the documents.
And CNN points to the section that I just pointed to and go, according to the special counsel, yes, he did.
And then Biden goes on to say, I didn't share classified information with my ghostwriter.
I now quote from the report, Biden shared information, including classified information, with his ghostwriter.
End quote. Biden, none of it was high classified.
Quote from the document.
Quote from the report.
These documents have classification markings up to the top secret sensitive compartmented information level.
SCI. So, again, just pure misstatements one on top of the other from Biden.
Now, this all puts the left in a little bit of a dilemma, because on the one hand, they can say, well, Biden isn't mentally incompetent.
And some of them have said this with a straight face.
I've even seen people, Representative Goldman, for example, say that Biden is just unbelievably sharp.
So not only does he not have dementia, he's just with it.
He knows what's going on.
He's got incredible perspicuity and recall.
I mean, that's just downright laughable.
But let's accept it for a moment.
Let's accept it for the purposes of argument.
If Biden is that way, I think what Robert Hirsch would say, all right, if I got it wrong, I'm going to go ahead and indict him.
Because my only reason for not indicting him was that he supposedly was mentally incapacitated.
You're telling me that he's not?
You're producing the White House doctor to go, no, he's sharp as ever.
All right. He's going to be indicted.
Interestingly, no one on the left who defends Biden's mental capacity draws the logical conclusion, alright guys, let's go ahead and indict him.
And by the way, even if Robert Hur doesn't indict him, that's okay.
Merrick Garland can overrule her and indict him on behalf of the DOJ. That would be interesting to see if that happens.
Of course, the reality is that Biden doesn't have the mental capacity.
And you don't need a doctor's diagnosis.
We see this all the time.
There are innumerable threads of Biden clips, one on top of the other.
And anyone who watches this just begins to feel uncomfortable and awkward and, in a way, a little frightened.
Why? Because think about it.
This guy has direct control over the nuclear codes.
This guy can blow up the world without fully realizing it.
And so the point isn't just that he is not all there and that he is in this dangerous position.
The point is that we actually know this.
And we've known it for most of the past two years.
And yet there's no serious effort to challenge this, to invoke the 25th Amendment, to remove this guy.
You know, interestingly, in the New York Times and other places, there was a lot of discussion in 2016 about whether the 25th Amendment should be invoked against Trump.
And now, suddenly with Biden, there are headlines in the New York Times that say to the affected, you know, neurologists say it's a very complex matter to decide.
Here's the headline from the New York Times.
Memory loss requires careful diagnosis, scientists say.
So when it comes to Biden, suddenly you can't We're good to go.
And there was a recording.
There would be a deafening scream from the media, produce the recording.
We need the recording. Where's the recording?
And yet I don't hear this from the right.
I don't hear Republicans go, let's produce the recording.
Let's demand that Robert Herr show us the recording, the conversation with Biden that led to the conclusion that this guy doesn't really know what's going on.
Of course, what happens with the left is you have this evolving defense.
Number one, Biden is really sharp.
Number two, Biden is not so sharp, but you know what?
He's okay. He's going to be able to hang in there.
Well, think about it. Even if that's true, I don't think it's true, but let's say it's true that Biden is okay right now.
The guy is running for president for the next four years.
In other words, he would be 86.
Does anyone think that Biden, in the condition that he is now, is going to be able to be the leader of the free world and keep his finger on the nuclear codes for four, really five, because he wouldn't take office until January of next year?
Five more years.
Absolutely not. So the only thing we're waiting for now is people on the left, and this is going to come.
I'm waiting for the headline that goes, yes, Biden is out of his mind, and here's why that's a good thing.
In other words, the absolutely intellectually dishonest position that dementia itself should be no bar to the U.S. presidency.
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The number again is I want to talk about the remarks of Vladimir Putin from the Tucker Carlson interview.
Remarks that haven't gotten sufficient analysis and, I think, careful attention that they deserve.
In a sense, all the emphasis has been on the fact that Tucker did the interview, that Tucker went to Moscow and conducted this interview, that the Biden administration wasn't happy about it.
Now Putin hasn't been interviewed in quite a while.
I think it's been a couple of years before and not since the invasion of Ukraine.
Other news outlets like CNN claim that we have requested an interview with Putin but he's always declined and apparently Putin was very careful in choosing Tucker Carlson and then of course people go that's because Tucker is a Russian asset and And that's because Tucker is friendly to Putin.
He's going to let Putin speak his mind.
He's going to allow Putin to do Putin propaganda.
And presumably, he's going to cover a lot of topics that are...
Tucker's own belief system and get Putin to affirm them.
Topics like the moral degeneracy of the West, the craziness of boys who try to become girls, the persecution of Christianity and the fact that Christians have a better home in Russia now than they are treated in the United States.
So anyway, there were all these fears and suspicions and expectations of the Tucker interview.
And Tucker's apparently not done because apparently he also met with Snowden in Russia and with Tara Reid, the woman who accused Biden of sexually assaulting her, in fact, raping her.
And presumably there's more Tucker material to come out of Russia.
But let's focus here on Putin because the Putin interview, in my view, did not go...
The way that anyone expected.
And it certainly didn't even go the way Tucker expected.
And Putin begins with a quite lengthy historical exegesis.
And he is interrupted by Tucker more than once.
You can tell Tucker is getting a little impatient, even irritated, and sort of like, this is not really all that relevant.
And at one point, Putin sort of chastises him and stops him and goes...
You told me that this was going to be a serious conversation and not just an entertainment, and so bear with me while I make my point, and then Putin picks it right up and continues with the historical...
You know, mini lecture.
Now, of course, there is not surprisingly some parodies of Putin's mode of argument on social media where people go, you know, Putin is asked about something that happened now and he begins with Adam and Eve or he begins with the Peloponnesian War and the Roman conquest and then slowly makes his way to the founding of Russia.
So the idea here is that Putin is doing this sort of It's a preposterous and meandering diatribe.
But I want to argue that I don't think that's it at all.
That what Putin is saying is, and by the way, you could get a version of this argument in many other contexts, in fact, in many other countries.
I can envision a similar argument being made in China about Taiwan.
The fact that Taiwan is a new creation.
It's a creation of people who oppose the direction of China.
In other words, oppose the direction of China in terms of adopting communism.
Oppose Mao and Chiang Kai-shek.
And so what happens is you've got a break with China that occurs to create Taiwan.
One can see historical arguments that leftist historians might make in America about whose land is it anyway.
Or even arguments about whether Texas should be part of Mexico.
That would have pretty deep historical roots.
I'm talking in the podcast about the Lincoln-Douglas debates which will explore some of these exact roots.
So the notion that property claims are anchored in history, look at Israel.
You could make an argument about the fact that Israel belongs to the Jews because it was their ancestral land.
And if you're going to make this argument not in a biblical way, but in a secular way, you'd have to begin by saying, all right, let's go to archaeology.
Let's Dig up the stones and look and see if the Jews were here in, let's say, 2000 BC. So you'd have an historical argument beginning in 2000 BC, then the Romans burning the temple, then the Jewish diaspora, the Jews going all over the world, then the Jews coming back starting in the 19th century, continuing in the 20th century, the 1948 founding.
So what I'm getting at is if someone were giving you a lecture about From Israel and telling you this is the historical case for why Israel is not a settler, it's not a colonial power, it is the land of the Jews, it would make no sense to go, this is just boring, this is just irrelevant, stop with this and let's just get to the present October 7th attacks.
So this is the attitude of Putin.
It's like, stop interrupting me.
I'm trying to establish a historical case based upon first principles.
You can disagree with the first principles, but then you've got to argue on that basis.
And that's really what's been a little missing, is the counterclaims anchored in history coming from the other side.
Now, there were some topics of obviously contemporary interest that Tucker was able to get to.
One of them was who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline.
And of course, Putin very succinctly says, you did.
Now, Tucker kind of plays dumb and goes, well, I didn't.
You know, I didn't do it.
And Putin is like, I know you didn't do it, but America did it.
The West did it.
And again, what Putin goes on to say is he says that there is a massive propaganda operation in the West.
He goes, the West has the best propaganda in the world.
Something we're not used to hearing.
We're used to the word propaganda being associated with totalitarian societies.
The Soviets have propaganda.
We provide information.
No. I think we now realize there's a lot of propaganda coming from our side.
A lot of lies.
Before the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline, lots of people in the West were like, we got to blow up the Nord Stream pipeline.
There's a whole sequence of clips.
On social media, I shared it on my ex-feed, where we got to blow up the Nord Stream pipeline.
That'll really teach Putin a lesson.
Let's just cut off his oil.
And then the Nord Stream pipeline is blown up.
And so you can see who had a motive to do it, the people calling for it.
Why would Putin blow up his own pipeline, cutting off his own supply of oil, a very lucrative supply of oil to Germany and to Europe?
So it was fairly obvious from the beginning, and now there's a lot of other evidence uncovered by Seymour Horsch and many others about how the pipeline was blown up really by a collaboration between the West and Europe and Ukraine.
Now... I want to also talk a little bit about what Putin didn't say.
He didn't talk about the persecution of Christians.
He didn't talk about the border.
He didn't talk about Biden being senile.
He didn't talk about some topics that I think Tucker would have liked him to talk about.
Tucker might have drawn out Putin as a critic of Western degeneracy, and this might have found a receptive audience among conservatives in the United States.
In fact, I expected some of this to be in the interview, and when I didn't see it, Putin didn't even go there.
At one time, Tucker says, hey, Putin, you know, do you think that God is playing a role in the world?
And Putin just sort of ignores it.
He says, no, I think the world is driven by the actions of I think?
Not playing to what would seem to be a receptive Western audience right of center.
And one possible answer, and it was Andrew Tate who suggested it, of all people.
Andrew Tate surprised me with this rather, I thought, startlingly insightful observation.
And he goes, Putin is simply not interested in catering to the West.
Yeah, he could have built more conservative followers, but he doesn't want them.
Why? Things are really going his way.
He's winning the Ukraine war.
The West is collapsing of its own weight, its own bad decisions, its own internal convulsions, its own irresponsibility, its own reckless spending.
So why should he, Putin...
Sort of try to bail out the West.
Why should he highlight problems and try to build coalitions and alert people to the fact that, look, this is something they might want to do something about?
He likes America having an open border.
He likes the currency being debased.
He wants to have alternatives to the dollar.
He wants to see America go into a cultural tailspin.
He's all in favor of more fentanyl coming into the United States.
And so when people are looking to Putin saying, oh, Putin was inarticulate.
He was so dull.
All he talked about is history for the most part.
He didn't give us the sound bites that even we on the right were looking forward to.
Well, the answer is that Putin has his own agenda.
And it's always worth keeping in mind that even though there are people in the world who might agree with you on this point or that, if they don't say that, if they maintain a sort of prudent silence about the topic, the silence itself becomes meaningful.
It's because they're up to something else.
And I think the up to something else that Andrew Tate highlighted, and I agree with this assessment, is that Putin sees the West going to hell in a handbasket, and the reason he didn't say anything about it is he's quietly in favor of it.
There's a lot of instability both abroad and at home, elections in Taiwan, North Korea on the brink, Iran increasing its aggression, all the stuff going on here in the United States.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome back to the podcast my friend Chris Widener.
We're partnered together on the Red Referral Network.
But Chris is also a guy with his ear to the ground with regard to the culture.
He's a former pastor.
He's an author, an entrepreneur, a motivational speaker.
The website, by the way, redreferralnetwork.com.
Chris, welcome to the podcast.
Last night, of course, the Super Bowl...
People are talking about a bunch of things, but one of them was this very striking ad involving Jesus washing the feet of, it seems, a kind of assortment of progressive characters.
And the theme of the ad was, He Gets Us.
Now, you're a former pastor.
You're also kind of a political analyst.
Let's talk about that ad.
So some people really ruffle the feathers of some people and some Christians say that this ad was kind of a ruse.
What do you think? I think you have to thread the needle very intricately here, because as I watched, as soon as I saw it, Dinesh, I thought, oh boy, people are going to go out of their minds over this.
Technically, it's true.
I mean, the truth is, God gets us.
Our sin, your sin, my sin, we're all sinners, you know, the theory of original sin.
G.K. Chesterton said the only philosophy empirically validated by 3,500 years of human history is original sin.
So he does get us.
Our sin doesn't surprise him.
He also washes the feet of sinners, which is also true.
So again, technically true.
I think where people are reacting is, but is this a ruse?
Is this a way to soften up the cultural position on some of those things?
And so I think it's kind of a thread the needle kind of thing.
It's like, yes, love the sinner, hate the sin, which is pithy little cliche, but there's truth to it.
So I think that's the way we ought to take a look at it is, yes, Jesus loves sinners, and Jesus serves sinners.
The Bible says He didn't come to this world to be served, but to serve and to give His life as a ransom for many.
And so I look at it that way, but I think we should also be aware of that this might be some way to soften the cultural opinion of Christians around some of those issues that we know are not biblical.
Well, maybe the problem with the ad, if there is a problem, is what it leaves out.
Or, to put it differently, you know, with the woman in the well, Jesus, of course, was, you know, go and sin no more.
So, on the one hand, you have the forgiveness symbolized by the washing of the feet.
But on the other hand, you do have the fact that there is a clear moral stance that goes along with that.
And that, it seems, was absent from the ad.
In other words... We know that there's a kind of a progressive mantra in the culture that sort of God loves everybody.
And so you can kind of keep doing and living the way that you are because you're going to be fully accepted by God no matter what.
I suppose behind this is the presumption of a sort of universal salvation.
And maybe that's what people were thinking.
People felt that this ad is a little too cunning.
There's nothing that it says that's wrong.
But on the other hand, to put it slightly differently, wouldn't it be interesting if Jesus was washing the feet of Trump?
Or washing the feet of some MAGA guy, right?
Which is also technically true.
Jesus would in fact do that.
And yet that would completely change the meaning of the ad.
And so the people who put the ad together, it's kind of like, what were they trying to accomplish?
I read a little bit about the group that did it, and apparently it's Christians, but it's a mixture of some non-Christians who apparently quote, sort of admire Christ as a person, and apparently these guys are coming together, but it was a $7 million ad, I believe, So quite a bit of thought and quite a few coins went into this.
Somebody said, you know how many homeless people you can feed for $7 million?
You know, Dinesh, one of the Bible passages I keep at the forefront of my mind almost every single day I think of this passage because of what I do and what you do.
We're out in the public talking.
Ephesians 4.15 talks about speaking the truth in love.
And here's what I find in culture.
Oftentimes, we have people that just do the love part.
Oh, Jesus loves everybody.
Jesus saves everybody.
It's all love and fairy dust and that kind of thing.
And then you have others who are just, you know, you're a sinner.
You're going to hell.
You know, it's the truth kind of stuff.
And people say, well, I'm a truth teller.
Well, you're kind of a Perfect coming together of who Jesus is.
He is grace and truth, grace and justice, judgment and forgiveness.
In a way that we can't be, Jesus is all of that.
And so I try to remember, how can I speak the truth but do it in love?
Let's talk about Taylor Swift and Travis, Kelsey and Joe Biden.
Can we not?
I know.
It's not that I really want to, and to be honest, I haven't been following these antics all that closely.
I'm only interested in the political angle here, and I'm not sure that the political angle is all that great because, I mean, there are people who think the whole thing is a psychological operation.
I mean, I've even seen people insinuate that the Super Bowl was set up, that the outcome of the Super Bowl was decided in advance.
Now, that seems to me maybe a little bit far-fetched.
I mean, isn't it the case here that what you have here is you just got...
Taylor Swift, and she's got this massive following.
She comes across as a country girl, as a nice girl, as someone that people can identify with as a role model.
On the other hand, she's also a pretty diehard left-wing activist.
Now, it doesn't seem to me that she's always been this way, but she maybe is that way now.
And so, essentially what people are nervous about is just the fact that the left is just so good at capitalizing on this sort of cultural capital and using celebrities where they can.
Now, they kind of know that the Hollywood weirdos don't work for them that well anymore, but Taylor Swift has a kind of country music background here.
So she would have some appeal to independents, maybe even people in the red states.
Is that your reading of the whole Taylor Swift business?
Yeah, I mean, have you probably seen the video of her dad confronting her when she was trying to come out?
It starts out talking about Trump.
She says something about Trump.
But the rest of the conversation, most people don't know, is it's really about Marsha Blackburn.
Our senator here in the state of Tennessee, she came out hardcore against Marsha Blackburn, and she was listing all these things that Senator Blackburn was supposedly against and those kinds of things.
So she is definitely a strong liberal.
And the way I look at it is he's also a very strong liberal.
I mean, you know, he's a Pfizer endorser and all this.
And I think they probably met and, you know, they...
She's also a tall girl.
I think, you know, a lot of women, they want a guy taller than them.
I think she's 5'11 or something like that.
She's probably attracted to him. He's big.
He's tall. He's famous. He's got his own money.
She doesn't have to pay his way.
I could totally see it as being something where they clicked over politics.
They clicked over their anti-Trump, anti-mega, anti-conservative stuff.
I don't have a problem with it.
I think they're both very weird.
I don't know if you saw the suit that he wore.
Oh, my gosh. Yeah.
He was channeling Michael Jackson or something.
Very weird. Yeah, it was sort of a...
I mean, hard to put it into words, because I was grappling to describe what he was going for.
I mean, it seems like he was going for...
A combination of white trash and chic.
You know, he was trying to invent white trash chic.
And some people, of course, were commenting, oh, Taylor Swift put him up to it.
She dressed him and so on.
And I don't know if that's even true.
Hey, let's update us on the Red Referral Network because I saw you did a post about the fact that everything is now, the horse is out of the gate.
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Yeah, we launched 20-something cities last week as we got the website up and running, and all people have to do is go to redreferralnetwork.com.
They can register. They'll be able to look and find local groups all over...
We've got big groups that are growing with a ton of people all around it.
The way we built the technology is when somebody registers, they put in their zip code and then we show them all the groups around them.
We have, I think, 150 people already pre-registered in the greater Fort Worth area.
I think it's 90-something in the greater Phoenix, Scottsdale area.
Even here in Chattanooga, where I'm from, we had over 38 people register.
So when people come and they register, they will find one of these local groups, or if they want, they can actually start a group, and we'll do all the training.
I personally train all of our leaders.
We do it on Zoom a few times a month, and we help people get Get together in these groups.
And what they are, I guess I should probably tell people what they are, is Dinesh and I are putting together these groups all across the country of conservative business people.
You don't have to be a business owner.
If you're responsible for business development for your company, maybe you're a salesperson in a car dealership or something like that.
You don't have to own the car dealership.
But if you are an entrepreneur, independent contractor, small business owner, whatever, you can join these groups and do business with one another.
The red is for conservative, referral is, that's how we do business.
We refer business to one another so that they can grow their businesses.
They also get together every single week and encourage one another because we're in cancel culture and being told how horrible we are all the time.
And then they get great content from you, exclusive content you make just for the groups to discuss.
And what I've been telling people is this, if somebody tells you that you are a racist, homophobic, transphobic, sexist, insurrectionist, they are entitled to their opinion, but they are no longer entitled to your money.
And it's time for us to cut those kinds of folks off, otherwise we're just tipping our executioners.
Instead, we need to do business with one another.
I mean, the Mormons do it, the Hindus do it, the Jews do it.
There are so many groups that see the value of not only socializing with one another, but keeping their money inside the group and actually getting business for themselves as a consequence.
So check it out, guys. Redreferralnetwork.com.
Chris Widener, thank you for joining me.
Thanks for having me, Dinesh. Always great to see you.
If you'd like to support my work, I'd like to invite you to check out my Locals channel.
I post lots of exclusive content there, including content that's censored on other social media platforms.
On Locals, you get Dinesh Unchained, Dinesh Uncensored.
You can also interact with me directly.
I do a live weekly Q&A every Tuesday, so tomorrow.
No topic is off limits.
I've also uploaded some cool films to Locals.
Documentaries, feature films, mine, but also films by others.
2000 Mules is up there and also the new film, Police State.
If you're an annual subscriber, you can stream and watch all this content for free.
It's included with your subscription.
So check out the channel. It's dinesh.locals.com.
I'd love to have you along for this great ride again.
It's dinesh.locals.com.
I'm exploring Harry Jaffer's great work called Crisis of the House Divided, which is a study of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
And we are in the section which makes the case for Douglass.
And I mentioned last time that the key to Douglass' strategy was to avert civil war, to hold the country together on a principle that he thought could...
If not unify the North and the South, be minimally tolerable to both the North and the South.
So it would be a policy that was sufficiently pro-freedom that the North would be like, we'll go for that.
And yet sufficiently tolerant of slavery that the South would be like, yeah, we can go for that.
And in this way, Douglas hoped that he would not only win political support, as the Democratic Party did in the North and the South, but that he would also get these two kind of warring sections or potentially warring sections to keep their hostilities in check, in abeyance, avoid taking it to blows, avoid taking it to war.
And this has to be held to be a noble goal, because a statesman that is deliberately propelling the country toward war is acting, you may say, in a presumptively irresponsible manner.
Now, there may be overriding reasons why war is inevitable.
Oh, the principle at stake is so important that it's worth fighting a war over.
And we'll explore these issues when it comes to Lincoln.
But Douglass' view is, we do not want a war.
And he thought that the country would be able to get rid of slavery without a war.
Why? Because of expansion.
This is the key to Douglass.
The country is expanding.
And it's expanding to the West.
We now take all this for granted.
The United States is from sea to shining sea.
The United States is from the West Coast and the Pacific Ocean all the way to the Atlantic Ocean from California to Maine.
But that was not the United States at the time of the founding.
It was certainly not the United States at the time of Lincoln.
The United States really began in a kind of sliver on the East Coast.
Massachusetts, New York, Virginia, Maryland, and then it spread out to initially the South and then the Midwest.
So in Lincoln's time, the Midwest, places like Indiana were the West.
That was the West.
And yet there was, statesmen could look further out and see, well, there could be a time when the United States will include, say, Texas.
There could be a time when the United States will include Oregon and California.
Douglas, interestingly, saw this.
Lincoln did not.
Even the prominent Whigs in Lincoln's party, people like Daniel Webster.
Daniel Webster is celebrated today as a champion of the Union, as a great statesman, as an advocate of intelligent compromise, and also as a far-seeing, wise kind of analyst of world affairs.
But at the same time, it was Lincoln's view and it was also the view of Lincoln's party that America should be an example to the world.
America shouldn't expand itself.
In fact, America should stay sort of small.
But what America has is a really great recipe called the founding.
And other states, other countries should be encouraged to adopt it.
So America leads by example.
Now, it was the policy of Douglass and the Democratic Party at the time that the way for American freedom to expand is to expand the actual physical boundaries of America.
So Douglass was excited that America had taken Florida from the Spanish.
He was excited about the idea of Texas joining the Union.
So he was a supporter of that.
Lincoln had serious reservations about it.
Douglass not only wanted the United States to expand westward to the sea, but he also thought America could expand southward.
America could ultimately include what we would now call Central America, Cuba, maybe even parts of South America.
So he envisioned a massive physical American empire, which, again, he didn't see as an empire of conquest, but rather an empire of liberty, the exact rights and That the American founders had offered to the few Americans who were around at the time would now be expanded to include many other people.
Now, so the way to sum this up is that for Douglass, expansion, I'm not quoting Jaffa, expansion was the keynote of Douglass' foreign policy, popular sovereignty of his domestic policy.
And these two kind of work together.
How? Because Douglass thinks, all right, We're good to go.
There aren't really plantations in Texas.
And so Texas comes in as a slave state.
But Douglass saw that almost every other state that was coming into the Union was a free state.
So he understood that the free states are going to one by one outnumber the slave states.
And this is going to put slavery on a path to ultimate extinction.
And that phrase, on a path to ultimate extinction, was something the founders believed.
The founders said, all right...
We're going to have slavery.
We're going to put up with it because there's no other way to get a union.
But we are hoping and expecting that slavery will start to die out.
The founders did take some steps for that to happen, by the way.
They restricted the slave trade.
In fact, they ended it effective, I think it was 1808, so essentially a couple of decades beyond the founding.
No more importation of slaves from Africa.
There was the Northwest Ordinance restricting slavery in new territories in the Northwest.
The founders also were instrumental in converting slavery from a national institution.
Let's remember, there were originally, prior to the founding, there were slaves in Massachusetts.
There were slaves in New York.
The founders made slavery into a southern institution.
Essentially, what they did was they cut slavery off at the middle, which means that it could continue to grow south of what later was the Mason-Dixon line, but the northern part of America would be I think?
There is a formula for slavery not being extinguished overnight.
Even the founders saw that that was impractical, indeed impossible.
But there is a formula for slavery shrinking.
And that's what I'm all about.
I can see slavery shrinking even more because of my doctrine of popular sovereignty.
And the key to popular sovereignty is that you create a sort of principle of choice.
For each community to decide for itself.
The northern states can decide for themselves.
The southern states can decide for themselves.
And ultimately, the western states can decide for themselves.
Now, it's important for Douglass, because he's defending the principle of popular sovereignty, he can't give the game away by saying, you know, I support the principle of choice, but I'm really anti-slavery.
He couldn't even say the opposite.
I support the principle of choice but I'm really pro-slavery.
Because then it would seem that the principle of choice had no validity in itself but was merely a technique or a ruse or a mechanism to achieve A substantive result, that Douglass really has a goal.
And so, since Douglass wanted to affirm the principle itself, he had to conceal the goal.
To be a true statesman, he couldn't say, I'm pro-slavery, and he couldn't say, I'm anti-slavery.
He had to profess that he was indifferent to slavery as a public matter, that his position on slavery was irrelevant, that what he was defending is the right of states and territories to make these decisions for themselves.
So the complexity here is not that Douglass didn't have a view, he did, but that he was forced by the political nature of his enterprise.
The political nature of his enterprise, which is not just to, by the way, defend a principle and seem that he's being very consistent about it.
That's important. But what's equally important is that behind that is a delicate job of statesmanship.
There are vehemently anti-slavery people in the North.
In fact, the abolitionists.
They have no tolerance for slavery at all.
And then in the South, you have people who think that slavery is a good thing, and they have no tolerance for abolitionists.
And the difficult task, the balancing job of Douglass is to resist the extremes of the North and the South.
And he does this by attacking the abolitionists in the North and attacking the Calhounites, the people who think slavery is a positive good in the South.
I'll try to show tomorrow that even though Douglas is accused of being inconsistent, he's accused of having moved from a very anti-slavery position in the early 19th century to a pro-slavery position in the later 19th century.
that this is explained not by Douglass changing his mind or even changing his emphasis, But rather by a change in circumstances.
In the early part of the 19th century, the pro-slavery side was really strong.
And Douglass' view was, let's attack that.
I don't want the pro-slavery people to get out of hand and try to demand a union based upon slavery.
The North will never go for that.
And then in the second half of the 19th century, the North gets strong, new states are coming into the Union, the North is getting very confident, some would say even arrogant, and so Douglass switches to attacking the abolitionists and attacking the Northerners.
Why? Because they want a Union in which slavery is completely abolished, abolished overnight, abolished even if the Constitution has to be abolished along with it, and Douglass' view is no.
I'm going to have to slow you guys down.
I'm going to have to attack you and blunt the force of what you're trying to do because I'm trying to keep this delicate ship of state with its mast up and sailing in a sense without tipping to one side or the other.
So while Lincoln had an easy task, We're good to go.
When the right is strong, the right side of the ship is strong, Douglas throws his weight on the left to balance the ship.
So Douglas, in a way, has a more complex, more tricky task than Lincoln, and for this, his statesmanship deserves a certain measure of respect, and I would say even admiration.
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