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Feb. 14, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
52:22
UKRAINE’S BORDER, AND OURS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep769
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Coming up, some Republicans seem to think that Ukraine's border is more important than our border.
I'll tell you why they think that and why I think they are wrong.
I also want to talk about the problem of Reaganitis, by which I mean a false application of Reaganite principles to today's world, which is very different from the world that Reagan faced.
And I've got an interview with a woman who's connected with the Disney family talking about the scandal of probate law and the way in which people's assets gets confiscated at the behest of some court.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
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.
I want to talk about Ukraine's border and ours, our border.
Brian was reminding me here in the studio that I tweeted out yesterday that here's an idea.
Why doesn't Texas change its name to Ukraine?
Right away, the Texas border will become of intense concern to our Senate and to the Biden administration.
Right away, they will allocate tens of billions of dollars to protect Ukraine.
The Texas, or should I say Ukraine in America, border.
And of course I was being sarcastic about all this, but nevertheless, there is the underlying question of why it seems that not only the left, not only the Biden administration, but I think?
Don't really care about it as much.
It's certainly not a priority with them.
And notice that when the border bill went down, they weren't like, okay, you know what, let's come up with border legislation that strengthens existing law.
No, they're like, well, let's not worry about that.
Let's just kind of get the Ukraine money through.
Let's get the Israel money through.
A total of, what is it, $95 billion with $60 billion allocated to Ukraine.
And all the while, the U.S. border just languishes.
Now, there was an important piece of news yesterday.
The impeachment of Mayorkas finally went through.
And it went through, well, the narrowest of margins, 214 to 213.
Now, the Republican margin would have been a little bigger than that, but three Republicans voted against impeaching Mayorkas, Representative Mike Gallagher, Tom McClintock, and Ken Buck.
Two of those, notably, are not running again, and the third guy probably shouldn't either.
And all these guys had kind of elaborate rationales like, well, you know, this is not the right way to go about it, or we should really be impeaching Biden.
Well, I agree we should really be impeaching Biden.
He's the one giving the orders, but let's impeach Mayorkas too.
Mayorkas may merely be, as I've said before, the hitman, but the hitman is part of the scheme.
The hitman is the guy who actually carries it out.
So you don't want to say, okay, I'm just going to put the organizer of the hit in the hot seat and let the hitman go, because after all, he's only a hitman.
No, the hitman belongs as one who is also held to account.
So I'm glad they've done this. Will the impeachment succeed in the Senate?
No. But guess what?
Biden turns out to be the first cabinet secretary to be impeached in the United States since...
Well, this is the man who has overseen this massive, law-breaking, criminal invasion of America.
He's the one who has enabled it.
Yeah, you blame the lawbreakers who came over, but you also blame the U.S. government authorities that have been egging them on, that have been facilitating, enabling the scheme.
I think that Mayorkas, by the way, should also be referred to the DOJ for criminal prosecution and perjury.
I mean, this is a guy who has, from time and time again, mouthed the most shocking lies.
Here's the latest one.
I mean, this is something that Mayorkas has said before.
It is my testimony that the border is secure.
Think about that statement.
And try to square that statement with 8 million, some say over 10 million illegals that have been let into this country on this guy's watch.
The border is secure in the face of this scandalous desecration of our border.
But let me now turn to this issue of Ukraine, because what I find really strange about Ukraine is the radically opposite things that people are saying about Ukraine, and particularly in the Senate.
So I'll start off with this comment.
This is Mitt Romney.
First of all, he says that sending money to Ukraine is, quote, the single most important vote that...
People will take as senators.
Wow! So think of Romney's priorities.
We have problems in this country with the border, our border, Second Amendment rights, the economy, election fraud.
And of all these issues, the most important issue to Romney is let's get money to Ukraine.
Now, ask yourself this question.
All these people who are talking about, if you vote against Ukraine, you're a traitor.
Tucker Carlson's a traitor.
Ask yourself, have they provided any sort of rational blueprint Maybe even a naive blueprint, but nevertheless, a blueprint of some sort saying, all right, we're going to send this $60 billion over.
Here's what the money is going to go for.
Here's how it is going to change the situation on the ground.
Here's how it's going to either defeat Putin.
Bring Putin to the negotiating table and bring an end to this war.
In other words, what are the clear, defined objectives?
money what's the difference that this money is going to make? There is as far as I can tell no answer to this question. It's simply a matter of you got to take sides. We're on the side of Ukraine. Ukraine are the good guys. No discussion of to what degree is it in our national interest to spend this kind of money.
There are of course some foreboding warnings about the fact that Ukraine is going to do this and Ukraine is going to do that.
Romney himself alluded to Ukraine taking over Europe.
Romney basically says that All of Europe is vulnerable to what Putin would do next.
And then you see, and this is Tom Tillis, another guy who's been pumping the Ukraine and voted for Ukraine money.
He says that Ukraine is losing.
I mean, Ukraine is winning the war.
Putin is losing this war, folks.
He goes on to say, this guy is on life support.
Putin is on life support.
Okay. Putin invaded Ukraine and took over a bunch of Ukrainian territory.
If Ukraine is winning, shouldn't Ukraine have taken all its territory back by now?
The war's been going on.
If it's going so well, in fact, Tom Tillis implies that the Ukrainians are killing 10 Russians for every Ukrainian who is killed.
This statistics, as far as I can tell, is completely made up.
Ukraine has been on the offensive, trying to get back its lost territory.
It has failed miserably.
The lines haven't hardly moved at all.
The Russian war machine is coughing out new artillery shells, in fact, faster than NATO is.
So, what's going on here?
On the one hand, we hear that Ukraine is winning, we gotta give them money, they're whipping the Russians.
So, if that's the case, then Russia must be pretty weak.
And yet, you have Romney go, oh, Russia poses a threat not only to Poland, but to the entire EU, in fact, to all of Europe.
Now, for Russia to pose a threat to all of Europe, Russia would have to be incredibly strong, not just to take on one European country, but a whole bunch of European countries, what, put together?
So, which is it?
Is Russia so weak that the Ukrainians, little Ukraine, can whoop Russia?
Or is Russia so strong that it is intimidating the entire European continent by itself?
Again, you have people putting forward one case and the other case in the same breath without pausing to go, how do these two claims about Russia square one with the other?
Even in the case of giving money to Israel, and I'm a very strong supporter of the idea that the United States should be behind Israel.
They were the ones who were attacked on October 7th.
We need to stand with Israel.
But what does that actually mean?
We want to give billions of dollars in aid to Israel and my question is simply this.
Is there been some evaluation of how Israel is doing economically as a country compared to us?
Compare for example the per capita income in Israel, the level for example of debt that Israel is in.
Let's just say that the Israelis Are doing about as well as us.
And I've been over to Israel. It seems to be an advanced country.
People do live in small quarters, but that's because the cities are highly concentrated with these high-rise apartments.
That's no different, for example, than, say, Japan, where people live in even smaller quarters.
So if the Israeli standard of living matches the American standard of living, and the United States is, what, $30 trillion in debt, Why are we borrowing the money instead of Israel?
I mean, these just seem to be sensible questions.
I'm not answering them.
I'm just raising them.
And the fact that they are never raised.
We stand with Israel. Let's give them billions of dollars.
Well, that doesn't follow.
Do they need the money more than we do?
Are they unable to get it somewhere else?
This is, after all, their fight, and so we want to help, but to what degree should we help?
I am just a little scandalized by the low level of political discussion, the non-attempt to answer reasonable questions, and I think some people turn against funding, become more skeptical of funding, Just because they haven't heard any plausible rationale from the people who should have and are expected to provide that rationale.
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I'm going to keep going on this topic of Ukraine's border and ours.
Here's an old quip from Donald Trump.
This goes back to 2014 but it's just as relevant today.
Quote, So this is Trump highlighting the preposterousness of the United States bankrolling.
Everybody wants to get checks from the U.S. taxpayer.
And this, by the way, includes the so-called NATO countries.
Now, NATO is supposed to be an alliance between the United States and European countries.
There are some others as well for collective and common defense.
Now, I'm not against the idea of an alliance.
I think it's actually better to deal with your adversaries as an alliance than do it on your own.
But when you have an alliance, it has to be based upon some reasonable sense of shared burden.
I mean, this is a widely understood concept.
It goes back centuries.
It's essentially that you share the load.
Now, you share the load proportionately.
If the United States is 10 times bigger than somebody else, the United States may pay 10 times more, but the other guy still pays their portion, their share, their...
Their allocation. Now, NATO members are supposed to be putting 2% of their GDP into defense spending.
That's the kind of agreed-upon threshold.
Do they do it? No.
A number of them don't do it.
Why? Because they go, why should we do it?
If we don't do it, the United States will fill in the balance.
The US will pay. And so we get to piggyback on US-funded defenses.
The US doesn't want Europe to be vulnerable.
They don't want the Europeans to be fighting each other.
And so the United States is essentially paying the defense budgets of European countries.
And when I say the United States is paying it, what does that mean?
You're paying it. I'm paying it.
The citizens of this country are essentially having their wallets raided to provide for the security of Greece.
And Italy and France and Germany, which, by the way, are first world countries that can provide at least to a considerable measure for themselves.
Now, in the Cold War, we did some of this, and it goes back to the Reagan years, and this was driven by the idea that the Soviet Union was a worldwide threat and that the main opponent on the other side was the United States.
But the key point is that We're not in the Cold War anymore.
And I think this is what...
There are a lot of people on the left today who...
These are people who attacked Reagan in the Reagan era, but now they invoke Reagan.
Republicans are abandoning the legacy of Reagan.
And I can see that even Republicans in the Senate who have voted for Ukraine funding, for this increased Ukraine funding, they're always conjuring up the Reagan legacy.
And I just saw some comments by Anne Applebaum, the writer, where she talks about the fact that the Republican Party is now taking up, if you will, the sort of pro-Russia position that some people on the left took up in the last century.
But of course, the key difference is that Russia isn't the Soviet Union.
I mean, you don't have...
I did a series on Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago.
Where's the Gulag Archipelago now in Russia?
It doesn't exist.
Tucker Carlson caused a little bit of a scandal by saying that Moscow is actually a more...
Not only a more beautiful, but a more livable city.
I don't know if that's true, by the way, on the balance or all things considered.
And maybe it applies to some cities.
Is it true that Moscow is a better place to live than any American city?
I'm not sure about that.
But nevertheless, I've seen some images and I shared them on social media of the subway in Moscow.
Beautiful. It's not just the architecture.
It's the kind of civic...
That is so striking.
You don't have fracasses and screaming.
You don't have people fighting with each other.
You don't have people grabbing anybody's purse and running.
The atmosphere is serene, lawful.
People seem to be going about their business.
There's a kind of modest cordiality.
Very striking images.
And I say to myself, yeah, I don't see that.
I don't see that kind of ambiance in any city in the United States.
I think back to Reagan and I was, of course, in the Reagan White House myself and I wrote a book about Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
My view is that Reagan today would have his doubts about Ukraine.
I don't deny that in the beginning I think he would have jumped in on the Ukrainian side.
He would see supporting and funding Ukraine as an extension of the Reagan doctrine.
But I don't think he'd be shoveling untold billions to Ukraine.
Why? Number one, Russia is not the Soviet Union.
Same place, same country, same geography, but very different structure, very different ideology, and that means very different goals.
Number two, Ukraine is peripheral to our vital national interest.
For Reagan, it was always about how important is this to our security?
For Reagan, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was important because it had to do with a strategic country.
And also for Reagan, the opportunity of the Muslims coming together and fighting to push the Soviets out.
And Reagan's like, let's help those guys.
This is in our national interest.
Reagan cared about Nicaragua.
Why? It's in our backyard.
It's right there.
And so Reagan's support for the Contras was based on that.
Ukraine A faraway country, much more remote to our national interests.
And at least if there is a vital interest in Ukraine, it needs to be explained in some terms a little better than, well, if it's first Ukraine, it's then going to be someplace else.
Not necessarily so.
Ukraine has a deep history connected to Russia in the same way, by the way, that Taiwan has a history of connectedness to China.
So I'm all for defending Taiwan, but it doesn't make any sense to say, hey, if the Chinese have their eyes on Taiwan, that means the Chinese will also have their eyes on Dubai, and the Chinese will also have their eyes on Copenhagen, because Dubai and Copenhagen have actually never been part of China.
And finally, Reagan didn't write blank checks that broke the bank at home.
Reagan understood the need for missile defenses and for the MX missile and for heavy defense spending.
But Reagan also understood that there was a time to scale things back.
This is when Reagan made deals with Gorbachev.
This is when Reagan brought about the end of the Cold War and the massive peace dividend that followed.
I'm happy to say that Speaker Johnson...
Mike Johnson has pretty much said he's going to kill this Ukraine funding bill.
He says, quote, So I come back to Ukraine's border and ours.
And there will be measures to try to force Johnson to give in on this There are efforts to try to get around Johnson and force a vote.
That's going to require Republicans to go against their own speaker, to go against the speaker.
By the way, that has happened before, as we saw with Kevin McCarthy.
It could happen with Mike Johnson.
So we'll have to see where this goes.
But I think Mike Johnson is on the right track when he says that if anyone wants to be serious about protecting U.S. interests and U.S. security, let's begin by doing it.
On our own border.
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Guys, I came across an article in Fox News that says, I'm reading the title now, how courts handle death is such a mess that even for Walt Disney's grandson, it was no fairy tale.
And of course, Disney's been in the news with regard to other matters, their woke policies and so on.
But this article moves in a different direction.
It's written by Sherry Lund, and it's about the scandal of our...
The probate court system.
We'll get into all that because at first glance the topic seems a little bit dry, the probate system, but it's not at all.
Now Sherry Lund is a probate reform advocate.
She's president of the Celebration Stem Cell Center.
She's fought for the past 12 years for her stepson, Bradford Disneyland.
So that's where the Disney connection comes in and other victims of probate courts.
It's actually an acronym for Citizens for Clean Courts, so C4, the number 4, CC, CleanCourts, USA.org.
Sherry, welcome and thank you for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
Your stepson is Bradford Disneyland, and I'm assuming that what got you into this topic What was his experience with the probate system?
Can you tell us a little bit about what propelled you in this direction and what put probate reform at the front of your agenda?
Yes, and thank you for having me.
What started our nightmare in the probate court was just an I say jealous relatives attacking our family.
And my daughter, Michelle, was in the hospital with a brain aneurysm.
She's Brad's twin.
And when a couple of trustees and family members realized she may not make it, Through the weekend, they ran out, got attorneys, started their attack on us, because my son would have inherited her estate, and he would not have wanted the two trustees to oversee his assets.
So it was a money grab.
It was a hostile takeover.
The lies that were submitted to the court, what we saw happening in the court was the judges did not require any evidence, just allegations.
The other side got to go on fishing expeditions, just upend our whole life.
It was horrible.
And as I went along, I met other victims and sat in their hearings, made my notes, and I said, wait a minute.
The courts aren't following the law.
They're not upholding people's constitutional rights or due process.
The rules of court are ignored.
What is going on here?
And so I really started my investigation on other cases, and I quickly saw a pattern in practice of horrific abuse.
And I've met hundreds of victims across the country, and they all have the same story.
Let's clarify for people what we mean by probate court.
I think in most people's conventional understanding, probate comes into play when somebody dies without a will, because if someone dies without a Maybe some children.
Maybe they have some siblings.
And so the question then becomes, how are their assets going to be distributed?
And at least I was under the impression that the law has some fairly clear outlines of how it should go.
Now, when you're talking about the probate system, is that what you're describing?
Is that basic structure that's sort of run amok and gotten out of hand?
Yeah. Exactly.
The probate court was initially put together to administer estates when someone died or help families through the administration of estates, but likely the attorneys saw a way to not only make great amounts of money, but to take control of estates and assets.
So this is what it's become, and it's become, in my opinion, one of the most well-organized crime syndicates in the world.
This is the same pattern of practice across the country when someone can have their rights, their freedom, We're removed without due process when they can lose their freedom and their property on a whim of a judge because the judges, attorneys, fiduciaries milk the estates and usually there's nothing left.
In our case, tens of millions of dollars.
We're made by the attorneys.
And I have to say, in my opinion, the judges too.
I do not believe the judges commit these crimes against the people and violate the law themselves without benefiting.
What happened to us should never happen to anyone.
What's happening to victims I work with today, David Redke, Natasha Holmberg, these people have their confidence and the judges refuse to give them their freedom and access to their own property and assets.
Now some people might say that, you know, Disney, obviously, this is one of the most famous names in America.
There's obviously a giant fortune.
It's not entirely surprising that there would be family squabbles over the fortune.
It's not surprising that there would be high-priced lawyers involved.
And we've seen in the news some other cases.
Now, I don't know if this is related, but in the case of Britney Spears, we saw how, you know, there was a kind of a guardian or a conservator who was running her operations, her life, controlling her finances.
The question I want to ask is, and you allude to in this article, the fact that this actually isn't just something that happens to the super rich.
That it also happens to a lot of other people because, after all, people accumulate assets all your life.
And so you could have even families that are moderately well-off, but they do have assets.
And you're saying that there is almost a cunning scheme on the part of the legal system when the opportunity presents itself to sort of raid that treasury and ransack it, leaving the descendants with only a fraction of what they should have gotten.
Correct. And now through the legislation work that I did last session with the two bills that we were able to get passed and signed by the governor, I saw that and worked with and talked to attorneys for major hospital systems where the hospitals have now gone into the guardianship and conservatorship business.
And if you look at how the tenables go out, and how many people have decided to jump on the bandwagon because there's such an immense amount of wealth there to tap into, it doesn't mean they have to be millionaires.
It could be a veteran.
He has benefits.
He has Social Security.
They have homes.
Those are all targeted by the system.
So especially when you get someone who is on the street, say, and they're put in the hospital, the hospital will file for guardianship in order to...
Go out, get access insurance, and then bill access insurance for the treatments that are being given to the patient.
If they think the patient has any assets, they then...
Go for conservatorship of the estate so that they can then go in and take over the estate.
And a lot of times that estate will go right back into the hospital's foundations to supposedly pay them back for the legal process.
We just see so many things happening.
I mean this is really very shocking because what you're saying is that essentially what these courts are responding to is some kind of a note from a nurse or a physician's assistant, maybe even a doctor, This guy has been committed and we now need to essentially have access to their finances.
And in your article, you talk about people who in some cases are drugged and therefore perhaps not able to make decisions.
In other cases, they're held against their will.
Is it the case that the courts here are just going along with it?
Because I find in a lot of these cases, a court doesn't want to be...
They defer to experts because they're like, well, what do we know about this guy's medical condition?
Here is a doctor's note, so we're going to act upon it.
And what's going on underneath that note is a major ransacking scheme of this family's assets in the name of, quote, caring for the patient.
I mean, am I off track here?
A little bit.
A lot of times the judges find the person incapacitated.
The judges are not qualified to make that determination, and the judges tend to appoint their Court-appointed friends, doctors, attorneys, fiduciaries.
We've been able to track certain law firms, get the bigger cases.
Certain doctors are appointed so that the court gets the answer that they want.
In one case here, John Barrow, he was...
Tested by, evaluated by five doctors, four found incompetent, one gun for hire appointed through the court, found him incompetent, so the judge says, oh, he's incompetent.
That was in order to take over a $24 million estate.
Poor man in his 60s is now sitting in a small little home in Scottsdale, Arizona.
His assets are being depleted by four or five people billing against those assets.
You know, tens of thousands of dollars a month.
And he's sitting in a place where he shouldn't be.
He's confident. This is happening more than you realize, and it's frightening.
If this can happen and it's rubber stamped by the court, we're seeing parents losing their children with no due process.
This is horrifying to me.
I mean, I have seen in a different context the way in which our legal system is almost set up to not only capitalize on discontent but sow the seeds of discontent.
And then, you know, I mean, for example, it's not uncommon In cases where you have litigation, this could be divorce litigation, any other litigation, where you'll be looking at a room full of people made up of attorneys, three or four on each side, financial experts,
two or three on each side, and you realize everybody is billing three to four hundred dollars an hour, and then you add up the number of people in the room and you go, hey, for this meeting that's lasting two hours, It's like $43,000 and all you're doing is discussing procedures and motions and schedules and, hey, are you available to come in next Tuesday or should we go make it the Tuesday after?
No, your honor. You know, I've got an appointment.
I'm on vacation.
And you're like, wow, look at the madness of this and it is all so clever.
Because all these people are...
I mean, you have to admit it.
That's what makes them drive BMWs and live in nice homes.
And it's not because they're doing anything productive.
They're leeching off of other people's hard-earned wealth.
And it looks to me like the probate...
Scandal is just part of this bigger legal scandal, but it does have one new component that you mentioned.
It doesn't just steal money, it ruins people's lives.
It takes over people's lives against their will.
It does. It destroys families.
It's destroyed our family.
We were very, very close, and I don't get to see my daughter Michelle because they have a handler with her now.
She has medical issues, brain aneurysms, and Her twin brother doesn't get to see her.
It's been horrifying for us.
It literally broke my husband's heart.
I think it was the reason, so do his doctors, that my husband died, because his heart was broken.
He was attacked so viciously when he was the rock.
He was the one protecting his children and protecting our family.
The fight that we had to fight to keep my son from being taken over was a fight no one should have to fight.
Our rights should be protected by the courts.
We should have due process.
In SB 1291 that we got passed last session, I took a case from the beginning of the case What rights should be given to the parties and the families?
When I have a head of probate telling me the family members don't matter, we have a problem.
When you have a judge saying, it's not my obligation and my duty to tell someone what their rights are, we have a problem.
Because from the beginning of the cases, if you take every probate case, family court, juvenile case, I guarantee you If it's investigated, they will find that from the beginning of the case, rights are violated, laws are violated, and no due process is given.
It's whatever the judge wants to do.
They legislate from the bench.
We've just passed a new bill, and the judges have come out publicly, blatantly snubbing their nose at our state legislators.
And they're not following the laws.
They're still violating people's rights to trial by jury before they take their freedom and their assets.
I'm dealing with victims who are having to file appeals, which are expensive, to try to get the lower court to uphold their rights, which are constitutional rights and state laws.
And they're just blatantly violating them.
So where do we go from here?
This is what I'm asking our lawmakers to do, is impeach a few judges and let them know they do have to follow the laws that our state legislators pass, and then addressing Congress that we have federal laws in place, but the state courts snub their nose at federal laws.
So we've got a problem.
Well, Sherry, I know when I read your article, I could kind of feel the scandal of it and feel the pain that you've gone through in this context.
And I also commend you because you've gone beyond fighting for your family and your stepson and are now fighting for other people who are probably not in as good a position as you to fight for themselves.
Guys, check out the article, How Courts Handle Death is Such a Mess- That even for Walt Disney's grandson, it was no fairytale.
It's on foxnews.com.
We've been talking to Sherry Lund.
I want to give you the website for Citizens for Clean Courts, ccitizens4ccusa.org.
Sherry, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you so much.
You know, guys, I did my Locals Live Q&A yesterday.
Very lively, very interesting, very engaged back and forth between questions and answers.
And I'd like you to be part of it.
I'd like to invite you to check out my Locals channel and consider becoming a monthly or annual subscriber.
I post lots of exclusive content there, including content that is censored on other social media platforms.
On Locals, you get Dinesh Unchained, Dinesh Uncensored.
You can also... I'd love to have you along for this great ride.
Again, it's dinesh.locals.com.
I'm talking about the case for Douglas, part of my discussion of Harry Jaffa's Crisis of the House Divided, a study of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
And in the middle of the 19th century, there was a giant inflow of immigrants, legal immigrants, coming to America from all over Europe, but a lot of them from Ireland coming in the wake of the potato famine there.
And these are people that would have a transforming effect on America.
In fact, they gave rise to the very idea of the melting pot.
The idea of the melting pot came several decades later, but it described the impact of this influx of people from all different parts of Europe.
This was a European immigration.
And yet, interestingly, a nativist or anti-immigrant movement developed in the United States that went by the name of the Know Nothings.
And the official name of some of these groups, anti-immigrant groups, was The Americans.
And the implication, of course, is that we are the Americans and these other people coming in.
And look, today, if you talk about people who are Scott Irish or German, you're like, what's the big deal?
Aren't these people European?
Aren't they white? Don't they speak English?
Aren't they of the same stock?
And you have to remember that in the middle of the 19th century, many of these people looked different.
They dressed differently.
They spoke differently.
Cockney accents, Irish accents.
Some of them didn't speak English at all.
They were parts of Pennsylvania where only German was spoken, for example.
So there was a strangeness to these new people, and the know-nothings wanted none of it.
Now, the Know Nothing Party was huge.
It had over a million members.
It was in the northern states, not in the south.
And it became a critical part of the support for the Republican Party.
Now, this is not something Republicans boast about, but the Republican Party, founded around 1854, assimilated into its ranks not only many people from the old Whig Party.
The Whig Party eventually collapsed, and the old Whigs, the northern Whigs, became Republicans.
But in addition to the Whigs, the Republicans got a lot of people from the so-called Know-Nothing Party or the Know-Nothing Movement.
And this is what created the strong coalition in the North that enabled Abraham Lincoln to carry pretty decisively the Northern states.
So that even though Lincoln was not on the ballot in many Southern states, he still won in the Electoral College.
Now, What was Lincoln's view of these know-nothings?
I want to quote a very powerful and interesting statement by Lincoln.
I am not a know-nothing.
That is certain.
How could I be?
How can anyone who abhors the oppression of Negroes be in favor of degrading classes of white people?
As a nation, we began by declaring all men are created equal.
We now practically read it, all men are created equal except Negroes.
When the know-nothings get control, it will read, all men are created equal except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.
And then says Lincoln, in a very Lincolnian turn of phrase, when it comes to this, I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty, to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
So this is Lincoln basically saying, you know, we got these know-nothings and I'm not a fan.
I'm not one of them.
I don't like them.
I don't like diluting the equality premise of the declaration and declaring all these classes of people, not just blacks, but also immigrants from the Slavic countries, from Ireland, from Germany, declaring all of them to be And this is, in fact, what the know-nothing rhetoric did incline to.
It did point in that direction.
These people are not like us.
They're subhuman.
They're brutish. They don't really belong here.
We can't assimilate them.
And Lincoln's like, I'm not...
I don't go along with this.
Now, interestingly, this quite famous passage from Lincoln that I just read, it's included in a lot of Lincoln collections and compendiums and so on.
Interestingly, this does not come from a Lincoln speech.
It doesn't come from any of Lincoln's writings.
Well, it comes from a Lincoln writing, but the writing is a A private letter that Lincoln wrote to a personal friend.
I think this is Lincoln's letter to Joshua Speed.
Yes, it is. It's Speed, and it was written in the summer of 1855.
Now, apart from this denunciation of the know-nothings, we have no other public comment by Lincoln about the know-nothings.
He says nothing at all.
He never allows this private opinion to become public.
In fact, at one point, when someone asks him about the no-nothings in public, Lincoln tells one of his supporters, I don't really want to offend those people, and so I'm not going to say anything about the matter, because the truth of it is, Lincoln needed and wanted their votes.
So Lincoln was forced into a prudent silence about the bigotry, the provincialism, the ethnocentrism, the narrow-mindedness of these know-nothings because Lincoln recognized it without them.
That the know-nothings, interestingly enough, were part of the anti-slavery movement.
See, there were a lot of reform movements in the 19th century.
The anti-alcohol movement, the so-called temperance movement, was part of that.
The know-nothing movement, interestingly, was also a reform movement.
It was sort of a let's get America back to its basics and let's keep the foreigners out type of movement.
And these movements overlapped.
And they worked to the benefit of the newly ascendant Republican Party.
Now, Douglass was on the opposite end.
Douglass welcomed the immigrants.
Douglass himself was Irish.
The Irish were sometimes denounced by the know-nothings as being alcoholics and hard drinkers.
Well, guess what? Douglass was a hard drinker and proud of it.
Douglass also had Catholic connections.
Douglass wasn't himself a Catholic, but he had married into a Catholic family.
And of course, a lot of the new immigrants who were coming, the Irish immigrants certainly, were overwhelmingly Catholic.
So this is a very interesting aspect of this whole debate, that even though Lincoln took his stance on anti-slavery, Douglass took his stance on pro-immigration and anti-prejudice against foreign immigrants.
So even if we're judging Lincoln and Douglass sort of by the standards of modern egalitarianism, you'd have to say that if Douglass is to be condemned for not being sufficiently anti-slavery,
Lincoln, it would seem, would deserve some condemnation for not being sufficiently open, at least not in a public sense, to immigrants from all over Europe who were coming in droves to America and would, over the next several decades, have a transforming and, in my view, unnet positive influence in making the America that has taken us into the 20th century and now beyond.
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