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Feb. 16, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:45
HIT THE ROAD, JACK Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep771
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Special Counsel Jack Smith is asking the Supreme Court to rush the January 6th trial.
He claims it's in the public interest, but I'll expose his real agenda.
Congressional candidate, my son-in-law, Brandon Gill, joins me.
We're going to talk about the travails of running for office and how to beat back the lives of Democrats and the Never Trump faction.
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, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The special counsel Jack Smith has just filed a motion emotion.
To the Supreme Court, urging that the Supreme Court quickly resolve the issue of presidential immunity, the question of whether or not Trump enjoys full immunity over his actions that he took as president, including whatever he did in January 6th.
Jack Smith says to the Supreme Court, resolve that now.
Decide that question so that the trial can move ahead really fast.
We want this trial to go expeditiously.
We don't want it to be held up.
We don't want it to drag out because he says that if you drag it out, it would frustrate the public interest in a speedy and fair verdict.
And he says that there would be serious harm to the public and to the government if this trial is held up.
Now, this is a very odd thing for Jack Smith to say, or for any prosecutor.
Why? Because it is customary in a case, particularly a case in which you have serious charges, charges that carry heavy penalties, charges that claim that somebody is somehow trying to overthrow the government, subvert the election process, in a sense, overturn our entire system of government.
This is about as serious a charge as you can make and typically the courts are Are very generous in letting defendants have time to look over materials, especially when the materials are voluminous.
There are thousands, if not tens of thousands of pages of discovery, of documents to look over and so on.
And so all of this takes time.
The whole process drags out.
I mean... If you think, for example, of January 6th defendants, you have people who are facing, in some cases, only misdemeanor charges.
In other cases, maybe misdemeanor and a felony charge.
But even though the cases were launched in 2021, in the aftermath of January 6th, some of them have still not gone to trial.
Some of them have trial dates scheduled as far out as October of 2024.
So, that is a...
I mean, maybe that is...
Slower than normal, but it gives you an indication of how slow the process works.
Now, Jack Smith has an agenda, but he cannot disclose that agenda.
There's a marvelous article.
It's actually published at lawfaremedia.org.
It's written by a prominent Harvard professor.
In fact, a Harvard professor who doesn't like Trump.
A Harvard professor who wrote a book against Trump.
The guy's name is Jack Goldsmith, and yet his article is very sober and very sensible, and what it says is this.
I'm going to go through it because of how insightful it is.
He says that there is a great urgency in Jack Smith's brief to the Supreme Court.
You've got to do this. You've got to allow this.
We need the case to go forward now.
And he says that there is an obvious reason why Jack Smith wants the trial to go forward.
And in fact, the reason is stated by Democrats and people on social media all the time.
And that is, we want to get Trump before the election.
In other words, we want this trial so we can have a shot at a guilty verdict.
And whether or not we get a guilty verdict, we want to put the facts of this case before the American people, before the election.
So the trial has a political motive.
The political motive is, as I say, quite brazenly put forward by Jack Smith's defenders.
What they're trying to say is that Trump was a threat to democracy in the 2020 election, and that's what the case is about, but that's looking backward.
But what Jack Smith wants to do is use the backward...
To nail Trump forward.
In other words, in the 2024 election.
The real goal here, after all, of, I would say, all the Trump cases is to get Trump and to keep him off, to prevent him from getting the presidency in 2024.
Some people look and say, well, no, they're trying to jail Trump, or, well, no, they're trying to get Trump's business, they're trying to wreck him.
Yes, they are trying to do that, but why?
Why are they trying to wreck his businesses?
Why are they trying to jail him in order that he can't be president again?
Now, here's the thing.
Jack Smith is motivated by this, but he can't say that.
Why? Because he's supposed to be Non-political.
He's supposed to be following the law.
And so he goes to the Supreme Court and he basically says, well, the public has an interest in a speedy trial.
What's that interest? Why does the public have an interest in a speedy trial?
Why is it necessary for the public?
So what Jack Smith does is he states these platitudes.
Democracy requires it.
The public interest demands it.
Whereas, if you look at the actual justice manuals of the DOJ, which talk about how cases should be prosecuted and so on, here is the Harvard professor, Jack Oldsmith, he says,"...if there were any other defendant than Donald Trump,
the rush to trial, which cannot possibly give the Trump legal team adequate time to prepare its defense, would be deemed wildly unfair." And then,
Jack Goldsmith quotes the DOJ manual, Which basically says, federal prosecutors and agents may never select the timing of any action, including investigative steps, criminal charges or statements, for the purpose of affecting any election or for the purpose of giving an advantage or disadvantage to any candidate or political party.
So, there you have it.
This is... What Jack Smith's doing is prohibited.
It's prohibited by his own DOJ. And he knows it's prohibited, and that's why he has to engage in a kind of a camouflage.
He cannot state the open motives of what he's trying to do, so he has to pretend like there is some other pressing reason.
Now, says the Harvard professor Jack Goldsmith, he says, look...
In the Colorado case, where they were trying to throw Trump off the ballot, he says, quote, So in the Colorado case, the Supreme Court had to rush it.
Why? Because after all, primaries are coming up.
There's a Super Tuesday coming up in early March.
There's the Colorado primary coming up.
So if you drag it out, what's going to happen in the primary?
So, the court has to decide so that states know whether or whether they can or cannot throw Trump off the ballot.
And Republican states, for that matter, can know whether they can throw Biden off the ballot.
So, the issue has to be settled.
There is a kind of ticking clock.
But says Jack Goldsmith, quote, there is no such rationale here.
When you're dealing with somebody who, quote, who you think tried to overthrow the 2020 election, well, that was three and a half years ago.
What difference does it make if that issue is decided now or in three months or in six months or even after the election?
So, the Justice Department doesn't have a good reason to rush this.
And yet, that's why Jack Smith has to resort to this sort of camouflage.
Now, Jack Smith concludes his article and he says, I hope the Supreme Court doesn't go for this because the politicization of our Justice Department has already gone far And he goes, you need to restore trust and confidence in the process.
And he says...
I hope that to the extent possible, and notice how kind of circumspect, how gingerly, how cautiously he approaches what he's writing.
I hope that to the extent possible, the court, being the Supreme Court, in this wildly unprecedented context, follows the same rules and principles that it would follow if one of the parties to the case were not an indicted Donald Trump running for presidential office.
Jack Goldsmith notices that in the filings that Jack Smith has made, he says, There's a further wrinkle to all this, which is that there is a case before the Supreme Court that the court has already taken.
They've already granted cert.
And this case is going to be heard in March or in April, so coming up in the next couple of months.
And it has to do with the obstruction of an official proceeding charge.
Now, for a lot of the January 6th defendants, this is the felony charge.
The other charges are things like being in a building where you shouldn't be trespassing, parading in a public building.
They're misdemeanors. The only reason that these guys have felony charges is because they're hit with this obstruction of an official proceeding law.
Which, there's a very good argument that says that that statute is being completely misapplied in the January 6th case, and that's what the Supreme Court is taking up.
That, by the way, is also a charge in the Trump case.
So it looks like what's going on with Jack Smith is that he kind of knows that his whole case is in danger.
I mean, the Supreme Court, if they throw that out, that Trump obstructed an official proceeding, then...
What are you going to get Trump on?
That he made a call?
That he said march peacefully and patriotically?
What is it that Trump actually did that subverted the election of 2020?
So Jack Smith seems to be saying to the Supreme Court, I beg you, let me have this trial.
Let me try to get a quick guilty verdict.
Even if you throw the verdict out later because you threw out the obstruction of an official proceeding, that no longer will apply to Trump.
I'll at least get my headline.
I'll at least have the Washington Post, the New York Times, CBS, everybody dancing in the streets, the left celebrating.
That's what's going to make me, Jack Smith, into a hero.
So please, Supreme Court, make me a hero.
And I hope the Supreme Court says, hit the road, Jack.
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I want to talk in this segment about some new data from the IRS about taxes, about who pays them, about the rich and the poor, about paying your fair share, about what is the fair share.
But I want to do this in the context of a conversation that I heard with Javier Millet.
One of the remarkable things about Millet is that when he's interviewed, it's almost like listening to a professor, a very good professor, explain things at the level of first principles.
And Millais rhetorical strategy is very effective, in fact, would work very well in a classroom, but also works very well in the political domain.
And what Millais has managed to do in Argentina is get the whole country or a large part of the country to listen to what he has to say.
Now part of it is because he's a real character, he wears the motorcycle leather jacket, he's got the rock star type of hair.
He's a character.
He's also a populist in the sense that he is among the people.
I just saw a video of when he boarded a flight and guess what?
Number one, he doesn't fly private, he doesn't have Air Force One, Argentina.
No, he's on a commercial plane.
It's not even clear to me that he was sitting in first class because he's like muscling his way to his seat and people are like grabbing him, shaking his hand, and he's talking to And so you've got a very engaged guy and a normal guy.
And I think the people of Argentina see this.
But in the conversation that I'm referring to, Malay was asked about the state, about the government.
And without sort of batting an eyelid, he says, yeah, these governments, the state...
Not just the Argentinian state, but states in general, are a criminal enterprise.
And you can see the interviewer has to do a double take and says, are you saying the state is inherently a criminal enterprise?
And he goes, yeah. He goes, because its job is theft.
It loots the population.
It produces nothing.
Its only job is to reach into your pocket and take your money.
And so it is a...
The essence of the state is coercion.
If the state were to say to you, hey listen, I think about Social Security.
If the government were to say, Dinesh, you're a citizen, you are now naturalized, let's go back to 1991, and you know what, we've got this amazing program, it's called Social Security.
If you pay into it a segment of your salary and your earnings your whole life, then when you turn 65, we'll give you payments until you die of, let's say, $2,500 a month.
No, this is a deal.
It's a package.
It's a bargain. And it's presented to me.
And it would be nice if I could say, well, you know what?
It sounds pretty good. I think I'll go for it.
Or, eh, I'll think about it.
You know, I don't really want it.
I think I'm better off if I keep my own money.
I establish my own savings accounts.
I will put aside for my own retirement.
You don't worry about me.
If I can't provide for myself, that's my problem.
It's not your problem.
Thanks for offering me this, but I'm not up for it.
What would they do? No, they would not go for that.
They would force me. They would extract, pull money out of my income without asking me, withholding.
And they call these, quote, contributions.
So this is what Malay is getting at.
There's a kind of confiscatory element to this.
It is gun to your head.
It's not all that different from you being stopped on the highway, somebody grabbing you and says, give me your wallet or else.
You have to do it.
And it's that aspect of taxation that I think we should never lose sight of.
It's not that taxation is not necessary, that it doesn't have some benefits.
I'm not recommending we abolish taxation.
I would like to see myself a flat tax, which could be pegged at 10%, 12%, 15%, in which there's a certain bottom where if you make under $30,000, you don't pay any taxes, but then the 10% or the 12% rate kicks in, And the 10% rate stays no matter how much you make.
Obviously, the rich pay more, but they pay more in the same proportion.
Everybody's paying the same percentage.
And think of how simplified that system would be.
No deductions. I mean, there's no mortgage deduction, no charitable deduction.
You list the amount of money you make, you calculate the 12%, you can do it on the calculator built into your phone or a calculator app, and there you go.
You have a postcard, you write down the amount, you write down the amount you owe, and you send it in.
Think of what a beautiful tax system that would be.
That's not, alas, the tax system we have.
Well, this brings me to the IRS. The IRS has some new data.
The data is from 2021.
Pretty normal. The data is computed with a lag of a couple of years.
And in 2021, it turns out, the top 1% of taxpayers...
Now, that turns out to be 1.5 million people.
So, that's pretty interesting to know that there are about a million and a half people, and this is families, I guess, in the country that fall into that top 1% of taxpayers.
And these taxpayers paid a record high 45.8% of all federal income taxes.
They're not talking about the percentage that people pay.
In fact, the highest marginal tax rate in the country is something like 37% or 39%.
It's in the high 30s anyway.
What they're saying is of all the tax revenues collected by the federal government, 45.8%, 45%, almost 46%, It's paid by the top 1%.
So the top 1% pays 45 to 46% of all federal taxes.
Now, that makes the interesting question of what does the bottom 95% pay?
And the bottom 95%, amazingly...
Pays a record low of 34.4% of the taxes.
Wow! So, let's think about this for a minute.
If you look at taxes, what they're telling us is that the top 1% pays almost half of the total.
The bottom, 95%, pays 34%.
So actually, if you add up those two numbers, you can find out what the next 4%.
In other words, there's a missing group here, the top 5%.
The top 5% excluding the top one.
And they pay a decent amount as well.
So... The remarkable thing here is we've been hearing non-stop rhetoric, the rich don't pay their fair share.
Wow! The rich seem to be paying a large portion of the entire take.
If you look at the pie, the top 1% is providing almost half the pie.
So, what is a fair share for people to pay?
Again, the people who keep talking about fair share never say what a fair share is.
They never outline what criteria go into determining what is fair.
Biden will typically often give just a single outrageous example.
Warren Buffett paid $18 in taxes one year.
Now, Warren Buffett has all kinds of deferred capital gains, There are all kinds of reasons why that could have happened.
Apparently, in one year, Trump paid a very low rate of taxes, but then the next year, he paid a giant amount.
And so, we're not talking about people whose income fluctuates from year to year.
Their deductions change tremendously.
And so, these kinds of anecdotes are used to create a completely misleading picture.
What we're looking at is what the rich people in general pay.
Hey, if you make $200,000 a year, $500,000, $1 million, $10 million, what do you pay in taxes and what is it right for you to pay?
So we need to have a discussion about taxes in the country, but if you're going around saying or if you've allowed someone to convince you that the rich don't pay their fair share, the latest data from the IRS shows otherwise.
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Guys, my guest today needs no introduction.
He is my son-in-law, Brandon Gill.
He is the founder of DC Inquirer.
He's running for Congress in Texas Congressional District 26.
His website, brandongillforcongress.com, brandongillforcongress.com.
So check it out. Brandon, great to have you.
I know that things have been insanely busy on the campaign trail, and I want to talk to you about that and about one thing in particular.
But let me ask you about a couple things going on in the news.
Finally, after some mishaps, Mayorkas has in fact been impeached by the House.
And now Marjorie Taylor Greene and I think it's maybe Crane are going to be the impeachment managers for Mayorkas in the Senate.
Now, there's some people in the media who go, well, what's the point of all this because he's not going to be convicted in the Senate where the Democrats have a majority?
And that may be so, but it seems to me that there's still great value in having this case before the American people.
Do you agree? What do you think is the benefit of prosecuting an impeachment even if you don't get him out of there?
Great. First of all, thanks for having me on.
You know, it was kind of a disgrace that we didn't impeach Mayorkas even years ago, much less last week, whenever the vote failed.
I'm just happy to see that Republicans can finally get something done in the House.
I can't think of anybody better than MTG and Eli Crane to take this to the Senate.
So I'm really excited to see that, for one.
But this is a good example.
Some of the pushback against the impeachment here is a good example of old-school Republicanism still being alive and well.
I talk on the campaign trail a lot about how we've got a Republican Party that's still living in the past.
We're still living as if we're in the 1980s.
What we need to do here is not just impeach Mayorkas.
I think we need to be prosecuting him.
But whether we're able to do anything in the Senate here or not...
We need to drag this guy's name through the mud because he certainly deserves it.
We need to do everything we can to hang up Joe Biden's open borders policies.
The Democrats impeached President Trump with no evidence whatsoever, and that did a lot of damage to his ability to push forward his agenda.
Now, he fought through that.
He fought through it valiantly and really well, but that was their goal, and I think that should be our goal with Joe Biden.
I mean, it seems to me also, Brandon, that with the way in which the media tries to cover up for the Biden regime, there's a big benefit here to staging a trial in the Senate, which there's no way the New York Times doesn't cover that.
There's no way that they can't show what's being put up on the screen.
It forces Democrats to take a vote on this.
And of course, if they vote the party line and they vote against impeachment, in a sense, they're ratifying Biden's open border in front of the American public for all to see.
So it seems to me that there is political value in doing this, but you couldn't be more right about the traditional Republicans.
I mean, I heard Ken Buck, whom I've had on the podcast, and he's like, well, first of all, Mayorkas is only an operative.
He's only doing the will of Biden.
In a sense, what they're saying is that, you know, I guess he's the hit man.
Well, maybe so.
But quite honestly, that that's only a case for impeaching Biden also.
And if you penalize the guy who organized the heist or organized the hit, you also want to get the hitman.
The hitman is part of the scheme.
The hitman is the guy who enables the scheme to be carried out.
So it's very hard for me to grasp these kinds of nuanced technical arguments that people like Buck are making, which are a recipe for not doing anything.
Well, I think that's the whole point, is all of this is just a really good, I think a poor excuse, but what they think is a good excuse for doing nothing.
If they can say, we can't get anything done here, the Senate's not going to take it up, why impeach him?
And to your point, the whole point of this is to put these people on record supporting open borders.
And it's to drag people before Congress or before the Senate, make them answer for what they're doing, throw them under subpoena, build a case against them.
Maybe we can use that later once we get Trump back in the White House and we have a Republican DOJ. But if there's no opposition to this, even, you know, it's one thing to fight and lose, to fight like crazy and go down swinging.
That's at least honorable. It's another to just completely capitulate to the left and say we're gonna lose anyway So why even bother and that's what these Republicans are doing and that is so shameful And that's why a lot of Republicans a lot of Republican voters are just sick of the party Because we've got to get people who are actually gonna fight back against the left Brandon do you agree that the Republican
Expulsion of Santos George Santos was a huge blunder I mean, I thought it was bad at the time.
It's now quite obvious that this has now resulted in a transfer of a seat to the Democrats.
They just won the special election.
And so it's one thing if you have a 40-seat majority and you want the luxury of saying, hey, we got this guy.
He's a kook. He's a con man.
And so we're going to toss him out into the street.
But when you have a razor-thin majority, the Democrats control the Senate.
They have the White House.
It takes those three to make a law.
I mean, to do something like this seems to me to show no comprehension of the overall crisis that the country is in, and yet it just seems so characteristic of the Republican Party.
Exactly. It's politically suicidal, and it does make you seriously question, for the people who voted to oust George Santos, which side are these guys on?
I mean, if you're a Republican and you know, which we did, that we have a razor-thin majority.
We are having a hard time getting anything done because our majority is so slim.
The last thing you would want to do is oust a member of the Republican Party in the House in a district that is highly likely to flip blue.
And they knew that all along, that if they get rid of Santos, most likely a Democrat is going to take his place.
And now we're seeing that.
But this is, again, reminiscent of a Republican Party that would rather be polite, that would rather have good looks, look good and look nice and look kind and look like you have good manners while the country is burning to the ground.
That's what this Republican Party is, the Republicans who voted to oust George Santos.
And we have got to move beyond that because our country is being taken from us and we can't have Republicans who are capitulating like this, just handing our country over to the left.
And that's what we did with the George Santos seat.
It's disgraceful. I mean, look, you got a chronic liar, Adam Schiff.
The Democrats will defend him.
You've got Ilhan Omar who will say things like, I'm actually a Somalian.
Somali interests come first for me, and she's okay.
Menendez in the Senate from New Jersey has gold bars in his house.
He's being paid off, apparently, by a bunch of Egyptians and others.
He's under multiple indictments, but the Democrats will defend him because they know they have a razor-thin majority in the Senate.
And so you'd think that Republicans would be like, look, if our enemies are acting this way, they're showing no scruples at all.
We're going to have to be able to fight fire with fire.
And I think that's the message that you're saying, that that's what we need to do.
Let's talk about your race a little bit.
It's a crowded field.
you've got 10 or 11 guys in the race, you're the only one who is standing up and saying that from the border to crime to dismantling the police state that you're going to go and be a fighter and amazingly there is now a massively funded sort of Democrat slash never Trump campaign against you. Massive TV The ad buys against you.
And what I find so telling is that this is a sort of a shady hidden group that's doing this.
And it's not that they're paid for by one of the other candidates.
In fact, they don't say who they want people to vote for other than you.
It's sort of like anybody but Brandon Gill.
Talk a little bit about this campaign.
Tell people what it's about.
And then I want to ask, why you?
Why are they targeting you?
Right. Well, first of all, I'll start with why they're targeting me.
It's because I've been endorsed by President Trump.
I've been endorsed by Senator Cruz.
I've been endorsed by the House Freedom Caucus.
And I've been very clear that I'm going to be a member of the Freedom Caucus on day one.
I'm clearly the conservative fighter in this race.
There's no doubt about that.
And that's why all those people have endorsed me.
Now, what's happened is we've seen over a million dollars of outside money come pouring into this race really out of nowhere.
And you're right, this is dark money.
These people won't put their names on it.
What we think this is, is this is the never-Trumpers.
These are the people who tried to take Trump down and they couldn't do it.
Trump is going to be our nominee and they know it and they don't like it.
So now that Trump is the nominee, they've got money to spend and they're going to spend it against anybody who's even remotely aligned with President Trump.
Like I said, I've been endorsed by President Trump.
I endorsed President Trump myself on the first day of my campaign.
I am the MAGA candidate.
I am the Trump guy and I'm proud of that.
I'm not going to back down from that.
But the Never Trumpers don't like it.
The big swamp DC super PAC monies, they don't like it.
So they're coming in hot against me.
Now, like you said, they're not even in favor of any other candidate in this race.
They're the Never Brandons now.
They're coming in against me.
So we're going to lean into this and we're going to fight back.
We're going to fight hard against these guys and we're not backing down for one second.
And we're going to beat them. This is MAGA versus the establishment.
It's the people versus the Uniparty.
And this race now, Texas 26, is ground zero for the fight of President Trump against the establishment.
And I'll tell you what, President Trump's side, which I'm going to represent to the death, we're going to win.
Yeah. I mean, in a way, it's an amazing phenomenon because it's kind of now a race in which people are voting up and down on Brandon Gill.
It's almost like the other candidates have vanished into insignificance.
Nobody really cares. It's like, are you for Brandon or are you against Brandon?
If you get over 51% on March 5th, You are the nominee.
No runoff. It's just going to be you.
And it looks like that's what the Never Trumpers are trying to do.
Block you from becoming the straight out winner.
Force you into a runoff with anybody other than Brandon.
What I want to also highlight is the deceit of the ad.
Because they're making it sound like they're showing images of crime and violence.
And they say Brandon Gill is for defunding the police.
So let me ask you straight out.
Are you for defunding the police?
No. No, absolutely not.
And you're right. They're spreading just flagrant lies about me, saying that I want to defund the police.
They know that's not true.
I've been a big supporter of law enforcement, always have, always will.
But what I will tell you is I do want to defund the FBI, and I've been very clear about that.
The FBI, as we highlighted in police state, has been weaponized against conservatives.
It's been weaponized against Christians.
It's been weaponized against pro-lifers.
So I absolutely want to take the knife to the FBI, and I'm going to fight to do that.
I'm not going to back down.
But what they're doing is they're just spreading flagrant lies against me.
They know that. Saying I want to defund the police is a total joke.
I mean, Brandon, I'm just, I mean, first of all, you've been running an exemplary campaign.
I'm glad that you're pulling together the resources to fight back because so often in a short campaign, you can have these sort of blatant lies, but they go out with massive TV buys.
They're on the radio.
and so that what they try to do is spread confusion before the actual truth has a chance to catch up. So it's really important to body slam the lies right away so that the district knows that you're the Trump guy, you're pro-police, yeah you're against the police state, but that's a whole different thing and I think you're the man to do it. Guys if you want to help Brandon please contribute to his campaign. Here's the website to check it
out brandongillforcongress.com Thank you, Brandon, for joining me.
Yep. Thanks for having me on.
I am continuing my discussion of the case for Douglas, and the book we're talking about is Harry Jaffa's Crisis of the House Divided.
I mentioned last time that before the Civil War, the big conflict in the United States was the war over Texas, the Mexican-American War.
And this is the war that extended the boundary of Texas from the Nooses River all the way down to the Rio Grande.
And this was a war that Douglass supported.
and he supported the entry of Texas into the Union, but he also supported the entrance of new northern territories into the Union.
So for Douglas, it wasn't just about Texas.
A lot of the Whigs, including Henry Clay, including a young Abraham Lincoln, they were very skeptical about Texas because they were like, we don't want to add a slave state.
But Douglas' point was, we want to enlarge the physical boundaries of America.
America is not going to be secure.
Imagine, let's say the United States begins at the Atlantic Ocean with the eastern seaboard for all the way from Maine down to Florida and then as you stretch out west the United States stops at Indiana.
Or you have southern states but as you push west it stops at Texas.
That only means that, or what it meant in the 19th century, is that European powers would continue to control the rest of America.
See this is what Douglas had no stomach for.
Douglass' point is, we've got to push those European powers out.
They're bad news for us.
Yes, we are descended from those same Europeans.
Yes, we have a civilization based on Athens and Jerusalem.
But on the other hand, Europe is also the place of absolute monarchies, of despotism, of suppression of civil liberties.
And so, Europe is characterized by monarchy in the political realm and aristocracies and then by superstition in the religious realm because you have established churches all over Europe.
Including England, we in the United States have a different kind of system, so we want our system to spread on this continent.
This was Douglas.
So, Douglas, in a way, had a vision of a larger America that was brought, in part, was partly realized by the Texas War, by the War over Mexico, but it was also realized by...
By the Gadsden Purchase, by the addition of California, to the Union, by Oregon, and ultimately Washington State.
So the United States didn't quite double in size, but added like 35-40% of new territory.
The United States just physically became a lot bigger.
Now, the key point for Douglass is this.
Let's remember that in simply acquiring new territory, the United States in this sense was no different than, say, the Roman Empire.
The Roman Empire would extend its boundaries.
The Roman Empire, of course, began in Italy, but it spread south, it spread north, it conquered large parts of Europe.
It extended itself even into Asia.
And for the Romans, there was a center, Rome, and there was a periphery.
And the periphery was the provinces, and the provinces were ruled with an iron hand.
Rome was superior.
Rome was calling the shots.
Roman citizens, it was very hard to get Roman citizenship, wasn't automatic for the people in the provinces.
And so they were second-class citizens, and in some cases they were gladiators and they were slaves.
Now the point is, Douglas didn't want any of this.
Douglas recognized that when you add territory to the United States, whether it is territory added by purchase or by choice or even by force, as in the case of extending the boundaries of Texas, however you get it, the people that come into the United States are full citizens the same as everybody else.
So in other words, just because you're a new territory, that you're not a second class citizen.
It's not that the existing citizens get preferential status over you.
So... The point is that states are admitted on the basis of equality.
The new states will have two senators just like the old states do.
The appropriation, the number of congressional representatives depends on size, depends on population.
So this is sort of Douglass's grand vision.
It is bringing in new territories, allowing them to become states and join the United States.
So you might say expanding abroad is carrying the torch of liberty as far as you possibly can.
This is what Douglass wanted to do.
And Douglass said... That slavery is going to be the obstacle that is preventing us from doing this.
So for Douglass, the slavery issue was important, but has to be seen as part of this larger vision.
And the larger vision was, if we can figure out a way to settle the slavery question, Figure out a formula that doesn't pull the country apart, that doesn't sort of rend the north from the south, that doesn't lead to massive bloodshed.
Then what we can do is we allow the expansion of the physical boundaries of the United States to create an empire of liberty.
Now true, in an empire of liberty, you might have states and you might even have some new territories that become states that decide to keep slavery.
But here's Douglass' kind of triumphant argument, or an argument that he thought was his winning argument, and that is, we are doing even that by the consent of the governed.
So if you look at the Declaration of Independence, all men are created equal.
People love to quote that part, and of course, that is an anti-slavery assertion right there, because of course, if all men are created equal, then one man does not have the right to rule another man without his consent.
We'll see this is the cornerstone of Lincoln's argument, that there is something contradictory to be professing liberty on the one hand, professing the Declaration saying that all men are created equal, and then what you do is you have the rule, the iron rule of one man over another.
But if you keep reading the Declaration of Independence, it doesn't just have the principle that all men are created equal.
That is a key principle.
But there's another one that is often overlooked.
Not, by the way, overlooked by Abraham Lincoln.
He knew it was there.
He knew he had to contend with it.
But this is the centerpiece of Douglass, and that is consent of the governed.
And for Douglass, what this meant is that whenever you have rules, including rules about taxation, about foreign policy, about slavery, about pretty much anything else, anything important...
You settle those rules through referenda, through democracy, through letting the people decide, through the consent of the governed.
And it's better to have rules settled at the local level.
Why? Because in a big country, and Douglas wanted the United States to be a very big country...
It doesn't mean that one size fits all.
There may be certain questions, Douglas agreed, and the founders agreed, that would be purely federal.
There might be other questions that are state questions and local questions.
And Douglas's point was, it makes sense on a topic where people disagree.
Nobody disagrees that you need to defend the national boundaries of the country.
That makes more sense to be a federal responsibility.
On the other hand, says Douglas, people disagree about slavery.
And they disagree not just because they have different moral values.
They disagree because conditions are different.
Slavery makes more economic sense over here and not over there.
So it's not that the people who are anti-slavery in northern provinces have more moral depth than people, let's say, in Oklahoma or South Carolina.
It's that in Oklahoma and South Carolina, you can grow stuff.
And slavery turns out to be very tempting because of the economic benefits it promises.
And so the citizens of those states are likely to vote to keep it because it is, in fact, vital to their economies.
So, Douglas' point is that popular sovereignty, the idea of letting communities and states decide for themselves themselves, Fits into this larger picture of the expansion of America that is an empire of liberty.
Here, by the way, is Daniel Webster.
He says, Texas is likely to be a slave-holding country.
He says, I shall do nothing to favor or encourage its further extension.
He means to further extend the domain of the slave states.
This is Daniel Webster continuing.
Slavery as it exists in the states is beyond the reach of Congress.
So Daniel Webster admits that where slavery is already there, there's nothing Congress can do.
This has been so since the founding.
This is a compromise that was allowed from the beginning.
But, says Webster, I'm now quoting, but when we come to admit new states, the subject assumes an entirely different aspect.
Our rights and duties then are both different.
And then he says, and this is a summation of Whig policy that Abraham Lincoln was on board with, I believe it to be for the interest and happiness of the whole union to remain as it is without diminution and without addition.
Wow! So here's Daniel Webster, and even though he is a great statesman, he wanted the United States to be the way it was in the mid-19th century.
And by the way, it was in the mid-19th century.
It wasn't all that different from the way it was in the founding.
And that's Daniel Webster's point.
the founders gave us a small America. He didn't see it as small, but of course it's small compared to America now. And Webster's like, we don't want to subtract from it. We don't want people breaking away from the United States, but we don't want people adding to it either.
And if Webster's view had prevailed, and also Lincoln's view at the time, Texas would now not be part of America, it would remain part of Mexico, or it would be an independent country.
Some people say that's a better idea.
But nevertheless, and all of the United States West of Texas, and all of the Northwest, or at least a good part of the Northwest, not all of it, would nevertheless be...
It's impossible to say what it would be today.
But what we do know is it would not be part of the United States of America.
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