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Feb. 28, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
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STANDOFF Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep779
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Coming up, I'll make the case for why House Speaker Mike Johnson should hold the line on Ukraine funding.
I'll discuss the latest developments in the Fannie Willis disqualification case.
And author and radio host Todd Stearns joins me.
We're going to talk about his new book on whether America can be saved.
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.
House Speaker Mike Johnson is back in town.
Congress is back in town.
And with that, more money for Ukraine is back on the agenda.
So there was just a meeting at the White House.
And Chuck Schumer was there, Joe Biden was there, Mitch McConnell was there, and House Speaker Mike Johnson was there.
And you can imagine who is the holdout man in this group, Mike Johnson.
Why? Because all the other guys were there to cajole, to convince, to pressure, to browbeat Mike Johnson into at the very least having a vote in the House on Ukraine funding and ideally from their point of view supporting this Ukraine funding. Now Mike Johnson did not relent.
He left the meeting and he said, look, I'm going to work with you guys about figuring out a way to avert a government shutdown.
But, and this was a very big but, I continue to insist that before we're taking care of other people's problems and other people's borders, let's address the very serious problems we have here, most notably our own porous and open border.
Now, this is a way of Mike Johnson basically saying that the Joe Biden scheme to pull a fast one on the border, which is to, in a sense, change the law by saying, in effect, okay, we'll let up to 5,000 illegals in a day, and when the number hits 5,000, a kind of alarm bell goes off, and then we start shutting the border down.
We're not going to fall for this.
Biden has the authority to shut the border down now, not allowing 5,000 in, letting nobody in at all.
And that authority was exercised in various ways in the Trump years.
Biden has the authority to exercise it.
And yet he hasn't done it.
And the problem has reached completely scandalous proportions.
Now, there's a kind of a weakness in Mike Johnson's argument because he's not saying...
As I think you should say, that we're not going to be giving Ukraine this money, period.
And then you would get into a substantive debate about whether or not it's a good idea to give more money to Ukraine.
And the argument for giving more money to Ukraine is we've got to stop these Ukrainians from dying.
There are casualties going on in the battlefield.
We have to get the money, otherwise Putin is going to win Ukraine.
The problem with this is that, first of all, Putin is winning.
Second of all, Putin has taken large parts of Ukraine and there seems to be absolutely no prospect of Ukraine getting those places back.
Third, the real question when you have a weak opponent, Ukraine, fighting a very strong opponent, Putin, is even if you prop up Ukraine, isn't it the case?
Isn't it a foregone conclusion that Putin will win the war and therefore the chances are that more people in Ukraine will die because we're prolonging a fight that should be settled by negotiation and that can be settled by negotiation and it has been the West and the CIA and Western intelligence agencies that have been in a sense provoking this fight
between the little dog Ukraine and the elephant which is Russia.
Now Mike Johnson has focused on, you could call it an issue of priorities, which is maybe Ukraine deserves the money.
I'm not saying I'm not going to agree to put a vote on this or even support Ukraine funding, but we need border action first.
And guess what?
I think it looks like, from media reports, that Joe Biden might actually take unilateral action to improve the situation on the border.
In other words, to put more border restrictions.
Now, will he go all the way?
And restore the Trump policies?
I doubt it. But it looks like Biden is going to take some action.
And I think that is A, to protect himself politically, because this is an issue on which he's been hemorrhaging support among the American people.
But the other reason is to be able to run back to Mike Johnson and say, Okay, see?
I've taken unilateral action on the border.
Now you have to put the Ukraine bill to a vote.
So this is a way of trying to force Mike Johnson's hand.
Now, I find it really interesting that when Joe Biden was pushing this notion of a new law with a 5,000 illegals per day allowance, you could call it, when he was doing that, the press was united in its affirmation that there's nothing Joe Biden can do about the border.
They were just repeating Joe Biden's talking points, which is Give me the authority to shut down the border and I will.
But now that Biden says he's going to do it anyway, the press is like, oh, Joe Biden has the authority to shut the border down.
So, again, do you see how utterly shameless these people are?
For days, if not weeks, they've been telling us that Biden needs a new law because even as the president, he cannot shut the border down.
And now that Biden says he can, they're like, oh, yes, he can.
So suddenly their position changes.
Now, do you think that the press is going to give any explanation of how they went from here to there?
Did they change their mind?
Was there some error of reasoning that they made before that they've now corrected?
No. This is the definition of pure propaganda.
Pure propaganda is, I say it's Tuesday...
And tomorrow, it's going to be Wednesday, but if you come along and change your position, the Biden administration, you say, no, no, tomorrow's Friday, I'm going to say it's Friday.
And I'm going to insist it's Friday, and I'm going to forget the fact that I said something entirely different just yesterday.
So, unfortunately, we are now in a public culture where this kind of dishonesty is happening.
It has become normalized, and that makes it very difficult for us to have honest political debate because we are swimming in a mainstream media of untruths.
Lots of instability around the world, elections in Taiwan, conflict in Ukraine, North Korea on the brink, Iran increasing its aggression.
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The national soap opera involving Fannie Willis and Nathan Wade continues.
There was a hearing...
In Judge McAfee's courtroom yesterday, and it is going to be picked up on March 1st, which is Friday.
And so the agenda for yesterday was the testimony of this guy named Terrence Bradley.
Terrence Bradley is a friend of Nathan Wade, and the question was whether or not Terrence Bradley would We're good to go.
We were not romantically involved when I, Fannie Willis, gave this assignment to Nathan Wade to be the special prosecutor of Trump and the other defendants.
At that time, we knew each other, but we were just acquaintances.
And only later did we become romantically involved.
That's the official story, and that's the story that's been given in court.
That's what Nathan Wade told the judge.
That's what Fannie Willis told the judge.
So the issue is were they being truthful because if they're not being truthful you now have a serious problem Which is you have judicial officers lying in a court and that is not just problematic from the point of view of the current Case against Trump and the other defendants it has to do with the fact that the first of all it's it's against the law It's against the judicial code. It can lead to disbarment.
It can lead to imprisonment It can lead to ethical sanctions by the bar.
And so this is, in fact, a very serious matter.
Now, this guy, Terrence Bradley, had been communicating with Ashley Merchant, who is the attorney for Mike Roman.
Mike Roman is the guy who brought all this out.
He's an opposition researcher.
And I saw a funny post on social media, which I showed Debbie to the effect of, hey, listen, if you're going to indict Mike Roman, be a little careful because this is the guy who knows to get the goods on you.
And sure enough, he has gotten the goods on Fannie Willis.
Think about it. It's Mike Roman and not the Trump people who dug out all this dirt, if you call it that, on Nathan Wade and Fannie Willis.
But Terrence Bradley is, as I said, a buddy of Nathan Wade.
And so he gets up there on the stand, and if you expected or I expected him to come clean and go, yes, Your Honor, I'm...
It is a fact that these guys were involved beforehand.
Clearly, this guy Bradley was trying to protect his friend.
And so he went into the great, I don't remember mode.
I don't recall.
I think I might have been speculating.
I don't really know why I said that.
All this kind of evasion.
And we've seen this evasion in other contexts.
I mean, it's kind of like when a cop busts a guy who's been robbing a store, he's like, oh, I didn't do it.
It wasn't me. Or Jason got the wrong guy.
No, no, no. This might be in my pocket, but I was just putting it there.
I meant to pay for it.
This is basically the atmosphere.
And so for a judge, and judges are, you know, they're trained in being able to see through this kind of thing, you would think that Judge McAfee was getting the picture.
But there was one moment in the testimony of Terrence Bradley that was really revealing.
And this was the moment in which the lawyers who were cross-examining Bradley, They pull out a text that he sent to Ashley Merchant, the lawyer for Mike Roman.
And he admitted. He goes, yeah, these guys were involved before...
They were involved in 2021.
And they say they were only involved in 2022.
And so this text...
First of all, he pretended like, I don't remember.
What text are you talking about?
So they were like, okay... He said, I don't really know.
And so they're like, okay, pull out your phone.
You have the phone on your own.
You have the text on your own phone.
And so the text was presented to him.
And you can see Nathan, you can see Terrence Bradley reading the text.
And then he says a single word.
Dang. Dang.
What does that word mean?
What it means is, shoot, oops, you got me.
The truth comes out.
The cat is out of the bag.
And so if you heard the dang, it sort of gave the whole game away.
And I'm quite sure the judge heard the dang.
I'm quite sure the judge knows really what's going on.
But still...
In order to issue his opinion, the judge is going to want, I think, to have a smoking gun.
And a smoking gun isn't going to be the guy said dang.
Even when Fannie Willis said that she reimbursed Nathan Wade for all these trips they took together, reimbursed him in cash.
I mean, think about it. You're reimbursing someone for flights, for cruises, in cash.
It doesn't make any sense.
No person would really do this.
It's implausible. It's ridiculous.
But yet, you can't prove that she didn't.
So, the judge is going to want to find something that he can sort of hang his judicial hat on.
And I think I know what that something is.
Again, there are a lot of things that create grounds for suspicion.
Here's a simple one.
Fannie Willis, well, geo-tracking shows that Nathan Wade made 35 visits to Fannie Willis' condo before the so-called relationship started.
35 visits! At least two of those were in the middle of the night.
And here is what I want to draw attention to.
2,000 calls and 12,000 texts between Wade and Willis in 2021.
Now, I don't see any way.
Look at, just do the math.
It works out to about six texts a day.
A day. Now, if these guys are just acquaintances, that's not going to happen.
There is no way.
And so, my advice to Judge McAfee is really simple.
Demand to see the text.
And I think what you're going to see in the text is certainly one thing and probably two.
The one thing is going to be just a lot of romantic talk between the two of them, and there you go.
They're romantically involved.
Case closed. They've been lying to the court and they need to face up to the implications of that, which at the very least involves disqualifying the two of them from the case, at the very least.
Not to mention referring it to the bar, referring it to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, referring it to the Attorney General. I mean, there's all kinds of things that could come out of this. And so Fannie Willis is in a lot of trouble here. But the second thing that could possibly come out of the text, discussions about Trump, plotting against Trump, schemes to get That would be the bonanza, the sort of judicial manna from heaven.
That's the red meat that would blow this whole thing sky high.
And so, I think that...
There should be now a supreme effort.
Not just, by the way, on the part of the judge.
He needs to see the text.
But we do, too.
It would be really good to have the text made public so that we could now see, first of all, what scheming liars we're dealing with.
People of low character, utterly dishonest, who are in a political hit scheme against the former president of the United States.
And wouldn't it be great if he's the one that has the last laugh?
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I'm really delighted to welcome to the podcast, a good friend, Todd Starnes.
He's a best-selling author, nationally syndicated radio host.
He spent a long career, 15 years at Fox News Channel.
He is also the owner of KWAM News Talk in Memphis, and he's the author of seven books, the new book, Twilight's Last Gleaming, Can America Be Saved?
saved.
Todd, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
This is a little bit of an ominous title, but I think it matches the ominousness, if I can put it that way, of our situation.
Can you begin maybe by outlining where, give us a little map of where the country is so we know the problem that the book sets out to solve?
Dinesh, first of all, thank you for having me on this show, and I'm a huge fan.
Read all of your stuff, and it's interesting.
One of my favorite books in the Bible is tucked away, and it's in the Minor Prophets, the book of Habakkuk, which really describes and I think illustrates the situation that we're in as a country.
But I went back, and when I go back and read Dinesh D'Souza books, I realize you're kind of like a modern-day minor prophet, Dinesh, so maybe we need to have the book of Dinesh.
Don't give me any ideas.
But it really is.
I mean, you know, the things that you talk about and the things that I write about, we're living in some very precarious times.
And I go back and...
I'm a big fan of Ronald Reagan, and as a matter of fact, the book is based on a speech that Reagan gave many years ago about our national anthem.
And he said, our national anthem actually asks a series of questions.
It doesn't start out with this declarative statement, is the flag still flying?
Do we still have our freedom?
Is it still there? And when you tie that in with another speech Reagan gave about how our freedom is not passed along in the bloodline, in the bloodstream, that every generation has to fight for our freedom, I think that's where we are as a country right now.
We've had a couple of generations that have not been fighting for our freedom.
And I think we are seeing the ramifications of that, the results of that.
When you look at the culture wars that are being fought right now, the race wars that are being waged in this country, I think it's a direct result of what's being taught in the classroom.
So again, going back into our history and looking back at You know, for example, the 1960s, when William F. Buckley Jr.
wrote the incredible book, God and Man at Yale, when he launched what became the Young America's Foundation, and what was the issue of the day?
And that's just the same issue that we are fighting today, because when you put all the puzzle pieces together, why are we shutting down churches?
Why are we shutting down religious liberty?
Why have our schools become indoctrination centers for far-leftist policies?
Well, it's very clear that we're fighting the same enemy that we were fighting back in the 1960s, and that enemy is communism.
Well, yes it is, and yet there was a moment toward the turn of the century when it seemed like that battle had been won, the Soviet Union collapsed, people had talked about the end of communism, the end of Marxism, and it looked like there was going to be a spread of freedom worldwide.
I think what's really interesting is that not only have the unfree countries like China, North Korea, and Iran kind of hung on to their unfreedom, but now the free countries seem to be moving away from the idea of free speech.
They've long given up the idea of unfettered free markets.
They are introducing concepts like increasing social control, technological surveillance, all this stuff that is moving us in the Chinese direction rather than, as some people had hoped, the other way around.
I think you're right.
And again, it goes back to what's been happening in the classroom.
And I write about this in the book, that really this is where the fight is being had.
Because our public education system, the taxpayer-funded education system, I believe is what's driving this radical change in our country, which is it's not natural.
You know, some of these changes in thinking on the big culture issues of the day It's not some sort of a natural progression.
These are being forced, hoisted on the young people.
And, you know, people seem to be surprised that we're having a battle over pronouns right now in the workplace.
But these are kids who are indoctrinated in those classrooms, and now they're in leadership positions in many companies, many organizations around the country.
But I do want to say, as ominous as the title is, the subtitle does offer a lot of hope.
Can America be saved?
And I believe America can be saved.
And, Dinesh, we have a lot of fun in the book.
People who've read my books in the past know I like to have fun.
I've got a great chapter title.
Jack and Jill went up the hill, came down gender neutral.
We also do a fun spoof on CNN covering the rapture, which is probably my favorite chapter in the book.
And I think, Todd, you're right, that an upbeat and a spirit that is optimistic and looks to a better future is, in fact, the way to go.
I mean, we can see in so many areas that if you adopt a defeatist attitude, let's say, for example, you tell people, I don't see any way that the 2024 election is going to be fair.
Well, the conclusion that a lot of people will draw is, well, maybe then there's no point in me voting because the system is already rigged.
And so, in a way, the cheaters achieve their objective without even having to cheat because the mere announcement that they intend to cheat achieves the purpose sufficiently.
So I think this is very much the right spirit.
And yet, we have to acknowledge that so many of our institutions, even institutions that we thought of previously as being right-leaning, I'm thinking of here the FBI, the military, the Boy Scouts, it seems like one after the other, our institutions have succumbed to the left, whereas their hold on their institutions has only become stronger.
I think that's a great observation, and I write about that in the first chapter of the book, Darth Brandon and the Temple of Doom.
Going back to that infamous speech that Biden delivered in Philadelphia with the Nazi-esque interior design work there, it was very odd.
But you're right. Going back and looking at what's happening, especially in the Pentagon and the military, which has become so woke, and I hear from so many veterans on our radio program, and they're just incredibly concerned and disturbed about military preparedness.
Well, when did that start?
You have to go back to the Barack Hussein Obama administration when he fired more generals than any other president, at least in modern American history.
And the intent there was to, I believe, was to physically remove patriotic, red-blooded American military men and women and replace them with people who share the ideology of Barack Obama.
So look, I think the lesson here, Dinesh, is that Republicans have to learn how to fight.
We've got to be happy warriors, right?
We can't adapt the tactics of the left.
We don't burn down city blocks.
We don't do that. But at the same time, that doesn't mean we have to sit there and just do nothing.
We've got to fight.
And one of the ways we can fight is going and voting on Election Day.
And as the stats prove, most conservatives and most evangelical Christians are simply not voting on election day, and that's a big problem.
Why do you think that is? Is it because you would think that people would...
You know, there was a time, I suppose for most of my adult lifetime, when the country seemed to be in reasonably good shape.
People didn't have to pay that much attention to politics.
A lot of our most serious problems appeared to be with adversaries abroad, and that's not something that the ordinary guy can do much about on a day-to-day basis.
But now when you see the infestation, the illegals kind of spreading out throughout the country, you see escalation of crime, you see problems of fentanyl, trial trafficking, drugs.
I mean, this stuff is affecting people right where they live.
And so the idea that they would say, oh, well, you know, I'm just not going to vote because it's too much trouble for me to do it, just to get out there and cast my vote, almost appears to be It makes no sense to me.
Why wouldn't people be more up in arms if it is a fact that their lives are so affected by politics?
You know, one of my favorite times at Fox News, we would have the fresh hires right out of college, and most of them, Lord love them, were liberal as the day is long, until they got their first couple of paychecks to Nash, and they started asking questions.
Well, wait a second, what's FICA? Who is that?
And What's this state income tax I've got to pay?
And what is this city income tax I've got to pay?
And it was interesting to watch that progression from liberal to conservative as they realized that the leftist policies were impacting their bank accounts.
And I think that's a lot of it is education.
We don't do a good job of that in the conservative movement.
And one of the reasons I love YAF, you know, they may not be, you know, partay kind of, you know, a group, but they're educating next generation voters.
And I think that's an important thing to do.
I mean, you can have fun in doing that, but we've got to educate next generation voters.
A complete missed opportunity is happening right now in Chicago's South Side.
Where you have disenfranchised black voters, generational black Democrat voters, and now they are being shoved aside to accommodate the illegal aliens.
If I were in charge of the RNC, I would be planting my flag in Chicago's South Side right now and recruiting lots of new people into the conservative way of thinking.
So we've got a lot of work to do just by reaching out and making those connections and letting people know what it means to be a conservative.
Are you optimistic, Todd, that with this new incoming regime at the RNC, I mean, it seems like Rona McDaniel was a complete dud.
In the few dealings I had with the RNC, I found them to be worse than useless.
And I thought to myself, how odd it is, because here I'm making films, it's a form of messaging.
Our investors are paying for the film, so it doesn't cost the RNC anything.
They don't have the capability to make anything even remotely close to this.
You'd think they would at least want to help get the message out, but no.
No interest whatsoever.
It's almost like you're in a battle, and the generals who are organizing our team aren't interested in fighting at all.
And so it's beyond laughable.
And so I know that Laura Trump and this guy Michael Watley, I guess, from North Carolina, I don't know much about that guy.
Do you have any sense of whether we can expect something better from that?
I mean, it's hard for me to see how things could get worse.
I really don't. I don't think it's going to get worse.
But again, when you're spending all this money on flowers and hairdos, you know what?
Go pick some flowers.
They're free. Go down to Supercuts.
They'll do a nice job for you.
And I'll put 10, 20 bucks.
Look, you know, we have to be fiscally conservative.
That's my whole thing is, you know, we're willing to spend out the wazoo, but we are supposed to be at least, at the very least, fiscal conservatives as Republicans.
I think this is going to be every man for himself, Dinesh.
I really do. And I hope that in this final four years of the Trump administration, that we are able to really focus on rethinking the way we do Republican politics in this country.
And we've really got to get back to the basics.
Because it's not a top-down problem.
I think all of the Republican groups around the country are dealing with these kinds of issues.
Would you also say, Todd, that long-term, this is not something that can be done in a year or four years, we have to also think about this problem of institutions, because I don't see a way to take the public schools back.
I don't see a way to take 300 left-wing universities back.
The media has gone from being biased, which is tilting one way, to brazen propaganda.
I mean, outright lies.
So, doesn't this really mean that long-term we have to build our own institutions that replace these institutions?
Because there are lots of people who, if you just leave your TV on because you're doing nothing all day, you're going to be getting a diet of propaganda one way or the other.
And so, don't we have a long-term task of building our own institution?
How would we even begin to go about that?
Yeah, I think we do.
And there are some people calling it a patriot economy.
I love that term.
I think we have to start supporting organizations that are fighting with us and not against us.
And that's, again, going to require a lot of work.
There are organizations like Timothy Plan.
And their whole mission, and they've been doing this for 30 years, is to help investors make sure they're not investing their money in companies that are supporting abortion, for example, or fighting against traditional marriage.
And the educational part of this is so vitally important, and I really believe a missed opportunity in the first administration of President Trump was not dismantling the Department of Education.
But we've got to get education back in the hands of local people.
I think if we're able to do that, we're going to be able to undo a lot of this.
But look at what happened at Harvard.
Money speaks.
Money ultimately speaks.
And I was very excited to see the pushback with all of the anti-Semitism.
And you had all these billionaires and millionaires pulling their funding.
My question is, okay, These schools are also anti-Christian.
So what are we doing about that?
And where are the Christian millionaires and billionaires?
And why aren't they engaged in that same level of activism?
So we've got to get away from this being terribly meek.
We're supposed to roar like lions.
Be gentle as the lamb, but we've got to roar like a lion.
That's what Adrian Rogers, the great pastor, used to say.
Great stuff, Todd.
The book, guys, is called Twilight's Last Gleaming, Can America Be Saved?
By the way, you can follow Todd Starnes on X, at Todd, T-O-D-D-S-T-A-R-N-E-S. Todd Starnes, thank you very much for joining me.
Thanks a lot, Dinesh, always fun.
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I'm now beginning the second and really critical portion of Harry Jaffa's great book, Crisis of the House Divided, and this is the section that is the case for Lincoln, the case for Lincoln.
And instead of just focusing on the text of the debates and looking at what Douglass said and what Lincoln said, here Jaffa does something that's a little different, and that is he takes us through the life of Lincoln and And specifically through a close analysis of some of Lincoln's early but great speeches.
Speeches whose full significance is not recognized.
And he does this with a very conscious purpose.
What is that purpose? Well, part of the purpose is to illuminate Lincoln, because Douglass, at the time of the debates, was already a well-known figure.
He was nationally recognized.
He had had a distinguished, in fact, a glittering career.
But Lincoln was coming kind of out of obscurity.
In fact, Jaffa writes, Was as undistinguished as Douglass's had been brilliant.
Lincoln became a skilled practitioner of the arts of party politics.
He was a ranking Whig in his home state.
But his record was that of a party faithful, a wheelhorse of the machine, adept in caucuses and smoke-filled rooms.
His most notable achievement was in securing the removal of the state capitol from Vandalia to Springfield.
Whoa! So Lincoln, in other words, was...
A little bit of an amateur compared to Douglas.
And yet, says Jaffa, when you listen to the incendiary charges that would be flung against Lincoln, this started with Douglas in 1858, but it continued in 1860, charges that came from the Calhoun camp in the South, but also from Northern Democrats.
Basically saying that Lincoln is a dictator.
Lincoln is a kind of Julius Caesar come to America.
Lincoln doesn't care about the Constitution.
He's willing to overthrow the constitutional scheme created by the framers.
That Lincoln has no respect for basic constitutional rights.
That Lincoln would risk plunging the whole country in the Civil War to satisfy his own base ambitions.
This is the full indictment of Lincoln.
We need to be aware of it.
And by the way, it's not an indictment of Lincoln that is just somehow ancient, something that people used to say in 1850 that has now gone away.
No, there's a considerable and articulate faction of people, and some of them on the right, mainly libertarian types, who think that, yeah, Lincoln was a dictator.
Lincoln suspended habeas corpus.
Lincoln unnecessarily plunged the country into civil war.
There could have been a compromise that could have averted that.
The effect of the Civil War was to magnify the size of government.
The reason we have big government today is all really because it goes back to Lincoln.
So, I don't know if you've heard all of this.
You might have heard some of it.
I'm quite familiar with all of it.
And so is Harry Jaffa.
Now, Jaffa is going to make a very subtle point here before he goes into Lincoln's life and early speeches, and that is he says that if you look at Lincoln's early speeches, in particular the Lyceum speech, but also the so-called temperance addressed, These are two early speeches by Lincoln, the Lyceum speech and the Temperance Address.
And Lincoln is, Jaffa argues, quite familiar with the problems of, you could call it, what happens when a great man is trying to change the course of events, is trying to steer the country not in an entirely new direction, because Lincoln is always going to insist that the direction he's steering the country is nothing
more than a realization of the principles that were put there by the founders at the outset.
And at the same time, though, it's got to be recognized that the founders allowed slavery.
Even though the founders said all men are created equal, some of the founders, George Washington included, Thomas Jefferson included, did have slaves.
So the founders in a sense have a gap.
Between the principles of anti-slavery, all men are created equal, and the practice of slavery that is not only going on among them, some of them, but it's also going on in parts of the country without being immediately removed or outlawed by the founding itself.
So Lincoln knows all this.
And so Lincoln is in a position where He wants to make, and he thinks the time is right to make, a big change.
That's what the Republican Party, by the way, is formed to do.
And yet, when you make a big change, people are going to say, well, who gave you the right to do that?
Well, yes, you're elected, but that doesn't give you a right to run roughshod over the Constitution.
So, In Lincoln's early speeches, the remarkable thing is they're not about slavery at all.
They are about other things.
The Temperance Address, for example, is all about alcohol.
There was a movement called the Temperance Movement.
It was all about basically stopping people from drinking.
And it was based upon denouncing alcohol, denouncing alcoholics, producing moral reform.
Incidentally, the anti-slavery movement grew out of the fervor, the moral fervor, produced by these sort of reform movements, including the temperance movement.
And so Lincoln is talking about powerful currents that are in the society then, But the way he talks about them is very illuminating because what Jaffa is going to argue is that Lincoln foresaw the kind of attacks that would come against him on slavery.
And he is giving us a way to think about those attacks.
He's doing a reflection on the meaning of popular government.
what does it mean to have our system of government, a constitutional republic, a constitutional democracy in which we are supposedly electing people who are better than us to rule us in our place, rule on our behalf and in our interest, a government of, by and for the people is how Lincoln would put it later in the Gettysburg Address.
So Jaffa is going to show us what Lincoln had to say really early in his life about these issues of popular government.
Thank you.
And Jaffa begins by saying that Lincoln knew that words matter a lot.
Ultimately, it may be that words are not enough, and in fact, sadly, one can look at the Civil War as what happens when words in the end fail.
There's nothing more to say.
They've already fired on Fort Sumter, and now we have nothing more to do other than to call up a militia from the north, and the Civil War is off and running.
Lincoln in the Gettysburg address says, The world will little note, nor long remember, What we say here, but it can never forget What they did here.
And what is Lincoln doing?
Well, rightly, he's focusing attention on the war dead.
And he's emphasizing that these are people who gave their lives for freedom.
But he does say, which is an odd thing to say, the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here.
But we remember.
We know the Gettysburg Address.
Many of us memorized it in school or in college.
And it is perhaps the most famous short speech of all time.
So, Lincoln is not being entirely straight when he goes, Oh yeah, no one's going to remember what I say.
I'm just giving a little speech.
Lincoln knows that...
That yes, there is the immortality of the deed, but there is also the immortality of the word.
And not only that, but the immortality of the word is necessary to preserve the immortality of the deed.
Let's say, for example, that there's a great battle, the Peloponnesian War, that is fought in the 5th century BC. How do we know about it?
Thucydides, the word.
The word preserves the deed.
If there were no word, if there was no Thucydides, how would we know about all the great deeds that were fought, all the great battles that were fought in ancient Greece?
We would not know.
How would we know about World War II, about Patton and about the landing at Normandy and the evasion of the Nazi forces at Dunkirk?
How would we know any of this?
The answer is, we need words to protect and preserve these things.
Now, the thing about Lincoln is that although Lincoln is very aware of the power of the word, in a way, Lincoln very artfully creates, and I'll talk more about this tomorrow, you could almost call it the Lincoln myth.
So when a lot of school children learn about Lincoln, it's that Lincoln was born in a log cabin.
Lincoln had a very humble beginning.
Lincoln came of age like chopping wood.
Now, what's interesting is that all of this is true, but it's not really the whole truth.
It's a partial truth, which means it is also partially an invention.
It's an invention of art.
It's almost as if Lincoln crafted a narrative of himself.
Lincoln is the original inventor of the log cabin idea of Lincoln.
Lincoln portrayed himself in a certain way.
Again, Lincoln isn't lying.
He did split logs. But on the other hand, he was also a lawyer.
He was also a congressman.
He was also making all kinds of deals.
He became fairly comfortable financially.
He was able to lend money, for example, to his brother who got into financial trouble.
So Lincoln is this rounded figure, but in his political storyline, he gives a kind of humble...
Story of upward mobility and presents himself as, I'm no different than any other American.
So this is part of the art of Lincoln.
He was, I think you'd have to say, an extraordinary man, an unusual man, a great man, but he's a great man essentially posing as a purely ordinary fellow.
Hmm. Subscribe to the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast on Apple, Google, and Spotify.
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