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March 1, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
44:10
ILLEGALS ON THE RAMPAGE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep781
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Coming up, I'll discuss the various candidates that Trump is considering for Vice President.
Debbie's going to join me for our weekend roundup.
We're going to talk about illegals on the rampage and Javier Millet's astonishing start in Argentina and his meeting with Trump.
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.
Who is Donald Trump going to pick as his vice president?
The It's an important question, and Trump has given some intimations that this is something that he's going to decide pretty soon.
So I want to weigh in on it.
The topic came up this past week when I was doing my Locals Live Q&A. Somebody asked me, like, who's your choice?
And I generally try to back away from those kinds of questions in part because I'm not a political strategist in that sense.
Who's up? Who's down?
Who would help to bring over this particular state into our camp?
I discuss politics a little more at the level of ideas than that kind of question might suggest.
But nevertheless, I was sort of pressed on it.
So it forced me to think if I were advised, let's say Trump were to call me.
And by the way, Debbie's sort of smiling here because Trump called yesterday.
Debbie and I were just about to head out to the podcast and...
I'm like, hold on, honey.
Before we jump into the car, it's Trump, you know.
And he was calling about Brandon Gill.
He was like, how's our boy doing?
How's Brandon doing? And I'm like, well, I think he's doing really well.
And I mentioned that Brandon has a chance.
It's not an easy thing to do to win outright on Tuesday.
But to do that, he would have to beat.
There are 11 candidates in the race today.
So one guy, Brandon, would have to beat all the other 10 combined.
And that's hard enough.
But to do it with $2 million spent against you in mailers and radio ads and TV ads that are bombarding you every day, I mean, this is almost impossible.
And even though it's almost impossible, Debbie and I think that Brandon will come really close.
He might pull it off. We are certainly hoping and praying he pulls it off.
Brandon is like not leaving any stone unturned.
He's doing everything he possibly can.
So, we think he might go over 50, which would be an incredible feat.
But even if he doesn't, he's going to come really close, I believe, to 50.
And that means there will be a runoff if he's under 50.
But Brandon will be the odds-on favorite because he'll be, I predict, at least 10 points ahead of the next candidate.
In any event, back to Trump.
And the...
And by the way, Trump was really reassuring because I think Trump knows that there's this attack on Brandon.
Trump is like, listen, if there's a runoff, we'll jump in big time and make sure that he gets across the finish line.
So anyway, this is something that both Brandon and obviously Debbie and I really appreciate.
Who's it going to be for the vice presidential nod?
Here's who it's not going to be.
Nikki Haley. Even though there's been some media speculation, the vituperative attacks on Trump by Haley, I think, have sort of sealed her fate.
There is no way that Trump is going to pick.
He's just as likely to pick Nikki Haley as he's going to be to pick Mike Pence again.
You know, not happening yet.
There have been a bunch of other names that have been tossed out there.
Tim Scott, Ted Cruz, Kristi Noem, Elise Stefanik, and J.D. Vance.
DeSantis' name has been out there.
Vivek's name has been out there.
So it's a pretty wide list.
And then there are some kind of dark horses that people will throw in every day.
What about this guy? What about that guy?
But the names I've mentioned are the main ones.
And here's my take on all this.
My take on all this is that if Trump wants to sort of electrify the country, really have a candidate that is kind of a cut above, that is not a normal run-of-the-mill candidate, I think he should go either with DeSantis or with Vivek.
Why? Because in my view, those two guys are transformational.
Now, the other guys are, I have nothing against them, and some of them are good, and some of them are really good, and I would be okay with a bunch of them.
So, just to go down a few names, for example, if you take somebody like Christy Noem, and Debbie was telling me that there was some event, honey, what were you talking about, where there was all this applause for Christy Noem?
It was on Fox and Friends.
They were in a restaurant. Fox and Friends were showing, I guess, one of their, you know, kind of spontaneous restaurant.
Who do you want? And they mentioned Kristi Noem.
Oh, everybody goes crazy and stuff like that.
And Debbie goes, oh, yeah, you know, because she's good looking, the men are going to go for Kristi Noem.
And this is sort of Debbie's law of politics.
The good looking woman gets the male vote and the good looking woman.
The good-looking male gets the female vote.
But, says Debbie, if you're really good-looking, your own gender doesn't necessarily go with you.
They're a little more skeptical.
They're a little bit more sarcastic about it, so to speak.
But in any event, The point being, Kristi Noem would be fine, but in my view, not the kind of thing that makes you jump out of your seat.
Elise Stefanik, she's competent, she's presentable.
Some people say she's a bit of an opportunist, but nevertheless, she's been a pretty loyal Trumpster.
She, of course, did a great job in dealing with the four horsemen of the apocalypse, which is to say the college presidents who were given a due whipping by Elise Stefanik.
So again, I'd be okay with Elise Stefanik, but now compare this.
To DeSantis or Vivek.
And I see those two guys as not only very good on the campaign trail, but also really good in office.
Because Trump is going to have a massive job of cleaning up the swamp, of defeating the police state.
So he needs people who know how to burrow into these agencies like the FBI and fumigate them from the inside out.
Well, DeSantis is doing that in Florida.
So he's operationally really strong.
And I think so he would be in a Trump administration.
He also, by the way, does represent future leadership of the Republican Party.
I'm not of the view that because he went against Trump in...
2024, he has somehow permanently disqualified himself.
I've said many times, I'm not like on board with some of the extreme acrimony between some of the MAGA Trumpsters and the DeSantis people.
And by the way, there's a good deal of blame there to be had on both sides.
But the good thing is DeSantis did the manly thing, the noble thing, the honorable thing.
He was a team player.
He said, I'm getting out. I endorse Trump.
Well, there you go. And even some of the DeSantis people who have now come on board on the Trump train, people like Bill Mitchell, who are like, I'm for Trump.
And I'm like, Will, welcome.
Join us. We need you.
We need all of you.
And with Vivek, you've got a guy, this guy's been a Trump loyalist pretty much all the way through.
Some people even thought he was a Trump surrogate, that sort of Trump had put him up to it.
I don't think that's the case.
Vivek was making the case for Trump.
In fact, it's an interesting question.
Had DeSantis run on Vivek's agenda?
I bet you DeSantis would have done a whole lot better.
I think he got bad advice.
I'm not really sure from whom.
But he chose the wrong lane to run in, so to speak.
And as a result, it did hurt him.
Even though I think his future prospects still remain bright.
I think, can you imagine DeSantis or Vivek debating Kamala Harris?
I also think that it's very important to unify the two wings of the Republican Party.
Now, Vivek doesn't do this so much as DeSantis.
DeSantis does do that because there is a kind of establishment wing.
Many of those people back DeSantis, and it would be good to have those guys back in the Trump column.
DeSantis would help that to happen.
We see all over Texas.
I mean, we see it in Brandon's district, but we see it in others as well.
This kind of schism between the MAGA forces and the establishment forces.
And we need some kind of a rapprochement, a treaty, a detente, a willingness to work together, because the political party actually needs both.
It needs an establishment. It also needs a kind of populist spirit.
And Trump, I'm sure, is going to keep this in mind as he thinks about the election.
And so my advice to Trump is there are a lot of good candidates to choose from.
In a sense, perhaps you can't go wrong with any of the really good ones.
But if you want my take on the matter, do consider Ron DeSantis and do consider Vivek Ramaswamy.
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Debbie and I are here for our Friday Roundup.
Debbie's actually been gone for a couple of weeks.
In fact, I think, honey, the longest time that we've been apart in the almost 10 years that I've known you.
But she went to visit her mom in the Rio Grande Valley.
She was there four or five days.
Then she was back for a day and then gone for another week or so.
And your mom happily is doing better.
She's doing better. Thank you for the, a lot of people have reached out to me and said they're praying for mom and thank you for the prayers.
You know, mom is doing much better.
She's home. She was in the hospital for two weeks.
So, you know, that's why I was there for so long.
But it's good to be back.
Yeah. Debbie came back and we had a dinner planned with a friend of ours, someone that you've known for many years.
I met through you.
And our friend calls and he goes, I can't make dinner because I'm feeling really sick.
And I guess what it is, is he took Ozempic and had a violent reaction to it.
Yeah. And he's the second person I know that's taken Ozempic and has had a violent reaction.
Lots of throw up, like, you know, Yeah.
I mean, it seems like that remedy, which is a kind of a medical remedy, it works, but it can also cause all these side effects.
Yeah. And this is why I'm so happy that we did PhD.
Because PhD weight loss has actually, and this is not a commercial for PhD.
No, we're just describing our experience.
It's a way that teaches you how to eat and you don't have to worry about gaining the weight back because you know scientifically what works in your body and what doesn't.
You know the foods you can eat and the foods you can't eat.
And following that for the rest of your life is the recipe for a successful weight loss program.
I mean, what you're really saying is that, you know, number one, it's not that you eat less food.
You actually eat a healthy quantity of food.
You don't feel hungry or good to go.
And number two, you know, both of us are kind of foodies.
We like to eat good stuff and we don't, we like, you know, and so you can.
Yeah, you can. You just have to do a little bit of planning.
There are some things that you need to stay away from.
Exactly. And one or two things that I really like, notably bananas.
I know. I love bananas. I am the banana boy, and I've been known to, I mean, I know when I was a kid, I could often eat six bananas a day.
You could as an adult, too.
I just have to say.
I'm like, honey, what happened to the bushel of bananas you bought?
They're all gone. They're all gone.
In one day. I was like, what?
I think my strategy was to eat one every time I walked by.
Yeah, you would do. You would do that.
You would do that. So you're saying I still, that's an adult.
Yeah, but not anymore, thank goodness.
No, not anymore. I'm very careful with it now.
Not to mention it's a lot of potassium for your body and it's very bad.
Too much potassium is a problem.
Yeah.
Yeah. The bottom of the barrel.
These are people that have actually left Venezuelan prisons, guys.
They were in prison in Venezuela because they were in a horrific gang.
This particular gang that is making its way to America is called Tren de Aragua.
Aragua is a state in Venezuela and Tren de means train of.
The train from Aragua.
And so these people are...
Ruthless. They are like MS-13.
And there was an article that came out that said that the Tren de Aragua was merging with MS-13 gangs in New York.
And this is a disaster.
A disaster.
And if someone doesn't think that more people are going to die like this young woman that died, or the young girl that was raped by a 14-year-old girl that was This is going to continue to happen and it's going to get worse.
More people are going to be affected.
You know, I saw an article that said, and this was so telling, the crime rate in Venezuela has dropped substantially.
Of course, the criminals are here.
The criminals are here. And then I saw Maduro was quoted saying...
Hey, listen, I know there are some people in America who want to send these people back.
I don't want them back, and I'm not taking them back.
It's kind of like, you wanted them, you got them, you keep them.
And Castro, by the way, as you know, took the same attitude from Cuba.
Yeah. And so what's happening is that a lot of the regimes of the world are like, we've got not just criminals, but we've got lunatics, we've got sick people that we don't want to have to deal with that could be a drain on our public treasury, send them to America.
Right. Well, you know, this whole illegal immigration problem, it has so many facets, right?
We have people coming in from Venezuela, criminals coming in from Venezuela, criminals coming in from Mexico, people that were in insane asylums in Mexico are being let out, and those are coming in as well.
And then you have the China component.
You have Chinese people coming in.
You have people from Afghanistan.
You have terrorists coming in.
So you have all these components coming in.
But the other component that nobody really talks about, but it's a real issue, are these people fleeing from the cartel violence in Mexico and Central America.
Oh, I see. These people are actually being...
They're extorted, right?
They say, if you don't do this, we're going to kill your family member.
We're going to put his head in a suitcase and we're going to send it to you.
Or we're going to kill you.
Politicians in Mexico are always kind of under the thumb of these cartels because if they don't do what they want them to do, they will kill a family member, they will kill them, they hang them from bridges.
And this is horrific, right?
There's bridges in Mexico where these gangs, these cartels, hang their victims headless.
And people are driving by seeing bodies with no heads.
This is so bad.
And it makes you go, well, no wonder these people are coming to America.
They want help.
So my solution to all this, number one, is close the border.
Close it. Immediately.
But the other thing is, why are we putting our troops in the Middle East when we could have more troop presence on the border?
And even with these cartels in Mexico, make them stop.
Make them stop.
The fentanyl, the murders, the rapes, we can make this stop.
I mean, I don't understand why Mexico is so immobilized by all this, because we have a small country that had an identical problem, rampant crime, rampant corruption.
I'm talking about El Salvador.
And what does the newly elected prime minister do?
He rounds up the military.
And he knows, by the way, the corruption extends into the military.
He knows that. So he appeals to the patriotic spirit of the military.
He appeals to their Christianity and he appeals to their sense of civic pride.
And he goes, I'm going to give you the weaponry.
You go out and wipe these people out.
And that's what they did.
They just went out and wiped these people out.
And in fact, he was accused of, oh, he's violating human rights because this is Naive Bukele.
He's not even giving proper funerals to gang members.
And this guy's like, proper funerals for gang members?
He's like, not at the top of my list, you know?
I'm interested in the safety and freedom of the ordinary Salvadoran citizen.
So I'm thinking the Prime Minister of Mexico can take a page out of Bukele's book, The President.
Yeah, so he has this...
It's a ridiculous program called Hugs, Not Bullets.
Right. Hugs not bullets. Hugs not bullets.
As if like they're going to go, oh yeah, obredor, right?
We'll do that instead.
We're not going to use our bullets.
We're going to hug instead.
No, you have to fight back.
He's scared of the cartels.
They have him under their thumb.
And so we need somebody in Mexico that is not going to be scared of these cartels.
And we need to have, we need to support them.
We need a Bukele in Mexico and we need a Trump in America because, see, the point is, if the Mexican government asks for U.S. military assistance to shut down the cartels, that would be in our benefit.
You know, when people talk about America getting involved abroad, we should get involved abroad when it is in our direct national security self-interest.
Exactly. And that is exactly what it would be.
And it's in our backyard.
It's in our immediate border.
Yes. And the effects of it are coming across the border every single day.
And look, this is both parties.
I don't hear a single member of Congress or Senate talking about how we need to fix the cartel problem.
Once we do that, because, you know, the cartels are also helping and aiding and abetting these Chinese people coming in.
Afghanistan is coming in.
They are doing that.
We need to shut that down.
Five illegals have been arrested for, one, raping a woman in Florida, B, murdering a college student in Georgia, C, murdering a two-year-old in Maryland, sexual assault against a minor in Virginia, and raping a 14-year-old girl and stabbing a man in Louisiana.
So this is Biden's legacy right here.
And this is all in one week.
Right. And it's going to get worse.
Much, much worse.
And the other thing, too, that we didn't talk about, not just the crime.
These people are coming in expecting a handout.
They want welfare.
And a lot of them are actually coming first before our own U.S. citizens.
And so this is a problem that is not going to go away without taking drastic, and I mean drastic measures.
Right. Yeah, if the American people don't wake up to this problem in this election...
I think this is the biggest problem facing our country today.
And it's frankly probably the biggest issue going into 2024.
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when you use discount code America you'll get 35% off plus $10 off additional sets plus free shipping and the money-back guarantee Debbie and I want to talk about Javier Millet who is fighting the good fight in Argentina and we'll talk about that but let's start with Millet making his way
to America he goes to CPAC he gives a pretty somber and a somewhat of an academic talk at CPAC he really talks about markets and how they work and But then he has a meeting with Trump and we were both laughing at the optics of that meeting.
What did you get from the meeting?
Oh my gosh, he was so giddy meeting Trump.
It was like a teenage boy meeting of his favorite rock star.
It was hilarious. He was like so giddy about it.
And he was like, oh, yeah. Oh, Mr.
Trump. And I could hear his English.
It's a little choppy, but he speaks English.
I wasn't sure if he did or didn't.
And then he even, you know, at the end, he even went...
Viva la libertad, carajo!
He had to get that in there.
Right. And I think Trump said to him, make Argentina great again.
Trump laughed at that.
Yeah, make Argentina great again.
Yeah. Now, I saw an interesting report that Anthony Blinken, once the Biden administration realized that Malay was likely to win the election, they tried to talk to him and say, hey, listen, we will give you all kinds of benefits and If you don't embrace Trump.
Think about this. Think of the politicking going on.
So you have the Secretary of State trying to sort of seduce Millay into their camp.
But of course, did he go for it?
Of course not. No, because remember, Millay is a far-right president.
I know. All the articles, it's almost like now he's not just right, he's far right.
But first of all, the concept of far right makes no sense when someone is elected.
Think about it. By definition, when a country elects somebody, they get the most electoral votes.
They're now the president or they're the prime minister.
But we never hear far right Maduro.
I mean far left Maduro.
We don't hear that.
In fact, the term far left is rarely used at all.
I've never heard it except from our camp.
So I think what's happening is this is what's going on.
You have a spectrum and here's the right and here's the left.
And the problem with the media is that they are halfway down in the left column.
So from their point of view, there is no far left.
No. The people on the left are just either in the same place that they are or slightly to the left of them.
And meanwhile, somebody who's a mainstream conservative appears from their vantage point to be far right.
So they're being sincere in their terminology, but really what it is, is it's really revealing about them.
It's very revealing about them.
To be more like the electoral system in America.
And that is a disaster for Argentinians because it's going to be like bringing back a dictatorship to Argentina.
Well, let's explain what we're talking about here because the argument itself is so silly.
By and large, when you have democratic voting, it can go one of two ways.
Proportional representation or winner take all.
So, for example, if you have two parties or three parties and they get, let's just say, 40, 30, and 20 in the election with the rest being scattered elsewhere, then one person gets 40 seats or proportionately 40% of the seats, the other gets 30, the other gets 20.
Another way to do it is that if you win the state in the election, you get all the electoral votes, similar to what we have in Massachusetts.
You win the state of Massachusetts, all the electoral votes, even though there are Republicans in Massachusetts.
So both systems are democratic.
One is not sort of inherently better than the other, and one doesn't represent autocracy and the other democracy.
These are different... But they say it does.
But they imply it does. Yeah, they imply it does.
But I think the only implied does because Millet is doing it.
Exactly. If their guy was doing it, it wouldn't.
They wouldn't even talk about it. They wouldn't even talk about it.
They wouldn't even talk about it. There'd be no problem whatsoever.
Now, Millet is...
He does not have a parliament that is on board with him.
And so he has to fight them.
A part of, I think, what he's trying to do is take what actions he can unilaterally.
And apparently, he has more power than, for example...
An equivalent person to Malay would have in this country.
Malay has more room to maneuver.
One of the things that he apparently has done is he has brought the borrowing of Argentina down dramatically.
And Argentina for the first time, admittedly over a short period of time, ran a surplus.
Now think about it. They were running massive deficits, massive debt.
By the way, we are too in this country.
So they were just adding to the debt, runaway inflation.
So Malay is trying to stop that in its tracks.
when someone interviewed him and asked him like, what's your plan B?
He's like, there is no plan B.
You know, I'm not gonna change my views and do what we, he goes, plan B is what we've been doing for 50 years.
And that got us into this mess.
Yeah. These articles don't talk about how bad off Argentina was and how high the inflation rate was and how Argentina basically had no money.
They don't talk about those things.
No. They want to stop Malaya, I think, for the same reason they want to stop Trump, because what terrifies these people is policies that work.
Yeah. So, one of the reasons the left was so excited about COVID, and Jane Fonda said that COVID was God's gift to the left, is COVID was the wrecking ball of the Trump economy.
And before that, the left was beside itself.
What are we going to say? How are we going to campaign against Trump?
He's just going to say, do you like the America you're living in now?
If so, vote for me.
So, with Malay, they don't want him to succeed because if he succeeds, he shows all of South America.
Think of the effect on Brazil, Ecuador, Chile, that there is another way to go and a way that works.
Yeah, and that's the only way that works.
Now, a lot of those governments in South America are extremely corrupt, as we know in Venezuela.
Maduro knows absolutely that those policies work.
Maduro doesn't care.
He does not care. He is a narco-terrorist.
And so he's making money from drugs.
He's making money from, you know, there's no money from the people anymore.
Everybody's gone. But he's doing well.
He's doing well. He has oil wealth.
And he also has Chinese wealth, Russian wealth, and Iranian wealth.
So what does he need the Venezuelan people for?
So this is an important point, I think, and this was true of the old Soviet Union with their ruling class or nomenklatura.
Russia didn't work as a society.
The Soviet Union was horrible for its citizens, but you know what?
It was good for the ruling class because they had...
in Moscow, they had dachas and little summer properties that they would go to and they had nice cars and chauffeurs. So at some level, what do they care if the people are suffering? Because ultimately they get to loot the country, which is what Maduro is doing, which is what Hugo Chavez did. Yeah, and which is what the left is trying to do here.
That's right. And you know, the other day I was watching, it was a couple of days ago, I was watching a news report, and it showed Kamala Harris talking about, you know how they're pandering to the college students?
I mean, this is like, we're going to pay off your debt, we're going to do this, we're going to do that.
Now there's a program, you know how we both did work-study, right?
Yeah. Where they will pay you to become involved in elections, to be a poll watcher.
And I thought to myself, this has got to be illegal.
And this would be exchanging money.
As a poll watcher, I was a poll watcher.
I wasn't paid.
It was a volunteer position.
You cannot pay somebody to be a poll watcher.
But you can see why they're doing it, right?
Of course you can! Because these kids, most of them, are so dumb.
They're going to go, wow, man, I really think that the Democrats are just really cool and they pay me to do this.
And so who do you think they're going to vote for?
Well, it's a way of getting their own demographic, their own constituency, because they're more likely to win those votes, get those people into the process.
And then you made another point, which is that a lot of these young people, because they're indoctrinated, They're not going to be inhibited by people telling them, hey, listen, you can't tell people how to vote because they'll be like, well, I can signal.
Exactly. And you know that as a poll watcher, I actually did report an incident where one of the poll workers, I think she was even the poll judge, this was a bilingual area, was telling a couple who to vote for, basically telling them to vote straight Democrat.
Right. And you cannot do that.
And I stopped her.
Obviously, the damage had already been done, but I stopped her from doing it to other people.
You can't do that.
You can't talk to people coming in to vote to give them any, even if they ask you, hey, I don't know who to vote for.
Who should I vote for? You cannot tell them who to vote for.
I mean, this shows you the way in which the Democrats, quite apart from complex, organized cheating schemes, they are always pushing the process.
Let's have more drop boxes in urban areas where our team is concentrated.
Let's figure out a way to get young people into the polling process.
Let's make sure that they vote.
Let's... Put their eyes on the polling process and let's figure out if we can give them some money to do that.
So Democrats and very often Republicans don't think because we have to be so vigilant in challenging them and stopping them.
And I guess at some point our side gets tired.
It's like, what next?
It's really hard.
So their energy that they put into manipulating the process.
And their lack of ethics. I mean, that too, because we have ethics.
We're like, we're not going to do that because I think that's actually illegal.
Whereas, they don't really care.
Yeah, their point is not, is it illegal, but can we get away with it?
Exactly, bring it on.
We're now beginning our discussion of some of the critical speeches of Abraham Lincoln.
Let's remember that this was a period in which politicians were known through their speeches and they didn't often make that many of them.
Lincoln had only a handful, several, but he gave the same one again and again and again so that these speeches become important roadmaps to the careful thinking of Lincoln and others, Douglass as well.
And these speeches were...
At least to a large degree written out, which is to say that they were not just spontaneous exhortations, they were the considered judgment.
Lincoln thought about what he wanted to say, he wrote it down, and he might have delivered it with some variation, but he delivered essentially the substance of a written address.
The first notable speech of Lincoln is called a Lyceum speech.
And the subject of it is very clear.
The perpetuation of our political institutions.
What institutions?
Lincoln is talking about the institutions bequeathed to us by the founders.
In some ways, we could ask the same question today.
Are the institutions that the founders gave us, are we perpetuating those?
Are Or have we moved so far away from them that we have an America today that would be unrecognizable to the founders?
I would argue that in many respects we have.
We have moved away.
Now, of course, we still have the separation of powers.
We have the checks and balances.
Many of the ingredients of the founding are still in place, but there are others that have been displaced or abandoned.
Lincoln begins his speech in a very classic conservative manner, namely, a kind of pious invocation to the founders.
And he says, We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them, meaning the institutions.
They are a legacy bequittas by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors.
So Lincoln is saying that these guys were once young, they were hardy, they were patriotic, but now they're gone.
They're not with us anymore.
And so our challenge is how do we keep our institutions, even though the men, and they were men, who gave them to us, are no longer with us.
Let's remember that Lincoln is talking now in the early part of the 19th century about And he's not that far removed from the American founding.
The American Constitution was the end of the 18th century, namely 1789.
Now, Lincoln goes on to say, we're facing threats as a country, but what are these threats?
And he says, and this has become a famous passage of Lincoln, he says, essentially the threats are coming from within.
They don't come from abroad.
Lincoln goes on to say it's not easy for a foreign enemy to approach the United States.
They're not going to be able to drink out of the Ohio River.
He says, quote, Not that the space called America goes away,
but America as an idea, America as a political architecture, America as not only a system of government but a way of life, if that America goes away, says Lincoln, we will have done it to ourselves.
We collectively would be responsible for that tragic outcome.
Now, Lincoln goes on to say that the real danger of facing the country is mob rule.
And he says mob rule has been sweeping the country.
He also says that mob rule...
Is the result of the failure of the spirit of the American Revolution.
So the spirit of the American Revolution, says Lincoln, is a spirit of temperance, of civility, of law.
And, says Lincoln, we don't have that.
We don't have temperance, we don't have civility, and we don't have law.
And Lincoln says that mob rule is bad in itself because mob rule involves violence, it involves breaking the law.
But he says even more than that, mob rule causes what he calls a lawlessness of spirit.
A lawlessness of spirit.
And he says this lawlessness of spirit ultimately translates to lawlessness in practice.
So in other words, you begin to disregard the laws.
You don't care about the laws.
It's like, hey, that guy's suspected of a crime.
He hasn't been convicted.
That's okay. Let's go out and lynch him.
So this is the spirit of mob rule where basically people take the law into their own hands.
Now Lincoln is not talking about exactly what we have today, which is a lawlessness coming from the government itself.
I think Lincoln would be very alert to that possibility.
But what he's talking about here is the lawlessness of citizens and groups that take the law into their own hands.
And, says Lincoln, this lawlessness alienates the feelings of good men.
It keeps good citizens, Lincoln calls them the best citizens, far away from the government.
And this is an interesting extension.
It sets the stage for an unprincipled, demagogic, maybe even tyrannical leader to step in and say, I will restore the law.
I will bring things back to normal.
I will settle all this essentially with an iron hand.
So what is Lincoln doing?
He's saying mob rule is dangerous in itself and also dangerous because of the evils to which it opens itself.
And, says Lincoln, this mob rule is, he says, it is abroad in the land, the mobocratic spirit, as Lincoln calls it.
But now we have a problem, which I'm just going to mention, and I'll take it up shortly.
I'll take it up tomorrow.
I'll take it up early next week.
Lincoln talks about he's going to describe mobs, but he's going to describe mobs that are on his own side politically.
In other words, he's going to describe mobs whose votes he needs.
He's going to describe mobs that are doing things that he doesn't want them to do, and he wants to invade against them, and he wants to even attack them, but he has to be really careful in attacking them because he's a politician.
So, think about it.
If a politician goes out and attacks his own constituents, then his own constituents aren't going to vote for him, and he's not going to be in office, and he's not going to be able to do the good things that he wants to do, including curtailing mob rule.
So this is the dilemma, this is the challenge facing a young politician like Lincoln, which is to say, how do you address a topic when there are people whose votes you need, who are loosely speaking on your side politically, and yet you are not?
Describing some dangerous activities that they are undertaking, disregarding the spirit of law, and how Lincoln does this becomes something of a rhetorical masterpiece.
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