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March 6, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
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VICTORY Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep784
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Coming up, Super Tuesday results, all good news, and I'll tell you why I'm getting more optimistic about 2024.
I'll consider an article insisting the only way for Israel to win is to make the Palestinians, quote,"...lose hope." And Jonathan Saenz, who's president of Texas Values, joins me.
We're going to talk about why the traditional family is the best way to find happiness for men, women, and children alike.
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.
Guys, I'm recording this opening segment of the podcast, not from my usual location in the studio.
The rest of the podcast is in the studio.
But this segment is out of a, well, a hotel room near Dallas.
Why? Because Debbie and I came in yesterday and we hit the pavement handing out flyers and paraphernalia and voter guides.
For Brandon Gill.
And boy, was it a big night last night.
We went to the watch party.
There were about 50 or 75 people there fired up.
The thing lasted five or six hours.
And in fact, our granddaughter, little Marigold, was, I think, having a tough time staying up through the whole episode.
But she did. Now, it was a big night for Trump.
Annihilating Nikki Haley pretty much across the board.
Nikki Haley eked out a victory in Vermont.
And apparently that was aided and abetted by a bunch of Democratic voters who are allowed to vote in the Vermont primary.
So it doesn't tell you a whole lot.
And I was wondering, is Nikki Haley still going to stick it out after this?
And reports this morning are no, that she's going to drop out.
My guess is that her donors had had enough.
They don't want to put money into a black hole.
And so it looks like Trump not only seizes the nomination, but as John King said on CNN last night, he goes, it's Donald Trump's Republican Party.
So I think that's the significance of what we're witnessing now.
The important thing at this point is to be magnanimous.
There may be a MAGA spirit controlling the Republican Party, but that's not to say we don't want the Nikki Haley voters.
We want everybody that we can get to vote Republican in November.
So let's keep that in mind as we go forward.
There's no point bashing candidates once they drop out of the race.
It's a time for sort of petty-mindedness to cease and to really try to bring everybody on board.
Thank you. With regard to Brandon, unbelievable.
We had really been pushing to get Brandon over 50%, which would have been incredible.
Why? Because there are 11 candidates in the race.
It's almost unheard of for one candidate to whip all the other 10 combined.
And yet we thought he can do it.
There is a pathway to do it, despite the $2 million ad spend against Brandon.
I mean, mailers, radio ads, TV ads pummeling the district all the time for the last two weeks.
But we thought, still, Brandon has got such a good ground operation, he's got so much going for him that he should be able to get over 50%.
And guess what? He got 58%.
The number two candidate, a fellow named Scott Armey, in fact, the son of Dick Armey, the congressman you might remember from Texas, Scott Armey got about 15%, and he was number two.
The other guys were all below 10%.
And so an incredible, well, victory not just for Brandon personally, but for Trump, who endorsed Brandon, Ted Cruz, a whole bunch of other people who had come in on this race.
And so the MAGA spirit is clearly alive and well in Texas 26.
I actually texted Trump late last night to let him know, hey, because he had called me.
He said, how's our boy doing, Brandon?
Well, our boy got across the finish line.
It should be a fairly easy romp to November because this is a Trump Republican plus 20 district.
So it's a heavily Republican district.
It can be hard now for Brandon to lose the race in November.
I don't think he will, particularly because he's shown he's such a strong candidate in the primary.
But one of those elections where the primary pretty much is the general.
So we're all excited for Brandon Gill.
We're all excited for Donald Trump.
We're excited for November, but there's a lot of work to do.
So guys, let's get to it.
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There is an ongoing debate about the Israeli reaction to what happened on October 7th, the Hamas attacks.
And most of the reaction is coming from the left and it is an attack on Israel and it's an attack on Israel's supposed kind of unrelenting war on Gaza and on the Palestinians.
And we see some admittedly fairly shocking photos about Gaza in rubble.
We see images of huddled Palestinians.
We see this, well, most recently the United States dropping aid packages out of the air.
And all of this is giving the idea that Israel is going too far.
The Biden administration has been talking about the fact that they might pressure Israel into accepting some kind of a two-state solution.
Of course, there's nothing new about this idea.
It's been around for decades.
But the immediate goal of the Biden regime is a ceasefire, return of the hostages, creating a pathway for aid to flow to Gaza.
But the longer term view is to somehow get to the roots of the problem, to create a Palestinian state where Palestinians feel that they have autonomy.
And there's a pretty interesting article that I read by Richard Hanania, which takes a rather bold view.
And I want to discuss the context for the article and discuss the argument of the article.
The article is somewhat startlingly called, Israel must crush Palestinian hopes.
Now, We don't often hear someone advocating.
You've got to crush the hopes, not just of an individual, but of an entire people, in this case, the Palestinians.
But this is basically how Richard is.
And I've had Richard on the podcast.
He's a very smart guy.
And he is a guy who calls it as he sees it.
And basically what Richard says in this article, he says, look, he goes, there's an underlying assumption that Israel always has to kind of watch it.
Even if Israel was attacked, even if Israel is responding to an attack, the general rhetoric that we hear from the left, from the media is, look, you can't attack Gaza because if you do it, you're going to be harming civilians.
And if you drop a bomb even on a leader of Hamas...
Think about it. That bomb is going to kill some other civilians.
All those civilians have relatives and friends.
They're going to end up fueled with unquenchable rage against Israel.
Other Palestinians will see images of this in Al Jazeera and on the news.
So the idea is that Fighting terrorism creates more terrorists.
And this viewpoint is, of course, very widespread.
It's repeated so often that it never really goes unquestioned.
But Richard does question it.
And I think he's right to do it.
And he raises this point.
He says, look, why should Israel worry about, quote, creating more terrorists when...
The hatred toward Israel and toward the West, more generally, has reached already a fever pitch and might have reached the maximum level.
In other words, let's just think of a scale of hatred toward Israel on a scale of 1 to 10.
If the scale was 3, you could say, oh, listen, be very careful because it could go to 4, it could go to 5.
But, says Richard, what if the scale is 10?
What if it's somewhere between 9 and 10?
What if it is the case that the vast majority of Palestinians basically have been convinced that terrorism is the only way to go?
They already hate Israel.
They can't really hate Israel a lot more.
So what is it that you're really worried about?
Now, Richard realizes that this is a fairly...
This is an extreme thing to say, and no one really knows what opinion is on the ground in Gaza for the simple reason that Hamas has not had an election since, what, 2006 when Hamas came to power, and public opinion surveys have been all over the place on this.
But here's a little interesting tidbit.
Apparently, when the United States was considering moving the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the State Department was raising some concerns, basically saying, you should be careful about Arab opinion.
And when he was asked, well, what is the...
What is the U.S. approval rating before the move?
And he was told it was 9%.
And what was U.S. approval rating after the move?
Apparently it went down to 6%.
And Richard's point here is, listen, if anti-Americanism is so strong that the U.S. has only a 9% approval rating, that means everybody kind of hates us already.
91% of people hate us.
And so if that number goes up from 91 to 94, like, who cares?
You've already got an alienated population.
So, the vehemence against the Jews and against America, he says, they're burning the American flag.
He goes, look at the way that they celebrate the rape and murder of Jews.
He goes, look at another example.
He goes, do you see Russian soldiers celebrating the rape of Ukrainian women?
No.
He says, I'm not saying it never happens, but he goes, they're not brutish enough to be dancing in the streets about it.
He says, look at all these videos that are put out by the Israeli group called Middle East Research Institute.
It's called Memory. He says, little kids are talking about how when they grow up, they want to become terrorists.
They want to sacrifice their lives for the Palestinian cause.
So... Richard's point is that terrorism is not only very popular among the Palestinians in Gaza.
Terrorism and Hamas are the source of their hope.
And his point is, if you really want to beat these guys, you've got to choke off their hope in this solution.
And he says if you do it, they're going to realize that that is never going to get them anywhere.
And so even if their anger has reached a maximal level, it will start abating.
And Richard gives a sort of a startling and interesting example.
He says look at the example of China and the Uyghurs.
The Uyghurs is a Muslim population within China.
And he says even though we keep hearing about China's exploiting the Uyghurs and China's oppressing the Uyghurs, he goes China's basically decided the Uyghurs are never going to beat us.
It doesn't matter how much they rebel.
We are going to crush them completely.
If they start throwing rocks, we'll send tanks to run over them.
And that's going to be the end of them.
So, in other words, the Uyghurs have no hope.
And Richard goes, it works!
Because by and large, the Uyghurs have realized, we're not going to go anywhere.
We can try to build some ties and get some international sympathy.
But he goes, even the rest of the world has sort of let it be.
Why? Because it's kind of a foregone conclusion that the Uyghurs are never going to beat the Chinese.
The Chinese have basically decided to use whatever force is necessary to stop them.
And Richard gives the example.
He says, listen, you know, if you're standing in a street and some guy comes and slaps you in the face, you're going to want to hit him back because you're going to be like, how can you do that?
You have the hope that your retaliation is going to be effective in deterring that kind of behavior.
But let's say, for example, you're on the street and you see Mike Tyson coming toward you, right?
Regardless of how Mike Tyson insults you or even pokes you in the chest or even slaps you across the face, you're not going to think, you know what?
I may want to throw a punch at Mike Tyson.
Why? Because you throw a punch at Mike Tyson, you're going to be flat on the ground and you may not even be able to get up.
So you realize right away, I really should forget about the idea of trying to do anything because I have no hope that I could possibly beat this guy.
And basically what Richard is saying is that's what Israel should do.
Israel should extinguish the hope of the Palestinians that...
Anything to do with Hamas, any kind of terrorism, any kind of invasion, any kind of blowing up of a cafe is never going to get you anywhere.
And so Richard is saying that when you do that, people then begin to realize, okay...
Israel is so determined that they are not going to let us do this.
We're going to have to find some other way.
To quote Richard, what this shows is that when people are given no other option, they adjust to this kind of new reality.
So, I think that this is interesting, at least to me, because I think this is in fact what Netanyahu thinks.
I think this is Netanyahu's approach to the war.
The problem for Netanyahu is that Netanyahu's different than Richard.
Netanyahu can't say it.
Netanyahu cannot come out and go, listen, my goal is to extinguish the hope of the Palestinian people.
It's to give them no hope that terrorism is going to pay off.
So Netanyahu has to justify his actions in other terms, and then people jump on him and go, that doesn't really make any sense.
But of course, what does make sense is Netanyahu's actual justification for what he is doing.
And the reason I think this article by Richard is interesting is because it lays out that unspoken justification with a certain kind of clarity.
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Guys, I'd like to welcome to the podcast a new guest, Jonathan Sines.
He's the president of Texas Values, a nonprofit group that advances a culture of family values in the state of Texas.
By the way, before this, he was at First Liberty Institute, where he was director of legislative affairs, also an attorney.
Jonathan, welcome.
Thanks so much for joining me.
Right before we started rolling here, you were telling us about this bizarre...
A satanic statue at the University of Houston.
Give us the details.
Well, Dinesh, it's great to be with you, and it's great to call you a fellow Texan.
I know you've gotten settled in pretty well in the Lone Star State, so we're excited about that.
Look, over the past two or three weeks, if not the past month, stories have been breaking that the University of Houston has been celebrating, really putting on feature, if you will, this satanic statue, this abortion idol.
It's hard to sort of wrap your head around an accurate description of it because there's a lot of different adjectives that can be used.
But the current status of things is it's on the University of Houston campus.
And you may know this as being in this area.
I mean, University of Houston is one of the largest college campuses in the state.
I mean, you've got UT, you've got Texas A&M, University of Houston with about 35,000 to 40,000 students overall enrollment is right there.
It certainly is the largest university in the fourth largest city in the country in Houston.
And so when things happen there, they get a lot of attention.
But this statue actually came from New York.
There's a couple of different reasons why it exists, but a big part of it is to push back on the Roe versus Wade reversal decision.
It also, in some ways, some people suggest that it's a way to glorify Ruth Bader Ginsburg, But if you look at artistically and some of the connections to it and historically the background are satanic and devil in nature, all right?
When you look at some of the words that are used to describe it and some of the people that have talked about it that support it.
It's got these weird looking horns and it's just, you know, I mean, and it's troubling in many ways because we know Texas has worked very hard to continue to be a pro-life state.
Not only is that where Roe versus Wade came from here in our state and it was overturned, but we have a lot of pro-life laws that have been upheld, the Texas heartbeat law and others.
And so we're moving forward as a pro-life state that loves them both, the mother and the child.
And so, you know, for the University of Houston to, and this is what we understand, use taxpayer dollars, their own money, to transport this statute down to the state of Texas, to the University of Houston, to give it a lot of, you know, glory, if you will, is very troubling.
Now, what we understand is the university has backed off sort of celebrating it.
They were supposed to have a ceremony.
So now they're sort of saying, oh, we're going to leave it there as, you know, it has some artistic value to some people, to them, I guess.
But last week, excuse me, earlier this week or last week when this comes on, on Wednesday, there was a protest, a prayer march, over 100 people there, a lot of media attention.
As you might imagine, a lot of students, people that are pro-life, And they don't think this represents their values at the University of Houston.
Jonathan, at Texas Values you've set up a website that stresses that one can love the mother as well as the child.
It seems like you're making an effort to kind of affirm the culture of life in Texas and emphasize that protecting the child is also in the interest of the mother.
You're actually helping both.
No, that's absolutely right.
The website's called lovethembothtexas.com.
You know, now that we're moving forward on the life issue, and there's still work to be done, I mean, I think it's a major issue in this election at the national level, the federal level, the state level, and so on.
But in many ways, Texas has spoken strongly of that issue with our state house and our senate.
in both chambers and our governor as well, certainly our Lieutenant Governor, Dan Patrick and Governor Greg Abbott.
But sometimes people think, oh, you just care about the child.
That's never been true.
I mean, we've always cared about the mother and the child, but the more that we can do to make that clear, that's what we're working on as we move forward.
And lovethembothtexas.com, the website has resources on there, connections, links, trying to get everybody to come together.
So if you're looking for a place to have resources or you run a nonprofit, you want to find out how the child can be supported and the mother throughout this process.
That's where there's a lot of great information, sort of a clearinghouse, a collection point of a lot of things there.
But to continue to get that message strong out there that we do love them both.
A lot of people aren't aware of this.
The state of Texas has a program.
It's called Thriving Families Now.
It used to be called the Alternatives to Abortion Program, but mothers and families can get care for their children all the way up till three years old after the baby is born when they have circumstances, crisis pregnancy, things of that nature.
And so that's what we're trying to do.
We're trying to help people be more aware of that.
That fund has about $130 million in it over a two-year cycle, so a lot of support.
And you may get a kickoff for this.
A lot of that money and funding has been shifted away from some liberal programs at the state level that we felt like were not working or were sort of wasteful or headed in a different direction.
And so it's not as if there's more taxes because of this.
It's funding that was already there.
Now it's being moved in a much more healthy and positive and a life-affirming direction.
You know, for decades we were told that if Roe vs.
Wade was overturned, immediate catastrophe, chaos, social convulsion would ensue.
We've now essentially had a pro-life environment in Texas for, what, several months at the very least?
And life goes on as normal.
Is part of the reason that Texas is freaking out the pro-abortion lobby?
It's because it's actually demonstrating that life goes on and you can have a pro-life environment and the world doesn't come to an end.
No, I think in so many ways what we're seeing is the natural instinct of women, and a lot of times it's not just the woman involved.
There's a husband, a boyfriend, a family that's involved.
Their instinct is support that child, but many times they felt like they didn't have anyone to turn to.
They didn't have the support.
There was social stigma, whatever the case may be if the circumstances weren't ideal.
So a lot of abortions, Dinesh, are performed on women that are married and have a good income, but they were told you can't have a career and a child at the same time.
So a lot of lies that have been told that we've, you know, we've seen have been proven wrong.
And so to have the opportunity, and it's been a little bit over a year, if not a year and a half, since heartbeat law was upheld, since the Human Life Protection Act went into law, where abortion across the board, with very few exceptions, in some medical situations, the babies are protected.
And so, you know, you got an average of 50,000 babies a year that were losing their life to abortion in the state of Texas.
Now it's down to less than 100.
That's a dramatic difference.
Culturally, though, we're seeing people adjust to that.
To your point, we're not seeing the sky fall.
We're not seeing all these scare tactics come true and these stories that people said would happen.
I'm proud of that, too.
I'm proud that the pro-life movement, people of all different backgrounds, different parts of the state have come together and said, We really, truly do care about the mother and the child, and we want to create that environment where the women don't feel like they have to go to California.
I don't know if you know this, but Gavin Newsom has a billboard sign on Congress right down the street from downtown Austin.
It was there for a while, advertising to get women to go to California, offering to pay them money to fly them there to have an abortion.
In New Mexico, they had this bus right across the street from the state line trying to lure women over there in this mobile abortion vehicle that they had. And so, you know, look, there's been some reports of some of those things, but largely I think people stayed right here.
And the result of that is because of the comprehensive pro-life environment we have.
But look, the elections could change all that. I'll tell you what, Speaker Mike Johnson, what an incredible and exciting thing to have someone in his position who is very pro-life.
I know there are a lot of congressional seats that are coming up and a lot of that's going on where the Biden administration is trying to push something at the federal level.
They want to have Roe versus Wade be put back into law.
And so I think that gives Texas an opportunity to show people this is how it can work.
There's nothing to be overly afraid of.
In many ways, I think this follows that natural instinct and it gives us all some hope in regards to humanity.
I mean, this guy running against Ted Cruz, his ads are all over social media.
You can hardly avoid them.
And it seems like he thinks that, this is all red, that he thinks that there is a strong pro-choice Inclination in Texas, because he's using this as his battering ram issue.
In fact, it's the one issue he talks about in the ad.
He's like, I'm running because I'm trying to overturn, I'm trying to reaffirm the woman's right to an abortion.
So he's kind of counting on Texas to elect him based upon this issue.
I Yeah, look, I think a lot of leftists, and I'm glad you brought that up, Dinesh, a lot of leftists, a lot of Democrats in Texas, and I think it's just a matter of desperation in some ways, but we're thinking and hoping there would be this huge backlash because of the Roe versus Wade being overturned and the Texas heartbeat law and all these different type of things.
And I mean, look, there was a lot of attention at first, and in other states, we've seen this play out more.
We've seen these ballot issues where they have gone to the pro-abortion side.
Kansas, Michigan.
Yeah. Yeah, where was the more recent one?
Why am I saying, I want to say, not Indiana, Ohio recently too.
That's right. So several of them, and now this is the strategy of the left.
They're like, oh, we found something that works, so to speak.
But I think many of that is because the way some of those things are worded, but some of that is a function of those states.
In the state of Texas, you can't just get some signatures and put something on a statewide ballot that's a constitutional amendment.
You've got to go through the House and Senate, and you've got to get two-thirds support.
So that's not going to happen in Texas.
I mean, not anytime soon, and I don't wanna take anything for granted, but there's a whole lot higher bar and many steps to go through than some of these other states.
But a lot of that is that backlash.
We're not seeing that in Texas though, even though I think there's been some response to that, we haven't seen that play out in the elections.
And I'm gonna mention this real quick too, the role of churches getting involved in this election as it always is, is so important, the state level, the federal level, and at the local level, because we see these issues related to life and others coming up at all levels of government.
And many of them have pregnancy centers now.
Many of these churches are more involved in this pro-life work that's comprehensive.
But if we look back to last election, Dinesh...
Where Beto O'Rourke, okay, when he ran against Governor Abbott, I mean, he could not have been more in the tank and focused on the abortion issue.
Remember, his campaign finance manager was the former woman that headed up Planned Parenthood, right?
For many years, Cecile Richards, the daughter of the last, you know, the Democrat governor for the state of Texas, Ann Richards.
They put all their eggs in that basket, all right?
And Beto O'Rourke lost to Governor Abbott by double digits, right?
I don't know if you saw this.
We reported on this, but a lot of people didn't really say much about it, that four years before that, Governor Abbott had an opponent at the general level, and this was Lupe Valdez.
She was a sheriff from Dallas County.
I don't think she raised a whole lot of money, maybe a million dollars.
She got more votes against Governor Abbott than Beto O'Rourke did, which is just embarrassing.
But I think there's at least something in there that shows that when it comes to a statewide ballot, that life issue has not been strong for the Democrats.
And it might have allowed them to be where they were.
Beto may have lost by more if that was not the case.
But in some of these other areas, when it's not statewide, you might see some of that play out a little bit more.
So we got to be smart about our messaging.
I don't think a lot of people knew who Colin Alred was before he decided to run for a law My sons are football fans.
They're big Cowboys fans.
I don't remember hearing about it.
I'm not trying to be rude about his football career.
I'm just saying I don't think he had a lot of name recognition, but he certainly has been on the blitz.
You're right about that. It's hard to avoid it.
You know, look, and Senator Cruz, he's not afraid of a fight.
You know, he had one, you know, several years back with O'Rourke, and so I think they learned a lot from that.
And I think they're going to continue to be strong.
And, you know, look, Colin Alred, he's got to win the primary in his own party before he gets ready to take on Ted Cruz.
That's not a sure thing for him.
Jonathan, we were talking a little bit earlier, and you were telling me that even the border has a kind of important connection to, of course, the family issue that you stress at Texas Values, but also the life issue.
How would you frame that issue in terms of what's happening at the border?
Well, I appreciate you bringing that up.
Look, the Texas values have been around for over 10 years.
I've been involved in this work for close to 20 years, working with Kelly Shackelford as a religious liberty lawyer, but then being asked to go to the Capitol, working on state policy issues, and over time getting involved in a lot of election-related issues, but always being in the state of Texas.
I'm fifth-generation Texan.
On my dad's side, a lot of family from South Texas.
We have a church outreach program called the Church Ambassador Network of Texas, and one of the people that run it is in the South part of Texas, Pastor Jorge Tovar, who's kind of a mythical figure if you ever see him.
But I was spending some time with him at a church down in the border, and he said, listen, before you leave, this was in Laredo, which is a huge intrigue point.
I mean, you've got railroad tracks going back and forth.
You've got several bridges.
You've got built up cities on both sides, right?
I mean, there's a lot of commerce going on there on both sides.
You can see the other side easily.
And so he said, listen, before you leave, let me take you to the border.
And I said, listen, I really don't have time.
I got to get back up to Austin.
But he goes, no, no, just see if you can.
So I cards it out. I said, you know what?
I'm here. Let's go. You know, it was 20 minutes away from where I was staying.
And I thought about this before because, you know, that's not an issue we work on specifically, even though we care about it.
We understand that. But we've seen Governor Abbott do such a strong job when before I think you saw him talk about it, but it wasn't getting a lot of attention with the way that the Biden administration has done terrible with it.
We've seen other people say this is this problem continues to exist.
We've got to do something about it.
But on the family side, we hear all the time of forced abortions, We hear of sexual assault against women.
So many victims that relate to family issues, families being destroyed and being broken up because you have people that are taking advantage of the fact that nobody's enforcing the rules or they're doing a poor job of it.
And people are just sort of walking across or they're paying people and doing all kinds of awful things.
And we don't have something that people can count on and some security.
And so when I was there, I got a chance to literally look across the water to the border and reflect on that.
And I think it's very much pro-family and pro-life.
To ensure and to support border security issue.
And if that means our state government has to do it, if the federal government's not going to do it, then we have to.
And I know Senator Cruz and many of our state leaders support it too, but I think Governor Abbott has done a great job of this.
And I don't know if you saw this, apparently Trump sort of suggested Abbott might be on the short list for a vice president pick.
I was like, wow, you never know.
I did see that.
Yeah, very interesting stuff.
Thank you, Jonathan Sines.
Really appreciate you joining me, guys.
You can follow him on x at Texas TX Values, the website txvalues.org.
Jonathan Sines, thanks very much.
Great. Good to be with you.
And there's a great voting resource out there that we're a part of, too, called FreeVotersGuide.com.
And people want to see that for the spring and in the fall.
I'm discussing Abraham Lincoln's great Lyceum speech, a speech against mob rule.
It's discussed in Harry Jaffa's book Crisis of the House Divided.
And I was making the point yesterday that Lincoln very strangely makes a case against mob rule.
But he doesn't really discuss abolitionism, and we have to understand why Lincoln does not make a virtue out of abolitionism.
In fact, he doesn't even say that abolitionists are entitled to The lawful exercise of free speech.
He doesn't go there at all.
Now, let's think of why this is so.
It turns out that the abolitionists themselves would invoke free speech in their defense.
We have the right to advocate for our cause.
But for Lincoln, the abolitionists were not advocating for For a change of heart about slavery in the places where it would make any kind of a difference.
Let's think about it. Abolitionism was a movement in the North.
It was very strong in places like New York and Massachusetts, but New York and Massachusetts were free states.
So, what's the great virtue of being an abolitionist and jumping up and down in New York or in Massachusetts?
If you really want to sway the country, you need to go to Missouri.
You need to go to Delaware.
You need to go to Kentucky.
You need to go to border states or slave states, places where slavery was popular, where slavery had been affirmed by the consent of the governed.
And you need to make your case over there.
there but the abolitionists never did that. Moreover, the abolitionists were all about we have the right to free speech but where is that right to free speech come from? It comes from the First Amendment. It comes from the Constitution.
Now did the abolitionists revere the Constitution? No. Most of them would burn the Constitution, denounce the Constitution. They would say that slavery is bad not because it is outlawed in the Constitution. In fact, explicitly it's not outlawed in the Constitution.
They would say that the Constitution doesn't really matter.
We have to run roughshod over the Constitution.
Slavery is against a higher law.
Slavery is against a law that has a superior status to the Constitution.
And so if we have to throw aside the Constitution to get rid of slavery, so be it.
And so, Lincoln does not want to give support to these abolitionist sentiments, even though he agrees with the ultimate goal of abolishing slavery.
For Lincoln, the goal is important, but the means are also important, how you go about doing it.
And moreover, Lincoln has no desire to throw over the Constitution on his way to abolition.
So, it's not that Lincoln is not sympathetic to the abolitionists, but Lincoln is withholding that sympathy, both because he doesn't approve of what the abolitionists want to do to the Constitution, but there's also a second reason.
Abolition and abolitionism is extremely unpopular in the Midwest and in the South.
And Lincoln is in a very interesting position where Lincoln is trying to reach people who are, you may say, in the middle.
And so Lincoln's point is, I'm not going to defend the anti-slavery cause at its furthest extreme.
Why? It's kind of like, let's say you're trying to persuade somebody about abortion.
And you essentially go, let me start talking about rape and incest and why abortion should never be allowed in cases of rape and incest.
Well, wait a minute. Why would you start there?
Why would you pick the hardest possible case, make the most extreme defense that you can?
Why do you begin with kind of the normal case?
Begin with the fact that, listen, the vast majority of abortions are abortions of convenience.
They're done because the baby that is to come is in the way.
Is that really a good reason to terminate a life?
So Lincoln is sort of Saying, look, I don't want to make the anti-slavery case identical with abolitionism, in part because I know that most anti-slavery people in the country are not abolitionists.
So, this is the first point.
The second point is that Lincoln recognizes that the abolitionists are making a free speech defense that a lot of us would sympathize with today.
In other words, we have a right to say whatever we want.
We should not face mobs that come hunting us down and attack us because of us advocating for our beliefs.
But this is not Lincoln's view.
In fact, it should be said that this view of the First Amendment, which essentially says that you have a right to say whatever you want, whenever you want it, both in the political sphere and beyond the political sphere, artistic expression and so on, This is not the mainstream view of the First Amendment through the more than now two centuries of the United States being in existence.
Lincoln's view is closer to what many people held at the time, the way that they understood the First Amendment.
And the way that they understood the First Amendment is that Is that with the right to free speech does come certain responsibilities.
The responsibility that you do not endanger the body politic in any fundamental way.
Here's a very interesting statement that is made by Lincoln during the Civil War in the connection with the arrest of a man, in fact, a prominent Democrat named Valindingham.
Valindingham was actually...
Making fiery speeches about why Northern Democrats should refuse to enlist in the army.
Don't join the Civil War.
Refuse to fight. If you've been enlisted, you might consider deserting and leaving.
Here's Lincoln. Must I shoot a simple soldier boy who deserts?
While I must not touch a hair of the wily agitator who induces him to desert?
So desertion, military desertion is against the law.
If you've been drafted into the armed forces and you quit, you run off the battlefield, you take off, that's a crime.
And it's a crime in times of war punishable by death.
And so Lincoln's saying, okay, this soldier boy, let's just say, ran off the battlefield.
You want me to shoot him? But where did he get the idea that he should run off the battlefield?
He got the idea from Clement Vallandigham, this prominent Democrat who was making fiery speeches saying, don't join the military, don't support the war machine.
So Lincoln's point is, you now want me to shoot this guy and leave the guy who talked him into it alone?
No. Now, of course, the guy who talked him into it could say, well, I have a free speech right to advocate for whatever I want, but Lincoln does not agree.
Lincoln actually goes on to say, quote,"...I think that in such a case, to silence the agitator and save the boy is not only constitutional, but with all a great mercy." Notice the interesting language that Lincoln uses.
It's not the language of rights.
It's the language of mercy.
Lincoln's point is, look...
This kid who runs off the battlefield is not the bad guy here.
The bad guy is the wily agitator in Lincoln's term who is encouraging desertion.
That guy needs to be punished, even though it must be said that that guy didn't run off the battlefield himself.
That guy only used words.
That guy was, quote, exercising his First Amendment rights.
But according to Lincoln, there are no such rights in that situation.
Now, for Lincoln, rights don't exist, you may say, in the abstract.
Rights are part of a constitutional structure, and the constitutional structure protects those rights.
So, the way Lincoln looks at it is that it's not ultimately about whether you protect this right or that right in isolation.
Even in the very famous case later in the Civil War where Lincoln suspended the right to habeas corpus, kind of a right to due process, and an important right, to be sure.
And Lincoln suppressed it.
He said, under necessity.
In fact, Lincoln's constitutional argument went like this.
He goes, listen, it is Congress's job to suspend the right in times of emergency, but the outbreak of the Civil War has made it impossible for Congress to even meet.
And since Congress is not in a position to exercise its role, I in the executive branch can do it for them.
You can debate this and whether Lincoln was able to sort of usurp, you may say, a prerogative of Congress and exercise it for the executive branch.
But here's what Lincoln says when he's pushed up against the wall on this.
He basically goes, look...
He goes, do you want me to fastidiously uphold this one single right, which is to say the right to habeas corpus, and what if in trying to do that, the whole ship of state goes underwater?
The whole country is destroyed. So if that happens, isn't it true that all your rights go away?
Isn't it true that the whole Constitution becomes a essentially a dead letter? So if you're trying to save the Union, you're trying to save the ship of state, you're trying to keep it afloat, that is the framework in which your rights exist.
And so saving the ship takes priority over saving this right or that right understood in isolation.
So the point here is that even though it is available to Lincoln to make a full-throated free speech defense of abolitionism against the mob, Lincoln, even though this argument is available to him, he doesn't use it.
Why does he not use it?
Because he doesn't agree with it.
He's going to make the case against mob rule in other ways.
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