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March 18, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
52:20
SELECTIVE PROSECUTION Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep792
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Coming up, big case before the Supreme Court today, government involvement in digital censorship.
I'll offer some early thoughts.
I'm also going to have Douglas Mackey.
He's the guy who made the satirical Hillary meme in 2016, went to jail for it.
We're going to talk about his case and about free speech.
And I'll also reveal why Judge Eileen Cannon in Florida might dismiss the charges against Trump in the classified documents case on the grounds of selective prosecution.
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Big day before the Supreme Court today.
The case of Missouri v.
Biden, which I've talked about multiple times on the podcast, is going before the court.
Now, it has a different name.
It's called Murthy v.
Missouri, but it's the same case.
The issue before the court is whether or not the government can pressure Coerce, direct, collaborate with digital platforms to censor not one, not two, but hundreds of thousands, if not millions of posts.
Millions of citizens, systematic censorship that is being executed by the platforms, but at the behest, at the direction, at the cajoling, in some cases even the orders, of the Biden administration.
Now, the arguments are going on pretty much as we speak.
So, I've only got a glimpse of them.
I'll talk more about them tomorrow because I'll have a chance to listen to the full hearing and assess what the two sides are saying.
But from the early indications, one of the things that the Biden administration is arguing, and I think this is borderline comedy, is that we need some new exceptions to the First Amendment.
In a sense, what they're arguing is there's a pandemic.
Whenever there's a serious situation, whether it's a pandemic or whether it's a generalized appeal to national security, we, the government, should have every right to not only ask but instruct digital platforms to suppress content.
And now, this is not to say the First Amendment does have an exception or two, but the exceptions are, as lawyers say, narrowly tailored.
They're very minor.
There is a heavy burden of proof that That you have to meet in order to make one of these exceptions.
This is why, by the way, people notoriously give the example of shouting fire in a crowded theater.
First of all, to my knowledge, there is no Supreme Court case, no landmark case that deals with anyone who even did that.
It's what philosophers call a thought experiment, a hypothetical.
And of course, by the way, it's not illegal to shout fire in a crowded theater if there is a fire.
It's merely that you can't do it to create a stampede that could cause obviously real physical harm to a lot of people, including potentially death.
So this is really why that is famously presented as, well, you know, the First Amendment has a limit.
The point is that there are very few such limits, and there are very few such limits, especially when you're dealing with political speech.
And, again, the First Amendment doesn't say that you can only say things that are true.
You can say things that you disagree with, things that are false, things that are absurd, things that are satirical, things that are outrageous.
The First Amendment does not decide that certain types of speech should be allowed and other types of speech should not be allowed.
So this is all before the court.
More on this tomorrow.
I actually want to talk today about developments in Florida.
This is in the... Julie Kelly thinks so.
And based on her writings and based upon her description of what's going on, I think so also.
Now, what are we talking about here?
What we're talking about, if you listen to the arguments going back and forth, there's a lot of technical elements.
They go through the Espionage Act.
They go through this and that.
Many of the counts come over this antiquated Espionage Act as if Trump is somehow guilty of espionage.
The whole thing is a little bit difficult to digest.
But... Here's the key issue.
Just recently, the special prosecutor, Robert Herr, decided not to bring charges against Biden.
Now, did he say that Biden was unintentional in retaining the classified documents?
No. He said this was intentional.
Biden knew about it. Biden, in fact, was sharing those documents with a ghostwriter.
Moreover, the ghostwriter, even after her was appointed as a special prosecutor, destroyed documents.
In other words, hid evidence, tried to conceal documents that were given to him.
Let's also remember that Biden has had documents for decades.
He's had documents for a long period of time.
Trump, of course, has not.
Moreover, Biden has no ability to declassify documents.
He was not, at this time, the president.
He was either a senator or he was vice president.
Senators and vice presidents don't have this kind of authority.
The president does.
And finally, Biden kept these documents all over the place.
He had them here. He had them there.
He had them in his house. He had them in his garage.
He had them at the Penn Center.
So the idea that Biden somehow was fastidious and careful with the documents.
No, he wasn't. At one point, the FBI finds some documents thrown all over the place.
They pack the documents into a box.
They seal the box.
The FBI is almost doing a certain type of cleanup for Biden.
And so the question raised by Judge Eileen Cannon is, wait a minute.
We're prosecuting Trump for doing things, and it's always possible, again, to have certain types of nuance.
No two cases are identical.
And so the Biden people, for example, and this, by the way, is also echoed by Jack Smith, the special prosecutor in this case, is he says, well, there's a difference in intent between Trump and Biden.
Actually, what's the difference?
As I just mentioned, Robert Herr found that Biden intended to keep the documents.
He knew that they were classified.
So the idea that somehow Biden's intentions were benign, but Trump's were malevolent, or conversely, that Trump had, quote, more documents.
Well, More documents.
We're talking here about, let me read here from Jack Smith.
Biden possessed 88 documents bearing classification markings, including 18 marked top secret.
By contrast, Trump possessed 337 documents bearing classification markings, including 64 marked top secret.
So? So what?
Whoop-dee-doo. Are you basically saying that there is a certain, like, threshold?
Trump had more documents than Biden, so it's okay to have 88 documents, but it's not okay to have 300 documents.
It's okay to have 18 top secret, but not okay to have 64.
I mean, this is the heart of the so-called distinction.
Or also, Jack Smith's claim that sort of Trump held on to the documents, he didn't give them back.
of disagreement. Trump said he was cooperating with them.
There was a back and forth. The FBI told him to put a lock on this door. He did. So I think what Judge Cannon is getting at is that many previous presidents have had classified documents.
Obama had them. Clinton had them.
And of course, we know Biden had them. Many vice presidents have had documents. Shortly after the Trump classified documents, Mike Pence goes, oh, whoops, I have classified documents. And so Mike Pence, Joe Biden, as vice president, have had classified documents. And yet, all of this is apparently just fine.
It's okay. Robert Hurst says, I'm not prosecuting Biden because, you know, he's old.
He's forgetful.
As if to say... Old?
Forgetful? I mean, is that a way of being able to get out of a crime?
I forgot that I did it.
It was a long time ago.
I robbed the bank.
You know, my memory just isn't what it used to be.
I mean, this is seriously presented by a special prosecutor as a reason not to prosecute Biden.
And by the way, of course, this cuts both ways because if Biden is so forgetful, if he doesn't even know what's going on, he can't remember the date that his son died, even within some years.
What's he doing running the country?
What's he doing with the nuclear codes?
So all of that became an interesting corollary to Robert Hur's findings.
But I think what Judge Cannon is getting the point that there's only one guy you're going after.
This is the essence of selective prosecution.
So there are a number of motions before Judge Cannon to dismiss this case.
But Julie Kelly thinks, and I agree, this selective prosecution motion is maybe the most lethal.
Because it's so blatant.
Everybody can see it.
It's so obvious. And all you need is the judge to take judicial recognition of what everybody already knows.
Selective prosecution is rarely used as the basis to dismiss a case.
I think part of the reason for that is that judges give a lot of prosecutorial discretion.
Like, you can't say, I was speeding on the highway, but they stopped me, but this other guy was also speeding, I'm being selectively prosecuted.
But in that case, you're not being selectively prosecuted, you're just the guy that they happen to catch.
So you cannot expect that they're going to catch everybody who did the crime.
You did the crime. And so you pay for the crime regardless of whether some other guy was able to get off.
So all of this is true. But in this case, we're dealing with a singular set of events involving top officials and classified documents.
And you've just got an array of cases, most notably the Biden cases...
And you have the current president who is getting a complete pass, by the way, by his own Justice Department.
While that same Justice Department is using the same laws, the same standard, to go after the presumptive nominee of the opposing party.
Politically, ethically, morally, this stinks.
It's up to Judge Cannon to show that it stinks legally as well.
It isn't just disgraceful.
It isn't just unethical.
It is selective prosecution and the case needs to go bye-bye.
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I want to talk about the Biden administration and the media's bloodbath hoax. Now, you're probably familiar with the hoax. What is so chilling about these hoaxes is that they are coordinated to a ridiculous degree. And so if you opened up your newspaper, you turn on your television, whether it's a network news, whether it's CNN, whether it's the, the LA Times,
you just look at the papers and you look at the TV and you look at social media and a single theme, headlines that are almost identical. And what do they say? Well, here is one of them.
NBC News. Trump says that there will be a bloodbath, in quotes, if he loses the election.
CBS News. In Ohio Rally, Trump says there will be a, quote, bloodbath if he loses.
Rolling Stone. Trump says there will be a bloodbath.
So this is a systematic, orchestrated, and part of the fascination is how these things come to be, because clearly these reporters don't get on Zoom calls and all agree, okay, let's have this as our headline tomorrow, guys.
It's not a conspiracy in that sense, but it is coordinated, and by that I mean, you've got the government, you've got nonprofit groups all putting out the message, and it's almost like everybody gets the signal, everybody gets the memo, everybody realizes this is the blow we're trying to land on Donald Trump today.
That's what's going on.
I'm going to read a few sentences.
And you think you're going to get that?
You're going to not hire Americans and you're going to get the cars, sell the cars to us?
No. We're going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line and you're not going to be able to sell to guys if I get elected.
Now, if I don't get elected, it's going to be a bloodbath for the whole.
That's going to be the least of it.
It's going to be a bloodbath for the country.
That will be the least of it, but they're not going to sell those cars.
That's what Trump said. Now, This is interpreted as Trump calling for political violence, even though the context is Trump is talking about the automobile industry.
He's obviously using the phrase bloodbath metaphorically.
Now, there's a guy who jumps in on social media and he...
He goes, this is not a normal way to talk.
I'm not quoting him. Quote, try using bloodbath in a casual sentence with friends.
I dare you. In other words, he's implying that Trump very deliberately chose this inflammatory, outrageous word.
And so he goes, try using bloodbath in a casual sentence with friends.
So I do. I try. And I post this.
I go, here's my quote.
Man, you should not have moved your bishop to E7. Now it's going to be a total bloodbath.
And I say this pretty much every time I play chess.
And then lots of people comment below, and they go, Super Bowl XXIV was a bloodbath.
Or, I looked at my retirement statements after the crash of 2008, man, it was a bloodbath.
Or, as this guy gets so slammed on social media, someone goes, the comments in this section are a bloodbath.
So, the point being, bloodbath is commonly used.
The media uses this term all the time, referring to the stock market.
Anything that's a complete decimation is described as a bloodbath.
So, if anybody other than Trump used the phrase bloodbath, In this exact context that Trump did, just take out the name Trump, put in somebody else, and this would be uneventful.
This would be just political boilerplate, politicians talking like this all the time.
So what this means is that the left interpretation of this is totally driven by Trump derangement syndrome. That's all that they hear Trump say. If Trump says, you know, man, you know, those guys did really well, they killed it. Oh, Trump is talking about murdering people. So the rhetoric, the normal rhetoric, the normal metaphorical rhetoric that we use in boxing matches and so on, that the rhetoric of combativeness is being interpreted
here, even though again, the context of it could not be more could not be more clear. I think the point of this Trump derangement syndrome is just this.
There's something about Trump.
I mean, that's the starting point of all this.
The reason that this won't happen to anyone else is the left is not scared of anyone else.
They know that they can corral.
They can put a leash on Mike Pence.
They can put a leash on Nikki Haley.
They can put a leash on Marco Rubio.
they can put a leash on anybody in the Republican or conservative camp with the singular exception of Trump.
So, in a weird way, the fact that the media singles out Trump, they go nuts when it's Trump, is a kind of secret tribute to Trump's power that they fear.
They fear Trump like they fear no one else.
And even when Trump says things that are benign, his ability to live in their heads is just legendary.
Here's George Conway.
I'm assuming to assume for the sake of argument he was referring to cars.
Okay, so Conway makes a concession.
You think there's a moment of honesty coming, but no.
Then he backs up to what matters is that he consistently uses apocalyptic and violent language in an indiscriminate fashion as a result of his psychopathy and authoritarian tendencies and because he's just played evil.
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I'm starting out with the premise that these words are coming out of Satan's mouth.
So, I'm going to treat them as satanic, no matter what the guy says.
And that's really what's going on here.
This is the level of dislocation and utter insanity that we're seeing, not from Trump, But it's what he brings out in the Democrats, in the left, and in the media.
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Guys, this is a huge election year.
Everything is on the line.
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Someone once said that the heroes of the Constitution are perhaps unlikely people, people who find themselves in a situation that dramatizes a fundamental constitutional right or liberty.
In this case, we're talking about free speech.
And my guest is a new guest.
I mean, well, we featured him in Police State, so you got a glimpse of him there.
His name is Douglas Mackey, and he is a free speech activist.
Now, Doug Mackey posted a meme on social media, a humorous meme related to Hillary Clinton.
And guess what? The FBI and other law enforcement agencies showed up, arrested him.
He was facing 10 years, I kid you not, 10 years in prison.
He got some prison time, although less than that.
I want to find out about his case, but also get an update on it.
And of course, we're having this conversation at the very time the Supreme Court...
is taking up the larger issue of free speech in the case of Missouri vs.
Biden. I think it's called Murthy vs.
Missouri. Doug Mackey, by the way, you can follow him on X. It's at Doug Mackey, M-A-C-K-E-Y case.
Or the website, memedefensefund.com.
This is where you can support Doug Mackey in this case.
Hey Doug, thank you for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
And, first of all, I just want to express my absolute outrage and horror at what happened to you.
What you did was innocuous.
It was no big deal.
And they tried, I mean, they tried to throw the book at you.
I want to go through the details of your case.
So, let me just begin by asking you, tell me a little bit about who you are and tell me a little bit about the The offensive meme that you posted that caused, that was the beginning of all the trouble.
Good morning, Dinesh. Thank you so much for having me.
So, my background, I actually went to a school not too far away from the one on your shirt there, Dharma.
I graduated from Middlebury College.
I moved to New York City.
And I was working as an economic analyst, so to speak.
And in my free time, I was posting a lot of memes and links, etc., online.
So, That was during the 2016 election.
And I posted one that said, I found one, actually I found it on 4chan.
And it said, save time, skip the line, text Hillary, text your vote to some number, some five-digit shortcode.
And yeah, five years later, the FBI was knocking on my door.
By that time, I moved to Florida.
The FBI was knocking on my door at 7 a.m.
and I was arrested seven days after Joe Biden was inaugurated.
And that was back in 2021.
So this has been a really long, drawn-out process.
Last year I was tried and convicted in the Eastern District of New York.
That's Brooklyn, New York. And I was sentenced just this past October.
And right now I'm currently on bond pending appeal, in my case, at the Second Circuit Court in New York City.
Doug, let's go through this more slowly.
Let's start with the meme.
What you were posting, as I understand it, and you were doing it under a Twitter account called at RickyVaugh99, is you posted kind of a joke, which is Hillary Clinton supporters are so dumb that...
You can actually tell them, hey, you don't have to go up, show up and vote.
You don't have to send in your mail-in ballot.
You can just text this number and that will be your vote.
It seems like what the government did, in this case the Biden administration, or the Justice Department, I guess, Is they took your meme seriously and they accused you of attempting to spread disinformation about elections and suppress the vote.
Were they accusing you of trying to suppress the vote for Hillary?
Exactly. That's exactly right.
So I was accused of a conspiracy against civil rights of actually injuring voters in the use of their civil rights.
That is the right to vote.
The irony, of course, here is that, you know, the joke was always sort of on the campaign and on the media because they thought that the voters would believe this.
Well, I never actually thought that any voter would actually believe this.
It was clearly a joke.
Clearly satirical, and nobody even fell for it either.
I mean, Doug, isn't it true that there was a woman named, if my memory serves me right, Christina Wong, who posted almost the identical meme playing the same joke, but against Trump.
And her thing was, Trump voters are so dumb that you can text your vote.
Nothing happens to her.
So, you know, in addition to the inherent outrage, I mean, I'm not saying that she should have been prosecuted either.
I think, obviously, neither of you should have been.
Exactly. But nevertheless, the discrepancy in treatment is illuminating.
Here's my question. Was the government able to produce 300 voters who said, oh wow, you know, I saw this meme and I didn't vote in the 2016 election because I was confused.
I thought I could text and that would con...
Did they produce the so-called stupid voters that were conned by your meme?
No, they didn't produce a single voter at trial, and it wasn't for lack of effort either.
They went around the Eastern District of New York knocking on people's doors saying, did you text this number back in 2016?
And they couldn't find a single person.
There were people that said, no, obviously I didn't think it was real.
And all those people that texted the vote, I believe almost all of them actually did vote.
Eight days later, except for one, but that person never voted anyways.
They had no history of voting.
So they came out and tried to make this big deal of trial.
5,000 people texted the number.
Well, the vast, vast majority texted the number after this was covered in sort of outrage by the media just to kind of see what would happen.
So no, not a single voter was actually produced that fell for this.
I'll come back to the trial itself and the peculiar choice of venue for the trial because they brought this case against you in Brooklyn, am I right?
I'll get to that.
I want to ask you something before that.
I want to talk about the FBI raid because...
I think for many people, I mean, I've never had an FBI raid.
I've had a case with the government in the Obama years, but two pleasant-looking FBI agents came to my door.
I didn't speak to them. They left.
They weren't raiding me.
They were just trying to get me to talk to them.
But I think for people who don't experience this, it seems surreal.
It seems like this does not happen in America.
I mean, it happens maybe if you're Al Capone, but it doesn't happen to people like Douglas Mackey.
So talk about where were you?
What were you doing? What was this FBI raid all about?
How many people came and what did they do?
Yeah, great question. It was extremely surreal.
I was just sleeping at home at 7 a.m.
in the morning here down here in Florida.
When I get the knock on the door, it's FBI open up, FBI open up.
And there you have it. There were two local agents from Florida.
There were two New York agents that were sort of directing the whole thing.
And then there were some local law enforcement that they, I guess they bring along for the ride as sort of their standard operating procedures.
So here you go, you got two or three squad cars, a couple SUVs, and eight to ten law enforcement agents.
Now, I was fortunate that I was just arrested and they didn't actually raid my house, which we've seen with a lot of these J6 people.
But yeah, this was so weird.
And the strange thing was, they said, we have a warrant for your arrest.
And I said, for what?
Now, they wouldn't tell me.
I didn't even find out until after the hall hearing at the courthouse.
Now you go, let's now move to the actual trial itself.
Was this a case where there was a trial or did they strong arm you into doing a plea?
So yes, there was a trial in Brooklyn, like you said.
Yeah, they charged me with a single felony count of conspiracy against rights.
So there was basically no way that I was ever going to plea out to this charge because this is a serious charge.
And not only that, I didn't commit the crime.
So I fought this case and we did go to trial.
You went to trial, and now you're in a venue.
I mean, one of the things I think a lot of people don't realize is that the government shops for a favorable venue.
I mean, because you're posting a meme on social media.
You live in Florida.
The meme goes all over the country.
So presumably, this is a case that can be brought in Texas.
It can be brought in Louisiana.
It can be brought in Florida.
But they decided, because some people may have seen the meme in...
The Eastern District of New York, where you might have a left-wing judge, you might have a left-wing jury, this is where we can get this guy, because there's going to be prejudice against him for being anti-Hillary and pro-Trump in the first place.
Now, is that part of the basis of you appealing this verdict?
Yeah, I would say we have multiple bases for appeal.
This is an extremely strong one.
Now, the even weirder thing is I was living in Manhattan at the time, and they brought the case in Brooklyn, which goes directly against the Constitution, because back during the Revolution, they were dragging colonists back to London to be tried for whatever, sedition, conspiracy, etc., So they didn't even really have a venue argument.
Now, you'll find this interesting.
They came up with a theory at trial after we tried to dismiss the case that because the tweets went over the wire, over the water surrounding Manhattan, that therefore Brooklyn had jurisdiction because Brooklyn and Manhattan share jurisdiction.
So that was extremely bizarre and that's a very strong basis for our appeal, which is coming up here.
So that's among many, I would say.
Tell me one or two of the other key premises of the appeal.
I mean, I'm assuming part of the appeal just rides on the First Amendment.
In other words, the First Amendment gives you every right to engage in satire, every right for you to publish your opinions, and you're dealing here with not a private...
You're not talking here about digital censorship.
We're not talking about, you know, X throwing you off Twitter.
We're talking about the government prosecuting you for a meme.
Now, I mean, if this isn't a textbook case, a flagrant violation of the First Amendment, I really don't know what is it.
Also, you're engaging in political speech, which is the most important kind of speech in a constitutional democracy.
I mean, courts have gone to bat to protect the First Amendment against nude dancing, for example, or Using epithets and the F word and so on.
We're talking here about political speech.
That should be, it seems to me, the centerpiece of the appeal.
Exactly. So, yeah, that's exactly right.
This is political speech.
That deserves the highest level of protection by the courts.
So, absolutely.
And so the statute that I was prosecuted under forbids conspiracies to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate voters.
And now you're looking at the statute and say, well, is this an oppressed shit?
Is this threatening?
Well, no, obviously it's not.
The verb that they're going with here is injure.
So the centerpiece of our appeal is that this statute cannot be applied to this kind of political speech.
We're talking about injury here.
Injure has a, you know, it should have a clear mission, clear meaning.
we're not even talking about defraud, so we're not even going down the path of is this fraud or is this satire. The fact that this was prosecuted under a statute where the main verb is injure, that is the centerpiece of the appeal. And also just the simple idea that you have to have fair notice that you're committing a crime before you can be prosecuted. So it's one thing, you know, ignorance of the laws no excuse
However, at the same time, if no reasonable person could know for sure that this behavior was criminal, then you can't be prosecuted for that conduct.
And this is extremely important because when all of us are engaging in politics, we're going online, we're posting memes and stuff, we need to know that we're not going to be prosecuted unless we violate a clearly established law.
For instance, I can't threaten you online.
I can't call in a bomb threat.
I can't post illegal child pornography, what have you.
That's obvious. And obviously, if I did something like that, I would be prosecuted.
This is extremely chilling to free speech when you're prosecuting somebody for memes that it's not clear that it's a violation of the law.
And not only that, they introduced a number of memes as evidence in the case, which was also extremely bizarre, and that's also extremely chilling to free speech.
It looks to me that they're taking the position, and I think this is important because today, the very day we're speaking, there is a big case before the Supreme Court, but the underlying premise of the case, and this is what the Biden regime appears to be arguing, that normally free speech would be okay, but we are now living in a special environment created by the internet, right?
I mean, let's think about this, Doug, for a moment, because we've obviously had the telegraph, the telephone, the newspaper, television, you know, cable, so the First Amendment appears to have survived unscathed with all those technologies, but evidently the Internet is a new type of technology that creates this new phenomenon of memes, which are particularly dangerous and scary and destructive, and so the argument appears to be that we need an Internet exception.
For the First Amendment that allows the government to collude with digital platforms in systematically censoring speech.
My first question is, were you censored?
Did you experience any censorship on any of the digital platforms at all?
And what do you think about this case that is before the court today?
Yeah, absolutely. I did experience that sort of censorship from these digital platforms.
Even before I posted this meme, I was suspended about a month before the 2016 election from Twitter without really a real reason why.
Now, after I posted these memes, I was also suspended again from Twitter on a different account.
So, yeah, I was absolutely censored by these digital platforms.
And I think that this case that you mentioned, Missouri v.
Biden, is extremely important because the idea that the internet is, oh, so foreign to our country.
I mean, we've had... Hundreds of years of pamphleteering, yellow journalism, all kinds of political cartoons that were against, let's say, the crowd or whatever.
You had, I think it was somebody like Thomas Jefferson or something called John Adams a hermaphrodite.
I mean, we have a history of rough and tumble political speech, which has its upsides and its downsides.
However, the founding fathers, they wanted to create a system where there would be this raucous sort of back and forth.
And yes, sometimes people do cross the line.
However, it's not criminalized.
So the idea that the government can sort of chip away at our First Amendment rights because it's on these digital platforms, I think it's absurd.
I think it's extremely concerning.
The courts have gone through, they've seen the rise of the telegraph and the telephone, and the case law has adjusted, and they've maintained the First Amendment all this time.
So the idea all of a sudden the First Amendment needs to go away, it's completely ridiculous.
But that's what they're doing in my case.
And if, you know, if we didn't have the First Amendment, they would already be throwing people in jail like we just saw over in Belgium, some guy because someone in his group chat saw it a naughty meme, you know?
So absolutely, the courts need to uphold the First Amendment.
Otherwise, it's just words on a piece of paper.
I mean, the Soviet Union had a constitution after all.
So we need to have an independent judiciary uphold the First Amendment.
Wow, Doug, we've communicated a little bit back and forth on social media.
We've never talked in person.
I didn't quite know what to expect.
I thought I might be dealing with like a wild and crazy meme guy, but you're a very sober and sensible guy, and the idea that you are some sort of threat to civil rights or voting rights, nothing could be more absurd.
So guys, if you want to support Doug Mackey, and you should, go to this website, memedefensefund.com.
Follow him on social media, at Doug Mackey Case.
He also has a substack, Douglas, with two S's, D-O-U-G-L-A-S-S, Mackey.substack.com.
Doug, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you Dinesh, it's been a pleasure.
I'm going to conclude today my discussion of Abraham Lincoln's famous Lyceum speech in which he warns not just about the danger of mob rule and mob rule here should be understood broadly.
Lawlessness, a disrespectful law, very much of the kind that we see today.
Today it's coming from the media, we see it coming from institutions, we're even seeing it coming from the government.
None of this is outside of Lincoln's indictment, although he's specifically in his own time talking about a certain type of mob rule, and that is the mob, by and large, pro-slavery mobs, but also abolitionist mobs running roughshod over the law and over the Constitution.
Now, Lincoln in this speech also, somewhat surprisingly, warns of the danger of a kind of Caesar-like or Napoleonic figure.
And this is a figure that can stir them up, that can egg them on to do horrible things.
For the left today, by the way, Trump is that kind of figure.
He's a kind of a Caesar.
He wants to be a tyrant.
He is stoking the fears of certain types of people.
So that is the left's way of trying to portray Trump as a danger to the republic.
And Lincoln, of course, speaking in a very different context, recognizes that there are going to be leaders.
He's thinking of leaders, by the way, in the Democratic Party, not in the Republican Party, in the Democratic Party, who will play on people's passions, the idea, their hatred of blacks, the idea that they want slavery because slavery is profitable for them.
So who cares about the rights of other people?
Let's just go ahead and vote for slavery so we can have it and we can establish a system of exploitation in certain states in the country.
So this is what Lincoln is getting at, but, and this is the interesting part of the speech, is Lincoln admits that he himself is susceptible to the Napoleonic or Caesarian, the Caesar, danger.
Why?
Because he, like the founders, is somebody that is ambitious.
He, like the founders, is somebody that wants to leave his mark on society.
He is somebody who pursues, let's say, eternal fame, and in fact, today, Lincoln is widely regarded by historians, even liberal historians, as the greatest president in US history.
So for all these reasons, Lincoln turns the lens, if you will, on himself.
A very rare thing to do.
He's not just pointing at the other guy and going, you're a Napoleon, you're a Caesar.
Lincoln is in a sense saying, I can feel that danger myself.
The danger for me to become a tyrant.
And let's remember that over the decades and now a couple of centuries since Lincoln's own time, century and a half, there are people who have accused Lincoln of being a tyrant.
He suspended habeas corpus. He ran roughshod over the Constitution during the Civil War. He arbitrarily arrested people. And this was a guy who did not respect basic rights.
Now, so Lincoln in a sense is almost foreshadowing the emergence of these types of critiques that would persist not only in his own time but also in subsequent times.
In one of Lincoln's speeches he gives an analogy that's really worth thinking about.
It's an analogy that comes right out of the Bible, and it is the analogy of the shepherd and the flock.
Now, in the Bible, the shepherd is the caretaker of the flock.
The shepherd is there to look after the flock.
But let's remember that this presentation, this benign image of the shepherd looking after the flock is open to one serious and some would say fatal objection.
What's the objection?
Yeah, the shepherd is better than the wolf because the shepherd is looking after the flock and the wolf is trying to eat the sheep.
But guess what?
The shepherd wants to eat the sheep also.
What is the shepherd raising the flock for?
Doesn't he want to slaughter the flock?
Doesn't he want to sell the flock so that they can end up on somebody's dinner table?
So isn't it true, this is the kind of, let's call it the Machiavellian critique of the notion of the shepherd and the flock.
Machiavelli would say...
The shepherd is a wolf.
He's a wolf in disguise.
He's a wolf that is, in a way, far more dangerous than the actual wolf because if the sheep sees a wolf, the sheep is going to run and go,''Let me try to save my life.
I might not be able to, but at least I can try.'' But with the shepherd, the sheep says, oh man, this guy's looking after me.
He's guiding me. He's moving me away from the cliff.
I'm not going to fall over the cliff.
I'm being taken to pastures where I can graze.
And the sheep has no idea that the sheep is being fattened up, as I mentioned, for somebody's dinner table.
The sheep is actually headed for steaks and chops.
And so... There are, let's put it this way, two different types of shepherds.
The malevolent shepherd, who's a disguised wolf, and the good shepherd.
I'm using that phrase deliberately because the good shepherd in the Bible refers to Christ.
Now, Christ is the good shepherd.
Why? Because Christ actually wants the welfare of the sheep.
Christ is, in fact, the one who guides us, but he guides us for our benefit.
He's looking out for us.
The shepherd, in Christ's case, is a sacrificial shepherd that is putting his own life in danger to protect the sheep.
And I think what Lincoln is trying to say here in the Lyceum Address is that he, Abraham Lincoln, even though this is early in his career, Lincoln is in no way, he's not a senator, he's not the president, he is at this point a pretty ambitious but nondescript character.
And so the marvel of these Lincoln speeches, and admittedly we are reading the speeches now with the benefit of hindsight.
So in retrospect, We can see the Lyceum speech as a kind of harbinger, a kind of foreshadowing of a great role that Lincoln is going to play on the American, if not the world stage.
And in this role, Lincoln will be one kind of shepherd, and he's up against a different kind of shepherd.
The other kind of shepherd is Douglass.
And Douglass is, well, Douglass is in favor of some of the sheep, but not others.
Because obviously for Douglass, it is okay, not only for the shepherd to exploit the sheep politically, but it's also okay for some sheep to exploit others.
This reminds you almost of Animal Farm.
Some animals are more equal than others.
And for Douglas, it is okay for some men who live in certain states and territories to make a decision collectively to enslave other men.
Those men have no say in the matter.
They're not apparently covered by the Declaration of Independence.
Their vote doesn't count.
In fact, they don't get to vote at all.
They are treated completely as property.
That says, Lincoln, in order to challenge this system, in order to expose, not a contradiction, because it's not a contradiction that the American founders allowed slavery.
A compromise is not a contradiction.
A compromise is very often getting the best deal that you can.
And if the American founders say, listen, if we don't, Allow slavery, at least for a time, we're not going to have a union.
In fact, we're not going to be able to unify the colonies to even fight against the British.
So, number one, we have to get our own independence.
And number two, we have to come together as a society that can coexist and live together in a single union.
How do we do that if we don't accommodate the competing demands of the different, in those cases, the original states?
And so the founders decided, let's have a union.
It's based on the principle that all men are created equal, but we are not able to fully implement that principle now.
We have to regrettably go with the idea that most men are equal.
There is the practice of slavery that has come into the union pre-existing, but We're not going to be able to get a union if we forbade it at the outset, and so we're not going to.
We're going to allow the states to continue with what was called their domestic institutions.
And of course, Lincoln was on board with all this.
Lincoln's point was, listen, I cannot undo compromises made by the founders.
But what we can do is we can look at new states and new territories that are not covered by the original pact.
This is somewhat similar to saying that we can't change a bargain, a social compact, among American citizens.
But if there are people from other countries who want to come here now, we are at complete discretion to say, no, you can't come, or we only want these kinds of people.
Well, we want to have these kinds of rules apply to these newcomers.
Why? Because, after all, they are not covered by the original pact.
They are not covered by the original agreement.
So, in the end, Lincoln wants to bring about the full realization of the principles of the founding of Ultimately, through the Civil War, he will be able to go even further than he intended.
He will be able to do things like have, in the aftermath of the war, blacks will get the vote.
There will be equal rights under the law, the 14th Amendment.
There will be, of course, the Emancipation Clauses.
Let's remember, in Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, the only slaves who were freed...
We're outside of Lincoln's power to free them.
So in other words, Lincoln did not free the slaves in the border states, which were under Union control.
He only freed the slaves in the Confederate states, which paid no attention to what Lincoln said or did.
So in a sense, this is the peculiarity of the Emancipation Proclamation.
It's justly famous.
But let's remember that what Lincoln here is doing is issuing an edict For people who are outside the reach of that edict, at least outside of the administrative and military reach of that edict, he is freeing slaves under the orbit or under the control of his military enemies, in this case, the Confederacy.
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