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March 19, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
52:26
CENSORSHIP ON TRIAL Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep793
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Coming up, I'll talk about the latest twist in Trump's New York case.
I also want to talk about the arguments presented to the Supreme Court in the very important Missouri vs.
Biden digital censorship case.
Social media influencer and author Tracy Beans will join me.
We're going to go in-depth into what the justices said and what kind of ruling we can anticipate or expect.
And I'll ask if the new regime at the RNC, the Republican National Committee, is in time and up to the task of fixing the problems before the 2024 election.
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.
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The big news from yesterday was the Supreme Court hearing on a consolidation of cases that we generally know as Missouri versus Biden.
And the hearing, which is something I've been looking forward to, many others as well, appears to have been a little troubling, problematic even, because of the types of questions raised by several of the justices.
Perhaps many of us had assumed, and assumed optimistically, that, look, these justices, and particularly the conservative majority, totally understand what the First Amendment is all about.
It's a restriction on government and it is fairly absolute.
In other words, there are some very narrow areas about where you – things you can't say.
But other than that, the government has got to stay out of the information control business.
They can't tell you what to say.
They can't regulate what you say.
And it doesn't really matter if what you say is objectionable, even untrue.
The First Amendment doesn't limit itself to true statements.
So unless some kind of imminent harm can be shown, quote, shouting fire in a crowded theater which could cause a stampede and multiple deaths, other than that, other than making explicit threats of violence and so on, you are allowed to say what you want.
And yet millions of Americans are being censored.
And this has been going on now for years.
It's going on now.
And yet the court...
From the tenor of questioning, appeared to be going into fanciful hypotheticals.
What if there is an internet sensation of young people jumping out of windows and there are people making videos about why this is a great idea and it's encouraging young people to do this?
Shouldn't the government be able to go to these platforms and demand that they take this content down?
Well, That's an interesting hypothetical.
Again, in that case, there is imminent harm, and also we are talking about young people, presumably minors, which creates a special situation, and And yet,
in the public domain, we're talking about platforms censoring people left and right on—not left and right politically, but I mean all over the place for all kinds of reasons—climate, abortion, COVID— Claims that what people are saying runs...
Essentially, if you run afoul of the leftist narrative, you are in danger of being censored.
And the Biden administration is actively collaborating and participating in this.
And yet, I'm not sure...
I'm going to have Tracy Bean, social media influencer.
She streamed the whole Supreme Court hearing on to offer her thoughts.
We're going to have an in-depth conversation about this.
But I just wanted to raise that we...
May not here get the decision we're hoping for.
I'm still hopeful we will, but it'll be very disappointing and indeed tragic if we don't.
A comment about Trump.
Trump has appealed, gone to the appellate court and basically said, hey, listen, you want me to put up a bond for $464 million?
This is the insane decision by Judge Engeron.
And I won't go into the insanity of the decision here.
But Trump's like, listen, I have the assets.
But it's very difficult for me to get a bond because what these insurance companies want is cash.
It's not enough for them to say, I've got Trump Tower, I've got these golf courses, I've got Mar-a-Lago, put it together, it's worth easily a billion dollars or more.
No, they want to know, show me the cash that you have, the liquid cash.
And now, I mean, this seems like a very reasonable request to make, and yet it's going to an appellate court in the area of New York.
I'm not sure they're going to give Trump this kind of...
In other words a stay of the bond while Trump appeals and of course the Attorney General is just salivating at the idea of Seizing Trump's property trying to get I mean think of what think of how gleeful the left would be if they could somehow seize Mar-a-Lago as a partial settlement of this claim pending the appeal I mean, this is horrific stuff and it really shows you lawfare at its brutal worst now
There's a bunch of people Ted Lieu and many others saying oh this also shows us that Trump is not a billionaire because how can You be a billionaire and you can't generate a four hundred and sixty four million dollars, which is less than half that amount Here's Ted Lieu. Quote, Trump claims he's a billionaire, but he can't play a $464 million judgment.
That means he's lying. How do I know?
Math. So, well, let's do the math, right?
Here's my question to Ted Lieu.
What's your net worth? Add up everything you have, subtract your debts.
What is your net worth?
Your house, your cars, your savings accounts, your retirement, put it all together.
What's that number? And that number is going to be, I don't know, I'm going to guess it's going to be a million dollars, maybe two million dollars.
And my question then to Ted Lieu is, if you were to generate cash At relatively short notice, say within a month to three months time, how much could you produce?
Well, the answer is that second number is going to be a lot smaller.
That is your liquidity, which is completely different from your net worth.
Most people who have a net worth that is substantial have pretty modest liquidity.
You take a typical millionaire or billionaire, they can't generate half of their net worth in cash.
Why? Because it's all tied up.
It's tied up in real estate.
It's tied up in pension and retirement accounts.
It's tied up in your business.
And Trump's business is a capital-intensive business.
Essentially, it's land, it's buildings, it's physical assets that tie up your resources.
So doing the math, you realize that That this claim that somehow Trump is not as rich as he's portrayed himself to be, no, that's not the issue.
The issue is liquidity. And I think the problem here is that these insurance companies have been demanding liquid assets, not illiquid assets.
And that's what's put Trump in this, I mean, it's really a very difficult situation.
I don't know if you saw the interview that Don Lemon did with Elon Musk.
It's extremely interesting and amusing on a number of fronts, and it's worth watching.
Well, you don't have to watch the whole thing.
Don Lemon is a fairly tedious guy, and he's also not exactly a very bright guy.
At one point, Elon Musk says to Don Lemon that if we lower standards, Particularly with doctors, then we're going to have medical accidents and people could and will die.
So Don Lemon goes, well, where is the proof that we've lowered standards with doctors?
And Elon Musk goes, look, right now we're not arguing about whether we are or not.
I'm simply making a kind of a, let's call it an if-then proposition.
If we lower standards, and that's basically what affirmative action DEI are about, lowering standards in academia.
Now, I suppose there's a big difference if you lower standards, let's say, in the field of women's studies or sociology, as opposed to lowering standards for pilots or mechanics or surgeons.
So this is what Elon Musk is getting at.
The point couldn't be more obvious, and yet Don Lemon was either playing dumb or Or he is dumb, one or the other.
Because he kept saying that, I don't really get it.
I don't understand. If I lower standards, are you telling me I'm going to get more bad doctors?
And that's going to lead to more deaths?
And Elon Musk was looking at him like, duh.
But... And then Don Lemon basically goes, well, why are we even talking about any of this?
Because he's like, if we don't have empirical evidence that these deaths are going on, why are we even raising the topic?
And of course, the answer is obvious, and that is that it's better to raise the topic before we have a series of deaths of people, completely preventable, by the way, because we've hired lousy doctors and surgeons.
Elon Musk is making a sort of Warning of what can and will happen if we allow DEI and affirmative action to essentially invade the world of doctors and the world of medicine.
I think it seems pretty obvious that it already is.
Now, the extent of it can be debated, but that diversity, affirmative action, DEI are now at play in the field of medicine and, by the way, in the field of the airlines.
Notice, have you noticed that there's been a series of just very troubling events involving United Airlines, involving Boeing.
So this is really I think what's on Elon Musk's mind.
And again, it is really fascinating to see how a guy who's now, by the way, no longer operating in the scripted world of CNN, he's now sitting across from Elon Musk, seems completely out of his element, confused, and unable to grasp a very simple concept.
So very often we think of the media.
We've got to realize that we're dealing in many cases with people who are either willfully blind or in an intellectual sense, actually blind.
Financial experts thought we were in the clear.
They were anticipating around six rate cuts by the Fed this year.
And then the inflation data came out.
Well, higher than expected.
So, friends, this isn't going away.
It really can't. The U.S. is $34 trillion.
That's trillion in the hole.
Yet the government keeps printing money, which pushes the prices you pay every day even higher.
So what do we do? We can either bury our heads in the sand or we can do something about this.
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Finally, belatedly, we have a new RNC, a new Republican National Committee.
And even as I take some modest solace in the new operation, and I'll talk about its significance in just a moment, It is really outrageous the way in which the RNC has abdicated its responsibilities.
And I don't just mean on the issue of election integrity, I mean across the board.
I mean, look at this systematic left-wing and democratic warfare against Trump and against the right.
If we had an effective RNC, it would be firing back on all fronts.
But the very fact that we don't even expect this shows how accustomed we have become to having a lazy, inactive, inert, useless RNC that has been vacuuming up money from all around the country and doing close to.
I wouldn't say nothing, but close to nothing for this.
And I think finally Trump had enough.
And he was like, okay, look, we need a big shakeup over here.
And so even though Trump has been supportive of Rona McDaniel in the past...
I think he realized that this woman is absolutely horrible, and she needs to be jettisoned.
And so finally, we have this new guy, Michael Watley from North Carolina, and we also have Laura Trump.
Now, from the left, they're like, well, this just shows that the RNC has now become a MAGA operation.
It's now an extension of Trump.
Well, it's normal for the RNC to be an extension of the Republican nominee, just as it's normal for the DNC to be at the behest of Biden.
And it is. So this is hardly a valid objection that the RNC is now doing the bidding of Trump.
We need an RNC that does the bidding of the Republican nominee, which Trump most certainly now is.
Now, the RNC is being remade just a few months before the election, and that means that there is an awful lot to do.
And the task before the RNC is huge.
I'm really glad that they are bringing in guys like Scott Pressler.
These are guys who have been doing things that the RNC should have been doing, but hasn't been doing.
Things like registering voters, things like going and talking to the Amish and trying to find out if there are Amish guys who will vote for Trump, trying to say, all right, if there are places that allow you to harvest ballots from family members, all right, we'll do ballot harvesting.
If you're allowed to collect ballots from anyone, as you by and large are in a place like California, all right.
Well, let's have harvesting at churches, at gun shows, at conventions, and let's do it in immigrant communities.
So the idea here is to take advantage of the rules as they are.
We're not talking about breaking the law.
We're not talking about deploying mules.
We're talking about the RNC doing what is permitted.
And, of course, the rules vary from state to state.
We also need massive voter registration all over the country because it's a surprising and little-known fact that there are a lot of people who are eligible to vote who don't vote.
And these are people who are on our side or they lean Republican.
But nevertheless, they're We're good to go.
The point being that if you keep saying that there's no difference between the parties, by the way, I do not agree that there's no difference between the parties, then people go, well, what's the point of me voting?
I'm choosing between Tweedledee and Tweedledum, and so it becomes a discouragement, a disincentive to vote.
We also need the RNC to do active lawfare, by that I mean to use the weaponry of the legal system in whatever way they can.
Monitoring election compliance, filing lawsuits against left-wing and democratic groups that are breaking the law or violating the law in some way.
Anticipating forms of fraud that could occur in the 2024 election and being ready, being ready to bust the fraud, being ready with court arguments.
Not like you let it happen, then you go, oh, let's round up a team.
No, you have a team already in place.
Big tech censorship.
There are all kinds of things that the RNC can do to combat that, including going to sympathetic judges around the country and demanding that there be monitors put into place.
This is what the Democrats will do.
They are very imaginative in the way that they use the legal process.
Why not go to judges in Texas and Louisiana and elsewhere and say, To see if they are illegally altering their search practices.
To see if they are collecting data that they shouldn't be.
If they're putting their thumb on the scale.
Are they engaging in unlawful election interference?
Do deploy at every level.
This is the point.
And finally, and this is a point made by Paul Ingracia in an article on the RNC, he goes, listen, the RNC should also be doing strategic planning for a new Trump administration.
You don't want to win the election, and you're like, oh, let's now begin the slow process of getting all the right people into the right jobs.
Well, that could take a year.
So you've essentially erased a year of your administration when you could be effectively doing things because you're looking for the right people to fill jobs, something that you could have been doing early on.
So all of this is a way of saying that the hour is late.
We may finally have the right team in place, but the team needs to not only get its act together, but really get going.
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Guys, I'm really delighted to welcome to the podcast Tracy Bean.
She's a writer, an author, social media influencer, and she was streaming the recent podcast hearing before the Supreme Court in the landmark case of Missouri v.
Biden. The case may have a different name before the court, but nevertheless, it's been described as perhaps the most important free speech case of the 21st century, and it's very important we drill down into What the atmosphere was like at the court and what the different justices said.
Tracy, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
By the way, guys, you can follow her on x at Tracy Beans, B-E-A-N-Z. Tracy, this was a case that many of us have been anticipating for a long time.
So there was a lot of buildup to it because there was a A court decision at the local level, then there was a court decision at the appellate level, and now, of course, it's right there before the Supreme Court.
For people who have been following this a little bit, but just need a little reminder of what is that issue here, can you frame the issue that was before the court?
What is it that the Supreme Court was deciding?
You know, interestingly enough, thanks for having me, Dinesh.
What the Supreme Court was deciding is whether or not the government has to stop coercing social media platforms to censor our speech.
Plain and simple. As you mentioned, there was a preliminary injunction in the main case, Missouri v.
Biden, that was decided at the district level.
And then the government said, well, we need to be able to censor.
So we'll appeal this.
They appealed it to the Fifth Circuit.
The Fifth Circuit looked at the fact pattern in the case because there's been discovery already and said, oh, my gosh, yes, this is bad.
We're going to affirm the district court's ruling that you can't censor people.
Now, important to note, there's carve outs in that injunction for the FBI trying to go after pedophiles or somebody saying it's election day is on me.
the wrong day or criminal activity, that's all excluded.
The only thing at issue in this injunction was whether or not the government can threaten social media, take down Dinesh's post on X, or else we're going to go after you with 230. Or even if there's the appearance of them threatening them with lobbyists, with legislation, with antitrust, whatever. That's what the government is appealing. And it's important to note also that the Fifth Circuit, when they ruled on this injunction and said, yes, it should stand, initially removed the
government bureaucracy known as CISA from the equation, which was detrimental to the entire case. Because if you know anything about CISA, they've been the backbone of this entire censorship apparatus from the beginning. So the states, Missouri and Louisiana, petitioned the court for reconsideration of that.
The court looked at the fact pattern again, reconsidered their initial decision and added CISA back in.
That's how sure the Fifth Circuit was about everything that was presented in this case.
Fast forward. Tracy, let's be clear.
So CISA is the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, and they've been doing a lot of censorship, particularly in the domain of what they call election misinformation.
But very often, it is simply people raising legitimate questions about elections and how elections are conducted.
Let's talk about this fact pattern for a second, because with a case, you have a principle at stake, but then you also have facts.
Let me ask you this.
Is it a fact that what was demonstrated before the lower court and the appellate court is that there is a massive regime of censorship in place?
We're not talking about censorship, for example, confined to, let's say, a health emergency, which is to say COVID.
This is the medical information.
It's really important people have this medical information.
We can't have this pandemic killing off the population.
So the government says that in this one case, we're going to be working with these social media platforms.
We know they have been engaging these platforms on a plethora of issues, and of course, all you have to do is go to the YouTube guidelines or the Facebook guidelines, and you'll see that there are 17 topics in which there is routine censorship.
And moreover, we're not talking about censorship of one guy or five guys.
We're talking about millions of Americans being subjected to the censorship owing to the collaboration between the government and the censorship platforms.
Now, am I right in saying that the private platforms have a right to censor on their own if they want to do that?
In other words, they are private.
They are not, quote, covered by the First Amendment.
The issue here is the government involvement and the government leverage and the government coercion.
100% correct.
And just to add a little bit to what you said, because it did come up in front of the appellate court, there is factual proof to back up the fact that the government basically forced these companies to change their terms of service.
And the Fifth Circuit even said, forevermore, terms of service at these companies will be crafted with the thought in their mind that right behind them is big daddy government breathing down their back.
they've forever tainted the terms of service that a platform creates in order to censor if they want to, like you just said, and every user agrees to. So we got 20,000 pages of discovery from the government and the social media platforms in this case already. There was a thousand, a little over a thousand, paragraphs in a, you know, brief filed in front of the first judge. This is the fact pattern that everybody's used to make decisions on this case thus far.
And then it went up to the Supreme Court because again, the government said we need to be able to censor Americans and appealed it to the Supreme Court.
When the Supreme Court granted the certiorari to hear this case, they granted cert, they put a stay on the injunction that was in place.
And in a really different move, three Supreme Court justices wrote a dissent to the stay.
So they said, these other justices haven't read this yet and don't understand what's at stake.
So the stay is irresponsible for these reasons and just outlight a bunch of them.
You could find it on my social media if you want to get into it.
So that being said, yesterday at the Supreme Court, Dinesh, it was clear to me that the judges who hadn't read the record yet still haven't read the record in this case at all.
Because there is no way that you could ask the questions and allow the government to brazenly lie in front of the Supreme Court the way they did yesterday if you had read it.
So we're still at a place where the Supreme Court has not even fully evaluated this case of the utmost importance for the American people.
And we're conducting a hearing about it as though they were communists.
I couldn't believe some of what I heard yesterday.
Yeah, Tracy, this was my impression based upon commentary about people who followed this closely and followed the discussion sort of blow by blow, was that the court was, well, first of all, the Biden administration, as I understand it, Offered a claim, which is sort of a factual claim.
And they said, we are not coercing these platforms.
We are merely making recommendations.
We are merely suggesting things.
We're kind of putting things in the suggestion box, so to speak.
And I suppose there is a grain of truth in what they're saying in this regard, that the digital platforms are themselves left-wing.
They are not opposed to censorship per se.
They have opened up these portals.
They have regular meetings with the government.
They seem to be plotting together.
But it seems to me that this distinction is not critical.
Because it's not a matter of whether the government is forcing the platforms.
The government cannot engage in a collaborative enterprise with these platforms.
To shut down the discourse of the American people.
Isn't the plain meaning of the First Amendment that the government needs to stay out of this?
And my question is, is this simple idea something that the justices of the court were not able to or not willing to accept?
Some of them. That's a multifaceted question I want to address in a couple of different parts.
Number one, you'd be absolutely stunned to read the pushback from social media on government.
When you have government saying, I demand you take this down, and social media comes back and says, we really shouldn't.
It's not against our terms of service.
And then government says, you need to take it down.
It's making fun of the vice president's wife, Jill Biden, or the president's wife, whatever.
And they demand it to come down, and the companies push back, and then the White House media dude, Rob Flaherty, curses them out via email, screaming at them to take it down.
Then they acquiesce.
That's threatening.
There were a lot of topics that they did not want to take down.
For example, Facebook pushed back on vaccine content and vaccine-hesitant content and said, this is gonna have the opposite effect of what you want.
If we continue to remove true statements from our platform against our terms of service, more people are gonna think something's going on here.
We should leave this content up.
It should stay.
And this was a huge debate.
So that's one thing.
Secondarily, the Supreme Court justices yesterday seemed to be treating the general public like me, you, well, not so much me, I'm a journalist, but they were asking questions in the vein of what would happen if you did this to the Washington Post or to the New York Times, if you called them up and said.
You need to not report on this because it's dangerous.
It almost placed the everyday American, who doesn't have a large following on social media, in the same category as the New York Post, the New York Times, or a journalist.
And I found that to be one of the most interesting things that came out of yesterday.
Because never once did they talk about the American citizen as a regular Jane or Joe going about their business.
They viewed social media posting from people specifically through the lens of journalism.
That was all of the questions were focused around the lens of journalism and not just Joe Schmo, you know, talking about whatever.
Super interesting to me. But Tracy, doesn't that actually cut against the Biden administration for the simple reason that, yes, it would be actually inconceivable for the government to have, let's say, for example, regular sessions with the New York Times and the Washington Post and instruct them on what they can and can't publish.
It's almost as if the Biden administration is saying that now that we have the internet, We are in a new technology and a new age, and therefore the First Amendment needs to be updated, so to speak, which to me is an insane argument because, of course, we had the telegraph, we had the telephone, we have television and cable, so new technologies have not required a rewriting of the First Amendment in any respect.
Let's talk for a moment about...
Justice Jackson, this is Ketanji Brown Jackson, and her seeming idea that, which appeared to be completely, almost a flagrant repudiation of the First Amendment, where she was basically saying,
wait a minute. Are you telling me that the government, especially at a crucial time, I think she's referring here to COVID, is going to be hampered in its ability to execute its policies by the First Amendment and the Constitution?
And of course, a lot of people have pointed out, well, yeah, I mean, the job of the First Amendment and the Constitution is to put limits and restraints On the government, do you think that we're dealing here with somebody who sort of just doesn't care what it says in the Bill of Rights?
Or is it the case that Judge Jackson was kind of arguing that this is like shouting fire in a crowded theater and essentially the First Amendment has to yield to exceptions that involve national security or maybe involve a health emergency?
What was your take on what she was getting at?
What she was getting at was basically that daddy government needs to protect us silly Americans who can't fend for ourselves and make our own decisions.
That was it at the heart of it.
Her hypothetical she had advanced in that situation was, what if there's a TikTok trend and there are children jumping off of buildings and the government wants the social media companies to take down those posts so no more children die?
And the more children see the post, the more children will jump off of buildings and therefore it's an emergency and the government needs to be able to demand that social media act or else people will die.
That was her example. But it's the same thing that happened during COVID. And the other thing that is at the core of this...
Truthfully, you do not need to be correct to have a First Amendment right to free speech.
You can lie all day long.
It doesn't matter. Truth never comes into the equation with the First Amendment, ever.
It doesn't matter what you say.
It could be true, false, whatever.
The problem here is that the government is promoting itself as the arbiter of truth and what everybody else says that they want taken down is false.
They're never right. They've been wrong every single time.
We can go down the list of topics they've wanted censored and talk about how they've been wrong.
COVID, Afghanistan, you know, whatever, whatever topic, Spygate, anything.
They've been wrong the whole time.
They've lied to us every time. So what they're basically saying to Katenji Brown Jackson is the government is the arbiter of truth.
We cannot allow Americans to see things we think are lies and Therefore, we need the power to be able to censor Americans whenever we deem an emergency or otherwise.
And she agrees. She thinks that that's the proper role of government.
I'd argue that's a communist government, not a free republic.
And she's in the wrong place.
She's in the wrong place. I mean, Tracy, what is—and I think you made a critical point a moment ago where you said, look, you know, if the government can show that they are—they were, from the beginning, putting out accurate information that was vital,
let's say, to saving lives, and that out in the public was all this misinformation, they could at least make a utilitarian argument that, look, the net benefit of what we're doing is to save lives— However, when the government itself is putting out false information,
number one, if you take the vaccine, you can't get COVID. Number two, if you take the vaccine, you can't transmit COVID to somebody else.
And these came straight out of the mouth of government officials, Rochelle Walensky.
To my knowledge...
These government officials were never censored, even when it became clear that the information they're putting out is false.
And moreover, there were many people who were putting out true information, information like, hey, even if you take the vaccine, you can get COVID and you can transmit COVID. And those people were censored on the grounds that even if you allow true information to get out, it might promote vaccine hesitancy.
So this new category emerges that I think was euphemistically called malinformation, meaning information that's true, but somehow we don't really want it getting out there.
And this comes back to what the First Amendment is for, to allow a free and open discourse so that out of the crucible of that, truthful information can emerge.
Yeah, and you know, the most frightening part of everything you just said, which is spot on, as always, is that CISA, the way they're doing this, the way that they're policing this, is by declaring your thoughts part of their infrastructure that they need to look over.
They call it cognitive infrastructure.
So CISA now guards over your thoughts anywhere they are and are tasked with protecting the narrative when it comes to your thoughts, which could move into any topic.
You know, the vaccine topic is obviously a very hot one because they were so wrong and still are so wrong.
The content you're speaking about was amplified.
The falsity was amplified.
I would personally argue after all the work I've done, they've been responsible for more harm than anybody who was talking about their personal experience ever could hope to have been.
So when you have a Supreme Court that...
conducts itself the way they did yesterday.
And listen, when you go in front of SCOTUS and you're arguing, sometimes the judges will ask questions to firm up their own positions, or they'll look like they're adversarial to your cause, even though they're just trying to really fill those holes in with case law or precedent or your argument.
So you can't always gauge the questions asked and then come up with what they're going to rule.
Look at Roe, for instance.
So that being said, the tone and tenor of some of these justices yesterday was wildly concerning and surprising to me, especially given they had just made a decision a couple days ago that public figures that are in government cannot block their constituents on social media.
So if they understand the importance of the town square in that way, then how could they argue differently when it comes to this case?
If anything, it would make this case more important, not less.
Well, it looks like the fate of this decision hangs with a couple of the Republican nominee justices in the middle.
Amy Coney Barrett, for example.
Is Gorsuch the other one?
Whose votes are critical here, Tracy, as we close out?
Who would you say are the key votes that will determine which way this thing swings?
The three it always is.
Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Roberts.
And Roberts, yeah. Wow.
Tracy, great discussion.
Thank you very much for joining me.
Love to have you back to talk more about all this.
Guys, I've been talking to Tracy Beans.
Follow her on X at Tracy, B-E-A-N-Z. At Tracy Beans.
Tracy, always a pleasure.
Thanks for joining me. Thanks, Vinesh.
I said yesterday that I was closing out my discussion of Lincoln's Lyceum speech, but I'm actually closing it out today because I have a comment and a thought about the The ending section of this great speech.
I'm going to read a few lines because Lincoln here is getting at something that's very profound about the founding.
And that is, he says, Did to the support of the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and laws, let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor.
So this, as you can see, an affirmation of the rule of law, which is the theme of the speech.
The theme of the speech is that there is political gangsterization going on.
And by the way, for Lincoln, although he's not fully explicit about this, the gangsterization is coming from two sides.
It's coming on the one side from the pro-slavery people, who will do things like round up a slave that has gone to a free state and just yank him back in violation of the laws of that free state.
Or the gangsterization comes from abolitionists, who are perfectly willing to repudiate the Constitution, physically burn the Constitution, and by the way, ignore the edicts of the Constitution.
And so Lincoln is against this kind of lawlessness wherever it's coming from.
Here's Lincoln going on.
This is a little like over the top from Lincoln.
Remember, it's a young Lincoln.
Lincoln at this stage is in his late 20s.
And this speech is a young man's speech, but nevertheless profound in its implications, particularly when you view it in hindsight, what it talks about and what actually happened in the country, the complete breakdown of the rule of law, in fact, the breakdown of the social compact.
And then says Lincoln, and this is the line I want to focus on, and in short, let it become the political religion of the nation.
Very interesting phrase.
Apparently, Lincoln thinks America needs a political religion.
Now, why? Why would a country need a political religion?
First of all, we have the Declaration.
We have the Constitution.
What is Lincoln really getting at here?
What does he want new to happen?
Well, I think what Lincoln is saying, and here I'm expounding Harry Jaffa's interpretation, is he says that for the founders, the act of founding was a sort of contractual operation.
If you think about the declaration, it's by people's consent.
People kind of come together and they make a bargain.
They make an agreement for their joint security and their joint happiness.
Of course, for the early modern philosophers, it's social contract theory.
So that's how the union gets formed.
But I think what Lincoln is getting at here is that that we need an attachment to America that goes beyond this.
Hey, we made a bargain as if a bunch of businessmen got together in a room and agreed to sign a contract.
And then later, some of the business guys said.
well, I want to get out of this contract, and there might be certain penalties and so on, but I don't have any obligation to the contract as it is.
True, there may be a penalty for breaching the contract, But nevertheless, the contract itself isn't in some way sacred.
It doesn't deserve any kind of religious devotion.
And here is, I think, where Lincoln is going.
He seems to be saying that in order for us to perpetuate the institutions that we have, the original contractual understanding of the founding is not enough.
Now, another way to put it, and this is how Jaffa puts it, is he says, look, when we think of Western civilization and Western civilization as inherited here in America, this Western civilization has two strains in it.
There's a kind of religious strain that comes from Puritanism, it comes from Protestantism, and that's the religious strain.
But then there is a kind of enlightenment strain that comes out of the French Revolution.
It comes out of rationalism.
And these two strains are, well, they're not entirely compatible.
Why? Because the religious strain invokes revelation.
It invokes the Bible.
It invokes God told us.
This is how it is.
We don't have to reason it through.
This has been handed down like the Ten Commandments on tablets of stone.
The Enlightenment tradition is the opposite.
Take nothing on authority.
Be skeptical.
Be empirical. Deploy your reason as the ultimate arbiter.
And according to Jaffa, Lincoln does not want to fully go with either of these.
He doesn't want to fully go with Revelation because he distrusts the idea of people just stepping forward and saying, God told me.
Let's remember that this is actually the approach of the abolitionists.
God says that slavery is wrong and therefore we don't care what the Constitution says.
We don't care what the Bill of Rights says.
We don't care about the rights of slave owners.
And so what we're going to do is, in fact, John Brown, the great abolitionist, I'm going to go down there, take the law into my own hands and kill a bunch of slave owners.
Now, ultimately, when John Brown was hanged and Lincoln was asked about it, Lincoln said, you know, I agree with John Brown about the evil of slavery, but I am not coming to his defense.
A man who goes out and in the name of his convictions commits murder and breaks the law ought to receive the penalty of the law.
And so... While we sympathize with his cause, we do not object to his hanging.
This is Abraham Lincoln.
And ultimately, and here we are looking forward or anticipating the Gettysburg Address, we see that Lincoln will in the Gettysburg Address almost ritually enact This political religion that he's talking about here early at the age of 28 or 29 in the Lyceum speech.
Lincoln will talk about a kind of a sacramental rebirth of the nation.
Now what does he mean by rebirth?
Well, what he means is you could almost understand this directly in the language of being born again, religious language.
Because what does being born again mean?
It doesn't mean that you're physically born again.
It means you're born again in the soul, spiritually, so to speak.
And that is exactly what Lincoln is going to argue in the Gettysburg Address.
If you read the words carefully, that's where Lincoln is going.
That's the ultimate meaning of it, is let's come together after this terrible war.
Let's look at the war as almost a divine penalty, a divine vengeance on the evils that we have allowed to corrode and corrupt this republic from the beginning.
So, in other words, although America's principles are good, nevertheless our practices are not, or have been at great variance with these principles.
This doesn't contaminate the principles, but it does mean that like the ancient Israelites, we have been as a country, in a sense, engaging in the temptations of Egypt for way too long.
And there's a terrible price to be paid for it, and that's what the civil war is.
And now, after the war, we need to come together as a country, and we need to affirm as, now in a religious sense, not just in an intellectual sense, that our founding principles, our constitution, take on a certain type of new, profound, and sacred meaning.
No longer do we have to ask sort of utilitarian questions like, does it make sense for me to make a social compact to be part of this country?
No. You approach the country very much, by the way, in the manner that say military patriots do.
People say, listen, there's a whole way of life here.
There is the blessings of freedom.
There's the American dream.
I may not be able to put it all in words.
I may not be able to say what it is about the country that I care about so much.
But nevertheless, I have this I think this is what Lincoln means when he talks about the political religion of the nation now.
All of this is relevant to us because this is, I think, what we as conservatives are all about.
We're conserving the founding and Lincoln is showing us how we should feel about it and what the founding truly means for us and, in fact, for countless generations of Americans from his own day to our own day.
And we are seeing today a vicious attack On the principles of the founding by people who really don't believe in the founding.
They don't just want the founding not to be the political religion.
They don't really care about the founding at all.
In fact, they are actively hostile to the principles of the founding.
And so the stakes in our own day, just like in Lincoln's day, could not be higher.
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