All Episodes
Previous Next
March 20, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
48:53
SEIZING HIS ASSETS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep794
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Coming up, what's next for Trump in the New York case?
Are they going to seize Trump Tower, seize Mar-a-Lago, seize his hotels and other assets?
I'll talk about that.
Author and radio host Steve Dace joins me.
We're going to talk about the border, the back and forth between the Supreme Court and the appellate court, and what's the next step for Governor Abbott.
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.
It seems to be kind of an irony that of all the cases that Donald Trump is facing, the criminal cases, the 91 plus charges, the decades and decades in prison, the one that is causing him the most trouble right now is not a criminal case at all.
It is this case in New York with a civil judgment made by a rogue judge, a rogue judge who identified a crime, not a crime, but a tort offense, even though there really isn't one.
No one is harmed by Trump's seeming or apparent overstatement of the value of his assets, not to mention the fact that it's pretty conventional in the real estate community.
You have an asset. You're trying to get a loan.
You say it's worth X. The bank says it's worth Y. A process of negotiation goes on back and forth.
By the way, between experts, people who are known to be able to make evaluations of properties, And if no one is claiming to be defrauded, no one lost money, there's no issue here.
There's no reason this should even be a case.
But here it is, and Trump has a verdict, and it's a very big one, $464 million.
He has until Monday to produce it.
To put up the money or to produce a bond, a kind of surety, a guarantee and assurance from an insurance company saying, all right, we are going to essentially stand good for that money.
Now, Trump has been trying to get this kind of insurance and do it on the basis of his properties.
Hey, I have Mar-a-Lago.
Hey, I've got Trump Tower.
Hey, I've got the golf course over here.
I've got the Trump Hotel in Vegas.
Trump has plenty of properties that put together are worth well in excess of this $464 million.
But apparently the insurance companies, which have never faced this kind of a plea for a bond of this size, are running scared.
They're like, no, you have to show us liquid assets, cash in effect, things that can be converted quickly into cash.
We have to put this into our own lives to recognize how absurd these demands are.
This is like coming to you or me and saying, okay, look, we've got a verdict against you for $100,000 or a million dollars or $5 million.
And you say, all right, well, listen, I've got the $5 million, but I don't have $5 million in liquid cash.
I put my money to work.
It's in pension plans.
It's in my home.
It's invested. So that this idea that I'm somehow supposed to produce cash and insurance companies won't give me a loan against these properties, in part because of the magnitude of the amount you're asking for— I'm kind of facing what?
What is going to happen if I can't raise this money?
Well, according to the New York Attorney General, we're just going to start seizing Trump's properties.
We're going to make a motion to take them over.
Now the problem with this is that, and Trump himself has said this on Truth Social, you take over my properties, you destroy their value, What do you do?
Sell them at fire sale prices or force him to sell them at fire sale prices?
And then he appeals and he wins his appeal and he's vindicated.
But the properties are gone.
They're sold. There's nothing that can be done now.
New York isn't going to make him whole for the value lost.
So what is going on here is a type of...
Very aggressive lawfare, a kind of economic warfare whose goal is nothing short of the ruination of Trump.
And they're doing this even while putting the whole brand of New York and New York real estate into question.
The Attorney General went before some real estate people and basically said, listen, don't worry, don't, you know, we're not going to do this to you.
Kind of almost confessing that this is a one-off.
This is a targeting of Trump.
This is not something that they're going to start doing to real estate developers in general.
But Kevin O'Leary, I saw him on, I think it was CNN or it may have been MSNBC.
Either way, this is a very, this is the guy who's on, what is he on, honey?
Is he on Shark Tank?
He's on one of these financial shows.
Anyway, he's a billionaire celebrity, very involved in New York real estate.
In fact, we're setting up a kind of New York consortium of real estate.
And he goes, I'm not doing it.
I'm getting out of here.
And he goes, moreover...
He goes, this is bad for New York.
He goes, New York and American law in general, the reason America has been a magnet for the world, a magnet for the assets of the world, is people have confidence that there are property rights in the United States and that they won't just come and take your stuff.
I mean, this is the key. This is the reason why historically people have been very worried about governments.
They carry their wealth around.
Rich people would, for example, you know, when there was the battle between the Turks, And the Europeans, this is centuries ago, and a lot of the Turkish ships were sunk.
I think this was the Battle of Lepanto, 16th century, I believe.
I'm just going off of memory here, so don't hold me to it.
look and look it up. The point I want to make though is that when the sunken ships were discovered later, it was found that a lot of the warriors had carried gold pots and pans and valuable items. They had to take it with them because they had no confidence that if they left it behind in their own countries that the property would be safe. So the point here is simply this, that New York is burning its brand. It is saying to the world, you
If you get an aggressive prosecutor, you get a corrupt judge like Judge Enderon, these people can just take your house, take your cars, take your retirement accounts, destroy you financially.
If you find yourself on the wrong side, it could be political, but you could be on the wrong side any which way, and they can go after you.
So ultimately what Kevin O'Leary was saying is this is not even really about Trump.
This is about New York.
It's about what America stands for.
And this verdict is not merely anti-Trump.
It's anti-American.
There's no better time than right now to call our friends at PhD Weight Loss and Nutrition to start your journey to a healthier you.
As I hear from many of you about how PhD Weight Loss and Nutrition has changed your lives, I know each of us has our own reason for starting.
I started because, well, I was feeling a little bit sluggish, tired all the time.
Debbie tried everything else, nothing would work, so we needed some help.
I've heard from countless listeners who did what we did and started the PhD Weight Loss and Nutrition program.
I heard from one listener who We're good to go.
Helped her lose the weight and keep it off.
So there are so many reasons to start and honestly, I cannot think of even one good reason to put it off.
So make 2020 for your year.
Call PHD Weight Loss and Nutrition today.
Here's the number, 864-644-1900 to get started.
Or you can go online at myphdweightloss.com.
But here's the number again to call, 864-644-1900.
You won't regret it.
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, higher than expected.
So friends, this isn't going away.
It really can't.
Why? Because the U.S. is $34 trillion in the hole, and yet the government keeps printing more money, which pushes the prices you pay every day even higher.
So what do we do about this?
We can bury our head in the sand, not good, or we can do something about it.
What should we do? Well, diversify a portion of your savings into gold with Birch Gold Group.
Gold is your hedge against inflation and Birch Gold makes it easy to own.
They'll help you to convert an existing IRA or 401k into a tax-sheltered IRA in gold and you don't pay a penny out of pocket.
Gold is part of our savings strategy.
Debbie and I buy it from Birch Gold and you can too.
So get started. Check it out.
Text Dinesh to 989898.
Get your free information kit on gold.
No obligation, just information.
Then talk to a precious metals specialist on how to protect your savings from persistent inflation with gold.
Text Dinesh to 989898.
No time to waste. Do it now.
I've been thinking, well, ruminating over this free speech case before the Supreme Court, the Missouri versus Biden case, and thinking about how listening to the arguments, the whole framing of the case seems to be wrong,
seems to be mistaken, because as framed, the question before the court is this, should the government be allowed When there is some kind of emergency, whether it's national security or a pandemic, the pandemic of course being the most dramatic example, should the government be able to step in and shut down misinformation and disinformation on digital platforms?
And that's the way that the Biden administration presented the issue and for the most part That was the way in which at least some of the justices took the issue.
Their hypotheticals were sort of based upon it.
It was based upon the idea that the government is the protector of true information and the public is susceptible and subject to false information, harmful information, information that could be deleterious to the society as a whole, and should we let the government, in a Work around the First Amendment and intrude because, after all, they are protecting truth against falsehood.
They are protecting our health and against the destruction of our health.
Now, what's wrong with all this can be encapsulated in a headline in an article, in-depth, just came out this month in the New York Times.
I'm going to quote the key...
The more time students spent in remote instruction, in other words, at home, not going to school, learning online, the further they fell behind.
And extended closures did little to stop the spread of COVID. So now we come to a proposition that was almost accepted as gospel for several years.
We must close the schools.
We must have these students learn from home.
Remote learning is going to fill in for the in-person instruction that they normally get.
And all of this will help to stop the spread of COVID. Now, notice that all these statements, all the premises...
Of government policy and the premises of censorship.
These things are true. Therefore, anyone who says otherwise is a vaccine denier, is somebody who is a menace to the public health, somebody who is countering the truth, somebody who's spreading disinformation.
We got to shut this person down.
And yet now, a couple of years later, we realize that those people, the disinformation specialists, were right.
What they said then turns out to be true now.
And in fact, was always true.
It was true even then. It's just that we're realizing that it's true now.
So you see right here why we need free speech.
Free speech is to allow competing ideas to have it out.
So that the best ideas can prevail or at least have a chance to prevail.
No one is saying that there's any automatic guarantee that they will prevail.
But what happens is the critical examination of ideas is a way to weed out the bad ones.
Now, the point is that the people who were censored in this whole...
COVID business were some of the most prominent scientists in the world.
We're talking about scientists at the best universities.
We're talking about scientists doing research.
We're talking about scientists who are specially qualified in the areas of epidemiology, and they are being attacked by bureaucrats Many of whom have no scientific training.
These are people by and large whose background is, for example, in the law or in making policy.
And these are people who are overriding the scientists and telling the scientists what they can and cannot say and shutting down their accounts, in some cases threatening their jobs.
And... And the government itself is putting out massive amounts of misinformation.
Now, I'm not saying that the government knew at the time that it was false.
But the point is, it turns out to be false.
So you're making claims that turn out not to be true.
Claims like, number one, if you get COVID, or sorry, if you take the vaccine, you're not going to get COVID. Number two, if you take the vaccine, you're not going to transmit COVID to somebody else.
Rochelle Walensky, the CDC director, said both those things.
They turn out to be false.
And yet, was anybody, was Rochelle Walensky censored?
No, never. Were any of the tens of thousands, perhaps millions of people putting out this government misinformation?
Were they ever censored?
Never. The only people censored were people going against the government's narrative.
And so this is really the key point.
That while the debate is presented as a government fight against disinformation, lots of the disinformation and misinformation is coming from the government itself.
The government is essentially claiming a monopoly on truth.
And it would be one thing, again, if this was only COVID. The government is claiming a monopoly on truth.
And by the government, again, we also mean this administration.
A partisan administration is claiming, we know the truth about abortion.
We know the truth about the trans issue.
We know the truth about climate change.
We know the truth about COVID. And we have every right to use our leverage to with the social media platforms to shut down our opposition to shut down people who think differently So this is a very serious situation.
I think what makes it even more worrisome for me is we're not just talking about a court that may be misguided here.
We're also talking about the American people.
Some of our argument here is against the American people.
I'm looking here at a survey, and this was shared by Glenn Greenwald.
He didn't do the survey, but it's a survey that was conducted by the Pew Research Center.
It says, the U.S. government should take steps to restrict false info online even if it limits freedom of information.
Now, interestingly, Democrats or leaning Democrats, 65% agree.
Republicans or leaning Republicans, 28%.
So, Clearly, the Democrats are overwhelmingly the party of censorship.
I mean, what an irony. The Democrats, who have always posed as the party of civil rights and civil liberties, free speech, and maybe they were that in the 1960s, but they're clearly not that now.
They are the party of repression and censorship.
but it's also noteworthy that a significant minority of Republicans, 28%, so that's a little more than a fourth, agree that the government should be able to censor false information even though it restricts freedom of speech.
So we're dealing here ultimately with a problem that is not only constitutional, not only legal but also educational.
People don't get that free speech is a core value.
Now the founders knew it was a core value.
In fact, the founders thought that the court should protect this value, protect this right.
That's why it's in the Bill of Rights, against the people themselves.
So it doesn't matter if the people don't agree with it.
The fact of it is you or I have free speech, and even if 99% of people want to shut us down, they shouldn't be able to do that.
Let's hope that the Supreme Court at least will take this lesson to heart.
Mike Lindell has a passion to help you get the best sleep of your life.
After he invented the world's best pillow, he created the famous Giza Dream Sheets.
Now these are dreamy.
They're great. Debbie and I love them.
They're the best sheets you will ever sleep on.
But for a limited time, you get the queen size set for $59.98, king size just $69.98, the lowest prices in history.
Mike and the MyPillow gang continue to be cancelled by the big box stores, attacked by the media.
So they really appreciate all of your great support during these times.
Want to thank you by giving you not just great deals, but also free shipping on your entire order today.
So to get the deals, to get the free shipping, go to MyPillow.com or call 800-876-0227.
Use promo code Dinesh.
You get the famous Giza Dream Sheets.
Queen size, $59.98.
King size, just $69.98.
By the way, 60% off on the original MySlippers.
So check out the deals. Go to 800-876-0227.
The number again, 800-876-0227.
Go to MyPillow.com.
Don't forget to use the promo code.
It's D-I-N-E-S-H, Dinesh.
Guys, if you'd like to support my work, great way to do it.
Check out and join my Locals channel.
You can become a monthly or an annual subscriber, and you'll be glad you did.
I post a lot of exclusive content there, including content that's censored on other social media platforms.
On Locals, you get Dinesh Unchained, Dinesh Uncensored.
On Locals, you can also interact with me directly.
I do a live weekly Q&A every Tuesday, 8 p.m.
Eastern. No topic is off limits.
And I've also created a movie page with a lot of cool films on Locals, documentaries and feature films.
By the way, 2,000 Meals is up there.
And also my latest film, Police State.
If you're an annual subscriber, you can stream and watch all this content for free.
It's included with your subscription.
So check out the channel. It's dinesh.locals.com.
I'd love to have you along for this great ride again.
It's dinesh.locals.com.
Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast an author, a radio host.
It's Steve Dace, Steve D-E-A-C-E. He's the author of a bunch of books, a book on Fauci, a book on the Fourth Reich, Confronting COVID Fascism, the new book, which looks great, Jesus Died for Us So We Can Live...
Forever. Wow, what a title.
And by the way, Steve is also the author of a book, a novel, that was made into a fantastic film called Nefarious.
I've talked about the film on the podcast.
I've seen it. It is a wonderful, wonderful film.
By the way, you can follow him on x at Steve Dace Show.
Steve, welcome. Thank you for joining me.
It's a pleasure. I want to tell your audience that, and I've said this to you, but I want to tell your audience that when you first viewed the rough cut, you were basically the first person outside of our production team to view the full rough cut of Nefarious, and your enthusiastic response to it gave us a huge jolt of confidence to press forward, and we are all very, very appreciative of that, and thank you for that.
Well, you know, Steve, let's talk for a moment about it.
The film took me a little by surprise.
It is focused on really two main characters.
A prisoner who says, in effect, remarkably, he says, well, I didn't do it.
The devil made me do it, or the devil did it through me.
An astounding claim.
And then a psychiatrist who is sent to examine him.
A lot of times you have films that have Christian themes imbued in them, but the films are a little heavy-handed.
They tend to be the version of a pastor's sermon.
You didn't write this story that way at all.
You wrote it as a thriller, and the message kind of comes organically out of it.
I think that's really what struck me as an example of good art on your part, the novel, and then also good filmmaking.
Well, you know, the production team at Believe Entertainment, particularly Carrie Solomon and Chuck Consulman, who took my book and adapted it into a screenplay, I mean, they really used this as an opportunity to break free of kind of what I would call the Christian movie formula.
And if you look in my contract, Dinesh, it literally says there can be no cheesy conversion scenes in this movie.
I've just seen way too many faith-based films that are like, okay, Grandma Moses is going to be upset if she leaves the theater and somebody doesn't accept Jesus into their heart.
So here, let's cram that in somewhere in the most cringy, awkward scenario we possibly can.
And I wanted to make sure that we didn't fall back into that pit.
And I think...
The confluence of the three of us and Chris Jones, the other producer, the four of us working together on this with their filmmaking experience and just a different voice that I added to the writers room as we were storyboarding it.
I think if anything, I gave them kind of permission to break outside of kind of the pure flicks model that they came out of.
And said, hey, our inspiration here is really Silence of the Lambs, Seven, Primal Fear, some of the great thrillers of the 90s, suspense thrillers, but we're going to just do it with a biblical worldview.
Yeah. But it's going to look like those movies.
It's going to sound like those movies.
Very high craftsmanship.
The level of dialogue that they wrote is just completely next level.
And I think we managed to pull it off.
And I think one of the smartest decisions we made from the very beginning in that film, Dinesh, is we broke away from, let's put a member of the clergy in the room with the demon.
And instead, let's put someone that is a fixture, a manifestation of the spirit of the age, who walks in, you know, as a secular progressive, I have all the answers.
I am the people you've been waiting for.
You know, I know it all.
I'm edumacated, they taught me everything, and there's nothing more for me to learn.
And what if we put him in a position where he realizes he's the Padawan of the dark side of the force, and he gets attacked from the left?
Instead of attacking him from the right, what if we were to attack him from the left so that he would actually see the logical conclusion of his worldview played out in its most menacing fashion and let that just absolutely wreck him?
And it does throughout the course of the film.
I can't tell you how many emails I've received and notes from people.
I wasn't a Christian.
This got me to rethink things completely.
Or I've got family members who weren't open to faith.
And this absolutely wrecked him.
One of our co-stars, Jordan Belfi.
I mean, he's gone through a spiritual awakening through his experience making the film.
He plays Dr.
James Martin in the movie, by the way.
And so that's why we made the movie.
We think before people...
Everybody's heard, Jesus is my buddy.
God is nice. Wear your pleated khakis.
Be nicer than God.
Everybody's been purpose-driven, and it hasn't worked.
We've lost the culture. We've got to get back to Samaritan religion, Dinesh.
And that starts with, there is evil.
And then, therefore, what is the remedy?
And that's really the theme of our movie.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's what I found very powerful and ingenious about it, is it's an apologetic that is based upon demonstrating not the divine power of good, but the simple reality of evil, which raises, of course, the question, what is the source of this evil?
In other words, if you don't have Satan, And all you have is God created the world.
God loves the world.
We are all wonderful from the top to bottom.
How to explain?
So it's a different way.
A lot of times people use the existence of evil.
Well, why would a good God allow evil to exist in the world?
You're asking a little different question.
How do you explain the existence of evil without, in a sense, the father of lies being behind this evil?
So anyway, a wonderful, wonderful film.
Let's talk, Steve, a little bit about some other evil stuff that's going on around us.
And I'm thinking here about all the business at the border.
There appears to be like a new round of confusion just created overnight by the fact that the Supreme Court comes in yesterday and essentially says, all right, Texas, while this is playing its way through the courts, you can enforce your border laws.
In other words, you have the autonomy as a state to police your border.
You can't do it outside of Texas, but you can arrest and deport, if necessary, criminal aliens in Texas.
And then along comes in a kind of emergency move, I think, the appellate court, which puts that law back onto the shelf and says, no, while we're working this out.
So what do you make first of all about this legal back and forth between the Supreme Court on the one hand, the appellate court on the other?
What's going on here?
If you don't mind, Dinesh, let me draw a biblical parallel to where we are legally, because I was listening to what you were talking about before I came on, and I think a lot of the meta-themes that you were addressing, I mean, we focus so much on the process of the law and the nuts and bolts of the law.
What you were discussing is what is the substance and origin of the law, because that gives you an idea of its actual intent.
The law is not a technocratic process.
It's a manifestation of something.
It's symbolic of something.
Some form of ethic. Some form of code.
And therefore, where does that ethic and code come from?
And there's a moment in the New Testament, one of many, where Jesus is arguing with the religious leaders. And he says to a group of Pharisees, and if you know Jewish religious history, the Pharisees, I know we get portrayed them in moderate evangelicalism as the bad guy in the gospels, but they're really in Jewish history, the good guys. They're descended from Ezra.
They kept the faith. They built the local synagogues. They preserved the faith during the Dysporas. And so that's why they're often the ones questioning Jesus, and the Sadducees barely They're kind of the Democrats. They don't really care about spiritual issues at all, okay?
And so the Pharisees are the ones that are intellectually curious and challenging him.
Are you real? And in one of those conversations, he says to them, you know, you guys tithe on...
Everything. Every ounce of everything.
Okay? And yet you reject mercy and sacrifice.
But the next thing he says is key.
He says, it was good to do the letter of the law.
You should have done that. You should have followed that.
But you rejected the spirit of the law.
The substance of the law.
The purpose of the law. Like earlier when he said that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath.
The point of the Sabbath is not, okay, let me make sure I'm meticulously following this day of rest.
It's literally just because God loves you and wants to give you a day of rest, so take it.
It's good advice. It's good counsel from the God who made you.
And so I think we have done this a lot.
Let's take a step back in all this legal mumbo-jumbo, in this tennis match back and forth with all these appellate courts, and let's get to the substance of the issue.
A state is being told that it has to put up with an unlawful invasion of criminal aliens who bring with them to some degree, to some ratio, unquestionably, a criminal element that is not good for society, that they are to permit that, and cannot defend the lawful citizens of America against people who have no agency or standing as Americans.
You can write all the briefs you want.
We can have all the procedures you want and all the Latin terms that no one understands except people that went to law school you want.
And I'm not saying just like Jesus said to the Pharisees, those things are not important.
The letter of the law and the process of the law is important, but it cannot subjugate the substance and origin of the law.
If your legal process says as a lawful citizen, you have to put up with an invasion that your government, which has a constitutional mandate to defend you from, won't, and therefore you have no subsidiarity at all.
You have no standing or agency in your state government, local government, or just you as an autonomous citizen who has the right to keep and bear arms.
You in no way, shape, or form have no recourse.
You just must accept this.
You must accept the human traffickers.
You must hope that it's not your son who overdoses on fentanyl next.
You have to hope that it's not your father who loses his job on the job site, on the construction site to an illegal alien next.
You just have to accept this.
If that is the outcome of the process of your law, you are lawless, and in no way, shape, or form should you be considered or followed any longer.
We are at the point now that, frankly, the governor of Texas needs to keep his oath, He took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
He didn't take an oath as a steward of stare decisis or the Supreme Court.
It is time now for him to do his job, and frankly, it's time for other red states This is how we got Roe v.
Wade overturned. It wasn't just that they had the one heartbeat law in Mississippi.
We did one in my home state of Iowa.
They were done in Texas, Alabama.
They built a critical mass of these states that the Supreme Court finally just had to say, all right, we've got the political cover to overturn Roe now.
Other red states need to pass similar legislation to what Texas is battling right now.
And then the governor, the executive branch, needs to do its job.
The job it was hired by the people to do.
It is not subservient to the U.S. Supreme Court.
It is subservient to the will of the people.
And by voting them in, the people expressed a will that they want their rights protected.
And that's the job of Governor Abbott.
Let's clarify a little bit of what you're saying because I think it's very bold and yet in some ways it's a little startling because what you're saying is this, as I understand it, that the federal government and the Biden administration, and apparently Judge Sotomayor agrees with this, is making a legalistic argument.
They're saying, in effect, that it is the...
That federalism, the division of power between the federal government and the states, assigns the duty of enforcing the immigration laws to the federal government, just as the federal government is charged with providing for the common defense.
I take it that Sotomayor is saying, I don't care whether the federal government is doing a good job or bad job or no job at all.
It is nevertheless their responsibility.
And therefore, Texas has no role here.
They might be unhappy with the illegals.
Too bad for them.
Our constitutional structure assigns this duty to the federal government.
You're saying that's a kind of Pharisee type of position because it's legalistic.
And you're saying, but who cares about the merits of it?
Because when you are dealing with something so fundamental as your society being overrun from the outside by people, as you say, who are not part of our...
Civil compact.
People who don't have, quote, civil or constitutional rights in this country.
People who are, in the very act of coming here, engaged in law-breaking.
You're saying that governors who are sworn to uphold and protect their own citizens need to take action on their own.
And if there's going to be a constitutional crisis, so be it.
Yes, because the constitutional crisis is caused by the inaction of the federal government.
A holding an alien of the rights doesn't cause a constitution a crisis.
Not doing so does.
So I would imagine Sonia Sotomayor, if the police cannot get to her home in time and she's under a home invasion...
I guess then she just has to just sit there and hope for the best when they barrel through her front door.
She has no agency. She has no God-given right to defend herself, protect herself.
No one else can step in.
No neighbor has an obligation to love my neighbor as myself and step in and help and protect someone who's vulnerable against evil.
She just technocratically has to sit there and let the evil do whatever it wants to her in her home.
That's absolutely preposterous.
She knows it's preposterous.
But she is trying to introduce a new legal schema.
And so therefore, let me follow the absolute letter of the law by rejecting every spirit, substance, and origin of it.
Let's put this in another context.
There's a couple of judges in Nazi Germany, and they were made into a compilation character in a great film post-World War II with Spencer Tracy and Burt Lancaster called Judgment at Nuremberg.
And Burt Lancaster plays a compilation of these judges.
And there were a few judges that were sympathetic to what was happening to the Jews and others under the Nazi regime.
And so they would try to find legal loopholes within German law to not sentence them to camps or to sentence them to house arrest or to just being outright executed.
And they would work those loopholes until they got to the end of the technocratic process.
But when the technocratic process, Dinesh could no longer give them cover, they handed those Jews over and others to the Nazis to send them off to their deaths.
They made the argument at Nuremberg, hey, we followed the law.
We took the law to its ultimate conclusion.
We did what we could.
They hung every one of those men at Nuremberg.
Why? Because as Spencer Tracy's character says to Burt Lancaster at the end of the film, there's a higher law.
Okay? Where does our law come from?
It comes from, thou shall not murder.
Okay? There's a higher law, and you guys all disobeyed it, and so you are guilty of that higher law.
You knew the difference.
Your conscience convicted you.
The fact that you tried to find new powers indicates that you knew what was happening was wrong.
You knew, embedded in your heart, was a higher law that this mass murder was wrong, and so the fact that you tried to oppose it to an extent that was safe for you, but wouldn't go the Oscar Schindler route of actually risking your own life, that convicted you, as Paul would say, you're a law unto yourself.
You knew. You knew what the truth was and disobeyed it anyway, and we hung every one of those judges at Nuremberg.
That is essentially the argument that is being made now.
They know. They know what the higher law is.
They know what it is.
That's why they've got security.
When you hear the Pope talk about open borders, maybe he's got his own private army.
They know what the higher law is.
That's how you know this isn't ignorance.
This isn't a policy or process disagreement.
This is an attempt that's not unconstitutional, Dinesh, but it's anti-constitutional.
People of conscience can look at the general welfare clause and debate for 50 years, does that include a food step program or not?
But this is unconstitutional, meaning it's not intended to undermine it, it just might not be included within it.
This is an attempt to undermine it.
And that's why, as you said with Lincoln here before I came on, the higher law comes into play, and people like Greg Abbott have a moral obligation now, okay?
Under God, the God we swear these oaths to that our rights come from, they must uphold the higher law.
That's the case that Lincoln was making.
Fascinating stuff. Steve Dase, thank you so much for joining me.
Really, I really appreciate it.
You bet, Dinesh. Anytime, brother.
Take care. God bless. I'm moving on from the Lyceum speech of Abraham Lincoln to his second great address, which is called the temperance address, the temperance speech.
And this is Harry Jaffa's technique in his book, Crisis of the House Divided.
What he does is he uses the analyses of different Lincoln speeches given at critical stages in Lincoln's developing career to show the formation and maturation of Abraham Lincoln's thought.
Now the Lyceum speech, as we discussed, is a speech warning about gangsterization, of mob violence, of an epidemic of lawlessness afoot in the country.
By the way, a speech that, with slight modifications, is completely applicable today.
We are seeing gangsterization of one of the major political parties.
Which one? The Democratic Party.
Same as in Lincoln's day.
We're seeing the emergence of a breakdown of the fair application of the rule of law.
We're seeing lawlessness.
And lawlessness pursued in new ways that didn't even exist in Lincoln's time.
The whole notion of, for example, lawfare, which would have been, I think, news to Lincoln.
Now, The surprising thing about Lincoln is that he traces this lawlessness kind of to the revolution itself in a surprising indictment, if you will, of the founding fathers.
Now, it's not a real indictment.
Lincoln admires the founding fathers.
But I think what Lincoln is saying is that the American founders created a new regime based on rebellion.
The new regime was created based on a revolution.
A revolution by definition cannot be legal.
If it's legal, it's not a revolution.
A revolution is an overturning of the existing order.
So another way to put it is the American founders preached disobedience So, Lincoln's basically suggesting, although not saying directly...
It's a little bit tough to then turn around and say, well, but now that we've created this new system, you've got to revere it, you've got to swear allegiance to the laws, you've got to be on board and sort of accept its legitimacy and...
Lincoln's point is that, yes, Lincoln is actually preaching the gospel of lawfulness, but I think what Lincoln is saying is we need some additional supports for people to want to, to feel a genuine attachment to this new, or fairly new, regime, the American founding.
And Jaffa describes this almost in biblical terms.
There was in ancient Israel the first temple.
When the temple was destroyed, a second temple was built on the exact same site.
And that temple endured, or at least endured for a time.
It was ultimately destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. But Lincoln is saying that if you think of the founding, well that was the first temple.
But the first temple, well, I mean the structure of the temple is still there, but you can say the spirit of the temple, which was a spirit of lawfulness, obedience to the laws, has now been, you don't find that spirit afoot in the country, is what Lincoln is saying. So we need to reconstruct the temple.
We're not changing the structure of the government, but we're changing the basis by which people feel that allegiance to the government.
And what Lincoln is trying to do, and I suggested this yesterday, is replace the very somewhat cold and contractual understanding of the government, which comes from Washington and Jefferson.
They're very much men of the Enlightenment.
They speak in terms of social contract.
They talk about creating a system of government that would work a little bit like a machine with coordinated parts that would balance out each other, the idea of checks and balances.
And I think Lincoln is saying all of this is actually good.
It is necessary, but it is not sufficient.
Now why is it not sufficient?
And by the way, this is a question very relevant to us because a lot of times when people today invoke the founding, they say, well, we're conservatives, we're conserving the founding.
The question then becomes, well, if the founding is so great, why isn't it helping us now?
If the Constitution is all we need, then why isn't the Constitution right now blocking all these lawless measures that we see around us?
The political prosecutions, the selective application of the law, the targeting of opponents, the unjustified raids on people's homes.
All of this is going on.
Well, we still have a Constitution.
What's the problem?
Why are we having it at all?
Well, partly, I guess the answer is people are not following the Constitution, including judges, including juries.
Well, if that's the problem, then Lincoln would say that even though we maintain the form of the law, it's there, the letters of the law, you can go read it, you can carry the Constitution around as some people do in their pockets.
Nevertheless, Lincoln is saying, well...
The law is meaningless if it doesn't infuse the minds and souls of the people.
Not just the ordinary guy, who I think, by and large, still respects the Constitution, but the people who are charged with implementing the Constitution, public officials, politicians, people who are tasked with preaching the Constitution, and that would include our education system, for example.
that would include civic institutions and then ultimately also judges and juries, people who are tasked with converting the Constitution from an abstract proposition from words on a page into actual judgments of the actual implementation of justice in the country. Now the American founders were very
aware of the importance of reverence, of an understanding of the moral architecture of society, and also of the importance of positing a creator.
They were, as I say, many of them men of the Enlightenment, Jefferson probably more so than any of the others.
And Jefferson was in some respects skeptical about some of the revealed truths of Christianity.
Not about the moral teachings of Christianity, which he agreed with, but the revealed truths of Christianity, the miracles, Christ is the son of God, the things handed down, if you will, from above.
Jefferson was very much a man of reason and a man who in some ways thought that revelation could be the source of a lot of problems in a society, partly because you say God told me and I say God told me and there's no way to adjudicate between the two of us.
Both of us claim to be receiving direct word from God, and there is no kind of reasonable basis to adjudicate.
Well, who's right? You have a tape recording of what God said?
No. Do I? No.
So we're both claiming something, and of course there's also the temptation that we're just saying that God told us.
We are actually attributing to God our own preferences, our own opinions, our own interests.
Here's George Washington in his farewell address and I want to read just two lines of it because they articulate something that Lincoln believed and yet, this is Jaffa writing, it would be difficult to find a more condensed expression of Lincolnian doctrine which was at the same time more alien in tone and feeling to the sense of what Lincoln believed.
In other words, Lincoln agrees with the substance But he would never put it this way.
So let's listen to what Washington said and think about it, and we'll pick up tomorrow why Lincoln did not believe that this mode of presentation, let's call it this enlightenment rhetoric, Is of any value in creating the second temple?
The second temple meaning a new basis of attachment to the Constitution.
Here's George Washington.
Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.
And then Washington goes on to say,"...let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.
Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle." Now,
Washington is actually defending the idea of religion here, but he's doing it in such a theoretical, abstract, professorial way.
Let it be supposed, may I conjecture, we may with reluctance concede, blah blah blah, that in some ways it's almost like this guy is giving a treatise for his thesis defense.
The point is, for Lincoln, this stuff is not a matter of abstract rhetoric.
This is something that has to be planted like a seed or like into the hearts of the American people.
And so the ideas are there, but it has to be planted in a new way.
And so we're going to be looking at Lincoln's rhetoric As a masterful study in how ultimately to appeal, to convey these doctrines that support the founding, not only to the American head, but also to the American heart.
▲
Export Selection