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March 21, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:15
BIBI VS. BIDEN Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep795
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Coming up, I'll examine a vicious new tactic that the Biden DOJ has come up with to inflict more torture on January 6 prisoners, even if the Supreme Court drops the so-called obstruction of an official proceeding charge.
I'll explore a critique of Christian nationalism to ask, what's wrong with it?
An author and journalist, Josh Hammer, joins me.
We're going to talk about Biden's problem with Netanyahu, and we'll talk about the larger situations going on in Israel.
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Is the Biden DOJ trying to threaten the Supreme Court?
I'm going to argue yes, but not threaten in the customary understanding of the term.
When we think of threaten the Supreme Court, we think of Chuck Schumer standing out there telling Justice Kavanaugh and Justice Thomas that they're going to reap the whirlwind.
So we have seen that kind of a threat.
It has happened.
I'm talking about a more subtle, legal, even a legalistic type of threat.
And this concerns a case that is coming up before the Supreme Court.
It is a case that has to do with one of the most powerful charges that is launched against January 6th defendants.
It also represents two of the four charges in the January 6th case that have been launched against Trump.
And this is the charge that says that you are guilty of the felony of obstructing an official proceeding.
It's sometimes called Section 1512 because it is from the U.S. Code, 18 U.S. Code, Section 1512.
Actually, 1512C2. That's the full citation.
And hundreds of January 6 cases involve this charge.
There are people sitting in jail serving terms because of this charge.
People who otherwise would have only misdemeanor charges against them, but now they have a felony conviction.
And as I mentioned, Trump is facing these charges.
So the Supreme Court is going to consider...
Whether the Justice Department is correct in interpreting this provision of the statute to apply to people who either went into the Capitol But what does it mean to say that they obstructed an official proceeding?
Now, you might say, well, they obviously did.
There was an official proceeding, which was the certification of the election.
Well, it's not so simple because there are a whole bunch of January 6 guys who went in after that proceeding had been halted.
They called an adjournment.
All the people left. No proceeding was going on.
And so obviously entering the building after that couldn't possibly have obstructed the proceeding.
So now you have to make a more convoluted argument, which is that, you know what, even though this guy went in afterward, he was part of a larger crowd.
Some of which went in beforehand and so since the crowd that went in before obstructed the proceeding and since this guy was part of that crowd he was part of obstructing the proceeding so you can do a big intellectual tap dance or pirouette to try to make your point.
But let's remember that this provision of the law was added, by and large, to stop financial crimes, Enron-type crimes.
And the obstruction of the proceeding here had to do with things like, the proceeding is a judicial proceeding, which is a judicial investigation into Enron.
Let's just say, for example, Enron deletes files, destroys evidence.
They're obstructing the official proceeding in that way.
That's the context of the law.
That's the original intent to use a famous phrase about the law, and this is going before the Supreme Court.
So there is many legal scholars believe, not just on the right, but also in the middle on the left, believe that there's a good likelihood, a good chance, maybe a 75% chance, maybe more, that the Supreme Court will throw out this charge, which means it would be thrown out for Trump on the two cases.
It would be thrown out for a lot of January.
They would have to revise a lot of sentences.
And this is where the legal threat comes in because Matthew Graves, who is the Biden DOJ's U.S. attorney from D.C., in one of his legal briefings, he says something very interesting and slightly shocking.
He basically says, look, if the Supreme Court overturns, removes Section 1512, In other words, says that it's not applicable.
We have not been using it correctly.
And local judges who have been sentencing based on that have not been sentencing correctly.
He says essentially that the DOJ will now go to those cases and see normally, let's just say, for example, that you had a 41-month sentence.
And out of the 41 months, Let's say 20 months or 25 months was based upon this Section 1512 violation.
You obstructed an official proceeding.
I'm going to give you 21 months for that, and that's how we get to 41 months.
20 months for the other stuff you did.
So normally you'd say, all right, if the guy got 41 months and now 1512 is thrown out, we've got to subtract the 21 months and the guy only serves the remaining 20 months.
He can't serve for a provision of the law that is held to be inapplicable in this case.
So what Matthew Graves is saying is, well, in that case, we're going to ask the court to look at his other charges and And up the sentencing.
So in other words, revise the sentencing upward even though or perhaps because we no longer have the ability to give this guy additional time based upon this section 1512 charge.
Now, this is actually highly inappropriate.
It's highly inappropriate because the way judges calculate sentencing is like this.
They look at the charges on which the guy has been found guilty.
They assign a certain sort of jail time for each of these charges.
And then they sort of add it up and say, okay, well, this is your full sentence.
So subtracting one of the charges means subtracting the sentence that goes with it.
So it's not as if the judge can go, hey, listen, I gave the guy 41 months, but 20 of those months or 21 of those months was based on section 1512.
That's been thrown out. But guess what?
I'm going to look at the other charges and then just up it to 41 months because I think 41 months, the thing I gave him originally is appropriate.
That's That's not how the system works.
The way the system works is we start with the misdemeanors or the other more minor charges that the guy is convicted of, and judges do have some discretion to decide a sentence within those charges, but they can't start.
They can't use the Section 1512 to add the 20 months or the 21 months.
Now, I think what Matthew Graves is counting on is that judges in D.C., We'll nevertheless play along with him.
And this is another way of saying that he is counting on the fact that his own corruption will be matched by the corruption of the D.C. judges.
The D.C. judges will wink-wink, look at Matthew Graves and go, oh, okay, well, we really can't use this section 1512, but we're crooks like you.
And so if you can find out a way to finagle these sentences up, We'll go along with you.
This is the game that is being played between Matthew Graves and, as I say, the corrupt judges of the DC division.
I hope that it doesn't come to that.
In fairness, I should say that the DC judges have not been going along with the Justice Department in its sentencing in January 6th cases.
In fact, if you look at a pattern of these cases, if the Justice Department asks for two years— Judges typically give one year.
So in other words, judges by and large have been giving one half approximately of the sentences.
Now, of course, it varies case by case.
But in general, I think the D.C. judges realize, even though they believe it was an insurrection, this guy was an insurrectionist, we've got to really teach him a lesson.
Nevertheless, they recognize that the Biden DOJ is treating these people with a severity of That makes no sense in the context of what they have done.
So even though these judges have a very harsh view of these defendants, they have been knocking down these sentences or at least not going close even to what the DOJ wants and this gives me at least a glimmer of hope that this latest ruse on the part of Matthew Graves will fail.
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There's a very interesting article in the Atlantic by a guy whom I once considered a friend.
He was never a close friend, not someone I knew very well, but nevertheless, we were very much on the same side of things.
His name is Peter Wehner, W-E-H-N-E-R.
He was speechwriter for George W. Bush, a decent guy.
And yet, he has become not only a vehement never-Trumper, but he has become somebody who has been chastising evangelical Christians for supporting Trump and for supporting the Trumpian.
the MAGA Republican Party.
His article in The Atlantic is called Where Did Evangelicals Go Wrong?
And I might at some other time discuss the article in some depth because I think it raises fundamental issues about the term Christian nationalism.
Is Christian nationalism a good thing?
Is it a bad thing?
Well, what is it? What does it mean to fuse Christianity and the concept of nationalism, or more benignly, patriotism, By the way, if you talked about Christian patriotism instead of Christian nationalism, the sting of that term will be all gone.
But in the article, Pete Wehner makes a point that he's arguing that Christians today, evangelical Christians specifically, have lost, quote, the real Jesus.
Now, whenever someone talks about the real Jesus, you always have to be very careful to see what are they actually getting at.
The evangelical Christians of today.
Let's see why. And then he goes on to say, Jesus made it clear time and time again that his kingdom is not of this world.
He goes on with things like the early church did not hand out voter guides and so on.
Alright, well some of this is just a little bit...
A little obtuse. It's a little silly.
It's a little, let's say, rhetorical.
I mean, the early church was subsisting in the Roman Empire.
It was being watched, surveilled, if you want to use our current term, ultimately harassed, persecuted by the Romans.
Nobody was having any elections, and the notion that they would hand out voter guides, I mean, it's just dumb.
Now, when Jesus said that his kingdom was not of this world...
Again, let's pay careful attention.
The kingdom is not of this world.
Did Jesus ever say, my kingdom is not present in this world?
Not of the world, which means it is, in a sense, spiritual.
It is unworldly.
It doesn't accept the values of the world.
But that's not the same as saying that the kingdom of God kind of only comes into being once you're dead, once you are transmitted to another world, and that's when basically Jesus takes over?
No. Jesus is talking about the fact that the Holy Spirit is going to come down and take over your heart, And it's going to do that now, while you're in the world.
It's going to happen to the apostles.
And it's going to produce a new type of life, a new type of spiritual life, but also a new type of earthly life.
I mean, this is why the Bible uses the very puzzling but earthly term, Born again.
When we think of birth, we just think of coming through the birth canal, and we think of blood, and we think of a baby's face splotched.
It's a very earthy, earthly thing that happens, and of course, Jesus is talking about the spiritual equivalent of that, but it's interesting that he uses a very worldly, earthy metaphor, which is the idea of being born and being born again.
Now, When people say, you know, what would Jesus do?
This question is always a little bit peculiar because Jesus is, even as he is fully human, he is also fully divine.
Now, we are not. So, if you say in this situation, hey, Lazarus is, you know, dead, what would Jesus do?
Bring him back to life. Well, are you going to do that?
Am I going to do that? No.
We're not Jesus. We don't have that kind of power.
We get our power through Jesus, but just the fact that we get it through Jesus means we are in a very different position than Jesus.
Jesus himself came to die for our sins.
Is it our job to die for the sins of the world so that we can redeem the human race the same as Jesus?
No, we can't do that.
We're not called to do that.
Jesus didn't ask us to do that.
So the early church recognized that it was not Jesus.
It was going to carry on in the manner of Jesus, but right away the early church does something that Jesus didn't do, which it starts organizing itself.
It starts creating organized communities, which are then in communication with each other.
It starts ultimately developing a strategy for dealing with persecution.
Notice Jesus didn't have that kind of a strategy.
Jesus' strategy was, take me.
Yes, I'm yours.
And I will submit to your persecution.
Ultimately, the apostles too submitted.
But once the church became the sort of dominant force in Rome, and ultimately in Europe...
It was forced to reconstitute itself.
And by reconstitute itself, it was forced to ask not things like, how do I run away from the Romans?
But now questions like, what kind of laws are good and appropriate for a Christian society?
So there's a natural transformation.
From a church that is in opposition to a dominant ruling power that is anti-Christian and a church that is trying to form and live in and govern a Christian society.
And you could say, well, we're not exactly in that situation.
True. But we are in a society where we are trying to preserve Christianity.
To retain the influence of Judaism and Christianity, this ancestry that we derive from Athens and Jerusalem, we're trying to figure out how we can preserve that in our society in the midst of a lot of secular elements and also some elements that are admittedly very hostile to Christianity.
So it seems to me that ultimately what Peter Wehner is trying to do Is he's trying to get Christians to get out of politics.
And by the way, he's only saying that because he wants Christians to get out of the MAGA movement.
That's really what he wants to say.
He can't say that because if he were to say that, then he would be arguing for one kind.
He's not going to say, hey, Christians, don't get involved in Trump's politics.
Support Biden instead.
I think that is where he wants to go with this.
But he, like so many writers these days, he has an artful pretense.
And the artful pretense is, well, we as Christians need to go back to a higher calling.
We need to withdraw from the political sphere, at least up to a point.
We need to recognize that our kingdom is not of this world.
So it is ultimately a recipe.
For political impotence.
A political impotence that I'm guessing that if Christ were around today, and Christ is around today, he's around today in our hearts, and many Christians who are motivated to save their country, save their schools, save their families, save their society, are responding to that inner urge that is produced by their Christian commitment.
And so ultimately, I think Pete Wehner here is...
Decent guy, though, he is very off track, is trying to sell us a bill of goods, and while this may work with the Atlantic readers, most of whom, by the way, they're not evangelical Christians, so the peculiarity of this article is he's talking to one group of people, basically secular leftist Democrats, and giving them a recipe for how evangelical Christians can learn better how to be true Christians.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome back to the podcast Josh Hammer, Senior Editor of Newsweek.
He also hosts the Josh Hammer Show podcast, syndicated radio show.
He writes a weekly newsletter, The Josh Hammer Report.
His forthcoming book, Sinai and Civilization on the Jewish People and the Development and Fate of the West.
Josh, great to have you as always.
I want to talk about the book and the broader issues that you explore in it.
Let's start with a couple of current events related to Israel.
It appears like the big question that Netanyahu is dealing with and the Israeli government is Is the sort of, I don't know if invasion is the right word, but the military operation in the area called RAFA. Can you explain for people who have heard the name but don't really know what that is, what are we talking about here?
Why is it important?
And also, it seems that the Biden administration is anxious about this, is opposed to it.
Let's get, we'll get to why that is.
But first talk about what is the significance of RAFA? Dinesh, always a pleasure to join you.
So, Rafah is basically Hamas' last stronghold.
Rafah is right on the Gaza-Egyptian border.
Many of us, at the very beginning of this conflict, after the Hamas pogrom of October 7th, many of us were calling on President Sisi of Egypt to actually allow in refugees through the border there in Rafah.
And basically, when you look at what the IDF has done since the land invasion started, Dinesh, in late October, they've very systematically just gone from northern Gaza down through the entire territory.
It's not a particularly huge territory, but they spent a lot of time in Gaza City.
That was the whole manufactured controversy over Al-Shifa Hospital, actually fighting just returned to Al-Shifa Hospital there this past week.
but that was Hamas's stronghold in Northern Gaza.
Then for a while, the concerted fighting shifted to Khan Yunus, which is Hamas's stronghold in Southern Gaza.
IDF, Mossad believe that is where Sinwar, who is the head of Hamas in Gaza, they believe that he is somewhere in the tunnels.
Hamas has this elaborate subterranean terror network.
They jokingly refer to it as the Gaza Metro.
They believe that Sinwar is there in Khan Yunus, probably with a lot of hostages, but they nonetheless cleared out most of the Hamas battalions of Khan Yunus, and they've just gone systematically through, and Rafah is basically Hamas's last stand.
So overall, the IDF says that there are 24 Hamas battalions in Gaza and Netanyahu says they have thus far eliminated 18 of 24, which is actually pretty good as far as a military nuts and bolts efficiency perspective considering the fact that this has been less than five months since the land invasion, they've knocked out 75% of the battalions.
And they think that at least five of the remaining six are there in Rafah.
So the analogy that Netanyahu has been using when he does the rounds on American media and it makes a lot of sense to me, is he says that telling Israel to stop short of actually going into Rafah to take out those last remaining Hamas strongholds, it's the functional equivalent, Dinesh, of telling the allies, of telling the Americans.
the French, the British, and so forth, to stop with the carpet bombing of Dresden and to stop short of actually going for the kill shot in Berlin.
That's basically what is happening here.
And, you know, just zooming out a little bit here, Why is the United States and why is the Biden administration specifically so micromanaging an ally's day-to-day handling of a war effort?
I've never seen anything like this in my life, and I think it comes from this mentality that doesn't actually treat Israel as a fully sovereign state, but essentially treats it much like a Guam or a Puerto Rico.
As essentially an American territory.
And that's really, really problematic because they are a sovereign country and we should have the respect to treat them as a sovereign country and to let them dictate their own military strategies on a day-to-day basis as they go about defeating a mutually shared enemy and a U.S. recognized foreign terrorist organization.
And that, of course, is Hamas. Now, Josh, to corroborate your point even further, you have the leading Democrat, apart from the President, Senator Schumer, giving a speech in which he essentially starts dictating to Israel Hey, I think you guys need to have another election.
Hey, I think that your elected prime minister is an obstacle to peace.
Hey, I think that the two-state solution is the way to go, but there are many people in Israel who don't seem to have seen the light on all that.
And so as I think about why the United States would do this kind of treatment...
It seems to me that maybe an answer is to be found in domestic politics.
Do you think that that is correct?
That the Biden administration is nervously looking at the election polling in Michigan and swing states and the impact of not only the Muslim vote but the priority that progressive activists place on this issue?
And is that guiding the way that they...
Israel about how to act.
The two-state solution for them is Michigan and Minnesota, referring to Dearborn, Michigan and Minneapolis, Minnesota, Ilhan Omar's district.
That's exactly what they are doing.
They are letting domestic political concerns dictate their treatment of an ally when that ally is in the midst of an existential war.
I mean, this is the first time Israel has actually fully declared war since 1973, since the Yom Kippur War 50 years ago.
and the notion that you are going to allow domestic political concerns to dictate your staunch allies treatment, again, Dinesh, of a mutual foe.
Hamas is a foe of the United States.
It's worth reiterating here, there are at least five to six American citizens who are still being held hostage by Hamas right now in those subterranean terror tunnels.
There were at least 25 to 30 US citizens who were tragically killed by Hamas on October 7th.
Hamas is not just an enemy of Israel and the Jews.
It's an enemy of the United States, of Western civilizations, of Christians.
It's an enemy of anyone that the Muslim Brotherhood does not consider infidels.
But that's exactly what they're doing.
They're also making a political miscalculation, I might say, because the American people still overwhelmingly support Israel's prosecution of its righteous war effort against Hamas.
The far left does not.
The people in Dearborn, Michigan certainly do not.
But I think that Biden, even on its own terms, is making a political error.
If he's trying to win over swing state voters in Georgia, Arizona, I don't know, maybe it's just me.
I think they're probably more concerned about crime, about inflation in the economy, about the southern border and illegal immigration, perhaps above all, Lake and Riley right there in Georgia, things like that.
So even on its own terms, I don't understand what he's thinking by looking at this issue.
But the one final point I'll make on this, Dinesh, is look, The people of Israel are very divided over Netanyahu.
There are many liberals who hate him, who vehemently protest him.
When it comes to the Israeli war cabinet's handling of its war effort right now, the country is overwhelmingly united.
75 to 80 percent of Israelis tell pollsters that they support the idea of doing what has to be done in Rafah.
It's not considered a particularly partisan issue there.
In fact, We're good to go.
Of just incentivizing and rewarding the most barbaric slaughter of the Jews since Hitler was alive.
So Schumer and Biden are looking at domestic political concerns, but they are morally wrong, they're ethically wrong, and even on a crass political calculation, they're misguided there as well.
Do you think, Josh, that there's a lot of emphasis on the issue of civilians, civilian casualties?
What about the civilians in Gaza?
Now, there's a survey here that's just come out, and it's talking about these results from March 2024, a survey of the Palestinians.
71% say that the attacks on October 7th were, quote, correct.
91% say Hamas committed no war crimes.
59% say Hamas should control Gaza.
Hamas has doubled the popular support of Fatah.
They believe that armed struggle and non-violent resistance is the most effective strategy to end the invasion.
In other words, what we're getting at here is something that Biden himself has vehemently denied.
He says, don't confuse the ordinary Palestinian with Hamas.
And yet, it was the Palestinians who put Hamas into power in the last election, admittedly several years ago, and it appears like Hamas would not be as successful or as powerful as it is if it wasn't rooted in local support in the Palestinian community.
Can you comment on that issue?
Yeah, this is one of the least discussed, but it should be discussed more aspects of this entire conflict.
So, you know, let's zoom out of Gaza for a second, just focused on Ramallah, the West Bank, Judea and Samaria, as we call it.
But in Ramallah, you have the Palestinian Authority, which was created by the Oslo Accords in the 1990s.
they have functional day-to-day control over most of the communities within what most people call the West Bank.
And Mahmoud Abbas, who has been in charge of the Palestinian Authority, the Fatah party, as you just said, he's been in charge of it since 2005.
He's currently, by my math, in the 19th year of his four-year term.
And the reason why he refuses to hold elections as their constitution, charter, whatever their document calls itself, the reason that he refuses to hold elections is because he knows that Hamas would win, and Hamas would win overwhelmingly.
And Hamas is overwhelmingly popular.
And, you know, I saw another recent poll, just to corroborate your points even further, I saw another recent poll maybe a month, month and a half ago or so, that said that if the Palestinian Arabs could choose one person in all of Gaza and the West Bank to be their next leader, who should replace Mahmoud Abbas?
He's in his 80s, he's in declining health, he's not going to last forever.
They said, who should replace him?
The number one choice was Marwan Barghouti.
Barghouti has been one of the leading funders and supporters of mass suicide bombings against Israeli civilians going back to the Second Intifada, the four-year prolonged struggle with bus bombings, restaurant bombings.
He has served a lot of time behind Israeli bars in prison there.
That is literally who the Palestinian Arabs tell the pollsters they want to be their next leader.
This is not a healthy culture, Dinesh.
Their schools teach them basic arithmetic that say, oh, if you slaughter two Jews and three Jews, how many Jews have you killed?
That's how they teach you two plus three equals five.
It is frankly just a rotten, fetid, and horrible, horrible culture.
And again, the idea of rewarding these people with an independent state right now is not just lunacy.
I would say it's actually outright evil.
Wow. And I shouldn't say I'm chuckling, but this whole idea, it looks like that's DEI type of math, right?
Anti-colonialism meets mathematics in one of the most perverted ways that one could imagine.
What do you think, Josh, is the effect of all this going to be?
You know, we were talking about domestic politics a moment ago, and it seems like the radical left and particularly the Ilhan Omar faction of the left has been able to use its leverage.
They go to Biden and they go, listen, we don't care if the alternative is Trump.
We're going to not vote for you if you don't deliver on this one issue that we care about more than any other.
Now, when I turn to progressive Jews, they are not taking the opposite position with Biden.
They're not saying to Biden, this is the issue that is important to us and we will abandon you and we will not support you if you sort of knife us in the back on this critical issue.
So I wonder whether the Biden people are saying, well, listen, it is important for us to, we have a constituency on both sides, but one side is threatening to pull out on us and the other side is not.
That's why we're going to go with the Ilhan Omar people.
I think there's something to that.
I call it this coalition of aggrieved interests, where you have basically all these intersectional identity politics subgroups.
You have the 18 to 35, the Gen Z millennial demographic.
You have blacks, Hispanics, some white PhD liberals.
The whole thing is really falling apart in real time, and they're having a hard time preserving this coalition right now because no one really seems to want the same thing.
Sure, many of the very young voters, many of the Muslim and Arab voters, Frankly, a higher percentage of black voters who tend to be a little less pro-Israel than white voters as well, they probably are more sympathetic towards an independent Palestinian state.
But the vast majority of white Christians in America tend to support Israel, tend to support Israel in its righteous war against Hamas.
And the white working class, even though it is rapidly shifting towards the Republican Party, especially so in the age of Trump post-2016, it's not fully there.
You do still have some remnants of white working class people, especially in the Rust Belt, who kind of, for vestigial reasons, still pull the ballot box lever for the Democratic Party.
And the more that you capitulate to the far left, very much on this issue, but other issues as well, the more that you're going to alienate that.
So Biden's just... Between Iraq and a hard place right now on this issue, and I think they're having a really, really hard time preserving this new Obama-Biden-Democratic coalition.
Josh, give us a brief preview of the new book.
It's called Sinai and Civilization.
It's on the Jewish people and the development and fate of the West.
It just seems awfully timely in setting the context for everything that we've been talking about.
What is the unique take that you're going for in this book?
Yeah, so this is a working title.
I actually just signed the contract recently, so the book will probably not be available on actual bookshelves until early 2025, probably right around the time of the presidential inauguration or shortly thereafter.
So, you know, hoping Dinesh to be a part of that conversation for the next president, who I personally hope will be Donald Trump, of course.
And really what I'm trying to do here, it would be very easy to write a post-October 7th book that simply says, here's the case for Israel, to stand with Israel, the U.S.-Israel relationship is important.
And don't get me wrong, that's all going to be in there.
I'm going to have multiple chapters explaining Zionism, Jewish nationalism, why it is a just and righteous cause, why the U.S. should support it.
The Balfour Declaration, a realist foreign policy that includes a strong U.S.-Israeli.
That's all going to be in there.
But I do want to make a broader argument because I've personally just been really, really taken aback and frankly, in many ways, disgusted by a lot of just the crass, vitriolic anti-Semitism that's coming all around the world after October 7th.
And we know that it's coming from many Muslim quarters.
We know that it's coming from many progressive quarters.
But I've been saddened to see no shortage of people who are right of center, who are dabbling in some things that they really should not be dabbling in as well.
And I want to write a book just to remind people, my fellow conservatives, anyone who will listen, frankly, that without the Jewish people, Dinesh, you don't have what today we refer to as Western civilization.
Without Revelation at Mount Sinai, without Jerusalem, without all of that, without the Hebrew scriptures and the Bible, you don't have Christianity, you don't have Christendom more broadly, and without any of that, you don't have anything remotely resembling what today we call the West.
And the argument that I really want to make is, one, to call on Jews to be prouder Jews and to be better torchbearers of this extraordinarily long 5,000 to 6,000 year long tradition that we today uphold, and then to call for a Jewish-Christian alliance, and a real strong Jewish-Christian alliance,
because without both the Jews and the Christians fighting for biblical concepts, for biblical principles, we ultimately will not have any chance of We're good to go.
I mean, I find this, Josh, not only very important but very moving because I think in my own education, as I studied the ancient Greeks, I sort of fell in love with the ancient Greeks.
And then over time, I came to realize that there were things about them that were not only very strange but very barbaric.
And moreover, the great thinkers of ancient Greece seemed not to notice.
They seemed to be okay with this kind of barbarism.
And then I realized that I was reading ancient Greece, or Athens if you will, through the lens of Jerusalem.
In other words, I was not looking at Athens the way Athens was in the 5th century BC. I was looking at a sort of transformed Athens that had been viewed and understood and interpreted through a thousand years of Judaism and Christianity.
And so this is a way of italicizing your point.
That Athens, as we know it, would be nowhere without Jerusalem.
And even the synthesis of Athens and Jerusalem relies heavily on the Ten Commandments, relies heavily on this unique contribution.
So this is a very valuable enterprise you're undertaking.
Josh, all the best with it.
It's going to be great stuff.
We'd love to have you back when the book is out.
Thank you very much for joining me, guys.
Josh Hammer, senior editor of Newsweek.
Follow him on X. At Josh underscore Hammer.
And then look forthcoming Sinai and Civilization or some title like that about the Jewish people and the development and fate of the West.
Thank you, Josh. Thanks so much for having me.
I'm toward the middle of Harry Jaffa's great book, Crisis of the House Divided.
We are about to embark on a study of Lincoln's famous temperance address.
We've finished talking about the Lyceum speech, probably the early most important speech of Lincoln.
Next up, the temperance address.
But before we get to that as a preamble leading into it, when we left off last time, I was talking about how The American founders defend a notion of civic virtue and of patriotic attachment to the country, but they do so in very academic, even utilitarian terms.
And you see this, for example, if you read the Federalist Papers.
Here is a line from the Federalist Papers.
I believe this is Federalist 10.
And Madison is talking about how do you prevent We're good to go.
How do you avoid that kind of tyranny, the tyranny that the founders sometimes call the tyranny of the majority?
And the Federalist says, well, this is how we do it.
We need a, quote, policy of supplying by opposite and rival interests the defect of better motives.
It's a very telling phrase and I could really spend quite a bit of time unpacking it.
But let me sum up what Madison is saying.
He's saying, listen, we cannot just rely on the kind of higher virtues of Americans because human nature isn't like that.
We can't just say, all right, guys, you all need to love your country.
You all need to put the common good above your own particular good.
Madison goes, that kind of exhortation is useful, and perhaps it will do some good, but it won't do enough good.
It won't command the attention of enough people.
So what we need is something else, a kind of backdoor solution.
Well, what's the backdoor solution?
Supplying by opposite and rival interests the defect of better motives.
This means that if we've got a gang over here and they want, let's say, to grab the public purse, they want to take a hold of the treasury, they want, let's say, government subsidies to go all to them, Then what do we do?
We have a rival gang over here, another one over there, and a fourth one over here.
And all of them begin to say, oh no, you can't have that.
I want it. And Madison is basically saying that by setting interest against interest, one claim against another claim, let's hope that these claims cancel each other out.
So you can see that what's going on here, what Madison calls ambition will counteract ambition.
This is a way of kind of creating a system, a constitutional structure that through checks and balances, through separation of powers, through other kind of devices, what it's trying to do is create a machine that will prevent a single faction, a single group, from usurping the full power of the government.
What Harry Jaffa is saying is that for Lincoln, it's not that Lincoln disagreed with this.
Lincoln was enough of a Machiavellian to know that yes, you do need to harness not only good motives but sometimes bad motives.
Bad motives aren't even necessarily bad.
They're just not good.
I mean, consider the example that Adam Smith talks about in The Wealth of Nations.
He talks about harnessing the power of self-interest.
Now, does Adam Smith say that self-interest is a wonderful thing?
No. Does he say that self-interest is a bad thing?
No. He just takes self-interest as an ingredient of human nature.
What he's saying is that, look, human nature is that way.
That's how it is. We're not going to be able to make it something else because human beings are going to look out for themselves.
They're going to look out for their self-interest.
So let's devise an economic system that taps into that and And channels this individual self-interest toward the material betterment of society.
That's a summary of the argument of the wealth of nations.
But, coming back to Lincoln, for Lincoln this is necessary but not sufficient.
And by not sufficient I mean Lincoln realizes that we do need in the end to appeal to something nobler.
We do need to appeal to something higher.
we do need to build up to an attachment to the country in which you're loving your country, not just because it's your country, but you're loving your country because it's a good country.
It is a country that is worthy of your love and attachment.
And this is something that's worth keeping in mind in so many areas of life.
It's worth keeping in mind when you raise your children.
Why do you love your children?
Well, I love my children because they're my children.
Well, yeah, and that is, again, a legitimate reason And you won't stop loving them, even if they turn out to be pretty horrible.
But, says Lincoln, I think he would say even in this context, try to raise your kids in a way that makes them lovable.
Try to raise your kids in a way that commands respect, not just from you, but from others, from other people who are less attached to them.
Other people are not going to say, I'm going to love this guy's kids because, you know, well, they're not his kids.
He has no obligation to love them.
And he's going to look to see, well, do I want to hang out with this guy?
What does this guy have to contribute?
Can I trust this guy?
Is he decent? Is he honest?
And so on. Now, Thomas Jefferson is somebody that Abraham Lincoln greatly admired.
And this alone deserves a moment of reflection because it's a little bit odd.
First of all, Abraham Lincoln is a Whig.
Now later, a Republican.
After 1854, Abraham Lincoln becomes a Republican.
But before that, he's a member of the Whig Party.
Now what's the Whig Party? The Whig Party arises out of the original...
The Jeffersonian party was the Democratic-Republican party.
And by the way, when the Federalist party, which was George Washington's party, disappeared, there was only one party left.
There was Jefferson's party.
It was the solitary party in the United States.
I mean, the solitary major party.
And then what happened is that the Democratic-Republican Party, the Jeffersonian Party, had a schism.
It split. It split into the Democratic Party, which was led by Andrew Jackson, and then the new party, the rival party, became the Whig Party.
The Whig Party's leader for many years was a mentor of Abraham Lincoln, Henry Clay.
But Henry Clay, like Jefferson, was a southerner.
Henry Clay, like Jefferson, was a slave owner.
And yet, Lincoln greatly admired Clay.
He did a beautiful eulogy when Clay died.
And Lincoln regarded Jefferson as the true interpreter of the American Revolution.
And as I say, that's strange because Jefferson was in some ways the inspiration or the original root of the Democratic Party.
And Lincoln was, in a sense, from a breakaway faction to that party.
Ultimately, he becomes the leader of the rival party, the Republican Party.
But second, Lincoln, although born in Kentucky, is in a free state.
He's a northerner to that degree.
He's from Illinois. Jefferson is a Virginia planter.
And yet, for reasons that we'll go into, Lincoln sees Jefferson as the apostle, as the guiding light.
So not Washington, not Madison.
It would be so much easier for Lincoln to pick Hamilton, who was a New Yorker, a Northerner, an immigrant.
And yet, Lincoln doesn't go that way.
For him, Jefferson is the man.
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