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March 22, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
53:06
THE GOOGLE NIGHTMARE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep796
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Coming up, I'll talk about the prospects of Trump succeeding in his appeal.
He's appealing the Fannie Willis disqualification ruling to the appellate court.
Jeffrey Tucker, he's a libertarian, author, and head of the Brownstone Institute.
He joins me. We're going to talk about Google and artificial intelligence, specifically the Google product called Gemini.
And we're also going to talk about the Supreme Court and censorship as well.
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.
The latest development in the Georgia case involving Fannie Willis and Nathan Wade and Donald Trump...
Well, number one, Nathan Wade is gone.
The judge, McAfee, gave Fannie Willis and Nathan Wade a choice.
Essentially, either he goes, Wade, or she goes, Willis.
And so, not surprisingly, Wade is gone and Fannie Willis stays.
Now... Beyond that, the Trump team, along with some of the defendants, has gone to the judge and said, we want to appeal your decision on the disqualification.
And the judge has, well, granted it.
Granted it despite some of the progressive legal scholars I'm reading.
They were like, the judge is never going to agree.
He's not going to slow things down further by letting this now be appealed.
But... Au contraire.
The judge goes, yes, go ahead and appeal it.
The judge goes, I'm going to continue the case in other respects.
In other words, there's no reason, while this issue is being appealed, it's not as if other motions can't continue, discovery can't continue, and so on.
But nevertheless, the appeal gives a second shot at making the case that Fannie Willis needs to go.
Now, there's a lot of evidence for Fannie Willis going, not just from the trial itself, which is to say there is powerful indications that Fannie Willis lied, that Nathan Wade lied, that he benefited, that she benefited.
There's just impropriety and the smell of impropriety all around this case.
And so the financial benefit is one thing.
The lying is another thing.
Lying before the court by a prosecutor, by a district attorney, this is a very serious matter.
The judge himself, although he tried a Solomonic splitting of the baby, which is to say, I'm going to partially grant the disqualification motion.
In a sense, what he did was he disqualified Nathan Wade.
He did not disqualify Fannie Willis.
So that's the splitting the baby in half, so to speak.
But he said things in his ruling that could be a powerful basis for this appeal.
Let's go through some of those.
He says that Fannie Willis' behavior is, quote, concerning a tremendous lapse in judgment and unprofessional.
I mean, those are three...
Very problematic things for a judge to say.
He said further that she, quote, made bad choices repeatedly.
And then he used a very telling phrase.
Her choices created, quote, an odor of mendacity and the appearance of impropriety.
Now the appearance of impropriety is a legal term.
He's not fudging.
He's basically saying that in a case, not only have things got to be on the up and up, but they've got to look on the up and up.
You cannot have someone who seems to be compromised, who seems to be taking money under the table...
Who seems to be lying?
Who seems to be benefiting illicitly from this arrangement?
So that's the appearance of impropriety.
That's in itself a problem legally.
But then the odor of mendacity.
Now here is a way of saying...
I think that these two are telling me major lies, even if I cannot exactly put my finger on the lies, or even if they have come up with semi-plausible scenarios.
Oh yeah, we took trips together, but guess what?
I reimbursed him, but oh no, I don't have any receipts because I reimbursed him in cash.
That's not really believable.
You would have had to make regular cash withdrawals so you have thousands of dollars of available cash in your house.
Where are those withdrawals?
So the judge is essentially saying here, I think these people are lying.
And then he goes on to say, he talks about concealing the relationship.
Questions remain about whether the DA and Wade testified untruthfully.
He talks about Fannie Willis speaking in that church.
He says, quote, that she cast racial aspersions that were, quote, legally improper.
She entered, quote, dangerous waters.
Quote, she may have ancillary prejudicial effects yet to be realized.
Underscoring, quote, the danger of public comment by a prosecuting attorney.
And on and on it goes like this.
So it's almost as if the judge, having, quote, sinned in his final verdict, is atoning for his sins altogether.
By saying, yeah, I kind of agree.
This is improper.
These are lies.
I don't believe this.
There's an odor of mendacity.
There's improper. There's at least the appearance of impropriety.
All, by the way, which would have been more than sufficient reasons to disqualify both Fannie Willis and Nathan Wade.
But the point being here, that all of this can now be quoted in the appeal.
You can now go to an appellate court and say, look, this judge made these findings and made these findings while basically letting these two, or at least letting one of the two, off the hook.
But they don't, they shouldn't be let off the hook.
Now, Megyn Kelly writes that quite apart from the prospects of appeal, you also have all these ethical problems and legal problems that go beyond Judge McAfee's decision.
The ethical problems have to do with an ethical investigation into Fannie Willis' conduct that is ongoing.
There's a congressional investigation.
There are complaints that have been filed with the bar.
Now, again, I'm not all that confident that any of this is going to amount to Fannie Willis being removed, Fannie Willis being disbarred, Fannie Willis being censured, Fannie Willis even receiving any kind of reprimand.
But I think what Megyn Kelly is getting at here is that, A, the woman has been publicly disgraced.
B, the very fact that you have multiple investigations going on is now going to do to her what she has been trying to do to Trump which is going to tie her up.
It's going to occupy a lot of her time.
She's going to have to give depositions, appearances, respond to lengthy letters, provide bushelfuls of evidence, all kinds of records of her texts, of her emails, and so on.
All of this can be done by groups and For this reason, concludes Megyn Kelly, quote, Team Trump, still, Team Trump is in much better shape today than three months ago in Georgia.
So, The point is, Fannie Willis is going to try to jumpstart the Georgia case, try to move off defense, so to speak, and move into offense where she can now start prosecuting this case.
The judge appears willing to move ahead, but on the other hand, he has also granted this appeal.
So all of this now goes to the appellate court.
It's in their hands.
But I think, again, serving the overall landscape Trump is doing pretty well.
This is not to say this hasn't taken a heavy toll on him.
Probably what I'm worried most about, quite apart from the amount of time Trump puts into all this, the legal fees that have been a drain, is the prospect of the New York Attorney General moving in and trying to confiscate his properties.
Now, it's not easy for her to confiscate Trump's properties that are not in New York.
So it's not going to be easy to go after Mar-a-Lago.
She will have to file suit in Florida to do that.
What is she going to do? Go to Scotland to get Trump's golf course over there.
So it is really a Trump Tower, and it is the Wall Street property.
So Trump has some properties in New York, and I think she would salivate over the idea of being able to go after those.
Obviously, the most destructive force would be to try to grab those properties and fire sale them.
Just sell them off. Why?
Because then even if Trump wins the appeal, you can't get the property back.
It's already been sold. So these people are trying to do maximum damage to Trump.
But this, by the way, is not a criminal case.
It's a civil case. It's a very injurious civil case.
And some people think that Trump should file an appeal based upon the Eighth Amendment.
Basically, it's an appeal against unreasonable bail and unlawful, cruel, and unusual punishment.
And they think Alan Dershowitz and others think that there may be better prospects for success on that in the appeal.
That will enhance Trump's chances of getting this confiscatory verdict at least set aside temporarily pending the appeal.
So I feel really bad for Trump with all these problems.
It is really more than any normal human being should bear.
And more importantly, it's utterly without merit.
All of it. All of it.
Not some of it. All of it.
And so this represents one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in my view that I've seen really in the United States in my lifetime.
And it's far from over.
And only a full, not only repudiation of it, but ultimately punishment of the people doing it, I think will rectify the scales of justice.
So I'm hoping that that happens well into 2025.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome our guest for today, Jeffrey Tucker.
He is president of the Brownstone Institute.
He's an author.
He's a writer. You can follow him on x at Jeffrey Tucker.
Oh, actually, at Jeffrey A. Tucker.
Sorry, at Jeffrey A. Tucker.
And his new book, Life After Lockdown.
Jeffrey, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
I wanted to talk to you.
You've been posting some, and I think this is a topic that my audience is interested in but doesn't know a lot about.
And that is the topic of artificial intelligence.
Now, this AI product that Google introduced, they introduced it a little while ago.
It seems to have generated a firestorm of controversy.
Google says, all right, well, you know, we're gonna hit the hold button and go back to the drawing board, but help people to understand what we're talking about.
What is Google Gemini?
Well, it's an AI Q&A sort of engine.
And once people started playing with it, it started becoming obviously ridiculous, to the point of being embarrassing.
It started with looking up pictures of the Founding Fathers and seeing that none of them were white, and so on.
Or it gave me pictures of the popes, and they were popes from all nations.
It was all kind of peculiar and absurdist, really.
But what it did is it revealed the underlying agenda of Google.
It wasn't just about their AI search engine.
By the way, as long as we're talking about this, you know what I think the most underused AI engine is?
Is Elon's Grok.
I'm not sure if that's available to everybody on Google.
On the X platform or if it's still in beta or not.
But that thing is actually reliable and more or less objective, kind of, sort of.
But Gemini is like some sort of joke, but it reflects the industrial priorities of the entire company.
You know, the company that once said, you know, don't be evil is now doing nothing other than being evil.
And it's pretty scary because last I checked, Google has about 96% Monopoly on all search results because the company bought, you know, the default search engine of iPhone and Samsung.
And so what they're trying to do is curate the public mind towards very distinct regime priorities and a political slant of the usual panoply of woke causes.
And that is affecting not just Gemini and the AI search engine, but all...
your search results. This is a major change from say 10 years ago. I think what you're saying Jeffrey is this and let me put it slightly different way and see if you agree with my formulation that when Google first introduced searches the searches were more neutral. They would pull up for example you put in Dinesh D'Souza the most common websites that deal with Dinesh D'Souza would pop up automatically. Google was programmed that way but after a while Google realized we have a lot of power because we're controlling the
information that people see.
So we can sort of rig that.
We can make it such that the websites we want people to see, let's say, for example, websites that say Dinesh D'Souza conspiracy theorists, those are going to come up first.
So Google began to do that.
But I think it was still invisible to most people because they still go, I'm going to Google it.
And it was not obvious that what was coming up was, in a sense, rigged.
But with Gemini, you're saying, now someone could ask a question to which they know the answer.
And so when you put in the question, you know, show me George Washington, and they show you a black guy, you're like, you're lying to me.
You're not... You're not answering my question.
You're trying to get me to think that George Washington was a black guy.
And so Google realized, I think what they realized was busted.
Our problem is that everybody knows we're now giving them the wrong answers.
Before, we could manipulate the search, but people didn't know.
Yeah. The mask really came off.
By the way, I just want to go back and revisit what you just said about search results from the past.
So, the way Google would determine what results turned up at top is what they considered to be credibility, which is to say that the people who are looking up things want the most credible results.
That was most often determined, and imperfectly, by user results.
So, whatever sites were most commonly used, well, those are the ones that ascended to the top.
And then if you got outside links from other credible sites, then you get this kind of network of credibility.
It was an imperfect system, but it was a way of democratizing information.
And Google's aspiration was to give you the best possible results according to what the people really wanted.
It was a people-driven technology under the ethos of an emancipatory sort of technology that would give us more information and create...
A better world, you know, of more informed public.
And as I say, it was an imperfect system, but we all knew the rules.
So as a webmaster, you would tweak your SEO and try to build really great site maps and then hope you would run really credible material and then other credible resources would link to you and you would send up the search ranks.
And you could check that according to publicly available search site rankings that was available at Alexa.com.
Okay? So, the higher you would rise in the publicly posted search rankings, the more you would go up in the search results, too.
So, those things all fit together.
It was like the system was really working.
So, all of that broke.
entirely sure when it broke, but sometimes certainly over the last six years, and then definitely over the last four. Amazon bought Alexa.com and was a custodian of it for just a few years and then took it dark. So you can no longer see what house heights rank.
So used to, in the old days, a site would, you know, attack Dinesh D'Souza.
You'd look it up and see that it was ranked a million in search results, which is to say nobody looked at it, right?
So you would just kind of disregard it.
Now you can't look that up anymore, and there's no publicly available site ranking.
So you don't know what is an important site that people are using and what is just an irrelevant troll that's coming after you.
You can't tell that anymore.
So that whole thing has gone dark.
That enabled Google to completely change its algorithms.
So now, what ends up at top has nothing to do with what sites people are looking at or who's linking to them or how your sitemaps are or how you're, you know, Keyword searches are going or anything like that.
It's nothing to do with site construction or use.
It's all according to the priorities, the industrial priorities or the political priorities of Google itself.
And that is determined by this blob thing out there called the censorship industrial complex that is massively distorting the internet in every single respect.
I mean, to the point that, I mean, this is a weird thing to say.
But you can actually just observe that the internet works less well today than it did 10 years ago in terms of giving you a broad range of results.
Now it's just out there trying to curate your mind and manipulate the public and plan the culture and get distinct political results.
And as I say, it's very effective, actually, maybe, because it's used by 96% of users.
It's pretty scary. Let's, it's so baffling that a company would move in this direction, I think, particularly in a reasonably free market.
And I say that because imagine if I get the idea, all right, I'm going to create a company that is called Maps, that's going to direct people to where they want to go.
And I'm going to give people a lot of detailed information so they can get from here to there by walking or in their car to So they get to the exact destination that they choose.
And then someone comes along and goes, Dinesh, I have a better idea.
Don't tell people where they want to go.
You tell people where they ought to go.
So even though Jeffrey Tucker wants to get home after work, I'm going to direct him someplace else that I think is preferable.
He needs to go there instead.
And that something is dictated by politics or it's dictated by some other agenda.
Why would a company like Google...
Google pervert its basic function in such a blatant way that it jeopardizes the value of Google.
So, your alarm I share because I once really strongly believed that the internet was the most frustrating.
Free enterprise oriented of all the sectors in the economy and would always stay that way because they operated in markets.
There was a kind of a libertarian ethos of all these companies in the old days and I wrote books about it.
Oh yes, it's just great.
They're going to free up information.
We're all going to know more and then Everything is going to become freer.
I really did not understand the dynamics of big business and its cooperation with big government.
I should have understood it, but I didn't.
And I've been really genuinely alarmed by the creation of these sort of corporatist enterprises where the whole industry has become consolidated and With just a handful of companies, and they've all built palaces in Washington,
D.C., and they've got huge lobbying forces, and they're really tightly working with the regulators and with the political establishment to retain that monopoly and essentially end competition in the tech sector.
So this is something completely new.
The ethos of the entire industry has fundamentally been upended from one that was disruptive and had a libertarian anti-regime sort of emancipationist goal, yay freedom for everybody, right?
That was the old days.
Now that's not it anymore.
Now it's cracked down on misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, and give people what they Give it to them good and hard.
And if you're an enemy of the state, like you are, you are going to be a target of big tech.
And it's really a tragedy.
I don't consider these people to be really agents of free enterprise anymore.
They're behaving ever more each day like state actors.
We know this now for sure.
We have so many FOIA requests and court discovery documents, tens of thousands of pages to prove that the case was heard in the Supreme Court the other day.
The justice seemed a little oblivious to it.
There is a gigantic censorship industrial complex in operation at all levels involving dozens of government agencies, 80 some odd universities, hundreds of different non-profits all funded by taxpayers and private foundations that themselves work in combination with the tech industry to kind of cartelize things and give us these sort of industrial corporatist results.
It's, as far as I'm concerned, one of the great industrial tragedies of all time.
Let's take a pause.
When we come back, let's talk about that Supreme Court case.
Let's talk about the rationale provided for censorship, much of which focuses on something that you've written about.
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I'm back with Jeffrey Tucker, president of the Brownstone Institute, author of Life After Lockdown.
You can follow him on x at Jeffrey A. Tucker.
Jeffrey, we were talking about the promise of the internet, how many of us thought, you did, I did, that the internet would be kind of an alternative to the regimentation of mainstream media.
It would liberate new ideas and allow them to percolate to the top and be seen.
And somehow, it's all turned out very differently.
Now, this was all before the Supreme Court recently, and In a very much anticipated case, and yet when the hearing occurred, it baffled a lot of us who were watching what the justices were saying.
They were engaging in hypotheticals.
One of the most famous, produced by Judge Ketanji Jackson, she goes, Well, what if there's a trend on social media where young people are being encouraged to jump out of windows?
And wouldn't it be wise for the government to go to the digital platforms and say, take this exemplary, take this conduct down so that people won't be encouraged to be doing harm to themselves?
Now, what struck me about that is that this, first of all, you have to go to a fanciful thought experiment that...
Sort of resembles shouting fire in a crowded theater, right?
Because you're talking about something that causes immediate harm, and you're also talking about young people who presumably are more impressionable, and yet there has been widespread censorship, not on this kind of thing, but on climate change, on challenging elections, on the efficacy of vaccines, and so...
In other words, the core political debates that reflect the meaning of the First Amendment are at stake here, and yet the justices appeared not to see that.
Now, how is that possible?
These are very intelligent people, and yet there was a surrealism, I thought, to the hearing about it.
There ought to be some sort of standard in the future whereby people are not allowed to be on the Supreme Court unless they have some vague understanding of the Constitution.
I'm just throwing it out there as a possible sort of standard that we could use in future hearings.
Yeah. But Jeffrey, do you really think that's it?
Do you think that that's the problem?
That they don't have a grasp of the fact that the First Amendment is a limitation on government?
In fact, that the court's main job is to protect the rights of individuals even against the people, meaning even against majorities legislating through laws.
Is it that the justices don't know that?
Or is it rather that they're seduced by things like, you know what?
We have this new technology of the internet.
It's not like the old technologies, and we might need to create exceptions to the First Amendment because we're dealing with this radically new thing called the World Wide Web.
Well, I don't know. Last week, I never would have said that we have Supreme Court justices who don't believe in the First Amendment or understand it.
But this week, I think we can say that.
Jackson clearly doesn't understand the First Amendment as a limitation on government.
She seemed to be working through it in her head.
Wait a minute. If we have this thing you call the First Amendment operating out there, that's, I think, her words, wouldn't that hamstring the government?
I mean, it was like a laugh out loud moment, you know?
One thing I would say about this, Dinesh, is that in history, and I'm speaking about going back half a millennium or so, sensors have always sought to control the distributors of information because they believe that the distribution sources are the way that the public mind is manipulating and controlled.
So, We saw this in the religious wars in Europe, and even in 1798 with the Sedition Act in the United States, they said newspaper editors cannot criticize the president.
They went after newspaper editors in 1835 in the South and said, you can't call for abolitionism.
And then in the 1860s, even Lincoln went after newspaper editors again who were criticizing The Civil War draft, and we saw it with Wilson in World War I and so on, they always went after the newspaper editors.
But here's the thing, the sources of distribution, right?
With the internet, every single citizen became, in effect, an editor, right?
We had YouTube. Now you would have your own television.
And social media empowered millions of people to reach millions of other people.
Well, if you're a censor, that creates a kind of an ambitious problem.
It's no longer just going after the editors of a dozen newspapers or something.
That's viable. Now you have to go after hundreds of millions of people.
And that means consolidating the industry.
Embedding your employees in the industry and getting this industry to have to obey the dictates of third parties that you're paying.
I mean, it's a complicated system.
But what we've seen and what these court documents reveal with the brief from the decision of the Fifth Circuit that pushed past this injunction is the construction of a vast machinery that many of us didn't know existed.
I mean, I didn't know existed.
I don't know about you, Dinesh, but...
When the lockdowns happened, I started seeing my own post-throttle, and I was confused.
Why am I so alone? How come I seem to be one of the few people in the world holding this opinion that it's not a good idea to just throw out the Bill of Rights?
And it turned out that we were all being censored.
And then as the months went on, It wasn't just, you know, disinformation or misinformation.
It was what they call malinformation, which is true information that they didn't want to be heard.
So, when these scientists, you know, from Oxford, Harvard, And Stanford all began to speak about the harms of lockdowns.
You know, an edict came down from the National Institutes for Health, you know, communicating with Fauci, let's do a quick and dirty takedown of this document that came out about a month before the vaccine came out.
And the reason, I mean, I'm speculating here, but I think the reason was they thought it was going to reduce vaccine uptake.
So, it was that incident alerted us to the fact that, my God, you know, this thing is huge and this machinery is vast.
We don't even know the extent of it.
Over the years, through this litigation, we've discovered just how gigantic it is.
As I say, even before trial, we have now 20,000 pages of documentation.
This is not about a White House employee calling up somebody on the phone and saying, you know, Dinesh is kind of on my nerves.
Can you give it a closer look?
That's not it. It's vast.
It involves dozens of government agencies, and you can get A job in the crushed disinformation industry.
It is out there now, and it's operating not just on a national level, but on a global level.
So that's really what's at issue here.
And yes, it's a massive, as the judge said, a massive attack on the First Amendment.
I just hope that the Supreme Court gets wise to it.
One of the frustrations I had in listening to that...
What I was hearing the other day at Supreme Court is that these justices behind the bench seem to be encountering this for the very first time, just knowing about it for the first time.
It's true the whole industry has been built almost in secret, surreptitiously.
It's come to sort of invade our lives and control things.
There wasn't like a switch you just turned.
It just began to be revealed to us gradually.
And now that we're paying attention to it, we've discovered this industry that's out there entirely designed to throttle certain opinions and advance others through complicated algorithms.
Here's the danger.
If AI starts replacing even the people that are involved and it runs on autopilot and they can adjust the terms of use of all these technologies, you know, at that point, you know, you don't have any defendants to argue in court.
It's just these machines are running our lives and advancing some ideas and not others.
And there's a race to make that happen before this injunction would go into effect.
So that's where we are.
It's deeply dangerous.
And Big Tech is cooperating with it.
You're highlighting two points, Jeffrey, and you've highlighted one more than the other, but I think both deserve to be just...
Noted. One, of course, is the elaborate machinery and the how of it.
And I agree. I mean, which of us could have predicted that there would be portals set up by these companies in which agencies would deposit not one, not ten, but thousands of names of people to be banned, posts to be taken down.
And then second of all, the ingenious technique of using non-profit middlemen So, for example, the government doesn't want to go straight to Twitter.
They give it to the Stanford Internet Observatory or the Virality Project.
Those guys become the couriers.
And so the government can say, well, we didn't make Twitter do anything.
So you got all that on the one hand.
The other thing that you touched upon, but I think needs to be emphasized more, is that the hypotheticals are always assuming that the government is right.
And that Jeffrey Tucker and Dinesh D'Souza are wrong.
We are spreading misinformation.
They are trying to correct our misinformation, even though, in fact, many times the government is producing the misinformation in the first place.
I mean, here's Rochelle Walensky.
If you take the vaccine, you can't get COVID. If you take the vaccine, you can't give somebody else COVID. Now, to our knowledge, was Rochelle Walensky, head of the CDC, ever censored herself?
Never. Never. So the government is allowed to put out as much misinformation and disinformation as it wants.
And yet, as you say, with the new term malinformation, if you and I put out correct information, hey, if you take the vaccine, you still can get COVID. Hey, if you take the vaccine, you still can give somebody COVID. And they go, wait, if people kept saying that, it may produce vaccine hesitancy.
So let's take these posts down, even though they are true.
I mean, that's... That is the ultimate scandal.
You're censoring the truth to allow falsehood to go unchecked.
Yeah. And, you know, to point to another irony of Judge Jackson's hypothetical, the kids jumping out of windows, it was the government itself that imposed all the school lockdowns and said, these are going to be fine.
The kids are strong.
They're robust. You know, they can make it through.
Zoom will be fine for their classrooms.
Don't worry about it.
We need to keep the schools closed.
We know now that that massively harmed It was a devastation.
Kids these states are years behind in their education thanks to these school closers.
So that was a government program.
That wasn't TikTok at work.
That was the CDC and the NIH. And the education school, the teachers unions that did that.
So they're the ones that harmed kids.
The government was the leading purveyor of misinformation throughout the entire COVID period, from lockdowns to masks to the travel restrictions.
So all the reasons they gave you why you couldn't celebrate it.
I don't know.
I so badly want some accountability for this.
Rand Paul's trying to do something about this.
Senator Johnson's working on it, but there aren't enough people that are focusing on this.
We need to figure out what happened and why and how we went from being a quasi-normal country that seemed to be more or less fixable to just, you know, on the verge of a hopeless tyrannical basket case ruled over by big tech, big pharma, and big media.
Yes! It cries out for answers.
I'm sorry. Totally.
Guys, check out the book. It's called Life After Lockdown.
It's by Jeffrey Tucker.
He's president of the Brownstone Institute.
Follow up on X at Jeffrey A. Tucker.
Jeffrey, thank you very much for joining me.
Good to see you, Tanesh. Thank you.
I'm continuing my introduction to Abraham Lincoln's temperance address.
And I've been talking about the fact that Lincoln wants to cultivate in the American people a sense of reverence, a sense of patriotism, a sense of civic attachment, but he recognizes that there is a problem in doing this.
Now, let's start with Lincoln's own hero, Jefferson, who is talking about slavery and And here's Jefferson.
He says, Now,
this right here is Lincoln talk.
And by that I mean this is the way that Lincoln would have put it himself.
This is in fact, if you read this and then go straight to the Gettysburg Address and read that, you'll find the same type of resonances in, not to mention in Lincoln's second inaugural.
Now, this is the Jefferson that Lincoln loved.
But it needs to be pointed out that there are problems with Jefferson himself making this case.
Jefferson appears to be making a case both, A, you may say, for God, because Jefferson is saying, hey, listen, where do you think our liberties come from?
Where do you think we get all men are created equal?
Are all men created equal in the observable respects?
No. If all men are created equal, it's got to be that they are moral equals.
No life is worth more than somebody else's, but why not?
Why isn't somebody's life, let's just say somebody who is a scientist and can develop a new cure for a disease that will benefit the human, why isn't that guy's life far more valuable than somebody else's?
Well, the answer is that we are equal in God's eyes.
So Jefferson is giving a theological foundation For not any political principle, but the core political principle that guides the Declaration of Independence, as in some ways the inspiring principle for the entire U.S. Constitution.
Now, even though Jefferson is making the case for God, and then Jefferson is also here making the case against slavery.
I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.
Why is he trembling?
He's trembling because he's like, We are far away from God's laws.
We are far away from implementing even the simple truth that all men are created equal.
Look at the widespread practice of slavery among us.
And slavery, by the way, was not as widespread in Jefferson's time as it was, for example, in the beginning of the 19th century.
So even though Jefferson is speaking in this resonant and powerful way, number one, he, Jefferson, is not exactly a devout Christian.
Now, he's a Christian. He follows Christian teachings.
He believes in the Ten Commandments.
But he rejects pretty much all of what we would call Christian theology.
The idea of Jesus as the Son of God.
The idea that Jesus is God.
The idea that Jesus did all the miracles.
The substitutionary atonement for our sins.
To Jefferson, this was all theological, like mumbo-jumbo.
And Jefferson's view is like, let's get rid of this.
This is not the area where we want to learn from the Bible.
We can learn the moral teachings of Jesus, but that's pretty much it in the so-called Jeffersonian Bible emphasizes or highlights those.
So Jefferson had a reputation as a, quote, free thinker and an atheist.
He wasn't an atheist. He wasn't really, strictly speaking, a free thinker either.
But he was on that side of, if you put the American founders on a spectrum, the vast majority of them devout, but there were a few who were not so devout, some of them deists, and some like Jefferson, you may say, say, to the left of even deism.
So that's one problem.
The second problem is that Jefferson is a slave owner.
And he has a plantation, a pretty big one.
He's got slaves up to 200 at a time.
And so he becomes a very difficult guy to make the case that our rights come from God or to make the case that slavery is bad.
So here's Lincoln, who has an interesting challenge.
So here's Lincoln who has an interesting challenge.
Lincoln is looking to Jefferson's example, but Lincoln is a time, and so he becomes a very difficult guy to make the case that our rights come from God or to make the case that slavery is bad.
Lincoln is looking to Jefferson's example, but Lincoln is also recognizing that Jefferson to some degree is a difficult prophet to be making this kind of a case.
Now let's turn from all this to Lincoln's own world, a world in which there are now many powerful movements that are rising up to produce what these people thought of as social reform.
These are social reform movements, although they didn't really see themselves that way.
They didn't say we're reforming society.
They went further.
These reform movements basically talked about creating a new Jerusalem.
They talked about creating a perfect world.
They talked about, in a sense, removing the sins that are plaguing society.
And these movements were, some of them were nativist movements, movements to preserve the sort of purity of the American stock.
Some of them were temperance movements, which are movements against usage of all kinds of stuff that you smoke, alcohol.
And so the idea is to purify the heart, purify the body, and create a sort of utopia on Earth.
The idea of making a perfect world goes along with the idea of millennialism.
Millennialism, the word comes from the meaning of the word thousand, 1,000 years, and also suggestions in the Bible of having a millennium that lasts for 1,000 years.
And so these reform movements were very explicitly, let's make that happen.
Let's get America there.
Now, the temperance movement ran alongside the anti-slavery They were side by side. And not only side by side, they appealed to a lot of the same people.
So the same people who were nativist and somewhat anti-immigrant were the same people who were for temperance and they were against alcohol.
By the way, here's the connection. They would say things like, we don't like the immigrants because a lot of the immigrants are Irish.
And we don't like the Irish because a lot of them are Catholic and they like to drink.
So this is the connection between nativism, or this anti-immigrant sentiment, and on the other hand, the idea of temperance, which is to say we have enough of alcohol in our society, fewer Irishmen means less alcohol.
So the temperance movement was a big and powerful movement, and it draped itself in the sort of costume of the American founding.
In fact, Lincoln's temperance address is given to a group of people who call themselves You guessed it.
The Washingtonians.
The Washington Society.
And their idea is kind of a funny thing because Washington himself made his fortune making whiskey.
But nevertheless, it's the Washingtonians.
It's the Washington Society.
And these guys are acting like they are in a straight line from the American founding.
It's important to realize that the temperance movement was, at the time that Lincoln gave the temperance address, it was bigger than the anti-slavery movement.
And it was a very powerful movement in the North.
Now, Lincoln is in a very odd position because while Lincoln is in fact anti-slavery, he is not an abolitionist.
And similarly, while Lincoln supports temperance, in other words, he believes that you should be reasonable in the way that you approach drink, at the same time, he doesn't share the fanaticism of the temperance movement, which is, Round up all the drinkers and humiliate them.
Basically try to take all the alcohol and out.
Remember, the temperance movement, its influence is so powerful going back to the 1850s, 60s, and 70s that it creates ultimately the movement for...
For outlawing alcohol, which occurred in the United States in the early 19th century.
That's what created all the bootleggers.
That's what created the resistance.
Ultimately, of course, the alcohol was allowed and prohibitionism came to an end.
But prohibitionism itself is a legacy of the temperance movement.
Now... Lincoln, in order to have political success, needed the votes of the anti-slavery people, including the abolitionists.
He needed the votes of the nativists, including the anti-immigrant people.
And he needed the votes of the temperance movement.
He needed the votes of the people that he was speaking to in the so-called Washington society.
And yet, Lincoln does not We're good to go.
The reason he doesn't agree with their methods is that their methods are intemperate.
So another way to put it is that temperance is all about the Aristotelian idea of moderation, of being in the middle, of not going to extremes.
That's what the word temperance means.
Don't be so intemperate, meaning don't go to excess.
Remain moderate, remain in the middle.
Lincoln is a moderate in that sense.
But at the same time, the temperance people are moderate perhaps in their goals, which is let's have a society based on moderation, but they are immoderate in the means, which is their means are attacks, their means are humiliation, their means are to take all the alcohol and pour it into the river, their means are let's punish the people who are engaging in alcohol.
Let's separate them from their families if necessary.
Let's impose obligations on them that maybe go beyond the power of normal, local, or governmental powers.
So Lincoln is aware that these people, if they are allowed to succeed, would do things that are perhaps not consistent with American freedom.
And so Lincoln's goal here is to give an address that That promotes true moderation.
Moderation in ends, but also moderation in the means that are used to pursue those ends.
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