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March 26, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
47:53
OVERRULING JUDGE MORON Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep798
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Coming up, this episode is called Overruling Judge Moron, a reference, of course, to Judge Engeron, and I'll review the appellate court's lowering of Trump's bond pending his appeal.
Conservative activist Ryan Fournier joins me.
He's chairman of Students for Trump.
We're going to talk about the transformation of the GOP into a MAGA party.
We're also going to talk about Rona McDaniel's future, and we're going to talk about the 2024 election.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble, listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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I was out yesterday and Kyle Serafin sat in for me.
The reason is that Debbie is taking care of her critically ill mom We call her Mitzi.
And we were both in the Rio Grande Valley for that purpose.
We did come back on Sunday, but Debbie is dealing with a lot of stuff.
Her mom is 88, but she is, it seems, in her last day.
She's actually now in hospice, so there's a lot of...
Things to be done, so we've been attending to all that.
So hence, my absence yesterday.
And in fact, Debbie is still doing her family duties, but I am picking it up with the podcast.
Now, let me start by talking about this very important appellate overruling of Judge Ngaran's decisions.
And the key point here is that he overruled, the appellate court overruled Judge Angeron, not just on one thing, but on a whole bunch of things.
And that hasn't really been noticed.
So I want to go through the decision, just because I think it is of wider significance.
Now, one part of it we all sort of know, and that is that Trump had been ordered to produce a bond of $464 million, an absolutely insane, preposterous, unprecedented, is even putting it mildly.
And Trump said, I can't really do it because no insurance company has ever issued a bond of this magnitude.
And so they're demanding not just that I put up property, which I have, but I put up cash.
Half a billion dollars of cash, which no one, perhaps no billionaire, maybe not even Elon Musk, has, quote, lying around.
So the appellate court moderates that amount.
It's still ridiculous. It's $150 million, or is it $175 million?
Sorry, $175 million.
Still an insane amount.
The actual amount should be something more like $25 million, if that.
The point of the bond is just to make sure that you've got assets and that if you have a verdict against you, you have the capital to be able to settle your debts, not to cripple the person financially so that the appeal becomes, in a sense, impossible for them to do because they can't float a bond of appropriate size.
So $175 million is, of course, still a big number, but Yesterday, Trump got an incredible piece of good news.
Now, not news. It's a surprise to him.
But it's interesting that this came through.
And that is that Truth Social is now public.
It's a public company.
And because Donald Trump is sort of one of the key founders of it, he's obviously the main anchor of Truth Social.
Well, he is Truth Social to a degree because Truth Social was started after Trump.
It was banned off these other platforms.
And Trump has a stake in Truth Social now that is worth several, perhaps two, perhaps three.
He can't cash out now because there's a waiting period.
But on paper... There's an addition of $2-3 billion into Trump's net worth.
In fact, Bloomberg puts Trump's net worth somewhere in the $5-6 billion range.
He is one of the world's 500 richest people.
So there were a lot of people who left, well I don't even think Trump's a billionaire.
He keeps saying he is but he's really not.
If he can't come up with $464 million, he's not a billionaire.
Well these people have to now digest the fact that Trump is a multi-billionaire and quite frankly if you have $6 billion of net worth, you probably can't find $175 million quote lying around.
I mean look in the couch, look in some old drawers, pull out all the cash, add it up, here you go, $175 million.
I just mean that proportionate to $6 billion, think of it, $6 billion is $6,000 million.
So to just make life simple and think about it, let's say you had $6,000 and somebody told you, you need to come up with $175.
Would that be hard? No, because you got $6,000.
So that is the exact proportionate math that I'm doing to make it understandable for us.
And this is the way for us to think about these cases in sort of understandable terms.
The whole case here, the whole case with Judge Engeron is something like this.
Let's say you interview for a job and somebody says, what are you worth?
What is your salary expectation?
And you say $200,000, $150,000.
And the employer goes, are you sure you're worth that?
You go, yeah, I think I am.
I think I am. I am putting that valuation on myself.
And the employer goes, well, okay.
And then over time, your salary, you work for the company.
They're very happy with you. You move up in the company.
Your salary goes up. You go elsewhere.
You get other jobs.
Obviously, based off of this baseline, you end up making, let's say, $750,000.
And then you are brought to court.
And somebody says, you exaggerated your valuation of your original salary.
You were never worth $150,000 to start off.
And therefore, and this is the key point, since you were not worth the $150,000, even though the employer agreed to pay it, All your subsequent raises, because they are raises off the $150,000, are invalid.
All that money is as unjustly accrued to you.
So we're going to add it up over your whole career, and now you owe the state of New York, let's say, $8 million.
And you go, what? $8 million.
I worked a bunch of jobs.
All the employers offered me that salary voluntarily.
I performed services commensurate with it.
The employers are happy.
No one is hurt. Nevertheless, no, no, no, no, no.
Because we think, we're second-guessing you, that you exaggerated your original...
This is exactly what's happening with Trump.
This is a good way to understand what's happening with Trump.
So you see the absolute preposterousness of the case.
But, of course, the judge knows that.
The attorney general knows that.
They know that what they're doing here is deeply twisted and corrupt.
To take, again, an example, this is an example not pertaining—not a hypothetical, but an actual example— Trump buys a post office, an old post office, converts it to a big hotel in D.C. This was the Trump Washington D.C. hotel.
I've stayed there. Gorgeous hotel.
Trump's now sold it.
But he made $126 million profit.
The judge goes, hey, listen, because you exaggerated your valuation to get the loans to buy the hotel, to buy the post office in the first place, all this profit is illegitimate.
I'm taking it all.
I'm stealing it basically from Trump.
And this is how it is.
And so the judge will go on to say, you then took that profit and you invested it and you made money on that.
But since the original profit was illicit, all the money that you made on the money is also illicit.
So we're going to make you pay all that back.
This is the accounting mechanism of Judge Ngaran.
This is a lunatic, a moron, a guy out of control.
And guess what? The appellate court has swatted him down on multiple counts.
Let's look at what those counts are.
This is what I started with.
I was saying that this is not just a matter of the appellate court reducing the bond to $175 million.
This is what they say. In addition, they say that defendants Weisselberg and McConey, these are the guys who worked for the Trump Organization, they are now allowed, Judge Angaran said they were not, They're allowed to work for any New York corporation or business entity.
Judge Angaran had barred Trump and these guys from being an office of any New York corporation.
The appellate court says, no, they can be.
Judge Angaran had barred Trump and these corporate defendants from applying for loans from any New York entity.
This has now been overruled by the appellate court.
Trump may pay with cash.
He may not need loans, but he's perfectly able to apply for loans to New York banks and New York entities.
Judge Angaran had also barred Eric Trump and Donald Trump from being an officer or director of any New York corporation, including the Trump Organization.
That's overruled now by the appellate court.
They can be an officer or director of New York corporations, including, of course, their own.
So this is an across-the-board...
I won't say...
It's not really an overruling because it's not a permanent...
But what it is, is it is a suspension of all these elements of Judge N. Garand's decision pending an appeal.
So Trump now goes to the appellate court.
He gets a second round to be able to make his case.
And I certainly hope that given the preposterousness of this case, and its wide implications, it goes beyond Trump.
I hope for these reasons that the appeal, which by the way, is not going to be this year.
It may not even be next year.
The appeal may come to fruition the following year, 2026.
There is a big lag time for these appeals, but in the meantime, happily, Trump has a reprieve, and I'm sure the truth social news didn't hurt either.
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When you use discount code AMERICA, you get 35% off, plus $10 off additional sets, plus free shipping and a money back guarantee. Guys, I'm really delighted to welcome to the podcast Ryan Fournier.
He is the chairman of Students for Trump.
It's a national student mobilization effort, obviously seeking the re-election of President Trump.
He's also the executive director of Radical Alert.
You can follow him on x at Ryan A. Fournier, F-O-U-R-N-I-E-R. And Ryan, welcome.
Thanks for joining me. Really appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
Absolutely. Let's start by talking a little bit about this business with Rona McDaniel and NBC. It's downright, I mean, I don't know if amusing is the right word to see all the hysterics that are going on at NBC and MSNBC. Morning Joe and, you know, the whole crew, Maddow, all of them.
Essentially acting like we are honest, respectable journalists here.
We have a global reputation for telling the truth.
Our network has this cherished credibility.
We're not going to squander it on bringing in somebody who tells lies and denies elections.
Now, for those of us who have been following events over the past few years, I mean, how are we even supposed to react to this?
How do you react to it?
It's no surprise.
We were actually joking about this.
A couple of friends and I, they're political operatives and all that, and they work sort of near the Trump campaign.
And we were saying, where does she go after she leaves the GOP? And we were saying, oh, she's going to go to CNN or MSNBC. She's going to be on one of those networks.
And then lo and behold, it comes true.
It happens every single time.
These are the people that support her.
She's clearly a rhino.
She's got the Romney name.
Nothing's going to change about that.
What she did to the RNC is a travesty.
The amount of money spent on private jets, on hair and makeup, on alcohol is atrocious, especially when we are losing elections here and here and here.
Back to back, right?
We needed somebody to come in there and change the system.
I think Michael Watley and Laura Trump are going to do a really good job.
We need somebody from the family in there.
And that's what has to happen.
I worked there in 2017, and I will tell you this.
There were more people there that wanted to sideline Trump at the RNC building in Washington, D.C. than anybody else I've ever met.
They didn't like the guy, but they knew that he was president, so they had to be there and they had to support him.
I am glad she's out.
I will say that. Long time coming.
And you know what? I wish her well, but I don't think she's going to need it.
She's now, you know, she's basically become a Democrat-lite speaker, which that's what she's going to be when she's on MSNBC. She's not going to be supporting Trump.
We already know that. So she's going to be basically a Mitt Romney 2.0 and a sideline against Trump 24-7.
Ryan, what do you make of the fact she was up for re-election not so long ago and was pretty decisively affirmed.
Harmeet Dillon ran against her, but it was not that close.
And that tells me that it's a bigger problem than Rona McDaniel, because if it was just somehow Rona McDaniel, she wormed her way in there.
Then, you know, it's kind of like finding somebody who's running a corporation.
They happen to be corrupt or they happen to have their own agenda.
That can happen by mistake.
But when you have the team that is putting you in place and has a chance to look at your record and puts you in place for one more time around the block, do you think that there's a larger sort of cultural problem inside the RNC? I mean, what is the task facing Michael Watley and Laura Trump as they now take over the reins at the RNC? What do they have to do?
I mean, so this is definitely a cultural issue, Dinesh.
You're 100% spot on there.
This is something that goes down to the core levels of the voting bloc in there.
A lot of people don't know that you have to be a precinct committee man or a national committee person to even vote at the RNC, which is why we have been so tactile.
And trying to get people to run for these roles come time for the 2024 convention so we can get in there and have MAGA Republicans, America First Patriots, to vote on these things.
A lot of the people that hold these roles have held them for years, since the Bush years, some of them.
Those are the ones that get to vote.
They're the ones who get to pick the chairperson or the chairwoman.
That is not up to the rank-and-file members of the Republican Party.
So there is a process here.
And if we don't change the people that are in these spots, we will not be able to control the RNC. So that's a big piece of this puzzle as well.
I'm very grateful that we were able to get the votes to get Michael Whatley, to get Laura Trump as co-chair, because I know that there was some infighting when all this was brought up.
You know, when Trump endorsed Michael Whatley, when Trump endorsed Laura Trump, there was a lot of infighting from what I heard.
But eventually they came to the table because they have no choice.
At this point. But there is a system there.
Let's call it the good old boys club, if you will.
And that has to change.
If we want to change the party, we have to change the people that are sitting there historically.
And vote the same way, walk into the room, leave it with the same IQ that they walked in with.
These are the people we've got to get rid of.
Do you think, when we talk about the people who are sort of messing up things in the Republican fold, this is beyond the RNC, we sometimes use terms like RINO, establishment, interchangeably.
And yet, those aren't necessarily the same thing, because let's say, for example, one could be an old-time Reaganite, but not recognize that the situation today is completely different.
So you're conservative in your views.
You're just not ready for a fight because you somehow think it's still 1987.
Another possibility is you're a Bush kind of establishment type of Republican.
That matters to you more than any kind of ideology.
Remember how George H.W. Bush would always deny that he was ideologically, ideology was like a bad word.
Now, Rhino, to me, indicates somebody who genuinely doesn't have conservative and Republican principles at all, that they are just like an operator, that they are posing as a Republican, but they're not Republicans.
So which of these, where is the problem, really?
What does this kind of...
MAGA takeover of the Republican Party entail.
Who do we need to convince and who do we need to push out and who do we need to sort of make sure is not in a position of leadership?
I'll say this.
There's a lot of information there.
Dinesh, you bring it out in such a way, like a scholarly way.
You have a lot of Reagan Republicans who will not support Trump.
These are people who are more so socially conservative.
They may have more liberal views on some of the issues, but they won't support Trump no matter what, some of them.
Then you have, with the recent primaries and the election going on, you have the DeSantis supporters.
I don't really put them in, you know, I put them in a group on their own because they wanted DeSantis.
Same thing with the Nikki Haley supporters.
There's some Chris Christie supporters for whatever reason.
Those guys are kind of on their own block.
And it's up to us to really go out there and get those votes.
You know, believe it or not, they're still important.
The DeSantis vote is important.
The Nikki Haley vote is important.
And we've got to still go out there and try to get that vote.
Try to do that. We owe it to them.
Or at least we owe it to our voters to try and get out there and do that.
Now, when it comes to looking at the party as a whole, there are so many people out there who, you know, suburban moms, they're starting to come back to the table.
The African-American vote is starting to come back to the table.
Latino vote, all of it.
We're seeing numbers that we didn't see in 2020 and we didn't see in 2016, especially with minority voters.
And I think that that's because the party has changed the strategy to a 24-7, 365 going out and Engaging with these folks, figuring out what the issues are.
What can we do to help?
Hearing them out, right?
I think Trump did a great job in 2020 with the First Step Act.
I do. I think that that sort of led the way for a lot more people being open to him getting back in office.
I also think his mugshot helped a lot with getting the urban vote.
A lot of people see that as a cred card.
You know what I mean? You've got your mug shot.
Now it goes on t-shirts.
You know, they put the funny pimp glasses on the face.
You know, they put the chains around the neck and the graphics.
You know, they make him out to be sort of this cool guy.
So it really does help that all this happened.
But to TLDR sum it up, there are votes that we have to go out there and get.
There are people that we need to talk to we haven't spoken to yet, sort of voter blocks.
But I do agree with you that there are people in this party who represent themselves as Republicans, but they will never vote for Donald Trump.
No matter what you do, they are so ideologically just backlogged that they could never see him as a candidate again or a president again.
And we can work to get that vote if we want, but I think we're better off going after the Sanis voters and Nikki Haley voters, going after some of those people and figuring out how do we bring you back to the table is really what it comes down to.
Let's explore this further when we come back with Ryan Fournier.
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I'm back with Ryan Fournier, Chairman of Students for Trump, also the Executive Director of Radical Alert.
You can follow him on X at Ryan A. Fournier, F-O-U-R-N-I-E-R. Ryan, you were talking a moment ago about sort of the never-Trumpers, right?
The people who say, I will not vote for Donald Trump.
Now, do you think that most of those people are reluctant to vote for Trump based on any kind of ideological or political position?
Or do you think that they sort of just accept the idea, he's a man of low moral character and therefore I am too high and mighty to vote for such a guy?
What is the root of the never-Trump emotion?
I think what it comes down to is the sound bites.
I really do. You've got to think of the everyday American who doesn't necessarily spend their time on X. Maybe when they're going to bed, laying up before they hit their head to the pillow.
Most of these people, they go work to nine to five.
They come home. We already saw surveys where 90% of the media is against Trump.
So these folks are coming home and they're seeing every single day, whether they're being sort of more towards Trump or against Trump, the media is fully against him.
And they're watching this.
They're seeing the headlines.
They're listening to the proverbial curb stomp that this guy gets every single day.
His supporters get every single day.
They never say anything positive.
So there are people out there who, yes, are Republican, who watch this stuff.
Or maybe they get some sound bites off Twitter.
Maybe they get some sound bites from CNN. But they're hearing this stuff.
And it is so negative all the time that I'm not surprised it wouldn't convince somebody who isn't so into politics like you and I both are to where they form an opinion on that.
And these are everyday people, average Americans.
And then there's also people on the, you know, vice versa, you play devil's advocate with that, who come home nine to five, watch the news and see that this guy's getting absolutely destroyed by the media all the time.
They see the four indictments, they see the 91 counts, and they're also thinking to themselves like, this is not fair.
You know, this is an attack on American democracy.
And so they're voting for Trump.
So I think it's all about perception, how people read it, how they see it.
That's changed the hearts and minds of certain individuals, whether they're for or against Trump.
The media has played a very big part in that with all of the negative attention the guy gets.
I mean to me a recent illustration of the way in which you get this distorting lens of the media was Trump's use of the word bloodbath. Remember Trump's talking about the auto industry quite clearly in context he's saying hey listen it's going to be a bloodbath in that industry if we don't get it right and then of course by pulling that quotation out of context it makes it the press goes look he's he's he's threatening a bloodbath if he doesn't get re-elected He's calling for civil war.
So I can see how this kind of corrosive misrepresentation presented again and again and again.
Now, it was clearly the hope of the left and the media that the Trump cases would play out exactly the same.
That the ordinary guy is not going to pay close attention, is not going to say, wait a minute, you know...
Where is the real offense in the New York case, for example?
Or Trump took documents, but don't other presidents have documents?
Didn't Mike Pence have documents?
Didn't Joe Biden have documents?
So when you look at these cases, they fall apart upon examination.
But without examination, you can go, I think...
The left was counting on people to go, oh my gosh, this guy must be a career criminal.
How else is he facing 91 charges?
It can't be that all these different DAs, all these different states, all these different jurisdictions, are they all against him?
Or is he just a guy who has been used to playing fast and loose with the rules from the beginning?
Right. I mean, yeah, you make a really good point because, I mean, look at New York, Letitia James, right?
You have a half a billion dollar bond, which has never happened in the history of this country before.
To me, this is an attack on America.
You know, if you want to create the case precedent as a DA who, you know, she might not be there in four years, right?
Trump might be out of office if he gets elected in, you know, five years.
So these are things that You're creating a precedent that will change the fabric of the nation, almost like Venezuela in a way, right?
You look at America, we don't seize people's assets if they can't post a bond like that, especially an unrealistic bond.
And then you say you have 30 days to pay it.
If you don't pay it, we're going to seize your assets.
That has never happened in the history of this country at these levels.
And to happen to a former president?
When Kevin O'Leary, he came out the other day, he said, this is an attack on the American brand.
It's the attack on the city.
This is going to keep foreign investors, people who come in and invest in commodities, real estate, startups, they're not going to do it anymore.
Because now you're going after a guy, if you're not protected as a former president, nobody's protected.
So they've opened up a gate, hell's gate, if you will, to this happening to anybody else.
Now, look at the precedent with bonds.
Bernie Madoff. Billions of dollars lost to the clients.
He had a $10 million bond.
Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX. Billions of dollars lost to the clients.
$250 million bond.
Then you have Donald J. Trump.
No monies were lost to anybody.
It's a victim of crime.
It's civil. It's not criminal like the other two that I just mentioned.
Half a billion dollar bond.
30 days to pay it.
Deutsche Bank got all their money back In time, with interest.
And by the standard of that time and by the standard of the day, the bank did everything right.
Trump's team did everything right.
Nothing was bad there.
The bank did the evaluations.
So you had no victims, no monies were lost.
So I can't justify this.
You can't look at this, you know what I mean, and say, this is justifiable.
Even if you're a Democrat, you've got to look at this and think to yourself like, okay, I don't like Trump, but this is stupid.
Because now you're opening up hell's door to this happening to any other regular American.
Nobody's going to invest money in New York anymore.
And I think a lot of people are thinking of not investing money in this country anymore.
Because if you have a corrupt AG with a D next to her name that can go out and do this...
It can happen to anybody. And it scares me.
It scares me. We're going to have kids in the future.
I'm scared to even raise kids in this nation if this is the lawfare that they want to do against people who support a guy who wanted to change the system.
And they're doing this to him.
It'll happen to you. It could happen to me.
It could happen to any of us.
I mean, I think what's scary, and maybe scarier is the right way to put it, is that I don't think that they care.
In other words, I think if you had Letitia James and you were to say, listen, you're undermining the economic credibility of New York, I think she would say, who cares?
My goal is to get Trump.
And again, she's not alone.
If she was alone, and by and large, all the prominent lawyers, for example, who are on social media were like, this is inappropriate.
Listen, we all want to get Trump, just like you do, but this is not the way to do it.
But no, I see most of them, not all, there are some exceptions, but most of them cheer her on.
And that tells me that there is now a broader movement afoot on the left that doesn't care about America's brand, doesn't care about New York's reputation, is perfectly willing to...
And you see this in other areas as well.
I mean, when I hear Vladimir Putin say, hey, listen, you're accusing me of putting my main opponent in jail.
Aren't you trying to put your main political opponent in jail?
I mean, you would think that normally Democrats would be like, let's not hand our enemies such an easy comeback.
I mean, we can deplore it.
What is going to be necessary to bring an end to it?
Is it merely winning the 2024 election or do you think there's more to be done?
I've thought about this for a while.
Even if he gets in, there's going to have to be reforms to all these three-letter agencies, the Department of Justice.
He's going to have to go in and fire the head of the SDNY. He's going to have to go in and just retribution is what I'll leave it at with that.
Retribution, because we have to fix the system here.
There's a line that you can and cannot cross.
I get that, but these people have overstepped the line and they need to find out.
And I fully feel that way.
I really do.
After seeing what happened in New York, after seeing what happened with the Fannie Willis trial down in Georgia with Nathan Wade, you have a judge who was friends with Fannie Willis, donated to her, worked with her before.
Now we got an appeal on that, thankfully, because if that didn't happen, that would have been a problem.
There are so many things kind of moving right now, Dinesh, that make me so concerned for the future of the country.
It's going to be more than just him, though.
This has to be reform at the state level.
They're using lawfare against him actively.
I mean, we can't just hash this off as it's nothing.
Because conservatives do that all the time.
And that's the one thing I've always argued with this party, is we always try to take the moral high ground, but yet we end up getting the ones being screwed at the end of the day every single time.
And I'm done playing that game.
I want people to go in.
I want them to fire these people, go in there, do the Trump you fired right to their face, get rid of them.
We have to change the entire government if we want it to work for the people again.
Because what's going on in SDNY, what's going on in Georgia, Atlanta, the Florida case, it looks like it's turning out in our favor with Judge Eileen Cannon, because she made a really good point to that.
She said, If the jury cannot see the classified documents, we're throwing it out.
And she made a good point. If they can't see these documents, all this information, then it's gone.
And that's what needs to happen.
We need to do the same to them that they are doing to us, but we can't cross a certain line.
Because if we do, then we're just as bad as them.
But we have to do something, not nothing.
And it's going to take more than Trump.
It's going to take a lot of patriots in the government, in these systems, to change the entire thing.
Yeah, I mean, I agree with that completely.
And I think what you're saying is that retribution is a necessary form of deterrence.
Because if we don't have retribution, if none of these people are held to account, I mean, think of the 51 intelligence officials who lied about the Hunter Biden laptop.
I mean, they knew they were lying, but they were happy to enroll in the lie to drag Joe Biden across the finish line.
No accountability, no retribution.
So Trump has talked occasionally about retribution, but it seems to be a necessary part of fixing this problem.
Hey guys, I've been talking to Ryan Fournier.
He is the chairman of Students for Trump.
Follow him on X at Ryan A. Fournier.
Ryan, always a pleasure.
Thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you for having me, sir. Always good to be on.
I'm continuing my discussion of Abraham Lincoln's famous temperance address.
This address was given in 1842 on George Washington's birthday before a, well, a reform drunkard society called the Washingtonian Society.
This was a society made up of people.
Who, in a sense, had been converts to temperance.
They were, many of them, drunks.
They had caused a lot of destruction in their homes and their families, perhaps in society.
But now they were reformed, and they were filled with the zeal of reform.
I mean, think about an organization like Alcoholics Anonymous, how there's a virtual catechism, a virtual...
A sense of belonging, but also a sense of strict rituals, and then this sort of sense of release, like I've been saved, almost in a theological sense, from the curse, from the sin of alcohol.
So these are the guys that Lincoln is talking to, and of course he's also indirectly speaking to the nation.
Now, the trick about the temperance address is that you have to realize when you read it that all is not as meets the eye.
And what I mean by that is that Lincoln will sometimes engage an elaborate rhetorical flourish.
So elaborate, it seems almost juvenile.
And it's important to realize that when Lincoln does that, he is signaling to the thoughtful listener or reader that he is doing a parody.
He is playing around.
He is fooling around a little bit.
He is being a little sarcastic.
On the other hand, at other times in the address, Lincoln speaks in the plainest, simplest, most straightforward language, and that's when you're hearing the real Lincoln.
So distinguishing the two is part of the art of reading the temperance address.
Now let me say a word about temperance.
Because it's not a word that we hear a lot about today.
In fact, we live in an intemperate society.
Behaviorally intemperate, rhetorically intemperate, politically intemperate.
Think of all the kind of normal courtesies and guardrails of our society that are being pulled off and yanked down.
I was talking a moment ago to Ryan Fournier about how the left will do whatever it can to get rid of Trump.
It doesn't matter if you get rid of precedent, doesn't matter if you hand propaganda weapons to your enemies.
If we can get the result, we're perfectly willing to go ahead.
Intemperate behavior.
Now, in classical times, by classical here we mean, of course, ancient Greece and Rome, there were four cardinal virtues.
What were the four?
Courage, sometimes called fortitude.
Wisdom, sometimes called prudence.
And prudence, by the way, is related to temperance because prudence requires a certain sort of judgment or moderation.
There is also justice.
And finally, there is temperance.
But Temperance is kind of the odd man in that list because it's the least obvious of the virtues.
Courage is a virtue because you're facing a trial, you're brave.
It's very obvious why that's a good thing, at least in most circumstances.
Wisdom, who can be against it?
Everybody knows wisdom is a good thing.
Justice is a good thing.
Why is temperance a good thing?
And what does temperance actually mean?
Now, Aristotle, who was a great advocate of temperance, Aristotle tended to use the word moderation.
But again, what is moderation?
What is moderation?
To think of the puzzle or the difficulty that we have here in thinking about a virtue like temperance or moderation, consider two proverbs that are often...
That we learn as kids and we repeat as the occasion demands.
But when you really think about it, the two proverbs contradict each other.
So here's the first one.
He who hesitates is lost.
What's the meaning of the proverb?
Take action. Go for it.
If you wait, it may not happen.
He who hesitates is lost.
Don't hesitate. That's the meaning of that proverb.
Here's another one. Look before you leap.
What's the meaning of that proverb?
Don't go for it.
Don't just recklessly rush into something.
Think, wait, consider, use caution.
So, which of the two proverbs is right?
Well, Aristotle would say, both of them.
Both of them are right.
And therefore, it means that it's not obvious what you should do in a given situation.
What is the moderate or temperate thing to do?
At one point, Aristotle is considering anger.
And anger, of course, is an emotion.
But Aristotle says that even with anger, we need to be moderate.
Now, he doesn't mean by that that we don't need to be angry at all, nor does he mean by that that we need to always check our anger and keep it to a certain, let's say, temperature.
It's almost like there's a scale of 1 to 10.
Hey, guys, always keep your anger around 5.
No, that is actually not what Aristotle is saying at all.
So what is he saying? What does he mean?
What does moderation mean with regard to, let's say, anger?
Here's Aristotle.
It is easy, he says, to be angry with the right person, at the right time, in the right way, and for the right reason.
That's not easy. So Aristotle here is implying that anger needs to be deployed very selectively.
It's not just a matter of, this makes me angry.
You have to think about, who am I angry with?
And am I expressing this anger appropriately?
And what is my reason for being angry?
And also, is this the right occasion to be angry?
In other words, there are inappropriate occasions.
Yes, you have a legitimate gripe, but no, this is a dinner party.
No, this is a funeral. You don't go up to the relative of the deceased and start arguing with them over inheritance.
You might have a legitimate point, but But there is a time and place for it to be made.
So this is really what Aristotle means by moderation or by temperance.
He means that there is an appropriate caliber for one's mood, for one's emotion, and for the way in which one deals with issues.
So keeping all of that in mind, Let's come back to Abraham Lincoln.
Now, as I mentioned, the...
There were these powerful reform movements going on in America in the middle of the 19th century.
There's the anti-slavery movement.
There is the kind of nativist, keep America American.
We don't really want the immigrants to come here, at least not in the kind of numbers that are coming over.
And also, we don't like these types of immigrants.
They're Catholic. They're alcoholics.
So these movements dovetail with each other.
The nativist movement, Temperance movement, the anti-slavery movement.
Lincoln sort of needs all of them.
They're all a key part of the Republican electoral majority that Lincoln is going to need to make his way to the presidency.
And yet... Lincoln sort of was a little bit silent about the temperance movement.
He didn't align himself with it.
Even when he came to give his speech, the people in the temperance movement were like, okay, let's see where Abraham Lincoln stands in relation to us.
And the challenge for Lincoln is this.
Lincoln is, and we're going to get into the text of the speech as I pick it up tomorrow, and you'll see what Lincoln is getting at.
Lincoln is sort of against two types of intemperance.
The one is the more obvious, and that is the intemperance of drinking.
Of being out of control in that sense.
But Lincoln is very careful to say that the gospel of temperance should be mainly preached by reformed drunks.
In other words, he doesn't like it when it's coming from politicians, when it's coming from lawyers, when it's coming from angry women who are railing about sin in the world and treat the intemperate individual, the drunkard, so to speak, as some kind of spawn of Satan.
Lincoln is going to argue that there is something wrong with this kind of moralistic or intemperate approach to temperance.
So if Lincoln is going to warn against intemperance, it is not only the intemperance of the drunk, which is a little bit easy to see, but it is the intemperance of the reformers, who are the anti-drunkards, because in them Lincoln sees...
let's call it a tyrannical danger, a danger of resorting to lawlessness.
So this is in a way the connection between the Lyceum speech, which is all about rule of law and a kind of spirit of lawlessness, Even though the anti-drunkards say, we want to have new laws, there's something about their spirit,
something about the way that they go about their reform, which Lincoln thinks is not only antithetical to human nature, but destructive to society, and particularly to a constitutional Republican Democratic society.
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