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March 28, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
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CRIME FIGHTER Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep800
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Coming up, I'll review the extraordinary crime-fighting achievement of El Salvador's leader.
This is Naib Bukele to ask, what can we learn from this guy, and why are some people calling him a threat to democracy?
I'll also examine the issues at stake in Alvin Bragg's case against Trump.
This is on the Stormy Daniels matter, and author Cal Beisner joins me.
We're going to discuss the meaning of Hey, if you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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.
Guys, I want to kick off by mentioning to you that tomorrow, Friday, is Good Friday.
So it's a holiday, a holiday at Salem, a holiday for the podcast.
So no podcast tomorrow, Friday, but I will be back in the saddle on Monday.
Now there's a lot going on with the Trump cases.
I want to talk about the Alvin Bragg case that is now lighting up.
And I'll say a word about that.
But I want to do that in the next segment.
I thought I would kick off the podcast today, today's episode, by talking about the guy from El Salvador.
We're talking about Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador.
And we're talking about his astonishing achievement in crime-fighting.
Essentially what Bukele has done is he has taken one of, if not the most dangerous countries in the world and made it one of the safest countries in the world.
And he's done it through a deployment of the police and even the military against the gangs.
And he has essentially said to the police and the military, take down the gangs and let's do it because the country has reached a stage where we are in an emergency.
People cannot be safe outside their homes or even in their homes.
This has got to stop.
There's no point having a country that cannot protect you.
I mean, think about the basic purpose of government.
Let's just go back to Locke and early modern philosophy.
The main reason we enter into government at all, we leave the so-called state of nature, is in order to have a government that protects us from foreign and domestic thugs.
That is the number one duty of government.
Some of us think that the government should do that primarily and worry, and only after it's doing that should it get involved in other stuff.
The other stuff is subordinate, less important.
This is Bukele's principle.
And he has proven it empirically.
In other words, he has delivered safety to the Salvadoran people, and they are grateful for it.
They love him for it.
There was a recent election, and this guy just destroyed the opposition.
He was overwhelmingly re-elected.
I don't know the final count, but at last count, when I was looking in on it, it was like he was leading by—he had 75%, maybe 80% of the vote— So, it's almost like the country comes together and in a single affirmation goes, Bukele, that's the guy we want.
I mean, imagine that kind of unanimity.
We haven't had that in this country in my entire lifetime.
Even for Reagan, you would have majorities that are maybe, what, 55%, 56%.
But then the other side gets 45%.
So, the idea of reaching these kinds of majorities is huge.
I'm not even sure that FDR came close to these kinds of majorities.
So, Let's just say that this is a guy who gets democratic affirmation.
By the way, demos means the people.
So the people are affirming him not only through re-election, that's the obvious mechanism in which you get democratic affirmation, but the other way is just popularity.
This guy is a rock star in his country.
And yet...
Here we have an article, very telling in Foreign Affairs, sort of the premier foreign policy journal in the United States.
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele's crackdown on street gangs has facilitated a dramatic drop in crime, but, this is a big but, the but is the thrust of the article, it has also come at a serious cost to democracy and human rights.
This is according to the author, whose name is Gustavo Flores Macias.
And I'm thinking, who is this Gustavo Flores Macias?
What are his credentials? Is he a Salvadoran?
Well, it turns out he's a professor at Cornell.
So here you have a guy sitting like some thousands of miles away in Cornell, probably in the political science department, and looking over at El Salvador and saying, well, yes, we have to concede that Mr.
Bukele has reduced crime, but at what cost?
He's undermining democracy.
Quite frankly, I think if you went to the Salvadoran people and said, would you rather have democracy in the way that this fellow Gustavo Flores Macias has in mind, or would you rather have Bukele?
Let's just call Bukele anti-democracy.
The Salvadorans would democratically say we prefer Bukele.
So to heck with democracy.
Who cares about democracy?
If the government is not doing its primary job of ensuring safety, obviously that's a blow to democracy.
That shows democracy sucks.
Democracy obviously can't deliver the goods.
So if you're forcing a choice between democracy on the one hand and public safety on the other, most people, me included...
I would prefer public safety.
I'd rather have public safety and personal safety than I would the kind of democratic system that is apparently being offered here.
Now, in reality, of course, I do not believe that there is this conflict.
In fact, I believe that what Bukele has achieved, he has achieved democratically.
The people are behind him.
To say he has majority support is putting it mildly.
He has overwhelming amounts of majority support.
And this guy is a man of action whose actions have electrified the world.
People all over South America and Latin America are thinking of copying his example.
By the way, this author Gustavo Flores Macias concedes that, but he thinks that's bad.
He thinks it's bad that all these other Latin American countries are going, yeah, we need to do it Bukele's way.
And the fact that Javier Millet is thinking about doing it in Argentina, but also many other countries are following in the exact same path.
In Ecuador, for example, President Daniel Noboa, he has a different kind of problem.
It's narcotics, but it's also gangs.
And so he's like, I'm going to deploy the police and the military to smash those guys.
And guess what?
He has seen a dramatic reduction of crime in Ecuador.
And so many other countries are, and in some way politicians in this country, hey, if we can make our streets safe, if we can transform these dens of crimes and violence into essentially a kind of a place where the parks, you can walk comfortably without anybody assaulting you or mugging you or choking you or grabbing your bag and running off.
by and large, the country would be a much more pleasant place to live.
And that's what Bukele has proven.
So where is this great threat to democracy coming from?
Well, by and large, what's going on is that this Gustavo Flores Macias says that because Bukele is doing this by himself, he's doing it through the executive branch, and he's doing it through the military and the police.
Recently, by the way, two guys were arrested.
They're part of a gang, and they were arrested for homicide in El Salvador.
And once Bukele identifies the gang that they're part of, he deploys 5,000 troops to go shut down that gang, finish them off, arrest them, take them off the street.
And by the way, once they're off the street, Bukele makes sure that once they're in prison, These gang members can't talk to each other.
They do not have contacts with the outside world.
They cannot take instructions from their gang leaders.
Hey, listen, you're in prison. Go get this guy from the other gang.
Or let's create a drug trade inside the prison.
Bukele is like, none of that.
And this is what this guy is upset about.
This is what this clown Gustavo Flores Macias is like, oh that's really bad because number one, the executive is acting alone.
We need to have systems that have the involvement of the legislature and the judiciary.
That's why we have democracy as this complicated machinery of government.
Well, okay, but El Salvador does have a legislature.
They do have a judiciary.
But the idea that somehow you have to go through all these bureaucratic hoops.
I mean, later in the article, we hear kind of what this writer wants Bukele to do.
Government should craft new policing strategies compatible with democracy.
Like what? Officials must invest more in civilian policing agencies.
What? We need to establish more competitive salaries and benefits.
We need to implement rigorous evaluation programs.
We need to establish closer collaboration between police and local residents, taking cues from proximity policing models.
We need institutionalized oversight mechanisms.
This is the kind of bureaucratic blah, blah, blah that you can fully expect from an academic.
Fortunately, the Salvadoran people are not paying any attention to this kind of nonsense.
This is all very good for the sort of sociology seminar.
But let's put it this way, all of this stuff is going on in countries like Mexico, which are dens of crime.
So the Mexican government is tied up with bureaucratic mechanisms.
They can't get this done because the Congress won't go along.
If the Congress goes along, the courts will shut it down.
By and large, the cartels are controlling the parliament.
They're controlling the courts.
There are payoffs going on left and right.
So it's not like this alternative remedy has not been tried.
In fact, it is the operating model throughout Latin and South America, and it's a disastrous failure.
The writer Gustavo Flores Macias tries to show that there are some successes that can be done differently, but he doesn't give a single example of a success that has any breadth or breadth.
Or width to it. In other words, he's able to say, well, you know, there's a small neighborhood right over here, and they're trying it, and they're showing some promising results.
This is the best he can do.
He can't say, let's just look at the country of Mexico.
They aren't doing it Bukele's way.
They haven't declared a state of emergency, but guess what?
They've shut down the cartels.
Can he say that? No.
Why? Because they haven't shut down the cartels.
So the bottom line of it is what Bukele is doing works, and It has produced dramatic changes in the statistics.
Other people can see it works.
The Salvadoran people know it works.
They are ratifying it by their votes.
And so if there is any crime-fighting campaign that can be seen to be an expression of democracy, not an undermining of democracy, but democracy in action, this is it.
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I want to tackle a few disparate things happening in the news and pull them together in this segment.
I want to say a word about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a word about the aftermath of the appellate ruling in New York.
This is the Judge Engeron case.
But then I want to also say something about the new Alvin Bragg case that is finally getting out the gate.
This is the A case that involves Stormy Daniels and payoffs or alleged payoffs.
And weirdly, the weird twist here is a claim of election interference.
Wow! Accusing Trump of interfering with the election, if you can believe that.
But first, let me say a word about RFK. A lot of people are worried about whether this guy is going to take away votes from Trump or is he going to take away votes from Biden.
This is the right way to think about a third-party candidacy of any kind of appeal.
Obviously, if some guy's running and no one's heard of him, he's not going to take away votes significantly from anybody.
But RFK Jr.
has genuine appeal.
He's very good on certain issues.
And then he's very bad on others.
And he's also a very unpredictable guy.
So if you take a new issue, now on some issues we know where he stands.
We know where he stands on COVID, by and large, sound.
We know where he stands on free speech and digital censorship, by and large, sound.
But he, on the other hand, is very bad on issues like civil rights and affirmative action.
He acts like it's 1964.
And affirmative action is nothing more than going into inner-city neighborhoods and opening up jobs that poor people now have a chance, poor blacks now have a chance to apply for, whereas they previously didn't even know these jobs exist.
This, I should say, has nothing to do with affirmative action or DEI as currently practiced.
And yet, RFK Jr.
is living in this sort of la-la land.
If you take an issue that he hasn't spoken on, you cannot predict where he's going to come out.
It's not even that he's middle of the road.
He doesn't necessarily take the middle position.
He'll go, he gyrates wildly from one position to another.
And now he's picked, very much consistent with this, he's picked an absolutely out of nowhere candidate for his vice president.
And it's this leftist woman named Nicole Shanahan.
She's apparently the ex-wife of a tech mogul.
She's a kind of a left-wing philanthropist.
This is a pick from the far left.
And I think in a weird way this is a very good thing.
Why? Because I think that the selection of Shanahan as the VP, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s VP, makes it more likely that he will pull votes away from Biden than that he will pull votes away from Trump. Had RFK Jr.
picked Aaron Rodgers or someone seen as more conservative, more mainstream, I think then the worry would be that, listen, these guys may actually take some MAGA votes, take some Republican votes, and this will be good for Biden, bad for Trump. So, and apparently the Biden people recognize this.
They're alarmed that he has made this choice because they realize that it's going to pull more from their camp.
Now, a word about Trump, and that has been a real explosion of valuation for Truth Social.
Ever since it went public, it's almost like that there's a lot of buoyancy, a lot of excitement about Truth Social issues.
And its prospects, it's almost like one of these meme stocks.
Its valuation is completely out of sync with the actual revenue that's coming in.
But Truth Social is not unique in that regard.
That was also the case behind the valuations of many other tech stocks and so-called meme stocks.
And Trump's own net worth has gone up gigantically.
Here's a very funny post by this guy, Will Slaughter.
I don't think he's trying to be funny. Well, he does say, he says, it's both hilarious and somehow inevitable that Donald Trump has entirely by accident solved his financial problems, overfunded his campaign, personally enriched himself, and made a total ingenious end run around campaign finance laws by turning himself into a meme stock.
There's a lot there. It doesn't need to be all unpacked.
But part of what he's saying is that you can, in a sense, contribute to Trump's campaign just by investing in Truth Social.
That's what he means when he says it's an end run around campaign finance law.
So Trump gets this huge valuation.
Even the money he has to put up, an outrageous sum, $175 million, becomes a biddance for a guy whose net worth is now apparently in the $8 to $10 million.
Billion dollar range, largely because of this massive surge at Truth Social.
And it's a major gotcha for the left because, and I'm continuing now to read from this guy, Will Slaughter, he goes, Is that it never would have happened but for the strenuous efforts of, quote, protectors of democracy to deplatform him and erase his voice from the public square.
That's why he started Truth Social.
And so the left has, in a way, contributed to Trump's massive economic windfall.
Now, there's the, as I mentioned, the Alvin Bragg case is getting out the gate.
And I'll have a lot more to say about it as we have hearings and so on.
So we'll get into all the details.
But what I want to point out is they're going to try to prove, and they're going to have to prove, not merely that there was some kind of payoff to Stormy Daniels.
Let's say that there was. And by the way, business guys do these payoffs not always because they did something.
They might have, but they might have not.
And they decide, listen, it's a pain.
I don't want to deal with this.
This is bad for my reputation.
I don't want to be these accusations flying around.
I will just settle the issue.
Even if I'm being ripped off, even if I'm being kind of held as a hostage, I'll make a ransom payment and be done with it.
So this is regrettable.
Some people say, well, we'll Innocent people wouldn't act that way.
Innocent people act that way all the time.
That's a fact. Corporations settle cases all the time.
CEOs will do these kinds of settlements all the time, by and large, to get rid of an allegation so they can kind of move on with things.
So that's one issue.
But even if Trump did that, that's a misdemeanor, the payoff itself.
It's not a felony.
So where does the felony come in?
The felony is that Trump...
reimbursed his lawyer Michael Cohen, reimbursed him in 34 installments and supposedly that is a violation of election laws.
So in other words there are 34 payments that Trump is making to Cohen that are treated as quote interfering with an election.
Well how?
Where is the election interference?
If Trump is trying to make let's just say something unpleasant go away.
That's not inherently interfering with any kind of election.
Anyone would do that under any circumstances.
They'd be like, I don't want this in the public light.
Whether or not I'm running for office has nothing to do with it.
No court has ever found that Trump interfered with any election.
And in fact, the SDNY, the Southern District of New York, had all this evidence.
They looked at it. They're like, there's nothing here.
So this is another effort to get Trump involved.
For doing something where the guy seems to have done really nothing.
Again, I don't know what happened between Trump and Stormy Daniels.
I'm not trying to get in the middle of that.
I recognize that Trump has had an earlier life.
And yes, he was the CEO in charge of Miss Universe.
And yes, he dated models.
And so I'm not going to pretend like I know what happened there.
But what I am saying here is that this is, in the main, a Trumped No different than all the other trumped-up charges.
And I would expect its fate to be the same dismal fate that we see now is quite likely to meet many of the other cases as well.
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The number again to call is Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast Dr.
Cal Beisner. He is founder and president of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.
This is kind of a coalition of scholars.
It includes theologians, economists, scientists, and so on.
Dr. Beisner has written over 15 books, published thousands of articles.
You can follow him on x at Cal Beisner, B-E-I-S-N-E-R. And the new book, Climate and Energy, The Case for Realism.
Cal, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you for joining me.
I don't know if you've seen this, but there is on social media now a kind of a viral clip that deals with the climate.
It's Senator Kennedy, and he is talking to a young fellow who is a championship skier, evidently based in Alaska.
And Senator Kennedy is asking this guy questions, and it becomes pretty obvious that the guy has no idea, for example, how pervasive CO2 is in the atmosphere.
He has no idea of what he wants to do with regard to fossil fuels.
He wants fewer of them, but he's not sure how much.
He has no idea what it's going to cost, and yet he's very earnest.
He's very passionate.
He somehow has the impressionistic view that skiing conditions are not quite the same in Alaska as they used to be, you know, maybe when he was growing up.
And that appears to be the experiential basis for this guy showing up as a, quote, expert witness to testify before Congress.
So it's quite a spectacle to watch.
Let me ask you, when you say in the subtitle of your book, the case for realism, what do you mean by realism?
Do we have a real problem?
And what is the realistic approach to think about it?
Yeah, great question, because so much of this is really badly twisted by a lot of the media, a lot of policymakers, a lot of environmental activists, and frankly, a lot of critics of environmental activism about this.
You know, there seem to be sort of three different views on this.
One is what might be called catastrophic anthropogenic climate change.
Climate change is not just real and not just influenced by humanity, but is a catastrophe around the corner.
At the opposite end of the spectrum would be what some people would call denialism, which says, hey, climate doesn't change, human action doesn't have anything to do with it, etc.
No, I think a realistic point of view, solidly supported by empirical scientific evidence, Is that, yes, climate change is real.
It's largely naturally driven, has been cyclical throughout Earth's history.
But yeah, human activity does influence it more and more over the last couple of centuries, including by our emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
We might actually have caused anywhere from just a tiny bit to most of the warming, roughly one degree Celsius over the last 200 years, We really don't know for sure because we know that climate has changed equally as much in other times in the past when we didn't force it, but we might have.
The big questions are, how much of a problem is this versus how much benefit there might be from it?
And then what are the benefits and costs of various different ways of responding to it?
And our answer in climate and energy, the case for realism...
It's really not much of a problem.
There are a lot of benefits to the warming as well as some costs.
Huge benefits from the increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because plants grow better and that makes more food for everything that depends on them and the poor around the world benefit hugely from that.
And then there are enormous benefits from the energy sources that result in carbon dioxide and other emissions, and from the farming that results in methane emissions and some others that contribute to warming.
We get more food, we get more wealth, and wealth protects us from anything related to climate and weather.
weather. As we can see from the fact that over the last hundred years, human mortality rates from severe weather events have dropped by more than 98%.
Would you say, starting kind of at the beginning and defining the problem before we get to the solutions, would you say, Cal, that there are two really significant events here that make plausible the idea that we as humans have something to do with a warming trend in the world?
One is, of course, the swelling of population accompanied by the Industrial Revolution, the fact that we have machines and there are just a lot more of us on the planet than there were before, and that this A kind of multiplication of population has all occurred relatively recently if we look at the long sweep of history.
And second of all, the scientific phenomenon just known as the greenhouse effect, namely that when you release more carbon into the atmosphere, the effect is warming.
I mean, isn't that a scientific principle that's been known for a long time?
So while one can debate the degree of it, The severity of it, the consequences of it, what to do about it.
You're saying that it is reasonable to think that, A, there has been some warming, and it is possible, not certain, but possible, that our presence, all 9 billion of us, and our way of life, industrially driven, had something to do with that.
Yes, definitely that's the case.
So it's really pretty basic science that if you add greenhouse absorbing gases to the atmosphere, you're going to make the surface of the world a little warmer than it otherwise would have been.
But it's also basic physics that if you drop a rock and a feather at the same moment from the same altitude, they're going to hit the ground at the same moment.
Unless of course, they're in air, in which case the rock plummets and the feather kind of wafts down.
And if it's windy, the feather might blow up into a tree and get stuck and never come down. In other words, nature, and especially the climate system, is a whole lot more complex than just basic physics. And so what is really important is how does the whole climate system, which probably is the most complicated natural system we've ever studied aside from DNA and the human brain, respond to added carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?
Now, all of the computer climate models that are the only basis for fears about future man-made global warming Assume that for CO2's initial warming effect in the atmosphere you're going to have a multiplication of that from water vapor and other gases.
The problem is those computer climate models Invariably, for over the past 30 years and more, simulate two to five times as much warming as actually observed over the relevant period.
Now, what that means is that the theory of how the climate works that is written into those climate models is wrong.
And that means that the climate models give us no rational basis for any prediction of future temperature and therefore no rational basis for any policy about what to do about it.
You said a minute or so ago, a couple of minutes ago, that climate change and warming has benefits.
Now that alone is, I think at least from the point of view of the heated environmentalist rhetoric, a bit of a scandal because you never hear about benefits.
I mean, it stands to reason when you have something happening, let's say, for example, the world is getting hotter or the world is getting colder, not only are there some benefits to heat and cold in and of themselves, you know, if it's cooler, the mosquitoes go away, for example. I mean, I'm just talking about normal experience.
But the other thing about it is that the world itself is very varied.
So, in other words, there are cold countries like, well, in my view of thinking, the United States.
There are other places in the world that are already really hot.
Presumably, the places that are really hot might suffer a little bit if they get a degree or two hotter, but presumably other places where it's just honestly a little too chilly become really pleasant when the temperature gets a little bit warmer.
Nuanced analysis which is, hey, climate change may be really bad for the Sahara but it might be pretty good over in Greenland.
Well, there's actually some really good news about that very concern.
Greenhouse warming theory tells us, and I think this is pretty solidly understood and credible, that greenhouse gas-driven warming happens primarily toward the poles, not toward the equator, primarily in winter, not in the summer, primarily at night, not in the daytime.
In other words, the warming is mostly of areas that are cool when they're coolest, not of areas that are hot when they're hottest.
The result is we don't see much warming toward the equator in the torrid zone, etc.
We do see most of the warming happening in the higher latitudes, closer to the poles.
That means that we have expanded growing regions, and we can grow in places that used to be too cold.
We also have lengthened growing seasons.
The last frost of the spring comes earlier.
The first frost of the fall comes later.
So, actually, the warming is generally a good thing.
Also, by the way, you were using the words hotter and colder, and I know that's typical.
But when we think of hot, we're usually thinking, okay, high 80s, 90s, over 100, something like that.
The differences in temperature that we're talking about in terms of global warming, increase in global average temperature, Are measured by tenths of a degree Celsius.
They don't even show up on our typical mercury thermometer.
They're certainly not something that anybody feels.
And what we have not seen during the period of allegedly largely man-made driven global warming, what we have not seen is any increase In the frequency or the intensity of any kind of severe weather events, including heat waves or cold snaps, including hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods, anything of that sort.
The computer models say we should see an increase in these things, but the actual real world observations say, no, they're not happening.
It seems like on this issue, whenever you have these global climate conferences, you are dealing with countries that show up that have different agendas.
Some of them, like India and China, are looking to develop, to grow, to have more industry, not less, presumably to be using more fossil fuels, not less.
And then you have the Western countries, which seem to be...
and for everybody to scale back and while these other countries might pay some lip service to these ideals they're clearly not on board. So what is a realistic way to deal with the problem that keeps in mind that much of the world is not fully developed yet?
They have no interest in slowing down their development and this is going to mean, almost inevitably, using more energy, more fossil fuels, more CO2 into the atmosphere.
Well, I think that's a great point.
The very last chapter in our book is by Vijay Jayraj.
He is an Indian climate scientist and energy management specialist.
Brilliant fellow.
And he just points out that the policies that the Western developed world want to impose on the developing world Are basically policies that by depriving them of abundant, affordable, reliable energy, which comes overwhelmingly from fossil fuels, would slow, stop, or reverse their climb out of poverty.
We're talking about roughly 3 billion people in the world who have zero access to electricity.
About 2 billion more who have only very limited access to electricity.
And yet electricity is crucial to long, healthy life.
And so, when we in the developed West talk about these things, we need to keep in mind that we're talking to billions of people who do not have the tremendous advantages that we have because we have 24-7, 365, reliable electricity for our air conditioning and heating and lighting and phones and computers and refrigerators and hospitals and everything else.
This is really what Vijay calls climate colonialism.
And I think it's just plain wrong.
There are plenty of studies that indicate that the effort to substitute wind, solar, and other Would result in literally billions of people going without food.
Right now, 50% of the world's population depends on food grown on farms that use fertilizers derived from natural gas.
Take away the natural gas, you end that production, you starve those people.
If I may make a final point, not only is it the rich countries that are providing these kinds of lectures, but we see this rather telling sight of these climate advocates from Hollywood, Al Gore, Bill Gates.
They're flying in on private jets.
These jets are consuming giant amounts of fuel and And they're doing it to go to a climate conference where they can tell the rest of us to, you know, turn down the thermostat and not to mention tell people in India and China that you don't need so much electricity.
So there's a kind of ludicrous aspect to it.
Well, you, sir, are bringing some Some needed sobriety and some very valuable data to this debate.
The book, guys, is called Climate and Energy, The Case for Realism.
I've been talking to Cal Beisner, founder and president of the Cornwall Alliance.
You can follow him on x at Cal Beisner, B-E-I-S-N-E-R. Cal, thank you very much for joining me.
Well, thank you very much, Dinesh, and take care.
Hope for another opportunity here.
I look forward to it. I'm continuing my discussion of Abraham Lincoln.
This is from the Lincoln-Douglas debates, my study of Harry Jaffa's book called Crisis of the House Divided.
I've talked about the Lyceum and Temperance addresses, and now we turn to Lincoln's famous house-divided speech.
We're not really going to We don't really need to, but we're going to discuss one claim in that speech that becomes very relevant to the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
In fact, this becomes a point that Douglas presses to his seeming advantage.
Douglas says to Lincoln, and he's making a charge against Lincoln that'll be very familiar for us today.
He's essentially saying he doesn't use the term Abraham Lincoln, you are an exaggerator.
You are an extremist.
You are a conspiracy theorist.
You are alleging things that are not only untrue but ridiculous.
You are alleging a kind of a collusion that not only doesn't exist but can't exist.
And so you cannot be taken seriously.
I mean, isn't it interesting to see The founder of the Republican Party accused of, well, pretty much the exact same thing that Trump is accused of today, we are accused of today, namely the charge of being conspiracy theorists.
But as Abraham Lincoln knows, there are real conspiracies.
And simply using the phrase conspiracy theorist is insufficient because you have to examine, is there some sort of a conspiracy afoot?
Now, conspiracies can take different forms.
You can have, for example, a bunch of people who sit down together and make a plan.
So let's just say, for example, NBC, they get together and they decide, we're not going to have any Republicans on our team who are featured as hosts or as regular guests who are pro-Trump.
That's our policy decision.
So are we conspiring?
Yes, we are. We're coming together, we're having a meeting, we're explicitly raising the topic, and we're agreeing no pro-Trump Republican will be allowed to be a kind of...
Paid guest or even a regular guest on NBC or MSN. That's a conspiracy.
Conspiracy in the sense of full intentionality and planning.
Then you have collusion.
Collusion is people working together to the same end.
So for example, the censoring of the Hunter Biden laptop.
You have all these different media organizations, and they're kind of all in for Biden.
Now, they don't talk to each other.
They're not having an early morning Zoom call or Skype call where they say, all right, listen, guys, let's none of us be the first.
In fact, let's all of us kind of make a pact.
No, they don't do that. But they don't have to do it.
Why not? Because they all agree, let's sort of do nothing that's going to impede Biden.
And let alone, here we are right on the eve of the 2020 election.
This is going to be very damaging to Biden.
We all recognize that we are Team Biden.
So consistent with that, we're not going to give any play to this Hunter Biden laptop.
And the New York Post is...
Engaging in very bad journalistic behavior.
Not only are we not going to go along, we're going to try to suppress them.
We're going to cheerlead for digital platforms to block them.
So this is a different type of coming together.
It's not a conspiracy in the intentional or deliberate sense, but it is a collusion.
They are working in sync.
They are almost like birds moving together in a coordinated flying fashion.
Each bird is not necessarily communing with the other bird.
It may be doing nothing more than watching the bird to its left or to its right.
But nevertheless, there is a discernible formation or pattern.
The birds are not going helter-skelter.
They're going in a defined direction.
Let's just say toward Florida for the winter.
Now, Coming back to Lincoln here, Lincoln in the House Divided Speech seems to allege some sort of a conspiracy.
And I say some sort because he doesn't say conspiracy.
Well, what does Lincoln say?
Let's look at his words.
He raises a prospect and he says...
We shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri, this is a border state, Missouri, are on the verge of making their state free, and we shall awake to the reality instead that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave state.
Alright, this requires a little bit of unpacking here because let's remember that under the terms of the Missouri Compromise, all the states north of the Mason-Dixon line are free states.
That is decided by the Missouri Compromise itself.
All the states south of the Mason-Dixon line are not necessarily slave states, but they can be.
So you do have popular sovereignty.
You do have each state deciding for itself, but only south of the Mason-Dixon line.
And here is Abraham Lincoln, who seems to be saying that the effect of I think?
And not only to give the northern states the option of having slavery, because presumably states like New York and Boston, I mean Massachusetts and Illinois, have no interest in becoming slave states, so even if you left it up to the people, they're not going to vote for slavery.
But Lincoln is implying that they might get slavery nonetheless.
In other words, Lincoln is raising the very shocking idea that it could be that Illinois, a Midwestern state north of the Mason-Dixon line, might become a slave state.
Now, many scholars of the period and scholars of Lincoln look at this and react to it exactly the same as Douglass.
In other words, they look at it and they say, as Douglass would later say in 1858, they go, this is ridiculous.
Lincoln is like going over the top here.
Lincoln's fears are, and I'm now quoting one such scholar, he says, this is an absurd bogey.
Lincoln's fears are, quote, imaginary.
This is extremely unlikely.
He goes, Lincoln's reasoning is, quote, based upon something of a non sequitur.
So what they're getting at is they're saying that Abraham Lincoln is raising the specter that northern states may have to deal with slavery, may have to become slave states, is on the face of it a false concern.
That this could never happen, that Lincoln is overstating it, Lincoln is...
Now, let's think about the implications of Lincoln doing this.
Let's just say that they're right, and that Lincoln is stirring up the passions of the North.
By the way, passions that will eventually lead to a civil war.
In fact, not too distantly.
Let's remember House Divided Speech, election of 1858, and then the presidential election of 1860.
The civil war is already, in a sense, underway by the time Lincoln even assumes office.
So if Lincoln is doing this, Let's just say this is not a real issue, but Lincoln is going to the people of the North and saying, in effect, you've got to rise up and you've got to put a stop to what is happening in the country and you need to act against the South because they are trying to export their slavery to the North.
Let's just say Lincoln is making this up.
And there's no basis for it and no validity to it.
Then Lincoln is either a fool.
I mean, just an idiot. Someone who has no idea what's going on around him, which would be...
That's one type of...
We kind of have these fears about Biden.
Is he a fool? Or is he malevolent?
And the same could be said of Lincoln.
Again, if Lincoln is...
If Lincoln is just conjuring up this specter, he's either a fool or he's doing something really diabolical.
And what's diabolical about it is he is the Pied Piper that is leading people to civil war not to prevent a real evil, But to prevent a fake evil, to prevent an evil that doesn't really exist.
He's saying to the North, you might get slavery.
You better rush to the defense of your way of life.
And in reality, there was never any prospect of slavery entering the North.
So Jaffa writes this, and I agree, quote, No defense of Lincoln is possible that agrees with this judgment.
So in other words, there is no way to concede that Lincoln is somehow creating a false threat, a false specter, and yet defend Lincoln.
Of course, Jaffa is going to go on to argue and he's going to offer some evidence, a lot of evidence actually, that Lincoln was right to allege that something very creepy was underway.
And even if the full extent of this collusion, this conspiracy, this orchestration is not known, we don't know exactly who said what to whom, nevertheless the idea of a coordinated effort by the former president of the United States, Pierce, the current president of the United States, Buchanan, by the way, both of them Democrats, and Douglas, the leader of the Democratic Party, future presidential candidate in
1860, Lincoln's, of course, rival for the Senate in 1858, and the Supreme Court, which is to say Justice Taney, the guy who wrote the Dred Scott decision for the court, Lincoln's implication or suggestion that these people are working together to achieve a pro-slavery which is to say Justice Taney, the guy who wrote the Dred Scott decision for the court.
Lincoln's implication or suggestion that these people are working together to achieve a pro-slavery outcome that will not merely consolidate slavery in the South, not merely extend it to the new territories, but even threaten the prospect and the possibility of slavery entering the free states, the northern states, this is what Lincoln is going to suggest.
This is what he's going to warn about.
And we're going to see, upon examination of the evidence, that Lincoln's fears are legitimate, they're justified, and this was a real possibility in the 1850s leading up to the Lincoln-Douglas debates and leading up to the Civil War.
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