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April 1, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:14
ISRAEL HELD HOSTAGE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep801
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Coming up, I'll explain how Hamas is using the hostages to hold Israel itself hostage.
And I'll show away maybe the only way Israel can break the deadlock.
I'll recap the Candace Owens Daily Wire controversy to make the case that free speech isn't as free as we like to believe.
And journalist Megan Basham joins me.
We're going to talk about Easter and Transvisibility Day.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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On Saturday, thousands of protesters flooded the streets of Tel Aviv to protest the Netanyahu government and to protest the Israeli war against Hamas.
Now, these were not Arabs who were protesting.
These are not Palestinians.
These are Israelis, and there were quite a lot of them.
Now, this is not, I would say, perhaps the mainstream of Israel, but it is the left.
It is the left in Israel.
And the left in Israel, which went a little bit silent after October 7th, after the Hamas attacks, We're good to go.
We have to eradicate Hamas.
We have to remove this fighting force and then we can find a solution for dealing with the Palestinians and coexisting with them going forward.
But this unanimity, like many unanimities, like the unanimity perhaps that existed right after 9-11, was always a little tenuous and was bound to be short-lived.
And as we now come into 2024, here we are at the beginning of April, clearly that feeling of national solidarity that was there right after October 7th has now begun to dissipate.
And like I say, the dissipation is among the Israelis themselves.
Now Netanyahu has long been a controversial figure in Israel.
Netanyahu is in no way an object of unanimous approbation.
In fact, lots of Israelis don't like him and he's been a divisive figure in Israel. The Israelis were fighting tooth and nail over a whole range of policies involving Netanyahu, allegations of corruption against Netanyahu, similar to the ones made against Trump, a battle over Netanyahu's attempt to rebuild and reorganize the Israeli Supreme Court.
In fact, lots of Israelis don't like him, and he's been a divisive figure in Israel.
The Israelis were fighting tooth and nail over a whole Israelis themselves. Now Netanyahu has long been a controversial figure in Israel. Netanyahu is in no way an object of unanimous approbation.
And it's arguable that the distraction that was caused by this inter-Nissan squabbling was in some way the enabler of the Hamas attack.
The Israelis didn't have their eye on the ball, they weren't focused on national security.
By the way, we are very much in the same situation.
We've got in this country a lot of internal division, a lot of arguments and fights over the border, over so many other issues, and arguably we are paying little to no attention to vulnerabilities.
I mean, what would the difficulty be of pulling an October 7-style attack in the United States?
In my view, it would actually be a lot easier than doing it to Israel.
Because the Israelis are a country that has a certain sense that their survival is at stake.
They live with that feeling.
So they're on a little bit of high alert all the time, regardless of what other issues they're dealing with.
We are the very opposite, a country that has very rarely been attacked.
In fact, the two times that you could say we have been attacked was, of course, Pearl Harbor and then 9-11.
But by and large, we've never faced anything like an invasion.
And yet, we are vulnerable to attacks and very serious types of attacks using modern weapons and modern technology.
And yet, there seems to be a sort of blithe indifference on the part of the Biden administration.
The problem for Netanyahu and the reason for these protests is they want the hostages back and they are saying, the protesters are saying that they don't care what kind of price Israel has to pay to get a hostage deal.
Let me quote this guy. This is Lee Hoffman-Geeve who is at the protest.
He's talking to the Associated Press.
"'We demand our government to sign a deal now, no matter what is the cost.'" We will not forgive our government if another hostage dies in captivity.
Now, I want to argue that this is in fact the worst strategy that the Israelis could go with.
In fact, it's a strategy that not only imperils hostages, the hostages that are there now, future hostages, it imperils the whole Israeli nation.
The problem Israel is having, and this is probably why Hamas was so clever in taking the hostages in the first place, is that it impairs the Israeli war effort.
The Israelis would like to go into these tunnels and blow them up.
They would like to identify Hamas facilities and blow them up.
But why can't they do that?
Because almost certainly there are hostages in those tunnels and in those facilities.
Hostages who are themselves being used in a sense as human shields.
And so the Israelis are a little paralyzed.
I mean, they are conducting operations.
They have done quite well in rooting out Hamas in a number of its strongholds.
They are now going into Rafah.
So I'm not suggesting that the Israelis don't know what they're doing on the ground.
But what I am suggesting is that the Israelis cannot quickly, expeditiously, efficiently end this war and finish off Hamas.
Why? Because of the hostages.
In a way, you could almost say that the hostages are holding Israel hostage.
Israel itself has got to condition all its planning, all its actions on we've got to make sure to preserve the lives of the hostages.
And of course, Hamas, that is Hamas' greatest leverage.
Hamas cannot fight Israel effectively, but the way they're fighting Israel is through international diplomacy, through trying to cut off the United States from supporting Israel.
So this is their strategy, and in those terms, it's working pretty well.
Now, if this were the Romans who were dealing with the hostages, the Romans would have taken a very simple approach, and that is they would have said, in effect, go ahead and kill the hostages.
We are going to find and kill every one of you.
And we're going to do that anyway, by the way.
But if you kill the hostages, we will kill you in a very inhumane manner.
Whereas if you don't kill the hostages and give them back, we're going to kill you anyway, but your debts are going to be quick and relatively painless.
So, the strategy of the Romans would have been very simply to devalue the hostages.
So right away they ceased to become a negotiating tool.
Hamas can't say, well, you got to do this, you got to do that, because the Romans would say we're not going to be doing that, so do your worst and then see what we do in return.
Now it turns out that this kind of deterrence strategy is far and away the best.
In fact, it's the only strategy that is likely to work decisively well, because the only language that people, the Hamas types, the Hamas people are like the Carthaginians and the Romans fought in the Punic Wars.
And the Carthaginians understood one language and that's the language of force.
As long as you dealt with them and negotiated with them and gave them leverage, your position was hopeless because that's what they wanted.
That's what they were really good at.
And the same with Hamas.
Hamas wants to drag this out.
They know that time is not on the side of Israel.
And so they know that the more that Israel dithers over the hostages, Hamas sort of has trump cards.
And the trump cards are in fact the hostages.
So this is really my worry about Netanyahu.
Not that Netanyahu is being too tough.
But in a sense that he's not being tough enough.
He doesn't understand clearly enough that his only strategy is one of moving to quick and decisive victory.
And in doing that, paradoxically, the best approach is not spending your time focusing on the hostages, but spend your time focusing on the job of defeating Hamas.
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Cancel culture and the Overton window.
Now, you might have heard this phrase, the Overton window.
What it means is the parameters of acceptable discourse, of acceptable talk in a certain given context or on a certain platform.
So, for example, one might say that at the Daily Wire, you can say certain things, but you can't say other things.
All the things that you can say fall within the Overton window.
And the things that you can't say are outside the Overton window.
Now the Overton window is potentially something that shifts.
It may or may not be something that is explicitly declared in advance.
In fact, you could argue that in almost any context of life, there are Overton windows.
Let's just say someone comes to your house to have dinner.
You're obviously going to be fairly broad-minded, let's say, in the way that these topics are permissible and you can say these things in my house.
But let's say someone says something that radically offends you or insults a member of your family or expresses a view that is so outlandish, you know, Himmler was right.
Then you go, hey, listen, this is too much.
You can't say these things at Thanksgiving at my house.
And if you continue like this, you're going to have to leave.
So that's the Overton window in the D'Souza household or in your household.
It sets limits.
And this is true throughout our society.
By the way, the First Amendment does not outlaw Overton Windows.
You're allowed to, in your house and in the Daily Wire and in various contexts, you're allowed to say this kind of speech is acceptable and that kind of speech is not acceptable.
Let's remember what the First Amendment says and what it doesn't say.
What it does do is it puts limits on the government.
It says Congress shall pass no law.
So read Congress here to mean the government in general because the executive branch is carrying out the wishes of the legislative branch.
So it is also covered by this term Congress.
The government can make no law restricting freedom of speech or of the press.
So this is a limitation notice on the government.
It's not a limitation really on anybody else.
Now, I say all of this because...
So we've got that...
So that's the meaning of free speech in a legal or constitutional context.
Then you have this somewhat amorphous phrase called cancel culture.
And cancel culture really has to do with canceling people.
Canceling people could mean, in a social media context, deplatforming them, like you can't be on Twitter.
We're going to close down your YouTube channel.
But it can also mean that you're fired as a writer for the New York Times.
And of course, What prompted me to think about all this was the firing, the untimely departure of Candace Owens from the Daily Wire.
Now, there was recently a conversation between Dave Rubin and Ben Shapiro where they were talking about Candace's departure from Daily Wire and Ben Shapiro makes the point that Candace is...
Well, the Daily Wire is not like Twitter.
It's not like X. X is a platform.
And a platform is really more a place where really anybody can join and anybody can say whatever they want.
And a platform is more like having your name in a phone book or having a phone line.
It is not the same as being a publisher.
Now obviously Daily Wire is a publisher and not a platform.
And yet, Daily Wire is not any type of a publisher.
It's a publisher that has built its brand and its reputation on opposing cancel culture.
Opposing the fact that, let's say, the Hollywood moguls were wrong to ban Gina Carano from having roles in Hollywood films.
Or Disney was wrong.
So, cancel culture here refers to people who are made to pay a steep professional price for their beliefs.
Now...
Looked at it that way, it appears that The Daily Wire is engaging in cancel culture.
But The Daily Wire can reply and say, well look, come on, we have certain positions, and while we allow a certain range of opinions on our positions, so for example, there are people at The Daily Wire, Matt Walsh notably, who doesn't believe the United States should be sending military aid or any kind of aid to Israel.
Basically, Matt Walsh takes the same position regarding the US and Israel as he does towards the US and Ukraine.
He doesn't want aid to Ukraine, or at least he thinks we've given enough.
And similarly, he thinks enough is enough.
We need to focus our money on our own problems.
And basically Shapiro is saying that's fine.
Another way to put it is Shapiro is really saying that's within the Overton window.
So here at Daily Wire, you're allowed to be critical of Israel insofar as it involves the transmission of U.S. aid.
But, implies Shapiro, without saying it, you can't go further than that.
You cannot say, for example, that Israel is acting immorally in the war against Gaza.
You can't say, for example, that Israel has killed far more civilians than the Hamas attackers did in the first place.
That if you take the view that Israel is the bad guy, then you're going too far.
You're outside the Overton window.
And the point is not whether or not the Daily Wire has a right to say this.
They obviously do. Well, the point is whether or not they can say this consistent with taking the position, we're against cancel culture.
Because if you're against cancel culture per se, then what are you doing except canceling someone, by the way, someone that you yourself selected?
No one said the Daily Wire had to hire Candace Owens, but they did.
And then they're like, no, what you're saying goes too far.
We're going to have to let you go.
So the point here is that Daily Wire is admitting that even...
That even though it is a critic of cancel culture, there are limits to what you can and cannot say.
And part of the problem with that is that that extends now to the other hosts who are still at the Daily Wire.
In other words, it becomes pretty obvious that, let's say, Matt Walsh, Jordan Peterson, Michael Knowles, all those guys are also operating within those limits.
And so you then have the question, well, are they telling us what they really think?
Or are they telling us what they think that Ben Shapiro thinks it's okay for them to think in order for them to stay at Daily Wire?
So the point I'm trying to get at here is that this whole business about free speech, cancel culture, the Overton window, It's a complicated business because it's one thing to say to somebody, hey, listen, you have every right to say whatever you want.
Let's just say, for example, that you think that Jews are a very bad influence in American society.
Let's say you think that.
That's a legal thing to think.
You have a right to think it.
You're not violating the First Amendment by thinking it.
And yet, what if a synagogue says, well, we don't really want to have that guy come and Preach in our synagogue.
That guy might even be a rabbi, but we're not going to invite him.
Why? Because this guy's views are not what we believe.
They're unacceptable to us.
They're outside our Overton window.
Even though we have all kinds of rabbis and they give us different types of interpretations of the Talmud, of current events, this goes too far.
And that's what Daily Wire is saying here.
So I'm using this particular episode simply to say that That when we think about cancel culture, we've got to realize cancel culture operates everywhere.
It operates on the left.
It operates on the right.
And it is not by itself inconsistent with the First Amendment.
But the real objection to cancel culture is not, hey, you're restricting my speech.
But when we object, for example, to the New York Times canceling a prominent conservative, what are we saying?
We're not saying you have no right to decide what appears in the New York Times.
What we're saying is, the New York Times, if it purports to be a legitimate newspaper, Should entertain intelligent views from across the political aisle.
And if it is systematically suppressing one side while featuring the other, it's not a real newspaper.
It's a propaganda outlet.
It's an extension of the Democratic Party.
It's a party newspaper.
Call it what you will.
The problem isn't the cancellation per se.
It is the false labeling of what the institution purports to be.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast Megan Basham.
She is a culture reporter for The Daily Wire.
She's a regular writer for Morning Wire.
And her articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, National Review, Town Hall.
Her book, Beside Every Successful Man, was published by Random House.
You can follow her on X at Meg Basham, B-A-S-H-A-M. Megan, thanks for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
Here we are the day after Easter, or perhaps I should say, here we are the day after Transgender Visibility Day, because...
I don't recognize that holiday.
I know, I know.
I don't know what you did to celebrate, but...
Now, this was a little bit of a shocker because it's one thing to have this trans propaganda shoved down our throats, you know, let's just say the other 364 days of the year, and it appears like there are just multiple LBGTQ-related days.
Not only days, but perhaps weeks and months, this Awareness Month and that Awareness Month, and yet The Biden administration found it necessary or perhaps expedient to shove it down our throats on Easter.
Now, what does that really tell you?
What does that tell us? Yeah, it's funny that you talk about Trans Visibility Day because I'm sitting here waiting for Trans Invisibility Day because it feels like it is very visible pretty much every day of the year.
And I think that's why so many people took such great offense that even Easter, we could not make Easter specifically about celebrating our Christian heritage and celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
That is what Easter is dedicated to.
And you We saw a lot of the mainstream media rush in when there was controversy over this and say, well, no, wait, wait, wait.
This this holiday has this this trans invisibility holiday or excuse me, visibility holiday has been around since 2009.
Well, you know, maybe people, you know, all sorts of fringe activist groups put things on the calendar frequently, but that does not mean that the White House acknowledges all of those sort of, you know, random holidays.
And in this case, it has only been recognized by the White House since 2001.
So no president before Biden ever recognized this.
You said 2001, but you mean 2021.
Excuse me, I meant 2020. Excuse me, yes, 2021.
So no president before Biden had ever recognized this.
And I think that's significant.
Not even Obama recognized this as a holiday, even though it had been active during his presidency.
So that tells us something.
It's only been around, as far as the White House is concerned, a couple of years, and it would have been very easy for them to choose some other day this year to recognize the transgender community.
I wish it wouldn't do that, but if it was going to do that, it could have easily picked another day.
For example, there's a whole week in November dedicated to trans awareness.
And like you said, if you look at the calendar, there is not a month in the entire annual 12 months of the year where he could not have picked a different day.
Now, it seems like some of the fact-checkers and so on who seem to view their job as one of covering up for the White House.
Like, how do we now explain this?
So what they say is, well, look, the Easter is a kind of a roving day.
It doesn't fall on the same day every year.
But March 31st is and has been, at least for a few years, Trans-Visibility Day.
So it just happened to fall on that day.
But isn't the answer to that, listen, the Biden administration sees that, oh, wait a minute, Easter happens to fall on that day this year.
So this is not a good idea to be promoting trans visibility on Easter.
Why don't we just push it back a few days or do it another day?
But clearly they didn't feel either.
No one noticed it was Easter, which is unlikely.
Or they thought, so no big deal.
So what if it's Easter? It's still Transvisibility Day.
And if you look at all the postings by leading Democrats and so on, there was far more posting about that in a coordinated fashion than there was about Easter.
Right. And that is the point at which you go, look, it seems pretty clear that this was intended to be a finger in the eye to the Christian conservative population in America.
I mean, that to me, it was unavoidable that it was going to We're good to go.
Consistently give him the lowest approval ratings.
So I don't think that this was in some sense going, let's try to balance two different constituencies, because he didn't really make much of a statement at all about Easter.
And when he did, he did not really acknowledge the, or not even really, he didn't at all acknowledge the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which is the reason that we celebrate Easter.
So he knows that he is not popular among Christians, and it almost feels like they're leaning into this.
If you look at their history of how they have treated Christians in the last four years, we have a DOJ that has targeted traditional Catholics as being potential domestic extremists.
We have an FBI that has asked banks to flag purchases of Bibles as indicators of potential extremism.
We have, and this one is the most gut-wrenching to me.
We saw six Christians killed by a transgender shooter one year ago, this Sunday, in fact, and three of those killed were children.
The Biden administration's reaction to that was to say that their hearts go out to the transgender community who are under attack.
So there is no way to look at all of these things in totality and not see it as the Biden administration purposely sliding and sticking a finger in the eye of Christians.
Now, Meg, here's a sort of a disturbing thought, which is that you emphasize that they know that they are angering conservative But, of course, conservative Christians aren't the only Christians in the country.
There's a pretty large body of Christians per se.
And this would seem to imply that there are liberal Christians or non-conservative Christians who don't seem to mind this kind of aggression against Christianity.
I say that because if the Biden administration genuinely thought that everybody who is Catholic, everybody who is Protestant of any of the mainstream denominations is going to be offended by this, that would impose a pretty high political cost on them.
But they must be pretty confident that there are a lot of nominal Christians who nevertheless would go along or at least not make them pay any kind of political price.
Is that a statement about perhaps the fractured nature of the Christian community?
Yeah, and you know something, I actually have a book coming out in July that will address this.
It's called Shepherds for Sale.
And what it goes into is that there are a lot of left-wing secular foundations, billionaires, people like George Soros, who are funneling money into groups to try to create the appearance of a Christianity that does not adhere to traditional biblical doctrine, that doesn't adhere to sound biblical doctrine.
I think if you look at all of this as a strategy, it makes sense for them to continually antagonize true Christians who adhere to biblical doctrine in order to sort of agitate and whip up a frenzy on the left for these particular, you know, they claim they're Christians, I have a lot of doubts about that, who will then say, well, actually, that's not true Christianity.
If you hate your trans neighbor, that's not Christianity.
So I see all of this as of a piece of trying to redefine what Christianity is and therefore neutralize true Christianity and its influence in the public square.
So if you ask me what the strategy is, that's what I think is happening.
Part of what's going on here, I think, is there's a slightly comical element, I think unintentionally, because I see KJP, the press secretary, and so many others, let us acknowledge the magnificent contributions of trans people in the country.
And I'm trying to think...
Well, what are those? I mean, what are these magnificent contributions?
If you had to name two, you're hard-pressed to come up with anything.
I mean, we've certainly had a rash of transgender assaults and shootings.
You mentioned the Nashville shooter.
We've also had, of course, trans athletes, basically biological males, you know, whipping biological females on the track and on the court and so on.
I don't know if that's the accomplishment they have in mind.
But I think really they don't have any accomplishments in mind.
What they mean is that you are producing an amazing accomplishment simply by existing.
Isn't that the implication?
Because they're not referring to any concrete accomplishments.
They're just referring to the fact that we have trans people in the country.
Yeah, and I think a really important part of that point is if you look at the statement, everybody's sort of talking about the timing of the statement, but not a lot of people are talking about the substance of the statement.
It's celebrating a community that, as you're pointing out, really has an epidemic of mental illness.
And on top of that, when you look at what that statement says, it specifically talks about the hateful laws in red states that are not allowing transgender kids to be themselves.
So that statement wasn't just, hey, we're celebrating this community, we see you.
It wasn't that. It was very much a political gambit.
And what its intention was, was to frame the very just bias Banning of mutilating children's bodies and robbing them of their reproductive capacities and framing that as somehow hateful.
So really, that is why they did this.
I think part of the reason is if you release it on Easter and you create this huge firestorm, it also gave them a chance to target those laws in red states that are preventing children from being mutilated in that way.
And let's be very clear that As the Biden White House is saying that there's something unjust and saying, no, we're not going to let you create this permanent damage on children's bodies.
You're also looking at countries like the UK and the Netherlands and Sweden and Holland who are saying, we're backing off from that.
We're saying this is not humane to continue to do this to children.
So you have some very liberal Western democracy saying, we're not going to allow this anymore, where the United States is continuing to just barrel down that road.
In blue states, it's really only the governors and the legislatures of red states who are stopping it.
So it wasn't like it was just a recognition statement.
This was very much a way to try to fire back on that.
Debbie and I were talking about this, and we were a little bit mystified when you consider that the trans community itself is very tiny.
It's a fraction of a fraction.
And so, clearly, the centrality of this trans agenda, the fact that everybody is dancing to the tune, must mean that it's being driven differently.
Do you think that this is the front line of the larger LGBTQ agenda?
I mean, I think there was a point at which I forget which was the comedian.
Who's the comedian we watch, the black guy?
No, not Chris Rock. Anyway, he was talking about the LGBTQs and he was saying, listen, the people driving this...
Dave Chappelle. It was Dave Chappelle. Oh, it was Dave Chappelle.
Of course it was. Yeah, that's right.
Sorry. I'd heard it. I just couldn't place it.
He was talking about the fact that this is the LGBTQ agenda, but he said the powerful group in that group is the Gs, the gays.
They're the ones that are really driving it.
Do you think that that's true?
And what is the...
The goal here. Is the goal an obliteration of the line between the sexes?
Where are they going with this?
Well, I think part of it is, you know, one, I think we have to recognize that not all the G in the LGBT are happy about the T sort of, you know, hooking onto their train.
And it's been interesting to watch people like Andrew Sullivan, like Douglas Murray, like a lot of the L's in particular in this group that are saying you're redefining what it means to, you know, have same-sex attraction to actually say that you are the other gender and that erases our identity. So it's been sort of fascinating to see how many in the initial sort of movement of the rainbow coalition no longer want the T in that group. But as far as the Biden administration and the Democrats go, I mean, the reality is you have to
consistently sort of find these fringe constituencies to, you know, create new special interest human rights around in order to continue to sort of whip up, you might say, a hostility against the dominant Christian culture.
And so that is what they continue to do. Because look, even though, you know, not everyone in America has always been a Christian, we know that only, you know, some, probably a fairly small percentage are actually saved believers. We have had a Christian culture and that has prevented all manner of depravity. And now what we're seeing is that that is moving away and we are opening the door to all kinds of immorality. So that even just today, a clip of Richard Dawkins went viral
where he said, I want culture.
I, an atheist, the most famous atheist arguably, want a cultural Christian dominance.
I want We want to have a Christian nation in that we recognize that this is who we are and these are the moral principles that we honor as a population.
Because once we've opened the door to that, you know, you see, I mean, we're seeing it, right?
You're seeing two men coming together saying, we're women and we're going to rent wombs of other women and there's a traffic in babies and it's just kind of opened a Pandora's box to chaos.
Yeah. I think the Democrat Party, though, they're sort of embracing that chaos because that is what gives them their power.
The fracturing of America, this sort of divisiveness, this constant warring between groups is...
is how they are able to, just like Marx, create an oppressed and an oppressor group, and so they are consistently shifting, okay, who is the oppressed group?
Because now that is how we get everyone together to sort of target that dominant Christian culture.
And so that is why they consistently look for groups to say, we have to attack what is America's historical identity.
Very interesting stuff.
Thank you very much, Megan Basham.
I've been talking to Megan Basham.
She is a culture reporter for The Daily Wire, frequent contributor to Morning Wire.
She's written for The Wall Street Journal and other publications.
You can follow her on X at Meg Basham.
Meg, mention again, what is the name of the new book that's coming out in July?
Yes, that is Shepherds for Sale, How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda.
So lots of receipts, lots of serious citations.
Great stuff. Thank you Megan Basham for joining me.
Thanks so much. I'm talking about Lincoln the conspiracy theorist, and I say this because that is the accusation that was launched against Lincoln, not only by Douglass, but also subsequently by scholars who argue that Lincoln's claim that there was a tendency
and a coordinated effort to establish slavery throughout the United States, not just in the South but also in the North.
This was a ridiculous, outrageous, unsupported, as they say these days in the fact-checking department a baseless accusation.
But in fact it was not a baseless accusation.
So we want to understand why Lincoln said what he did.
Lincoln, first of all, wasn't arguing that there was an explicit conspiracy.
What he was saying is that there is a coordinated effort.
A coordinated effort among whom?
well, among Douglas, who is leading a political faction and is in fact leading the northern Democrats.
So that's the political side of it.
And the other is the presidency, because the presidency was initially held by Pierce, a Democrat, subsequently by Buchanan, another Democrat, and then of course, subsequently by Abraham Lincoln himself.
And the third party of the coordinated effort here is the court, the Supreme Court, which was heavily tilted to the south, to the Democrats, was had as the chief justice, Roger Taney, who was a southerner and a Democrat.
and somebody very sympathetic to the cause of the South.
So Lincoln's point is, let's look at the actors.
They are functioning in different areas.
You have Pearson Buchanan in the executive branch.
You've got Stephen Douglas in the legislative branch.
You've got Roger Taney and his cronies at the Supreme Court.
Well, this is the sort of troika, the three legs of the stool.
These are the people who are Pushing slavery in a direction where if you kept it going, Lincoln is not saying again that we're already there, but he says we're moving in a direction.
We started out with the Missouri Compromise.
The Missouri Compromise is no slavery north of the Mason-Dixon line, and below the Mason-Dixon line, popular sovereignty, so states can decide for themselves.
Lincoln says, we're getting rid of that, and we have gotten rid of that with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which replaced the idea of the Missouri Compromise with the idea of popular sovereignty everywhere.
So popular sovereignty everywhere means every state, North and South, and also the new territories can decide for themselves whether they want to have slavery, yes or no.
But under popular sovereignty, it's pretty inconceivable that the northern states would decide to have slavery.
They didn't want to have slavery.
Slavery didn't really make any sense over there.
So if you put it up to a vote, Lincoln admitted that you're not going to have slavery in New York.
You're not going to have slavery in Massachusetts or in Indiana or Illinois.
But all of this is to ignore perhaps the most important Supreme Court decision of the 19th century, the Dred Scott decision.
The Dred Scott decision was a Supreme Court decision that essentially found the Missouri Compromise to be unconstitutional.
The Missouri Compromise was constitutionally invalidated and the Supreme Court basically said that neither Congress nor the territories have any right to legislate about slavery.
In other words, the Supreme Court essentially said this is a matter for the states.
Congress has no role here and the territories themselves cannot decide.
What the Supreme Court didn't say is whether or not the states were the final word on deciding about slavery.
That was left a little ambiguous.
But, the point was that the southerners would take their slaves out into the territories, and they wanted, they were insistent upon their right to do this, and they insisted that since the slave is my property, it's kind of like if I take my iPhone, and And I go to California.
It doesn't really matter what the laws of California are per se.
It's my iPhone.
It's my property.
I should be able to take my iPhone over there and bring it back because it's my iPhone.
And basically, that's what the Southerners and that's what the Democrats wanted to do with slaves.
They said, the slave is like my iPhone.
I should be able to take my slave into a territory.
Regardless of what the territory's own rules and laws are, my property rights need to be protected under the Constitution and by the Supreme Court.
Now, Lincoln's point was...
If you are saying that there is a right to slave property that overrides the laws of territories, what if the Supreme Court comes along tomorrow?
This is a decision not yet made, not in the Dred Scott decision, but Lincoln said it could come next, and in fact it is the logical next step, is to say that if it's your property, then even states should not be able to restrict it.
So leave aside territories.
Remember, territories are kind of outside the United States.
They are applying for admission to be states.
They exist in a little different relationship to the United States because they're trying to come in and be part of the country.
However, you have states.
Let's just take, for example, Lincoln's own state of Illinois.
What if you take a slave from, let's say, South Carolina to Illinois and We're good to go.
Can put any restrictions on what a slave owner can do with his slave or slaves in the free state of Illinois.
So this would represent, in Lincoln's view, you could almost say the nationalization of slavery, because now slavery is permissible in every state.
Because even if the state itself doesn't want to have those laws, slaves are coming in, slaves are leaving, slaves could presumably even be traded.
Because after all, it's your property.
Let's say you walk in with slaves as another slave owner.
He's also from South Carolina.
You decide to sell him some slaves.
He decides to buy them from you.
You're doing the transaction in the free state of Illinois.
Lincoln's point is, well, Illinois is no longer, strictly speaking, a free state, because it is now trafficking in the commerce of slavery, and the state itself is powerless to do anything about it.
It can't stop it. It can't say, go back to South Carolina and do it over there.
Essentially, what you've done is you've made slavery a national institution.
So this is Lincoln's argument.
Now, when people today study the Red Scott decision, they pick out the lines from Tawny where he talks about that the black man has no rights, that the white man needs to respect.
The emphasis is on the racial element.
But Tawny was a very slippery character.
And interestingly, when he did his analysis claiming that blacks had no rights under the Constitution, he He claimed not to be speaking for himself.
He claimed to be speaking for the founders.
He said, look, my job as a judge is not to tell you what I think.
My job as a judge is to tell you what the founders thought.
And then Tawny reasoned like this.
He goes, the founders did in fact say that all men are created equal.
He goes, but they clearly couldn't have believed it.
Why? Because if they believed it, they wouldn't themselves have slaves.
And they wouldn't themselves have allowed slavery to continue in the Union.
So the fact that the founders, A, had slaves, some of them, and B, they agreed to have slavery continue, at least in some parts of the country, Shows that they were just speaking rhetorically or aspirationally or in very general terms or this is the way we wish it was, but they weren't saying their real thoughts about it.
And therefore, says Tani, our country was essentially created to have rights by and large for white people and not for black people.
And it is this issue that people focus on today when we look at the Dred Scott decision.
But in Lincoln's own day, he was interested in something else that the Dred Scott decision said, something that he argued that if taken to its logical conclusion would show that America was a country not only built on slavery,
but We're good to go.
And if that premise is true, this follows and that follows and this follows.
And so the conclusion, the validity of the conclusion is completely dependent on the premise.
If the premise is true and the reasoning is sound, the conclusion must follow.
And so Lincoln uses this structure of reasoning to show that what the Democrats are pushing for in America is nothing less than the nationalization of slavery.
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