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April 5, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
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UNINVITED GUESTS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep805
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Coming up, I want to explore the bizarre question of how squatters who take over other people's homes somehow got rights and the extent of the problem in American cities.
Conservative activist Gavin Wax joins me.
We're going to talk about a bunch of things, how Trump can win in November, how to scare away a squatter, and what a second Trump administration should do first.
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Suddenly, we're hearing a lot about squatters.
Squatters. Now, I think you all know what a squatter is.
A squatter is a guy who takes over and squats, so to speak, in your apartment, in your dwelling, in your house, on your property, and in a sense claims that it's now his property.
He is now the occupant of this property, and you can't really, or at least you can't easily, get him out.
Now, the squatter issue has been with us.
I mean, it's been an issue in the country for a pretty long time.
In fact, there are laws, and we'll talk about those in a moment, that deal with the squatters.
But the squatter issue has been ramped up to a whole new level because of now the mass presence in our society of hundreds of thousands and indeed millions of illegals that Joe Biden has let into the country.
And these are people who not surprisingly are looking for a place to stay.
Now they can be temporarily put up by cities and hotels and locations.
And I've even heard about cities taking over campuses to put up these illegals.
But none of those solutions are prominent.
So at some point, the guys are going to have to go out and find a place to live.
And some of them are like, hey, there's an unoccupied building.
Hey, here's an apartment and it looks like the resident isn't here.
So why don't we just kind of move in?
And we've seen some reports.
I think the ones I've seen are mainly from New York, but there was one case in Queens about a New York couple that had purchased a home in a suburb of Queens.
It was actually for the use by their disabled son.
But it turns out that the tenant refuses to leave.
The guy was a caretaker, and he was expected to move out, but he's like, I'm not moving out.
I live here now.
You can't get rid of me.
And now there's an expensive and difficult legal process to try to get the guy out.
Eviction is not easy.
By the way, eviction is not easy in the country for reasons that go beyond squatting.
Let's say, for example, we have a very interesting case in the neighborhood that I live in.
In which you've got an older man, a rich guy, and he apparently has taken up with a stripper, or he's taken up with somebody who was a pole dancer or a stripper, and what he's done is instead of having her move in with him or marry her, kind of... Like in the movie, what he's done is he's put her up in her own place.
He's bought a place for her in a very nice neighborhood and basically said that you and your daughter can live there.
And that's what's going on.
He lives elsewhere. So this is a very disgusting and distasteful arrangement, but...
What can you say? It's going on.
Now, let's say he decides, I'm tired of her.
I want to get rid of her. It's my place.
I never put her name on the deed.
It's my house. She's living in it.
I want her to leave. She can say, no, I'm not going to leave because I live here.
And he might say, well, we don't have a contract.
You don't have any right to be there.
But still... Doing an eviction is going to be difficult.
It cannot be done immediately.
You can't just call the cops and have her leave.
She's not going to leave. And so you have to take legal action that's expensive, that can take months, and sometimes have an uncertain outcome.
So Debbie and I were talking about this, and we've talked about this.
We've gossiped about it, gossiped privately among ourselves in terms of our own neighborhood.
But when you're talking about these squatters, I mean, Debbie sarcastically goes, well, Dinesh, of course we have a squatter problem in the United States.
We have a squatter in the White House.
I mean, brilliant observation.
Yes, we have an unauthorized occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
And as I thought about that, it also occurred to me that, you know what?
Our elite in this country, all these people who supposedly are...
In charge of institutions that claim to represent people and speak for people, they're squatters.
And by squatters, I mean that nobody appointed them, nobody asked that, you know, you get to speak for women, you get to speak for blacks, you get to speak for working people.
Nobody appointed them.
Nobody elected them.
And yet they arrogate to themselves the prerogative of representing and speaking for these groups.
So they're squatters in a metaphorical sense, in that they are claiming to occupy territory that they're not entitled to, that they are not.
So in some ways I can see why these, you may say, usurping elites are sympathetic to people who usurp other people's homes.
Right. So I took a look.
I went to the American Apartment Owners Association.
And this is a very good compendium of laws on squatting.
And it turns out that there's a whole bunch of states that allow squatting.
About 10. So about 40 states don't allow it at all.
But about 10 states allow it.
And it turns out that the process...
Well, when you look at the laws, you begin to see how we even got these laws.
Most of these laws require a pretty lengthy period of occupancy for you to have, quote, squatters' rights.
So, it varies somewhat, but it varies between 7 years and 30 years.
So, some states...
Let's look at some examples.
Georgia, 20 years.
North Carolina, 20.
Massachusetts, 20.
But then California, 5 to 7 years.
Washington State, currently 7 years, although they may change it to 18 years.
In Michigan, it's a 15-year occupancy requirement.
But they specifically mention, especially in areas like Detroit and Lakeside cabins.
So I can see here how these laws came to be.
You got cabins, somebody built it, the guy died, the cabin is just left there, nobody's really using it, so squatters move in.
And the idea is that through occupancy over time, if no one claims it, you can then say, well, I live here now.
You can't throw me out because I've been living here for a certain number of years, maybe 10 or 15 years.
Of course in some states, the states cunningly say you have to pay property taxes and you have to, as I mentioned, you have to work the land in order to basically claim squatters rights.
So the point is not that these laws are by themselves bad.
Very often what you have is a law.
The law by itself is okay.
But the law becomes a joke because it becomes abused by people who are taking advantage of the letter of the law in order to create a situation that was never foreseen by the law.
So the law never foresees that somebody, let's say, goes on a European vacation or goes out of state for a job and comes back and somebody else is living in your house.
What?
Now, Debbie says this happens in Venezuela all the time.
In fact, property rights are basically gone in Venezuela.
If you leave Venezuela and you come back, there's a very good chance that there will be other people now living in your house.
And they basically use cultural Marxism.
Oh yeah, you're an exploiter.
You're a bourgeois. You can't claim to rights to a house.
You're not even living here and we need the house.
So the usual humbug about social justice is deployed to justify really arbitrary gangster-style seizure of other people's property.
And I see this problem now ramping up in the United States.
Not again, because this is not because a new raft of progressive laws have been passed.
It's because we've got a whole new bunch of people that have illicitly been let into this country by the Biden regime.
They've done it for crass political gain.
And that is what has taken the squatter problem, which might have been a problem even without the illegals, but now is at a problem at a whole different level.
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Scotland has passed a hate crimes law that is so expansive.
It is probably the worst hate crimes law in the world.
and it criminalizes not only quote crimes or acts but it also criminalizes speech.
Speech is treated as an act and it specifically notes that it is now a crime in Scotland to misgender people.
And there's a whole accompanying vocabulary.
Oh, don't misgender me.
Oh, you've got to use my correct pronouns.
But also, don't deadname me.
So, for example, if I decide I'm no longer Dinesh, I'm now, let's say, Daphne.
And you call me, hey, Dinesh!
I'm like, don't deadname me.
You're using my dead name, my old name, Dinesh, when you should be calling me Daphne.
So this madness has now basically become, I mean, it's one thing for people to even do it.
It's another thing for them to force you.
It's another thing for them to say that you are violating my civil rights if you misgender me.
And this law is a law that must be challenged.
Why? Because what happens with these bad things is that they begin to spread.
Other people go, yeah, we're going to use the Scottish law as a model for our law.
And then you find it all over Europe.
You I want to speak about the heroism of J.K. Rowling.
This is the author of the Harry Potter novels because almost single-handedly, not single-handedly, but almost single-handedly, she has decided, I'm going to take on this madness.
And I'm going to take on this madness in the name of women.
And so... What does J.K. Rowling do?
She says, alright, I'm going to violate the law.
I'm going to violate the law, but I'm going to do it in a very clever way, and I'm going to dare them to prosecute me for it.
So this is genius.
What does J.K. Rowling do?
She basically starts, in a Twitter thread, she outlines a whole bunch of crimes and offenses that Committed, she says, by women.
And J.K. Rowling starts off with, Scottish woman and butcher Amy George abducted an 11-year-old girl while dressed in female clothing.
Of course she was wearing women's clothing.
She's a woman. Amy took the girl home and sexually abused her over a 27-hour period.
Now, as it turns out, this so-called Amy George is not a woman at all.
This is a biological male.
But a biological male who obviously claims to be transgender and goes around calling herself Amy George.
Samantha Norris was cleared of exposing her penis.
Her penis. This is where we are today.
To two 11-year-old girls.
Hooray! Unfortunately, she was then convicted for possession of 16,000 images of children being raped and sexually assaulted.
Be that as it may, Sam's still a lady to me.
So you can see the type of post we're seeing here.
And it goes on, lovely Scottish lass and convicted double rapist Isla Bryson found her true authentic female self shortly before she was due to be sentenced.
Misgendering is hate, so respect Isla's pronouns please.
Love the leggings.
And so JK Rowling here is...
Is revealing to anyone with a brain and anyone with any common sense that we are in a major international freak show.
But it turns out that this international freak show also runs afoul of the Scottish hate crimes laws.
And really, JK Rowling is having none of it.
She goes, only kidding, obviously the people mentioned in the above tweets aren't women at all, but men, every last one of them.
And then she goes on to talk about the Scottish Hate Crime Act, and she basically says, I'm currently out of the country, but if what I've written here qualifies as an act of offense under the terms of the new act...
I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment.
And this is a beautiful turn of phrase right here, because what is she saying?
She's saying Scotland, really?
Scotland is a country with a, not only, first of all, a history of being tough guys.
I mean, think of Braveheart. Wasn't Braveheart about Scotland?
Wasn't about the Scottish rebellion against English occupation?
Didn't Mel Gibson portray William Wallace?
And that's the kind of ferocious Scottish spirit, the spirit of the Scottish clans and the great battle of, what is it, Bannockburn, where Robert the Bruce led the Scots.
So this is Scotland. Look what's happened to Scotland.
And not only that, but J.K. Rowling refers to the Scottish Enlightenment.
Now, the Scottish Enlightenment is, in fact, even more impressive than the English Enlightenment.
The English Enlightenment, you can put in names like Locke, very impressive, perhaps Newton, but the Scottish Enlightenment has figures like Boswell.
Adam Smith, the founder of modern economics, author of The Wealth of Nations, the philosopher David Hume, widely regarded as the greatest philosopher, not the greatest philosopher of all time, that would be either Plato probably or Aristotle or Immanuel Kant, but the greatest philosopher to write in the English language.
That's David Hume. So this is the marvel of the Scottish Enlightenment.
And J.K. Rowling is saying, look at the narrow-minded tomfoolery.
Look at the kind of twisted state of Scotland, a country with this great history.
But she goes, hey, listen. I'm going to challenge this law.
I'm going to make fun of it.
I'm going to put out rhetoric and you can say I've misgendered people or I've deadnamed them or I've misrepresented them or I haven't used their correct pronouns.
And J.K. Rowling is like, I don't really care.
But if you want to arrest J.K. Rowling and take one of the most famous women in the...
In Great Britain, holler up before the Scottish hate crimes law.
And the Scottish police have been sort of running for cover because they're like, well, we've taken a look at this.
Because, of course, a lot of the trans activists complain.
They're like, arrest J.K. Rowling.
J.K. Rowling needs to be arrested now.
And the Scottish police backing away from a fighter.
Like, no, we don't think what she's done is criminal.
So this is further whimpery by the Scots.
We've come a long way from William Wallace.
But what I want to commend here is the effectiveness of J.K. Rowling in thinking, you know what?
I've got a big following.
I've got a name.
So, you know, it's funny. I'm seeing a lot of leftists on social media.
You know, I really love the Harry Potter novels, but I'm no fan of J.K. Rowling.
I'm actually the opposite.
I'm not a huge fan of the Harry Potter novels.
I think for children's books, they are actually way too long.
And some people say they're not children's books.
And so, well, then you have to judge them by the adult standard and compare them to what?
Pride and Prejudice? Or compare them to Ernest Hemingway?
Or compare them to modern adult works of literature and judge them by that standard?
So I don't really know what to do with Harry Potter.
I've seen some of the Harry Potter films.
I can't really get into them.
They're sort of okay to me, but not great.
And then I stopped watching them just when they got out of hand.
Harry Potter this, Harry Potter that.
So my point is I'm not a super fan of...
J.K. Rowling's writing or work, but guess what?
I'm a huge fan now of J.K. Rowling the woman, J.K. Rowling the fighter, J.K. Rowling the person who knows how to take a bad cause, in this case the Scottish Hate Crimes Act, and expose it, pull down its pants, you know, reveal its private parts and all their gross ugliness for all the world to see.
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Guys, I'm delighted to have back on the podcast Gavin Wax.
He's a New York-based conservative activist, commentator, columnist.
His book, by the way, The Emerging Populist Majority.
Gavin serves as executive director of the National Constitutional Law Union.
He's also president of the New York Young Republican Club.
You can follow him on x at Gavin Wax, W-A-X. Gavin, thanks for joining me.
Thanks for coming back.
Let me start by asking you about this interesting showdown that is brewing between Jack Smith, the special prosecutor, and Judge Eileen Cannon in Florida.
This is all over the Trump classified documents case.
And, you know, this is a Trump judge, very different from the judges that the left normally gets.
You know, they have Judge Engeron in New York.
He's in their pocket. They've got a favorable judge in the Alvin Bragg case.
Of course, they're expecting to have their way with Tanya Chutkin in D.C.
But in Florida, they have not only a Trump-appointed judge, but a judge who seems to be pretty vigorously pushing back on the government.
And this is not making Jack Smith happy at all.
What is your reading on what's going on there?
Do you think that this is a case where Jack Smith recognizes that he's met his match and he's hoping to go to the 11th Circuit, in other words, to appeal over the head of Judge Cannon and get her somehow overruled or maybe even pushed off the case?
I know the left has been kind of fantasizing about all this.
What's your take on the Jack Smith-Eileen Cannon showdown?
Well, listen, I think it goes even beyond the judge.
I think even the jury pool there in Florida would be extremely favorable to President Trump, not because of a partisan bias necessarily, just because you'd probably have a much more fair and more representative demographic pool from which to pull from.
It's more competitive.
You have an environment there that's not exactly a one-party state, one-party town.
And it's funny that when you encounter situations like this, or rather when the left's lawfare encounters situations like this, where you have one judge who's willing to actually enforce the law correctly in an unbiased fashion, and then you secondarily have a jury pool that isn't, you know, 99 to 1 Democrat, all of a sudden their lawfare schemes and machinations seem to fall flat.
I think that's an interesting takeaway, looking at all these different cases.
But with that said, listen, I think Jack Smith's entire sham prosecution of President Trump is falling apart at the seams.
Obviously, we have the situation here with Judge Cannon in Florida where he's receiving pushback, but I think even the timetables, the delays, the date of the actual election, I think?
His decision, even in New York with the appellate division, was recently revised in terms of the amount of the bond to be something a lot more reasonable than the close to half a billion that they were originally demanding that President Trump pay through this disgorgement, which is a type of thing that is used to achieve equity and bring about restitution to victims, even though we all know that's a victimless crime. So it's clearly being abused as a way
to circumvent the Eighth Amendment. But all of these cases, you know, from the criminal to the civil, to the federal, to the local in Manhattan, they're all based on nonsense. They're all politicized. They're all motivated by pure partisan political maneuvering on behalf of the Democrat establishment. And it just shows a sense of fear. It shows a fear of President Trump's political and electoral resurgence and how he is very much in a
position to retake the White House come November. And if he was not in that position, if he was not running or if his poll numbers were far weaker than they currently are, we wouldn't be seeing any of these cases.
So the documents case with Jack Smith is another one of these ridiculous, you know, untested legal theories where there is a prosecution that is not prosecuting the law fairly and equally.
Obviously, we've heard all the cases regarding Clinton and Biden who've had far more egregious examples of abuses as it comes to this law, but certainly they're not being prosecuted despite testimony on the Hill and elsewhere.
So I think most Americans see through the charade and we're all hoping that the legal lawfare that they're waging will continue to fall apart as the months proceed.
I mean, what I find interesting in reading this stuff that Jack Smith is putting out is he will identify a difference between, let's say, Trump's possession of the classified documents and Biden, and he will pick out the one difference which is favorable to Biden.
So for example, he'll say that Trump had, and I'm making these numbers up, but I'm not far off, Trump had 160 documents and Biden only had 58.
he acts like this is a key difference, and based on this difference alone, now you can see, Judge Cannon, why we're prosecuting Trump and not Biden.
Now, what he doesn't mention is that Biden had documents from his days in the Senate.
Biden had documents while he was vice president.
Trump has declassification authority that Biden doesn't have.
So in other words, there are a number of factors that cut the other way in favor of Trump.
Those are omitted and excluded.
And so Jack Smith will present as a knockdown argument, a one-sided interpretation of the data.
And it's almost like he thinks that the rest of us are such fools that we can't supply the missing information.
So you have this leftist polemic And I agree with you.
I think that with a fair jury, this stuff can easily be exposed.
What worries me is when they're able to use tactics, and Judge Ngaran certainly tried.
It's kind of like, listen, I'll make it almost impossible for you to appeal by imposing such a large fine that no insurance company in the history of the country has ever come up with a number that large to post bond like this.
You won't be able to postpone and then we just start taking your stuff and act like that is nothing more than a neutral application of rule of law.
I mean, isn't it disturbing that you've got so many rank and file Democrats, I mean, I see this on social media all the time, who not only are okay with this kind of lawfare, but are cheerleading it at every stage.
It's very disheartening to see.
Obviously, the dichotomy politically in our country grows wider by the day.
The left are vicious.
They're ruthless. They'll stop at nothing.
They're shameless. They don't really even care about presenting themselves as fair and unbiased anymore.
They are openly biased political actors, whether they're prosecutors or judges.
And there's a ton of judicial misconduct. There's a ton of prosecutorial misconduct.
You were just describing, you know, Jack Smith's twisted logic, if you can even call it logic, for why he chose to prosecute Trump and not Biden. I mean, it just goes to show that they are not acting in good faith. None of them are, and they don't seem to care because they know that they're in power, they have power, and they're going to wield it and use it.
And I think this sort of situation will continue until Republicans use the power we have at the state and local level, or even at the federal level where it exists, to go tit for tat.
And it may not be the best thing to say, it may not sound great, but honestly, desperate times call for desperate measures.
And I think what they're doing to President Trump is a test run.
It's going to be done to many more, you know, political dissidents on the right, conservatives, Republicans, you name it.
And this is just the beginning, and they're setting horrible precedent.
I mean, as you mentioned with Engeron, with the bond, I mean, that is absolutely horrible precedent.
They're twisting the letter of the law to circumvent very established constitutional norms against cruel and unusual punishment, and they're masquerading it in the form of a disgorgement.
But all of these things are extremely technical.
They're extremely in the weeds.
And the general public is not going to be fully up to speed on all the machinations that are going on.
They're going to see the headlines.
They're going to see Trump is indicted.
They're going to see this, that, and the other.
And they're not going to understand and realize the complexities of these cases and how unjust they are and how mishandled or rather how corrupt the handling of the prosecution in these cases are.
And we're in really dangerous times right now, and we really need to have some sensible people, particularly from the left and the Democrats, call out this nonsense.
And it only adds insult to injury when a lot of these localities, you know, we mentioned New York, you know, are very, very, very pro-criminal and they will let some of the most violent, repeat, dangerous offenders, violent thugs walk free on desk appearance tickets.
They won't be prosecuted.
They'll get slaps on the wrist.
So you have this really stark divide in a very tyrannical, I guess a narco-tyrannical way where they will let the violent criminal thug walk, but they will throw the entire block, all the institutions, all their judicial and prosecutorial power against President Trump because he poses a threat to them politically.
It's a very sick, twisted, Orwellian, you know, judicial environment we're living in here in New York.
And I'm afraid that if they get away with this, it's only going to continue and it's only going to expand further.
And it's going to make it very difficult for people like myself to even live in New York.
You know, you're talking about the machinations of the Democrats.
I spoke yesterday about the way in which they're trying to use now, not they are trying, they're using, Biden signed an executive order, using federal dollars to get young people to the polls.
So the idea here is they're presenting this neutrally, like they're not saying, well, we're looking for democratic votes.
They say, well, we're trying to increase, we're trying to educate young people about civic engagement.
And they want to get these young people not only to vote, but they want to get these young people to be involved in the voting process, to volunteer, to go door to door.
What the Democrats do is they set up a complex organization.
It involves funding from groups like Arabella Advisors.
It involves nonprofits.
It involves setting up liaisons with hundreds of universities.
So, the reason I mention all this is because, you know, we talk about the Democrats winning by cheating, and they do cheat, but they also know how to tweak the process in very cunning ways that are facially neutral, but are really benefiting their side.
It's kind of like if we were to say, all right, let's use the Department of Health and Human Services or the Department of Education to educate gun owners and evangelical Christians on civic engagement.
We're not telling them how to vote.
We just want them to fully participate in the process.
So we're going to work with gun organizations around the country.
We're going to work with various Bible studies around the country.
Our goal is to get more people to vote.
And who can be against that?
What I'm saying is, we don't even have the imagination to think of this.
They not only think of it, but they then figure out how to carry it out, and it would be impressive enough if they were able to do it privately, but then they figure out, here's how we can get some government dollars into the process.
So, what I want to ask you is, as someone who wrote The Emerging Populist Majority, how do Republicans...
Kind of match up against this kind of a very creative and cunning and it's not entirely on the up and up but it is effective.
No, listen, Dinesh, I think you make some great points here, and it's an interesting question.
Listen, I often say that I respect the left.
I respect their ability to turn power into a science and the art of attaining political power and governmental power.
They've turned it into a science or even an art, and they've mastered it in many ways.
And they're extremely shrewd and cunning and visionary.
And I say that because I wish our side...
I had even a fraction of that sort of visionary type of approach to politicking.
And if we did, we'd probably be winning a lot more of these political battles.
Obviously, we have truth on our side, obviously the principles on our side, but in many cases, we have a lack of leadership, we have a lack of courage, we have a lack of vision to actually enact our principles and our view.
And because of that, we're always on the back foot and we're always losing these fights because we look Far more to be, you know, kind of go along, to get along, to get pats on the head, not to rock the boat, not to, you know, get the media on our back and not get any attacks or any score.
I mean, you look at Republican Party leadership historically, and you look at even many Republican elected officials, including in very deep red states, oftentimes they're extremely weak.
I mean, we saw this even recently with what happened in Nebraska, where there was a winner-take-all vote.
Nebraska is a very deep red state, but for some reason they foolishly allow their state to proportionally distribute their electoral votes based on congressional district.
And as a result, Democrats get a vote usually out of Nebraska because of the Omaha metro area congressional district, where it's apportioned.
And we have now a supermajority in that legislature.
It's a unicameral. So they certainly could get rid of it.
They chose not to. This is the typical, very weak, defeatist Republican mindset.
But listen, what the Democrats are doing is very shrewd and getting these votes, getting this civic education of young voters.
I would say there is one maybe pushback to it.
It just goes to show that their ideology has become so bankrupt and has really lost the plot in many ways that even though they control all the institutions, even though they control all the opinion generating centers of power, academia, the popular culture, the corporate boardrooms, you name it.
And even though they really have young voters, really hook, line and sinker brainwashed into their ideology, they're still such low propensity voters.
And even though they're brainwashed, they're not even enthused to go to the polls and it still requires some massive federal project to really activate them.
But it just goes to show they're using any and all means to win.
And whenever time they lose, it's really just a consequence of how far they've pushed the envelope towards the left that they've alienated so many people.
But listen, I highly and I would definitely encourage Republicans when and where possible to do to use government power to support their constituents, to support their voting base.
We know gun owners go and vote.
We know churchgoers go and vote for Republicans, gun owners, homeowners, small business owners, families.
You know, we know the demographic cohorts that support Republicans and Democrats.
They know their cohorts.
They know We're good to go.
So anywhere we can support groups that we know vote Republican, we should, because as long as the left is doing it, if we don't do it, we're always going to be on the losing end of this political divide.
My takeaway from this, Gavin, is that it is surprising, given how inept our side is, that we do as well as we do.
We should take some encouragement in the fact that we're about 50-50 in results, even though our operations leave a lot to be desired.
I think the other side of it though is that this is a country that is a center-right country.
In other words, we have a natural majority in the country of probably 55 to 60 percent.
The problem is that the other side deploys far more resource sources, they're far more organized, they're far more clever about it.
As you mentioned, they have this iron grip on key institutions or the megaphones of our culture.
And so even though they're not a majority, they come very close to getting a majority because they have this effective operation.
This is all very eye-opening, Gavin.
Really appreciate your joining me.
I've been talking to Gavin Wax, the book, The Emerging Populist Majority.
Follow him on X, at Gavin Wax.
Gavin, thanks as always for joining me.
Thank you for having me, Dinesh. Have a good one.
I'm talking about the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
I'm interpreting and expounding Harry Jaffa's important book.
And I just want to show you, by the way, this is the book in my hands.
As you can probably see, it is completely falling apart.
In fact, I have to be careful that pages don't just drop out when I make my way over to the podcast.
Now, not all my books are like this, but You know, there are some books that are worth reading once, twice, more than once, maybe five times, because you always get more out of them.
And I try to write books that are like that, and even make films that are like that, where if you go back and watch my film on Obama, even though you've seen it, maybe seen it twice, you watch it now, you'll get something more out of it.
Now, a little word about the Lincoln-Douglas debates themselves.
There were multiple debates.
They were at different locations throughout Illinois.
There was a debate in Chicago, a debate in Alton, Illinois, a debate in Galesburg.
And you had large crowds that showed up to hear these debates.
Now, obviously, you know, there were no microphones.
The speakers were standing up on sort of podiums or raised platforms.
And these weren't debates in the modern sense of the term.
Well, I don't even know if I can use that term now because we hardly have debates anymore.
But we used to have debates.
And debates, of course, were formatted.
They were structured. I know, for example, I've done probably 50 debates over the course of my career, probably about half of those or a bunch of those in Christian apologetics and a bunch of those in politics.
I've debated Walter Mondale, I've debated Jesse Jackson, Mary Frances Berry, who was head of the Civil Rights Commission.
I've debated the World Economic Forum, and of course I've debated prominent atheists like Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and others.
In those debates, typically what you have is a kind of structured format, opening statements, say 20 minutes or 15 minutes, you state your case.
Then you have a rebuttal, 5 minutes, 8 minutes.
Each side gets to answer what the other guy put forward.
Then you have maybe cross-examination.
This was for me perhaps the most fun part of the debate where for a certain amount of time, say seven minutes, I get to ask Hitchens questions, tough questions, sometimes yes or no questions, put him up against the wall, expose, get him to concede things he doesn't want to concede or find out things that he doesn't really know where you get him to admit that there are things that he's claiming he knows that he doesn't really know.
So cross-examination and then a kind of a brief closing or summary statement.
So that's a debate as we've had them in the recent past.
But that was not the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
Essentially each guy spoke in turn and they spoke for like an hour.
So each of the speakers had an extended period of time to deliver an extended address.
So think of this as a tribute to the audience because the audience wasn't, these debates weren't held for example in a university chapel.
They were held out in the open.
The audience was a mixed bag of people from all walks of life, voters, citizens, interested people, of course some press.
And in those days you had Republican press and you had Democrat press.
So you had press that represented one or the other party and would actually openly advocate for that party.
By the way, we have partisan press now, but it pretends not to be partisan.
NBC is partisan.
MSNBC, CNN, NPR is partisan.
PBS is partisan.
CBS, The New York Times, these are partisan organizations purporting to be real journalists and Honest journalists, fair and balanced, and of course, it doesn't take a lot of intelligence to see through that and to see what's really going on.
Now... I want to zoom in to the debate at Galesburg, October 7, 1858.
This is Abraham Lincoln talking about the Dred Scott decision.
He begins by talking about how the Supreme Court is the supreme law of the land, And now we're going to follow Lincoln's argument more closely.
He says, And then he reads the sentence.
So Lincoln is here quoting verbatim from the Dred Scott decision.
And then this being Abraham Lincoln, he says this, I repeat it.
The right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution.
So what's Lincoln doing here?
He knows this is a critical phrase.
He knows he's speaking out in the open.
He knows that he needs to be heard.
And one way to make sure he's heard is repetition.
Let me tell you again.
And he emphasizes these words.
This is Lincoln, in a sense, converting what in writing we might put in boldface.
Notice how Trump will post in boldface.
It's like, pay attention.
And so Lincoln here, by repetition, is achieving the verbal equivalent of boldface.
And let's continue with Lincoln.
What is it to be affirmed in the Constitution?
So Lincoln now takes the word affirmed, and he says, well, what is that constitutionally, legally?
What does that mean? He goes, made firm in the Constitution.
So made that it cannot be separated from the Constitution without breaking the Constitution, durable as the Constitution and part of the Constitution.
So what Lincoln is saying here, following the logic of Dred Scott, is that the right...
To the right of property and a slave is not only in the Constitution, it's an essential part of the Constitution, and you cannot really have the Constitution be itself without containing this particular clause.
And then Lincoln says, So here's Lincoln stepping back and saying, look, when we talk about a right that's in the Constitution, that means that states cannot override it.
Legislatures cannot override it.
Executives cannot override it.
And in fact, even state constitutions cannot override it.
Why? Because the Constitution is, and this is why Lincoln began this way, the supreme law of the land.
And now what Lincoln does is he unfurls a very Lincolnian syllogism.
Here is the syllogism that I'm going to read.
He goes, I submit to the consideration of men capable of arguing.
I'm going to state in syllogistic form the argument and he's asking, you know, see if you can find any fault with it.
1. Nothing in the Constitution or laws of any state can destroy a right distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution of the United States.
So let's go over that again.
And that is that you, and it's what I just said, you cannot have any rival to a right distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution.
That's what it means for the Constitution to be the supreme law.
Two, the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution of the United States.
So here Lincoln is doing nothing more than stating that What was the conclusion of the Dred Scott decision?
Namely, the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution of the United States.
From this, Lincoln draws his startling, powerful, and politically mobilizing conclusion.
Therefore, nothing in the Constitution or laws of any state can destroy the right of property in a slave.
In other words, no state.
And what is Lincoln thinking about here?
He's thinking about Illinois.
He's thinking about free states.
He goes, hey, here in Illinois, we think of ourselves as being a free state.
We think of ourselves as having outlawed slavery.
We don't have slaves in Illinois.
But if it is true, as the Dred Scott decision says, that the right of property in a slave is right there in the Constitution.
It can't be taken out.
It's distinctly and expressly affirmed.
Then it follows, because the Constitution is the supreme law of the land, that no law in Illinois or Massachusetts or New York or any free state can override this constitutional provision or at least this constitutional provision as interpreted by the court.
So Lincoln is basically saying that I've given you a syllogism.
If the premises are true, Now, what Lincoln is really going for is he's trying to convince his audience, if you don't like the conclusion, it must be because one of the premises is false.
And of course, what Lincoln wants to say is that the idea that the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution, that's false.
And because that premise is false, even though the reasoning is sound, the conclusion is also unsound.
But what Lincoln is doing here in very powerful political style is he's unfurling a kind of warning that if we give in to Dred Scott, if we accept its premise...
It's going to follow not only that there's going to be slavery in the South and slavery in the new territories under popular sovereignty, but there could very well be a right to slavery in the North, in the Northern states, in the free states, in states that are dominated by Republicans.
Essentially, the Democrats are going to nationalize slavery.
We're going to have slavery throughout the United States, and that is dictated by the inescapable logic of the Dred Scott decision.
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