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April 8, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
48:45
X IN BRAZIL Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep806
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Coming up, I'll show how Elon Musk is risking the banning of his entire platform in Brazil to uphold free speech.
I'll show how even the poorest people today have no conception of what it means to be poor by historical standards.
And Oron McIntyre from The Blaze joins me.
We're going to talk about how Trump and Biden are stacking up for their rematch in 2024.
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.
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In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
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I want to talk about some remarkable things that are happening with regard to the Platform X, formerly Twitter.
In Brazil.
Now, at first glance, this may seem like a distant topic to be talking about, but no.
It has important bearings about X and about the free speech principle, which is at stake here in a very big way.
But it also has implications in the sense that you see in Brazil a dark preview of something that I think not only can happen in the United States, but will happen in the And certainly will happen as the sort of left's dream for America is realized,
a dream in which you have really a one-party state, no effective opposition, an imposed singularity of viewpoints, a complete coordination of the institutions of society— We're good to go.
I want to show that it's happening in Brazil with US complicity.
We are helping it to happen in Brazil and by we I mean the Biden administration.
So let's follow this as it has been developing blow by blow.
So blow number one is that the Brazilian government notifies X that it needs to ban a bunch of people from the Brazilian opposition party.
So, in other words, they want X to ban people who are opposing the ruling regime in Brazil.
The ruling regime is run by the head of Brazil.
This is Lula da Silva, but also by two underlings who are very powerful in Brazil.
One is a Supreme Court judge named Alexandre de Moray, and the other is the Attorney General of Brazil.
And these guys are the ones.
The Attorney General is Jorge Macias.
And these are the guys who approached X and said, take all these people down.
So initially, Elon Musk said, okay, I will.
I have to because I'm following the laws of whichever country I'm part of.
But then people began to say to Elon Musk on X itself, listen, you know, Elon Musk, you're Elon Musk.
You don't have to bow down to these Brazilian overlords.
Tell them to go take a hike.
Tell them you're not going to ban these people." And so Elon Musk in kind of move number two decided, you know what?
I'm not going to ban them.
And Elon Musk recognized the full implications.
I realize that they're going to go after me.
They're going to find me.
They're going to fine me.
They're going to try to shut down X in Brazil.
Elon Musk will obviously lose money if that happens in Brazil.
And Elon Musk is like, so what?
So it's worth noting here that the fate of free speech in America at this point in our history is kind of relying on one guy.
Now, this is a very odd thing to say, and it's in a way a very unfortunate thing to say because it shouldn't be.
First of all, it's kind of unfair to Elon Musk for him to carry this kind of a burden.
But secondly, free speech is not in good shape in a country where it requires one guy We're good to go.
What's happening in Brazil is they are taking steps to open up a criminal investigation into Elon Musk and to try to...
In fact, the Attorney General in Brazil said, I'm already in touch with all the telecom companies in Brazil about shutting down X in Brazil.
So, look at this.
This is a kind of a fascist move.
To take one of the world's big platforms and just close it down for the simple reason that Elon Musk is refusing to ban members of the opposition party.
In fact, in the original demand, Brazil told Elon Musk, you have one hour to take these people down.
Now, Brazil is supposed to be a democracy, but what kind of democracy is it where you are able to not only shut down a platform like X, but you are allowed to imprison members of the opposition party for no reason other than you're accusing them of, quote, spreading disinformation about your party?
Wow. So how is democracy possible when one party is in power, they tell the other party, anything that you say to criticize us, we will consider disinformation.
And then we will start locking you people up.
This is not a democracy at all.
This is a dictatorship masquerading as a democracy.
And, very sad to say, it is supported by the Biden administration.
The Biden administration actually pushed to consolidate the power of Lula in Brazil.
You might remember there was some dispute over the Brazilian election.
Did Jair Bolsonaro win?
Did Lula win? And immediately the Biden administration jumped in and said, Lula won.
we recognize Lula as the leader of Brazil acting like any effort to dispute the election was some sort of you know re recreation of January 6th. Brazil had its own kind of echo of January 6th and now it seems that there's regular communication between the Biden administration, the State Department and the Brazilians. It's almost as if the Biden people are in league with Lula and this guy Macias and Morey all to go after Elon Musk. Elon Musk
has become the guy and I think because Elon Musk is the obstacle to the shutting down of free speech which is the goal of these authoritarians.
Isn't it ironic that these are the people who accuse Trump of being an authoritarian?
Look at the way that they shut down the democratic process itself by shutting down opposition leaders, by cutting off access of the people to information.
Information is the lifeblood of a democracy.
And then here's my takeaway from all this.
That what's happened in Brazil that allows this to occur is that they've captured the Supreme Court.
And what does that tell you?
That this is why the left is so determined to capture the Supreme Court here.
Because if they do, then you will have Supreme Court justices, by the way, very similar to a Judge Ngaran or to Tanya Chutkin, the judge in D.C. These are the people who will be on our court.
And they will be deciding, oh no, you know, the illegals voting, that's constitutional.
We can't talk about one man, one vote.
An illegal is a man, isn't he?
One man, one vote. There you go.
So, we're going to see decision like this, decision upon decision come down until our democracy, even though it might remain a democracy in name, is really not a constitutional democracy anymore.
Very similar to countries like East Germany, the old East Germany when it was under communism, the German Democratic Republic.
The word democratic is there just for cosmetic reasons.
There's no real democracy.
Democracy has become a shell.
Democracy has become a sham.
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But here are some of the reasons.
The cost of goods continues to rise despite interest rate controls by the Fed since January 2021.
Cost of living is up 17.9%.
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I came across a post on X that is full of very interesting information about the world today.
We have lost. And by the world we have lost, I mean the ancient world, the world before, say, 1500 A.D. And it's worthwhile every now and then to remember what that world was like because it shows you how far we've come and it shows you how even our basic understanding of poverty, not just in the industrialized countries or the developed countries, but anywhere, anywhere in the world today, is completely different than it was in the past.
I also find this post really interesting because it reveals the origin of a number of phrases that we learn along the way, but we never know what they mean or where they come from.
Let me give you a few of these phrases.
Holding awake, which you do when someone dies.
You hear the phrase, the upper crust.
It's the upper crust. What does that mean?
Where did that idea come from?
Or, dirt poor.
Or, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I mean, if you focus on these phrases, they make no sense.
Why would you throw the baby out with the bathwater?
Bathing a baby? I'm going to throw the bathwater.
Let me throw the baby out. Don't throw the baby out.
What does that mean? Why would anyone even say that?
Why do brides carry bouquets of flowers?
Sometimes people use the phrase, piss poor.
I heard that phrase when I first came to America.
I was like, why would you say that?
What is the implication of it?
Well, the beauty of this post is it explains it all.
So I'm just going to give you a few lines and a few sentences to show you.
Okay, here we go. They used to use urine to tan animal skins.
So families used to all pee in a pot, and then every day the pee was taken and sold to the tannery.
But to do this, if you had to do this to survive, you were called piss poor.
You were piss poor because you needed to collect money from your urine in order to survive.
Alright. Apparently, people in the year 1500 and before took very irregular bats.
They would take bats only like once a month.
And obviously, the rest of the month, you would start smelling pretty bad because it wasn't time for your monthly bat.
And so brides who would often stink...
Because it was not their bath time, would carry a bouquet of flowers because the flowers would hide the odor of their body.
And that custom of carrying the bouquet of flowers persists today.
Apparently when people took baths, the man of the house would bathe first when the water was really clean.
Then the wife and then the children one by one according to age.
So basically the babies would be washed last and the water was already extremely filthy.
And so sometimes what happens is you could actually lose the baby in the bathwater.
So that's why the phrase, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, because the bathwater was so dirty that you have to be careful to identify the baby.
Now, houses apparently in those days, well we know that they did, they had these thatched roofs which were piled with straw and many times the animals would have to climb into the straw to stay warm because that was the only place to be protected from the cold.
But then if it started raining, Sometimes what would happen is it would become really slippery on the top and animals would fall down.
They would come crashing down into the hut and that was the phrase, it's raining cats and dogs.
Because it's raining cats and dogs, down comes the cat, down comes the dog, along with the rain.
Poor people in those days had dirt floors.
Only the wealthy had something other than dirt, and that's the origin of the phrase, dirt poor.
Also, when bread was sold, it was sold kind of according to status.
So, by and large, if you're a common laborer, you got the bottom part of the bread, which was burned.
Other members of the family would get the middle part of the bread, and then the guests would get the top of the bread.
And that's the origin of the phrase upper crust.
The upper crust is like the sort of the elite.
And so hospitality in the ancient world meant giving the upper crust to the people who are going to get the best of it all.
And then here's my favorite.
Apparently, people in those days, their lives were obviously pretty tough and pretty miserable, and so heavy drinking was the norm.
And heavy drinking was heavy drinking in a scale that we don't even realize today because very often people would be so drunk they would be knocked out for like a couple of days.
They wouldn't even get up.
So someone would be coming across, walking on the road, and they would see what would look to be a corpse lying dead on the road.
And yet you would realize it could just be a drunk guy.
And that guy, he's been there since yesterday, but that's because he just hasn't revived.
So initially they were just prepared to bury the guy, but of course he might not be dead.
And so a custom developed where when you find one of these guys, you sort of lay him out on a carpet or lay him out on a rug and you watch him for a couple of days to see if they come too.
If they don't come to, they might actually be dead.
But if they revive, then they're obviously only drunk.
So the whole custom of holding awake was nothing more than observing to see whether or not the guy actually is revived.
And if he's revived, obviously he rejoins the family.
And if he's dead, you put him in the ground.
But this way you make sure that you don't put people who are alive into the ground simply because they had too much to drink.
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Guys, I'd like to welcome to the podcast a new guest, Oron McIntyre.
He's host of the Oron McIntyre Show, a columnist for Blaze News.
In fact, he has a forthcoming book that we want to preview.
It's called The Total State.
You can follow him on x at Oron McIntyre.
Oron, thanks for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
We're going into this critical election with Trump and Biden, I guess, rematched to some extent from 2020.
What is your take on how things are shaping up so far?
Well, it became very clear in the original election that it was really a referendum on Trump.
It was very clear that the system did not like Donald Trump.
He had a strong economy, which almost always guarantees a second term for a president.
An incumbent almost always wins with a good economy.
And then we saw the Black Swan event of the pandemic, followed up by the riots.
And then, of course, all of the new standards.
of the ways that people get elected when it came to the 2020 election.
The system threw everything they could at Donald Trump, and Joe Biden was really just a cipher, I think, for the system, the existing oligarchy, to continue their rule and push Trump out of the way. This time, Joe Biden actually has a record as president, and it's really bad, and I think a lot of people recognize that. Even the left understands that Joe Biden is a very weak candidate.
And so what's very interesting here is that for once we actually see Donald Trump burst a real candidate with a terrible record, and I think in that situation, we're going to see a shift. The real question, of course, is what can the Democrats do to impact Donald Trump's electability?
They've done everything they can with indictments and everything else, and so I think it's less about is Donald Trump going to lead naturally? I think he will. I think the question will be how much can the Democrats throw at Donald Trump to try to keep a legitimate election from occurring.
Now, the form of election interference in 2024 appears to be different than it was in 2020, different than in 2022.
In this case, it appears to be systematic lawfare on all fronts.
The cases in New York, of course in Florida, in D.C., and And yet, it appears that the impact of these is not what the Democrats predicted.
I think they predicted that, look, in no normal environment would the Republican Party be okay with a candidate with a multiplicity of criminal indictments.
And yet, it appears like the criminal indictments have, to some degree, fueled Trump, strengthened him, caused people to rally behind him.
Do you think that this is a failed strategy, or do you think that the Democrats are still hoping, hey listen, if we can get a single conviction, a single big guilty headline, even if that is later overturned on appeal, that will be enough to torpedo Trump for November?
I don't think the Democrats had one specific cohesive strategy.
It was more of a everything in the kitchen sink thrown at Donald Trump.
That's why the media chose the term insurrection after January 6th, even though you'd never heard them call anyone, even people who were actually traitors against the United States insurrectionists.
And that's because they were specifically attempting to invoke The 14th Amendment's clause about insurrection.
But that was just one of many things that they were trying to do.
As you said, there are so many different charges, many of which I think people feel correctly are illegitimate, are manufactured simply to try to take Trump out of the running.
I don't think that any of these cases are really gonna remove Trump's eligibility, but the real question will probably be the way that the election system has changed.
Molly Hemingway wrote a great book called Rigged about the way that our election system has been fundamentally altered since the last election.
And I'm sad to say that the Republican Party hasn't really dealt and grappled with the enormity of that issue.
And so I don't think Trump will be taken out by this law fair, though it simply has hampered him.
I think you're right that this has backfired as a way to stop Trump from getting the support of the Republican Party.
But I also don't think it's the deeper issue.
I think we have a wider systemic issue with the way that our elections are now held.
And that is probably the thing that Donald Trump will have to actually face.
What factor do you think, Oran, is significant or the most significant in that respect this year?
Do you think it's the, is it the bad voter rolls?
Is it the mail-in drop boxes?
Because there were some things that they did under the pretext of COVID. That pretext is gone.
But nevertheless, you're right, some of those systems are still in place.
Republicans almost belatedly are now talking about, well, we better do some ballot harvesting of our own.
But I agree with you.
I don't think that seems quite up to the fact that the Democrats are very good at tilting the scales in many different respects, not the least of which is to funnel giant amounts of money into non-profits.
Which even though they are legally forbidden from participating directly in elections seem to have figured out clever ways to get involved.
Exactly. And this is part of what my book, The Total State, is about, is the way that our government has expanded beyond the understanding that the framers had when they laid out the way the Constitution was supposed to work.
The checks and balances that were created by the founders were only meant to apply to our formal government.
They never imagined a system where this giant NGO and media apparatus is utilized by a solid ruling class to go ahead and violate all the separations of powers and everything else that were built into the Constitution. And the Republicans, to be frank, haven't figured that out either. Like you said, there's some effort to chase the dragon, to chase the system now that the Democrats have set up, but there's no way to actually counteract it. That's really being kicked around by the Republican
Party. You can look at people like Ron DeSantis. Now, Ron DeSantis is a popular governor in Florida, of course, and I think that attributed to the size of his win. But the other reason he had such a sizable margin of victory in Florida when everybody else in the red wave fizzled out was Florida actually did voter reform. They actually took action to clean up their rolls, to get a hold of mail-in ballots and ballot harvesting and all of these
things. And that had a tangible impact on the voter numbers and the way that the election went. So I think you can see a model in that, but of course, it's difficult to do that at the federal level when so much of this is at the state level and you don't have a Republican apparatus that can clean all of this up in every state.
Although interestingly, Oran, in a couple of the key swing states, I'm thinking here specifically above Michigan, certainly Arizona, even in Pennsylvania, there was a Republican legislature that did have the power to jump in on this stuff and clean up the system, and yet they didn't.
Now let's talk about why that is.
Do you think that it's simply because, I mean, certainly every time a Republican tries to clean up the voter rolls, there are deafening screeches of racism, of denying people the right to vote, of even requiring ID as seen as some kind of imposition on people's ability to vote.
Are Republicans in classic manner running scared from the sort of racism label?
Or is it just that we have a lethargic party here that is just slow on the uptake and just doesn't do what's necessary even to protect its own interests at the ballot box?
I think it's all of the above.
You're right that the Republican Party is terrified of the accusation of racism and every other slander that the left throws at them.
And there's simply no way that there's going to be an effective political opposition to the ruling class in the United States until people simply get over this.
Someone calls you racist, you say, I don't care, I'm fixing the voter rolls.
The end of that. You really cannot allow that accusation to have any weight inside of the American political sphere if you want to clean things up.
But on top of this, I think that there's just a lack of imagination on the right.
The left act as a ruling class.
They act as if they have the right to rule.
and they act as if they should go ahead and take action to ensure that they stay in power.
The right continues to believe that democracy is, you know, just kind of a debate club where we get together and we have discussions in the marketplace of ideas and the best idea comes out on top.
You would think if you look at the results of things like transgender stuff for children and all the other ridiculous things that are wildly unpopular but still get forced onto our populace on a regular basis that they would understand that the idea that the best idea always wins in the marketplace doesn't seem to bear itself out in the actual democratic process. But they continue to operate under this illusion that allows them to kind of shy away from taking more vigorous actions like the ones we're talking about.
Your forthcoming book is called The Total State.
Now, normally the total state is, at least to my mind, totalitarianism, right?
That word itself embodies the concept of totality, and we think of communist and fascist regimes which are dedicated to the total state.
Are we there yet?
Are we moving in that direction?
What do you mean by the total state?
And on a scale of, let's say, 1 to 10, how far down the road are we?
Well, like you said, Dinesh, when most people think of the total stake, they think of the jackboots and the gulags, right?
The Soviet Union, Nazi Germany.
And this is why I think it's hard for us to recognize how far down this path we've already gone.
Because in the West, we kind of ended up with a soft, liberal, democratic version of the total stake.
James Burnham was a thinker on the right.
He worked at National Review, and he came up with the idea of the managerial revolution, explaining that while the Nazis, the fascists, and the communists had this system that seemed more totalitarian, every government in the modern world, even liberal democracies, had adopted this idea of managerialism, building on bureaucratic systems that were leviathans that had to control the mass production and consumption of these new huge nations.
And because of that adoption, they had to go ahead and figure out how to continue to rule even though they were under a democratic process instead of under obviously like a communist dictatorship or a Nazi dictatorship.
And so what they figured out was that manipulating the vote, controlling the voters, controlling especially the information that these people received is actually what allowed the ruling class to stay in power.
And man, have we seen the way that that has played out, especially in the area of COVID. We're good to go.
I'm talking about this kind of totalitarianism, this soft totalitarianism that has come to power in the West.
And I think at this point, we're pretty far down that road.
If you can shut down churches, if you can shut down elections, and then you can open up riots while everyone stays huddled inside, how free of a country do you really have?
I mean, I do find it amazing that the penetration of this total state goes way beyond academia.
It goes beyond the media.
The way it was, for example, able to contaminate the health authorities, for example, came as a total surprise to me.
I mean, let's say I'm the editor of Scientific American.
I've got a prestigious journal.
I am publishing authoritative studies.
I'm widely respected all over the world.
What on earth could convince me that to start writing articles about how women can become men or start writing articles about the fact that, you know, if you take the vaccine, you can't get COVID and you can't...
I mean, things that are manifestly untrue and absurd, not only for expert scrutinizers, but for the ordinary guy can look at it and go, this is blatant nonsense.
So why would somebody like that throw away the credibility of a magazine?
I guess perhaps the answer is they don't see it as throwing it away as long as the credibility is intact with the elite class.
But comment on that.
How do you get through to a guy like that?
Yeah, I think the key really is understanding the power of the ruling class.
In the United States, we tend to not think about class society.
We like to think of ourselves as an egalitarian society where everyone rises up, has equal ability, all of these things.
And so we tend not to recognize the unified interests of a ruling class.
But a ruling class always exists.
Even though we call ourselves a democracy, ultimately we have to vest that power in a representative class.
That's what a representative republic is all about.
And so that means that over time, if that class is allowed to ossify, if it's allowed to become one unified thing, then they will develop very specific interests and they will warp power around them.
This is what Carl Schmitt warned about when he coined the phrase the total state, that as the democratic process would penetrate every sphere, as this ruling class attempted to gain power and Make sure that they regularly won every election, make sure that they regularly held power no matter what, that the politics would have to penetrate every sphere, whether it be the personal, the religious, the medical.
And because of this, we would see a total state where every aspect of our existence became completely political because the ruling class needed to wield every single social interaction as a political weapon to make sure that they stay in power in the next election.
And do you think as we close out here, Oren, that the resistance to the ruling class, if it comes from anywhere, must come from the Republican Party?
I mean, there is a strain of opinion that holds that we have a uniparty in this country, that the Republican Party is just another version of the Democratic Party.
Maybe it's Democratic Party-lite, but they're kind of all in it together.
Now it seems to me if that's the case, this is almost a recipe for hopelessness because then it means that there are no institutional channels through which any kind of effective resistance can be mounted.
Where do you think resistance can and must come from?
I think that the Republican Party will ultimately be a vehicle for reform.
However, I do not think it will be as it exists now.
Many Republicans recognize Donald Trump as a danger to the Republican Party, and they were right because Donald Trump came in and smashed this old guard idea.
What truly was, I think, the Uniparty when people refer to that, that neoconservative understanding of the world that aligned pretty much with the left on most issues, I think got smashed by Donald Trump coming in.
I don't know that Trump is able to complete this transformation.
He may not be the guy to completely move the Republican Party where it needs to go.
But his value was in smashing the Overton window that defined what the right could be.
Trump came in and said, it's okay to care about your jobs and protect them.
It's okay to close down the border and care about your culture and your country.
It's okay to recognize that people need to care about America first and not send all of their money to foreign countries and deploy our troops everywhere.
And these are all positions that were stalwart, things that the right had fought for, for most of my life.
And so it's really great to see him change the way that the right defines itself.
So we'll probably have people who call themselves Republicans or run as the GOP to go ahead and have access to certain parts of the apparatus or to get onto certain tickets.
But I think what we will see is a transformation or what we have to see is a transformation of what the GOP is if we wanna see any real change in the United States.
I mean, that's fascinating.
What you're kind of saying, the way I take it is that it's almost like the old, when the Whig party transformed itself into the Republican party.
Now, of course, there what happened is the Whig Party actually dissolved, and the Republican Party took its place.
But it's conceivable you could have a similar transformation within the Republican Party.
I think that's what you're talking about.
Great stuff, Oran. Guys, we've been talking to Oran McIntyre, TV host at The Blaze, host of The Oran McIntyre Show.
Forthcoming book is The Total State, and follow him on X at Oran, A-U-R-O-N. McIntyre, Oran, thank you for joining me.
Thanks for having me.
I'm continuing my discussion of Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
The book that we're talking about is Harry Jaffa's Crisis of the House Divide.
And I've got probably a few more sessions before I complete the book.
But it is a little known fact that Stephen Douglas, prominent Democrat, running against Lincoln, almost became the head, the leader, of the anti-slavery movement.
He might even have become the leader of the Republican Party.
Now, these are incredible things to say.
It would be almost similar to someone prominent in the Democratic Party.
Suddenly having a chance to get the Republican nomination for the presidency.
So the question then becomes, why would Republicans have any interest?
Why would the anti-slavery party, why would the anti-slavery movement, the so-called free soil movement, why would it want to nominate or even consider a guy like Stephen Douglas?
Well, the answer has to do with something that happened in Kansas after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed Kansas to make up its own mind about whether it wanted to have slavery or not.
Now, as soon as this happened, a whole bunch of slave owners and pro-slavery guys from the South Rushed over to Kansas and conducted a kind of an immediate referendum.
This was called the LeCompton Constitution.
The LeCompton Constitution, which became an adopted constitution for the state of Kansas, was essentially a radically pro-slavery document.
It said that slavery would exist in Kansas, and this was achieved not really by having a normal election in Kansas, But rather by, well, something rather familiar in our own time, by sort of stacking the deck,
by rigging the rules, by setting it up so that the election was conducted immediately with an influx of Southerners, Southern Democrats into Kansas, and so the outcome was correctly perceived.
By lots of people, not only in Kansas, but all over the country, as this is a rigged, this is a bogus election.
Kansas has voted for slavery, but not really.
But not really. Now, there was so much outrage about this.
There were outbreaks of violence all across Kansas.
People began to speak about bloody Kansas because of riots that broke out following the Lecompton Constitution.
And throughout the North, There was unmitigated outrage about what had happened in Kansas.
Stephen Douglas, very interestingly, came out strongly against the LeCompton Constitution.
And Stephen Douglas did so not because he opposed popular sovereignty.
He was the champion of popular sovereignty.
So not because he didn't want Kansas to decide for itself if it wanted slavery.
That was Stephen Douglas's position.
Kansas should decide for itself.
But what Douglas basically said is this was not a A correct way to determine the will of the people of Kansas.
In other words, Douglass acknowledged that the LeCompton Constitution had been adopted in a sort of bogus or fraudulent way.
And when Douglass took the strong position against the LeCompton Constitution, many people in the North thought, wow, this is a Democrat and he's anti-slavery.
He's one of us.
We need to back this guy.
Now, Abraham Lincoln very shrewdly recognized that Douglass was not backing away from his principle of popular sovereignty at all.
All that Douglass was saying is that I want popular sovereignty.
We should have referendums on slavery in the North as well as in the South.
Except here in Kansas, as a matter of fact, they haven't had a proper referendum.
Of course, the implication being that had Kansas, let's say, had a proper referendum and decided, hey guys, we would like to have slavery, then Douglas would obviously have supported it.
Because Douglas' whole position was that he, quote, didn't care if slavery was voted up or down.
What he did care about is the procedure by which this decision was arrived at.
In a sense, you can see here the sort of the pro-choice position.
I don't care whether people have abortions or they don't.
What I care about is giving people the right to choose.
And Douglass's position, very similar to that.
I'm giving territories and states the right to choose.
Now, the great achievement of Lincoln was to cut Douglas out from potential leadership of the anti-slavery movement.
Because think about it, if Douglas had taken over the anti-slavery movement, the anti-slavery movement would have been based on popular sovereignty.
And for Lincoln, this was anathema.
This was anathema on many different levels, but mostly it was anathema for one simple reason.
And that is, the simple notion that you don't care if slavery is right or wrong is, for Lincoln a complete abomination.
It's not just a moral abomination.
It's also a heresy against the Declaration of Independence.
Why? Because the Declaration of Independence asserts the equality of all men.
The moral equality, the political equality, and ultimately the legal equality as well.
Now, Lincoln recognized to acknowledge a principle, a moral principle, a legal principle, is not to say that there might be circumstances in which the principle is abridged, is modified, is even repudiated.
But when you repudiate it, you have to acknowledge that...
That the principle itself is valid, even though the application is not allowed at a given time.
So, for example, this was Lincoln's view about slavery and the founding.
The founders compromised with slavery because they had to.
They weren't saying that slavery is a good thing, nor were they saying that slavery is morally indifferent.
They agreed.
They agreed that slavery was bad.
And pretty much all of them agreed.
Let's take the example of Thomas Jefferson.
Now, people like to point out that Jefferson at one point in his life owned 200 slaves, that Jefferson was a southern planter, and all of this is true.
But this is the very same Jefferson who was a...
Active proponent of prohibiting slavery in the Pacific Northwest.
So what ultimately came to be expressed as the Northwest Ordinance, who was pushing for that?
Thomas Jefferson. So here you have...
And again, this is not a contradiction.
It's not like Jefferson is somehow so mysterious that we just can't understand the man.
Sometimes he goes this way.
Sometimes he goes that way.
No. For Jefferson, slavery in the South had been brought...
By the British. Slavery had been embedded into American institutions.
In fact, in Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration of Independence, he blamed the King of England for introducing slavery.
He goes, I blame you for bringing this horrible practice and, in a sense, sticking it on us.
And not only that, but not even allowing us to get rid of it.
So Jefferson's point is now slavery is sort of built into the structure, certainly the plantation economy of the South.
Jefferson is like, I don't know how to extricate it very easily, but nevertheless, A, slavery is against moral principles.
It's wrong, even if I have to have slaves on my own plantation because I don't know any other way to run a plantation in the South.
So this is...
Lincoln's position.
Lincoln's position is almost identical with Jefferson's.
Lincoln, of course, is coming 80 years later.
But what Lincoln is saying is we have to begin all discussions of this topic by recognizing that slavery is wrong.
Once we recognize that slavery is wrong, we can now discuss how to handle it.
And Lincoln was open to all kinds of pragmatic accommodation or compromise about what to do about it.
But he was not open to any compromise on the question of whether or not slavery was wrong in the first place.
Now, for Lincoln...
You have an interesting question about why you have slavery south of the Mason-Dixon line in places like Kentucky, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and then you have no slavery in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin.
At one point, Douglass had intimated, he suggested that the reason for this was the climate.
Somehow, slavery is more amenable to the southern climate.
It's not so amenable to the northern climate.
But Lincoln's view was that doesn't really work because he said, look...
We can maybe make that argument about the Deep South and the Far North, that they have very different climates.
But Lincoln's point is when you look at the Midwest, when you look at the great middle of the country, you've got Southern states, but their Northern parts are bumping into the Midwest.
And then you've got Midwestern states and their Southern part is bumping into the South.
And so it's no explanation just to say it's the climate because the climate itself doesn't really do it.
If you look at the Ohio River, there's no difference in climate between the left bank and the right bank.
In the state of Missouri, you have Missouri sitting side by side with Illinois, and yet Missouri has slaves and Illinois doesn't, even though the latitudes of the two states are pretty much identical.
So Lincoln's view was that, look, slavery ultimately isn't just a matter of, hey, the climate dictates it, so we gotta have it.
He said slavery is a matter of choice.
It is whether or not the moral sense of the people in that area are going for slavery or not.
And even though Lincoln was a critic of popular sovereignty, Lincoln was not a critic to the sense that Lincoln agreed that ultimately slavery must be banned by the moral sense of the people not being for it.
So Lincoln was never for laws that run radically against the sentiments and will of the people.
He never took the position, hey, listen, these people may absolutely all want slavery, but we're just going to force them to be free.
We're going to force them to be free states.
Or conversely, these people want to be free, but we're going to force them to...
And public sentiment have got to sort of reinforce each other.
It's the public sentiment that provides the support for the law to be enacted in the first place, and then the law acts to strengthen that public sentiment and reflect it and sort of represent it in the public policy sphere.
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