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April 15, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
54:13
WAR GAMES Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep811
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Coming up, I'll consider a couple of telling details of the Iran attack on Israel All is not quite as it appears and something else might be going on.
I'll offer a roadmap on day one of the Stormy Daniels trial.
That's finally in a New York courtroom.
And Brandon Caserta, this is one of the victims of the Whitmer kidnapping hoax, is going to join me.
We're going to talk about how he was framed by the FBI and by the U.S. government.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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Iran has launched a series of rockets and cruise missiles at Israel.
And the Israelis have intercepted most of them.
not all of them, there seem to have been some, I don't know, a dozen, maybe a half dozen, that Went through, because you could see, even on the videos circulating on social media, you could see the explosions.
So this is not a case where all the missiles were intercepted, but it is a triumph of the Iron Dome and Israeli interception, apparently supported by the U.S., that the Iranian attack does not seem to have caused anything.
Tremendous havoc. In fact, it looks like there's only one casualty, a single solitary casualty.
And the immediate aftermath of all this is a predictable series of reactions across the political spectrum that take the incident pretty much at face value.
And so we get a lot of lectures about the effectiveness of Israeli interceptions.
Some people saying, well, the attack needs to be severely punished.
Israel apparently is thinking about ways in which it can retaliate and respond.
And the Biden administration, which has been kind of oscillating from, would we demand a ceasefire?
We don't want the Israelis to go into Rafa.
But just as with October 7th, now that there's an attack, the Biden administration is, we strongly condemn the attacks, but we don't want Israel to overreact.
We don't want Israel to attack Iran.
And... And then there are conservatives all over, across the spectrum by and large, responding in very predictable ways.
So you've got Christian conservatives invoking the Bible.
Here's David Brody.
Israel is not Ukraine.
It's much different. Just read the book of Genesis.
If we don't stand with Israel, I truly believe we'll lose God's hand of protection.
Here's Biden himself.
I condemn Iran's attacks in the strongest possible terms and affirm America's ironclad commitment, blah, blah, blah.
And then there's the national security spokesman, John Kirby, on Meet the Press.
And he's like, well, he says, and again, speaking in this kind of namby-pamby rhetoric where you don't really know what he's saying, he was asked a question.
He goes, is this war going to escalate?
He goes, well, President Joe Biden doesn't believe that it needs to escalate.
Well, first of all, what the heck is that?
It's like asking, are we in a war?
Well, I don't believe that we need to be in a war.
Well, we may not need to be in a war.
Are we in a war or not?
Well, I don't believe we are.
Well, we're not asking what your belief is.
We're asking, what is the situation?
So, sometimes when you read, when you listen to these guys, you have to realize they're speaking in a kind of deliberately obfuscatory manner.
Now, there's also some comment about the fact that Jordan and some of the other Middle Eastern countries have come to the defense of Israel on this, and does this indicate a shift of loyalties in the Middle East?
I think a lot of this is missing the point here and missing what's going on.
Let me mention two telling details that I think get us to the heart of the matter.
Number one. The Iranians fire these rockets, and they are carried by unmanned drones.
And they do it not from the border of Israel, which, by the way, Iran is capable of doing.
Iran has Hezbollah.
Hezbollah is based in Lebanon, but it is right on the border of Israel.
Hezbollah has a massive arsenal of rockets.
They're essentially lobbing them over the fence, so to speak.
But Iran didn't do that.
They fire the rockets from six to seven hours away.
In other words, it takes the rocket seven hours to land.
And then they announce it.
They're like, we have launched these rockets.
They're going to be getting to you in about seven hours.
In other words, it's almost as if the Iranians do something where they know and expect and perhaps even want to These rockets to be shot down.
Why else would you tip off your adversary and tell them, hey, it's kind of like two boxes.
I'm about to throw a punch, and you start rolling your hand as if you're about to throw the punch.
Well, obviously the other guy is going to put his hands up and mount a defense because he knows where the punch is going to land.
So the first question is, why would Iran do this?
And now we come to the second question, and I'm referring here to an article in the Jerusalem Post.
I'm now quoting, Iran informed Turkey in advance of its planned operation against Israel, adding that the U.S. conveyed to Iran via Ankara, Ankara is the capital of Turkey, that its operation must be, quote, within certain limits.
Now, you have to digest this for a minute, because...
What is going on here is that according to the Jerusalem Post, Iran told Turkey, remember Turkey is a at least nominal ally of the United States, and Iran says to Turkey, we're going to be doing these attacks.
Turkey turns around and tells the Biden administration.
So the unmistakable lesson or conclusion to be drawn, the Biden administration knew about the attacks in advance.
Now, did the Biden administration go to Turkey and say, tell the Iranians not to do it?
Because remember, Joe Biden has been saying that here in public.
When he was asked, what is his message to Iran?
He's like, don't. One word, kind of like the Spartans, don't.
And yet, in using the back channel of Turkey, the Biden administration says to Iran, yeah, go ahead, launch the attack.
But listen, don't go too far.
Like, launch the attack, quote, within certain limits.
Now, how do we make sense of all this?
Well, I think there's really only one way to make sense of it, and that is the Biden administration is working hand-in-hand with Iran.
In other words, there is a scheme afoot for the Biden administration to shift its alliance from Israel and Saudi Arabia on the one hand.
Remember, the United States has been allied with Saudi Arabia since the 1940s.
Israel since at least the formation of the Jewish state in 1948.
And so, this is long-standing US policy of more than half a century.
And yet, we have here some clues.
I agree, we don't have definitive proof.
What we are trying to do is make sense of what we know about this incident.
But what seems to be going on here is that the Biden administration is choreographing Iran's actions in such a way that they can then say, well, we are protecting Israel.
But at the same time, they're allowing Iran to make a kind of show of force that is not really a genuine display of force.
The political strategist and political scientist Ian Bremmer made an interesting observation.
Now, he made this observation several years ago, quote, U.S. relationship with Iran will be significantly closer than with Saudi Arabia within a decade.
And he said this in 2016.
So it's almost been a decade.
And we can see that what he's saying is coming true.
And the clear...
Evidence of this, we find going back to Obama in the Iran deal.
Because in the Iran deal, the Obama people would step forward and say very confidently, we have clear language in the deal that prevents Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.
They kept just repeating this phrase constantly.
But if you actually read the Iran deal, buried in it, not the small print, because it's in the same size print as everything else, But it's in there, deep into the text.
The deal, if you look at it, is like 100 pages long.
This is like on page 95.
And I'm going to read.
Iran is called upon.
Called upon.
Think of what that means. Called upon doesn't mean you have to.
Called upon means we are asking you to.
Iran is called upon to not undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons.
So look at the language there.
I am calling upon you not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles Quote, designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons.
I'm not telling you you can't build a nuclear weapon.
I'm not telling you that you can't build ballistic delivery systems.
I just don't think, I'm just calling on you not to develop these things that are, quote, designed to be to launch a missile.
So you can build a ballistic delivery system, you can say it's designed for something else.
I'm building it because I have all kinds of peaceful uses of nuclear power.
I'm designing it for that purpose.
Now, true, if we ever get into a war, I'll have those ballistic delivery systems and I can use them to carry missiles, but they weren't, quote, designed to do that.
And it goes on like this.
So, clearly, what the Obama people did is they...
Altered the language in the Iran agreement, not to stop Iran from getting a weapon, but giving Iran a backdoor clearance to develop a weapon.
So to my way of thinking, this is not this latest Iran attack cannot be simply interpreted as our adversary has done something, we've got to do something.
There's clearly an element of complicity from the Biden administration itself.
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of this is aimed at convincing and putting pressure on the Republican House on Mike Johnson to clear funding for Ukraine and for Israel.
There's a bill that is being held up by Mike Johnson.
And sure enough, now that you have the Iran attack, I see Mike Johnson is like, well, no, we're going to have to bring this to the floor.
We're going to have to have people consider it and vote on it.
So could it be, this is an incredible thought, could it be that part of the motive of this backdoor diplomacy between the Biden regime and Iran is aimed not even at Israel, not even at the Middle East at all, but is a domestic strategy to take a bill, a law, that is frozen in the House.
It's already gotten clearance in the Senate. Biden is ready to sign it, but they're having trouble getting it through. So it's like, let's bamboozle these Republicans.
Let's put pressure on them so they are forced to take action in response to this international threat, a threat that the Biden administration itself knew about and has helped to manipulate and helped to orchestrate.
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Jury selection has begun today in the It's sometimes colloquially called the hush payments or the hush money case.
It's the case that involves Stormy Daniels and Donald Trump.
And it is a little bit...
It's a little odd and interesting that this is the case that may well go forward.
In fact, it's very likely to go forward.
All the other cases are, to one degree or another, stalled.
January 6th case is awaiting a Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity.
The Florida case on classified documents is moving very slowly.
And of course, the Fannie Willis case in Georgia is now being jump-started again.
But again, who knows when that's going to find its way into a courtroom.
But here we have in the courtroom already with a left-wing judge.
This is Merchant.
And Trump is being charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
Now... When you hear 34 counts, you tend to think, oh my gosh, 34 counts.
What they're talking about is 34 business entries that record reimbursement payments to Trump's lawyer.
This is Michael Cohen.
And supposedly what happened is that Michael Cohen made a payment to Stormy Daniels.
And to basically go away.
And then this was recorded in terms of the multiple payments so that the payments weren't made in one shot.
The reimbursements occurred in small pieces, 34 pieces to be exact.
And so, again, you might step back and go, well, look, we don't know what really happened in this particular situation, but...
Let's just say that Trump paid this money through Michael Cohen.
So what? Where's the illegality?
Where's the crime? Where are the felonies?
Why are you alleging a criminal case?
Well, it turns out that there is no criminal case and certainly not a felony case at all to this point.
So the only way to make it a felony case is to allege Election interference.
Election interference by Trump.
So now you have something, you're like, election interference?
Well, how does the election interference even enter into it?
Well, it turns out...
That the election interference is that the DA, Bragg, is alleging that Trump was a part of a scheme to suppress politically damaging stories about his own candidacy going back to the 2016 election.
So the idea is that supposedly that these stories had every right to come out.
Trump wanted to suppress the stories from coming out.
So he arranged the payoff to Stormy Daniels.
And by doing this, Trump is interfering with a presidential election.
I mean, You really have to step back and almost laugh at the audacity of this and the foolishness of it and the preposterousness of it because...
Let's even say that Trump doesn't want negative stories to come out on him.
So, every candidate doesn't want negative stories to come out on him.
There were negative stories that would have come out on Biden with the Hunter Biden laptop.
There were all kinds of people who went to great lengths to suppress those stories from coming out.
None of those people have been charged with election interference.
By the way, the election laws are not state laws.
They are federal laws. And so what Alvin Bragg has done in this case is he's taken a misdemeanor case, which is the falsifying, the misdemeanor case is the falsifying of the business records.
But in order to make it a felony, he has to bootstrap or tie that misdemeanor case to something else that is a felony.
And the felony would be violation of federal election laws.
Now, has Trump been charged federally with doing that?
No. Has he been convicted of doing that?
No. So you can see the absolutely preposterous foundations of this case.
It's a nonsense case.
It's a complete joke.
And yet, and here's the very sad news, you can get away with a complete joke if you have a corrupt judge.
You can get away with a complete joke if you have a highly biased jury.
So think of a biased jury getting twisted jury instructions from a crooked judge.
And so the prosecutors are like, we're in hog heaven.
Because we are in an environment, this is New York City, where we can get a jury that despises Trump, that wants to get him, that takes a certain glee in getting him.
And so we're going to see this tragic tale unfold.
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He was on TV and he was like, this is a case about whether anybody is above the law.
No, the case is the exact opposite.
If this were anybody other than Donald Trump, this case would never have been brought in the first place.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
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Again, it's dinesh.locals.com Guys, many of you are familiar with the Whitmer kidnapping hoax.
I've talked about it on the podcast more than once in the past.
And I learned from Julie Kelly about one of the defendants, Brandon Caserta.
And Julie was like, hey, Dinesh, you should get Brandon sometime on the podcast.
And it's taken me a while to do it, but I finally have.
And I messaged Brandon on X. He's like, hey, let's do it.
And so I'm delighted to welcome Brandon Caserta.
By the way, his X handle is at Brandon underscore Caserta.
And He's a machinist from Detroit, Michigan.
He's also a Second Amendment advocate.
And I want to go into the details of the case.
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Brandon, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
Really appreciate it.
You have experienced firsthand the machinations of the intelligence agencies of our government.
It's a problem that many Americans know about, but they don't know about it up close.
They don't know about it firsthand.
So I want you to kind of tell your story from the beginning.
Let's begin by me just asking you, how did you get involved at all with these other guys?
And how did you get involved at all in anything to do with Gretchen Whitmer?
Yeah, absolutely.
Nice to see you, Dinesh. So, kind of how it happened is, you know, the COVID-19 pandemic happened.
I was laid off from work.
And I had been training with firearms for quite a few years.
And I kind of...
There was definitely some concerns.
I saw what was going on.
I have a healthy fear of the government.
And I was looking to get involved with people who, you know, we could work together to take care of our community or protect ourselves and our property if, you know, something happened with the government.
And so just kind of like prepper stuff.
And when I met these guys, I met them on Facebook, Joe Morrison and Pete Musico.
They had already had a group called the Wolverine Watchmen, in which I was never a member of.
I was never patched in.
And the government continues to keep saying that I was a member of that group when I was not.
So I met them on Facebook and they invited me out to their private property to train.
So I show up one day, this is in like June.
And I had actually walked directly into a TEI, which is a terrorist enterprise investigation that had already been conducted.
Jason Chambers, the lead handling agent, had already gotten approval for the TEI, and they were already running the, I guess you could call it the PSYOP. It was already in motion, where they were trying to coax people to talk about politicians in a negative light, and talk about their opinions and stuff like that.
I met them online and just my character and the way I look, I was the perfect candidate for them to frame, you know, by using what they might consider anti-law enforcement rhetoric.
And things like that, me being all about the Second Amendment and all the Second Amendment violations that we have going on in our country and speaking out against that, it's something for them to be able to create a narrative Without you even realizing it, I never thought at all that I would be arrested or anything based off, you know, what I talked about or anything I did or the training that I conducted.
All that stuff happened behind the scenes away from my awareness from the FBI. Let's put some of the things that you said into slow motion, because I want people to kind of understand better.
Are you saying that at the very beginning of COVID, there was so many controls being imposed by the government that you began to fear that our basic rights, including Second Amendment rights, would be in jeopardy?
And you're like, hey, the Second Amendment is a protection for citizens in the last resort, so I'm going to train to make sure that I can defend my Second Amendment rights if it ever comes to that.
And then you sign up for this Facebook group, and you mentioned this guy Jason Chambers.
Now, was this a guy who was an FBI informant who was already involved in, as you say, an operation to get guys like you...
Sort of lure you into this scheme and then bust you for engaging in unlawful behavior.
Was that the idea? Yeah, yeah.
You want me to talk about Jason real quick?
Yeah, yeah. Go for it.
Okay, Jason Chambers is a lead FBI agent, and he had a secret intelligence company called Exa Intel that he was using his FBI credentials in the cases that he had covered, like the Boston bombing and other terrorist cases,
using that to prop up his His private company called Exa Intel that we actually weren't able to bring any of that evidence in the federal case, which is unfortunate because he clearly had a monetary incentive to get this TEI going.
And he was the head agent of the lead informant, which was Dan Chappell and Steve Robeson.
Now, let's talk about when did the issue of Gretchen Whitmer, the kidnapping, when did that even come up?
Who brought it up? And then talk about the involvement of these FBI agents and informants in moving that scheme forward.
Talk about the actual plotting and how that went down.
Yeah, so during that time, Michigan, we had pretty strict lockdowns.
We couldn't buy seeds.
We couldn't plant gardens.
We couldn't buy paint to paint our houses.
Gretchen Whitmer had one of the strictest lockdowns of any of the governors.
There was like a top five governors that had lockdowns like that, including New York and California and stuff.
So For us guys, the tyranny of these governors, we're going to be talking about it.
We're going to say how we disagree with it, and we're going to say how it's unconstitutional, which it actually wound up being ruled that it was unconstitutional, all the executive orders.
So because of that, the FBI sees that as an opportunity to kind of prey on maybe certain people that would be a little bit more Uh, prone to influence, you know, like Adam Fox, he lived in the basement of a vacuum repair shop.
he, you know, he didn't really work like he was he was not doing the greatest, you know, and the FBI had surrounded him with three different informants, you know, two undercover FBI agents, contacting his girlfriend online to try to get in the group.
And, you know, the FBI set up all the main training events and everything and paid for everyone to go there drove us to Wisconsin pay for our hotels and everything like that.
And essentially, they were able to get certain people like Adam Fox or Barry croft to speak in a negative light about the governor and then try to ask them like, hey, well, what should we do about it?
We have to do something about it.
We need a plan.
We need a plan and they would push these plans.
Hey, let's go drive by her vacation cottage.
Hey, let's go here.
And they would lure people in by saying, hey, we got some free gear.
You want to come check it out? We got to drive a couple hours away to go get it.
But, you know, the people that are on that ride don't actually know what's going on.
They think they're getting free gear, but really they're trying to take them to go drive by the governor's house and stuff.
Oh, I see. Now...
What was your, let's talk about your involvement at all.
Did you think that kidnapping Gretchen Whitmer was a good idea?
How did you get roped into that scheme at all?
What did they tell you and what did you think was going on?
Did you think that, wow, this woman has become a tyrant, we need to get her?
Or was it the case?
Talk about that. Yeah, I mean, me personally, I believe that most politicians now are puppets.
So going and using force and violence against a politician does not seem, not only is it not pragmatic, I don't think it's the proper way to go about things.
I'm more about waking people up and getting them to withdraw their consent from, you know, all these unconstitutional orders and everything that the government's doing. But they were able to use my verbiage about, you know, police brutality, and Second Amendment rights to kind of, you know, they never asked me directly, Hey, do you want to go do this?
Hey, do you want to kidnap the governor?
They never said that.
They would be like, hey, we're going to drive over here.
You want to come with me? And I would usually be working.
I'd be like, no, I'm good. I got to work.
Or that Saturday night on September 11th or 12th, I believe, when it was raining, they went to go drive by her vacation cottage and And, you know, it seemed like a joke to me when they had asked me.
And I'm like, okay, well, I'd rather just stay here and hang out.
It's nighttime. We just got done training for like 10 hours.
You know, I'm good.
And I just didn't go because it wasn't something I was interested in.
It was almost like a joke.
Like, what are you guys going to drive by her house and throw in teepee her house or something?
That's kind of like the vibe that you got.
It was never any serious plan or anything like that, but the FBI tried to make it appear to be that.
And then suddenly you find yourself, I mean, probably, I don't know if you were shocked and horrified, I mean, you obviously had a negative view of the government anyway, but suddenly you find yourself, you're under arrest, you're facing serious charges.
I mean, what were you facing once they arrested you?
Yeah, I was facing a conspiracy to commit kidnapping charge, which carried up to a life sentence.
With all the terrorism enhancements and everything like that, it was a lot of time that I was facing.
It was shocking, man.
All my freedom was taken away from me.
I had been preyed on by the government and framed in a fake plot that I had nothing to do with.
it was all the FBI. And I knew at that point in time that I had to do whatever I could to fight for my freedom. Because if this can happen to me, look, I'm just a regular guy from Detroit, Michigan, I'm just a machinist. I'm a family guy. I'm a blue collar guy. You know, um, I'm not super popular or anything like that. And I knew that if the government could target me and bring me for something like this, they can easily do it to anyone else.
So when I went to court, I was fighting for my freedom and everyone else's freedom in America, because this could happen to you and you won't even know it until you get arrested.
I mean, Brandon, you know that one of the schemes that they use, one that I'm familiar with myself in a different context, is the strategy of the plea bargain.
They say, essentially, you're facing life in prison.
This will basically destroy your life.
But, if you agree to plead, you can get a reduced sentence.
And so, in a sense, even someone who is innocent has to weigh the odds and go, wait a minute, you know, maybe even though I didn't do it, or maybe even though I'm not really culpable, I should take a plea.
And some of your sort of co-defendants did do that, as I understand, but you didn't.
You decided, I'm going to take my chances, I'm going to go before a jury...
Did you have confidence that the jury system would work even though you probably know and knew even then that the government's rate of conviction in these kinds of cases is extremely high?
They almost always get a conviction and yet you went in there and you took your chances and they paid off but was it a tough decision?
And it wasn't in principle.
I tried to think about it from a truth and freedom principle.
And the FBI had offered me two plea deals.
And each one of those plea deals involved me cooperating with them and essentially snitching on everyone else.
And I just simply cannot lie and I can't admit to doing something that I didn't do.
In principle, I cannot do that.
That's not what someone like Samuel Adams would do, Thomas Jefferson, none of those guys.
They wouldn't just cooperate with the British government because, you know, they're under duress at that point in time.
You know, so I stood in truth and I had faith that the jury would see the truth and see that I never agreed to anything.
I wasn't involved in any of this stuff.
Hey, you may not like what I have to say, but it's my First Amendment right to say it.
And the jury did see that.
They saw that, and they acquitted me of my charges.
I mean, looking back on it, it seems like your real crime, so to speak, that they went after you for was probably just some trash talk and loose talk.
I mean, but whether this is...
I'm imprudent to do.
It's not something that should be surveilled and monitored by the government.
It's not something you should be prosecuted for.
And would you say that this scheme was cooked up by the FBI? Or was it cooked up by...
You guys and the FBI merely moved it along.
Because to put the government side of it, I think they would say, well, you know, we often do infiltrate groups in the mafia and so on, and they've got an idea.
Now, we have to go along with it because we're part of the group as informants.
But there seems to be a big difference between sitting in on a group that is planning to do something anyway...
And you being an active part of moving the plot forward, a plot that would not have gone forward if the FBI had not been involved.
Yeah, absolutely. The FBI concocted the entire thing, without a doubt.
They wanted this investigation to occur.
People like Barry Croft, they were running surveillance on them for a year or more.
They were running surveillance on me for a few months, and they had no probable cause.
My paperwork, everything that they say on my paperwork, they say that I did, is all First Amendment and Second Amendment protective activity.
And they had no real probable cause to launch the investigation, but they had surrounded people like Adam and Barry to the point where they were just constantly coming at him and coming at them to try to get him to go over here or planting evidence on them.
Like, oh, here's this orange bag with a bunch of fireworks and gunpowder in it.
You are going to use that for a bomb.
And just...
Push the entire thing and the entire narrative.
And that's what happened.
We never had any real plans.
We never had any intention to do any of that stuff.
Adam and Barry Croft are in jail right now for things that they said, you know, things that they said.
They never actually did anything.
That's why the charge is a conspiracy charge.
You know, it's not actual, real, tangible evidence.
It's talk. Very scary.
And then, of course, I mean, to me, the significance of this case is partly in its own right, but it's also partly for what it tells us about what happened later on January 6th.
I mean, what is your advice, Brandon?
Let's just say today that an American citizen—and I've seen some videos of this happening on social media—you get a knock on your door, there's two guys standing outside from the FBI— And they're like, hey, you know, we just want to talk to you about some of the things that we've seen that you posted on social media.
What is your kind of urgent advice to the ordinary American citizen if, kind of, God forbid, that happens to them?
Absolutely. So what I would suggest is 100% Without a second thought, invoke your Fifth Amendment rights.
Remain silent. You are not obligated to incriminate yourself.
And talking to the police, they will use anything and everything against you.
They will take whatever they can out of context.
And it's easy.
They're good at taking your statements out of context because they're able to put certain things in evidence and keep certain things out.
So if there's a 20-minute clip of you talking about something, they can put two minutes of that in there and keep the rest out.
And you have to fight.
Tooth and nail to get it in court.
So I would suggest, you know, talking to them is not going to help you.
If they were there and they had enough evidence to arrest you, you'd be arrested, you'd be in cuffs, and you'd be in jail.
If they're there to talk to you, they're there to collect evidence against you in order to arrest you because they don't have enough of that yet.
So invoke your Fifth Amendment right Do it properly.
Do it politely. Don't be aggressive about it.
Invoke your Fifth Amendment right and say it.
Don't say, I don't talk to cops.
Don't say, I don't answer any questions.
Say, I feel it will be correct to invoke my Fifth Amendment right to remain silent at this point in time.
And do it like that and wish them a good day.
And when you're talking about stuff online and you're expressing yourself...
Try to fill in the context.
Don't make it ambiguous.
You know, when you're talking about something specific, make sure that if someone else heard you, they knew exactly what you were talking about and they couldn't take that out of context and make it seem like something that it wasn't.
Wow. Brandon, I know you've been through the ringer on this, and I want to commend you for sticking by your principles and also the bravery you've shown in this process.
Guys, I've been talking to Brandon Caserta.
You can follow him on x at Brandon underscore Caserta.
Brandon, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you, Dinesh. Take care.
I'm now in a crucial section of Harry Jaffa's book, Crisis of the House Divided.
And we are discussing the meaning of the Declaration of Independence.
And I want to focus on a core passage that I mentioned on Friday, but one that I wasn't able to sufficiently discuss.
This is Lincoln from his speech in Springfield, Illinois, on the Dred Scott decision.
The speech is June 26, 1857.
Now, here's Lincoln.
I think the authors of that notable instrument, this is the Declaration of Independence, intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects.
So here is Lincoln meeting the charge that the Declaration of Independence is, on the face of it, untrue.
Why? Because it says all men are created equal, and it would be quite easy for someone to point out then, as now, that men and human beings are not equal.
They're different in all kinds of respects, and Lincoln is admitting this.
Lincoln goes, of course they are.
He says, they did not mean to say all were equal in color.
Size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity.
So, Lincoln admits...
That human beings differ, sometimes in kind of accidental features like color, but sometimes in very relevant capacities.
So he mentions size.
Now that's not normally relevant, but it could be relevant, for example, if you're talking about playing basketball or football.
He mentions intellect, a key issue because it was widely believed then and some people believe now.
Well, maybe the different races differ in intellectual capacity.
And Lincoln is like, maybe they do.
He's not saying they do.
He's not saying they don't. He's saying maybe.
Moral developments could be that some individuals, some groups are superior to others in their moral actions and Or social capacity.
So Lincoln is conceding the discrepancy among human beings on a whole range of things.
Then he comes back to the founders.
They defined with tolerable distinctness in what respects they did consider all men created equal, equal in certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
So here's Lincoln saying... The equality is in that.
The equality is not in capacity.
The equality is in rights.
And what are those rights?
Life. Liberty, the pursuit of happiness.
So in other words, everybody has an equal right to life.
You don't have a right to life that's better than mine or bigger than mine.
Everyone has an equal right to liberty.
In other words, if you are of normal capacity, in other words, you're not mentally retarded and have to be confined, but you are a normal adult human being, you have a right to liberty, and you have the right to pursue happiness.
You may or may not find it.
It's the right to the pursuit.
The right is not even to happiness.
It's the right to try.
We continue with Lincoln.
This they said and this they meant.
So Lincoln is saying that the founders were correct.
People do have these rights.
Now, it's worth thinking for a moment about what it means to have a right.
It's nothing more than to say that you deserve this and this is something that you don't have to work to achieve.
It is a right.
It accrues to you by virtue of the fact that you are a human being.
Now, to have a right to something doesn't necessarily mean that the person who Acknowledges that right, is able to give it to you.
Let's say I were to say to you, for example, you have a right to be adequately paid for your labor.
I'm stating a fact.
You have a right to work, you have a right to bargain for a fair wage, and you have a right to be paid for your work.
Now let's say you then come back and say to me, but you know my employer won't pay me.
Now He says,
They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all men were enjoying that equality, nor yet that they were about to confer it immediately upon them.
In fact, they had no power to confer such a boon.
A boon is a gift.
So Lincoln is saying the founders weren't in a position in which they acknowledged a right and yet they recognized that the circumstances in which they found themselves made it impossible for them to make good on that right, to grant that right.
So Lincoln says they meant simply to declare the right so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. Now this I think is a critical line because it this is the full and adequate refutation of the charge of hypocrisy.
Lincoln is saying that you have a claim, but the claim is only going to be vindicated when the person who recognizes the claim is in a position to carry it out.
You could say, for example, you have a right to an inheritance.
So you have a right to the return of some money that you lent another guy.
And yet, you may not be able to realize that right.
In fact, you could even have a court judgment.
I have a court judgment that entitles me to get my money back.
But, until that judgment is enforced, and that may only come later, the other guy may say, I don't have the money.
Well, I don't really have it anymore.
I've already spent it.
So, the point is that acknowledging your right is important.
It's important because without acknowledging the right, the enforcement is not going to follow at all.
But Lincoln's point is that when it comes to all men are created equal, the enforcement that was not possible in 1789 is becoming possible in 1850.
So in other words, this is the point of the Republican Party, to make good on the rights that were promised in the founding, but that even the founders knew could not be delivered then and there.
The founders were hopeful, maybe things will get better and we'll be able to realize these promises, these ideals, these rights, but Lincoln is saying that this is why we are here.
He comes back to the founders.
They meant to set up a standard maxim for a free society.
What's a maxim?
A goal, an ideal, a framework, a formula, which should be familiar to all and revered by all.
Constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and therefore constantly spreading and deepening its influence and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.
So Lincoln is saying, if you have an ideal, and this would apply to any ideal, I want to be, for example, a paragon of virtue.
I want to be courageous.
I want to be truthful.
I want to be decent.
I want to be honest. Now, I might fall short.
I may not be as courageous as I think I should be.
But that doesn't make me a hypocrite.
It only means I'm falling short of my ideals.
And it may be that in certain circumstances, I can't be.
I want to be courageous, but guess what?
I'm confined. I can't do it.
Lincoln says, nevertheless, courage remains a virtue.
Nevertheless, courage remains an ideal.
Everybody admires it.
Everybody looks up to it.
Everybody wants to be more courageous.
And so it sets up the governing standard for a society.
And Lincoln says that the great achievement of the founders was to...
Enshrine the ideal, even though they were not in a position then and there to enforce it.
But nevertheless, what Lincoln is saying, and this would apply to the 1850s and 60s, but also applies to the civil rights movement.
Ultimately, this expanding of the franchise, not just the end of slavery, but the extension of rights to groups that previously didn't have them.
They weren't carried out.
They weren't enforced. This is, in fact, credit not only to the founders who enshrined the ideal, but to the people like Lincoln and like the Republican Party that worked so hard and paid enormous price, by the way, to turn that ideal, to turn that maxim into a reality.
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