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April 16, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:19
KANGAROO JUDGE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep812
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Coming up, I'll review the latest developments with Judge Merchant.
This is the kangaroo judge in Trump's New York hush money case.
Author Corey DeAngelis joins me.
We're going to talk about school choice and his new book, The Parent Revolution.
If you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza show.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
I want to talk about this kangaroo judge and this kangaroo court.
In New York. Now we have a lot of kangaroo judges dealing with Trump.
I would put Tanya Chutkin in D.C. in that category.
Judge Engeron, what is he if not a kangaroo judge?
But I'm actually talking about the judge in this Alvin Bragg case, this so-called hush money case, this altering of business documents case.
And the judge is Judge Merchant and Judge Juan Merchant.
And I was thinking for a moment about this kangaroo court, kangaroo judges.
I'm not really sure the origins of that term, but I think we all know what it means.
It's a bogus court.
It's a bogus judge.
And this is not impartial justice being handed down.
It's something radically different from that.
Now, this judge has required and demanded that Trump be present every single day for a case that could take weeks.
We're talking about a case that could take six weeks, it could take up to eight weeks.
And Trump is required to be in the courtroom.
Now, Trump's lawyers asked permission for Trump to go to Barron Trump's graduation.
And the judge said, no.
Now, Trump, of course, is outraged by this.
Here is his statement, who will explain for me to my wonderful son Barron who is a great student at a fantastic school That his dad will likely not be allowed to attend his graduation ceremony Something that we have been talking about for years Because a seriously conflicted and corrupt New York State judge wants me in criminal court on a bogus quote Biden case and on it goes and
The motive for this I think is nothing more than pure vindictiveness And vindictiveness not just against Trump, but apparently vindictiveness even against Barron Trump.
Because this is a case where the judge could easily say to Trump, hey, listen, if you miss something that's going on in the proceedings, that is...
That is your loss and might make it more difficult for you if you testify to know what was said before.
But that's a decision that you have to make.
That would be one thing.
But the judge is holding Trump in the courtroom.
And for what? What is the legal requirement?
Why is it necessary for Trump to be in the courtroom all the time?
Now, the deeper motive here, I think, is not to get...
Barron or to prevent Trump from going to a graduation.
It is to prevent Trump from campaigning.
And this is one of the tertiary benefits of all these cases.
Quite apart from the glee that the Democrats are going for, the glee that would undoubtedly attend any guilty verdict, the glee that would undoubtedly attend any form of incarceration for Trump, But quite in addition to that, when you have a campaign, a campaign is all about timing.
It's all about using the limited time you have to get out there and get your message out there.
And the Democrats are doing that.
They are working on all their campaign strategies.
Now, Biden isn't doing a whole lot of campaigning, but it's not going to do a lot of good for him to do any campaigning because he's a horrible candidate in the first place.
So they're relying on the get out the vote operation.
They're relying on a giant inflow of funds.
The Democrats are. Trump is his own best weapon.
But in this case, the judges realize, and Judge Merchant is only one of them, I can tie this guy up for a month and a half in a critical election year and just keep him sitting right there.
And not only that, but keep him silent because Trump is also under a gag order.
Now, Trump is not totally gagged, as you can see.
He puts out statements from time to time.
But he's got to be a little careful because he cannot, if he flagrantly violates a gag order, they could, in fact, throw him in prison.
They could throw him in jail for contempt of court or for ignoring the gag order.
So Trump has to operate sort of close to the line but without crossing the line.
Now, This case, as I mentioned before, is based on the foolishness that Trump is somehow trying his own form of election interference.
How? Now, with regard to this, I need to talk a little bit about this payout to Stormy Daniels.
By the way, here I have in front of me a public statement, January 30, 2018, to whom it may concern.
Over the past few weeks, I've been asked countless times to comment upon reports of an alleged sexual relationship I had with Donald Trump many, many years ago.
The fact of the matter is that each party to this alleged affair denied its existence in 2006.
11, 2016, 2017, now again in 2018.
I am not denying this affair because I was paid, quote, hush money has been reported in overseas and own tabloids.
I am denying this affair because it never happened.
I will have no further comment.
So this is a public statement by Stormy Daniels.
But then you have to ask, well, we do know that there were payments made to Stormy Daniels by or through Michael Cohen at the time, Trump's attorney.
Why would somebody who hasn't done anything make payments?
Well, let me tell you why.
Recently, Debbie and I got a legal letter in the mail.
It had to do with a project that I did a couple of years ago for a big media company.
The media company asked me to do a project.
They offered to pay me for it.
I did the project.
I was paid for it by a wire.
End of story. But then I get a legal letter and it's from a bankruptcy judge saying that one of the investors in that company, in that media company, has filed for bankruptcy and they are now suing me to me and many, many others to recover money that was paid from this person's supposed...
In other words, the idea is that this guy owed money to other people, but nevertheless he made these payments.
These are payments that he should not have made and therefore the money has to be returned.
Now, the person who is making these payments, I've never heard of this guy.
I've never spoken to him.
I know nothing about it.
He is an investor in a media company and my dealings were with representatives of the media company.
They were written up in a contract.
I performed the terms of the contract.
I was paid. But what is this bankruptcy judge trying to do?
He wants me now to respond to a lengthy complaint.
He wants me to do what I've already done, go to our family lawyer and have him draft a response.
That's going to cost thousands of dollars.
So what if I were to say to this bankruptcy judge, hey, listen, you want to collect a certain amount of money from me.
How about if I give you $10,000 to go away?
In other words, to just drop this matter, go pester other people.
It's not worth my time.
I'm willing to just close this matter.
Why? Because it'll probably, in terms of time and money, cost me that much or more to have to fight this.
So even though there's no merit to it, it's completely ridiculous.
I've got 10 other things I have to deal with.
I don't want to deal with this.
People make these kinds of decisions all the time.
The IRS files are complained against you, claiming you shouldn't have taken these eight deductions on your taxes.
Your deductions are completely valid.
You could go to tax court and fight them out, but that'll take weeks.
It'll take months. You need to hire a tax attorney.
And so you decide, well, listen, I'll just go ahead and pay this because it's not worth my time to fight it.
So The point is that individuals, businesses, it is not uncommon for people to do these kinds of kind of take the money and go away payouts, not because they are culpable, but because they don't want to deal with the hassle.
That could very well have been the case here.
So, nevertheless, all of this is a case that really shouldn't even be in court because, as I say, this is a practice that does occur.
The complexity of this case is they're somehow claiming that if Trump had paid this hush money from his campaign funds, then he could legitimately consider it a campaign expense.
But because he paid it from his personal funds, that's where there's a campaign finance violation.
So ultimately, weirdly enough, speaking as someone who has been down the campaign finance road, this case is a campaign finance case.
And yet campaign finance case is a federal.
The case in New York is not a federal case, but what they're doing is they're bootstrapping this hush money payment to a supposed violation of the federal campaign finance laws.
I mean, I saw Jonathan Turley on TV the other day, and he was just shaking his head at the sheer...
It's absurdity, the embarrassment to the legal community that this case is even being brought.
But it's being brought for an obvious reason.
Trump can't really get a fair trial in New York City, and we saw a little glimpse of that Just yesterday, they were doing a kind of screening for jurors.
And one very telling sight is that more than 50% of the jurors who were called up, they had called up a whole bunch of people.
Let me see. They had called up 96 potential jurors.
50 of them were disqualified straight out for the simple reason that they came up there and they just go, I really don't like Donald Trump.
I see nothing good about Donald Trump.
I cannot vote fairly on this case.
My prejudices are basically going to take control.
And so the juror had to be excused.
And so this is a...
Classic demonstration that you shouldn't have trials where you can't get a jury of your peers.
A jury of your peers is the key meaning of having a juror system that works.
It's people who are like you, people who are able to assess the case fairly, and in New York City, That's not going to be easy to do.
The Democrats know this.
Alvin Bragg knows this.
Judge Merchant knows this.
And that's why the case was brought where it is, in order not to have a fair trial, but in order to get Trump one way or the other.
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Welcome to my show!
The Parent Revolution, Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools.
The book is coming out shortly, but available for pre-order now.
By the way, guys, you can follow him on x at DeAngelisCorey, C-O-R-E-Y, and the website FederationForChildren.org.
Corey, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
I appreciate it.
There seems to be a real grassroots revolution underway, driven, I suppose, by parents to change the way that education is organized in America.
Am I right in describing this as, in fact, a parents' revolution?
And if so, when was its beginning?
Absolutely. This is a school choice revolution, a parent revolution.
We've had 11 states go all in on school choice, allowing the money to follow the child in the past three years alone.
These are all Republican-led states.
The GOP has basically become the parents' party.
And it's because the teachers unions really overplayed their hand by fighting to keep the schools closed as long as possible.
They wanted to get federal bailout money from the taxpayers because they knew that they could leverage the school closures to hold children's education hostage to receive billions of dollars in so-called COVID relief.
It worked for them in the short run But in the medium to long run, it actually backfired.
Their plan backfired spectacularly.
They revealed themselves.
They showed their true colors.
Parents saw the school system didn't care about them all that much.
But more importantly, through the remote learning, which we should have just called remotely learning, there wasn't a lot of learning going on, families got to see a little bit of what was happening in the classroom.
I'm an activist in the area, myself, you probably knew this as well, Dinesh, that the far left has infiltrated the government school system for a very long time, and it was revealed to everyday citizens through the school closures.
And so conservatives started to push back at the school board meetings.
That helped. They were able to flip some school boards in some states and some districts.
But they started to get labeled as domestic terrorists by the National School Boards Association for trying to do this.
This was an attempt by the establishment to bully and silence parents into submission.
And other families still had their mics cut off at school board meetings for trying to reveal that The books that they don't want in the public school libraries have sexually explicit content.
For some reason, it's okay to read in front of children at school but not okay in the public school board meeting setting, which takes us to the parent revolution where parents started fighting at the ballot box too.
In 2022, there was a lot of talk in the midterms about a red wave.
That didn't really happen.
There wasn't a blue wave either, but there was a school choice wave.
76% of the candidates supported by my organization, the American Federation for Children, and our state affiliates won their races in 2022.
And we didn't just plan the easy ones.
We targeted 69 incumbents.
It's the hardest thing to do in politics, to take out a sitting legislator, and we took out 40 of them.
So the political winds have shifted towards educational freedom, and that has led to 11 states passing universal school choice in the past three years, and we're not done yet.
Like a week ago, Louisiana just passed through their house by a vote of 72 to 32, and A universal school choice bill.
And even some Democrats voted for it.
It shouldn't be a partisan issue.
It isn't among voters, but the Republicans have really picked up the football and taken it pretty far down the field in advancing parental rights and education.
I know that there's been a bit of a convulsion in Texas.
I'm based in Texas over this issue of school choice.
It looks like Governor Abbott has gotten behind it.
It also looks like he has targeted some of the Republicans in the Texas House who were opponents of school choice.
Now, how is it possible in a red state like Texas for there to be any resistance at all to the idea of giving parents a choice?
Because the idea here is that parents have an option.
You can go to the public schools.
So this is not an effort to shut down the public schools.
It's an effort to make the public schools competitive with potential alternatives that might be better.
That's right. So why do you think that there's been, even in some Republican states, you say 11 states have made good progress, but hey, aren't there about 25 Republican states in the country?
Yep, you're right. And look, if you like your public school, you can keep your public school.
That option is and still should be on the table, unlike with your doctor.
But with school choice, it's a rising tide that lifts all boats.
The public schools up their game in response to competition.
I live in San Antonio, Texas myself, so...
Most of these guys who voted against school choice in the House were already endorsed by the state affiliate of the largest teacher union in the country, the National Education Association.
The bill did pass the Senate very easily in Texas by a vote of 18 to 13.
It was in the House. You had these so-called Republicans who were already endorsed or funded by the teachers unions who voted against their own party platform issue of education freedom.
Well, look, five of them saw the writing on the wall, didn't even run for re-election.
And out of the 13 that we targeted from my organization, the American Federation for Children and our super PAC, Focused on promoting school choice, AFC Victory Fund.
We targeted 13 of those guys and 10 of them either lost their seats outright on Super Tuesday or they were forced into a runoff.
Most of those forced into runoff were forced into runoff in the second place, which translates to a 77% win rate for education freedom supporters.
And that's basically...
Impossible. I mean, it's basically unheard of because incumbents win their re-election about 95% of the time.
So that trend was inverted in Texas, and it looks like we'll have the votes to pass universal school choice next year.
The running joke in Iowa, because a little-known fact is that they passed universal school choice in 2023, full-throated, everybody, no picking winners and losers.
In 2022, Governor Reynolds made a similar push like Abbott did.
And said it passed their Senate very easily.
It moved over to their House, which was supposed to be controlled by Republicans.
They could not get the ball across the finish line.
She went and primaried a bunch of them, got a new House, and they have an even more expansive school choice initiative now.
So the running joke in Iowa is that the Democrats should have voted for the pared down version back in 2022, because what they ended up with was an even more Republican, more conservative body that passed an even better program.
We're seeing that same story play out in Texas right now.
A lot of this, the moderate Republicans or rhinos lost their seats, or they're going to lose their seats on May 28th because they've been forced into a runoff, most of them in second place.
So this is just more good news in Texas.
The excuse that they'll use, however, to try to have their cake and eat it too, is they'll try to say, I'm in a rural area.
And look, rural voters are super supportive of school choice.
The nine most rural states in the country already have some form of private school choice, including West Virginia, the first state to pass universal school choice, much more rural than Texas.
Maine and Vermont have the oldest voucher programs in the country.
And they were actually started in the late 1800s.
Specifically for kids who lived in rural areas that didn't have access to public schools because they were so rural, they'd give the money to the families to take to private, even religious schools as well.
So they figured this out over 150 years ago that not having a lot of options in your area is an argument to expand opportunities, not to restrict them.
But this is the argument that you'll hear time and time again in red states because they can't make lefty arguments, right?
Because then the primary voter is not going to be happy with them.
So they have to come up with some other excuse to side with the status quo.
And they'll say, we don't have any private schools in my area.
The public school is the only option.
And then in the next breath, they'll try to say with a straight face, That this is going to dismantle our public school.
That's so great.
Well, one, if the school's so great, they should have nothing to worry about.
But two, if it's true that no one's going to leave your rural school because there aren't any other options, well, you really shouldn't have anything to worry about in that case because where are people going to go?
They're not going to take any money anywhere else.
So the worst case scenario is that nothing really changes in rural areas.
But the thing is, they understand that when you give the money to the families, supply will meet that demand.
If you have one school, maybe you'll have two schools, or maybe you'll have a micro school.
That doesn't cost as much to start up, where you have basically a homeschooling co-op.
These are all opportunities that can be expanded with school choice, especially with education savings accounts, which is the new form of school choice being promoted in most states where the money can go to a private school if you want.
But if not, you can take that to pay for homeschool curriculum.
You can use it to pay for private tutoring, micro schools.
It really takes us from school choice to education choice because schooling is only one way to achieve an education.
We'll be right back with Corey DeAngelis, the book we're talking about, The Parent Revolution.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
I do a live weekly Q&A every Tuesday.
Well, tonight, 8 p.m.
Eastern, and no topic is off limits.
I've also uploaded some cool films to locals.
I've got Dinesh's movie page up there.
2,000 Mules is uploaded, as well as my latest film, Police State, and I'm working on a new one.
For this year, the election year.
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So check out the channel. It's dinesh.locals.com.
I'd love to have you along for this great ride.
Again, it's dinesh.locals.com.
I'm back with Corey DeAngelis, the senior visiting fellow at the American Federation for Children, also a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, actually my old alma mater.
The new book, The Parent Revolution, Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools.
Corey, you were talking about the ways in which in Republican states they try to cajole and con voters.
And they do it not by making left-wing arguments, because the voters are going to be on the lookout for those, but sort of conservative arguments.
And one of them that I've heard in Texas is the idea that Which is, I think, intended to scare off some homeschooling parents and so on.
Hey, listen, when the government is giving you money, whether it's for vouchers or scholarships, that is going to come with strings, with government conditions.
And so suddenly, your homeschooling project, which was operating pretty autonomously, by now taking taxpayer money in the form of scholarships and grants, The government is going to now be running your homeschool project.
What would you say to those parents to assuage them and say, hey, listen, this is not a rational fear and this is really propaganda being put out by the other side?
That's right. And in fact, the chief propagandist on the other side, Randy Weingarten, the school closer, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, she's not some libertarian anti-government type.
She's a big government socialist.
We all know this. She has repeated the same argument on X, formerly Twitter, saying that, oh, this is going to cause control of the private schools.
They're doing this to try to make an argument against school choice from the so-called right.
But you have Other groups, including this one called Pastors for Texas Children in Texas, they're a union front group funded by Randy Weingarten.
They make the same argument, and they actually profit from the school districts.
One of their co-founders, Charles Luke, is actually the head of the Coalition for Education Funding, which charges school districts a dollar per student.
I mean, they're making big bucks off of lobbying for the status quo, and they're basically just union front groups.
And to get to the heart of the argument, however, this is making perfect the enemy of the good.
The reality is most kids are already stuck in government-run schools today that are totally controlled by the government, and people have no choice to take their money elsewhere.
And in fact, the government can already regulate private and home education today.
They have historically as well in Oregon.
The government actually outlawed private education altogether in Oregon in 1922.
Thankfully, three years later in the Supreme Court, in the case of Pierce v.
Society of Sisters, the court famously ruled that the child is not the mere creature of the state.
That wasn't because of a school choice program that they outlawed private education.
It was because you had authoritarians who wanted to control the mind of other people's children.
Fast forward to today.
New York has the worst homeschooling laws in the country.
Do they have a private school choice initiative?
No. In fact, if you look at other states like Rhode Island and Massachusetts, they're ranked the worst according to the Homeschool Legal Defense Association's map of 50 states and their homeschool laws.
They're ranked the worst for government overreach, but they have no private school choice initiatives.
Look, on the other hand, States like Iowa and Oklahoma, they're much more free when it comes to homeschooling and they have full-throated universal school choice.
Giving families the option to accept the funding or not can reduce the likelihood of government overreach in at least three ways.
First of all, you have fewer kids being indoctrinated in government schools.
They're going to be less likely to vote to regulate private and home education in the future if you have less socialists being churned out through the government school system.
Two, politics is all about organized interests.
If you have more people benefiting from private and home education through school choice initiatives, that builds a broader coalition, a bigger tent to fight back against authoritarian overreach when it comes.
And then three, more people benefit from private education.
The concept becomes more mainstream.
If it's more mainstream, then the rest of society should be less likely to call to regulate it.
And if they do, you'll have, again, a bigger tent to fight against that overreach.
So if you're on Randy Weingarten's side on this issue and not my side, you're probably making perfect the enemy of the good.
You're probably not on the right side.
And all of these initiatives are voluntary.
No one has ever been forced to accept the funding.
It's all voluntary on the part of the parents, on the part of the schools.
They can make that cost benefit decision themselves.
And at the end of the day, my group and others have included in their model legislation, specific anti-regulation stipulations to put into the bill so that the private actors don't become government actors, even if they do choose to accept the funding that the government can't tell you, you must teach CRT to accept the money.
For example, that has never happened, by the way. But we also so I don't think that language is necessary to put into the bill, but it is something that we push as well to to reduce the concerns for regulation.
And in Texas, where I live, the homeschool Texas Homeschool Coalition, the main homeschool advocacy group out here actually supports the education savings account bill.
So there are some that you might hear from that say, oh, we're homeschoolers and we don't support this, but that that is not every single homeschooler.
It's not representative of even the majority of homeschoolers.
So look, this is, let's take the W or else we'll be stuck with the L. Randy Weingarten would be super happy if you sided with her, but she's not the wrong side of history right here, and she just wants to keep her gravy train going.
She wants to force you to spend your property tax money in her government-controlled schools without having any choice to take the money or not.
I'd rather at least give parents the opportunity to say, well, maybe I want some of that money back.
I mean, you made an interesting point when you said that the public schools, if they were doing an outstanding job, then it might be that parents would be relatively content with disallocation of their tax dollars and not be looking for any kind of alternative.
But A, now alternatives are available.
B, the public schools are doing a horrible job and you're quite right that COVID exposed that.
And C, it is conceivable, I mean, that even though these unions are going to resist these choice programs, that public schools could in fact get better when they have to compete for students.
Is there any evidence that school choice programs do make public schools more competitive, better, that they begin to start actually teaching students and they tone down the indoctrination?
Is there any evidence that we can actually see better public schools and a more flourishing private school system?
Absolutely. This is actually the clearest strand of research in the private school choice literature.
So this is the main talking point from the teachers union, but they don't care about evidence.
If you actually listen and look at researchers, even within the university system that is overwhelmingly skewed towards the left, even they will admit that the competitive effects studies are positive when it comes to school choice.
There are 29 studies on this topic.
26 of them find statistically significant positive effects of private school choice competition on the outcomes in the public schools.
So it's a rising tide that lifts all boats.
The latest study was actually published in a top economics journal called American Economics Journal.
It's by David Figlio and his research team.
And they looked at the Florida expansion of school choice over time.
And they found that it didn't only have a positive impact on public school test scores, it also improved behavioral outcomes like attendance and reducing misbehavior.
So this is a win-win solution.
It obviously benefits parents who get more of a say in their kids' education and directing those dollars, but it also benefits the kids who remain in the public school for whatever reason.
Look, a lot of people do like their public school.
Some are doing a good job, but at the end of the day, people are gonna disagree about how they wanna raise their kids.
And even if your school is knocking it out of the park when it comes to test scores, they might not be aligned with your values.
And I think that's kind of what happened over the past few years is parents who were politically motivated and active, they thought nothing was wrong because they saw the test scores were fine in their public schools.
But there's there was something else going on with with radical leftists trying to control how to raise other people's children.
And that really set a fire behind the school choice movement and conservative parents in particular to push for reform within the public school system.
There's also a meta analysis peer reviewed at a journal called Educational Policy published in 2022, the latest one on the topic, the most comprehensive by a University of Texas at Austin researcher.
And they pulled all of these effect sizes together of the competitive effects and found, again, the overwhelming proponents of the evidence, the average effect is a positive effect on the public schools.
So again, this is a win-win solution.
It is not public versus private.
It's just all about education freedom for parents.
And if you like the public school, you can still have that option.
But if not, let's give the families a choice.
Let's have them in their driver's seat.
Agree totally. Guys, I've been talking to Corey DeAngelis.
He is Senior Fellow at the American Federation for Children, also Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
The book, you can pre-order it now.
The Parent Revolution, Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools.
You can follow him on x at DeAngelisCorey or the website FederationForChildren.org.
Corey, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you so much for having me, Dinesh.
As I go through the Harry Jaffa book, Crisis of the House Divided, and as I outline the Lincoln argument about the Declaration of Independence, about slavery, about popular sovereignty, I can't help seeing the deep parallels between the abortion issue today and the slavery issue
of the 1850s and 1860s. At one level, the similarity is about popular sovereignty itself, because you could argue that what the court did in the Dobbs decision is it sent the abortion issue back to the states. And by doing that, it said to the states that you, each state, can now vote up or down as you wish on abortion.
And isn't that pretty much the same thing as Stephen Douglas wanted to do with popular sovereignty?
Wasn't that exactly the principle of the Kansas-Nebraska Act?
Wasn't that Stephen Douglas's big idea, which was that, hey, we're debating The issue of slavery in the territories, why don't we leave it up to the territories themselves?
Let them decide if they want to have slavery or don't.
And in a sense, that logic would also then, by extension, apply to states as well.
So if the territories are allowed to decide for themselves, why don't you let the states, north and south, decide for themselves?
So that is the analogy at one level.
And in fact, this analogy kind of helps us understand why there is a clash right now between some of the Trump MAGA candidates and some of the pro-life organizations.
Because the pro-life organizations are taking the stance that popular sovereignty by itself is Is insufficient.
It's not a long-term solution.
It's defective because it's intellectually incoherent.
It's intellectually incoherent.
Why? Because it takes an issue on which you can only give one answer.
Is the unborn child a child or not?
Is it a human being with rights or not?
Is abortion a form of killing?
Yes or no?
And if you answer yes, it is, then obviously it doesn't make a lot of sense to say, well, abortion is the equivalent of murder, but guess what?
We're going to let that issue be up to each state to decide for itself.
States can take an optional view with regard to murder.
Well, that is crazy.
That is sort of nonsensical.
And yet, and yet...
I want to emphasize that even though Lincoln was merciless in exposing the incoherence of the popular sovereignty argument, nevertheless, Lincoln's argument against popular sovereignty is a little more complex than simply to say that popular sovereignty is always and everywhere bad.
Why? Because Lincoln was the great defender of the Missouri Compromise.
The Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the 1820s was very simple.
It drew a line right across the middle of the country, the Mason-Dixon line, and it said that north of the line, no slavery.
So, there would be free states north of the line, but what would there be south of the line?
Answer? Popular sovereignty.
South of the line, states were free to decide if they wanted to keep slavery or not.
So, for example, when Texas joined the Union, this was...
In the 1840s, Texas came in with slavery.
Texas had slavery.
And so Lincoln raised no objection to the fact that south of the Mason-Dixon line, states would in fact have the, quote, right to choose.
And so the point to be made here, and this is the broader point I want to make, is that you can have something that is completely wrong in principle.
And yet, necessity or prudence enable you or allow you, in fact, sometimes require you to permit that thing to go on in practice.
Now, why would you want something to go on that is bad?
Well, one answer is the doctrine of the lesser evil.
Something could be bad, but it could be the alternative to something that's worse.
And so you allow the thing that is bad in order to prevent the thing that would be even worse.
That's one reason.
The second reason is I mentioned the word necessity.
Now necessity is something like I gotta do it because it is necessary to my survival.
So let's say, for example, you have some bandits who invade my house and they put guns to the heads of me and Debbie and they put us in a position where we are forced to agree to something under duress And the alternative is our own survival is at stake.
And so because our survival is at stake, our basic self-protection, we agree.
We might even agree temporarily, or we might agree until we're strong enough to be able to repel them.
So the point is we temporarily go along with something, even though it's bad, because again, this is a requirement of necessity.
Aristotle said somewhere, speaking about natural right, natural right is a simple idea that there is a distinction in nature, a distinction external to ourselves, a distinction that's not purely subjective.
Aristotle said that natural right is always changeable.
And this is a very odd thing to say because we think of virtues like courage and truth as being absolute.
They're not changeable.
Always tell the truth.
Always be courageous in a situation that demands it.
And yet Aristotle's point of view is that even though these principles are enduring, Nevertheless, the application of them is somewhat fluid because let's say you want to be courageous.
Yes, you do, but there is also such a thing as being foolhardy and reckless and knowing the precise difference between when are you being courageous and when are you being reckless.
Well, the answer is that depends on the situation.
And so similarly, even with regard to slavery, even with regard to abortion, the point is that it is one thing to articulate a clear and fundamental principle.
At the same time, you have to pay attention to the circumstances.
Now, the reason we pay attention to circumstances and part of the moral thrust of popular sovereignty itself It's the notion that all rules in a free society and in a self-governing society are subject to the consent of the governed.
And the phrase, the consent of the governed, is right there in the Declaration of Independence itself, which means that whatever moral principle you have, You cannot impose it over the consent of the governed without the people pushing back.
And so when the Supreme Court says in the abortion case, for example, let's let the states decide it, and now we take a Republican state like Kansas or a purple state like Michigan, What you have is you've got people in that state and they're going to have strong opinions about the subject and the question is what to do about those.
Lincoln's view in this is that you take the moral principle and you achieve as much good as the circumstances permit.
So, for example, if you have a state where there is an underlying moral consensus about abortion being bad, bad let's say in all cases, you go for a law that would reflect that.
On the other hand, if you have a state in which opinions are more in the middle, there are likely to be for some restrictions on abortion but not an absolute ban, then if you go for an absolute ban, what do you get?
You get a referendum that not only has no restrictions at all, but codifies, if you will, the principle of absolute choice that was enshrined in Roe vs.
Wade. So that's really what has happened in a couple of these centrist or even Republican states is in going for more, you get nothing.
Lincoln on the other hand was enough of a politician to realize what you need to do is get as much as you can and then you build the moral and political case for more and then you go for more.
And that remember was really what Lincoln was saying about the Declaration of Independence itself.
The founders in their own time could not get a ban on slavery.
Why?
Because the consent of the governed wouldn't allow it.
And so what did the founders do?
They take what they can get.
Slavery was legal through almost all the United States for all the 13 colonies, by the way, had legal slavery at the beginning.
But after the founding, slavery was essentially outlawed or on its way to being outlawed throughout the North.
So that's progress.
For the founders, that is moving, if you will, in the right direction.
It would take many more decades for the political winds to shift enough that the Republican Party as an anti-slavery party could emerge in the North, starting in about 1854.
a party that did well in the 1856 election, and ultimately won the election with Lincoln in 1860, and American politics, of course, was changed ever since.
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