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April 18, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
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FREE THE PRISONERS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep814
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Coming up, I'll react to the Supreme Court hearing pertaining to obstruction of an official proceeding, which quite likely portends the release for many January 6 prisoners.
I want to consider the bizarre ideological world inhabited by NPR's new CEO, Catherine Marr.
And Terry Schilling of American Principles Project joins me.
We're going to talk about politics that can help to revive the beleaguered institution of the family.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble, listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The Supreme Court recently heard a very important case.
It is the case involving a January 6th defendant or prisoner, a guy named Joseph Fisher, a retired cop.
And Fisher had been convicted under Section 1512.
Section 1512 is the section that deals with the obstruction of an official proceeding.
It's 18 U.S. Code 1512, Section C2. Now, Essentially, what Fischer argued is that the law was passed for a completely different reason.
It doesn't pertain to political protest.
It doesn't pertain to objecting to your government.
It doesn't pertain to even being in the Capitol.
It doesn't even pertain to any kind of violence.
It doesn't pertain to anything other than mutilating or destroying documents that are part of some sort of investigation or proceeding in that sense.
Now Fisher is quite right that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which was passed in a decade or more ago, and this was in the connection of the Enron scandal.
When was that scandal? 1995.
Well, 1995. So really a quarter century ago, Debbie is correcting me.
Yeah, maybe a little bit later.
But anyway, what we're getting at here is under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, it was passed because when there was this Enron scandal and Congress was investigating, a lot of the Enron guys said, let's delete documents.
Let's get rid of this evidence.
Let's shred stuff.
Let's burn it. Let's get rid of it.
Let's take it out of the office.
And so Congress passed the law basically saying you can't interfere with an ongoing investigation, or that's what they meant by proceeding.
And they specifically talked about destroying and mutilating documents.
And this is what's in the U.S. Code.
But then there's a second section, which is a little more broad.
And the second section just talks about, or anyone who otherwise interferes in an official proceeding.
And of course, this is the section that the DOJ, the Biden DOJ, has used to charge not just this guy Fisher, but more than 300 other January 6th defendants, basically saying, you intended to stop the official counting of the electoral count, and so you tried to interfere in an official proceeding.
Now, the issue before the court was how to read this two-part statute.
You have one part that very concretely talks about mutilating or destroying documents, and then you've got the second part that, in a more elastic way, says, or otherwise tries to interfere with the proceeding.
Now, the Biden administration, represented by the U.S. Solicitor General, this is Elizabeth Preligar, argued that the two sections are actually separate.
The first section, yeah, deals with mutilating documents, and obviously Fisher didn't do that, and most of the January 6th defendants didn't do that.
But what they did do is the second part.
They did try to interfere with an official proceeding.
But what Fisher's lawyers argued, and some of the justices seem quite sympathetic to this, was that no, if I have two clauses in a law, clause one, that talks specifically about, let's say, robbery, or burglary, or Or let's say murder.
And in the second clause, I talk about using a gun.
Then the second clause is intended to be read in conjunction with the first clause.
So in other words, if I go to do a robbery and I take a gun, then I'm violating the second part of the statute.
Or if I'm going to do a murder and I purchase a gun in that context, that's how the second clause relates to the first.
The second clause doesn't mean I can find some other guy who's not involved in a robbery, not involved in a burglary, not involved in a murder, but happened to go out and buy a gun and say, oh, you are violating Section 2, even though you don't satisfy any of the conditions of Section 1.
So this is the, I think, the power of Fisher's argument.
He says that Section 2 can't just be taken as a broad, let's arrest anybody we feel like, because they have obstructed some sort of official proceeding.
And I think this rang true with a lot of the justices.
At one point, Alito jumped in, and I think in perhaps the most memorable exchange, he goes, well, wait a minute.
What about Jamal Bowman, the congressman who pulled a fire alarm, which caused official proceedings to be delayed?
In other words, stopped and then continued later.
Doesn't he violate this section?
What about the left-wing protesters who come into a public building, whether it's the Supreme Court, whether it is the Senate?
They take over offices.
They cause proceedings to be delayed or postponed or stopped.
Why aren't they being prosecuted by the Biden DOJ? To which Elizabeth Preligar does a kind of a familiar type of tap dance.
Well, she says, well, in those cases, they may not have corrupt intent.
Well, how do you know the January 6th defendants had corrupt intent?
Well, you're presuming that if somebody was there, they must have wanted to stop this proceeding, even if they didn't say so, even if there's no evidence that they actually did, or even if they were outside the building before the proceeding was even stopped, or they came in the building after it was stopped.
You can't stop a proceeding if the proceeding has already been stopped, and then you enter the building.
That was the case, for example, with Matthew Perna.
So, Elizabeth Preligar was trying to convince the court that, yeah, it's true that we haven't gone after any of these other guys on kind of our side, but nevertheless, we are being fair and neutral in administering the law.
By only going after January 6th defendants.
At one point she was asked, can you think of any other cases of people, protesters who disrupted official proceedings and yet they're facing 20 years in prison?
Let's remember, that is the maximum sentence under this obstruction of an official proceeding.
And so you've got a bunch of these January 6th guys and their other charges are misdemeanors.
Being in a restricted area.
Somewhat comically parading in a public building.
Whoop-dee-doo. And so normally the sentences would be extremely minor because the offenses are minor.
Or even in the case of some guy who like fought with a cop, okay, well that may carry a more severe sentence, but it's still not 20 years.
So this is a pretext for political persecution.
And even though there were The leftist justices, I think, are going to vote in favor of the government.
So that's three votes on that side.
The one justice that seemed to be a little bit on the fence, Amy Coney Barrett.
I don't think she is quite on the fence.
I think she will actually fall on the conservative side.
But I think there were five solid votes there to strike down this interpretation.
Not to strike down the law.
The law is fine. But to strike down the application of the law in this context.
And that's very good news for Trump, because Section 1512, the obstruction of beneficial proceeding, is a key part of the charge against him being brought by Jack Smith.
But more than 300, in fact almost 350 January 6th defendants stand to have their convictions rolled back.
Obviously their convictions on this count eliminated.
In some cases, you'll have guys who are released from jail.
In other cases, you have people who are maybe still in jail, but their sentences will be correspondingly reduced.
So, this is a very important case.
Now, unfortunately, well, this is the way the court works.
We've got to wait a couple of months for the decision, which should come before the court adjourns in June.
But I'm looking for a decision that is quite likely to be 5-4 or maybe even better, 6-3.
Debbie and I own some gold and we're pretty happy right now.
Why? Because gold is pushing to all-time highs.
And why? Well, actually, there are several reasons.
The cost of goods, inflation, continues to rise despite interest rate controls by the Fed.
By the way, since January 2021, cost of living is up 17.9%.
The national debt continues to skyrocket.
It's now above $34 trillion.
Not good. Causes many people to worry.
When is this house of cards going to come crashing down?
And then it's a presidential election year.
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I want to talk about, well, Debbie calls her the creepster.
The creepster.
We're talking about Catherine Marr, the CEO of National Public Radio.
And we're going to get a little window into her mind, such as it is, and her soul.
And this is important in part because, you know, NPR is a very powerful institution.
Do you realize that they...
Have a network that spans some 1,000 radio stations.
And all of this, by the way, funded by you, funded by me, funded by taxpayer money, at least in part.
And so we have a stake in this.
And yet NPR is this far-left institution that is being run, as you will see, by this deranged ideologue.
In fact, just this morning I saw a One of these comments by her where she's like, while I was at Wikipedia, she used to work at Wikipedia, and she has this kind of giddy expression, you know, she goes, I discovered that a lot of history was all about the white males and everything they discovered,
and so we began a systematic process of de-centering these white males, and we began to fill in the missing gaps of history, all the The women and the natives and the aborigines and the people of color who have been long excluded.
And I'm listening to all this and I'm thinking, well, I don't know, you're probably thinking of the, well, I did have an ancestor who was a goat herder.
And this guy, now admittedly, he did not invent anything.
He did not explore anything.
He didn't travel to America in 1492.
He didn't write anything.
In fact, how could he?
He was illiterate. But this is not to say that he was without achievement.
In fact, he was known throughout the village for his ability to jump in a single jump over 19 goats at one time.
Now, unfortunately, when he did that, his signature achievement, he landed on the 20th, crushing into death.
But nevertheless, until Catherine Maher came along, no mention of this guy in Wikipedia.
He's been completely left out of history.
So maybe now, under the new regime, you could pull out Isaac Newton, pull out...
Oh, Debbie goes, well, since you're blacklisted in Wikipedia, they're definitely got to give room to your ancestor, whether he be a person of color or not.
So, anyway, being a person of color does him no good.
Anyway, we're talking about Catherine Marr, and I want to look at some of her old posts and her old tweets, because she's a very active tweeter, and so you get a real window into her, into the way she thinks.
And by the way, she's not alone.
There are a lot of women like this, deranged, twisted, living in their own bubble, and they're running a lot of institutions.
I mean, they're running prominent foundations, they're heads of universities, they're heads of media corporations.
And so the first thing you notice about Catherine Marr is her, I would call it alternative vocabulary.
Epistemic emergencies, she lives in a world of structural privilege, transit justice, non-binary people, late stage capitalism, cis white mobility privilege, the politics of representation, toxic masculinity.
Now, Catherine Marr is just too mind numbingly dumb to be able to actually justify, explain, vindicate, offer concrete evidence.
She doesn't do any of this.
She's like a robot who repeats these phrases in a kind of chant.
No. Debbie says, have you considered the possibility that she is a creation of AI? Now, you know, I don't think she's a creation of AI because...
Well, I mean, she could be like chat GPT. She could be a walking chat GPT. But I think she's actually a creation of some ancient satirists who sat around basically...
These are like the guys who made Portlandia.
You know, they sit around and they go, let's come up with a real whack job!
Okay. And someone goes, how about Catherine Marr?
Well, okay, here we go.
So I think that's going on.
So Donald Trump is, in her words, a, quote, deranged racist sociopath.
And then you follow Catherine Marr's goings-on, and you find out where she lives.
Most of her time, she's at a meeting.
Or in a conference, or at the airport, or in a taxi.
So she has this kind of mobile world.
She is, in her 30s, she was not only unmarried and without children, but she said that she really, it would be very irresponsible for her to bear children because, quote, the planet is literally burning.
The planet is literally burning.
Debbie goes, it may be a good thing because one Catherine Marr is pretty much all that the globe can tolerate.
But she doesn't, quote, want to bring a child into the warming world.
I see. Now, you go on to discover that Catherine Marr is...
She's not only politically correct, she's culinarily correct, she is sartorially correct.
Her daily routine involves yoga, iced coffee, Zoom-based psychotherapy.
I mean, I can only imagine the world of a psychiatrist.
He's like, I've never encountered an individual like this.
Obviously a creation of a hologram or pure satire.
But on a serious note...
This wacko is running NPR. And that means there are a lot of young journalists who come into NPR, and they might have left-wing inclinations, but they're being signaled that this is the way to be.
After all, when you come into an institution, you always aspire to.
Who's the CEO? They're setting direction.
This is the leadership, and this is the sort of quintessential journalist.
And I think this is right.
The quintessential journalist, according to NPR, is in fact Catherine Marr.
You might have heard Mike Lindell and MyPillow no longer have the support of their box stores or shopping channels the way they used to.
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Guys, if you'd like to support my work, I'd like to invite you to check out my local channel.
You can become a monthly or an annual subscriber.
I post a lot of exclusive content there, including content that is censored on other social media platforms.
On locals, you get Dinesh Unchained, Dinesh Uncensored.
You can also interact with me directly.
I do a live weekly Q&A every Tuesday, 8 p.m.
Eastern. No topic is off-limits.
I've also uploaded some very cool films to Locals.
I've got kind of a Locals movie page.
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So is Police State, my latest film, and a new one I'm going to be working on.
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Hey, if you're an annual subscriber, you can stream and watch all this movie content for free.
It's included with your subscription.
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.
Hey guys, I'd like to welcome to the podcast a new guest.
His name is Terry Schilling.
He is president of the American Principles Project.
That's a project that is a premier national organization defending the institution of the family.
Terry has worked for, well, a bunch of pro-family political leaders.
Congressman Chris Smith from New Jersey, Sam Brownback, Republican from Kansas.
He's also the founder of the American Principles Project family initiative, big family initiative.
We're going to talk about all this.
You can follow him on x at shilling1776.
And by the way, the organization reports.americanprinciplesproject.org.
Terry, welcome. Thank you for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
Let's talk about what happened or what has happened to the institution of the American family.
It seems like the family is a very beleaguered institution these days.
It's under attack from a number of fronts.
There's a lot of work to do in rebuilding it.
But let's start by just trying to trace what went wrong.
Is it a failure of policy?
Is it a transformation of the culture?
I think if we can identify what went wrong, we might be able to focus on where is the place that things need to be fixed or reformed.
Yes, absolutely. And thank you again so much for having me.
I've been reading you since I was with a kid and I've seen all your movies and it's a real honor to be here.
The American family really didn't start to become under attack by progressives in our government and in politics until the 20th century.
There was a movement called the Progressive Movement and this is a really radical movement and you understand this but They want to progress beyond all barriers, all institutions, all norms and laws, and they want to tear it all down.
And the Marxists, when they came to America, they tried to start with the economic arguments of Marxism, but it didn't work because our neighbors were all doing better and moving upward, and you could support a family off of winning.
So they decided to destroy the American family.
Ironically, the Soviets were the ones to first get rid of marriage.
They created a five-minute marriage dissolution process where anyone could get divorced for any reason or no reason at all.
It took five minutes and the Soviets did that first, but it didn't really work here in America.
In America, we had very strong Christian roots and we were decentralized.
And what happened was they had to start with birth control.
And even when artificial birth control came on the scene, they had a very hard time legalizing it in America, because at that point in time, in the 1920s and 30s, Americans really thought of life and death as being decisions that God was in charge of, not human beings. And so when they tried to mainstream the birth control pill, people weren't adopting it because they didn't want to play God.
And then, you know, most of the problems that we have, Around the families started in the courts.
There were not popular movements to create no-haul divorce.
There were not popular movements to legalize contraception.
And there were not popular movements to legalize abortion.
They had to go through the courts, which were captured by progressives.
And so they started with the pill, which essentially separated the procreative act from procreation.
And from there, logically, it made sense that, well, marriage, since sex is no longer directly tied to childbearing and having children, well, then marriage is really just kind of an accessory or a stage in life that you go through, and it's temporary. And then from there, children became discardable through abortion.
And now you fast forward to today, and we're a whole other country.
We are now corrupting the innocence of children in ways that I don't think anyone, besides Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World could have predicted.
There's that famous interaction where one of the children is an outcast because he doesn't want to have sex with another child.
Once we left alone.
And so we find ourselves there today, where you broke down the sexual act.
That's the conception of human being.
That's where we start like that, is through sexual act.
So once you disorder that, everything else gets disordered and screwed up.
And now we're to the point where...
There's a serious movement and a serious industry in this country that doesn't believe that gender even exists or that biological sex doesn't exist.
And it's something that a doctor assigns to you after you're born.
And so we're seeing the mass disordering and dysfunction and chaos being enacted in our society.
And it's all because it's broken down the American family.
Do you agree with me, Terry, that this latest trans phenomenon is not really a marginal phenomenon?
I say marginal because there might be some people who think, well, gee, you know, what are the percentage of people who are trans?
There are obviously going to be very few.
But what you have here is a fundamental attack on the very idea of the biological separation between the sexes, because if there's no biological separation between the sexes, how can they be different or distinct biological roles assumed by the sexes?
So, you mentioned birth control, you mentioned divorce, you mentioned abortion, but there is also this fact that the family has tended to be, not just in the West, but all over the world, An institution that was, well, patriarchal, was also relied on a distinction of kind of functions or roles between the man and the woman.
So the family developed as a kind of a delicate balance between men and women.
And then children, of course, become dependent on a mother and a father.
Young girls emulate their moms and young boys emulate their dads.
And it seems like The left is trying to put a wrecking ball into all of this, and the trans phenomenon, as I see it, is a wedge to continue that radical process.
What do you think? No, Doug, you're exactly right.
And the academic architect of transgenderism is a Berkeley professor named Dr.
Judith Butler. She's a total full-blown Marxist.
And when she began writing about transgenderism and the theory of gender ideology, what she said was, when it comes to transgenderism, we are going to use gender in order to destroy gender.
And that is what it's doing.
It is erasing, you know, they call it a sex change.
And in the 80s and 70s, that was a euphemism, right?
It was actually an optimistic thing that they were trying to convince people to do.
But really, what these surgeries and procedures are is sex erasing or sex destruction, right?
You are now no longer able to reproduce as a male or female after getting these procedures.
So it's really a destructive surgery.
Sex change procedures, those are impossible.
They stopped calling them that because it's consumer fraud.
The whole thing is consumer fraud.
But Dinesh, the thing about this is that It started off small, but it is exploding.
It is exploding in growth, especially among young girls.
We are getting ready to release a new report called the Gender Industrial Complex.
And what we have found is that this year alone, when you combine the hormone treatments, the pupae blockers, the surgeries, it costs an average of $140,000 to transition to To another gender, for lack of a better way to say that.
So it's now a whole industry is around $4.5 billion annually.
And they expect that to surpass $10 billion in just five years.
If you let these guys get away with all the destruction that they're doing...
up in a similar situation as a Brave New World where you'll have Elon Musk-types controlling the babies that are in the population through IVF and artificial means and everyone will be sexless. You have to pay attention to what these gender activists are saying.
And what they are saying is...
And this is not me saying this.
I'm quoting them and paraphrasing them.
They believe that we are the oppressors here.
When I'm raising my sons to be met and when I'm raising my daughters to be girls and women...
They view that as oppressive.
They think that gender has always been fluid and that through some random chance through history that people start enforcing this on people.
Their ideal world, the gender activists, their ideal world is a world in which every kid, instead of going through puberty, they get puberty blockers.
And then eventually to decide what they want to be out of the infinite amount of genders that they're inventing every single day.
It's a very dark place and it's not a road that we really want to go down.
And it seems that what you're saying, Terry, is that there is a perverse marriage between ideology and commerce.
Because when you describe it as being a massive industry, I'm kind of assuming that it's not as if these hospitals and these doctors are all apostles of Judith Butler.
They may not even have heard of her.
But, as happened with, and this happened a generation ago with plastic surgery, right?
When it first came along, the idea was that it's reconstructive surgery.
Think of the person who just had a terrible accident and now they can kind of get their face back or some semblance of it.
And everybody was like, yeah, it's a great idea.
And then pretty soon, once the doctor is moving, the hospital is moving, it becomes now just a choreography of your own body.
But still, again, we're talking then in that case about adults, right?
If you want to spend your money and lengthen your nose or enlarge your breasts, well, you are an adult.
But you're talking about an industry in which children who really are not mature enough to make these kinds of choices are being steered partly perhaps through peer pressure, partly maybe through just a normal confusion of being an adolescent, but partly also because of the huge amount of money to be made by therapists, by doctors, by hospitals.
So it seems that progressive politics works best from their point of view when they can take radical ideology and marry it to consumer capitalism.
That's exactly right.
And what happens is, out of that $4.5 billion every year of profits and revenue, they then reinvest that into public relations campaigns.
That's why you read about it so much in the news and all these things.
But they also reinvest it into government affairs and lobbying and getting new laws passed that don't protect trans people.
Their bodies are being destroyed and mutilated and sterilized.
It protects the trans industry.
Dinesh, one of the interesting things that we've found is that in these financial documents, there's a term that comes up quite often, and it's like-time value.
And so what does that mean?
That is typically a term that Silicon Valley and venture capitalists use to talk about the lifetime value of their customers.
So every customer that they bring in the door, there's a lifetime value.
If they stick with us their whole life, whether it's Netflix or Hulu or Paramount +, whatever it is, They calculate the lifetime value of that person, of the customer.
And that is the type of terminology that these people are using.
There was an amazing video, well, a depressing video out of Vanderbilt Hospital, where a lady, she's in charge of the finances there, is talking about why the hospital needs to get into trained surgeries and how much money that they're making.
And she even says, we'll get $20,000 for a mastectomy.
But that's not including the aftercare.
That's not including the hospital stage and the surgery cost.
But I will tell you, you've made this argument before that essentially Barack Obama was the anti-American.
He was the worst president you've ever had.
He divided this country so much that by the end of our second term, we didn't know which bathroom to use.
And there was a real movement for that.
But where this real transgenderism industry exploded was when The Obama administration declared that gender identity discrimination was prohibited under civil rights law and under Obamacare.
Once his administration came out with that, the insurance companies and the hospitals who already had progressive activists there took that and ran with it.
And essentially, if you were on a health insurance plan that covered mastectomies for cancer victims, Well, now you'd have to perform mastectomies from people suffering from gender dysphoria who would like to remove their breasts to become non-binary or masculine.
This was not just a free market thing.
This was not just an academic thing.
This exploded because government got involved and started subsidizing it and paying for it.
It is a perfect storm for communism and Marxism to help further destroying.
They've destroyed the family in so many ways.
It's still some aspects that were strong here in this country, but now they're destroying the individuals.
The family protects the children and the individuals, and we train people how to be good citizens, and this goes right to the heart of what the family's supposed to be protecting.
And would you agree, Terry, I mean, if we're going to roll this back, if we're going to recover the family as it was, or perhaps closer to what it used to be, is the first step simply to strike and stop these sorts of trans surgeries, this sort of systematic oppression of children, is that the first step or would you start in a different place?
No, look, I think, you know, if your house has been, you know, destroyed by a fire, it's still on fire, you first have to put that fire out.
And right now, the house is on fire.
And it's not just a surgery, Dinesh, there is a whole pipeline, a transgender, Inc.
pipeline. You know, there was an excellent expose released a few years ago by a woman, an investigative journalist, Jennifer Bilek, about this industry where People like the Pritzker family.
J.D. Pritzker is the governor of Illinois, but they're from, I forget which hotel chain they're part of, but they fund non-profits.
Yeah, it's Hyatt.
They fund non-profits that then make the argument that these surgeries are necessary, they're life-saving, that they keep people from committing suicide.
So the non-profit then feeds into the for-profit, the hospitals, and then the government comes in to protect that industry and subsidizes it.
It is an absolute nightmare, and we have to ban it.
We have to start with banning it for children, right?
And then we have to allow people to sue on the basis of having harm done to them on purpose.
You know, a lot of this report came out from the United Kingdom because they shut down those procedure providers.
It's weird. Europe is more ahead of us than we are, and it's kind of crazy.
But they're shutting down the stuff for children because it's hurting them.
But what they have found is that There is reckless disregard when it comes to not just children, but adults as well.
They push them in. They don't give them the help they need and the aftercare and support they need afterwards.
So we've got to start with the kid because that's being used to create lifelong customers.
And then we have to give consumer protections like a private right of action so that people can sue once they realize that they've been a victim of consumer fraud.
I mean, those are excellent starting points, Terry.
And there's a lot here, guys.
So check out the American Principles Project.
Here's the website, reports.americanprinciplesproject.org.
I've been talking to Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project.
Follow him on X at Schilling, S-C-H-I-L-L-I-N-G, 1776.
Thank you, Terry, for joining me.
Excellent. Abraham Lincoln was in general not a sarcastic man.
In fact, he had a rich sense of humor, but his sense of humor inclined toward the goofball or the slapstick.
Later, when Lincoln was president, he really liked satirical imitations.
He would sometimes have people do satirical imitations in the Oval Office.
But bitter kind of sarcasm was not his style in general.
His rhetoric is very clean, very sparse.
It relies on limpid or clear logic.
That is the Lincoln that we find in the speeches and in the writings.
This is fairly typical Lincoln.
He's talking here about the notion of racial superiority.
And he says that if you're going to use racial superiority or intellectual superiority to enslave another race, he goes, well, somebody else can do it to you.
Here's Lincoln. If A can prove, however conclusively, that he may of right enslave B, well, why may not B snatch the same argument and prove equally that he may enslave A? Okay.
And then Lincoln goes on to say that there are always smarter people than we are in the world.
So if we have the right to enslave somebody else because we're smarter than that guy, well some third guy, let's just say some Einstein, has the right to come along and say that he has a right to enslave us.
This is the familiar Lincoln.
But I want to highlight a very sarcastic retort by Lincoln that is very effective rhetorically and also reminds me of something that's bigger or goes beyond the slavery debate.
Here's Lincoln. This is from a fragment that we have.
It's undated, so we don't know when Lincoln wrote this, but he wrote it on a piece of paper in his own handwriting.
Here's what he goes.
Although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a good thing, we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it by being a slave himself.
And that part of it is underlined.
So you see here the very effective deployment of sarcasm.
Hey, you are always praising the virtues of slavery.
Oh, it's a wonderful institution.
Oh, it produces harmony.
And the slave is like a member of the family.
And the slave is treated with great affection in the household that the slave...
And Lincoln's like, well, really, if slavery is so great...
Why don't you try it?
Why don't you become a slave?
Well, of course, then you get, well, I don't really feel like it, and well, that's not really the issue here.
But Lincoln has scored his point.
And when I think about the point that he scored, my mind goes to the various...
Arguments that we hear today for abortion.
And these are arguments that closely mirror the arguments that the slave owners made.
In fact, you often hear people, even now, say things like, well, if you don't like abortion, well, don't have one.
And this is supposed to be a knockout type of argument, but if you think about it, it really isn't.
Because it's no different from saying to someone, well, if you don't like racial discrimination, don't discriminate.
If you don't like the anti-Semitism that drove the Nazis, for example, to kill the Jews, don't kill any Jews yourself.
Well, clearly that doesn't really work, does it?
So let's look at some arguments that we hear today about abortion, and let's look and see how they parallel those of slavery.
This is actually from a post I saw, very well done by a guy named Nathan Prindler.
He goes, The slave is my property.
You can't tell me what to do with him.
Well, that parallels the, I'm in control of my own body.
You can't tell me what to do with my own body.
The argument for privacy.
No one is forcing you to have an abortion.
That's your own business.
Mind your own business. Similarly, no one's forcing you to have a slave.
Mind your own business.
The argument from superseding rights.
My property or my body rights come before the rights of the slave or the unborn.
So in both cases, it's like, well, yeah, the unborn may have some rights, but my rights come first.
So similarly, the slave may have some rights, but guess what?
My rights as a slave owner, my rights to own property come first.
The argument from inevitability.
Slavery has been around for thousands of years.
It's never going away.
We might as well have a safe and legal system in place for it.
Same with abortion.
Hey, people have always found ways to terminate their pregnancies.
The Spartans left unwanted children on the hillside.
So this has been around.
It's not going to go away.
We might as well legalize it and find a safe and legal way.
This is now quoting the Clintons to have it continue.
The argument from pseudoscience.
The slaves or the unborn aren't really people.
They aren't really like us.
They're physically different and therefore we're allowed to own them or kill them as we will.
Again, a kind of a very familiar echo of an old debate.
It's almost as if the Lincoln-Douglas debates are today fully present, but in a modified form.
The argument from socioeconomics.
If slavery or abortion ends, most of these slaves or babies will wind up on the street without a job.
Boom. That's what the slave owners said in the Democratic South.
Hey, we can't have all these slaves roaming around.
What are they going to do? There's no productive work for them in that respect.
They're useful as slaves.
And similarly, what are we going to do with all these unwanted children?
Is the state going to look after them?
Who's going to take responsibility for them?
The argument from the courts.
Slavery or abortion was vindicated by the Supreme Court.
It's the supreme law of the land.
It's already been decided.
It's settled law.
And obviously, that argument doesn't apply after the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v.
Wade, but it is an argument we've heard nonstop for four decades.
The argument from bogus comparison, slavery or abortion is in the best interest of the slaves or of the unborn.
The world can be a cruel place, so it's actually best for them to be enslaved or to be aborted.
In other words, the slave is going to have a terrible fate.
If you left him roaming out in America with nothing to do, anybody could just prey upon him.
He's got no one to protect him.
However, if he's on a plantation, wow, he's looked upon as a member of the family, he's going to be looked after.
And similarly, in the abortion context, these babies are unwanted.
A terrible life awaits them.
We might as well do away with them and spare them the terrible life that lies ahead.
And finally, the argument from the assumed hypocrisy of the other side.
You say you want to end slavery or abortion, but you don't want to live with free blacks or adopted unwanted babies.
So it's sort of like...
If you're against abortion, you've now got to take lifelong responsibility for all the children that are not aborted.
You've got to take them in yourself.
And similarly for slavery, if you're against slavery, well, what are you going to do to provide for all these people for life?
If you don't take responsibility for them, you're a hypocrite.
Your position against slavery is incoherent.
No, it's not. Because we're trying to stop a great evil.
It doesn't mean that we can solve all the problems that arise out of stopping that great evil, but we can solve them societally.
We may not be able to solve them individually.
So, I mention all this because...
Whenever we discuss history, as in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, there always is a certain ring of unfamiliarity.
We're talking about things that occurred 150 years ago.
There is something necessarily archaic about it.
But that's also the charm of history, right?
You find yourself in a different time, in a different place, with people who aren't exactly the same as you are, and that's part of the fascination of history.
But also I want to stress, and I've tried to stress in this segment, the relevance of history.
Not just the old cliche that those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it.
No, but there are sometimes very close similarities between debates that occurred before and debates now.
And so by learning about those debates that occurred in the past, we can illuminate, we can have a better understanding of our own situation here and now.
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