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April 22, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:41
THE RELUCTANT JUROR Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep816
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Coming up, I'll show how the attitude of a reluctant juror in the Trump criminal trial in New York encapsulates why Republicans lose so often in political and cultural battles.
I want to argue that the Ukraine vote exposes a fault line within the GOP that spells trouble for the future of MAGA, the Make America Great Again movement.
And Pastor Greg Luck joins me.
We're going to talk about his new film, Miracles at the Movies.
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Today's episode of the podcast is called The Reluctant Juror.
And I'm going to speak about The Reluctant Juror.
But it's not just in the context of the Trump criminal trial going on in New York. This is the so-called hush money case and the jury is now seated. In fact, opening statements begin today. I'll be tracking those and talking about the case as it develops.
But the importance of the reluctant juror is not just for the Trump trial.
It's also to help us answer the question, why do Republicans, why do conservatives lose?
Because I think that the reluctant juror is not the full answer, but an important answer to this question.
Why do we keep losing?
Now, Let's talk about this reluctant juror.
It's a young woman, and you can see the clip on social media.
She seems to be in her mid to late 20s.
She seems to have a background from maybe Eastern Europe, although that's not clear.
She does have a bit of an accent, and she's being interviewed about why she got off the jury.
And she explains that she tells a little bit about her background and she tells a little bit about her...
And it's very clear as you listen to her talking that she's a very sensible person, a very nice person, seems very fair-minded, very sincere, very candid...
And then she's asked about Trump.
And she says, well, she seems favorably disposed to Trump.
She likes Trump. She indicates that Trump did a good job when he was president.
And yet she says that for these reasons...
She didn't think that she could be impartial.
So, in other words, precisely because she likes Trump, is favorably disposed to Trump, she tells the judge, I don't think I can be impartial, and the judge promptly, probably quite happily, excuses her from the jury.
Now, when I first saw this, I was taking this in and saying to myself, well, it sounds like you're a really good person for the jury.
Because, number one, you are a fair-minded person.
So whether or not you are for Trump, in this case you are for Trump, But does it mean that you can't listen to the evidence?
You can't see what's going on?
You can't look at the law?
You can't make an impartial judgment, even though you have political opinions?
And so why did you put yourself in a position where you could easily be thrown off the jury?
your behavior not only contrasts dramatically with the behavior of leftists, who are not only trying to be on the jury, but they're on the jury now.
And you would have been a very important kind of balancing force to the degree that a jury is supposed to reflect Trump's peers.
Shouldn't there be some pro-Trump people on the jury?
Because there are going to be some anti-Trump people on the jury, and the judge is not making the fact that people are anti-Trump a bar to them being on the jury.
He's simply asking the question, and this is the point.
The leftists are all like, yes, I'm not really a fan of Trump, but I believe I can be impartial.
Well, if they can be impartial, well, why can't you be impartial?
So, the difference here is one of psychology.
The Republican is essentially a stickler.
The Republican is a, well, strictly speaking, I'm leaning for Trump, and that means I'm not strictly impartial.
Democrats never think like this.
They never operate like this.
Their point is, we want to get on the jury because we think that we're going to be able to judge Trump and give him really what he's due, what we think he deserves.
Republicans don't think like that.
And this is the psychological gulf, chasm, if you will, between the two parties.
What it really means is that the two sides aren't even really playing the same game.
Republicans think that a jury is made up of almost a phantom group of impartial people snatched out of the sky who are going to listen, if you will, without having any prior thoughts about the case, coming in as a blank slate.
Democrats think that's nonsense.
Everybody who comes and has a point of view, it might as well be our point of view.
So either we run the country or they run the country.
Let's make sure we run the country.
That's their philosophy. So my point is that in this abstract world, this theoretical world, this civics book world, This woman's moral strictures, this reluctant juror's principled stepping off from the jury might make sense.
But not only do we not live in this world, we are so far from it.
We're in a polarized society where if our people take the principled stance and get off the jury, their people won't.
And the jury will solely be made up of their type of people.
And so you see right here how Trump's situation is made worse by the fact that Republicans have this kind of self-conception.
So when I said, I posted and said something like, I can't really believe this nonsense where this young woman who would actually help to make the jury more balanced, more fair, would counter, if you will, the extremism of the left, and yet she voluntarily hops off, gets off the bus.
I said, this is very bad.
And then, of course, sure enough, there were some people who replied to me, and they're like her, and they say things like, well, Dinesh, what are you saying?
Are you advocating that she tell lies?
Are you advocating that...
No, I'm not advocating that she tell lies.
I'm advocating that at certain times, a prudent silence is...
Justified. At certain times, the point is, you just say, look, I may have some opinions about Trump.
There's certain things I like about him.
There's certain things I don't like about him.
And I believe I can be fair.
I think that actually does reflect what this woman thinks.
The difference between her and the other jurors is that the other jurors actually aren't going to be fair.
They can't be fair and they don't think that's a problem.
They are the ones who are happy to lie.
And so what I'm saying is that unless you think that jurors should be made up exclusively of leftists and exclusively of Democrats, so then the question becomes, what happened to the jury of Trump's peers?
How do we get a fair and balanced jury when it's made up entirely of people who are...
In some cases, not merely hostile.
They're suffering from utter Trump derangement syndrome.
What kind of a fair trial comes out of that?
And again, this is more than about this case.
It's just indicative of a broader problem, not just with the justice system generally, but with the way that Republicans and conservatives approach the fight.
The point I think we're trying to make here is that we are not in a level playing field.
We are not living in the civics book America that we...
Believed in and were raised in and maybe even witnessed earlier in our youth.
It's a very different kind of America.
In some ways, there's a kind of active cold war going on in the country.
Either we recognize it and sort of adapt to the situation or we consign ourselves to perpetual defeat and failure.
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Congress has approved a giant package, aid package for Ukraine and The vote was pretty decisive in the House because virtually all the Democrats voted for it.
And actually, a majority of Republicans did not vote for it.
121 voted against it.
But it still passed 311 to 112.
So that's not a close vote.
And what it means is that the Democratic Party is lined up 100% behind Biden.
And the Republican Party on this issue is pretty much split down the middle.
So, there is a war coalition between Democrats and a sufficient number of Republicans, both in the House and in the Senate, To send, it seems, a continuing stream of military and non-military aid to Ukraine.
Here's Mike McCall, Republican of Texas, right before the vote.
Evil is on the march.
History is calling and now is the time to act.
His speech, if you listen to it, says that Congress has the opportunity to do a vote that is the equivalent of, quote, stopping Hitler in the 1930s.
So he's acting as if this is the way to prevent World War III. So according to this theory, if you don't support Ukraine, then Putin will gobble up Ukraine, which will only be the starting point, after which he will start gobbling up other countries, including countries like Poland.
This will then set off World War III. So the way we prevent World War III is we give Ukraine what it needs to continue to fight and hopefully to win.
Now, one interesting sight after the vote in the House was that somebody went to the Democrats and handed out Ukrainian flags.
And so you see all these Democrats, I don't think the Republicans were doing it, but Democrats all waving the Ukrainian flag in the US Congress.
These are, by the way, Democrats who would not, you would never see them all waving the American flag, but they're waving the Ukrainian flag.
And that I think is an indication of what's happened in the country.
You now have a Democratic Party that's more excited about securing Ukraine's border than about our own border.
In fact, not only are they more excited, they will do everything they can to block any action on securing our border.
They have political reasons for wanting the border to stay open.
I do think it's significant that a majority of Republicans voted against Ukraine, because that's a change.
Republicans at the beginning were pretty united in supporting Ukraine.
And my own view is to support Ukraine in principle, but there is a limit, and there is a question of priorities, and there's a question of our national interest, and there's a question of where is this war actually going?
If you could show me, for example, that this latest batch of aid is going to be enough to repel Putin, push him back behind the Russian border, secure Ukraine's independence, and then generate, if you will, a treaty or peace, then I would say, well, maybe it's worth the expenditure.
But There is no reason to believe this is even the case.
In fact, here's an interesting report by Seymour Hersh, the legendary longtime investigative reporter, Last year, CIA Director William Burns secretly flew to Kiev to warn Zelensky face-to-face that Washington was aware of his personal corruption and his unwillingness to dismiss any of the dozens of officials known to be deeply involved in diverting funds to personal accounts.
Burns told the president that there was anger among some of his subordinates because he was taking too large a cut of the spoils.
What are they talking about?
Corruption in the Ukraine.
When you have not just millions, but billions of dollars flowing in, Zelensky takes some, his allies and aides all take some, and apparently they're upset that he's taking too much.
He's not giving them their share.
So this is the kind of rampant corruption.
Frankly, it's not unique to Ukraine.
There was rampant corruption in Afghanistan.
There was rampant corruption in Iraq.
And the bigger question is this.
Does anybody think that this $60 billion is going to help Ukraine win the war?
No. The war is a bottomless pit.
And so what's happening is Ukraine is losing the war for the simple reason that it kind of has to.
You have a tiny country, Ukraine.
It's kind of like a little guy, 5'2", and he's taking on a big guy, like 6'8".
Who's going to win that fight?
Well, the little guy goes, oh, give me some help, and I could use a slingshot.
I need a little javelin.
And so, sure, that's going to maybe postpone the inevitable, but only postpone it.
There's a kind of a diabolical theory that the Democrats here are trying to postpone the collapse of Ukraine before the election.
Because if the collapse of Ukraine occurred before November, it would be another Biden disaster on top of the Afghan disaster.
It would help Republicans.
Now, you'd think Republicans would know this and would go, hey, listen, that's on Biden.
This is Biden's war.
We're going to let Biden fund his own war.
We're not going to be part of it.
If Ukraine collapses before the election and it benefits us, hey...
Then we'll take the benefit.
We'll take the win. But no, Republicans are like, let's save Biden through the 2024 election.
And if Ukraine collapses after that, well, it's then too late.
Biden would not pay any kind of political price.
So, I think that the problem here is that this money going to Ukraine is just part of an ongoing, we want more, and then that more is exhausted, and then we want still more.
And by the way, if Ukraine loses the war, we're then going to have a big pitch among Democrats and on the left.
Let's have more money for Ukraine to rebuild Ukraine.
So now that Ukraine has collapsed, now that the place is in rubble, we're going to now take on the cost of rebuilding it.
Now this shows a government that is utterly out of touch with its own citizens, and it shows a government that cares more about foreign interests than about our own interests.
And so, all of this, I think, is bad in itself because it's going to prolong a war over there that is not doing a whole lot for us, to be honest.
This is not about World War III. I don't think that World War III is imminent, at least not there.
If World War III does come, I think it's far more likely to come out of the powder keg of the Middle East.
I think that a war that engulfs the world is more likely to start Over there than in Ukraine.
But to me, the Ukraine vote is very dispiriting.
It seems like we were sort of stabbed in the back a little bit by Mike Johnson.
Mike Johnson had been going around saying very emphatically, we're not going to fix other people's border until we fix our own.
Now, nobody made him say that.
He was going around saying that on his own.
This was his position.
And then he gets a briefing from the intelligence agencies and he comes out with a completely different position.
In a sense, he changes his mind.
He pushes through this Ukraine package.
And so all of this puts us in the very awkward position where we feel like not only is the other side stomping on us, but our own side isn't exactly standing by us either.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
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Guys, I'd like to welcome back to the podcast Pastor Greg Locke.
He's the founding and lead pastor of Global Vision Bible Church.
He's also the executive producer of a film we want to talk about called Miracles at the Movies.
This film is going to be...
Taking place in theaters across the country on April 23rd, 2024.
So, mark your calendar and tickets are on sale now.
By the way, you can follow Pastor Locke at Onyx.
His handle is just at PastorLocke.
Greg, welcome. Thank you for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
It seems like this film is coming at a very opportune time.
Could you describe the peculiar moral crisis that we face today in America, perhaps in the West, perhaps even in the world, that makes a film like this so needed?
I think by and large, people are just looking for hope.
They see so much in the mainstream news media that just discourages them, and people are just filled with a spirit of heaviness, and it seems like churches are just compromising unbelievably, having to do anything and everything just to get a crowd, and people just don't know where to go for truth.
But, you know, as we read the Bible, both Old and New Testament, we find God always has a platform for truth.
So I jokingly, not so jokingly, tell pastors, look, when you kick God out of the church, He's going to the movie theater.
And so last year, when our movie come out in Jesus' name, hit theaters, you know, much like you understand, there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes to making a movie And then when you're a guy like us that's very vocal, you have all the shadow banning.
You have movie theaters that won't take it.
You have the protests. You have all of that.
But it just came out hot as a blockbuster because people are talking about the demonic.
You know, people are talking about the supernatural.
And so this year when Fathom approached us, it was their idea.
They said, we'd like to rerun the movie and give you 30 more minutes of, you know, like live ministry time at the end.
But, you know, I knew the Domino Revival had done so well, and I was in that, and it kind of tied, come out in Jesus' name together.
So I said, what if we did a doubleheader?
What if we took 45 minutes of our movie, 45 minutes of Pastor Mike's movie, we crammed them together and kind of just gave them the best of both worlds, and then let both of us sit down and give the nation hope, give the world hope.
And so that's what our hope is, that people will watch this and be like, you know what?
I need a miracle in my marriage.
I need a miracle with my addicted teenager.
I need a miracle with my addiction, with my sickness, cancer, whatever it is.
And I really believe God's going to set people free in the theater.
We'll talk about the content of the film in a moment.
I just want to talk about, so essentially, you had a highly successful film come out in Jesus' name.
Pastor Mike Signorelli had a successful film, the Domino Revival.
I think what you're saying is that, did you condense the two films, kind of put them together so it's like a double feature, and then at the end you have a, is it a Q&A or is it a presentation by both you and Pastor Mike, where the two of you sit together and interpret So we took both movies and condensed each one of them to 45 minutes and just kind of crammed them together.
Kind of took the most action, you know, out of both of them, the best parts, cut some things out, building the storyline, because a lot of people have already seen it.
And then we sit down and we actually just talk through the issues.
And so it's like a very casual...
Preaching, teaching, biblical approach.
We talk about deliverance. We talk about healing.
We talk about suicide and things like that.
Things that are happening in the nation and really just giving people hope.
And then I even go back into my childhood and I talk about abuse issues and things that people need to learn to let go of and offer forgiveness to people so they can be set free.
So that's kind of what they can experience.
And for really 30 minutes, it's just...
You know, this is what you need.
And then towards the end, it's almost like we commission everybody in the theater.
Now stand up and start praying for people.
Start helping people. Start ministering to people.
Start being kind to the people that are around you.
And so we want to set them free so that they can be at liberty to help people in the theaters that need to be set free, that need to be prayed for and just loved.
Pastor Greg, one of the common themes, it seems, of both films is that they take seriously the idea of deliverance from the demonic, from Satan.
And now, the question I want to ask you is, we see a lot of breakdown, confusion...
a lot of it is at the level of individuals, people who feel hopeless, commit suicide for example.
Some of it is the breakdown of the family, some of it is the erosion of civic bonds and civic unity.
Where does the demonic, where does Satan fit into this picture?
Because on the one hand, it would seem like it's kind of an excuse for people to say, well, Satan made me do it.
Thus, you know, subtracting away the idea of moral responsibility and yet you can't be a Christian and not recognize the power of evil in the world no less than of good.
So how do you see, what is Satan's operating manual for the world?
You know, I think one of the open doors for people is when they do try to blame the demonic, when they do try to blame the devil.
Because when you don't take personal responsibility for your own sin, for your own actions, I mean, I believe God forgives sins, but he doesn't relieve consequences.
You make a stupid choice and you're going to get a stupid result.
So not everything is a demon.
But I think in the church world, we're so afraid of, you know, demonology and angels and, you know, Exorcism, deliverance, whatever you want to call it.
And it's been so abused by some YouTube preachers with major size platforms that the church has an aversion to it.
But when people come to the office and you know good and well that they're under some sort of religious generational bondage, some sort of generational curse, you know, my dad experienced this, my grandfather experienced this, and we call it hereditary.
But it's interesting that most doctors believe in deliverance ministry more than most pastors, because the first thing they do when you walk into a doctor's office is give you a sheet of paper, and you have to start going down the list, right?
Is heart attack in your family?
Does high blood pressure run in your family?
Anybody ever commit suicide?
You know, strokes, this, that, and the other.
And what they're looking for is a generational connection.
Is this something that runs in your family?
Well, according to the Bible, we believe in generational blessings, but we have to also believe in the other side of the coin, which is a generational curse.
And so, here's what we tell people in deliverance ministry.
Not everything is a demon. We believe in three things.
Casting out demons, breaking off generational curses, and pulling down strongholds.
And by strongholds, we mean, you know, temptations, addictions.
So because not everything's a demon, some people don't need deliverance.
They need discipline, right?
They just need to read the Bible. They need some accountability.
They need to stop looking at pornography.
And so we have a theme at our church.
We say, look, yes, we know not all sickness is demonic.
Not all addiction is demonic.
So we say, look, if it is demonic, it will leave through the power and the authority of the name of Jesus.
So we say, look, when in doubt, Cast it out.
Let me deal with it as an issue of deliverance.
And if it's not deliverance, then we'll get you some medication.
We'll get you some treatment, some traction.
We'll get you some counseling. We'll pray for you.
We'll get you to someone professionally that can help you.
But if it's demonic, there's only one remedy, and that is you cast it out in the name of Jesus.
I remember many, many years ago, I must have been a teenager when I first saw The Exorcist, and of course that indelibly and unforgettably puts in your mind what a casting out of demons in the modern age might look like.
You do this.
You've done it. Pastor Mike does it.
You both talk about delivering, you know, drawing the demon out, and in the name of Jesus, Can you describe what that actually is like?
In other words, what is it like to have somebody who is possessed by a demon?
What is it like for them and what is it that you do to perform the exorcism?
I don't know if you used that term.
Sure. It really is a case-by-case situation because it depends on the amount of oppression that somebody has.
Now, what we find, this is just my statistic, but what we find is probably 95 to 98 percent of the adults that we deal with in deliverance ministry, they've been carrying this bondage, this hurt, this unforgiveness, this oppression since they were a child.
You know, again, maybe through a generational curse, maybe through a sickness that they incurred when they were a child, or maybe through molestation or rape or incest.
Something opened the door either by them or to them.
When we deal with people, we have to take it on a case-by-case basis.
For example, when you deal with somebody that may be struggling with depression, deep anxiety, Isaiah 61.4 calls that the spirit of heaviness.
The Bible talks about in 2 Timothy the spirit of fear.
There are things that are behind the sinful natures that we have at times.
There are things that are behind our addictions.
But A spirit of heaviness is going to respond different than a spirit of witchcraft.
If somebody had a voodoo curse put on them, they would raise around witchery and wicked and Satanism.
It's going to respond differently.
And deliverance has a sound, right?
I can be in a room and let's say four or five people all flare up at the same time.
It's better when it's peaceful. I like the peaceful ones, but we've seen people levitate.
We've seen people blow up, scream, holler.
That's not optimal.
That's not what I want to see, but it just happens.
And I can hear somebody scream a certain way, and I can say, oh, that's grief.
That's witchcraft. That's unforgiveness.
Because here's what's interesting.
Demons respond today the exact same way they did 2,000 years ago when Jesus and the disciples and the apostles cast them out.
They still respond the same way.
Matter of fact, there's only two groups of individuals that still respond to deliverance the same way.
Demons and religious people because they don't know what to do with it when they see it.
That's fascinating. You know, when you use the phrase, the spirit of heaviness and the spirit of fear, I guess I tend to respond to those metaphorically.
Like, I read the word spirit as being the mood of heaviness, the mood of fear.
But you're saying, no, there's actually a literal meaning.
The spirit... A spirit is a being.
It's, in this case, obviously an evil spirit.
And it is a spirit that may, in fact, need to be cast out.
Let me ask you, not shifting gears dramatically, but just focusing slightly differently.
There's so much going on.
So much of the evil in our culture is being driven ideologically or politically.
It's through public forms of deception, the way in which our institutions have become untrustworthy.
How does the church handle that issue?
Does it boldly speak into society and into the culture or does it withdraw from the culture and look at these as spiritual problems that need spiritual tending but not an explicit advocacy of politics?
How do you see that?
You know, I think, and I've been very vocal, especially since, you know, the whole COVID debacle.
I've been very vocal that we're in the mess we're in because pastors will not stand up and say what needs to be said.
The church has become so woke in the culture.
And I call it skinny jeans, fog machines, and big screens.
And that's all they've got. There's no substance.
There's no truth. And every pastor in the Bible, every evangelist, apostle, prophet, you know, whether it was a minor prophet or a major prophet, all of them We're good to go.
If you do, you're going to destroy your church, you know, separation of church and state and all that nonsense.
Whereas what we're finding is, okay, we grew so exponentially during COVID when I said, we're not going to close our church.
I'm not going to sit around and make you wear a mask like you're in a hospital.
You know, why would we do that?
We're going to stand up for righteousness and we're going to live up to the freedom that we have in this nation.
And when we did, our church just absolutely exploded.
We're still in a 3,000 seat tent four years later and revival's still happening.
And people are like, What are you doing?
What are you doing? What the Bible says I'm supposed to do.
I'm supposed to be bold and I'm supposed to stand up.
I'm not called to entertain the goats and slop the hogs.
I'm called to feed the sheep.
And when sheep are well fed, they will bring more sheep and the pasture will grow and grow and grow.
So I think it's a sin.
I think it's a sin and a shame that pastors have shrunk back from their biblical responsibility to stand up and say, look, enough's enough.
Enough is enough.
This is what the Bible says.
And everybody's like, well, we think you ought to preach like Jesus.
If I preach like Jesus, nobody would show up.
Nobody would watch my broadcast, right?
They killed the man because of what he said, not because of what he did.
And Jesus was a revolutionary voice in his day against corruption.
It seems amazing to me how, I mean, we've seen the way in which so many of the mainline churches have declined dramatically because they have tried to make themselves relevant.
They've diluted the kind of clarity of the Christian message.
Now we see in the Catholic sphere, Pope Francis seems to be adopting the same failed message I think what you're saying is that if a pastor stays true to what, not true to himself, but true to what the Bible is and do what the Bible says, then your church is going to be fine.
It's going to grow and people are going to want to come because that's really what they need and that's what the world needs.
Yeah, and God's going to honor it.
I mean, when we honor His Word, you know, a man told me years ago, if you'll make much out of the Bible, God will make much out of your life.
And these churches, they just want to have programs and pageants and games and potlucks.
And that stuff's good within its place, in its context.
But people need the truth.
And so they say, well, you know, you're just going to run people off.
Well, yeah, some people will leave.
We've had a lot of people leave, but we've had a lot more people show up and a massive social media outreach and movies and books.
Not because I'm some famous preacher, but because people are like, wow, this guy's a voice in the wilderness.
And that's what John the Baptist was.
He was a voice in the wilderness.
He was brash. He was raw.
It'd be hard to sit down and have a cup of coffee with John the Baptist, right?
I mean, he was very bold.
But Jesus said twice, he's the greatest prophet ever born of a woman.
And then when he gets his head cut off for preaching against political corruption, number one, and for preaching the gospel, his head cut off.
And here's what's interesting. I tell our church all the time, nobody in the whole world, me, you, no one, nobody knows the name of the executioner that picked up an axe and chopped his head off.
But everybody knows the name of John the Baptist.
And the reason biblically is because those who are trying to silence us, history will never remember them.
But people like us that stand up for righteousness, we are leaving a legacy to the next generation and we will be honored and remembered by God.
Guys, this is great stuff.
Follow Pastor Greg Locke on X at Pastor Locke.
And the movie, Miracles at the Movies, April 23rd, 2024.
Tickets are on sale now.
And we'll have the link up with the podcast.
It's actually a Fathom event.
So this means that it's going to be in theaters nationwide and it's tomorrow.
It opens to, is it tomorrow evening?
Yes, tomorrow evening.
Yeah, tomorrow evening.
Okay, guys, this is fantastic.
Thank you, Pastor Locke. Thank you for joining me.
Thank you, Dinesh. I appreciate it so much.
I want to talk about Abraham Lincoln's relationship to two interesting figures, two very different figures, one American and one an ancient Greek.
The American is Henry Clay. Henry Clay was a Whig, as by the way Lincoln was in his early career.
This is before Lincoln became a Republican, before the founding of the Republican Party.
And Henry Clay was a slave owner.
He was originally from Kentucky.
Lincoln, by the way, was born in Kentucky before his family moved to Illinois.
And The other figure is Aristotle.
Now, Lincoln is not known to be a direct advocate of Aristotle.
He rarely quoted Aristotle, if at all.
I'm not familiar with a single direct quotation by Lincoln of Aristotle.
Lincoln tended to focus on American figures for the most part.
But I want to show that there's a continuity between Aristotle and Henry Clay and Lincoln, even though Aristotle was an advocate of slavery, Henry Clay had slaves, and Lincoln, of course, neither had slaves nor was an advocate of slavery.
But there is a common thread, and it's important to recognize what the common thread is because it teaches us a lesson about politics more generally.
Now, let's begin with Henry Clay.
Here is Abraham Lincoln delivering a eulogy from Henry Clay, and he quotes from Henry Clay's speech to the American Colonization Society.
The American Colonization Society was a group that actually believed that after emancipation, blacks who are former slaves should be returned to Africa.
Today there are some people who present this as if it was some kind of a racist position, but it had black advocates, it had white advocates, and Henry Clay explains why he thinks it's a good idea.
Quote, this is Henry Clay talking, not Lincoln.
There is a moral fitness in the idea of returning to Africa her children, whose ancestors have been torn from her by the ruthless hand of fraud and violence.
And then he goes on to say that if freed, they will carry back to their native soil the rich fruits of religion, civilization, law, and liberty.
And then he says, may it not be one of the great designs of the rulers of the universe, thus to transform an original crime into a signal blessing to that most unfortunate portion of the globe.
This is interesting on so many different levels.
First of all, you see that Henry Clay here is very much in the Jeffersonian tradition.
He has slaves, but he is also kind of anti-slavery.
He recognizes that slavery is bad.
It's a curse. It's not something that should have happened.
But Henry Clay also recognizes it has happened.
Here we are. We are in this situation.
And he goes, how do we get out of it?
He goes, well, it's going to be a very difficult prospect.
If we take these slaves and just free them and leave them here, there'll be not only aliens, in a sense, in a new country— We're good to go.
He's not wrong.
Just as Jefferson, in having some of the same concerns, was not wrong.
And these concerns were shared by Lincoln, which is why Lincoln himself supported the idea of returning freed slaves to Africa, at least early in his career.
Later, when Frederick Douglass and others told Lincoln, this is not what we want.
We want to be in America.
We've been here so long.
We're Americans now.
Lincoln sort of He acceded.
He gave in. He changed his mind based upon this testimony.
But Lincoln discusses an argument in which people in the Republican Party are critical of Henry Clay and attack him on the grounds that he was a slave owner.
They say, how could you support Clay?
Here's Lincoln. He says, the liberty men, meaning the advocates of the abolitionists, the advocates of anti-slavery, the liberty men, Lincoln is speaking, the liberty men said we are not I mean, wow. Think of how often we hear this today.
We're not going to do evil because it's going to bring about good.
So we're not going to support a slave owner like Henry Clay, even though he is on our side on the extension of slavery.
And here's Lincoln's reply.
By the fruit the tree is to be known.
An evil tree cannot bring forth good fruit.
If the fruit of electing Mr.
Clay would have been to prevent the extension of slavery, could the act of electing have been evil?
So right here is the answer to Republicans who say things like, we can't do that.
We can't support that position.
That's wrong, even though it may bring about a good result.
We can't vote for Mr.
Trump because, after all, that's voting for the lesser evil and that's still an evil.
And Lincoln goes, well, you know things by their fruits.
Look at the actual effects of what your vote will produce and ask yourself, are those effects good?
If so, the act of voting for that candidate, that party, that position is good.
Let me now turn to Aristotle for a moment, because although Aristotle defended slavery, Aristotle defended what he called natural slavery.
And the natural slave is one of two types of people.
Either it is someone who is mentally incompetent, this is a person who cannot govern himself, and therefore has to be governed, not just in Aristotle's day, even today.
Such a person belongs in an institution or they're under somebody else's supervision or they have some other type of custodian or caretaker.
The second type of person, this type of person is often ignored, is the person who is so incorrigibly wicked or bad That, in a sense, they cannot be entrusted with their own freedom.
Now, today, of course, we take that position with regard to incorrigible criminals, people who serial killers.
It's like, we can't let this guy roam free.
He has to be confined.
Now, we'll say, well, we're not making him a slave.
We're putting him in prison.
But it's the same thing.
You're depriving the person of their freedom.
Quite frankly, if you're in prison, you're deprived of the fruits of your labor.
So there's a sense in which imprisonment is a form of slavery.
And yet for Aristotle, Aristotle knew that most slaves in the world in his time and in subsequent times were not slaves for those reasons.
They were slaves because they were just grabbed.
They were just captives in war or they were part of a slave trade in which there were slave catchers who got them in Africa, sold them to intermediaries.
Then across the Middle Passage they came to America.
So Aristotle calls these people not natural slaves.
But rather, conventional slaves.
They're slaves by custom, by convention.
There's nothing in nature that requires them to be a slave.
And so, this kind of slavery, Aristotle concedes, is unjust.
There's no argument for justice.
And yet, Aristotle seems to be okay with the existence of conventional slavery.
There were lots of slaves in Greece, in Aristotle's time, who were captives in war.
Aristotle never set free them.
Why not? Because for Aristotle, civilization is a very rare thing.
Civilization requires exceptional people who have free time or leisure to be able to do things like write a play, write books like Aristotle's own books, the physics, the metaphysics, the politics, the ethics and so on.
So civilization is this rare and fragile plant. It doesn't exist in most places in the world in Aristotle's time.
And so Aristotle's point is that we are living so close to the edge of necessity, essentially he's saying we need somebody to do the dirty work and those people are slaves.
So if we didn't have slaves, we wouldn't have civilization.
Now Lincoln never directly commented on this argument, but my guess is that whether or not he approved of it, he would see in a sense the sense of it.
He'd see what Aristotle is saying.
And I think the point that Lincoln is making is We're good to go.
That in a world of abundance, in a world of machinery, in a world of industry, Aristotle's argument becomes completely obsolete.
You don't need slaves to do the dirty work because you have machines.
You have the stove.
You have the steamship.
You don't need to have physical labor to pull things anymore.
And so... So in the 19th century, freedom, not slavery, produces economic development.
Aristotle's point is that in our time, in the 5th century BC, we can't have civilization if we don't have slavery.
And in a sense, you can see that when Lincoln says that the founders declared the right...
So that the enforcement would follow when the circumstances permitted?
Lincoln is in some ways saying that even in the 18th century, the world was a lot like it was in Aristotle's day.
In other words, people are still getting around on horseback.
People are still essentially operating without machinery of any kind.
And so it's physical labor that does all the labor.
But in Lincoln's own time, the world is changing.
The world is becoming a world driven by freedom, by mechanization, by the expansion of commerce.
Now, in some ways, that would also support slavery, because think of it.
It was commerce and the world demand for cotton that drove the plantation system in the South.
But nevertheless, Lincoln saw a future in which slaves would...
Slavery has always been wrong.
But in the modern world, given mechanization and industry, slavery would not only be wrong, but it would no longer even be necessary.
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