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April 29, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:12
THE SET UP Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep821
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Coming up, I'll reveal some newly released details that confirm that the Biden DOJ's Mar-a-Lago raid was largely a setup.
I want to talk about O.J. Simpson and Trump's New York case.
Two things that don't seem related, but as you'll discover, they, at least in a certain respect, are related.
And author Jeremy Karl joins me.
He's from the Claremont Institute.
He's going to explain why whites, oddly enough, are the ones pushing an ideology of anti-whiteness.
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Was the Mar-a-Lago raid organized by the Biden DOJ, carried out by the FBI, which is part of the DOJ, was it a set-up?
And many of us, of course, have long suspected that it was and is.
But what is the proof?
What is the evidence that there was, in fact, a setup here?
That this was an effort to get Trump, a manufactured case against Trump.
Not all that different from a cop who sort of slips into an apartment claiming to find drugs and then plants the drugs in a drawer.
That would be a setup. So how do we know that this Mar-a-Lago raid was a setup?
Well, Little tidbits are coming to light that point in that direction.
And I've mentioned a few of them before.
Let me review some of those.
Number one... The National Archives and the Biden administration, in fact, the Biden White House, were going back and forth and conspiring with each other, collaborating with each other about bringing charges against Trump.
By the way, the head of the National Archives, a vicious anti-Trump guy, and so this guy, he was even said publicly, like, ever since January 6th, I've been smoldering with rage.
You know this is a guy that would love to get Trump.
Number two, we know that Merrick Garland now lied about the independence of these investigations into Trump.
No. The Biden White House counsel was in on all this stuff.
It was, in its own words, quote,"...in the loop about criminally charging Trump." In fact, the Biden DOJ even instructed the archives about how to cover up evidence of the coordination between the two.
And finally, I've also mentioned before that the Department of Energy discovered that Trump had an active security clearance after leaving the White House.
And so what they did is they went and retroactively terminated it.
And the effect of that is to say, no, when Trump had these classified materials, he was not entitled to have them. Because of course, if he has a security clearance, then he can have those materials. He is allowed to have access to them.
Now, there's a further detail that I want to highlight that has just come out.
And it has come out, interestingly, from a witness interview with a DOJ prosecutor, a guy named Michael Tacker.
And this witness told Tacker that after the Trump administration ended...
The GSA. What's the GSA? The General Services Administration.
It's a sort of department or area of the executive branch that sort of takes care of logistics, the General Services Administration.
These guys took a bunch of the boxes from the White House and stored them in Virginia.
So let's follow this very closely because one of the questions we have to ask is, how did those boxes end up at Mar-a-Lago?
Of course, the underlying assumption, and it is a big assumption, is that somehow Trump took them.
Trump, quote, took classified documents from the White House to Mar-a-Lago.
Now, even if he did, there's a good argument to be made about, so what?
Number one, he's the president.
Number two, much of this was his presidential papers.
Number three, he's allowed to have them.
Number four, Mar-a-Lago is under 24-hour, 24-7 Secret Service protection, so it wouldn't be a big deal if Trump took them.
But did Trump take them?
That's the point. And what this witness is saying to the Biden DOJ is, no, he didn't.
The documents were in the White House and the GSA, the General Services Administration, took these documents and put them in Virginia in six pallets.
So six pallets of boxes were taken to Virginia and then someone contacted Trump and said, we are not allowed to store these documents over here.
You need to get them.
In other words, these documents need to go to you.
And so these are the documents that ended up at Mar-a-Lago.
So this is a very interesting resolution or seeming resolution to the mystery of how those documents got there.
And it turns out, at least it seems, Trump didn't take him there.
The GSA took them.
They were in Virginia.
And then somebody called Trump and, in a sense, said, take this stuff to Mar-a-Lago.
And whether the Trump people picked them up or how they logistically got there, I'm not exactly sure.
But what we do know...
Is that an attorney for Trump, a guy named Tim Pallatore, has said, I'm quoting him now, His point is that Trump's predecessors had a lot of time.
Obama, of course, had been in there for eight years.
There was an organized transition.
But with Trump, Trump's election was a surprise.
And then, of course, there was a contested election of 2020.
Trump didn't believe he lost in the first place.
There were efforts to fight back against the result.
So the point being that there was chaos at the end of the Trump administration.
And so these boxes were left behind, and the GSA took them.
And the GSA then basically made the Trump people get those boxes, those pallets.
That's how they ended up at Mar-a-Lago.
And then, boom, machine gun-toting agents arrive in Mar-a-Lago in August of 2022 and, quote, raid Mar-a-Lago.
and then Jack Smith indicts Trump for storing these presidential records at Mar-a-Lago, as I say, even though they were completely safe over there.
There's no even allegation that Trump misused the documents in any way, and the documents were under 24-hour Secret Service protection. So it seems to me that this latest revelation about the fact that the documents were not, quote, taken by Trump, but rather were relocated to Virginia, and then Trump and Trump's people were contacted basically saying, you need to get these documents, you need to have them over there, we cannot store them over here.
This could very well have been the ruse that was aimed at getting those documents to Mar-a-Lago to clear the ground for the FBI raid and the criminal charges that followed.
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I want to talk in this segment about O.J. Simpson and...
the Donald Trump case in New York. Now these two might seem completely unrelated and of course in most respects they are.
But there is a an odd and I think interesting connection that I want to spell out.
Debbie and I watched this past weekend a documentary on OJ that is on Netflix.
It's about four or five episodes.
I didn't watch the full thing.
Debbie watched the full thing, but I just watched the last couple of episodes because they zoom in to the OJ Simpson trial and, of course, its aftermath.
And it's actually the aftermath I want to focus on because...
Because after O.J. Simpson was outrageously vindicated, found not guilty, acquitted of a murder that he quite clearly committed, then a little bit later, the following incident occurs.
O.J. is free. He's kind of living high on the hog.
He's, well, basically living like a degenerate.
And He is hanging out with the worst crowd.
I guess part of it is he was ostracized from the best crowd.
And so he is fraternizing with prostitutes and strippers and basically, you may say, just acting like a complete lowlife.
And then he gets wind of the fact that a bunch of people are selling his memorabilia.
He thinks have illicitly taken it from him.
In other words, when there were some lawsuits over the Simpson properties, that there were some dealers who got a hold of signed autographs and things like that, signed footballs, and they were selling this stuff, and OJ is like, I know these guys, I know where they are, they're in Las Vegas, we're going to Las Vegas, let's go get our stuff back.
And O.J. takes a bunch of his buddies, again, a kind of motley crew.
Now he, I think, made the serious mistake of taking one guy, a security guy, with a gun.
And I say he made the mistake of doing that because once you introduce a gun, you now escalate the situation dramatically.
In any event, you have these dealers who Who are in a hotel room.
OJ's people contact these guys and pretend like they're just people who want to buy OJ merchandise.
But in fact, they all show up in the room, including OJ. These dealers are shocked.
And OJ is like, you people have been stealing from me.
Give me my stuff back.
Now, in other words, you have basically an altercation in a hotel room among people who know each other.
At one point, however, the security guard pulls out his gun and says, nobody leaves.
And I say nobody leaves because the very phrase, nobody leaves, was later used to suggest that these dealers in the hotel room were, quote, being kidnapped because they're not allowed to leave.
So therefore, they are under the forced confinement of OJ and his gang.
And at one point, the security guard tells one guy, go into the bathroom and stay there.
And so these threats and this threatening atmosphere then become the basis for O.J. getting a whole bunch of charges, including breaking and entering, assault, kidnapping, assault with a deadly weapon, the gun. And so O.J. goes to court and he gets, get this, 33 years.
33 years. And absolutely, if you just look at the incident, it's insane.
You have a hotel room argument.
Nobody is in fact hurt.
Nor is there any attempt to harm anybody.
OJ basically takes this stuff.
Which is, what, a handful of signed autographs, a handful of footballs, sticks it in some pillowcases and walks off.
So something that would normally be relatively modest, and I'm not saying this is not something that is a, there is a breaking of the law, but proportionality would demand that this should be, you know, six months, maybe a year.
But OJ gets 33 years.
And they interview one of the lawyers on the original OJ case, not Johnny Cochran, because he's dead, but a guy who was at the Cochran law firm, who was at the desk on OJ's side.
And this guy goes, you know, when I was a kid, We used to play four innings, but the game didn't end with the game ending, because there was a fifth inning, which is when we would fight in the parking lot afterward, and that really settled the issue of who was really the stronger team.
And he goes, this was the fifth inning.
In other words, OJ got away with it in the four innings, And his 33-year sentence was a judge later saying, well, OJ didn't really do anything here, but let's get him.
Let's get him for the murder.
Now, I was thinking about all this in connection with the Trump case in New York.
Why? Because I think if we can fairly look at what happened to OJ in that hotel room, on the face of it, that was grossly unjust.
But the people who did that, the judge who brought, well, the prosecution that brought all these charges against O.J. and the judge that imposed the sentence, I think all of them were kind of giving O.J. what they saw as his just comeuppance.
So they were enacting an injustice, a manifest injustice.
On the grounds that this was a really bad guy who truly deserved it.
And I think this is a key to understanding the behavior of the Democrats and the left and Alvin Bragg and the judge, Juan Merchant, in the New York case against Trump.
In other words, Trump's real sin, just like OJ's original sin was murder, you're like, well, who did Trump murder?
Well, Trump didn't murder anybody.
Trump's real sin is being Trump.
Or to put it slightly differently, Trump's real sin is becoming a Republican.
I say this because, of course, Trump was Trump before, but he wasn't hated.
He became hated once he moved right and became the...
Bellwether, the leader of the Republican Party.
So that's Trump's original sin.
The idea is we have to get him for that.
We have to punish him for that original sin.
So it doesn't really matter what he did in New York.
Oh yeah, some hush money payment, not in itself illegal.
And yeah, some campaign finance laws that really aren't related to the hush money payment at all.
But let's string a bunch of nonsense together.
And we know it's nonsense.
But we pretend it's not.
We go through the motions.
We have charges.
We have grand juries.
We have the outward trappings of law.
But really what's going on is an effort to achieve a certain type of frontier justice.
And the frontier justice, from the left's point of view, is that Trump has committed, if you will, the The murderous offense of aligning himself with the right, of championing this philosophy called MAGA, he deserves to be severely punished for that.
We couldn't punish him at the ballot box So let's punish him through the legal process.
The case that is going on in New York, in all its ludicrousness, which resembles by the way the ludicrousness of the O.J. second case, the sort of O.J. stealing his own member of Billy a case, which again on the face of it makes you laugh.
A guy gets 33 years from stealing his own memorabilia.
Oh yeah, Dinesh got 33 years.
He stole his own books.
He discovered that one of his buddies was in possession with the books.
He went and got them. He's getting 33 years to pay for that offense.
Everyone like, that's absurd.
But the justification for it is that this is, in the case of Trump and in the case of New York, And to refer back to what I said from the Johnny Cochran attorney that was interviewed in this documentary for Trump, this is his fifth inning.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast Jeremy Karl.
He is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute.
He's a graduate of Yale University in the Kennedy School of Government.
He is the author of an important new book, and it's called The Unprotected Class, How Anti-White Racism is Tearing America Apart, a topic Of great interest to me.
I'm delighted to have him on.
By the way, you can follow him on x at realjeremycarl, C-A-R-L, or the website just claremont.org.
This is the website for the Claremont Institute.
Jeremy, welcome. Thank you for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
I want to begin by asking you kind of a puzzle or a conundrum, and that is that, you know, if we look at the idea, say, of Marx, he talks about the fact that groups habitually defend their own interests.
The workers defend their own interests, the bosses defend their own interests, and Marx says that you need a revolution because people who have power would never relinquish it voluntarily.
Which now turns me to the conundrum of American whites.
They have been running the show.
They have been in charge.
I suppose to some degree you could call them a class.
And yet, at least when it comes to progressive whites or a powerful segment of the white community, it appears to be acting completely against its own interests.
It's cutting off pathways for its own kids seemingly to get to universities.
These are the people responsible, I take it you'd agree, for the anti-white ideology that you write about.
In other words, this is not something that minorities could have brought about on their own.
Do you agree with that?
And second of all, how do you explain this, let's call it race treason, to put it in a blunt way?
Yeah, Dinesh, you didn't start out with an easy question.
So it is something I address in the book, and I do actually specifically identify, as you do, liberal whites as kind of the great Satan here, if you will, to borrow a term from the 80s.
At the same time, I don't want to kind of whitewash things to say that minorities don't have agency or that their political leadership...
Doesn't also bear a share of responsibility.
But I think you've touched on something really important, which is you do have this conundrum or paradox at the heart of it of why liberal whites would do this.
And I don't even have a totally clear, single bullet answer to that question.
I think what I'd say is there's a couple things, one of which is...
I think liberal whites kind of almost see themselves as a different ethnos, a different group than regular white people.
And they see it as a way that they can sort of show their status.
In other words, if you've got $50 million, $100 million, and you're a white guy, nothing you can do that will really show your power to say more than to say...
Hey, go ahead and discriminate against white people because implicitly you know you can get around that.
Your family can get around that.
Whereas if you're a middle class person, you can't.
So I think that that's a significant piece of it.
I think in other senses, sometimes there may be elements of self-deception.
You know, they don't even realize it.
And then there are elements in which...
We have certain founding, you know, principles in the U.S., and I think people believe that deeply.
Of course, our history in America is not absent other types of racism, and I mentioned that in the book, and I think that kind of bad actors have used misplaced white guilt because I think overall the American story is a great story that we can be proud of despite the many failings we've had on the way, and they've used that for their own ends to kind of undermine a much better story that we could be telling.
the phrase white guilt and it's a phrase that puzzles me because it is a little different than the way we normally understand guilt.
Normally guilt is connected to something that you did, right? And we don't feel guilt generally in other ways. I mean it's even difficult to experience guilt when it's a family member. Let's say you discovered your great-grandfather was a rapist, let's say.
I don't think that would disturb your day.
I don't think it would throw you into a frenzy.
I don't think you'd say, okay, I'm going to give away my house because I inherited it from him.
So what is this peculiar phenomenon of absorbing the guilt?
Of people long dead that you never really knew, that you might not even be related to, because part of the ideology of white guilt, as you know, is even to foist it on white immigrants who came here, let's say, after slavery, whose ancestors were not complicit with the original crimes, or whites descended from northern soldiers who gave their lives in the Civil War.
So how does one genuinely incorporate that kind of guilt when it really makes no sense?
Again, great question.
I think there's a couple things at work here.
One, there's a great book called Fault Lines by a pastor named Vody Bauckham, and you might be familiar with it or him.
I reference it a lot in my chapter in the church on the book.
But he really talks about a lot of this white guilt as kind of an critical race theory within the church and elsewhere as a form of Christian heresy, this idea of inherited guilt.
And he makes the very powerful point, which I certainly echo in my own book, That ultimately we all sin, but that sin is individual and it's not inherited and it's not as a result of the color of our skin.
So I'd say that that's, you know, kind of from a religious perspective that I as a Christian, that's how I would answer it.
But I think kind of underneath your question is a question about motivating factors.
And I think, and this is again something I try to get at in the book, because this doesn't just spring fully armored like Athena from Zeus's head.
I mean, there's reasons why it's happening.
What I argue is that this is all really about the most fundamental question in a lot of politics, which is resources and who gets them.
White people are at least perceived to have a lot of resources, and I think there's some reality to that.
I think other groups or at least some leaders of other groups would like I think that's really what drives what we're seeing here.
That's very interesting.
Let's focus on...
I think you're getting to the heart of the matter here, which is that we have moved from an ideology of equal rights.
Equal rights would be epitomized in the idea that, look, there's going to be an Olympic race...
Everyone shows up at the same line, a gun goes off, a clock goes on, the guy who hits the finishing tape first gets the medal.
End of story. And it doesn't become valid to say things like, well, this guy has a treadmill in his basement and I don't, and so I need to start five yards.
People would laugh that out of court.
But you're saying that if they already want to produce a certain outcome, they now need to come up with rules that would justify why the race is, at least in subtle ways or secret ways, rigged.
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about a key case.
This is the Griggs case of 1971, which a lot of people don't really know about.
They know about affirmative action in college, and that case, of course, went before the court.
But there's also affirmative action in the workplace, now sometimes operating under the Can you talk a little bit about the principle that was enshrined in the Griggs case?
And then I want to ask you whether or not it seems to me or seems to you to be critical that this case be revisited and perhaps overturned.
Absolutely. And I talk about the Griggs case a lot in my book because I think you're right.
It's really important. And in fact, the American Conservative magazine had a symposium a couple of years ago where various writers, including me, were asked, what one Supreme Court case would you overturn if you could?
And I wrote about Griggs because I think it's that fundamental.
So for your listeners who don't spend time like we do, kind of working about esoteric Supreme Court decisions, I'll just give the quick background.
Griggs v. Duke Power was a 1971 Supreme Court case that enshrined what's called disparate impact in United States law.
And to kind of oversimplify things, what it did is it basically said...
If you have an employment process or another similar process and you wind up with a disproportionate kind of impact or one group is really underrepresented, whether that be blacks or Hispanics or even could be whites in theory, you have to kind of go through all these hurdles to prove that you weren't discriminating and that your thing is kind of has all these business necessities or the practice is illegal.
And here's the really key point.
It's illegal even if there is no intent to discriminate by race.
And so you get these really bizarre things.
And in fact, there's an independent member, a law professor of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, who wrote an article in a law review a few years ago that was entitled roughly disparate impact theory makes everything presumptively illegal.
And I think that's pretty much right because what it's done is it's given a huge tool to racial arsonists to kind of just come in and make demands and find discrimination where there really is no discrimination going on.
This idea that you've just described is so dramatic and I would say so outrageous that we need to focus on it a little bit more to show why it is so preposterous.
The underlying assumption, is it not, is that in the absence of discrimination, each group would fan out Not just into the workforce generally, but into every particular workforce.
So, in other words, a particular car company would look like America.
It would mirror the workers, the ethnic breakdown of workers in the surrounding population.
Now, isn't that just statistically absurd?
And I say that because, let me put it this way.
If I were to toss a coin a hundred times, there's a pretty good chance that I will come pretty close to 50 heads and 50 tails, right?
But if I toss a coin three times, you can make no good prediction about where I'm going to come out.
And so think of tossing the coin three times as being a particular company.
Think about tossing a coin 50 times being the entire workforce.
In other words, what I'm saying is even under completely random conditions, there is no way to say, well, let's make it four.
Dinesh tossed a coin four times and therefore we can confidently predict that he should get two heads and two tails.
And if he gets three heads and one tails, Dinesh is a discriminator and he needs to be hauled into court.
I mean, isn't that the statistical preposterousness at the heart of the Griggs decision?
Yeah, I mean, it's statistically preposterous in the way that you say.
It's also preposterous because for all sorts of different reasons, different groups have different fields they go into, different things that they're interested in, you name it.
So it is just ridiculous.
And again, just so that folks will understand, this is not sort of some abstract thing that's fun to talk about in a video broadcast, but doesn't affect their real lives.
Right now, the Biden administration, this just came out maybe a week ago, is suing a convenience store chain called Sheetz, I believe.
It's not in my area of the country, but I think it's in a lot of others.
On the basis of disparate impact, because they did a criminal background check on their employees.
And that turns out, because different ethnicities and races have different rates of criminal offending, to have a disproportionate impact on African-Americans and Hispanics.
And so Sheetz, for this totally sensible thing, right, like a lot of businesses would not want to hire criminals, is now being hauled into court, and they will probably lose that case under current law.
And certainly the Biden administration is going after them for it.
So it's something that we really need to fix.
And not only might they lose that case if it goes to court, but doesn't the government routinely bludgeon these companies by saying something like, listen, we will bring our relatively infinite resources to bear against you.
We'll tie you up in court for, you know, long periods of time.
It'll cost you an ungodly amount of money to defend against this.
You still might lose at the end.
And therefore, why don't you agree in advance to sort of surrender?
And drop these criminal background checks.
So the government routinely uses its legal muscle, and that's because they have the Griggs framework that they're operating under.
Why hasn't a Griggs type of case come before the Supreme Court already?
Because if the Supreme Court is willing to knock the legs out of affirmative action in college admissions, wouldn't it seem logical that by the exact same logic they should overturn Griggs as well?
Well, it's fascinating. And I would like to see that.
But the story is actually even more sorted than you might be aware.
So in 1989, there is a sequel to Griggs called Ward's Cove versus Atonio that comes before the Supreme Court.
And what's basically happened at that point is even the Supreme Court, which was pretty darn left wing at that time, realizes that they've gone way too far with Griggs.
And they basically do things to cut the legs out of Griggs.
They don't totally overturn it, but they make I think?
They head for the hills.
And the people, you can read accounts of this, the politicals in the Civil Rights Division knew how bad this was going to be, but their hands were tied.
So there ends up being a legislative compromise in the Civil Rights Act of 1991 that effectively enshrines Griggs.
Into the statute.
And so that's where we are now.
Fascinating. So what you're saying is that really what there needs to be is an overturning of the law on the grounds that it is unconstitutional, and that will have the effect of overturning both Griggs and then the statutory kind of reinforcement of Griggs, if you will.
Very interesting stuff.
Yeah, this is great stuff and a really important book, guys.
I've been talking to Jeremy Karl.
The book is called The Unprotected Class, How Anti-White Racism is Tearing America Apart.
Follow him on X at Real Jeremy Karl.
Website, Claremont.org.
Hey, Jeremy, thank you very much for joining me.
Thanks so much, Dinesh. It's a pleasure to join you.
As conservatives, our job is to conserve, to protect, to preserve, to defend, to uphold.
But what is it that we are conserving?
We're conserving the principles of the American founding, but we're not just conserving principles.
We're not just conserving a document or a series of documents.
We're conserving a way of life that organically developed in America, partly shaped by the principles of the founding, but also shaped more generally by other things.
In other words, we're conserving a certain traditional American way of life, In other words, not just, as I say, not just a declaration of independence, a constitution that we carry in our pocket, not even a corpus of works that includes Tocqueville and the Federalist Papers and so on.
We're conserving an actual America that we...
Have lived in that are certainly our parents and our grandparents, your parents and grandparents, my parents never came to America, but nevertheless, it is a, we are conserving an American way of life.
But where does that American way of life come from?
What are its roots?
Now, since I came to America in the late 1970s, I studied America in college and of course subsequently And I've thought of myself as very knowledgeable about America, or pretty knowledgeable about America.
And if you would ask me the question, what are the origins, what are the roots of American culture?
I would say a few things.
The first thing I would say is that American culture in its deepest sense was established not by immigrants, but by settlers.
Now, settlers are themselves immigrants, but they're sort of the original immigrants.
They're the people who come into a society and make the society.
Then, once that society becomes pretty good, pretty attractive, better than other societies, then immigrants from those societies go, hey, you know what?
I like the recipe over there better.
I have a chance for a better life over there.
I'm going to uproot myself and move over there so I can have that better life.
So immigrants assimilate to a society that the settlers built.
But again, that begs the question, who are the settlers?
What is the society that they built and where did the materials for building it come from?
Now, to this question, generally, if you had again asked me before, I would have given a kind of a straightforward answer.
And that is that American culture is a hybrid.
It's a part of Western culture, Western civilization.
And the settlers who came to America, virtually all from Great Britain, In other words, mostly England, but also Ireland, Scotland, Wales.
Those settlers who came to America brought with them, they didn't come sort of empty-handed, they brought with them elements of Athens and Jerusalem, which is to say classical reason and biblical revelation.
But they also brought with them more than that.
They brought with them ideas of the Enlightenment.
They brought with them, in other words, not just the principles of Jerusalem and ancient Greece, but also the principles of Rome and also the principles of the Renaissance, of the Reformation, of, let's say, the common law and the constitutional structure The structure, the way that Britain as a society is constituted.
England doesn't have a written constitution.
This is all the stuff that they brought.
So in other words, America was settled originally by English people who brought with them England, but they also brought with them some ideas that are much older than England, ideas that go back to the Hebrew prophets and the ancient Greeks.
And this is a correct answer to the question, but it is an incomplete one.
And this is actually what I want to start talking about today.
As you know, I've been discussing Lincoln and Harry Jaffa's book, Crisis of the House Divided.
I'm finished with that, and I'm embarking on a new journey.
And the new journey is a brief study, a brief study of a very unbrief book In fact, I was showing Brian the book earlier, and I think he noted that this book is, well, I'm looking at it right now, it is exactly 946 pages.
So I'm holding it up. And it's got a ridiculous title.
It's called Albion's Seed.
Albion's Seed. What a title!
I mean, in my view, this is the second worst title in the history of publishing.
I'm exaggerating slightly, but only slightly.
The worst title was done by a colleague of mine in Washington, D.C. many years ago.
He wrote a book, a very good book, by the way, on Catholic social teaching, and he called it Transquilitas Ordinis.
I believe that book was purchased by exactly four people.
Because think about it.
You walk into a bookstore, you have Transquilitas Ordinus.
How many people are going to go, wow, that's one I want to read.
I've always wanted to...
You don't even know what it is.
What is it even talking about?
Similarly, Albion Seed is a very discouraging title.
Albion is actually an ancient name for England.
So, Albion Seed refers to the British seeds that were sown in America.
And yet, it turns out that this book, written, by the way, by historian David Hackett Fisher, I don't know a lot about Fisher's work, but he's a very prominent and well-respected historian.
I mean, there's a little comment at the top of the book, the finest work of synthesis in early American history in more than 50 years.
And I have to agree.
By that I mean... That this book opens my eyes, and I think it will your eyes, to the fact that it is just too broad, too general to talk about a single British migration to America.
We actually have to speak within the same 50 or 70 years of four separate migrations.
Four separate migrations to America that have created or constituted what we now recognizably, even today in the 21st century, would call the four strands of American culture.
Now, ironically, these four strands I have been familiar with pretty soon after I came to America.
When I got to America, I was in Arizona, and it became pretty clear to me that I was dealing with, in a sense, the American West.
The people in Arizona were cut from that clot, so to speak.
Later on, a year later, I went to Dartmouth, and I found myself in, well, New England country.
And I realize that people there are pretty different.
They build their houses differently.
They talk differently.
You know, people who go to Harvard say they go to Harvard.
So you've got different accents, different ways of dress.
New England architectural styles look different from Arizona.
And so, quite clearly, you're dealing with a different American culture.
The culture, let's just call it, of New England.
And then, later on, I find myself moving to Washington, D.C. Well, originally to Princeton.
And even Princeton has a kind of aroma or echoes of the South.
Now, Princeton is New Jersey.
But nevertheless, a lot of the Southerners, for example, who fought in the Civil War were Princetonians.
Princeton was the southernmost school of the Ivy League.
And then, of course, I lived in, not just in D.C., but in the suburbs of Virginia.
And Virginia, of course, was the leader of the Confederacy.
It was, admittedly, one of the last states to secede.
But nevertheless, Virginia defined the culture of the South.
So let's look at it.
We have, in America, a culture of New England.
Number one, a culture of Virginia, which then shapes the culture of the South.
Number two, then we have the very recognizable culture of the Midwest.
This is, let's call it, Mike Pence country.
And not only in the Midwest you find different cuisine...
Different ways of talking.
A different personality, as you see in Mike Pence.
He embodies the Midwestern personality.
And if you look at other Midwesterners, look, for example, at Paul Ryan.
You will see that they share the Mike Pence sensibility.
So there's clearly a Midwestern style.
Look at Midwestern girls.
They have a lot less makeup on, for example, than Southern girls.
And so you can make these sort of observations about America, and yet it really never occurs to us to ask how did it sort of become this way?
How did we get New England?
How did we get Virginia?
How did we get the Midwest?
And finally, how did we get a group that I'm going to very, in a very affectionate way, but nevertheless, I think in an accurate way, call the rednecks.
The Rednecks.
Now, the Rednecks are a group, and again, I'm speaking colloquially and I'm not speaking in a disparaging way.
I'm speaking about people who are defiantly Redneck, people who would embrace the label.
People who, again, have recognizable characteristics.
If you drive on the 45 in the outskirts of Houston, you see rednecks doing wheelies on the highway.
If you find people who, in Texas and Louisiana, don't want to be told what to do, they don't want to take the vaccine, they are people who do not like to submit to authority.
They're inherently distrustful of it.
These are the rednecks.
Now, the rednecks is actually a description of a larger group of people.
This is a group of people that began to settle in America, in West Virginia, but carried their culture westward.
And so this is not a simple phenomenon of the North or the South.
It actually stretches across the breadth of this country, but these are people who originally came to the Virginias, but the western part of Virginia, the rural part of Virginia, very interestingly, West Virginia broke off from Virginia over the issue of slavery.
So West Virginia became a separate state.
Lincoln recognized it as a separate state.
It's been a separate state ever since.
So quite clearly, West Virginia and Virginia are not the same.
They weren't the same even before when they were both called Virginia.
So this book, as I say preposterously titled Albion Seed, is actually a beautiful and interesting and profound explanation of how we got not just British America, not just the original America settled by,
quote, the British, but the argument of the book is that four distinctive British populations came to America, brought with them their distinctive folkways, and this is a key part of the The book's subtitle, Four British Folkways in America.
So when we pick it up tomorrow, I'll talk in more detail about what is a folkway, what does that actually mean, and what does it mean to say that there are four separate strands of people who settled America and have made up Even recognizably today,
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