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April 30, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:58
CIRCUS IN NEW YORK Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep822
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Coming up, I'll give you the latest on the Alvin Bragg New York case involving Trump.
I want to show why the prosecution's theory here is kind of a circus act.
And David Tice, executive producer of Paul Revere Films, joins me.
We're going to talk about the risk of EMP attacks, as depicted in his new documentary, Grid Down, Power Up.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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The most recent news, the most recent headlines in the Alvin Bragg case against Trump in New York Suggests that Trump has been fined $9,000 for violating a gag order.
Trump, by the way, is almost congenitally unable to follow gag orders.
Just gagging Trump is just not easy to do.
And my guess is that Trump is okay with paying the fine.
He'd rather speak and pay fines than not speak, at least not speak on the whole wide orbit of issues that the judge is demanding that he not speak about.
And the judge is even threatening now to jail Trump if he continues to repeatedly violate these gag orders.
The judge has relented on the issue of Trump going to Barron Trump's graduation.
I think he probably thought about it and thought, well, this is making me look bad, so I will succumb on this one.
But to me, neither of those things, the fine or the going to Barron's graduation, get to the heart of this case.
Debbie and I were talking on the way to the podcast about the case, and I said to her, I said...
The problem with this case is it's very hard to even state the underlying crime.
In other words, whenever you're dealing with a criminal case, you have to be able to specify the crime.
The Obviously, if you have someone who has been murdered in an alley, well, there's a crime.
So, somebody did that, and the crime is obvious.
Or the crime can be plausible.
So, for example, you could say, and this would apply, for example, to the Mar-a-Lago case, it is plausible that That you've got these critically important top secret national security documents.
Trump should not have had them.
You can argue about whether he should or did or didn't have the right, but there's a plausible crime there.
The plausible crime is unauthorized possession of top secret national security documents.
Plausible. Now we turn to the New York case.
And when we try to think about, well, let's think about whether, well, people call it the New York hush money case.
Well, as I've mentioned before, it's not even clear that this was genuine, quote, hush money, because people sometimes pay money just to be rid of a hassle.
But leaving that aside, let's say it is hush money.
Paying hush money is not illegal.
If someone comes up to you and says, hey, I know what you did last summer, or I know this about you, and I'm going to put it out there.
If there's any plausible crime, it's on the part of the blackmailer.
It's on the part of someone who comes to you and threatens you and says, listen, I will put out these secrets about you if you don't pay me.
That is plausibly criminal.
But paying, just like paying a ransom, is not a crime.
So there's nothing illegal about paying hush money.
So where does the crime even come in?
You probably know that what Alvin Bragg is trying to do is take this non-crime of hush money and bootstrap it to an election law violation.
Now, I know something about election law violations.
And my question here is...
Where's the election law violation?
Well, we know, for example, that no, Trump has not been charged in any federal election violation.
He has certainly not been convicted of anything.
So the election violation at this point is kind of hypothetical.
But... But where is it even plausible?
What did Trump do to, quote, interfere with the 2016 election?
So here is where we get an unbelievably fanciful theory.
A theory that is so exotic as to border on the comical.
Here is the idea.
Trump... He agreed to pay the hush money to Stormy Daniels.
He could have paid it out of his campaign finances.
And frankly, had he done that, there'd be no campaign finance violation because you're allowed to use campaign money To achieve a campaign objective.
And all campaigns don't like to have negative stories come out.
So if a campaign spends campaign money on suppressing a negative story, that's legal.
That's not a violation of campaign finance.
The amazing thing here is that Trump didn't use campaign money.
He used his own money.
He had Michael Cohen make the payments.
Trump supposedly reimbursed him.
End of story. So, according to Alvin Bragg, Trump was making an illegal donation to his own campaign.
Or to put it slightly differently, that Trump was using non-campaign money...
To achieve a campaign objective, what's the campaign objective?
To prevent negative stories from coming out on Trump.
Wait. Every campaign tries to do that.
You know, if Brandon is running for Congress and he hears that Politico is trying to do a negative story about it, and he expends campaign finance resources to call the reporter, listen, try to talk him out of it, saying, listen, there's nothing there, you're barking up the wrong tree, or...
All of this is completely normal and legitimate.
So, what you have here is an allegation of a crime that is essentially cooked up by stitching together various things, none of which by themselves are crimes.
Now, even the allegation that Trump somehow altered his business record so as to camouflage the hush money, so what?
Many people who...
Who do these kinds of payments are not going to want to say hush money payment on the books, so they're going to put consulting or something vague like that.
And by the way, this could be a matter for the IRS to say, well, this is an erroneous classification.
But even if it's an erroneous classification, it wouldn't be a felony.
It would not qualify for the serious charges that Trump is facing.
So what we're left with is the fact that this whole case is nothing more And I hearken back to what I said yesterday, which Debbie actually wasn't in studio.
It's a little bit like OJ's second case, where the actual offense is, on the face of it, quite trivial.
OJ is trying to retrieve his own merchandise, but he's hit with 33 years because he's actually being punished for something else.
And I think what's going on here is that the DA, Judge Merchant, and I don't know about the jury, but I have my doubts about a jury in New York.
I've also looked at some of the bios of the jurors.
This appears to me to be a fairly left-wing crew.
There may be a solitary population.
A juror that is positively inclined toward Trump, but even I'm not positive about that either.
This is a case of essentially trying to get Trump, no matter what the facts, or no matter what the absence of facts, to find him guilty of crimes, even though no crimes can be specified.
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Has Cary Lake sold out on the pro-life issue?
My answer to that question is, as far as I can see, no.
But the National Review gives a different answer.
In an article by Rich Lowry, I read, quote, Of the contemporary GOP. I mean, stop right there.
There's so many problems in the GOP. We've got so many renegade characters in the GOP. Think of somebody like Mitt Romney and what a pest and a plague this guy has become.
Think of it, the former nominee of our party.
Think about people like Liz Cheney, the never-Trumpers, the do-nothing Republicans who are sitting in the House and the Senate.
Time servers.
And all of this is going on.
So Carrie Lake is the worst of the GOP. Now let's try to find out why.
How can she be the worst?
Carrie Lake is personally opposed to abortion.
This is Rich Lowry. And this line is, well, if I can use the phrase, kind of pregnant with sarcasm, because where Rich Lowry is going here is he's implying that Carrie Lake's position on abortion is as follows.
I am personally opposed to abortion, but I think abortion should be legal.
And Rich Lowry is saying that if that is Carrie Lake's position, that is in effect a pro-choice position.
And I agree.
If, in fact, Carrie Lake was saying, I am personally opposed to abortion, but I'm going to vote for it, I think it should be legal.
I don't think there should be restrictions on abortion.
I think that the government should stay out of the abortion business and leave it up to the individual.
The truth of it is, Cary Lake is saying none of this.
And therefore, this is a gross distortion of Cary Lake's position.
But let's come to what Cary Lake did say that is causing the distortion.
I'll get to that in just a moment.
I'm continuing with the article.
The GOP Senate candidate in Arizona has adopted a position on the issue that is nearly indistinguishable from that of double-talking Democrats.
Now, this is just a flat-out false assertion.
Why? Because what is the position of the Democrats?
Well, the position of the Democrats could not be more clear.
Abortion should be legal for all nine months of the pregnancy.
In other words, a consolidation of Roe vs.
Wade. Abortion is a right.
It's a constitutional right.
Many Democrats even support government funding for abortion.
No restrictions on abortion pretty much in any circumstances.
Now, is that Carrie Lake's position?
No. Nothing Carrie Lake has remotely said suggests that Carrie Lake wants to have abortion legal in Arizona or anywhere for nine months.
And yet, Rich Lowry says, quote, that she is, quote, functionally pro-choice.
Now, let's think about why Rich thinks this.
First of all, he goes on to say she would oppose a federal ban on abortion.
Now, as you know, I've been talking about Lincoln and about slavery.
Prior to the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln opposed a federal ban on slavery.
Lincoln supported a ban on the extension of slavery to the territories, but he was not in favor of a law that would make slavery illegal nationwide.
Does that mean that Abraham Lincoln was not anti-slavery?
Does that mean that he was functionally, quote, pro-choice on slavery?
Absolutely not.
That Lincoln's position was, quote, identical with the Democrats or nearly identical?
Absolutely not.
So, where is Rich Lowry even getting any of this?
Let's look at the statement by Carrie Lake.
I choose life, but I'm not every woman.
I want to make sure that every woman who finds herself pregnant has more choices so that she can make that choice that I made.
Now, when Carrie Lake says that she wants women to have more choices, what is she actually talking about?
Is she talking about a Roe vs.
Wade world in which every woman decides for herself?
No. This is not the context of what Carrie Lake is discussing at all.
Rather, what Carrie Lake is talking about is the people of Arizona...
Coming together and passing laws about abortion that reflect the moral sentiments of the people in Arizona.
I think what Carrie Lake is saying is that rather than try to impose a law that was passed in 1864 that doesn't have political support in the state, Rather than do that, let us come together as Arizonans.
We're not extremists on abortion one way or the other, but as a community, as a state, let us make laws that are appropriate to the moral sentiments of people in the state.
In other words, what Kerry Lake is doing is nothing more than saying that in a post-Roe versus Wade world, it's going to be up to each state to make laws about abortion.
So in other words, We're good to go.
The problem, I think, with the Rich Lowry approach is that it has a certain type of consistency, a moral consistency.
You cannot say, I'm personally opposed to abortion, but I think it should be legal.
Why? Because why are you personally opposed?
And as soon as you give the answer, well, I'm personally opposed because I don't think it's right to be able to kill your own kid, or I don't think it's right to kill another human being, well, then the statement, but I think it should be legal, makes absolutely no sense because no one is in favor of legalizing the killing of the innocent.
So, in that sense, Rich Lowry, in terms of making a moral syllogism, is absolutely right.
But there is a distinction between making a moral syllogism, and Lincoln understood this perfectly.
Slavery is always wrong, and yet we tolerate it in certain circumstances, and moreover, even the abolition of slavery has got to be accomplished with the consent of the governed.
I stress that point in my discussion of Harry Jaffa's book, and I stress it here.
So it seems to me that this critique of That National Review is making of Carrie Lake confuses moral principle on the one hand with the practicalities of a given situation on another.
It also confuses the moral principle on the one hand with the legal reality of the situation on the other.
The legal reality is that the pro-life movement has fought to decentralize the issue of abortion, remove it from the courts, turn it over to the states, has fought for that for 50 years.
Now that that goal has been accomplished, all that Cary Lake is doing is saying, let's get together as Arizonans and pass a law as restrictive about abortion as popular sentiment or as the consent of the governed will allow.
That it seems to me, if I'm getting her right, if I'm reading her position right, it is completely consistent with the pro-life philosophy.
It is the pro-life philosophy being pragmatically applied to the situation in her own state.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast a new guest, David Tice.
He is the producer and director of an important new film.
It's about the power grid.
It's called Grid Down, Power Up, and the website is griddownpowerup.com.
David Tice is, well, he had a long career in investment banking and managing mutual funds, but then he pivoted into movies.
He was the producer and financier of the major motion picture Soul Surfer.
Debbie and I saw that.
We loved it. Really great film.
Came out in 2011.
And as I mentioned, the new film, Grid Down, Power Up.
David, welcome. Thank you for joining me.
Let me start by asking you why a finance guy, a mutual fund guy, would want to steer in a little different direction and become a movie maker.
Well, there's a couple different responses to that.
One, you mentioned Soul Surfer, and that pretty much fell into my lap.
That was definitely a God thing where I've recognized how film can powerfully impact And you can make such a difference.
And certainly what you and Debbie have done with your series of incredibly powerful films, you know, just getting the word out.
Really took a hiatus after...
Soul Surfer.
And this documentary, I got into this because it was low-hanging fruit.
I heard about it, but I've been concerned about our critical civilian infrastructure for a number of years.
And I've been a China hawk.
I've worried about China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran for a long time.
I recognized that I was a NASA grandfather.
Because my grandkids were four, three, two, one.
Houston, we have a problem.
We have a problem because, and I've lived a very long, happy, productive life.
I'm nearly 70 years old, but then my grandkids are those lower ages.
And if we don't protect our critical civilian infrastructure, they aren't going to be able to live as long of a life.
And so I'm very, very concerned about that.
Yeah, this is all very fascinating because as you know, David, those of us who kind of came of age in the 60s and the 70s, the era in which we were warned about the threats of nuclear weapons, you surely remember the nuclear freeze movement and the idea that we could have a kind of a complete breakdown of civilization.
There was, in fact, I don't remember the name of it now, There's a powerful movie that came out about all that in which essentially the world is decimated by a kind of nuclear holocaust.
But it looks like now, today, we're facing perhaps a different set of threats.
So I think what you're saying is if you are one of America's deadly enemies...
You might not be looking to nuclear weapons as your sort of preferred mechanism for bringing the United States down.
You might be looking for ways to immobilize the power grid.
Is that right? Exactly.
And I think there's a certain, you know, belief that we all know about mutually assured destruction, MAD, and, you know, therefore, well, they're not going to blow us up because we're going to blow them up.
But then if they can take...
Out our critical system infrastructure, they can say, well, we're not really killing you.
You're just dying yourself because you didn't have the skills, you know, and all your people were killing each other and you guys weren't smart enough to protect your water systems and your power grid.
And I think, and they can do that from thousands of miles away, you know, through a cyber attack, uh, We're good to go.
Or even if you think the bad guys aren't going to do anything, there's something called a GMD, a geomagnetic disturbance, which is essentially a natural EMP. And we know that's going to happen.
You aren't that far from NASA, but some NASA scientists...
I've said that there's roughly a 12% probability every decade that there could be a massive enough solar storm that could knock out our power grid.
Now, explain for those of us who, you know, we know about the power grid, but I don't actually know a lot about the power grid.
When we have hurricanes in Texas, they talk about the fact that the power grid is jeopardized, or the power grid has to be maintained, and there's usually a flurry of discussion about it at that time.
What is really a power grid?
What is it? Is it a physical infrastructure?
Is it maintained by the government?
Is it the kind of necessary foundation for electricity to circulate?
What does a power grid do?
Okay, so our film goes through all this, and I know we're short of time, so I'm going to be very succinct.
But there's about 3,000 private companies that essentially operate the power grid.
So there's three components to it.
There is generation, then there is transmission, and then there's distribution.
If you walk around your neighborhood, you will see substations.
So this is part of your distribution system.
There's about 55,000 substations, and essentially there's all kinds of electronic equipment.
The biggest...
Part of it is transformers.
And there's 2,000 of these high-voltage, multi-hundred-ton transformers that are extremely important to be able to power up and power down the voltage in order to have the electricity go to our homes.
So we're concerned about these...
Our transformers specifically and our distribution system.
And if the power grid goes out, we are so complacent.
We're all used to a few hours where the power goes out, maybe a couple days, but it always...
it always comes back. There's been something called the EMP Commission that operated for 17 years at the behest of Congress, and it had the smartest scientists, most accomplished physicists, electromagnetic pulse individuals, and they found that it could, we could have as many as 90% of Americans might die. If our electricity grid went out for an extended
period of time.
There was also a FERC study, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, that found that if as few as nine critical nodes of substations were taken out at key points, it could cause a nationwide blackout.
Given what you just said, David, you would think that this problem would be something that would be of great concern to the Department of Defense, that it would be part of our defense infrastructure to make sure that something like that did not and really could not happen.
Are you saying that that is not the case and that, in a sense, nobody is paying attention to The possibility that something this dire could happen?
So, Dinesh, there has been attention paid.
Actually, Donald Trump passed an executive order in 2019 about the EMP threat.
Barack Obama was concerned about the GMD threat or the threat of solar weather.
But what we've had is we've had It's extreme, you know, incompetence and there has been massive lobbying from the utilities and the utilities don't want to be told what to do.
They would rather think about warming up our pizza oven and be thinking about, you know, the aspirations of North Korean leaders.
And so, frankly, the military does really need to take a bigger role.
The military is concerned about this.
But essentially, there's just been a lot of bureaucratic ineptitude.
And I'm arguing that we need a Manhattan Project scale initiative.
Just overcoming all this bureaucratic, you know, essentially Trump's executive order was codified into law in 2020 in the National Defense Authorization Act.
But then there was a lot of delegation that went to DOE and DHS, Department of Homeland Security, as well as Department of Energy.
Barack Obama's instruction went to the regulators.
And, you know, unfortunately, FERC and NERC that are the regulators over the biggest part of the bulk power system, they drop the ball.
And therefore, we just need a Leslie Groves type figure that was played by Matt Damon in the movie Oppenheimer, who would break down doors and just, we need a grid czar, you know, that says, this has got to be fixed.
I was going to ask you exactly that, which is to say, how does a movie kind of come into play here?
Because I assume that your goal with the film is really to alert people to the fact that this is a very serious problem, potentially almost an existential type of problem.
But what if someone watches the movie and they go, okay, well, I'm persuaded, David.
Now, what's next?
What do you want me to do?
Okay, so we've got ways for citizens to become what I call grid warriors.
And we know your audience is among the smartest in the country that worry about getting things done.
They care about America.
They're patriotic individuals.
So they can go to our website.
In the top right corner, there's a participate tab.
And we have actually created letters to Thank you.
write email, sign a petition, actually make phone calls to your state and federal legislators, your regulators. I mentioned FERC and NERC. They can write a letter to their chairman of the state PUC. They can write letters to the members of board of directors of their public utilities.
We've pre-written all those letters and then you can add to them.
And then we have a lot of power as citizens.
If we tell 20, 50 of our friends, you know, we have a seven minute version of this movie as well as an hour version.
And Then you can make that outreach.
If you tell 20, 50 of your friends and you have them tell 20 or 50 of their friends, we can make this happen.
We actually end the movie on a very patriotic high note, saying that America has had our backs up against the wall before and we've overcome this.
We overcame racial segregation.
We built a national highway system.
We ended up, you know, overcoming Nazi Germany by converting our civilian domestic economy to an arsenal of democracy.
So we can do this, but we need a Mothers Against Drunk Drivers scale movement.
I mean, I think that may be the difficulty right there because, you know, of course, things like slavery, you have a moral issue, right?
That's driving...
In Nazi Germany, the United States wasn't attacked by Nazi Germany directly, but you had Pearl Harbor, and that was a galvanizer.
As you know, the United States was pretty lethargic about getting into the war until that happened.
So, you know, one could almost draw the...
I think, troubling lesson that it takes a crisis.
It takes the enfeebling of the power grid for people to go, oh, that's a problem.
We better not pay attention to that.
Do you think that people are capable of...
Seeing, just through watching a film, for example, hey, this is a real problem.
It hasn't happened yet, but you don't want it to happen because once it happens, it may be very difficult to recover from it at that point.
You're confident, it seems, in the ability of citizens to go, yeah, I recognize the problem.
I'm going to be proactive in...
Doing my part to get the word out so that our leaders pay attention.
And this problem is, I'm assuming this is not something that can be tackled kind of directly at the grassroots level.
We have to mobilize the people in charge to do a better job, right?
That's exactly right. But being on your show and others like your show is what is key to this.
And essentially creating fire in people's belly. You know, I've got fire in my belly. You have fire in your belly about changing America and making America better.
And the thing is, this is a fixable problem.
There is technology available that can be incorporated at a substation level that will protect these transformers.
These transformers that I talked about that weigh several hundred tons.
And, you know, unfortunately, we have very little...
Domestic manufacturing capability.
We need to build up our domestic manufacturing capability.
We need to protect it.
The front end, there's something called neutral ground blockers.
There is something called cyber cloaking.
If people saw the movie, Julia Roberts' Netflix movie, Leave the World Behind, and it was talking about how Teslas, where their navigation systems were compromised and freighters ended up crashing on board and airplanes were crashing, essentially from cyber attacks.
There is technology available that could be at a front end, you know, that can fix that.
And that's what makes this such a travesty.
Where we've got to get individuals saying, we're mad as hell.
We are not going to take this anymore.
You know, we need to do something.
I mean, that's a fascinating reference because Debbie and I saw that movie, gosh, about six months or so ago, the Julia Roberts movie.
And I thought it was quite powerful in depicting the impact of some kind of an EMP or EMP style attack on What was missing from the movie, of course, was any explanation about the how, the who, how did this come about?
The movie doesn't even try to go there.
And it seems to me, in that sense, your film is a marvelous complement to it because it vividly depicts consequences.
Your film is about causes.
What is the underlying problem with the infrastructure?
What are things that we can do to fix it?
So this is a really marvelous effort.
Guys, and the movie is available, as I understand it, for free.
Is that right? That's very correct.
Okay, so here's the website, guys, griddownpowerup.com.
The movie is also available on YouTube.
I understand it's going to go up shortly on Rumble.
David Tice is the producer and the director.
David, thank you very much for joining me.
Again, such an honor to be with you.
You're doing such great things for America and such a pleasure.
Thank you. I'm just beginning my discussion of a wonderful historical study by the historian David Hackett Fisher.
The book is somewhat unfortunately called Albion Seed, Albion being a reference to Great Britain, to England.
At one point, it was Napoleon who said that he was disturbed by the actions of perfidious Albion.
He was referring to the English and, of course, the longtime rivalry between the English and the French.
But this book is about America.
It's called Four British Folkways in America.
That is the subtitle.
And as I mentioned yesterday, it's about the four very different currents of...
I won't call it immigration because it's really settlement.
The original settlers of this country who came from Britain, but they didn't all come together.
They didn't come at the same time, and they weren't the same people.
There were four separate currents.
One, I'm going to call it the New England current.
This was, of course, the group that we now call the Puritans.
Then there was the Virginia colony.
This is a group that the historian David Hackett Fisher will call the Cavaliers.
And they were the founders, the establishers of what we would loosely call the culture of Virginia, the courtly culture of the South.
That came from England, but it came from a particular part of England and from a particular type of Englishman.
Then, of course, you have the culture of the Midwest.
And that is very distinct, very different.
And finally, the culture of the backwoods, the culture of, you could also call it the borderlands.
These are the people who settled in the Appalachians in West Virginia.
Ultimately, many of them moved further west.
So these are the four British strains in America.
And the reason I think that this history is so illuminating, well, part of it is just illuminating in the same way that it's illuminating to look at your own family tree and see, wow, this is how we got here.
This is who we are. This is how our society is made up.
In fact, even if you look at immigrants who came subsequently, who are not directly related to these four British strains, you discover that the immigrants have assimilated to one or other of these strains.
And so, for example, think of an Indian guy.
Think of Vivek Ramaswamy.
Vivek Ramaswamy moves, or his family moves, from certain parts of India.
They move to America, but they settle in a particular part of America.
In Vivek's case, I'm actually not even sure where.
Do you know where Vivek settled in America, where he grew up?
I'm not sure. But let's say he grew up in Philadelphia, or let's say he grew up in New England.
The point is this.
Vivek's family would then be exposed to this sort of New England strain of British culture.
They will assimilate, thinking that they're assimilating to America, but they're not assimilating to a generic America.
They're assimilating to New England.
And as a result, they become a sort of new type of New Englander.
An Indo-New Englander, if you want to call it that.
Part of the interesting thing about, if I look at my own case, for example, and I look at my accent.
Now, my accent is a subject of some domestic controversy because I claim that I have an indistinguishable American accent, but Debbie goes, this is not true.
She claims that I have a, quote, Indo-European accent, too.
Even now.
But interestingly, I have lived in different parts of America.
So when I first came to America, I was in Arizona.
That, of course, would be the culture of the West.
This is a desert culture that was developed by people who moved to Arizona, very often coming from the Midwest.
And in some cases from the East Coast.
Then I went to Dartmouth, which is very much part of New England.
And right away I noticed a difference in architectural styles, difference in the way people talk, great difference in the food.
The food in Arizona, very southwestern, very much...
A kind of food influenced by Spain and by Mexico and of course also by cattle ranches and so on in Arizona.
And then I notice in New England the food is totally different.
And, for example, lots of people in New England are aficionados of making pies.
Cherry pies and blueberry pies and blackberry pies.
And this is part of the standard fare of New England cuisine.
But it's not necessarily the standard fare all over the place.
And it certainly wasn't the standard fare in Arizona.
And then later on, I lived in California.
That's a whole different culture.
In Washington, D.C., where I lived in Virginia, and that's the culture of the South.
So here's the point.
There is, of course, an American culture, which is generically American.
And all the four kind of British cultures that we're talking about have certain things in common.
But They have things in common, and then they also have important differences, and we should be aware of both.
So let's look at what are some of the things that they have in common.
Well, first of all, they all speak the English language.
And so you have English spoken across the country, at least certainly by the four strains of the original English settlers.
That's not a big surprise.
But they don't speak English in the same way.
There are regional, distinctive patterns of speech, and linguists, of course, can study these.
Southerners talk, for example, a little differently than Northeasterners.
And it turns out that those differences were transported from England.
This is the key point, that it's tempting to believe that those things just developed in America.
Hey, people moved out West, and people kind of developed a kind of more informal lingo, and that's why, for example, Texans use certain phrases, and you don't find those, for example, in Boston.
But the argument of David Hackett Fisher is that while some of that does occur, there is adaptation to local circumstances— The fact of the matter is that you can trace distinctive patterns of speech, of architecture, more importantly, of religious belief, of modes of religious practice, about ways in which husbands relate to wives and families relate to children.
All of this can be, you can find the roots of it in the original migrations themselves.
Something else that these four British cultures have in common?
Religion. All the immigrants or all the original settlers were Christian.
But again, when we say that they were Christian, they were different types of Christian.
And so for example, the Puritans in New England were Puritans.
They came from a sort of rebellious Protestant stock.
They were against the Anglicans.
Many of them had fled, not Catholic, but Anglican persecution in England, in Great Britain.
Let's remember that since Henry VIII converted to Anglicanism, essentially founded the Anglican religion, the Catholics have not really, except for brief intermittent periods, been running England.
So the persecution of the Puritans and of the Huguenots was coming from the Anglicans.
And so the Puritans practiced Christianity, but Puritan Christianity was completely different from From, let's say, Anglican Christianity, which was the Christianity of the crown, which was the Christianity of the king, Charles I, for example. And it was the Anglican strain of Christianity that was transported to Virginia, and that's the strain that became dominant in the South.
So, point is, yeah, they were all Christians, but they were not all Christians of the same stripe.
So... We're good to go.
Now, as I mentioned before, there are people who think that a sort of a generic Englishman came to America and the character, the regional character of America, including its politics, were shaped by local conditions.
This, for example, was the thesis of Turner, the so-called frontier thesis of explaining American history.
And basically what Frederick Jackson Turner said is he goes, America was shaped by the frontier.
As people began to make their way out West, this idea that the frontier, the next place to go to, the place which has not already been settled, which has not already been occupied, where there are almost unlimited horizons of opportunity, that idea has been the defining and shaping idea of America.
Now, I think there is actually something to that, and certainly the...
The settlers who went further west had that sense that a new world was opening up to them as the country sort of opened up further and further to the west.
So what I'm arguing is no denial of that.
But it is an argument that says that a lot of the regional cultures of America, and of course including their politics, think about this.
Why are southerners Today, conservative.
It's not enough to say that Southerners are natural Republicans or anything like that, because after all, Southerners weren't Republicans 50 years ago or 75 years ago.
Southerners were mostly Democrats.
So even though you have had a shift of parties among Southerners, and I'm thinking here specifically about white Southerners, nevertheless, Southerners have maintained a certain type of conservatism Consistently, all the way through.
And the question is, where does that come from?
What is that based upon?
Let's look at New England.
If you look right now at the kind of woke protests that are occurring in campuses, some of it is spreading around the country.
And I'm not saying that you won't find protests in the South because they're occurring at Emory University, for example, as we speak.
But nevertheless, they are predominantly on the East Coast and on certain parts of the West Coast.
Not even the entire West Coast.
Certain parts of the West Coast.
And the question is, why?
Why is it that, let's call it the woke seed, is so easily fertilized in New England ground and in other parts of the country that were originally settled by New Englanders?
Well, there's an answer to that question, and I think that this book can help us to get that answer, and we will get to all that.
So this is, for me, a kind of exciting journey in discovering the original roots of the idea of America, the idea of America that we as conservatives are trying so hard today to conserve.
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