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May 2, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
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INDOCTRINATION U Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep824
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Coming up, I'll discuss the failure of leadership on the college campus.
This is university officials just absolutely dealing with these encampments in the wrong way.
I'll review a surprise announcement by El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, which could provide a model For leaders around the world.
And Saurabh Sharma, he's president of the organization called American Moment, joins me.
We're going to talk about the campus.
We'll talk about how we get the best people into conservative politics.
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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Devya and I have been watching these campus protests that seem to persist in some places to escalate.
Debbie takes a little more dire view of it than I do, but clearly there's elements of it that are disturbing and there are elements of it that are just weird and nutty.
I don't know if you saw, there was an interesting social media clip of the woman who was speaking for the activists who took over Hamilton Hall.
And this Columbia student was out there talking to the press, and she's like, we need food, we need water.
And some enterprising reporter, I don't even think it was a right-wing reporter, but just a reporter said, well...
Um, why do you feel like you're entitled to food?
And she goes, well, that's because we're students and we pay for a meal plan.
Well, this was highly misleading because the dining hall was open.
In fact, there was a community note on her...
Post on X, which says that the campus restaurants, John J. Dining Hall, the so-called Fact Shack, JJ's Place, and so on, all open.
So there's plenty of food on campus.
There's no shortage of food.
I think the student was trying to role-play as if she was in Gaza.
We're starving. We don't have food.
We don't have water.
We're students. Isn't the university going to provide?
And this is actually very similar to, we're in Gaza, we're starving, we don't have food, where's the United Nations, where's the Red Cross?
In other words, what I'm getting at is I'm not minimizing what's happening in Gaza, I'm minimizing the effort of the students on...
Elite campuses that have plenty of access to food have never missed a meal in their life acting like they are Gazans.
Now, I want to focus today on the reaction of the college leadership on different campuses because it's quite varied.
At the University of North Carolina, The President, Lee Roberts, sees that the activists have taken down the American flag and put up the Palestinian flag.
He goes up there with security, takes down the Palestinian flag, puts up the American flag, and makes a pretty sensible statement that says, look, we're a state university.
We don't belong to the activists.
We belong to the people of North Carolina.
And so we need a flag that represents all the people of North Carolina and And that is the American flag.
Quote, the flag represents all of us.
Pretty good move. Later, Debbie tells me the activists took the American flag down again, and some frat boys put the flag back up and guarded it so that they couldn't take it down.
So we need a little bit more of this, which is to say we need good people on the other side telling the activists that they don't own the place.
As I mentioned yesterday, the activists are not the majority on these campuses, but they act like they are.
They act like they have free reign on the campus.
Another place with good leadership, the University of Chicago.
The president puts out a statement and he goes, essentially what he says is, I'm hearing a lot of stuff to the effect that these camps are peaceful, they're non-violent.
And he goes, no, not really.
When you put up illegal camps...
You claim that you have sort of autonomy, almost like that.
Do you remember that whole Seattle CHAZ zone where nobody was allowed to enter?
Well, that is aggressively taking over public space, space that doesn't belong to you, and controlling access in and out of it.
In some cases, blocking Jewish students from getting to class.
No, you have to go through another gate.
You can't go through the main entrance.
We control the main entrance.
So... I believe the protesters should also consider, it's put pretty politely, that an encampment is a way of using force of a kind rather than reason to persuade others.
Those violating university policies should expect a place to...
Disciplinary consequences.
And this is true, and the University of Chicago is serious about it.
Some of these other colleges are really not serious, because they say things, and sometimes it's the right things, but then they back off.
So at Yale, for example, the president, Peter Salovey, he goes, well, we cannot have an ideological litmus test, which is what the students have been trying to impose.
Well, true, under free speech, you can't have a litmus test that you have.
You know, basically what the students are saying is, if you don't support Palestine, you cannot come inside of this encampment.
And that's the ideological litmus test that the president of Yale is referring to.
But guess what? Yale has been imposing litmus tests for decades.
This is the point. Where did the students learn that there are litmus tests?
They've learned from their own professors.
They've learned from their own administration.
Litmus test on abortion.
Litmus test on white supremacy.
Litmus test on George Floyd and racism.
Litmus test on Black Lives Matter.
So, my point is, Yale has instructed its own students in the very ideology that they are now applying to Palestine.
So, that is the point. DEI requirements.
You can't become a professor if you don't sign a DEI statement.
That's a litmus test imposed by, guess who?
Yale. So this is the point.
At Northwestern, terrible.
While Northwestern has not said that they will divest from companies that do business in Israel, they released a list of concessions.
Guess what? Free ride to Palestinian students, scholarships, and also guaranteed additional faculty jobs for Palestinian academics.
So absolutely disgraceful.
Guarantee that this kind of activism will escalate.
Why? Because when you subsidize something, you get more of it.
Portland State. Now, I don't have high hopes for Portland.
Our friend Andy Ngo reports on Portland.
He's from Portland. He loves Portland.
He's trying to save Portland.
But as far as I can tell, he's trying to do this all by himself.
So good work, Andy.
But it's going to be tough.
This place is crazy.
And at Portland State, no surprise, they took over Miller Library.
They basically shut down the entire campus.
And so, sure enough, the president, her name is Ann Cudd, she enters into a sort of a negotiation.
I'm sure the students love this.
They're like, yeah, you know, just like Hamas is supposed to negotiate with Israel, we're negotiating with the administration.
It's kind of the same thing, you know.
We'll agree to release the hostages if they agree to do certain things.
And so, unfortunately, this idiot, Ann Cudd, plays the game.
She's like, oh yeah, you know, I'll be Israel.
I'm Netanyahu, you know.
And so she agrees, we will not pursue any criminal charges against these students.
We will not suspend or punish these students in any way.
And we will put more funding, more funding, I'm sure there's a lot of funding already, into DEI and CRT. DEI, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, CRT, Critical Race Theory.
So, terrible.
But now that I've mentioned all that, there's something else that I want to mention that is also bad.
And perhaps I'll take this up tomorrow in a little more detail because it deserves more detail.
And that is I'm quite outraged at the House.
And this is the Republican House with a lot of Republicans voting for this, as well as a lot of Democrats.
A new bill to criminalize or to define as hate speech.
Antisemitism. Now, the point is, this kind of thing always comes down to the details.
How do you define antisemitism?
And the way that this bill does is It's essentially a complete shutdown of free speech on the issue of Israel and anti-Semitism.
In other words, it is utterly unacceptable.
It's completely outrageous.
Kind of shows you how even many Republicans don't understand that free speech means allowing speech that you don't agree with.
And so all the stuff that I talk about regarding free speech would be worthless.
if I turned around and called for the suppression of all the speech that I don't agree with.
So tomorrow I'm going to go into the details of this so-called hate crimes or hate speech law.
Well, it's not a law yet. It's passed just the House, but it's passed the House.
I wouldn't be surprised at this point if it passes the Senate as well and Biden signs it.
But it is utterly disgraceful, utterly un-American, a kind of flat-out attack on the First Amendment.
And I say this as a supporter of Israel, as somebody who is disturbed by the levels of anti-Semitism on campus.
But if there's anything that those of us who advocate free speech do not believe, it is that the way to defeat ideas that we don't like is to shut them down and disallow them.
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Nayib Bukele is the president of El Salvador, and this guy has sort of burst on the international scene Which is unusual.
Normally, if you're running a small country like El Salvador, nobody pays any attention to you.
Who's the president right now of Honduras?
You don't know and I don't know either.
Why? Because whoever that is, they're not making any waves.
I happen to know the Sandinistas are still running Nicaragua, which is very unfortunate.
And so things can't be going very well over there.
You've still got kind of these old Marxists going back now to the 1980s and 90s.
And they were ousted from power.
they're back in power but in El Salvador you've got this remarkable fellow Bukele and he just won re-election by a huge margin. Why? Because he unleashed the not just the police but the military against the criminal gangs MS-13 and a number of other gangs they were essentially running El Salvador kind of the way the cartels run Mexico and this guy goes well you're very powerful You've got a lot of money.
You're collecting a lot of revenues from drugs and other things.
But guess what? I have the El Salvador military and we've got better weapons.
And so he unleashed the military on these guys and launched a campaign of...
I mean, perhaps extermination is not too strong a word, but he crushed the gangs in El Salvador to the point where they were whining about not getting proper burials.
We can't be buried with our gang colors, as if Bukele could be moved by something so idiotic.
And then that was kind of his one issue for a while.
That was the main thing he was doing.
But then he decided to start doing some other interesting things.
He essentially said, all right, well, we actually don't have that many people in El Salvador.
We can use some more, but we don't want riffraff.
We don't want the kind of people coming across the U.S. southern border, no.
We want talented people.
We want smart people. We want entrepreneurs.
We want people with good ideas.
We want people with degrees.
We want people to come invest in El Salvador.
I'm going to make it easy for those people to come legally.
So think about it. Think about how this guy in a small country pays far more attention to the welfare of his country and his border than we do in this country.
Cabinet. There seemed to be like 40 people in the room.
Then he goes, guys, I'm really glad you're all here.
Guess why you're here? It's because right here next to me is my Attorney General, and I'm going to have all of us, every single one of us in this room, investigated for corruption.
Why? He goes, because he goes, corruption is a very widespread in our part of the world.
And quite frankly, he could have said all over the world.
I mean, I can tell you, for example, and this I'm getting mainly from my family members in India, corruption is rife.
If somebody is a chief minister of a part of India...
And you want to build a new building, 10% of the revenues from that building are going to end up in this guy's pocket.
And so you've got Indian politicians who are worth millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars, all by kickbacks that they have institutionalized into the system.
Any transaction that occurs that's profitable, they get a cut.
And this happens all over the world.
So Bukele says, listen, when we look back at the presidents of El Salvador, so many of them are corrupt.
There are some who are not corrupt. President Duarte, he mentions Duarte, is well known for having been very straight-laced.
But he goes, but guess what? He might have been straight-laced, but all the people around him were corrupt.
And so corruption was still the defining feature of El Salvador.
And then he goes, look, you only live once.
I've decided that not only am I not going to be corrupt, I'm not going to be surrounded by corrupt people.
And so I want to make sure that none of you are taking bribes.
None of you are on the take.
None of you are using extortion.
And if you are, you'll end up in the place that you deserve to be, namely jail.
Now, when I first saw this, I was like, wow, this is pretty impressive.
Is he actually going to do it? Two days later, I read, Christian Herson Flores, using his position as presidential commissioner, was demanding money from people and companies in exchange for benefits and preferential participation in government projects.
He's been arrested. So, Bukele, again, is setting a standard, an example to people, leaders around the world.
He's basically saying, I am an open book with regard to corruption.
I'm going to ask myself to be investigated and I'm going to make sure that all the people around me who are coming to government, not to do good, but to do well for themselves, to enrich themselves, are going to be scrutinized and are going to be punished.
I think... Can you imagine if you had this kind of ruthless enforcement of anti-crime policies, of border policies?
I mean, if you apply this Bukele standard in America, I predict that 90% of Democrats and about 40% of Republicans would be arrested tomorrow.
Why? Because they're getting kickbacks in one way or the other.
They're benefiting from being at the swamp.
They're ultimately there for their own benefit, not the benefit of the country.
So even though all their language, if you listen to them, well, we're public servants.
Well, we're attempting to do good for people.
It's not that they're not motivated by any good intentions.
It's that they pay careful attention to their own bottom line.
And that's Bukele's point.
You get a salary for working in the government.
You don't want it. Don't work in the government.
But if you do take the job, you can't take kickbacks on the side.
And if you do, you're going to be investigated.
You're going to be prosecuted.
So every time I see that this guy's done something new, I'm like, what is it this time?
And I'm like, I feel like breaking into applause.
So I'm not trying to give a kind of overall assessment of Bukele.
I don't know what his foreign policy is.
Probably something I need to look into some more.
But in these respects that I've talked about, this guy appears to be exemplary.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
Guys, I'd like to welcome to the podcast, Saurabh Sharma.
He's the president of American Moment.
He's also co-host of Moment of Truth.
He's also the former chairman of Young Conservatives of Texas.
We were just talking a moment ago about Brandon Gill and his race and Saurabh and Brandon have connected.
Saurabh, delighted to have you on the podcast.
By the way, you can follow him on x at Sharma US. The website is AmericanMoment.org.
Saurabh, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
I appreciate it. Tell me a little bit about your background.
You're a new guest and I'd like people to know a little bit about you.
Are you of Asian Indian descent?
Yes, I am, actually.
And, you know, I spent a lot of time looking up to you when I was in young conservative circles, so it's exciting to be on this show.
I think the first national political conference I ever went to, I met you and I have a picture far back in my Instagram.
So, you know, I got my start in student politics and youth politics in the state of Texas, running Young Conservatives of Texas at UT. It's been a really nostalgic few weeks for me because I imagine all the trouble I'd be getting into messing with these Hamas enjoyers on college campuses if I was still a student, but I decided to come to Big Boy Politics in D.C. instead.
I was involved in conservative movement stuff on my campus and in the state of Texas all throughout college and then started an organization in D.C. three years ago that really is trying to help solve the personnel problem that we have up here in Washington.
We don't have enough conservatives that We're good to go.
Well, that's a very interesting and important project because as we look back to Trump's first term, there were so many guys who were appointed by Trump or appointed through the system that Trump created, and they either turned out to be unpredictable, unreliable, or they turned out to stab Trump in the back.
And so I'm glad that there's a recognition of a problem there and a...
Absolutely. I'm sure that you've noticed this phenomenon before, but every generation of young conservatives have these sort of founding myths that creates their political involvement.
So if you're a young conservative in 2010, maybe you get involved because you really don't like what Barack Obama is doing.
If you're involved in the 1980s, it's because the Reagan revolution really catalyzed your involvement.
There's so many hundreds, thousands of young conservatives across the country who the story of their political engagement was watching the way that President Trump was subverted during his first four years in office and saying, you know, I could go make money, I could go do something else, but really I want to be part of this group of people that's going to help make sure that doesn't happen next time.
And so we have our work cut out for us, but luckily there's plenty of demand, plenty of very bright, intelligent, capable young people that want to get involved.
And we try to be the white glove service, helping midwife and facilitate that so that we have this rising generation of people in DC that sort of tell the boomers, you know, enough is enough.
We need some fresh blood, some fresh ideas here in Washington.
Why do you think you mentioned about, not just in the Trump administration, but a lot of conservative congressmen and senators end up with terrible, you said, I think your word, terrible staff?
Why is that? Is that because a sort of lethargic type of conservative goes to Washington constantly?
Kind of looking to do better and make good and not too worried about changing the country per se.
In other words, is there a temperamental difference between the kind of guy who goes to Washington, quote, from the right versus someone who goes to Washington from the left?
Absolutely. At the staff level, here's the basic dichotomy we have.
When the Biden administration began, there's, you know, call it about four to five thousand positions that are political appointments that the president gets to make.
For every one of those positions, there was probably 10 far-left ideologues with six PhDs and a singular desire to be the deputy director of the State Department for, you know, some very narrow region.
This is the thing that they've been We're good to go.
Normal, nice people.
If they're very ambitious, they want to move to a big city, make a lot of money.
Whereas if they just want to have a family and a basic lifestyle, they'll be out in the country.
They won't be in one of the four urban core areas.
And so that's one reason for it.
The other reason is that...
You know, if you think about what the cultural status quo, center of gravity is on the right of center, if someone tells you, I work in the federal government, what's the first joke that'll be made around beers or cigars?
It'll be, oh, you're a disgusting bureaucrat, you work in the swamp.
There's very little cultural cachet to be had on the right of center being involved in this important work.
It doesn't mean that we need to say that to be a good conservative you need to work in government, but we do need to carve out a small cultural space to say, you know, these mighty few that come and decide to take less income and to do really difficult work fighting against the bureaucracy.
They have an appropriate place of honor inside the conservative movement.
And with that will come the talent that should come along with it and the conviction as well.
That's the final piece, is the ideology.
What's been the center of gravity of conservative ideology for 30 years?
Government bad. Well, talented people aren't going to opt into being part of government if the entirety of our worldview is government bad.
And this is why President Trump is so important.
He said, you know, we should be tough on China with trade or that we really need to get our immigration problem under control.
He had a slightly different perspective on government than the traditional libertarian perspective on the right of center.
And so again, now, if you're a talented young person with conservative convictions, you look at the fight in D.C. and you say, actually, there are really creative things that I could be involved with, whether it's, you know, helping bring manufacturing back to America through better public policy or saying, you know, we have a fertility crisis.
What might we do? What creative ideas could we do with the tax code or other things in order to improve Americans' lots?
So those are the main reasons why I think there's this big discrepancy.
I mean, when you look at Trump himself, he must enjoy the idea of governing, right?
Because this is a guy who enjoyed really unparalleled success in the private sector.
If that was fully satisfying to him, presumably he would never have made a very risky pivot into politics.
In fact, a lot of his infamy has been due to that move.
In other words, it's not because of Trump.
They don't like Trump. Well, they liked Trump before.
But once Trump entered Republican politics, that's when he became radioactive, at least from the point of view of the Democrats and the left.
Let's pivot a little bit, if we can, to the topic of the campus, because you're not too far removed from the campus.
You were saying that you can kind of see UT Austin in the rearview mirror.
There are a couple of theories about what's going on in the campus.
One of them is that what's going on is very disturbing.
You have a generation that is being ruthlessly indoctrinated.
There's the possibility that these are terrorists in the making.
not all of them, of course, but when you're imbued with an ideology that sees your own country and Israel as evil, you're looking for meaning in life, somebody goes, hey, well, why don't you plant a bomb over here?
So one possibility is that you're dealing with a threat that needs to be seen in some ways almost as a national security threat.
The other view is that these students are completely lost souls.
They, if it wasn't this, it would be something else.
They could just as easily have been ignited over climate change.
They could have been ignited over something else.
Gaza is just the kind of issue du jour, the issue of the day at the moment.
And tomorrow they'll be obsessed with something else.
What is your view as you look at this seemingly expanding activism on the campus?
I definitely think it's closer to the latter of the two options you laid out.
So think about the civic and history education that every American young person gets.
There's basically four events in history, the American founding, the Civil War, the Civil Rights Act, and 9-11.
The Civil Rights Act especially plays a very central role in the education of American young people.
So their history books are full of these black and white pictures of protesters, of marches in Washington, and they think, oh, this is a way I can insinuate myself into history.
And they see it as an opportunity to make something of their lives in an era where they feel like there might not be a lot of opportunities.
There's also, I think, an element of sort of a coming-of-age ritual.
You look at some of the really goofy dances and demonstrations happening in these college squares.
It really does sort of have the...
The resemblance to almost a tribal ritual.
You're 16, you're a man now.
You do the dance in the public squares and go slay a dragon.
In this case, it's the great issue of Israel.
So I do think that there's an element of this that is completely nonspecific to the Israel issue in particular.
But I will say that...
Palestine and the Israel-Gaza war has always played a very unique place in the left's moral imagination.
For the last 60-70 years, it's very much been a central issue.
I remember when I was in college, one of our traditional foils that we often were clashing against was the Palestinian Solidarity Committee.
And there's sort of two reasons why I think such a thing exists.
One, it's a very simple moral narrative that people get to adopt.
It doesn't really require them to learn all that much about history.
It's Palestine good, Israel bad.
But also, you know, if there are Arab students on a college campus, you know, almost every student group ends up getting, you know, I'm sure you saw this when you were in college.
You know, there's the Asian Students Association, the Latino Students Association, etc.
And these often, because there's only so much you can talk about, you know, golly gee, we like the food that our mothers made.
They eventually go searching for political causes to adopt.
And the Palestinian Solidarity Committees on college campuses are in representation of Arab communities.
Ethnic politics on college campuses.
And that's only increased over the last few years because colleges are very, very solicitous of foreign students.
And you have all these Gulf monarchies that have a lot of wealthy 15th cousins that can easily afford going to Northwestern or Harvard or Yale or whatever it might be.
And so it's really this confluence of factors that make it so that it's not surprising at all that There would be a tinderbox here.
Also, it's final season.
And so if there's a moral cause that means that people can't go to class and they couldn't possibly show up to their tests, then self-interest is going to militate that they will seek it out.
So those are some of the reasons. This narrative, this exact narrative you described, played out a little differently because the campuses had a strong presence, particularly the elite campuses, of Jews from progressive families.
And the way that the narrative played out is you got racism, you got sexism, to which the progressive Jews would add anti-Semitism.
And so it was...
Anti-Semitism that was grafted onto racism and sexism.
And as a result, these progressive Jews saw themselves as part of an oppressed minority.
Of course, the enemy here wasn't Israel.
It wasn't even the Middle East.
The enemy here was sort of the white power structure in America.
And these progressive Jews saw themselves as in some ways not white at all.
I think it's been a rude surprise for the progressive Jews to realize that they've been kicked out...of the minority coalition.
They've been replaced by the Arabs and the Palestinians and that they are actually now considered part of the white oppressor class in America and part of the occupier group in Israel.
And I think you've given an interesting explanation.
You're basically saying that the presence of more Arab and foreign students on the campus bankrolled by wealthy relatives abroad has sort of changed the complexion and thus the politics of the campus.
Absolutely. I mean, you look at the politics of a city like Dearborn, Michigan, no one would even begin to tell you that the ethnic origin of the residents has nothing to do with the politics that they adopt.
This is very commonplace in every country in the world.
Ethnic origin has to do with the eventual composition of politics.
I do think, though, that it's very important to realize that so much of this Palestine activism on campus and the anti-Semitic tendencies that a lot of these activists have is downstream of anti-white bigotry and hatred.
And white taken in a very sort of expansive term.
I think that the category of white in the moral imagination of the left these days in the United States is any group that's not a basket case, that decides to participate in pro-civilizational behavior.
And that's any individual.
So everyone from Clarence Thomas to Marco Rubio, because they're traitors to what is seen as a certain way to vote and to behave in public life.
But Certainly, the Jewish people who've had great success in the United States, Israel, went from desert to one of the most technologically prosperous countries in the world in no time flat.
There is a deep resentment of the good, the true, the beautiful, and the complex that the left has.
And so, it's utterly unsurprising that...
They would look at the dichotomy between Palestine, which has never really been able to govern itself in a proper, meaningful way, and the stable center-right governance of a country like Israel, and be very angry.
And the same dichotomy is playing out in a bunch of different theaters across the world.
Hungary versus the Western European powers is a very similar dichotomy.
The increased attention on India as some great villain in Asia is also...
The same thing is happening with El Salvador.
Nayib Bukele saying, actually, we will not let this country be governed by MS-13.
It's the same phenomenon.
It's the people who believe in civilization versus the forces that try to tear it down.
Fascinating. What you're really saying is the left is the party of dysfunction at the individual level but also at the societal level and in a way the party of barbarism because you're quite right.
If a country goes barbaric, let's say South Africa descends into absolute chaos and they start massacring people over there, the left is like, wow!
Look at those revolutionary wonders going on in South Africa.
As long as South Africa is stable, the country is prosperous, it's got the highest GDP in Africa, it's got to be villainized because it's a functioning society.
Very interesting analysis.
Guys, I've been talking to Saurabh Sharma.
Follow him on x at sharmaus, the website americanmoment.org.
Saurabh, thank you very much for joining me.
It was my pleasure. I'm talking about the four folkways that shaped America and relying on the work of historian David Hackett Fisher.
My plan is to devote a couple of days to each of these folkways, and hopefully at the end of this you'll understand the big currents that have shaped American culture and American politics.
So in each case, I'll kind of begin with the present, talking about what a particular region of the country looks like now.
Then I'm going to ask how did it get that way, and we'll answer the question by looking at the book Albion Seed by...
Let's begin with New England.
Let's begin with the Yankees.
Now, we don't talk about Yankees today so much.
We still talk, of course, about New England.
But this has now become a very...
Politically depressing part of the country, because it seems like Republicans and conservatives can't make headway in New England.
There were parts of New England that were typically pretty conservative not that long ago.
New Hampshire, for example, where I went to college.
Was a Republican state in the 1980s.
In fact, its motto, live free or die.
Now, how can a state whose motto is live free or die be a liberal state or a democratic state?
But now it is.
It is. Now, the reason that happened in New Hampshire is essentially immigration.
Now, not immigration from Mexico or another country, but essentially importations from Rhode Island, from Massachusetts mainly.
And since New Hampshire is such a small state, it essentially got flooded by outsiders who brought with them their liberal politics.
But this is just another way of saying that the politics in the region generally today, very left of center.
Epitomized by all the colleges.
And notice that New England is very dense with colleges.
If you go to typical southern states, you'll find a few colleges.
Maybe ten.
And ten would be considered a lot.
Texas, of course, would have more than 10, but Texas is maybe the only state in the South that is populated with colleges like that.
But in New England, you'll find 10 colleges or more in the outskirts of Boston, let alone in Massachusetts, where I bet you there's going to be 40 or 50 colleges of varying size and influence.
Many of the elite schools are in New England.
There's an isolated one outside of New England, say a Stanford out west.
But think about it. In all of California, you only have two, Stanford and Berkeley.
Many states have none.
But here you have New England, and they've got pretty much the entire Ivy League, but they've got lots of other very good colleges that are not Ivy League colleges, but are nevertheless very much in the top rank.
Very hard to get into.
That's the standard I'm applying.
The other thing about New England today is that it is politically very woke.
In other words, they want to tell you what to do.
They want to create...
It's not that they're against creating community, but they want community based upon conformity.
They want everybody in the community to adopt the same mores, have the same outlook, the same views.
And number one...
They think this is a good thing.
So even though there's some talk about pluralism, they don't really believe in pluralism.
By the way, we're having, if you heard a little clap, that's because we're having some thunder, raging thunder here in Texas.
And so you're getting a little bit of the weather kind of intervening on the podcast.
But let me keep going. So you've got this idea, political idea in New England today, which is we want to have a community of true believers, right?
We don't believe in dissidents.
We don't believe in outsiders.
If people are not going along with the program, our job is to squeeze them, to force them, in some cases to kick them out.
We are creating here in New England the sort of beloved leftist community.
That's their goal.
What I want to point out to you is that this is exactly the way that the Puritans were.
In other words, the Puritans, really 400 years removed, couldn't seem further away from the woke leftist on a New England campus or even the typical college president today.
And yet, there is a connection.
Why? Because if we look at the Puritans, they came to America, but they came to America with a certain idea of freedom.
It's not freedom in the normal meaning of the term.
Freedom in the normal meaning of the term means you can kind of do what you want.
You can explore.
You can test out ideas.
You can write the script of your own life.
The Puritans believed none of this.
Their view of freedom, they did use the word freedom, but they meant by it something totally different.
In fact, they meant by it exactly what the woke left means by it today.
So, for the Puritans, freedom means we don't want to be told what to do, and while we're in England, we're being persecuted by the king and by the Anglican establishment and by the ruling powers, and so we need to get out of there.
But we need to get out of there not to go to a country where everyone gets to do their own thing.
On the contrary, we want to move to a country where we can establish our own community.
And our community collectively will be free.
No one will be telling us as a group what to do.
In that sense, we will set up our own lives, our own marriage customs, our own architecture, our own institutions, our own mores.
But... Our idea is that we are going to create a community of, well to put it bluntly, a community of saints.
A community of virtuous people.
And even those who may not be so virtuous will be forced to conform We're good to go.
While the Puritans were Protestants, they were deeply Christian, they were creating the Christian community, and obviously we've seen a tremendous secularization over the intervening 400 years.
We would not expect any place to be exactly the same as it was four centuries prior, but nevertheless the point I'm trying to make is that the same impulse Creating a solitary community.
Having everybody conform.
A high emphasis on virtue.
But virtue now is not Christian virtue.
It's not even individual virtue.
It's not you being a decent person.
But rather, it is political virtue.
It is sort of public virtue.
It is using the right pronouns.
I mean, the Puritans were not fastidious about pronouns, obviously.
But they were very fastidious about names.
So, for example, in the Puritan world, they did not like to take the names of biblical kings.
Why? Because in England, the Puritans were against the king.
So kingship for them was a little bit problematic.
They could make exceptions.
You'll find people in Puritan times named, for example, David.
But this was not because David was a king.
It was because David was so devout.
David was beloved by God.
So the Puritans were careful about their names.
They were very punctilious, very particular about their customs, very much like the left is in New England today.
And so the big point I'm trying to make here, and I'll be fleshing it out over the next couple of podcasts, is the fact that when you look at Puritan dress, Puritan food, Puritan architecture, these people who came from a particular part of England The part that Fisher calls East Anglia.
This part of England is where the Puritans were very strong.
This part of England is where the Puritans decided, we got to get out of here.
Now, why did they get out of there?
They got out of there because essentially the...
The royalists, which is to say the crown, decided that the Puritans were troublemakers.
The crown was concerned with order and stability in England.
And so the Puritans were always talking about revolution, not just revolution in the spiritual sense or revolution even in the sense of the church.
They wanted to uproot the Catholic Church and get it out of there.
But the Catholic Church was already kind of out of there.
England was an Anglican country.
But the Puritans didn't like the Anglicans either because the Anglicans were too close to the Catholics.
And so the Puritans began to talk about political revolution.
And needless to say, the Crown was not amused.
The Church of England was not amused.
And so a massive crackdown began on the Puritans.
And this is what really drove the Puritan emigration to America.
Now some of the Puritans didn't come to America right away.
They fled to other parts of Europe, the Netherlands and so on, places where they were less tormented than they were in England.
In fact, in the Netherlands, not tormented at all.
But then a considerable number of them decided, look, there's a new world out there.
We now know about it.
It is so-called virgin territory.
What a perfect place for us to de-camp, establish ourselves in America, and then we will create a Puritan community, a Puritan paradise, if you will.
A paradise not defined by freedom in the sense of letting people do what they want to do, but a paradise defined in the sense of a Puritan community where the Puritans would tell everybody how to live and what to do.
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