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May 3, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
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DREAM TEAM? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep825
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Coming up, Trump's immunity claim had a hearing before the Supreme Court.
I'll tell you how I think the court is going to come out.
And I also want to critically review this atrocious anti-Semitism hate speech law that just passed the House of Representatives and has a pretty good chance of passing the Senate.
Debbie's going to join me.
We're going to actually talk about her theory, which is that the campus protesters are a fertile breeding ground for terrorists themselves.
And also, we're going to talk about the prospects of a Trump-DeSantis ticket.
Is that the dream team we're looking for in 2024?
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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I'd like to talk about two important things that happened this week.
The first was that Trump's I'm going to go.
Trump claimed that he, as president, should have absolute immunity.
And absolute immunity would mean just what the word says.
You could do whatever you want as president and not be prosecuted for it.
And Trump has said numerous times, if I don't have absolute immunity, in other words, if presidents don't have absolute immunity, they can't really function.
Interestingly, the Biden administration, this is the Biden DOJ, made the opposite case.
And by the way, Jack Smith, the special counsel who has an interest in this, the issue of presidential immunity is central to the January 6th case that he's prosecuting in Washington, D.C. before Judge Tanya Chutkin.
He was there.
He was listening.
And he heard his own side make the case that there should be no immunity.
In other words, the president should not be immune from any criminal behavior whatsoever.
They can be charged with a crime, and if they're guilty, if they're found guilty, they did the crime, then too bad.
It doesn't matter if you're the president.
No one is above the law.
And the Supreme Court, it turns out, was in the main taking a middle position.
And all the justices seemed to be in the middle of these two extremes.
Now, the three liberals on the court were more leaning toward the Biden-DOJ side and the six conservatives, Or the five conservatives and one moderate, however you want to call it, were leaning more toward the Trump side.
But this distinction, I think, became critical for the hearing.
And that is, the Supreme Court drew a sharp line between presidential conduct that is part of your duties in office And private conduct that you do that is not part of your duties in office.
So this distinction, I think, in most cases is extremely clear.
If the president, for example, undertakes to do something, and it is part of his job description.
It includes things that presidents do.
Pass legislation, have a bully pulpit to speak to the country, engage with issues that the country is dealing with, try to make sure that the procedures and processes of the executive branch are properly in place.
This is all the president's job.
And the Supreme Court seemed to have a clear majority on the side that there should be immunity for that.
You don't want there to be vengeful prosecution of presidents after they leave office.
Oh, you did this over here.
You did this over there. You did this in the Middle East.
We're going to charge you with a crime.
The president can't really function if he's paralyzed by the doubt or the fear that he's going to be held criminally liable for decisions he makes in the conduct of his presidential office.
So I think that the Supreme Court is quite clearly going to come out and say, presidents have immunity for official conduct.
But, and there is a big and important but, and that is that we now need to contrast official conduct with private conduct.
So private conduct in its extreme form would mean something like the president leaves the White House.
He goes out for a drive.
He then goes up to a house in Washington, D.C. Somebody opens up the door and the president shoots that guy.
Or the president commits some private offense against somebody and is charged with a crime.
Or let's say, for example, the president decides to ride a bike and he crashes into somebody, severely injuring them.
The point here being that we do things in our private life that are not really part of our official duties.
And why should the president get immunity for those things that are, in a sense, conduct done as a private individual?
So I think this is actually the court being very smart here, not actually taking one side or the other completely, but recognizing that there is a kind of substantive difference between an official act and a private act.
Now, in fairness, that line is not always so clear.
I think it's pretty clear that presidents do have a duty to make sure elections are properly conducted.
I don't think that a president, for example, contesting an election, I certainly don't think a president having a rally in Washington DC and calling for people to peacefully and patriotically march on the Capitol, none of that would seem to be, all of that would seem to fall within Trump's official duties.
That's something that presidents do, including, by the way, Running for re-election.
Most presidents who are elected do run for re-election.
So that falls into the official category.
But let's take something like this.
Trump has a conversation with Rudy Giuliani, who is, by the way, not a part of the government.
Giuliani is a private citizen at that time.
And they discuss, for example, go over to Georgia and do this, or I want you to say that.
Now, I'm not talking about anything specific that Trump and Giuliani talked about.
I'm just giving this as a sort of hypothetical.
And let's say that somehow in there, there is some alleged criminal conduct.
Well, the idea would be here that this is actually not part of Trump's He's in fact not interacting with people in the executive branch at all.
He's interacting with a private citizen over a matter that is not of consequence to the people of the country as a whole, not of consequence to the government, but something that is in Trump's own interest.
This could qualify as a private transaction, not, if you will, a public one.
And so I think what the Supreme Court is going to do, and it's going to be very bad news for Jack Smith and actually good news for Trump, The Supreme Court is going to come out probably next month and say, hey listen, we're going to remand this case back to Judge Tanya Chutkin.
We're going to tell her to undergo a process of separating out what actions that Trump did that qualify as part of his official business.
All of those are immune from criminal prosecution, so take them off the table.
I think, quite honestly, this will gut a good bit of Jack Smith's case.
And as Debbie reminded me, there's also the 1512, the kind of obstruction of an official proceeding that is separately before the Supreme Court.
So if the Supreme Court knocks that out, it's hard to see what's kind of left of Jack Smith's case.
In theory, he could still proceed, but there's also going to be a long delay, probably a delay that takes the whole matter beyond the 2024 election.
I want to talk about a second matter that I alluded to yesterday.
Well, I started talking about it yesterday.
It is this bill that is passed by the House, voted, a lot of Democrats voted for it, a lot of Republicans voted for it.
It's supposed to be, it's well-meaning, it's supposed to like, let's outlaw hate speech related to Israel and anti-Semitism.
But look at the stuff that they supposedly want to, not supposedly, that's in the bill, that they want to outlaw as hate speech.
Quote, denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., example, by claiming that the existence of the state of Israel is a racist endeavor.
Now, the state of Israel is not a racist endeavor, but saying so is not hate speech.
Number two, applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
In other words, if you single out Israel and say, Israel must pay attention to civilian casualties, but you don't ask any other country to do that.
Well, that is a double standard, and I think morally it's unconvincing, but it's not hate speech.
Number three, using the symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism, e.g.
claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel, to characterize Israel or Israelis.
If you say the Jews killed Jesus, I think that's a kind of a...
Well, I mean, strictly speaking, it's accurate.
But in the way that it's used to blame Jews who are around today as if you killed Jesus, it's obviously an anachronism, a fallacy.
But again, is it hate speech?
Is it speech that you want to sort of criminalize?
Is it speech that you want to disallow?
Absolutely not. And finally, drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
Look, it's very distasteful to do that, quite frankly, when people make Nazi comparisons.
You always have to ask, are these comparisons even valid?
Because very often someone does say, that's just what Hitler did.
So this reductio ad Hitlerum is indeed overused in the discourse, but not only with regard to Israel.
It's overused in American discourse all the time.
So my point about it is, why is the US Congress, who are the stupid Republicans that somehow think it's a good thing?
We're trying to fight against cancellation.
We're trying to fight for free speech.
Now again, we're not trying to fight to allow any kind of speech at all.
If you ask me, is there conceivable hate speech?
Yeah. If you actually call for all the Jews at Columbia to be murdered, We're good to go.
But on the other hand, having opinions, whether right or wrong, whether exaggerated or not, whether you're pro-Israel or anti-Israel, I am strongly against these protesters and activists on campus.
We've even called them, you know, Hamas encampments and so on.
But the idea that their speech should be outlawed is no less abhorrent than the idea that my speech should be outlawed.
I hope that this atrocious bill, which has passed the House now, I think there's a decent chance it'll pass the Senate.
I hope it doesn't become law, but I fear, alas, that it might.
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I'm really glad to have Debbie back for our Friday Roundup these days.
Well, she's not always in town because you've still been making trips back and forth to the Rio Grande Valley to visit your mom.
And she's hanging in there.
Yeah, she's been in hospice since mid-March.
And here we are, beginning of May.
And she seems to be getting better, thankfully.
But it is really sad to see her just lying in bed and she's not able to walk and...
It's difficult for her to swallow and all those things.
She sometimes goes a day or even days without any nutrition, without really eating.
So it's kind of an odd, almost a limbo, I guess, with uncertainty about what direction it's going.
Is she going to get better?
Maybe even get out of hospice?
Some people do or not.
Yep. So, in the meantime, I just go as often as I can.
And it's difficult because, obviously, I still produce the show.
I take it with me on the road.
You take your computer. Yeah.
And so, anyway, but it's good to be here.
Yeah. And I notice you're wearing your star...
My Star of David necklace.
Yeah. And they have a disastrous, in my opinion, deal that is in the works.
Basically, for 40 days, they're going to do this throughout 40 days, the Israeli forces are going to withdraw from the densely populated areas.
And aircraft traffic in Gaza Strip will be suspended for 8 to 10 hours every day.
Of course, the displaced Gazans will be able to return to their homes.
And then it goes on to say that during this period, Hamas will release at least 33 hostages under the category women, children, up to the age of 19, adults over the age of 50, sick and wounded.
But Israel is going to release 20 Arab prisoners for each hostage.
What? Yeah, yeah.
It's really disastrous because, number one, if the whole point of this war is to decimate Hamas, this isn't going to decimate Hamas.
No, and not to mention the fact that if I were Hamas, I would say, alright, well, this is a wonderful reason for me to take more hostages.
Because guess what? Every time I get one, first of all, I can do whatever I want with them, and then they become an incredibly valuable form of currency.
I can buy 20 Arab captives for each one, especially if they're women and children.
Right, right. So it is...
I mean, does no one think about this kind of thing when they make these deals?
You know what? And I asked a friend, our friend Zev, and he says, I said, why on earth would Israel agree to do this?
He said, U.S. pressure.
So, in other words, the Biden administration.
The Biden administration is pressuring Israel to do this.
As you know, they're no friend—they're really—you know, I think it's pretty safe to say that the Democrats are no friend of Israel.
They're not. I mean, ironically, Israel has one friend in the world, and that's the United States, but the United States is— The United States is occupied by its own regime, the Biden regime, and they are most definitely not.
So even though they said some of the right things after October 7th, you're saying that their actual pressure is on Israel, and Israel doesn't want to lose the United States also.
The problem is the Biden administration is saying, yes, but these Gazans, look what is happening to the Gazan population, but they don't address the fact that Hamas intertwines himself with the Gazans and makes them human shields.
They never talk about that.
They never talk about that.
And that is the problem.
That's the crux of the matter.
I think you take a much darker view than I do of these protests on the campus here in America.
Not just on the campus, but also in the street.
Apparently, the protesters are a 50-50 mix, at least on many campuses, of students and outside agitators.
I mean, that itself is interesting, because the outside agitators are organized.
They're possibly paid.
They bring in equipment like tents and things like that that are all similar on different campuses around the country.
So there's clearly a whole supply chain that's providing all this.
And you think that this could be, I mean, a little ISIS in America.
It's jihad. It's jihad.
I believe that these are little terrorists in the making.
And why I say that is I was looking at some of the kids that were arrested, some of the adults too, but some of the kids that were arrested in UCLA because this morning they were actually showing them being arrested.
They wore masks, not for COVID, but just to disguise themselves.
And the masks were being taken off by the cops.
and a lot of them did look Middle Eastern.
They looked like they could be from the Middle East, and some of them just looked like normal hippies.
But see, what I find really funny is a lot of these are gonna be terrorist recruits.
Okay, I know that because the fact that they don't even, that they don't care that they are actually in favor of Hamas by default, if not, you know.
I mean, you can tell they have no love for, not just for Israel, they have no love for America.
They have no love for America. They have no love for the universities that are giving them scholarships in many cases.
Absolutely, absolutely not. They hate these places.
They do, they do. And anyways, but what I was going to say is that these kids, the Middle Eastern kids, are prime for radicalization, okay?
They're probably going to be radicalized in some way.
But the white hippies that are taking part are so dumb, they don't realize they're being played.
And I'm talking about the Bill Ayers of the world.
I'm talking about even the, you know, the adult Soros.
I sent you a little thing where Bill Ayers is now short.
I think for Bill Ayers, it's Vietnam all over.
Yeah, I think so. And I think that they really think this is a worthy cause.
But what they don't realize is that at the end of the day, their head is going to go on a platter because these Islamists are going to do that.
They do not like them.
The left thinks, you know what, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
So I'm going to be friends with these Islamists.
Well, guess what? They're going to have your head.
They would have no hesitation about quitting for Bill Ayers, even a 78-year-old though, chopping his head off.
Absolutely not. These are jihadists.
These are Muslim radicals that will stop it.
And look, as you know, I've watched, I think, all of the videos that are out there of the massacre of October 7th.
And so I know what these people are capable of doing.
I've got to say, this is why Debbie is on the warpath on this issue.
And I've seen some of this.
You've shown some of it to me, but only a portion.
You get almost a daily diet of these videos.
And I think the level of barbarism is shocking.
Look, I couldn't sleep for days, weeks after seeing these videos.
I couldn't understand how any human being could do this to another human being, and especially to babies, to children, little girls, women, old women, elderly women.
I couldn't...
And take such relish it.
And take relish it and brag about it.
Yeah. This is the part, I mean, I mentioned in my monologue that, you know, the kind of reductio ad Hitlerum or the Nazi analogy, but even the Nazis did not.
You won't find Nazis dancing around a death camp.
So the Nazis tried to hide the death camps.
It was more secretive. It was more secretive.
These guys are like...
Proud of the handiwork.
Yeah, they are. They're making videos of it.
They do. And I just saw another video yesterday of a man killed in his home.
And the terrorist was laughing as he was shooting his head off.
Literally. His head exploded.
I mean, Israel has every moral justification.
Look, there are some people who have reasonable arguments about the level of U.S. aid to Israel.
To what degree is it our problem?
And you can have those debates.
I think there's nothing wrong with those.
But the fact that Israel has the moral authority to respond to October 7th, I think it's the same level of moral authority we had after 9-11.
Yeah, but I think, you know, obviously I was horrified with 9-11, but these people took relish in killing each individual person.
Not even just flying a plane into a building.
Raping women with such violence that they broke their hips, their bones, their pelvic bones were shattered from the rapes.
I mean, it's a level of barbarism that...
Only the jihadists actually seem to have.
And so, you know, for those reasons, I don't understand how the Biden administration can even make a moral equivalent with how Israel is responding to these people.
Because, as you know, I said, no, do the same thing to them.
Do the same thing to their moms and their daughters and their babies.
That would be moral equivalent.
And that's not what Israel is doing.
Yeah, exactly.
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We want to talk in our second segment about Trump.
And so get this.
Trump goes to court.
And he is in attendance for the trial.
The moment that the trial adjourns, Trump is out and on a plane, and he goes to Wisconsin and Michigan both, attends major rallies in both states, and flies back to New York so he can be back in court 9 a.m.
the next morning. I mean, just think about this.
First of all, could Biden do this?
No way. I couldn't do that.
I don't think either of us could.
You might, but not me.
I probably could in my old days.
I don't know if I could today.
Yeah, you get tired easily now.
Well, I mean, Trump is considerably older than I am.
I don't. And this man has prodigious energy.
How? And not to mention the fact that, of course, he and I were texting in the middle of it.
I know. You're like, how are you communicating with Trump?
And I'm like, well, that's because he's at a rally.
and he must, you know, he has a little bit of ADD so I think when he has a break in the rally, he looks at his text, oh there's something from Dinesh, okay here we go.
And of course you were laughing at the fact that his text was in all caps.
Yeah it was great. Only one part of it was, and we can't talk about it yet but hopefully...
Well it relates to things that we're working on and very nicely Trump, you know, commended Brandon, my son-in-law, for his success and Trump very notably goes, he's a winner.
Trump loves, you know, he loves success.
He loves winners. So it was great stuff.
And speaking of winners, do you think that this Trump-DeSantis situation might be a winning ticket for the Republican Party?
Well, the latest round was that, as you know, there was a lot of bad blood when DeSantis was in the race coming from both sides as far as I could see.
Now, not all of it was coming from Trump or DeSantis.
There were some, but a lot of it was coming from the Trumpsters and the DeSantis camp, the kind of DeSantis influencers, so to speak.
And it was kind of bitter, and some of them are still bitter about it.
But Trump and DeSantis, initially when they did a treaty, I thought it was maybe just one of those arms-length types.
But they had a recent meeting, and Trump put out a very cordial statement, essentially saying DeSantis is completely on board.
And that revived in my mind the question of, because I was in favor of a Trump-DeSantis alliance from the beginning, then I thought, much as in, maybe I'm in favor of it, but maybe the two parties are just temperamentally incapable of it.
Trump just can't bring himself to do that.
He thinks DeSantis is such a sellout because DeSantis kind of cut his teeth on MAGA, and now he's turned out to turn against Trump.
I think DeSantis thought that Trump has made this too personal.
They should be able to run.
Why shouldn't he be able to run?
So I thought, these guys are never gonna get together.
But politics does make strange bedfellows, and I do think it is a real possibility.
And I do think that at least in a certain obvious sense, it will unify the Republican Party.
Virtually everybody who is anti-Trump has something good to say about DeSantis.
Now, some of the never-Trump people are secret Democrats.
They want Biden to win.
And so they don't like Trump, they don't like DeSantis either.
Yeah. They might be okay with a Chris Christie or a Nikki Haley, but they also recognize that that's never going to happen.
It's not even remote.
So I think a Trump-DeSantis ticket is a real possibility, and I think Trump should not ride it out.
Yeah. He should consider it.
Well, you know, I heard the other day on the radio that two people can, you know, president and vice president cannot be from the same state.
Right. What is up with that?
Is that something that- Yeah, so we talked about that and I did a little bit of research on it because as it turns out, that is not really true.
So let me explain.
I'm actually drawing here on a legal scholar who is talking about it, but he's giving them the mainstream view.
Quote, there is nothing in the US Constitution that prevents candidates for president and vice president who live in the same state from running together.
Now, he admits as a practical matter, it may be a bad idea because very often the president locked up his own state, right?
So, for example, with Reagan, it was like, let me pick a candidate from a different part of the country.
Maybe they'll bring me a valuable state like Ohio.
So those considerations, but those are practical considerations.
The question we're exploring, is there something in the Constitution that prohibits you?
Well, let's look at the phrase.
I'm not reading the Constitution.
This is Article 2, Paragraph 3.
Quote, The electors...
There's some irrelevant verbiage there.
The electors shall vote for two persons of whom one at least shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves.
So think about it. The language is not saying that the two guys on the tickets cannot be from the same state.
It is saying that the elector cannot vote for a slate in which both the candidates are in their home state.
So for example, if I'm in a home state of, let's say, Florida, And I'm voting for Trump and DeSantis both.
They are both in my state.
So I as an elector cannot vote for both of them because they happen to be in the same state as me.
So here's the point.
It used to be apparently in American politics that the president and the vice president were on separate tickets.
They ran separately.
And so essentially the constitution was trying to spread things around and say, listen, you don't want a president and a vice president and the elector casting his vote all to be from the same state.
It'll concentrate power too much in like one pocket of the country.
So the elector can't vote for a president and a vice president who are from the same state as he is.
That's the restriction.
But the important thing here is that Trump and DeSantis can most certainly run together.
In fact, very interestingly, you remember when George W. Bush ran, Dick Cheney was evidently at that time a resident of Texas.
And so, of course, was George W. Bush.
Now what happened is right before the election, like five days before, Dick Cheney, because he saw, okay, Texas and Texas, he went and changed his registration to Wyoming.
Of course, he had a ranch in Wyoming, so he had a good reason to do that.
And he essentially made the issue moot by doing that.
In fact, somebody went to court and said, Dick Cheney cannot be the vice president because he's from the court.
It was like... We're not even going to pay any attention to this nonsense.
So I think it's not really going to matter.
But as a tokenistic matter, Trump and DeSantis, at the last minute, Trump could change his residence to New York for like one day.
The election is over.
They're not from the same state.
I don't think this is going to be an issue.
But you know the left will make it an issue like there's no tomorrow.
Because it's Trump. Oh my gosh.
I mean, listen. The left, look what they're doing.
They're essentially trying to get him off the ticket all together.
No, but they realize that they can do these shenanigans to try to prevent him from being elected.
If he is elected, the chance that they can then stop him.
See, the simple truth of it is once you get across the finish line, it's really difficult to change the outcome for anyone.
The difficulty in 2020 was that they weren't able to bust all the cheating beforehand.
So Biden gets across the finish line and then Trump is trying to undo the outcome.
Very hard to do. It'll be very hard for the left to do it if it goes.
I hope so.
I hope so. But it's interesting, though, because like I told you the other day, I said, you know, this is going to be every time we have an election, the losing party is going to say that the winning party cheated and back and forth and back and forth.
It's not going to become a habit.
It's going to become kind of like saying someone's a racist.
It has no meaning anymore because everyone is now a racist.
And so it's going to be every election is going to be fraudulent.
But, of course, we know that this one actually was.
The 2021 definitely was.
I think they're going to try.
You know, look, what are these cases if not election interference?
So this may be their 2,000 mules, except they're doing it out in the open now.
They are. The mules thing probably won't work again.
You raised an interesting question yesterday.
I think we were just chatting about what will happen if this election proceeds and Trump is in fact in jail.
Yeah, yeah. And I was saying that is such a wild card.
Yeah. We're good to go.
If you can't cheat enough, in other words, if the person will win by a landslide and you cannot have enough votes to cheat with, then what better way than to just get him out of the way?
Just lock him up. Just lock him up.
I mean, and for decades, in fairness, you know, you have Freedom House, you've got all these agencies of the U.S. government, the State Department.
If any other country locks up its opposition leader in the weeks and months leading up to the election, we scream...
You're not a democracy.
You're not a true democracy.
This is not a real election.
It's a fake election. Even in Venezuela, when Hugo Chavez first ran, he didn't lock up the member of the opposition party.
They ran in an election, and as you said, in the first election.
At the beginning, but then he did start doing it.
But later he started doing, right.
And now Maduro has tried to get Maria Corina out of the way.
That's right. Right. She's the legitimate nominee of the opposition.
Maduro is trying to get her, to prevent her from running on the grounds of the fact that she had been barred previously from running.
So the parallels with Venezuela continue.
They keep going.
They keep continuing. I'm talking about the four cultures or the four folkways that shaped the United States at the beginning, before the American Revolution.
And we're going to zoom into the first of the four, which is the Puritans, the people who set up, inaugurated the culture of New England, the culture that is today so left-wing, so democratic, so woke.
Its origins were from a group of people who were deeply religious, determined to create, it was their phrase, John Winthrop, a city on a hill.
But a city on a hill in which you didn't have the freedom to do whatever you want, you basically had the freedom to be a member of that community and follow its strict rules.
Now, interestingly, this Puritan migration occurred over really just a 10-year period.
Unbelievable. All of New England was settled really in 10 years.
Now, obviously, the people who settled it had a lot of children and grandchildren, and so their numbers expanded greatly.
But... What happened in England is what caused this migration.
Charles I was the ruler of England, an Anglican king, but he was sometimes suspected of having sort of Catholic sympathies.
And he decided to rule autocratically, to rule without a parliament.
Why? Because he was fighting with parliament.
Ultimately, by the way, this would go into a civil war and Charles I would lose his head over it.
And then Parliament would take over, and amazingly enough, that would produce a second wave of migration to America.
So what we're beginning to see is the first wave came from the people who were persecuted by the king, and then when Parliament took over, the second wave, these are the people who went to Virginia, were the people on the king's side, who were now on the losing side in England, and so they began to flee to America, creating a different culture in the American South.
Welcome to my show!
And as John Winthrop himself basically put it, he says, essentially, this is about as vile an environment as we can possibly endure.
And so you can see the temptation for the Puritans to flee.
Some of them went to Ireland, a bunch of them went to Netherlands and the Rhineland.
Some of them, about 20,000, went to the West Indies.
They went to places like Barbados and Nevis and St. Kitts.
But a fourth contingent decided to go to Massachusetts.
And they contributed an enormous amount to the culture of North America.
They were also the very first of the settlers.
And they came, as I say, in a decade, between 1629 and 1640.
In 1640, the English Civil War broke out.
And amazingly, some of the Puritans who were in America decided to go back to fight on the Puritan side, on the Cromwell side of the Civil War against the king, against Charles I. And And so the migration flow ended as rapidly as it began.
It began abruptly. There was a wave of people who came over a decade, and then it stopped, and some of those people actually went back.
Now, to get an idea of numbers, the original migration was about 80,000.
About 80,000 people came, so a pretty decent sized number, but not a gigantic number.
But pretty soon, by 1700, it was over 100,000.
By 1800, it was over 1 million.
By 1900, 6 million.
And by the end of the century, something like 16 to 18 million.
So these are people who came to America.
Now, they landed, most of them, they landed in Massachusetts.
But they began to occupy a lot of southern New England, eastern New Jersey, and northern New York.
It says, in the 19th century, their descendants migrated east to Maine and Nova Scotia.
Some went north to Canada.
And along the way, they founded cities like Buffalo, Cleveland, Chicago, St.
Paul, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco, and Salt Lake City.
So you can see that this east coast migration...
It also became a migration across the country.
It reached Chicago.
It then went further west to Salt Lake City and ultimately northwest to San Francisco.
Today, if you go to San Francisco, you'll notice it looks a lot like Boston.
It is the most European city in the West Coast, and many people think the most European city in America, but I find it to be quite similar architecturally, even culturally, to Boston.
Why? Because it's the same type of people who originally settled it.
Now, what was the purpose for which the Puritans came?
The historian David Hackett Fisher tells us that religion was not their main purpose.
It was their only purpose.
Their goal was to create a biblical commonwealth here in the northeastern United States.
And everything that they did was shaped by that.
Now today there's a school of history.
These are the so-called materialists.
And they tend to try to look at history in terms of the material conditions, the scarcities, the abundance, the things like that, the economic conditions.
But even though no one is free of economics, in other words the Puritans like everybody else had to figure out a way to survive, That wasn't really their motivation.
They weren't driven by economic factors.
They were driven by religious factors.
And the proof of it is when they got to America, the first thing that they did, and it wasn't very easy to do, is they all joined churches.
They all joined essentially Puritan churches.
Churches by which, by the way, you had severe qualifications to join, not only a profession of commitment.
I mean, these days you want to join a church, you just show up, they're happy to have you.
But in Puritan days, you had to not only make an extensive commitment, you had to agree to follow all the rules, and more important, you had to show blameless moral character before they would take you in the first place.
And yet, a majority of adults could meet these conditions and they joined these churches.
And the inspiration for the churches was the Bible.
It was the Old Testament.
But most of all, if there was one man who shaped the Puritans, it was none other than John Calvin.
And the underlying philosophy of the Puritans, and again, whenever I talk about the Puritans, I want you to kind of keep in mind the woke left in America today because you're beginning to, you're going to see in a strange way echoes of the Puritans in the woke left today.
First of all, they had the idea of natural depravity.
In other words, that people are basically evil.
Now, today the left doesn't think that people are evil.
But what does the left think?
Institutions are evil.
There's structural oppression and racism.
So, the idea of evil being inherent, built in, the difference is that the Puritans thought it was built into you.
Whereas the left today in New England thinks it is built into the structures of society.
But I mean, who made those structures?
We did. Human beings did.
So if human beings don't have a natural depravity, how would the structures automatically assume this kind of depravity?
Obviously the structures are a reflection of the people who built them.
So the Puritans believed that...
That you've got this natural depravity and that shapes the way your society needs to be organized.
Number one, you've got to treat children not as innocent but as naturally depraved individuals that need to be controlled and told what to do.
The job of schools and colleges is to instruct them, to cajole them, to use persuasion if necessary but force if you have to.
The second idea that comes out of natural depravity is that the emphasis on virtue in a society.
And for the Puritans, that just meant rules.
You can't do this, you can't do that, you can't say this, you can't say that.
So the Puritans, for example, would have considered something like the First Amendment to be absolutely ridiculous.
And this is important for us to know because sometimes when we talk about America being founded, we talk about the Puritans and other times we talk about the American founders as if this was the same group of people.
No. The American founders, by the way, first of all, they came much later.
The Puritan migration, as I mentioned, ended in 1640.
The American Declaration of Independence is 1776, so that's well over a century after that.
But the American founders had a very different sensibility than the Puritans.
For the Puritans, the important ideas were natural depravity.
The second important idea was the covenant.
The covenant between not only God and man, but between also man and man through God.
So, for example, marriage is seen as a covenant that a man and a woman make with each other, but they make it with God's supervision and God's sovereignty over it.
And so, the Puritans looked at society as a web of contracts.
And the final idea I want to stress, and again, let's think about the woke left today, is the idea of the elect.
We don't use the word elect today, but we use a very similar word in describing the left, the elite.
So the elect are the ones who are chosen by God for salvation.
And for the Puritans, it was a really important question.
Am I saved or am I not?
And more equally important, not just am I saved.
How do I know I'm saved?
In other words, how do I know I'm a member of the elect?
Let's remember, the Puritans believed in predestination, that God already chose His elect at the beginning of the world, but how do you know if He chose you?
So for the Puritans, it was an obsession to look for signs that they were part of the elect.
Well, today, the descendants of those same Puritans also consider themselves in a way superior, but not superior because God chose them.
They're superior because they're better educated.
They're superior because they've got the right views.
They're superior because they have the sort of inner track in society.
They are at the best schools.
So they consider themselves to be better people.
And therefore, they think they have the right, as the Puritans thought they had the right, to tell other people how to live, what to think, what to eat, how to behave, and what to do.
So, there are very interesting parallels between the ancient Puritans who came 400 years ago to this country and their descendants who are in the same part of the country now, With a politics that is perhaps very different from the Puritans,
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