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May 10, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
46:30
BELIEVE ALL PORNSTARS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep830
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Coming up, I'll use a case study to expose how medical misinformation and Marxist ideology are infiltrating our medical schools.
Debbie joins me for our Friday roundup.
We're going to talk about a review of the Trump cases and also the strange story of a pastor who gave a cheerful sermon that ended with his announcement of his wife's untimely death.
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I've talked before on the podcast about how troubling it is and dangerous that affirmative action, DEI, ideology, diversity, equity and inclusion, this stuff is bad enough when it infects the humanities.
It is worse when it infects Safety.
It infects the medical profession or the airline profession.
These are places where the consequences of mediocrity, of negligence, of failure are very catastrophic.
And for this reason, I was quite intrigued by an investigative report in Free Beacon.
This is of UCLA's medical school and the mandatory instruction in the medical school, but the article also references other universities as well.
So they begin by talking about the fact that They have a required essay for all first-year students in UCLA's medical school.
It's called Structural Racism and Health Equity.
This was a class introduced, it's a new course, introduced in the wake of George Floyd's death.
So right away you can tell this is not going to be good.
And the essay that the students read, it turns out, is not directly about civil rights, but it's written by a so-called fat liberationist.
Now, you'll have to pardon me if I occasionally chuckle, but the idea of this is that Is that fatness is a good thing.
And that most of our society regrettably suffers from fatophobia.
Fatophobia. Debbie's kind of chuckling because she actually knows that you are currently listening to this commentary by a fat-o-phobe.
But according to the essay, obesity is a slur.
And it's used to exact violence on fat people.
I once heard it said that fat people tend to be really good-natured because they can't fight and they can't run.
So they might as well be good-natured.
But in any event, apparently being fat exposes you to the danger of violence.
And they say that this burden falls even more on black, disabled, trans, and poor fat people.
So, being fat is bad, but apparently being fat and black is worse.
Being fat and disabled is worse, and so on.
So, let's see what's going on here.
They're telling medical students not to worry, not just about being obese, But treating obesity.
And this is not good.
Why? Because what are you supposed to be learning?
I mean, the primary distinction, just like the primary distinction in philosophy is between, let's say, nature on the one hand and convention on the other.
There are primary distinctions that you learn in math and in physics and so on.
Well, the primary distinction in medical school is between health and sickness.
So you have to be able to identify, well, this is a normal, healthy body, and this is an abnormal, not healthy body that requires treatment, care, improvement, and so on.
So if medical students can't do that, what really are they there in medical school to do?
It's almost like next step is like cancer is not a sickness.
No reason to treat it.
It is simply a different way of being than not having cancer.
Well, again, if that's true, why go to medical school?
What's the point of going to the hospital?
If you have cancer, it's pretty much the same as if you don't.
So here you have...
You have Jeffrey Flyer, the former dean of Harvard Medical School.
He goes, this is a profoundly misguided view of obesity.
It's a complex medical disorder with major adverse health consequences for all racial and ethnic groups.
I mean, this is a major problem in the country.
Americans weigh one-third more than they did 30 or 50 years ago.
And so this is like a national health problem.
Now, it doesn't stop, of course, with fatophobia.
Sure enough, you have medical students being subjected to free Palestine propaganda, decolonization propaganda, climate activism.
Now, all of this is like disguised as a health issue.
So we're worried about the climate because it could really adversely affect your health.
We're worried about decolonization because racism is really bad for your health.
So these ideological causes are shoehorned into the medical school curriculum.
And this is not unique to UCLA. The article points out Stanford Medical School has lessons on microaggressions and structural racism.
Yale Medical School has its own so-called advocacy and equity sequence, which they say, this is how you become a physician advocate for health justice.
Now, some of this is coming from the Association of American Medical Schools.
So sure enough, you see these schools adopting this stuff.
There is an association at the regional or national level pushing this propaganda down through a bottleneck.
They even speak of so-called DEI competency.
So DEI competency is supposed to be being competent in DEI. In other words, being competent in incompetence.
Being competent in essentially promoting affirmative action and other types of nonsense.
And this is actually defined, notice how they use the word competency in a way that completely twists its meaning.
The former Harvard dean flyer, he says this is so bad when you actually look at the curriculum that it demands some kind of an investigation.
In fact, the dean, does the dean know what's going on?
And the dean at UCLA is Stephen Dubinette.
He's a pulmonologist.
So no one really knows if this is a guy who is knowingly and willfully pushing this kind of ideological Marxist, quasi-Marxist propaganda, or if he's just...
Kind of a medical goofball.
In other words, competent in his narrow field, but has like no clue of what's going around him.
Propaganda's frying right and left.
They alter the curriculum. And this guy's like, yeah, you know, as long as I can do my work in my lab.
So, it could be either one.
It could be that the dean is one or the other.
But either way, the effect is the same.
So on we go.
Readings in queerness and gender theory.
Readings on gender self-determination.
And when you say readings, what you mean is articles that are completely one-sided on that subject.
Now, there is a literature in this country, promoted often by therapists and others, people in other words who have a vested stake in the trans ideology.
These are people pushing, well, here's some Here's some studies that show that people who have undergone gender transitions are actually quite happy with themselves.
They feel like they've discovered their true identity and so on.
But the point is, there is an extensive literature and a very credible literature on the other side.
For example, out of Europe, the Cass Report.
Which along with other studies has caused England and a number of other countries to restrict and in some cases terminate these hormone therapies for children.
This kind of critical analysis is not included.
So you have these medical schools, it's kinda like we're gonna give you one set of ideas on this side, basically pro-trans propaganda.
We will exclude critiques of trans ideology And so again, this is not really medical education.
In fact, it's not education at all.
Here's a guy named Leo Sapir, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
He's an expert on gender medicine.
He goes, UCLA School of Medicine has decided to shield its students from the ongoing scientific debates playing out in Europe and even in the U.S. This is fundamentally unserious, a stain on the school's reputation.
So, it is unfortunate that our schools, which have built their credibility by producing good doctors, good scientists, good nurses over the years, are now kind of squandering it.
and they're squandering it by importing this Marxist, affirmative action, DEI ideology that is not only not medicine, but in some respects it is the antithesis of medicine.
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I'm glad to have Debbie back for the Friday Roundup.
These days it's a little bit of a hit and miss, but you did a trip to Harlingen, and I think our next one we're going together, so it'll be really nice.
Yes, yes, yes. I wanted to comment a little bit about what you were saying about medical misinformation and all of that.
Because as you were talking about that, it reminded me of when I used to go on medical mission trips to Guatemala with a group of doctors.
And all of the older doctors were very conservative and right-wingers, you know.
But it was the younger people The younger ones that were more woke, you know, they were for socialized medicine.
Because at the time, it was during like Obamacare, you know, when that was being debated.
And all the doctors were just like, no, this is not going to work.
This is, you know, horrible.
Don't you see what happens in third world countries?
Blah, blah, blah. Anyway, and these were like, well, why not?
I think it would be really good for people to get- Make healthcare available for everyone.
You know, we wouldn't have to do this.
It would be like, you know, for everyone.
And so, anyway, it just reminded me that maybe it's a generational thing also.
I'm just, you know, I don't know.
Well, I mean, I think that the...
You can look at it that the older generation of doctors, when they went to medical school, they had professors who were liberals of the old stripe.
Yeah, classical liberals. And these young...
Doctors have all been educated by a post-Vietnam left-wing generation in the med schools.
And things are, you know, the part of the monologue was the fact that it's going down to a whole new level.
Because it's one thing to say, all right, I'm willing to sacrifice my $250,000 salary.
I'll be happy to take $150,000 if that money goes into a pot that socializes medicine and makes, let's just say, healthcare procedures cheaper.
That's never... That's totally different from this kind of stuff where suddenly things that are recognized to be bad for your health are classified as good.
Don't worry about obesity.
I mean, is there a bigger health problem in the country than obesity?
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Yeah. We had done together a kind of a diet plan in 2018.
And it worked for us.
But what I thought was interesting is that you tried it again.
Yeah, it didn't work. And it didn't work.
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We didn't advertise for them because she literally saved my life, I feel.
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Well, you were just getting really...
You felt really defeated.
I felt not only defeated, but my health was going downhill.
And so I think that...
With all of the things, you know, I just got blood work done.
All really good.
So I'm very, very happy with my weight.
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And it can be done.
But anyway, the fat shaming...
I have to plead guilty.
I occasionally do it.
Partly because I see it as a vehicle for humor.
Somebody fat shamed me, actually, on the podcast before we started PhD.
They're like, you know, Debbie, you're really pretty, but you could lose 20 pounds.
And oh my goodness, they had no idea what they had just done.
Well, not to mention the fact that you had been trying.
That's why I was so...
He was so annoyed.
So depressed. All right, let's talk about the Trump cases.
So we'll start with Fannie Willis.
That case is now being taken by the Georgia Court of Appeal.
I think a good thing because there is a decent chance, I don't know what the chance is, maybe 50-50, maybe better, that they will look at what the facts are and what the judge himself admitted about the facts and go, nah, so that case may well be dead in the water.
Right. I hope it is.
I hope it is. You know, again, all of these cases, as I've told you before, it's like throwing spaghetti at the wall and whatever sticks, sticks, right?
Well, Megyn Kelly had an interesting phrase.
She calls it the inside straight.
And the inside straight is that you beat all the raps together.
Which seems almost impossible that you could, right?
The Supreme Court hasn't ruled on the immunity issue, but whatever it rules, you're going to have to go back and sort that out.
Basically, Jack Smith may be out for the count before the 2024 election.
Fannie Willis isn't going all that well right now.
That's being appealed.
And so all that's left is New York and Stormy.
Imagine if you're a liberal and you're like...
Now Stormy Daniels is my best hope.
Yeah, yeah. Well, and that's if that's even, you know, let's say that these liberal, let's say that all of the jurors are liberal and that they don't really care what comes in.
You know, because again, allowing this kind of testimony was the judge's perverted way of thinking that, you know what, I want the jurors to have a tainted view of Donald Trump.
Well, you know, in cross-examination, though, this is worth pointing out.
Stormy Daniels gave this kind of, like, detailed account.
Like, Trump showed up.
He was, you know, he was at the door.
He's in his pajamas. The tile was black and white.
Well, in the cross-examination, the attorney has brought out that she has multiple versions of this story.
She's told it different ways.
One point, Trump is over here.
Then he's over there. First, he's in the bathroom.
Then he's at the door. First, he says this.
Now he says that. Good.
So the story is itself a kind of novelistic work in progress, depending on the audience.
She doesn't even remember what the original version of it was.
Now, again, you're saying, will this make an impact on the jury?
Or will the jury go, you know, we use the thumbnail for this podcast, Believe All Porn Stars.
I know, and remember when you said you want, because every once in a while, you know, we come up with a thumbnail.
I sometimes come up with a thumbnail, and sometimes you do.
I do. Kind of the title of the podcast.
Kind of the title of the podcast. And so we play on words and things like that.
But yesterday when you came up with it, I was like, no.
And you're like, you have, what did you say to me?
Well, I was just saying that when I kind of push the edge, which is often a very good, you know, or witty title, which works, your instinct is to pull against it, right?
Your instinct Usually. No, no, no, no, no.
So we kind of balance each other.
I push the envelope.
A little too much in my opinion, but okay.
People love it. So you know what?
Okay. Yeah.
But I mean, think about it.
Isn't that when you're looking at a case that is hinging on the credibility of, well, Michael Cohen, but also mainly Stormy Daniels, it was believe all women.
That was the big slogan of Me Too.
Yeah. And we know that that itself is a highly defective slogan because women sometimes tell the truth and sometimes they don't.
Same as men. And so a doctrine of believe all women is absurd.
Even Biden recently echoes believe all women.
Well, believe all women...
What about the woman that accused him?
What about Tara Reade? Exactly. What about the woman who said you raped me?
Exactly. You don't believe her? Accept her.
No, accept her. Believe a woman, accept her.
Yeah. So anyway, it was very funny you said that.
But listen, so do you really, do you think that there's a chance that they will have Avenatti get on the stand?
Can the prosecution call for him as a witness?
No. Well, I don't think they can, given that he is incarcerated.
Uh-huh. Well, why not?
There are incarcerated people that go on the stand.
That go on the stand. Yeah. Yeah.
So, I mean, I'm not saying it's impossible.
I don't know. This is probably...
I mean, of all of them, I think he's the most credible, and I say this only because he has...
What does he have to lose?
He's already in jail.
He doesn't have anything to gain by it.
Oh, so you mean between Cohen and Stormy and Avenatti, in a weird way, Avenatti, because he's already incarcerated.
Exactly. And also think about it.
I mean, he doesn't benefit from supporting Trump.
And he doesn't like Trump. He doesn't like it.
He doesn't like Trump. So the fact that he's defending Trump is kind of interesting to me.
And if I were the prosecution, I would see if I could cross-examine him.
Well, you're saying if you were the defense, you would think of calling him.
I mean, the defense, not the prosecution.
I'm sorry. Yes, the defense.
I know the prosecution doesn't want to because it'll ruin their case.
I mean, Avenatti is basically saying that Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels concocted a scheme to rip off Trump.
So there was an outsider, Stormy, an insider, Michael Cohen.
But I mean, don't you think that that kind of testimony will completely change the dynamics?
Well, I mean, if it should be credibly put forward, I think the jury would be like, whoa, this is...
And again, if the jury is even...
Is open to hearing what actually happened.
If there's one holdout, you know, and all they need is one holdout, right?
Correct? Right. So it just, you know, let's hope that that happens.
Let's see how it plays out.
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Again, it's dinesh.locals.com Sometimes in our Friday roundup, we like to cover, well, stories that are somewhat offbeat or eccentric, sometimes amusing.
The story we're about to cover is not really amusing.
It's not amusing at all.
It is very strange.
And it involves a pastor in I believe South Carolina.
And anyway, I have an article on the guy.
But he comes up to give his sermon.
Here we go. It's John Paul Miller.
And he comes up to give his sermon.
And he gives a sermon. And he seems quite normal.
He has a couple of anecdotes.
He has lessons. He has jokes.
And at the end of the sermon, he goes, I have an announcement to make.
And I want you to take this under careful consideration.
And I want you to also continue to support the church because we're going to go through a difficult time.
My wife, he says, just committed suicide.
And not only was the audience shocked, but everybody who watches this, the clip is on social media, there's a kind of eeriness to it.
And so a lot of people responded by like, he did it.
I did too! Yeah, and the pastor and his wife were in fact going through a divorce, so there was some background on it, not to mention the fact that apparently the woman, her name is Micah, her sister said, Well, she told me, meaning Micah told me, that if anything ever happens to me, it's this guy.
In other words, it is John Paul Miller, the pastor.
Now, having said that, the police have released the 911 call, and the woman is calling from a national park.
And she says to the 911 operator, That there is video footage.
Take a look at this. Here we see the woman at a store purchasing the gun, right?
So it does appear now that some of the people who immediately said he did it were jumping the gun.
The police have officially said it is a suicide.
But... It's still incredibly strange.
And there's a little detail that caught my attention from one of the articles that I want to read you to react to.
I'm just reading from the news report.
When deputies reached the state park, they found a handgun in the water near the crime scene during the search of the area.
What? I'm assuming...
I mean, the question is, is this the gun?
Because think about it. You can't dispose of the weapon if you're committing suicide, tossing the handgun in.
That couldn't be it, right?
No, no. So, I feel like we don't know still the full story, but this is one of the more bizarre...
That is extremely strange.
Extremely strange. Extremely strange.
Well, first of all, look, you know, suicide is a very serious thing and it has actually become quite an epidemic.
Yeah. You know, I told you that it was something that when I was young...
I first learned of it because a family friend who was a very young kid who was in law, he was actually already a lawyer.
He went to law school when he was like 16 years old.
Brilliant kid. He did it.
He committed suicide. And that was the first time that I'd ever even heard of the term.
I had no idea what it was.
And subsequently, I've lost a lot of friends through it.
And so it's almost become an epidemic.
It's almost become an epidemic.
I don't want to say acceptable, but a way that people try to...
They can't endure their life situation, and so they're like, I'm going to head for the exit.
Yeah, and I don't know. Again, there are some people that claim that this happens because of a chemical imbalance in the brain, so they're not really aware of doing it or whatever.
It's almost like a release for them.
I don't know, but I do know that it has become way too common and way too tragic.
Well, part of it, I think, is the fact of the increasing secularization of our society.
But, I mean, these people weren't secular, honey.
No, no. I'm not saying in this particular case.
But I think in general, think about it.
If you believe that this life is a gateway to another life, right?
right? Not to mention the fact that suicide is, to say it's frowned upon is putting it mildly. It's a very serious sin. Dante puts the suicides pretty deep in the Inferno. And he does so because it's like a rejection of the gift of life, which is really a gift from God. But in a purely secular framework, if you're a pure hedonist, now it may seem odd for a hedonist, who's supposedly someone who pursues pleasure, but a hedonist pursues pleasure
and works to minimize pain. And so if your life is defined by pain, strangely, it is a hedonistic act to commit suicide, oddly enough.
And so, we're beyond what happened in this particular case.
Yeah, no, in this case, but I don't understand it.
I mean, you know, a pastor, his wife, she, you know, whatever.
It's very strange, in my opinion.
Anyway, on a somewhat lighter note, talk about the Instagram story that you told me about.
Oh, yeah, yeah. Because it is.
Now, this one actually is amusing.
How do you say her name? Asplunt.
Let me look at it. So you have a woman with a really strange name.
Well, this is a woman named Catherine.
She used to be Catherine Driscoll, so she kind of had a normal name.
But she marries this guy who is a billionaire.
And his last name is A-S-P-L-U-N-D-H, Asplund.
Yeah. So then what happens?
The funny thing is they're not just any billionaires.
They're Gen Z billionaires.
They're Gen Z billionaires. Okay, so let's start with that.
So Gen Z girl marries Gen Z billionaires.
Yeah. And then what happens? Yeah. So what happens is that she, of course, changes her name, her last name.
She goes on Instagram because she wants to get an Instagram handle with her name, her new name, her married name.
And discovers that there is another Catherine Asplump in Instagram.
And so she freaks out, I guess, tries to reach out to this person and says, listen, I will pay you whatever you want because I need that handle.
You don't understand. I just got married and I need to change my name.
And so this other person, the other Catherine, original Catherine, says, well, great, but I, you know, okay, I will give it to you, but I need to investigate to see if I actually can.
When she investigated, she found out through Instagram that if you do that, if you give away your handle, you will be banned from Instagram and you cannot get back on.
She obviously didn't want to do that, so she gets back to this Catherine billionaire girl and says, I'm sorry, but I cannot give you my handle.
The girl goes nuts.
She just goes nuts on her.
What I thought was funny is that she writes, and they actually have the messages.
They do. She writes to the other girl and goes, I don't believe that your name is Catherine Asplund.
Prove that your name is Catherine.
Oh, and then she says, I happen to know that there is only one Catherine Asplund in America.
So the girl responds, well, I'm not American.
She's from somewhere else.
So it's hilarious.
And then she goes, you can report me.
And then just did. And my fiancé did too.
You know, because she's trying to...
She's egging her on.
And then she goes, you're asking me to do something to get my account banned.
I doubt Instagram would take that lightly.
And then she goes, I'm asking you to change your username because you are pretending to be someone you're not.
And then she goes, but my name is Catherine Asplunk.
And then she goes, which is illegal.
And then she goes, nope.
You asked to purchase my username, which goes against the Instagram rules.
I just reported you.
And so they go back and forth and back and forth.
I think the reason we find this interesting is that it reflects this entitlement mentality.
Oh my goodness. That somehow I have a right...
To this name. If somebody else has the name, they've got to step aside, turn it over to me, otherwise, you know, they're frauds.
Oh, yes, yes.
And yet, by remarkable coincidence, this other woman has the exact same name.
Yeah, yeah. And so, anyway, so she basically said, you know, I would have done it if you hadn't been so, like, mean, demanding.
She's like, but...
I'm not, you know?
So, anyway, I got a chuckle.
Every once in a while, I like to get a chuckle out of something, and that was...
Well, you know what's funny is, as you know, somebody once ran a search on me and found another Dinesh D'Souza.
Yeah, I know. Yeah. And not only that, but so I told you, and I think we were just dating at the time, I told you, hey, I believe there's another Dinesh D'Souza and he's in the Houston area, in the Texas, larger Texas area.
And you said, well, I think I spotted him.
Well, yeah, I was driving and I saw this little red sports car and on the license plate, it was Dinesh.
Oh, that's my car. Oh no, I'm just...
Really?
You have a red sports car and I don't know about it?
No, no, no. I just thought I'd get you on that one.
You're like, what a coincidence.
Wait, hey, hey. Oh, wait.
I recognize the driver.
Dinesh, what are you doing?
Dinesh, I thought you were in California.
At the time. Wait a minute.
Anyway, we're just having fun.
And this is 10 years later, honey.
Just think. I know. Wow.
Time flies. The years have flown.
I'm talking about the four British folkways that shaped America.
We covered the Puritan migration from the outskirts of London to Massachusetts and New England and now we are covering the The second migration, not of Puritans, but of, well, you could call them anti-Puritans, the Cavaliers, the Royalists, the supporters of Charles I, who became losers in the English Civil War.
They came to America.
Generally, this was an aristocratic migration, but accompanied by a lot of indentured servants.
And they came to the New World and they brought with them a whole way of thinking and a whole way of life, not to mention the Anglican religion.
These were people who settled Virginia and then pushed out further south, and much of the culture of the south was shaped by this group, by these cavaliers.
So this is sort of migration number two.
I talked about how they gave English names to the counties that they moved to.
I talked about how they came with a certain type of English accent That, not just what we call the classic British accent, because if you listen to British accents, there are actually many of them.
There is, of course, the kind of standard, elegant British accent, sometimes called the BBC accent, but that is not spoken all over the country.
We all know that there are Cockney accents and other types of regional dialects.
So, I talked about the way in which Southern pronunciation is Words like y'all are the product of this cavalier migration.
Now, the people who moved to the south were different than the Puritans.
The Puritans were into self-improvement, creating a new society, a city on a hill.
The cavaliers were really about how do we keep the old world that we came from?
How do we keep it intact?
How do we recreate it here?
And live exactly the way we used to live in England.
And so once the Cavaliers had set up, if you will, Southern society, their view was, we have no intention of changing anything.
Our goal is not improvement.
Our goal is to keep it the way it is, old houses, kind of the old world, and words like innovation, novelty, modern, these were negative words in the South.
This was a culture of exiles who actually were, many of them, from the top ranks of society in England.
They liked it over there and they wanted to essentially recreate it over here.
Now, the pace of life in Virginia was much slower than it was in New England.
Not just at the beginning, but even now.
The pace of life in the South is essentially sluggish.
It's recreational.
It's take your time.
I once knew a guy in Washington D.C. from South Carolina.
And he told me, we were actually late for a flight.
And I'm like, David, let's run.
He's like, a Southern gentleman never runs.
And he was totally serious.
Initially, I thought he was joking. But no, he meant, if I miss the flight, I miss the flight.
I'm not going to run.
Running is actually something that is undignified for a Southerner.
And as a result, not only do Southerners not like to run, they also speak slowly.
So the Southern drawl, which in a sense extends words, extends syllables, is kind of goes along with the idea that we're not in a big hurry about life.
There's a funny line here from the historian David Hackett Fisher, a conversation in Virginia about a watermelon could occupy an afternoon.
You could spend the whole afternoon discussing, well, how to grow a watermelon, different sizes and shapes of watermelons, how watermelons compare with other fruits, and so on.
This Southern culture reflects itself in buildings.
If you look at what we call the plantation house, and even smaller buildings in the South resemble plantation houses, but they're just smaller in size.
They obviously don't have the so-called great house.
The great house is obviously much littler if you're talking about a middle-class family.
But the Southern homes tend to be A single residence.
And sometimes if there's land, other smaller residences on the land.
Now, again, this might seem to have been an adaptation from slavery.
We have the so-called big house and then the slave quarters.
And some of it might have been that, but it's also the case.
And this is what the historian David Hackett Fisher says.
If you go back... To England, the southern parts of England that migrated to the American South, and you look at the homes over there, you think you're in Virginia.
In other words, you've got the same types of trees and rivers, the same dense foliage, and the same types of building construction.
I also want to talk about the family ways of the South.
Because the family ways of the South were patriarchal.
The great hero of the royalists in England was a writer named Sir Robert Filmer.
And Robert Filmer basically argued that the monarchy of a country is similar to a family.
The king is sort of like the dad.
The queen is kind of like the mom of the whole country.
And then he went on to say that the family is conversely a little bit like a monarchy in which the father is the king and the mother is the queen and then the children are sort of like the subjects.
And then of course there are other subjects otherwise known as servants and of course in Virginia later slaves.
So a tremendous importance on family but We're good to go.
There's also more emphasis on extended family, so that the Puritans were really nuclear families.
It's basically the dad, the mom, and the kids, and that's it.
But for the Southerners, you'll often find in the Southern household, you've got the nuclear family, but then you've got like...
The half-brother and two cousins and sometimes some other guy known to the family who's now staying in one of the cottages adjoining the main house.
So southerners take a lot of pride, again, even now, in their hospitality, in their willingness to take in strangers.
And so family here becomes a much broader term than just the nuclear family.
Now, interestingly, in Puritan New England, marriage was seen as a contract or a covenant.
Now, what's interesting about a contract is that the contract was ideally one that would continue for life, but Puritans did, in fact, allow divorce.
And they allowed divorce for the same reason that contracts can be broken.
So you make a business contract with somebody, and usually in the contract it says that if you break the contract, it's called a breach.
If you breach the contract, you've got to pay, and so on.
So it's not that you can break a contract without consequence.
There are consequences, but the contract is in fact breakable.
And so Puritan contracts were, marriage contracts, were rarely, but they were in fact dissolved.
In Virginia, no.
Marriage was seen as a sacrament.
The Anglican position here, very close to the Catholic position.
So divorce, not allowed.
And this is whether or not the marriage was arranged or not.
It made no difference. Also, Puritan marriages were very much kind of like Puritan church services in New England, very Spartan.
A Puritan marriage was kind of like a cookout.
You just show up, you've got a pastor there, the ceremony's performed, and everybody says a prayer, you know, eats some apple pie and goes home.
That's it. In Virginia, the opposite.
Marriage is a banquet.
It's a festival. It's a feast.
There's typically a fancy ball, sometimes more than one.
In rich families, it goes on for days.
You see the emergence of a, and this is the point I want to make, a distinctive southern culture, distinctive in so many ways, and ultimately, I think political differences, when you really think about political differences, really what are they?
If politics is a way of organizing a society, Then political differences are differences among people who want to organize their society differently, who want to live differently.
Quite clearly, the Puritans wanted to live differently from the Virginians.
And even though in the American founding, We know these groups came together.
They formed an alliance.
It was an alliance against the British crown.
It was an alliance for independence.
But now looking back on it and looking at the way in which we see regional cultures in America even today, you can almost say that it was a war not of independence but of independences because it was a war of different groups of people Encapsulated in different states of the Union that wanted to have their own life, their own way, and formed together the United States of America.
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