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May 13, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:59
CANNON FIRE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep831
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Coming up, I'll discuss how Judge Eileen Cannon in Florida has brilliantly turned the tables on Special Counsel Jack Smith, in effect putting him on the defensive and giving Trump a political boost going into November.
I'll consider the implications of Trump's huge New Jersey rally over the weekend, and Oren McIntyre joins me.
We're going to talk about his new book, How liberal democracies become tyrannies.
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 want to talk about two interesting and important developments in two of the Trump cases.
First, the New York case, the so-called hush money case.
And then I want to go into a little bit of detail about the case.
In Florida, this is the one involving classified documents, special counsel Jack Smith and Judge Eileen Cannon.
So I've titled this podcast Cannon Fire because in a remarkable reversal, it looks like the judge, who's a Trump appointee after all, has figured out a way to put Jack Smith on trial.
So sort of turn the tables in the case and we'll We're good to go.
To follow Stormy Daniels.
Now, Stormy Daniels is not a fraudster.
She's a porn star.
She's a hustler. She's a shakedown artist.
But Michael Cohen is somebody who is a lawyer who tells lies, a lawyer who makes stuff up, a lawyer who engages in nefarious activity and has been caught doing it and, in fact, convicted for...
For doing it. So in that sense, a character who's even more loathsome because...
Why? Because a lawyer is entrusted with a certain kind of credibility and authority that you don't see and don't expect in a porn star.
So here's Cohen on the stand, and he's going to have a challenge because ultimately this is looking like a case in which it all comes down to Michael Cohen.
Let's think about the elements that need to be proved here.
And, you know, one can say...
And I've said and others have said that, look, the jury is very likely to be biased and they're hoping to get a conviction of Trump no matter what.
But even to get that, you have to have some plausible way to show that this guy did something.
If at the end of the day you go, oh, I voted for guilty.
Really? Why? What crime did he commit?
Well, I don't know if I could really say.
That doesn't make any sense.
The jury, even if they all want to convict, are going to need...
To be able to close a certain type of loop, at least to the degree that they're convinced by it.
So here's what they need to be able to prove.
Number one, that Trump knew and authorized these hush money payments to Daniels.
That is the least of it because that's by itself not illegal at all.
So what if he knew? So what if he authorized them?
The second part is that this payment was classified as legal expenses.
Now again, that's no big deal either because the payments were made to Michael Cohen.
It was in fact a legal payment.
Remember when Hillary Clinton, when they classified the Steele dossier, they classified it as legal.
Why? Because they made the payment to a law firm.
Now, were they trying to conceal the fact that the payment was actually for the Steele dossier?
Yes! And yet, it's not obvious that the legal classification is somehow, you know, the fraudulent or unlawful altering of a business document.
It's more like, okay, we know why you did it that way.
But nevertheless, the payment is to a lawyer and it can be classified as legal.
Trump needs to have known...
And also approved of the fact that there was a deliberate misclassification.
And the third part, which is the hardest and the most extreme, and I don't even see how they're going to be able to prove this, that Trump knew and intended the misclassification to be for the purpose of violating campaign finance laws and, in a sense, rigging the coverage of the 2016 election.
Wow. I think Michael Cohen will just flatly state on the stand that these things happened.
Why? Because if he doesn't state them, then you can't close the loop.
There's no way to even establish any wrongdoing.
So the whole thing hangs kind of on Michael Cohen.
Now, even if Michael Cohen says that Trump did all this...
It's really kind of a he said type of case, because obviously Trump denies it.
Obviously the Trump people go, well, this never happened.
And so you would think right there, when you got a pure he said, she said, and you've got a guy who has this low level of credibility, namely Michael Cohen, it's a little far-fetched for the jury to go, well, you know what?
We believe Michael Cohen.
But I think this is really what the Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg is hoping for.
Well, it's the best he's got.
The jury just goes, we don't really care.
We know that Michael Cohen is making stuff up.
But nevertheless, he said it.
So, you know, we believe him.
And therefore, guilty.
And so, this is the...
This is not only what Alvin Bragg is hoping for.
I believe this is what the judge is hoping for.
So, this is Juan Merchan, the...
The judge, left-winger, somebody who I think has the same goal as Bragg in this case.
Now let's turn to the Florida case.
And talk about Judge Cannon.
She has indefinitely postponed the Florida case, which realistically probably means it's not happening before the election.
So you might think, well, okay, well, there we go.
Let's move on, because nothing is going to be happening.
No, actually, Judge Cannon has made a pretty busy calendar.
Other things are going to be happening.
And what's going to be happening, in effect, are hearings on three things that are very sort of uncomfortable for the special counsel Jack Smith.
And when Julie Kelly suggests that she's sort of putting, in a sense, Jack Smith into the docket, into the hot seat, making him a kind of defendant, this is exactly what is going on.
And so not only do you have these three hearings coming up, but they are spaced out in such a way that This is what is going to be going on in Florida between now and the election.
So if the media is trying to cover it, this is what they're going to be covering.
And what are they going to be covering? Let's look at the three things that are coming up.
The first one is selective and vindictive prosecution.
So the Trump people are going to say, listen, yeah, our guy had classified documents, but so what?
Who didn't? All these other people did.
Biden had classified documents.
Biden took classified documents from his days in the Senate when he didn't have any declassification authority.
Other presidents have had classified documents.
You're not prosecuting any of them.
You're only prosecuting Trump.
Well, this is obviously selective prosecution.
So on that basis, the Trump people say, the whole case needs to be thrown out.
That's going to be case number one.
And it's obviously awkward for Jack Smith.
What's he going to say? Well, yeah, the special counsel decided that Biden is too dumb and stupid and forgetful to be able to put him on trial.
So then the logical implication is, why is Biden running the country?
And second, are you saying that Trump is on trial because he's essentially all there, whereas Biden is not all there?
Is that really what you're saying? So, very awkward for Jack Smith, and that's coming up.
The second thing that's coming up is...
Is the appointment of the special counsel itself unconstitutional?
Wow! Well, turns out that when you look at the statute, the statute actually says that the special counsel has to be, quote, properly appointed as a federal officer.
In other words, he has to be an officer of the government.
You can appoint somebody who is within the DOJ or assistant attorney general or somebody like that who is a federal officer.
But Jack Smith was in private practice.
Jack Smith is a private attorney.
Essentially, Merrick Garland goes, you come on in.
I'm naming you special counsel.
And so the question is, does that comport with what a special counsel is supposed to be?
If not, Jack Smith is exercising unlawful authority and his office needs to be dissolved.
Or at least he can't hold it.
If they want to have a special counsel, they're going to have to appoint somebody else.
So you can see, again, this is going to be fun to watch, Jack Smith defending the authority, the constitutional basis for his own office.
And finally...
The question of whether Joe Biden's White House has been colluding from the start to bring this case against Trump.
Let's think about it. There's an official narrative here.
And the official narrative is that Trump returned some boxes to the archives.
The people in the archives opened the boxes and were really shocked to see all these classified markings.
And so they notified the DOJ and thus began a criminal investigation into Trump.
Now, it turns out that that is not the case.
Or to put it differently, it didn't start there at all.
In fact, all of that happened.
The criminal referral was sent in February of 2022.
But all through 2021...
The White House and the Archives were kind of working together.
In fact, the Archives even said, if we do a criminal referral to the DOJ, how do we do it?
And the White House and the DOJ were like, we'll help you.
We'll help you to draft the criminal referral that you are then sending to us.
So you see what's going on here?
What's going on here is that the newly installed democratic government is working hand-in-hand with the archives to bring a criminal charge against the former president.
Now, again, this is not what Jack Smith has been saying.
They've been pretending like it's on the up and up.
It's like, oh, we just discovered that there was all these violations going on and then, of course, we had to act on them.
No, it turns out they were plotting and concocting and trying to figure out how to do this.
Long before these documents even arrived at the archives.
So, what does all of this mean?
It means that we are going to be given a sort of an intellectual treat.
And the intellectual treat is to watch these three hearings play out in Florida in the weeks and months leading up to the election.
It's not the drama the Democrats want to be.
They wanted Trump on the docket.
They wanted Trump's crimes to be put out for all to see.
And instead, it's going to be Jack Smith who finds himself, in a sense, on the defense.
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Wow, it looks like the Democratic attempt to use lawfare against Trump and delegitimize him, break his hold, not just on the country, but on Republicans.
And let alone on independence, to make independence run in the opposite direction.
Oh man, you know, we might like certain things about Trump, but we like certain things about what he did as president, but guess what?
We're just not okay with voting for a criminal.
So this is what the Democrats were going for.
It is their form of election interference...
2024. Notice that the techniques of manipulating elections can vary.
2020, mules.
2022, the tabulators don't work in Maricopa County, Arizona.
So on the day that Republicans turn out on mass to vote, things kind of go awry.
So a clever way to suppress the Republican vote.
And then 2024, lawfare.
But... The lawfare appears not to be working.
Now, Trump has been doing some big rallies in swing states.
He remarkably went to court in New York, then flew to Michigan, flew to Wisconsin the same day.
Did rallies, flew back and was, you know, in court the next morning.
So, but it's one thing to do a rally in a swing state and get a big crowd.
That's impressive enough.
But here is Trump this past weekend on Saturday in Wildwood, New Jersey.
Now, when I first heard about this, and I mentioned to Debbie, and I'm like, I wonder why he's going to New Jersey, because in an election, normally, you don't really campaign, at least not in any big way, in states that are safe for the other side.
So you can understand campaigns in Arizona, campaigns in Georgia, North Carolina, even perhaps Virginia.
Virginia is a state that used to be Republican.
It's now a blue state, but it is a winnable state, in my opinion, at least under certain conditions.
But New Jersey, really?
And then I see that the crowd begins to gather.
This is hours before the rally, and it's huge.
And people are estimating the size.
It's already up to 30,000, 40,000.
I told Debbie that the crowd was 80,000, and then I read that it had swelled to 100,000 at its max.
And if you see the little video clips of it, and Trump's put some of them out himself on Truth Social, It is quite a sight to see.
I mean, it looks like an infestation of locusts.
I mean, it's like darkening the horizon.
It's huge. And what is it telling you?
I think what it's telling you is that, first of all, people have had enough.
They've had enough of Joe Biden.
That's one thing. The other thing it's telling you is that people are saying, this is my way to show my solidarity for Trump.
So I can't interfere in the legal process.
I'm not going to show up in court.
The process has to go forward.
But guess what? I'm going to get in my car.
I'm going to go to Wildwood, New Jersey.
And I'm going to kind of stand with this guy and make a statement.
And there were some very cool videos made by people.
I showed Debbie one by...
By this very middle class black woman saying basically, you know what?
I'm voting for Trump no matter what.
You can lock him up. You can put him in a capsule and shoot him to the moon.
I'm voting for him anyway.
You can say whatever you want.
Doesn't really make any difference. And she goes, it's not just me.
She goes, this is going to be black women.
This is going to be black men.
She goes, my kids could be standing in line trying to get through and get permission to vote.
So the point being that people are recognizing that The country is in a state of urgency, if not emergency, and that there is kind of one guy that stands in between the way things are now and the sort of slide toward just the wreckage of what used to be the United States of America.
I've seen a lot of people commenting things to the effect that, you know, too big to rig.
This election is going to be... Matt Gaetz posted a video.
This one is going to be hard to steal.
And that may be true.
Trump talks about the fact that it'd be good to win with a safe margin.
So even though the Democrats, who, by the way, they fault Republicans for being election deniers, they'd be the first to deny an election if they lost it.
They'd be screaming about it.
How do we know this? Well, that's because they screamed about Bush versus Trump.
Gore, 2000, they screamed about the 2004 election, and they screamed about 2016.
They claimed that those elections were rigged and stolen.
So the Democrats actually have a much longer history of election denialism.
It was anomalous for Republicans to challenge the 2020 election.
Republicans, by and large, never I don't know the full significance of what happened in New Jersey over the weekend.
I don't think Trump, I think, does have some idea in the back of his mind.
He even said, he goes, he says, here's Trump.
As you can see today, We're expanding the electoral map because we're going to officially play in the state of New Jersey.
I mean, that would be something incredible because elections just haven't been that wide.
Admittedly, you know, Nixon won 49 states and Reagan won 44 states in 80 and 49 states in 84.
But that was way back in 1984.
And we haven't had those kinds of elections since then.
So can Trump even dream or seriously think about winning New Jersey?
I'm not sure. But I do think that the mass crowds in New Jersey tell you that the country belatedly finally may be waking up.
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Guys, I'd like to welcome back to the podcast our friend Oren McIntyre.
We're going to talk about his new book.
It's called The Total State, How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies.
He's the host of The Oren McIntyre Show.
He's a columnist for Blaze News.
You can follow him on X at Oren, A-U-R-O-N, M-A-C-I-N-T-Y-R-E. Oren, welcome.
Thanks for coming back.
I appreciate it. I want to dive into the book, but before I do, let me ask you about the ongoing New York case, the so-called Hush Money case.
Stormy Daniels has testified.
Now, apparently, it's Michael Cohen's turn.
And it looks like it kind of all hangs on this guy.
And I say that because, all right, they've established that payments were made to Stormy Daniels, but that's not illegal.
Making her sign a non-disclosure agreement or NDA, that's not illegal.
So it has to be that Trump...
Knew that these were hush money payments, that he knew that the records were being falsified and misclassified, and further, that he knew that he was doing all this to apparently influence his own chances in the 2016 election.
Do you think that it all comes down to Michael Cohen and...
Can a serial liar and a convicted felon actually make any headway with the jury?
It seems like this whole trial is a joke, right?
I mean, obviously it seems like Stormy Daniels has already contradicted herself, has possibly perjured herself in this testimony anyway.
And you can look at the application of the law with Michael Cohen, and I'm not gonna pretend to be an expert here, but as I understand it, they're already using basically a novel application of this law because it's only supposed to be for local elections anyway.
So what even is the legitimacy of this trial?
I guess we can break down whether his individual testimony will be consequential, but I think really we understand what this is.
This is an attempt to smear and slander Donald Trump and make it impossible for him to run for president.
The system is using absolutely everything they can to prevent him from being seen as a legitimate candidate.
Of course, it seems to have backfired because it's only increased his support from his base, and it seems to have shaken.
Even many kind of uncommitted voters, because they look at this and say, this is very obviously trumped up charges, this is obviously something that should not be happening in the United States.
I think ultimately the only people this actually convinces are diehard Democratic voters in the first place, and I don't think we should really probably even get caught up in the technicality of the case, because ultimately this is a purely political prosecution that is looking to have political ends, and this is exactly how it should be seen.
This is just a I mean, I'm seeing now even some prominent Democrats saying, either from the media or writers or academics, saying in effect that, look, the Judge Engelron case, which involved Mar-a-Lago and the valuation of Mar-a-Lago, that that would never have happened if the defendant wasn't Trump.
And, in fact, I believe that the New York Attorney General was even assuring real estate developers in New York, hey, listen, no worries.
Don't think we're going to be doing this to you.
This was kind of a one-off on Trump.
And then I saw yesterday Fareed Zakaria on CNN saying exactly the same thing about this case, the Hashmani case.
He's like, I think we can all agree that if the defendant wasn't Donald Trump, this wouldn't be happening.
Now, that is a very dubious message for the Democrats to want to be conveying to the country,
Thank you. I mean, this is a raw application of power.
That's all this is. This is a declaration that the rule of law is over and that what we do now with our institutions, use them as blunt instruments of force to manipulate our elections and punish our political opponents.
That's a terrifying thing to see.
If you are someone who lives in a country that is operating like this, it quickly becomes apparent that what you have is not a democratic republic or constitutional republic, but a banana republic.
And so, yeah, I think that when voters see this, even those who hate Trump start to look around and say, do I really want to live in this country?
Is this really the place I want to be in?
Sadly for many of them, the answer is still yes, but increasingly we see peeling off more and more voters who worry that the system is going too far after Trump.
I think there are still a lot of Democratic diehards who will push this issue to the maximum, but hopefully you see enough people realize the kind of peril they're placing the system in.
Because if they continue down this road, there's really not much left between them and complete totalitarian application of these systems.
Now, you said something just a moment ago, kind of striking, which is you said that, you know, there are some people who would like to live in this kind of a country, right?
Probably the majority of people would go, nah, I think I'd rather live with a country under rule of law.
But I think it's important to recognize that whenever you have a biased or a system that is targeting a group of people, There are going to be people on the other side who like that because for them it's a shortcut.
They're like, listen, otherwise we have to work really hard, try to defeat Trump in the election.
We may succeed, but we may not.
But gee, if we can lock him up, that solves our problems in advance.
So, there is an expediency, a political expediency from the point of view of one side of the political aisle, and I think that's really why, whenever something happens to Trump, I do see glearful celebrations in the media and on social media, because when you have a party that supports some of this, right?
Yeah, I actually talk about this in the total state.
When you have a friend-enemy distinction created inside your country, when you have a side that sees itself as entirely in the right, entirely worthy of ruling, and entirely having the right to punish its enemies in any way, it doesn't care about all of those, you know, checks and balances and other nasty things that are supposed to slow down the accumulation of power.
What we've seen, the reason we've seen the rise of the total state in the United States is that increasingly, the Democrats never expect to be out of power.
This is why many people have noticed that they've moved so much of the power of the government out of the normal, formal declarations made in the Constitution and its articles, and instead have moved them into these unelected bureaucracies that we often call the deep state.
And that's to protect the power of the Democrats no matter what elections say.
And so they're building up this power.
They're wielding it against Trump because they want to make sure that they never have to worry about handing the Leviathan that they've made over to their enemies.
And so I think we're going to continue to see these guys try to force the issue because they don't expect the Republicans the right to ever actually punish them for their abuses of power.
You know, when I first saw the title of your book, I thought you were going in a somewhat different direction.
In other words, I thought you were going to say that democracies can become tyrannies when the majority runs roughshod over the rights of the minority.
This is what the founders on occasion called tyranny of the majority.
But what I hear you saying now is something a little different, that the Democrats actually want to get away from From the give and take of democracy.
They want to create permanent structures.
Let's just say, for example, the expertise comes from academia.
The left controls the courts.
The left controls the regulatory agencies.
Now, none of these are directly accountable to the people.
So, instead of using the democratic process as a mechanism to establish tyranny, they're actually trying to get around it and subvert it.
Yeah, I discovered as I started to write this book that there was actually a large body of political theory on the right going through guys like James Burnham and then Samuel Francis discussing the managerial state and the way that it would take over the institutions of the United States.
It warned that ultimately we always have a ruling class and that ruling class always wants to stay in power.
And so what the ruling class learns to do is manipulate the way that voters get information.
They manipulate the way that they understand the world around them so that they can no longer create a check on power.
And then they move the power of those of the Constitution, those formal branches of government, into those non-elected bureaucratic institutions, not just in the deep state, but into things like the university, into corporations, even into globalist NGOs that dictate down into the United States, what is supposed to be a sovereign country, how it will respond to things like COVID. And so over time we see that they shift all of these powers into these non-democratic institutions,
but they continue to go through the ritual of democracy.
So we still get elections, but those elections have fewer and fewer consequences. The whole time we're told that we have more democracy, we're defending democracy, but we're actually defending as an oligarchic structure that has distributed the power that is supposed to be inside of those formal constitutional articles instead into these different bureaucratic institutions.
I mean, I was struck when I read some of the writings of the early progressives.
This is going back to the 1900s and the 19-teens, people like E.A. Ross or John Dewey, where they would say, well, yeah, we need to have these emerging bureaucracies.
Now, granted, the bureaucracies have to be accountable to the people, but guess what?
Who's going to be supplying the understanding and expertise to the people for the people to make up their minds?
Well, it's the bureaucracies themselves.
So you have a kind of circle here where the people get information and do make decisions, but the bureaucracies are the ones that tell them what's going on.
And I was thinking about all this in connection with this great campaign against misinformation and disinformation.
Isn't it a clever way to protect...
This expertise, even when the expertise is telling you things that flatly aren't true.
Well, that's exactly right, Dinesh, and you're exactly right to point out how early this actually started.
Walter Lippmann actually wrote a book called Public Opinion at the Beginning of the Progressive Revolution.
And he was a good liberal and he was very kind enough to lay out exactly how the press should be interacting with the public.
And he said at the beginning of mass communication and mass press that the press's job would be to inform public opinion, to manufacture public opinion, to tell the people how they should vote to make sure that they vote correctly.
So they have not been hiding the ball on this.
The idea of the war on misinformation, disinformation is just new terminology for a very old leftist tactic.
The social engineers have been trying to control the United States for a very long time.
Ultimately, that's what the...
Progressive movement was.
The idea that we could top-down manage society.
We thought that this only happened in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, but actually there's a long strain of this in the United States.
When people identify communism in the United States, there Really just identifying this idea of managerial progressive liberalism that has worked its way into everything.
And what we're seeing now is just kind of the inevitable Marxist manifestations working their way through institutions and things like DEI. These are just the inevitable conclusions of social engineers who believe that they can rewrite human nature, control every aspect of humanity, every social institution, and remake people in their own image.
And so this is what they're trying to do is, like you said...
Manipulate those institutions, tell people the experts know everything, they are basically the new priestly class of the new religion, and to question them is heresy.
This is why Trump found himself on the outs inside his own administration.
His administration was being run by generals and Dr.
Fauci's instead of by the guy who was elected by the people, because ultimately those experts had their hands on the levers of power in the total state.
Orrin, if the media has a critical role in shaping public opinion, the Progressive Project would not work if there were just as many conservatives who were motivated to join the media.
If they weren't admitted to traditional media institutions, they would create their own.
But it seems temperamentally that guys on the left want to change society.
They want to run things.
They don't really particularly care about stable families and having a nice house and saving to, you know, add to your kitchen.
These guys are perfectly happy to live rootless lives.
They go where the story calls and so on.
And the conservative isn't cut from that kind of Raw material, if you will.
So, what's the solution to it?
Because it seems like if the activists, and here I'm including the media in activists, are all coming from one side, the problem would appear to be largely insoluble.
That's correct. James Burnham in his book The Machiavellians talked about lions and foxes, the disposition of the ruling class.
Conservatives are the lions.
They are the ones that are very martial in character.
They protect religion and tradition and identity.
The left are the foxes.
They're all about manipulation.
They want new and novel things.
they want to combine things.
And of course, every ruling class needs a healthy mix of those two to some degree.
But what we have now is a ruling class that is entirely foxes.
Our media-controlled state is run entirely by the exact people you're talking about, those that don't care about families, don't care about religion, don't care about the permanent things.
They want to remake everything and meddle with everything from the top down.
And this is slowly destroying the fabric of our society, as we talked about with our institutions, our identities, our ways of life are being deconstructed by this constant rule of the media, the constant rule by foxes.
What has to change?
We have to get away from a system that is ruled by foxes.
We have in mass democracy something that was never intended by the founders.
In the Constitution, we have a mixed government.
The Constitution is designed not for a mass democracy, not for infinite expansion of the franchise and unlimited checks of the manipulation of the people through the media.
But instead, we were supposed to have barriers to popular control.
We can already see that the left is trying to destroy the last vestiges of this, right?
They got to get rid of the Electoral College.
They have to get rid of the Senate.
This is only part of a long line of ways that we've done this.
These manipulative Fox oligarchic journalists and put it back in the hands of people who are possibly more conservative.
And I think that means a shift to probably a more radical version of federalism.
We can't have these vast bureaucratic institutions that can reach in and control every aspect of American society.
We need to return to the founders' vision of a country that is united but is also allowed to have particular and regional interests that are represented by the states, by the people who were supposed to be ruling at the local level.
We should have that kind of solidarity in the local that was envisioned by our founders.
Yeah, this is really good stuff, Warren.
I mean, I take the message of your book to be that if you're looking for the total state to come through a guy with a Stalin overcoat or a Hitler mustache, you're looking in the wrong place.
This has been happening.
The project was conceived a century ago.
It opportunistically has expanded under various progressive presidents.
It uses opportunities like the one provided by COVID. It moves ultimately by stealth, as you say, the way of the fox.
And people need to be alert to this peculiar American type of tyranny that is now creeping in on us.
Guys, the book is The Total State.
My guest, Oren McIntyre.
Follow him on x at Oren McIntyre.
Oren, thank you for joining me.
Thanks for having me. Welcome to my show!
The Cavaliers, who came royalists, Anglicans.
They came from the south of London.
For the most part, they moved to Virginia and established the culture of the south.
Then we'll talk about the Quakers and some of the kind of rebel religious groups that came, settled in Pennsylvania, and then moved west, and they created the culture of the Midwest.
Let's call it Mike Pence Land.
And finally, we're going to talk about the borderland people, the people who are, who created the culture of the Appalachians, the culture of the Rednecks, the culture that has also decisively shaped a good bit of the country, including Texas.
Now the Anglicans who came were royalists.
They were supporters of Charles I.
When King Charles was executed by the forces of Oliver Cromwell, the Cavaliers, the Anglicans decided, we're out of here.
And they came to Virginia.
They created the culture, the kind of courtly culture of Virginia.
And we see this in their names.
I mentioned the names of towns.
Now I want to talk about the kind of names that Virginians gave to their kids.
And by the way, we see a residue of this even now.
The Puritans gave very biblical names.
Samuel, Joshua, Isaiah, a lot of them, by the way, from the Old Testament.
In Virginia, you rarely find kids named Isaiah.
The Virginians were really into English names, the names of English kings, Frankish knights, Teutonic warriors, special favorites, common names in Virginia.
William, Robert, Richard, and Edward, George, Charles.
You wouldn't find any of those names commonly in Massachusetts in the 17th or the 18th century.
The daughters of Virginia got names very often of Christian saints, but not necessarily...
I mean, you won't find a lot of Deborahs.
Deborah's from the Bible, and that's where Debbie gets her name from.
But no, by and large, these are Christian saints who are not in the Bible.
So here are common names in Virginia.
Margaret, Jane, Catherine, Francis, with an E, Francis, Alice, and then of course, not a lot of English favorite names, Mary, Elizabeth, Anne, and Sarah.
Now, the Southerners got their idea of the family right out of the English monarchy.
Here is the great British English writer, Sir Robert Filmer, and he wrote a book called Patriarcha.
And his point was not to defend the patriarchal family.
He actually took that for granted.
His point was to defend the monarchy as modeled on the family.
So, here's Filmer.
If we compare the natural duties of a father with those of a king, we find them to be all one, without any difference at all, but only in the latitude and extent of them.
So, the king is the father of the nation.
As the father over one family, so the king as father over many families extends his care to preserve, feed, clothe, instruct, and defend the whole commonwealth.
And then it says, all the duties of the king are summed up in a universal fatherly care of his people.
So, notice that this argument, by the way, cuts two ways.
It invests the king...
With the legitimate authority of the father, and it endows the father with the authority of the king.
Filmer wants the analogy to go both ways.
And so the structure and organization of families in Virginia, and even today in the South, very different from Puritan Massachusetts.
So to take a simple example...
You have a case of adultery involving a wife, an unfaithful husband or an unfaithful wife.
Now, in Puritan New England, this was a grave sin.
It was an equal sin whether it was committed by the man or by the woman.
The punishment typically was the same and both were seen as egregious departures from the teachings of Scripture.
If you had the same case of adultery or the same two cases of adultery in Virginia, it was not like that.
By and large, the wife's adultery was considered much more serious than the husband's.
The husband's adultery was considered bad, but the wife's was considered to be abominable.
Now, again, it may seem, oh, this is a double standard and makes no sense at all.
Well, there actually was a kind of sense to it, and the sense of it was that the legitimacy of children is threatened by the adultery of the wife, but not adultery.
apparently by the adultery of the husband.
Honey, I don't know if you agree with this way of thinking, but the idea is very simply that the Virginians were importing the patriarchal organization of England, in which inheritance went to the eldest son.
Well, if you're not sure who the eldest son is, or if you're not sure if the eldest son is conceived with the husband or with somebody else, the whole system is thrown into total.
So there's an emphasis in Southern culture and in Virginia on the stable organization of society.
Now, the Virginians were very easy going with their children.
They were not harsh the way the Puritans were.
Well, the Puritan assumption was that children are essentially little devils.
They're naturally depraved.
Now, they may not have strength, but they have evil will.
This is the point. And their will needs to be regulated, controlled, and broken.
The Southern view was not that.
It's that, you know, kids are like boisterous.
They're like a little bit rowdy.
And in fact, the Southern view was that this rowdiness should not be completely suppressed.
Why? Because boys need to learn how to fight.
Boys need to learn how to play rough.
So boys need strong and boisterous wills and emotions.
But that being said, once they are able to develop those, they also have to develop self-control.
And so, it's not as if the Puritans were into self-control and the Virginians were like, no, do whatever you want.
No, the Virginians were, you know, you need to be a tough and strong character, but you also need to have a certain self-command, a control over your emotions and your behavior.
Dancing was discouraged in the Puritan and Quaker colonies.
But in Virginia, dancing was mandatory.
Every kid needed to learn how to dance and dance was part of the social life of Virginia, not only originally, but even today.
The... I was listening to a little video and it was a reading of Wyatt Earp talking about the effectiveness of using a gun in the Old West.
And Wyatt Earp basically said the most important thing for a gunman is to take his time.
A seemingly ridiculous statement because obviously if you're in a draw, the other guy has a gun, you have a gun, you're not going to want to take your time.
Let me light a cigarette. Boom, you're dead.
But that's not actually what Wyatt Earp means at all.
What Wyatt Earp means is that you have only a fraction of a second to shoot.
The most important thing is not to be able to go for your gun.
It's not just a matter of the speed of being able to get your gun.
The main point is that once you get your gun, you have one chance to deliver a fatal shot.
So being able to, quote, take your time means within the fraction of the second that you have drawn your gun, You make sure that you only need to shoot once.
In other words, you take proper aim and you shoot straight.
You shoot in the correct way.
And the point is that the guy who's flashy, the guy who does tricks with his guns, the guy who tries to have two guns at the same time, is always going to get shot.
By the gunman who learns to take his time.
So the point here, and I cite the White Earp example, because you need to be boisterous.
You need to be strong. You need to have a gun and know how to use it.
At the same time, you need to have self-command.
You need to have self-control.
You need to realize that the important thing is not just to draw your gun, but to make the best of the single shot that is permitted you before you get shot yourself.
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