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May 14, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
48:56
FISA TRAP Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep832
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Coming up, I'll talk about Michael Cohen's cross-examination.
I also want to talk about the FBI now ramping up its bad stuff, not just on FISA, but also on online censorship.
And author Mary Margaret Olhan joins me.
We're going to talk about true stories of young people who suffered a crisis of identity and transitioned, only now to transition back to the sex that they were born as.
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.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
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I want to talk about a couple of topics that are in the news in this opening segment.
The first one is what's going on in the court in New York, and the second one is the FBI and FISA and online censorship.
Let me start with the New York courtroom.
Today, the cross-examination of Michael Cohen.
And this should be, well, kind of a feast because you've got here a guy who has zero credibility.
A scam artist.
A liar. Not just a liar to the court, a liar to Congress.
And all of this has been established, proven.
He's convicted. He's gone to prison.
So this guy should be a kind of an opportunity for the Trump lawyers to have just a heyday.
But I'm going to defer to tomorrow what happens in the cross-examination.
And so for now, I just want to make a couple of points about the overall structure of this case.
I actually want to focus a little bit more on some of the other people.
In the case, just so we get the big picture, here's the big picture.
You got a district attorney, Alvin Bragg, and this is a guy who has been taking felonies, people who have done bad things, felonies, and dropping them to misdemeanors.
He's been doing this systematically while he has been DA.
Except in one case, Trump, where he takes an alleged misdemeanor, which is to say altering these business records, misclassifying a hush money payment, and he's elevated to a felony by bootstrapping it onto a purported campaign finance violation, a federal campaign finance violation.
The lead prosecutor in the case was a DNC, a Democratic National Committee consultant.
He was actually number three at Biden's DOJ before he was hired by Bragg to go after Trump.
The other lead prosecutor is a regular Democratic donor to not only Joe Biden, but also Act Blue in 2020.
The judge, another Democratic donor, he has donated to Biden, and his daughter is a far left-wing activist who has been using the trial to raise money, we're talking not thousands or even tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars for the Democrats, using the trial to do it.
And then the lead witness, Michael Cohen, we know all about him, a convicted perjurer, who, by the way, has been selling t-shirts of Trump in jail on TikTok.
This is the state of the case.
Well, we'll come back to it tomorrow.
Let's talk about the FBI. And this is where our own stupidities come back to haunt us, because we had an opportunity through the House of Representatives, through Mike Johnson, to send a message to the FBI. No new building, no new money, no FISA without a warrant.
And poor Mike Johnson gets suckered.
He gets rolled.
He gets conned.
He goes into a briefing.
He comes out as if he's just sort of seen the light.
And the FBI gets another pass.
And not only do they now kick up the FISA warrants, which they're allowed to do under the new law that was passed in the House, passed in the Senate, signed by Biden...
But they're now also starting to kick up the online censorship and just in time for the election.
So think about this. You have an election.
We know the Democrats are going to use online censorship against us.
We had the opportunity to kick them in the shins, send them a message before they got around to it.
We didn't do it. And so, needless to say, they are taking the obvious lesson, which is, hey, these Republicans are all talking no action.
Let's kick up the censorship.
And so Senator Mark Warner just disclosed that federal agencies, the FBI, not only the FBI, also CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, have resumed their discussions with big tech platforms.
Now they present this, the FBI does, as if it's very benign.
So the FBI made a statement, the FBI remains committed to combating foreign malign influence operations including in connection with our elections.
They're acting like all they're doing is they're stopping the Chinese and the Russians and North Koreans or whoever else.
No, it's quite obvious that that is not what they're doing and it's certainly not all that they're doing.
We saw in 2020 that there was online censorship of millions of Americans, not just on the issue of COVID, but also on the issue of so-called election disinformation and then a whole host of other topics as well.
So this is systematic censorship.
And now the FBI and these other agencies are kind of nervous about it.
Not because of the House.
They're not scared of the House anymore.
They're not scared of Mike Johnson.
He's proven to be a wimp on this issue.
But they are scared of the Supreme Court.
And there is a case before the Supreme Court.
This is the case, of course, of Murthy v.
Missouri. And it is the case that basically says that the Biden administration is not allowed to direct, coerce, cajole, push digital platforms to do anything.
For them to do that is to violate the First Amendment.
Now, of course, the Biden administration says, we're not coercing, we're not forcing, we're merely recommending, we're merely suggesting.
And so this is the stuff that the Supreme Court has got to figure out.
That decision, by the way, is expected this summer.
And so the Biden administration is kind of on notice, and at least, but I think their view is, hey, listen, the decision hasn't come yet, so why don't we just...
Kind of start warming up the oven.
Why don't we start kind of getting the online censorship going and let's make as much progress as we can until the Supreme Court shuts us down.
And then the Supreme Court may not shut us down because, see, the Supreme Court could kind of go different ways on this.
They could go the way I think they should go.
No collusion at all between the U.S. government and the digital platforms.
Do the digital platforms want to do their own censorship?
Let them. But you can't be involved in that in any way.
The other extreme, which I don't think the court will say, is keep going.
No problem. You can do what you've been doing.
There's no First Amendment issue here at all.
But the third possibility, which I think is going to be tempting for the court, and I hope the court does not go this way, because this will just create a kind of gray area, and we know that the gray area, the sort of gray part of the water, the sharks can continue to swim.
And the gray area would be something like this.
The Biden administration is prohibited from forcing digital platforms to censor and ban and shadow ban and restrict and suppress people. However, there's nothing wrong with the Biden administration advising these platforms. The Biden administration can say, we think you should do this, we think you should do that, the platform may or may not. The reason that this doesn't really work is because the government has powerful leverage over these platforms,
because the government is the one that signs off on the section 230 legal exemption that prevents people from suing these platforms. So the Biden administration always has this kind of leverage. Hey, listen, if you don't do what we say, you don't have to. But guess what?
We have leverage over you when it comes up for the section 230 renewal.
And there are all kinds of other things we can do.
We can haul you up before committees and hearings.
We can investigate you.
There are all kinds of ways that we can use leverage to make you do what we want you to do.
So the only way for the Supreme Court to stop all this is to give a clear instruction to the Biden administration, hands off.
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Speaking of censored topics, and I want to talk about a topic that has been censored about as much as any other, and that, of course, is COVID. To this day, there is massive censorship on the topic of COVID, at least on platforms like Meta, Facebook, and also YouTube.
And yet, we're finding out more and more that what they have been censoring is not falsity or falsehood, but truth.
And And sometimes the truth isn't fully known.
The truth needs to be investigated.
And to investigate it, you need room to speak.
And so let's turn to the simple question, a question that I think has been haunting us since the beginning of COVID.
Where did COVID come from?
Did it come from a natural market in Wuhan or did it come from a lab?
But now there's a couple of interesting statements that have come out from key figures in this debate that strengthen the lab leak theory, the lab leak hypothesis.
Now, who are these figures?
I wanna mention two.
And in doing this, I'm relying on a very good article by the science writer, Matt Ridley, who also has an important book on the origins of COVID.
The book is called Viral.
In the article, he talks about Ralph Baric, who's the University of North Carolina professor.
This is a guy who invented some ingenious techniques for genetically altering these coronaviruses.
He's the guy who sort of taught the people at Wuhan what to do, how to do this kind of gain-of-function research.
Now, the other figure is a little bit more of a public...
This is Peter Daszak.
He's the highly paid president of a non-profit called EcoHealth Alliance.
This is the guy that has obtained large amounts of money from the U.S. government and funneled it over to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to do gain-of-function experimentation.
So these are both Very bad guys.
But they're not bad guys of the same stripe.
This Barak fellow is kind of a quiet researcher.
He is a gain-of-function guy.
He does his research. He doesn't speak often to the press.
He doesn't make public statements.
The other fellow, Peter Daszak, this is a guy who writes op-eds.
Oh yes, I'm convinced that COVID came from a wet market in Wuhan.
So, Daszak is the kind of guy who likes the limelight.
A little bit like Fauci. Remember Fauci posing for magazines and smiling for the camera?
Fauci loves the limelight.
And I think this is really why Fauci, for example, has...
Well, he's tried to keep himself at the center of the debate from the beginning.
Daszak is also the guy, by the way, who was boasting to people, this is before COVID, that, man, you got to use the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
It's really cheap to do experiments over there.
Well, yeah, maybe so.
And maybe the reason for that is that they don't have any biosafety controls.
But now, these two dudes, Beric and Daszak, have been interviewed by the Select Committee on the Coronavirus in the House, the House of Representatives, and they have made some kind of startling admissions.
First of all, we start with Peter Daszak.
He goes, in effect, he goes, I now admit that a lab leak is possible.
Now, this is important because this guy has been saying, in fact, here's a quote from him in 2020, the idea that this virus escaped from a lab is just pure baloney.
It's simply not true.
It's just not possible.
So, he goes from saying it's not possible to, well, it is possible.
He's not saying it happened that way, but he's admitting that it could have come out of a lab.
Second of all, when he was questioned, he said he didn't really know what was in the Wuhan Institute's database of viruses.
Now again, this completely contradicts what he had said before in 2021.
He said, look, we do basically know what's in those databases.
So in other words, he's not only saying, he's saying, well listen, since we are well aware of all the stuff going on in Wuhan, we can say confidently it didn't come out of there.
Now he's saying, well, we didn't really know the stuff that was going on in Wuhan, and therefore, of course, it could have come from there.
He's acknowledging that the viruses that the Wuhan scientists were manipulating and playing with, he didn't know.
He certainly didn't have a full list.
And he also admits that he didn't know that they were breeding bats in the Wuhan Institute, nor did he know that they were trying to Without leaving a trace, meaning they're actively working on doing a certain type of bioengineering, where if you go back and look at it later, you won't know that that's what they did.
It will seem like it occurred naturally.
So, in other words, you're hiding the origins of the kind of research that you're doing.
Now, we turn to the other fellow, Beric, Ralph Beric, and he undermined a key part of the case against the lab leak.
He said, first of all, he had said that he thought that the virus may have come from a wet market.
That's what he had said before.
Now, he says no.
He goes, he doesn't think that COVID originated in the Wuhan seafood market.
He agrees with China's leading infectious disease doctor, George Gao, that the market outbreak came after the initial infection.
In other words, yeah, you have some evidence that you could find it in the market, but that was...
After the first cases were discovered by several weeks.
So in other words, it didn't start at the market, it moved to the market from, seemingly, the lab.
So Matt Ridley is rightly saying, when you put these things together, slowly, almost like brick by brick...
The case for the lab origins of COVID is getting stronger and stronger and stronger.
And now I just want to read Matt Ridley's conclusion because I think it sums things up really well.
He says, He says,"...but in exactly the right city, at exactly the right time, they were playing with exactly the right kind of genetic insertion into exactly the right part of exactly the right gene of exactly the right kind of virus in exactly the right way." And they showed exactly the wrong kind of openness about it afterward.
It would be a heck of a coincidence and awfully bad luck if somehow COVID broke out naturally right there and at the same time.
So what he's really doing here, Matt Ridley, is he's kind of giving you probabilities.
Yeah, it could be that even though there's a lab and they're working on viruses, these viruses, and they're manipulating them in just this way to give you just this kind of an outcome.
Yeah, is it possible that somehow, simultaneously, naturally, it started out somewhere else?
It is possible, but what's the likelihood of that happening?
The likelihood is it came out of the Wuhan lab.
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Welcome to the podcast, someone I've followed on social media and actually met at the Heritage Foundation some months ago when we did a screening there for Police State.
It's Mary Margaret Olihan.
She is a senior reporter covering culture and politics for The Daily Signal.
She used to be at The Daily Wire, The Daily Caller before that.
And she has a new book, which is a very important topic, D-Trans Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult.
You can follow her on X at Mary Margo...
Oh, Mary Marg Olihan.
Mary Marg Olihan.
Is that right? It is right.
I couldn't get the whole name in there.
Oh, yeah. Sorry about that.
Okay. Welcome to the podcast.
Thank you for joining me.
And wow, this is quite a topic you've taken on.
And I want to talk to you about these stories about people sort of detransitioning, which I assume means that they transitioned and now they're transitioning back.
But let's start with the kind of the trans phenomenon in the first place.
You know, it strikes me as just downright bizarre to say that substantial numbers of people in Western culture or even across the world are, quote, born in the wrong body.
I mean, prima facie, that seems to me a little preposterous to say now.
But it is not preposterous to say that in our time now, quite a few people...
To put it differently, they become convinced that not only that they want to become something else, but they truly are that something else and they are somehow biologically misplaced.
Right. Now, where do you think, Mary Margaret, where does that come from?
It's one thing to say it's pure propaganda or ideological indoctrination, but do you think that the root of it is just the confusion that people experience at the time of around puberty where you're sometimes a little unsure, who am I? If I'm a girl, how come I'm not more feminine?
If I'm a boy, how come I'm not more tough?
And at that vulnerable point, the indoctrination kicks in and convinces you, gee, well, you must really be a girl.
I think that's definitely a massive part of it.
But I think stepping back a little bit, we have this massive cultural crisis right now where no one knows who they actually are or what their identity is or what their identity is grounded or based in.
And, you know, our culture has seen such a lack of faith, a lack of family cohesion and unity.
And so for many young people these days, once they start going through puberty and they start asking themselves these questions, who am I? Why am I here?
What's my purpose in this world?
What makes me unique? Why should other people care about me?
They're coming up empty. They don't really know why.
And so when they look for a deeper meaning or something that will make them unique and stand out, they're told by these gender activists, oh, well, you know, if you are trans, you'll be part of this class that is special and privileged and persecuted.
And that automatically makes you someone.
And it's not articulated like that, but that is the general sentiment.
You know, you can go from being a straight white girl who has nothing going for her and is shy and awkward and lonely to suddenly becoming a persecuted minority that is, you know, beloved by the transgender community and is hated by evil Republicans and fascists who would prefer that you committed suicide.
That's the line that they're given, right?
So I think a lot of this has to do with young people not really understanding why they're here.
Why they're on this earth, what's their purpose, and being afraid of traditional notions of masculinity and femininity because they're seeing all these representations on social media or in pornography or in gender ideology terms, and those things are scaring them.
So rather than be a woman and have to live up to these very sexualized standards of women and the degrading forms of womanhood they see in pornography, they're thinking, it might just be easier to be a guy.
And the gender activists are telling them, yeah, that's because you are one.
And there you go. It's too easy.
I mean, I think you're making a really good point that this is part of a larger crisis of meaning and identity that goes beyond just the matter of what sex you belong to or what gender you identify with.
But if what you say is true, it would probably follow that a greater proportion of, let's just say, white men or white women would be pursuing the trans pathway, if you will, than minorities.
The reason being that the minorities already have a victim category that they can sort of put themselves into.
But for, you know, a white guy who's normally an oppressor on all fronts, This is a way for him to join the kind of coalition of minority victims.
Is it a fact that more people proportionately are trans who are white than are, let's say, black or Hispanic or Asian?
Well, I think what the statistics have shown most recently, and I should add that we don't have perfect statistics on this movement, especially on detransitioners, because so many detransitioners are afraid to go back to their doctors and report that they even detransitioned.
But we have seen, as Abigail Shire has documented, and researcher Lisa Littman has documented, that there are increasingly high levels of white teenage girls who are identifying as transgender across the world.
But this has certainly been the case in the United States and in Europe, where all these girls due to social contagion and peer pressure and are experiencing gender dysphoria and deciding that they're a guy.
And a lot of the time it will happen in little pockets of friend groups where multiple young girls will suddenly realize that they were a man this whole time and begin transitioning.
The victim mentality that I mentioned was something that Helena Kirchner, one of the girls in my book, explained to me that she was encountering on Tumblr.
She was saying that this was very much presented to her as kind of an escape from the monotony that was being a young white female teenager.
And once she went over to that other side, she suddenly found that she had purpose and she was interesting and there were people who cared about her.
Whereas before, that was not the case, which is a very sad little study, but it is also a common factor based on the detransitioners that I've spoken with.
Do you think, Mary Margaret, that what has really given this movement so much momentum to the point where a relatively small group has almost been able to take over the cutting edge of the culture is because it is a weird marriage between ideology, far-left ideology, and commerce?
And by that I mean that These surgeries, these treatments are kind of expensive.
And so it is a big racket for the therapists.
It's a big racket for the doctors, for the hospitals.
I mean, whenever you have a product that involves thousands of dollars per event, per transaction, per patient, Doctors suddenly go, whoa, I can actually.
It's kind of like the way that you see these plastic surgeons with huge homes.
Why? Because that's an expensive treatment and if you can get demand for it, it's going to take you out of the normal run-of-the-mill $200,000 salary of being a doctor and suddenly you're a multi-millionaire.
Right. It is a lucrative profession.
And something that I think a lot of people don't realize is, let's say you're a 14-year-old girl that decides that she is a transgender man and you begin taking testosterone.
It's not like you just start taking it for a couple months and then you stop.
The idea is that you take it for the rest of your days.
And you continue taking testosterone, which you're paying for, whether it's through like a mail order subscription from one of these companies or whether you're getting your prescriptions from CVS, you're still going to be paying for that for the majority of your life unless you desist.
And the same thing can be said for the surgeries.
If a young girl goes in for a double mastectomy like Chloe Cole did and has her breasts irreparably removed, The next step is not...
The gendoradiologists don't want her to stop there.
They say for her to fully become a guy, she has to get a hysterectomy, get her uterus removed.
After that, they'll be pushing her to get fake male genitalia, which without being too disgusting or too graphic, is formed using, sometimes, part of someone's intestines or intestinal lining.
And those are fake genitalia that obviously do not work and never can since it's fake and she's a woman.
So, there are a whole number of costly surgeries that follow, including facial masculinization and body styling, where they'll cut down on your torso to make you look more like a man, and the list goes on and on.
So, theoretically, you could be continuing to get these very invasive and costly surgeries for years and years to come.
So it is very lucrative and the money angle of it is a very dark place to look into given that many of these people getting surgeries are so mentally ill, suffering so much already and these doctors and therapists are just using them to profit from and lying to them that these types of things will make them happy.
I mean, I feel odd talking about this topic because it seems to me that in any other era, this would be a subject to comedy.
I mean, you have, you know, a woman goes in to see the doctor and she says, well, you know, I kind of would like to have a penis.
And the doctor goes, well, listen, you know, maybe we can take somebody else's intestine.
I mean, this is just absurd.
And yet there's a kind of sick...
Gravity to the subject because I know that it ruins lives.
I had Chloe Cole on the podcast several months ago, but you've talked to several young people who have detransitioned.
What is the kind of unifying thread, the kind of awakening that Helps them to go, whoa, this was a bad road for me to go on because I'll sometimes see that, oh, you know, there are a lot of these people who have done this and they couldn't be happier.
They're loving their new life.
What causes people to have second thoughts?
I think, speaking generally, the biggest thing that caused the detransitioners I spoke to to realize that things were not right was more of a general realization that the doctors and therapists promised them that these things would make them happy, that their mental health suffering would go away once this was accomplished.
And for many of these detransitioners, once they got to the other side of, say, taking testosterone or getting a double mastectomy All of a sudden, there was this moment where they were like, I am struggling more than I was before.
And then that was that moment of realization, oh my gosh, why?
I was promised that this would all be better.
And then there was the moment of, okay, maybe I was lied to.
And from there, the cards all begin to fall.
And then for some of them, Like Abel Garcia, for example, a man who identified as a woman and was trying to become a woman.
He went back to his doctor and said, I think that I did the wrong thing.
I think that I shouldn't have done any of this.
And the doctor said something to him that he found so infuriating.
The doctor said, maybe this is just part of your gender journey.
Instead of acknowledging, we've really harmed you severely mentally and physically, and you're right, you shouldn't have done any of this because it's impossible for you to become a woman.
That was not said. What the doctor said was, maybe this is just part of your gender journey.
And so that, across the board, was the attitude that these young people encountered if they went back to their doctors, which not everyone does, because in essence, it's kind of like going back to an abuser and saying, oh, hey, I just realized you abused me severely, and I didn't like it, and I'm just back here to tell you this.
You know, it's kind of unusual to...
And so, like I was saying before, the statistics on detransitioners are very low because so many of them actually go back and explain.
So the establishment media will tell you that not very many people detransition, which is not true.
And I would also guess that for the people who don't detransition, they might be experiencing some of these same feelings like, whoa, this isn't really what it was kind of promised to be.
But they're going to be very reluctant to acknowledge a mistake because it's such a huge mistake.
You know, they even say, there are studies that show that people who get suckered out of money hate to go public.
They don't go to the reporters and talk about it.
Why? Because it's a confession that you're an idiot.
Somebody took you for $50,000 that you met on the street and somehow you wrote a check to them.
I let them empty out your bank account.
So if someone goes, you know, I thought I was a girl, but then I figured out I wasn't, people go, Well, something, you know, this is not the normal run of the mill.
I chose the wrong career or even I married the wrong person.
This is a blunder of cosmic proportions.
Well, what I want to commend you on is I think this is the right approach for tackling this kind of topic.
You know, you could have written a kind of ideological rant or diatribe about the trans phenomenon, but you're like, no, I'll be a reporter.
I will look at actual cases of people who made this journey and then made the journey back.
I will interview them, profile them, give their reasons for making these decisions, and then draw certain kind of common themes and common conclusions.
Guys, this strikes me as a really important book.
I'm looking forward to reading it.
The author is Mary Margaret Olihan, senior reporter at The Daily Signal.
The book is D-Trans Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult.
Mary Margaret, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you so much for having me.
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Have you noticed that culture in the American South is quite different from the culture of New England?
And this is the way it's been for a couple of hundred years, and this is even the way it is now.
Now, no one is saying that the culture of the South today is identical with what it was, let's say, in 1690 or 1750, but what What we are saying is that there are common threads that have passed through those decades and even centuries,
so that there is a recognizable difference now between the South and the Northeast that was present because of the first settlers who came to those places from different parts of England.
So let's identify some of these differences.
If you notice, for example, I'm going to focus here on white boys and white girls for the simple reason that we're talking about the settlers who came from Great Britain, from England.
You'll notice that white boys and white girls in the South are much more kind of polite.
They're much more mannered.
They have a lot of respect for their elders, by and large, and they try to exercise a certain amount of modesty and self-control that you don't see in New England.
Now this is not to say that Southern boys and girls aren't boisterous or they don't get out of control, but it's simply to say that regulating themselves, maintaining this kind of decorum, is in fact a part of Southern culture and has been for a long time.
Go to churches, Anglican churches in the south and compare them with the kind of churches that you see in the northeast.
The churches look different. The southern churches are more ornate.
They have a lot more, they have more crosses, they have more art, they are architecturally more elaborate.
The churches in the northeast are basically almost like a vacant building, a kind of outer shell.
and you go in the church and there's pretty much nothing there.
There's just maybe a table and then the seats for people to sit in.
And of course, the content of the services, the Anglican service, for example, as compared to the Puritan services, completely different.
A third factor.
Southerners love, by and large, to gamble.
They are risk-takers.
Even the kind of sports that they do are risk-taking sports.
They'll bet on horses, they'll bet on dogs, they'll bet on cockfights.
And again, this is a cultural mannerism, a cultural inheritance that has been passed down.
By contrast, You know, you can go all over New England.
You're not going to find a cockfight or a dogfight or even people betting on the horses.
How many horse races do you know of that go on in like Rhode Island or New Hampshire?
Not a lot. In fact, I don't know of any.
And yet you have the Kentucky Derby, for example.
So these are all just examples of ways in which these cultures differ.
Let me talk about the culture of formality by focusing on a book that was actually compiled around the time of George Washington.
And George Washington read these kinds of books because George Washington's whole idea is, I've got to learn how to be in full command of myself.
In a sense, to become a better person by following rules.
And look at these rules.
They're really fascinating. Because of the level of detail.
This is really unthinkable in New England.
It says that every action that is done in company, meaning when others are present, ought to be with some sign of respect to those who are present.
So, none of this self-expression.
Pay attention to who's in the room and act accordingly.
Number two, let your countenance be pleasant, but in serious matters somewhat grave.
So here's the idea. Generally, you need to be an affable guy, kind of an easygoing guy, and Southerners, you notice, are easygoing.
But when it comes to serious matters, it's not just that you need to feel deeply about them.
You need to act grave.
If it's a funeral, no chuckling, no jokes, no dawdling or looking around, no looking at your phone.
There is an outward formality that is supposed to convey the dignity of the occasion.
Here's another one. In speaking to men of quality, let's remember, Southern culture is very hierarchical.
You talk, for example, to someone who owned a plantation completely different than you would talk to someone who's a servant, let alone a slave.
In speaking to men of quality, do not lean or look them full in the face, nor approach to near them.
At least keep a full pace from them.
Stay one pace away.
Don't, quote, invade their space, as we say these days.
And then here's my absolute favorite.
In walking up and down in a house...
Only with one in company if he be greater than yourself.
You're walking in a house, let's say down a corridor, and you're with somebody who is greater than yourself, which is to say older, from a better family, someone who is an honorable judge or someone like that.
Okay, here's what you got to do. At first, give him the right hand and stop not till he does.
So give him the right hand, meaning he walks on the right, you walk on the left.
Number two, while you're walking, you're not allowed to stop unless he stops.
If he stops, you can stop.
Otherwise, keep going. And be not the first that turns.
Don't make a turn. Let him make a turn.
And when you do turn, let it be with your face toward him.
So whichever side you're turning, even if you're turning to the left, you'd normally think that your head would move to the left.
No. Keep your head face to the right so that you're always sort of deferentially acknowledging your superior.
And And if he be a man of great quality, walk not with him cheek by jowl, but somewhat behind him, but yet in such a manner that he may easily speak to you.
So the guy, don't walk side by side because that implies you're equals.
You're not equals. You need to walk behind.
But don't walk so far behind that he's got to turn his head to talk to you.
You should walk sort of behind, but you can still talk to him.
Now... Look at this.
I mean, who would come up with this?
And yet, this is a somewhat maybe exaggerated form.
This is teaching young Southern boys and girls how to act in social company.
Self-command is the rule.
Now let's turn to Southern churches.
And I talked a little bit about the ways in which the Puritan churches were by and large very, I won't use the word Spartan because it then brings in a different connotation, but they're very bare, they're very plain.
People dressed very plain.
Cover your head, simple clothing, nothing elaborate.
Southerners, at least before, not today unfortunately, this is something that has changed for the worse throughout our culture, do not dress up anymore.
But Southerners traditionally dressed for church.
The church had a kind of dignity to it.
Kneeling was very common in southern churches.
Sermons were an important part of the worship, but not the key to it.
The key was the liturgy.
In the Anglican church, the service is somewhat similar to a mass.
But when the sermons were given, they were sort of learned sermons.
They were sort of disquisitions and kind of analysis of Latin words and Greek words from the New Testament.
An attempt, for example, to give an exposition for Aramaic words or Hebrew words in the Old Testament.
Very different from the New England sermon.
The New England sermon was passionate and long and really a focus on the literal words of Scripture and dominated the service.
Not so much in the Anglican Church.
And then let me turn to the third topic I mentioned, which is gambling.
Now, you won't be surprised to hear that in Massachusetts, under Puritan New England, gambling was outlawed.
No gambling. Severely punished offense.
Here's John Cotton and Cotton Mather.
Gambling makes a mockery of God's presence in the world.
It's almost like God ordains the way things are gonna happen.
Nothing really happens by, quote, chance.
So this idea that, you know, I'll put 50 bucks on this or 20 bucks on that, this is like making a joke of something that, of events in the future that God has ordained.
Whereas in Virginia, it's not like that.
In Virginia, gambling is normal.
People are always betting. They're not just betting on games.
Here is the historian David Hackett Fisher.
They made bets, not merely on horses, cards, cockfights, and backgammon, but also on crops, prices, women, and the weather.
Imagine gambling about the weather.
Courts enforced wagers as a form of contract.
And there were even gentlemen, people who owned property and land, who went to ruin because they made absurd gambles and lost everything.
So there's a sort of a recklessness of the culture in the South that was not present in frugal New England.
Later, of course, people would identify many of these same traits with the slave owners, and the slave owners were in fact like this.
They were reckless.
They often gambled.
But those are not traits somehow unique or distinctive to slave owning.
those are traits that have been present in southern culture from the beginning and some of those traits and this is part of the just the interest and I think intrigue of this book some of these traits could be found in the southern parts of England from which those people came so if you go back to southern England certainly then but even now you'll find some of those traits present in southern England and so this is an importation that has lasted for
centuries and I guess the interest of it to me is it kind of explains how we get these regional cultures in America New England the South the Midwest and then the the Appalachians or the rednecks All these strains, very visible in American culture today.
This is an attempt to trace their roots or to trace their inheritance.
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