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May 17, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:39
THE UNRAVELING Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep835
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Coming up, I'll examine an appellate court review that suggests the prosecution withheld vital evidence back in the quintessential FBI frame up, which was the Whitmer kidnapping case.
Debbie's going to join me for our Friday roundup.
We're going to discuss the upcoming presidential debates, what's happening with the Trump cases, and how some doctors were paid money, a lot of money, to get their patients to get COVID vaccines.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
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I'm going to have...
Well, Debbie will come on for our Friday roundup, but when I mentioned to her that I was going to talk about the Whitmer...
Kidnapping hoax, the Fednapping or hoax plot, as I sometimes call it.
And he's like, well, haven't you talked about that before?
Like, why is this so important?
What's the big deal about it?
Do people care about Governor Whitmer?
Not really. This is not about Whitmer herself.
This is about, well, to me, the importance of the Whitmer kidnapping hoax is twofold.
One, it is the biggest, certainly one of the biggest, entrapment cases the FBI has ever staged.
That's number one. Number two...
It is the essential key to the lock of opening up what happened on January 6th.
Let's remember that the guy, DeAntonuo, who ran the Whitmer kidnapping hoax, was then transferred to Washington DC to head up The January 6th operation.
So there is a personnel tie between the two events, and I think the same playbook was run, not identical, but very similar playbook, embedded informants, And FBI people dressed up as Trumpsters,
egging the action on, essentially causing people to do things that they wouldn't have done otherwise, and then like, whoa, there's an insurrection, whoa, there's an attempt to kidnap the governor, even though this was your plot, your scheme, your idea.
The concept of these FBI hoaxes in the movie Police State, I trace it all the way back to the aftermath of 9-11 and the use of these kind of entrapment schemes against Muslims.
Find a couple of radical students at City College of New York or Someplace like that and then start implanting the idea in them.
Well, have you thought about bombing a building?
Have you thought about joining ISIS or Al-Qaeda?
So this is in police state.
But it's important to realize that this playbook can be run now.
So there's a kind of pressing relevance to all this.
Let's take, for example, the Gaza encampments.
Debbie and I were actually joking about this.
And of course, the FBI would never do it because we're now talking about entrapping the left.
And right now, the FBI, the intelligence agencies, the police state has its eyes firmly focused on the right.
But they could do it to the left.
And this is a point that the left may want to keep in mind.
They're not immune. And it's very easy to do.
Imagine if you go in these Gaza encampments and you have some guys like, you know, Palestine forever!
By any means necessary!
And all the FBI guy who's dressed up like a student or a professor who's like, I'm a professor, I'm joining you in the encampment.
Hey, listen, you know, if you really...
Did you mean what you just said about by any means necessary?
Yeah, I did. Well, what about the idea if we were to, like, bomb the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C.? That would really teach them, wouldn't it?
Oh, yeah, that would be great.
Well, listen, what about, how about if we work on this together?
I realize it's a bit extreme.
We've got to kind of keep it on the down low.
Well, the entrapment scheme is off and running.
And some people may go, no, I'm not going to do that.
But... Think of it.
In any encampment, you've got people who are a little on the edge, who are a little emotionally unstable, who are a little kooky, if not downright crazy.
You're gonna have some takers.
And so that creates an FBI case.
And busted! We got ya!
When you buy your ticket, you get off at the Dulles Airport or the Reagan National Airport.
You've arrived to carry out your scheme, and there's a bunch of FBI guys waiting to arrest.
But the point is, this is a playbook that was run in 2020.
It could easily be run again in now and in the future.
So let's... Let's focus on the new development in this Whitmer case.
By way of background, we know that this is a case where the plot itself is driven by the FBI. It's not that the intelligence agencies or the FBI said, all right, there's a plot other people are hatching.
We're going to sneak our guys into it so they can listen in on what's going on and then bust the plot.
No. This was a case where there was no plot.
There were chat rooms where people are raging and ranting.
Oh, we're tough guys.
We'll show Governor Whitmer.
She's a B-I-T-C-H and so on.
And so the FBI goes, ha, that's our target.
Let's egg these guys on.
And that's what happens.
And so when you have the case, they're going to, for example, reconnoiter Whitmer's vacation home.
Five people are in the van.
Three of them. 60% of the plot's senior leaders are federal agents or informants.
So 3 out of 5.
This is obviously the FBI driving the plot.
And similarly, you have a multitude of FBI agents and informants inside of the plot.
You've got some defendants, and then you've got FBI guys who are about as numerous as the defendants themselves, or close to it.
We plot explosive experts who was supposed to buy the bombs.
He's an FBI agent.
The head of transportation of the whole militia, the guy who's delivering you to the location, FBI agent.
The head of security for the militia, undercover FBI informant.
Two other undercover FBI informants, active participants in the initial meeting in which the plot to storm the Capitol was allegedly hatched.
And note, the plot to storm the Capitol.
Does that sound familiar? I mean, that's a direct echo of what was to happen later with January 6th.
So, extensive involvement by the By the cops, by the FBI. So now, two defendants, they got long prison sentences.
This is Barry Croft and Adam Fox.
Now again, there were a couple of guys, one of whom I had on the podcast, Brandon Caserta, they were acquitted.
There were a couple of other guys who I think unwisely, but understandably, took plea deals.
And the problem with a plea deal is you're consenting to your involvement into a sentence.
So you have to live with it.
It's not easy to get out of that.
But two guys went to trial and were convicted.
But they were convicted because the judge...
The judge, a guy named Robert J. Jonker, what a name, Jonker.
Anyway, Judge Jonker would not allow evidence of the magnitude of the FBI involvement in concocting the scheme.
A lot of the notes, the recordings, the out-of-court statements by these informants and agents was excluded from the trial.
And so, Barry Croft and Adam Fox are now appealing, appealing to the Sixth Circuit Court.
And the Sixth Circuit Court had a hearing in which the judges expressed a lot of skepticism about the exclusion of this evidence.
Basically, what the judges said is that if this evidence has been improperly excluded and And second, if the effect of it is to prejudice the outcome.
In other words, make a difference. Sometimes you exclude something and it doesn't make any difference.
So, had you included it, big deal.
It wouldn't have made any difference. We didn't tell the jury that the defendant went to a movie the day after the murder.
Well, okay, that was not brought up in the trial.
I was excluded from evidence, but what difference would it make?
Either he did it or he didn't.
Whether he went to a movie afterward may not be so consequential.
But here, the question is, it could be consequential.
In fact, I think it was consequential.
And after the hearing, we now have a notification to the prosecution And I'm going to read it because it's very telling.
Assuming that the informants, this is the FBI informants, out-of-court statements should have been admitted, was the district court's error in excluding those statements harmful or harmless, and why?
So I read this to mean that the circuit court has already decided, you know what?
This material should have been included.
But we haven't made up our mind on how important it is and what a difference it would make.
Now to me this is silly.
Obviously if you haven't included a volume of information about the magnitude of government pre-involvement in the plot, it is consequential.
It does make a difference.
It makes all the difference.
And so, but I think the court is playing it coy here.
They're asking the prosecution and the defense, okay, let's assume that this material should have been included, which is kind of our view.
Tell us whether it matters or not.
The prosecution is now going to have to come back and say, well, it didn't really matter, which is idiotic.
And the defense is going to say, naturally, of course it mattered a great deal.
And I think the defense case here is overwhelmingly persuasive.
And what encourages me is I think the judges are already thinking this way.
The judges are like, of course it matters.
We're going to give both sides a chance to explain what the significance is of not letting this material in.
So what's going to happen?
I think this is what's going to happen.
The Sixth Circuit Court is going to We're going to overturn the verdict against Adam Fox and Barrycroft, which is very good.
Both of them have huge, long prison sentences.
And the circuit court is going to say, if you want to retry them, you can.
But this time, all that evidence has to be let in.
So you're allowed to retry them.
Go for it if you want, but you cannot exclude this relevant evidence and excluding it was prejudicial in this case and therefore the outcome cannot be trusted and must be overturned.
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Debbie and I are all set for our Friday roundup and I thought maybe we could begin with the New York case involving Trump.
This was a week in which a lot of people showed up.
And I think that's significant because for a long time, Republicans were maintaining a kind of, I think, kind of an ugly silence about this.
And it's probably for the obvious reason.
These people are such invertebrates.
And they were like, we better stay far away from that.
But now that they see it's not affecting the polls, Trump continues to start to like, okay, well, let's go show up.
Now, I'm not saying this is the people who showed up, because the people who showed up, by and large, were some of the tougher guys on our side.
So, you know, J.D. Vance showed up.
He was in the courtroom. Vivek Ramaswamy showed up and made an excellent statement.
But interestingly, Mike Johnson showed up.
And of the three, I see on the left that Mike Johnson showing up has unnerved the left.
They're like, why is the Speaker of the House...
Interfering in a criminal proceeding involving a hush money payment.
So what's your take on this Mike Johnson appearance right in front of the courtroom?
Well, I mean, it might actually surprise a lot of people how much he likes Trump.
He is actually a Trumpster, which is very interesting because of the way he acts in Congress and other things.
FISA warrants. Yeah, yeah.
No, he's very much a Trumpster.
Yeah. One of the things that he said kind of, I think, was a little off-putting to me.
And I know a lot of people say this.
And they're like, yeah, this was very disturbing because it is a kind of a mockery of justice.
A miscarriage of justice.
A miscarriage of justice. And I'm like thinking, no, it's not.
Not that. Totally.
Not for everybody.
They use the justice system unlike we do.
Remember, when Trump became president, he could have put Hillary Clinton in jail.
He could have. But I don't think he just, you know, I think he wanted to move past Hillary.
To him it was a rhetorical thing to say in a debate.
You need to be in jail. But he wasn't about to go sick the DOJ. Exactly.
Exactly. But that's just it.
We don't use the justice system the way they do.
And so when people say it's a miscarriage of justice...
Or even generically, our justice system is out the window.
What you're saying is no. Actually, in the most case, our justice system is performing...
Fine. It's just that they've carved out a notable exception for Trump and Trumpsters, and that's the heart of what's going on.
Right-wingers, really. Yeah, it's very typical of Republicans not to recognize, not to be able to precisely pinpoint what the problem is.
And the problem is not some generic miscarriage of justice in general.
No, it is actually their character, and that is that they use, they target political opponents.
That is like a recipe for the left.
I told you they did this in Venezuela.
They did it in Brazil.
They do it everywhere that left-wing governments dictate, right?
Yeah. Raising an interesting question, do you think that Republicans should say now in advance, and this would actually put these guys, I think, on notice, and say, listen, there's an upcoming election.
We just want you to be really clear that if we win this election...
Merrick Garland is going to be indicted.
And Mayorkas is going to be indicted.
Biden is going to be indicted.
Kamala Harris is going to be indicted.
And we even provide the relevant statutes.
We lay it all out. And we say, we're telling the American people in advance.
So no one can say later, oh, you're surprising us.
The American people didn't vote for this.
They didn't give you a mandate to do it.
We're telling you in advance that if you vote for us, we're going to do this.
Right? They won't do that, first of all.
I don't think they will do it either. And I also don't think that...
Even though they should. They should, but I also don't think that the majority of the people agree with you.
I think the majority... When you say you mean the Republican leaders or the base?
No. The majority of the people, and I guess the base, right, do not agree with you.
I think they say, listen, we cannot behave the way they behave.
You think that's... Yeah, because I've sometimes wondered, is that the mainstream view?
We know that that's a fairly pervasive view.
It is. I think it's ultimately a well-meaning, but it is a wrong view.
It's a wrong view because it offers no prospect of stopping what's going on.
It is a recipe that just can't deliver the goods.
What does deliver the goods is implanting rational fear in the other side.
A little taste of their own medicine.
A taste of their own medicine. Yeah.
I mean, how else do you stop a bully, right?
Imagine if you go, we're better than that.
We're not going to do what you do.
We're not going to kick you in the shins.
That's off limits. I mean, this would be a party that is consigning itself to the dustbin of history.
Yeah, but aren't we also considered the dumb party?
Yeah, I guess you're right.
I mean, we are. Let's talk about the debates.
Are you surprised that there are going to be, I mean, more than one, multiple debates?
Yeah. Yeah.
You mentioned yesterday, you said something about him being retarded.
He's not retarded.
He is senile.
But furthermore, he's corrupt and senile, which makes it a very bad combination.
Yeah. In a way, just calling him senile is almost letting him off the hook, because that's something he can't help.
You can go, poor man, he's senile, and maybe he shouldn't be running the country, but he's a decent guy.
You're saying, no, he's not a decent guy.
He actually knows enough to know that he is running a mafia.
Yeah, he does. He is the mafia boss.
He is the boss. And he recognizes that.
Now, he may not have the same memory.
Oh, yeah, we hit this guy on Canal Street.
But you're saying he does know what he's involved in.
But remember, I also told you that I don't believe that Biden is made the same way as Obama.
Because I do believe Obama goes after his political opponents like no one That's his M.O. He goes after not just political opponents, but dissenters, right?
He went after you. So, he goes after people that are threatening his agenda, right?
I don't think, you know, Biden has been in office for, what, 40, 50 years?
I've never seen him do this up until now.
Yeah, you're right. You're saying he's not...
He's vindictively thuggish by nature in the way.
He's probably the kind of crook who likes to have payments flowing into his pocket.
It's all legal. It's really why he went into politics.
It's the old, you know, I'll do you a favor if you slip some money to me in the back door.
I think as a VP, he was able to get a lot of money and a lot of power using that office.
Well, he probably went to Obama, and Obama thinks he's an idiot, and Obama's right on this point.
I probably said, listen, you give me a couple of portfolios where Biden knew there was money to be made.
Mm-hmm. Energy companies in the Ukraine.
China, which of course is looking for ways to open up its avenues in America.
And then Biden was like, I'll go out there and I will basically sell my office.
But that's not the same thing as the, I want to put members of the opposition party in prison.
That's an Obama type of thing to want to do.
That is Obama right there, full blown.
What do you think Trump needs to...
Trump is going to be certainly more energetic.
He's more dynamic. I mean, this guy goes to rallies after being in court all day, speaks for 90 minutes straight, and he holds the audience.
I mean, think about it. Do you know anybody in American politics who could hold an audience for like 90 minutes in the open air?
No. I mean, it's unbelievable.
No. Yet, and yet, Trump needs to be careful in the debates.
What would be, if he asked you, well, Debbie, give me some advice for these debates as I prepare for them.
Well, I would be a little more precise with facts.
For example, this whole notion that Biden's Right.
Right. And now it's back to three point something, which is still above what it was when he came in.
But if Trump doesn't lay it out like that, then he's going to lose on the facts.
Because as you know, the last time when he debated him...
Remember those 50 FBI people, FBI agents?
Yeah, I do. That falsely said that- That the Hunter Biden laptop is Russian disinformation.
Right. So when they said that they lied, right?
And Trump knew this.
He actually already knew that this was a lie.
Right. But did the American people find out?
Did they actually believe Trump?
No, they believed Biden when Biden said that it was actually true.
Because Biden was appealing to what seemed to be unimpeachable authority.
Look, it's not one or two guys, it's 50 guys, and some of them are Republicans, and they're all telling you it's disinformation.
So, in other words, Trump appears to be saying something on his own, and Biden has the backing of the intelligence community, even though it was Trump who was telling the truth and not Biden.
Exactly. And it also, furthermore, it was Trump that was saying, this election is going to be stolen.
You watch. Trump said it.
And he wasn't just speaking, you know, like, in code.
It actually happened.
And so now all of the media outlets all say the same thing.
The unfounded...
The baseless. The baseless claims of election fraud.
On and on and on. They all say that.
Because why? Because everyone now knows that this actually did happen, just like they know that the 50 FBI agents actually falsified a document.
But it didn't matter then.
And so what I'm afraid is going to happen in these debates is that Trump won't go in there with hard facts and shut him up.
Because if he actually— Because we know that if Biden brazenly lies, the media will rush in to assure you that this is not what he meant to say.
What he actually meant to say is this.
Or look at the content. What he's really getting at, Dinesh, is this.
So there'll be all this kind of—it's almost like when you have an old granduncle who, like, speaks nonsense, but you don't want to reveal that he's speaking nonsense.
You tell the family, well— You sugarcoat it.
Yeah, you should have coded. What he's trying to say is this.
No, he wasn't really alive in the 19th century.
He doesn't mean that.
He's really talking about 1940, not 1840.
No, I get it. You're constantly clarifying and clearing things up.
But the debates will be, I think, exciting to watch.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H, Dinesh.
Debbie just went in to get her shingles vaccine.
Now, I haven't taken my shingles vaccine, but I guess the shingles vaccine is in two doses.
You take one, and then a few months later, you take number two.
And we were warned about this, but it turned out to be true.
This is one painful vaccine.
Oh, boy, is it ever.
It's more painful than any vaccine I've ever taken.
And I'm not really sure why, but boy does it hurt.
And it doesn't necessarily hurt when they do it.
It's right after. It's like it attack, you know, it bruises the muscle and the muscle just like knots up like there's no tomorrow.
It's like, wow, what did you do to me?
But it also, I believe this is the technical term and that is that it releases all kinds of like immune responses to your body.
And so, you know, you have the potential to get fever and, you know, feel sick, get a stomachache, get nausea, headache, that kind of thing.
I didn't get any of those.
Just a very sore arm.
Our doctor, whom we like a lot, and she's actually an Indian doctor, and she was like, you gotta take the shingles.
Oh, for years. For six years, she's been telling us.
Have you taken our vaccine? Yes, yes.
Now, admittedly, shingles is not a good thing to get.
Yeah, well, I hear it's really bad.
Really bad. Like, really, really bad.
And are you more susceptible as you get older, like over 50?
Yeah, yeah. So that's why they recommend the vaccine or the two-dose vaccine.
But I was telling you yesterday, I guess it was, that I saw a very interesting article.
Well, it was actually released by Representative Thomas Massey first, about how, well, let me give you some details.
The basic idea here is that hospitals and healthcare providers, including doctors, are paid a lot of money to get people vaccinated for COVID.
Now this came out almost accidentally.
One of the companies released data.
This is called Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield Medical.
And as you look in the chart, you begin to see that they're offering, let me give you some numbers here.
They're offering a $125 bonus per vaccinated patient, per patient, as long as the provider has vaccinated at least 75% of their total Anthem members.
And you're talking actual money?
Because you know I have an article about that.
No, I'm talking about actual money.
For context, a health care provider with roughly 265 patients could have received as much as a $25,000 bonus for vaccinating 200 patients before September 1, 2021.
So it's a table.
And think about this.
Doctors have hundreds of patients, right?
And so even though it may not seem like a big number, $250, it's $250.
You and I go and it's $500 for the doctor or for the health provider.
And that just tells you how much money these companies are making on it because they can afford to pay this as an incentive.
Right, right. Now, you were saying this seems highly unethical.
It may even be illegal.
Now, we know, and this is true not just of doctors, that by and large, corporations that are selling products often figure out really sneaky ways to compensate so-called experts.
The experts could be professors, they could be doctors.
So talk about some of the ways that you're familiar with.
And these are legal, but you can see that they're introducing an element of corruption in the medical profession.
Yeah. Well, I mean, just on a personal note, you know, my aunt, my dad's sister, is a retired dermatologist.
And I remember when she would go to conventions, she lives in New York, but when she would come to Texas, like to Dallas or Houston, and I would meet her there because she would go to these conventions where they had all kinds of facial products, creams, you know, you name it.
And she would get...
So many things.
She'd received so many of these samples, and sometimes even full samples.
She didn't know what to do with them, so she'd give me some.
So I love going to meet her at conventions because I would stock up on all these facial creams and whatnot.
But I thought that was just kind of cool.
But little did I know that these doctors actually get compensated for a product or a drug that they prescribe more than anything else.
And so I looked at this article.
So hold on, before you do the article, I just mentioned that, so what some of these companies do, paying a doctor straight for a vaccine is a little blatant, and that's not the norm.
Usually what they'll do is they'll say, we're having an international conference.
It's in the Bahamas.
We will fly you down, provide you with air tickets, hotels.
We'll pay for all your meals, and we'll give you, like you say, satchelfuls of this and that.
And the idea being to endear you to their product so you're more likely to prescribe it.
Now, what you're about to talk about is a study that shows the doctors, Yeah.
Well, it's a ProPublica newsletter.
It was done in December of 2019.
So this is before COVID, right?
But it says, We're good to go.
This is not saying that these doctors received actual money, but they received cash for speaking at, like you say, in the Bahamas.
I mean, think about it. You get a $10,000 fee for speaking at a convention.
Yeah. You're going to be a little more friendly toward them.
Exactly. So it makes you think, like you go to the doctor and, you know, like we both have high cholesterol and we're not on statins, but doctors are always pushing statins on us, a particular brand.
And so then I'm like, well, are you doing it because it's the best thing for me or is it because you're getting a little kickback from it?
I mean, we know about this in other professions, right?
So for example, you have wealth advisors who are advising you on where to invest your money.
Now, sometimes, companies, financial companies will come to those wealth advisors and say, hey, listen, we have a special package.
It's an attractive investment for these reasons, but we'll pay you a commission for every client of yours who signs up for this.
Well, obviously, the wealth advisor is not going to be unbiased.
They're not just looking out for the client.
The investment may be decent, But the reason that they're recommending that investment is because of the money that they're getting.
Talk about the example of Linzess, which we've seen ads for Linzess.
Oh, yeah, yeah. So Linzess, yeah.
I mean, I'm on the treadmill. I'm often hearing ads for Linzess and other medical products.
So it says, ProPublica's analysis found that doctors who received payments related to Linzess in 2016 wrote 45% more prescriptions for the drug on average than doctors who received no payments.
I mean, imagine that. Talk about how much money Linzess spends.
You had read it from the article that Linzess spends something like $20 million or some big number per year.
Yeah, I can't find it right this minute.
But it says, and here's another key takeaway, right?
Of those 50 drugs that are the most common that they use, 38 cost more than $1,000 per year.
For 32, at least 10% of doctors prescribing the drug received payments tied to the drug from the company that made it.
For 46 of the drugs, doctors received payments for the drug prescribed more than it compared to with other doctors who did not receive.
On average, doctors who receive payments prescribed 58% more of that drug than doctors who did not.
So...
This is a way of saying that we have all been raised in a trusting environment where you go into the doctor.
The doctor says, you need seven tests.
And you're like, okay, let's go.
Well, when can I come in? I'll make an appointment.
As opposed to, what tests?
What are they for? Why do I need all seven?
What are my actual symptoms that are telling you that these seven tests are needed?
Part of the reason, of course, is that people have health insurance and so they're not paying.
If they were paying, they would be much more particular about what the tests were.
So we've seen a breakdown of proper I mean, incentives properly structured are very good.
So if you go into a doctor, you have a cold, the doctor wants to prescribe a certain, let's just say, cough syrup, and it costs like $250, you're like, hey, wait, isn't there a cough syrup that costs $40 that I can buy instead?
So the incentives there are structured properly.
And then you go, wait a minute, I could go over to CVS or Walgreens and just buy it over the counter.
Exactly. Why am I coming to see you in the first place?
Yeah. Exactly. Nobody goes to the doctor for a cold.
It's like the old joke where the guy goes to the doctor and he goes, well, doctor, what are the results of your test?
The doctor goes, well, you have a virus.
The guy goes, oh, a virus.
The doctor goes, yes, and that'll be $400.
And this guy goes, well, how much would it be if you knew what it was?
Because... Everything is a virus.
It's a virus.
Well, good point there.
And as you know, a cold virus, you know, it goes away on its own.
But you're right.
I mean, it does kind of give you pause for concern when you go see a doctor.
And as soon as they prescribe something for you, you're like, do I really need that?
Yeah, because you're wondering if in the back room they're like on the phone, honey, yeah, go ahead and book those tickets to the Bahamas.
We're getting our incentives.
The D'Souza's just left the building.
For me, the charm of the book I've been discussing, David Hackett Fisher's book called Albion Seed, Four British Folkways in America, is it helps us see the four distinct folkways that have made up America in a recognizable way, not just historically, but even today.
So take a few just kind of obvious anomalies.
Like, why is Southern food spicy and varied compared to, say, food in the Northeast?
Well, this book will help you answer that question.
Why do you have relatively few cities in the South?
I mean, you have whole states in the South that have like one or two cities.
Whereas it's common in Midwestern and Northern states to have multiple cities.
Why is it that the South, in other words, is more country, it's more rural, it's more agrarian?
Well, there's a reason for that.
And we're not just talking about things like customary architecture or accents and the way people talk, even though the book is very good at providing a lot of detail, like why do Southerners say y'all?
And why do people from Boston say Harvard?
These are, it turns out, inheritances from England.
In other words, you can go even now to certain parts of England and hear people talk like that.
So that's a remarkable thing, because you might have thought, well, these ideas, these customs developed in America.
Some people move north, other people move south, the weather is different, the landscape is different, so maybe the cuisine, the culture developed...
In response to the ambient or surrounding environment, but says David Hackett Fisher, no, a strong element of it was imported straight out from the mother country from England.
I want to focus here, and this will complete my discussion of the Cavaliers or the Virginians, the transplantation of the Cavaliers to the South, to the American South.
I'll try to finish off with that today, and then when we pick it up, Next week, we're going to pick it up with the third wave of migration, which is the Quakers, who moved to places like New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but then pushed out for the West to create and at least shape the culture of the American Midwest.
I want to talk about the idea of liberty and the way in which it differed pretty dramatically in the South from what it was thought to be in the North and particularly in New England.
And this is also kind of a way of helping to understand the Civil War because you have two groups of people And Lincoln noted that both sides not only read the same Bible and appeal to the same God, but they both use the language of freedom.
The North says, we need to fight against slavery because we need to free the slaves.
The South says, no, we need to fight against you because you are taking away our right to self-government.
We too are fighting for liberty, although it's quite obvious that different meanings of liberty are at stake.
So, let's go to the heart of the matter and contrast the idea of liberty in Puritan New England with liberty in Cavalier or Southern Virginia.
Now, in Puritan New England, liberty really meant, well, it meant two separate things.
The first thing it meant is, we as a community, the Puritans, had the right and the freedom to come to a new place and establish our own society with our own rules.
Obviously those rules are our rules and they have little tolerance for outsiders.
We are creating a Christian commonwealth and our freedom to do that is what we mean by liberty.
We don't mean the freedom of individuals to choose what they believe or what faith they want to practice, religious freedom, separation of church and state, none of that.
What freedom means is our right as a group To impose our way of life on a newly created city, on a hill, a new community.
That's one meaning of liberty.
Here's the second meaning of liberty.
I have the liberty as a Puritan to follow the will of God.
In other words, I need the freedom to do that.
But my freedom is limited to that.
And so, for example, while I'm following the will of God, at least the will of God in the Puritan understanding, I am exercising my liberty.
But let's say I decide, I don't want to do that.
I want to do something else. To the Puritans, that's not liberty.
You have no right to do anything other than follow the will of God.
You can't get off the straight path.
You have no freedom. You have no claim, no entitlement to do that.
So freedom, again, to summarize, is the freedom of the individual soul to follow a divinely illuminated path or...
It's the freedom of the whole community to be what it is, to be a Puritan community, and if necessary, to harass, torment, and persecute others who are not following your way.
Even if they claim to be as Christian as you are, the idea is that, no, this is our way of being Christian.
You either go along or you get out.
Now, let's turn to Virginia, where there is a very different understanding of liberty at play, an understanding that really at first glance appears to be, well, at the very least paradoxical.
Here is the British essayist Samuel Johnson talking about the time of the American Revolution.
He's asked about, what do you think of the American Revolution?
And let's just put it this way, he's not a fan.
Here's what he says. How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?
Boom. I mean, talk about a slamming of American hypocrisy right at the front end.
And Johnson, of course, with unerring instinct is like right on it.
Yeah, we keep hearing liberty, liberty.
He goes, who's shouting?
Well, slave owners.
And Johnson was certainly right that a number of the prominent leaders of the American founding were, in fact, slave owners, including, of course, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and many others.
Not all of them, but many of them.
Now, It may seem really odd that in Virginia an idea of liberty would develop at all when you have confinement, incarceration, compulsion, slavery being caused.
The norm being widespread.
You would think that when you have masters and slaves, there would be no talk of liberty.
The masters would basically go, well, listen, we're stronger than you.
We have overcome you by force.
We can buy and sell you now.
And so let's just banish all freedom talk because quite clearly we are not like into freedom around here.
But... Says the historian David Hackett Fisher, and he's not original in saying this, but he puts it really well.
He goes, ironically, the Southerners developed, in a way, an even more protective idea of freedom than in the North.
They became even more passionately dedicated to freedom than the people in the North.
This seems really strange.
But it was noticed, even across the pond, even from England, by the Irish statesman Edmund Burke.
And Edmund Burke actually gives you the reason.
For why he says that Southerners are passionately attracted to liberty.
So let's listen. He says,"...a circumstance attending these colonies makes the spirit of liberty still more high and haughty than those to the northward.
It is that in Virginia and the Carolinas they have a vast multitude of slaves." So, Burke is sort of saying the opposite of Samuel Johnson.
He's saying, you want to know why the Southerners are even more attached to liberty than the Northerners?
Guess what? It's because they have slaves.
Now, how? Why?
How could it be that when you have slaves and you're betraying the idea of liberty that way, that you'd somehow be a greater champion of liberty?
Well, the answer is kind of obvious, and Burke spells it out.
He goes... Where this is the case, meaning slavery is the case, in any part of the world, those who are free are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom.
Freedom is to them not only an enjoyment but a kind of rank and privilege.
And then he goes on to say, Alright, so here is the, as they say, take home value.
It's this. I'm a master.
I have all these slaves.
I can see how miserable these slaves are.
They're tied up.
They're confined. They're displayed in cages.
They're locked up.
They can be punished in any way by the master.
And so, what do I say? I go, wow, I'm really glad I'm not in that position.
I'm really glad I'm free.
And because I can see what confinement or unfreedom means, I appreciate my own freedom all the more.
I become more defensive of it.
I'm more protective of it.
I'm more willing to fight to the death, not to give it up.
And so the point being that the idea of freedom in the South, in the American South, develops In full consciousness of the existence of slavery.
And freedom here means something like the ability to dominate another group and the ability to control my own destiny.
That's what it means to be a master.
A, it means I've got other people who are captives who are subject to me.
That makes me more free because I can now...
I'm sort of like the guy with 30 hands.
Why? Because even though I got two hands, I got 14 guys who are working for me.
Each of them got two hands.
So that's 28 plus my two.
I've got 30 hands.
So I've got more freedom to do stuff with 30 hands than I would with only two.
And second, I am very conscious that That when I exercise my freedom, there is a terrible alternative to it right in front of my face.
So freedom isn't some abstraction.
I'm not just quoting a certain sort of abstract or theoretical idea of freedom.
I can see this is slavery, and I'm at the opposite end of the spectrum.
I not only need to appreciate my freedom, I need to work to secure it, to guarantee it, if necessary, to fight for it.
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