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May 21, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:31
RAZING ARIZONA Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep837
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Coming up, I'm going to talk about how Michael Cohen's been stealing from Trump.
I'm also going to talk about the lawfare against conservative attorneys in Georgia and Arizona and elsewhere.
I want to refute the notion that Daniel Perry, recently pardoned by Texas Governor Abbott, is somehow a racist murderer.
A documentary filmmaker, Christina Erso, joins me.
We're going to talk about her film on the Whitmer kidnapping and also how she got cancelled by her bank.
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I want to talk in this opening segment about two types of lawfare.
Lawfare at the level of Trump, which is the New York case, Michael Cohen.
Then I want to talk about some lawfare that's also going on in Arizona.
This is lawfare against, I would argue, election integrity itself, and I'll come to that in a moment.
Michael Cohen goes on the stand, and of course he's the key person for the prosecution to try to make the case that Trump agreed to pay off Stormy Daniels.
That part is undisputed.
But that Trump specifically knew and caused a false entry to be made in the bookkeeping, so it was listed as legal.
This is supposedly the altering of business records or the falsification of business records.
And moreover, that Trump did this with the motive of thwarting or getting around federal election law.
This is what Michael Cohen is trying to convince the jury of.
But it comes out in cross-examination that In which Michael Cohen's interminable series of lies are exposed one after the other.
And we've long known that Michael Cohen is a liar, a perjurer, gives false testimony before Congress, has served time in prison.
What turns out that Michael Cohen is also, in a way that is not known, a thief.
Michael Cohen admits on the stand he's been stealing from Trump.
Now, it's bad enough to say I've been stealing from Trump.
It's bad enough to say, as Michael Cohen does, that when he arranges reimbursements, it's kind of like I'm your lawyer and I come to you and I say, hey listen, we're going to do a reimbursement and you're going to have to pay $40,000.
But the actual amount is only $30,000.
So you write me a check for 40, I keep 10, and then I give 30 in the payment.
So I'm misrepresenting to you, Trump, what the reimbursement even is, or what the payment even is.
Now, As I say, this kind of thievery is bad, and not only bad, it's a felony.
In fact, it's a more serious felony than falsification of the business records.
And so, here's the point.
Normally, in a case, when you're a prosecutor, what do you do?
You allow the guy with the lesser offense To cooperate with you, typically for a token or minor sentence, in order to get the guy that's done the worst offense.
If someone has plotted a murder, you get the guy who drove the getaway car, and he goes, yeah, I'll identify all the guys who did it, including the person who set the whole thing up.
And that's the guy who's obviously responsible for the whole thing.
But in this case, notice it's the reverse.
Alvin Bragg is going to the guy who committed the more serious offense.
Felony theft.
And saying to him, hey listen, if you cooperate with us, we won't worry about that.
Why?
Because we're trying to get Trump on a misdemeanor.
A misdemeanor that they will later try to bootstrap onto a felony, the felony being of course the violation of federal campaign finance law.
Now, as I said, it'd be one thing if Michael Cohen was stealing from Trump kind of on the But here's the point.
He's stealing from Trump in the Stormy Daniels payoff.
In other words, he's stealing from Trump in the very transaction that is at issue in this case.
And so, this is, well, I mean, I saw Eli Honig on CNN, and CNN, as you know, has been lionizing Michael Cohen all in the lead-up to this case.
But even CNN, and by the way, not just Eli Honig, but others as well, they're like, this is actually very bad.
This is very bad, not for Trump, it's very good for Trump.
It's very bad for the prosecution.
It's very bad because the jury...
All you need is for the jury to have some reasonable doubt.
Like, I can't believe this guy.
This guy is absolute scum.
This guy is stealing from Trump in the very payoff that we're talking about.
So, this is...
Debbie and I both think that this is going quite likely to a hung jury.
We don't think Trump's going to get acquitted because there are going to be some jurors who, even if you could prove nothing against Trump, would nevertheless vote to convict him.
So there's no way Trump gets a full acquittal, we think.
But we also think that there's going to be at least one, maybe two, maybe three, maybe four members of the jury because Trump, after all, is a New Yorker.
And even if you have New Yorkers who are...
Democrats, there's a little bit of Trump in a lot of New Yorkers, and they're going to see what's going on here, and New Yorkers are also, I've got to say, pretty savvy.
They're pretty savvy in figuring out what the con is here, and the proven con man here is Michael Cohen, not Donald Trump.
I mean, if you want to fault Trump for anything here, bad judgment in hiring Michael Cohen.
But that's not illegal, but it is dumb.
Now, let me turn to Arizona.
Because what's going on here in Arizona, and something of the same has happened elsewhere as well...
Is that the democratic power structure, in this case the Attorney General, Mays, they're going after conservative lawyers in the state.
And they're going after the conservatives who are trying to pass election integrity.
So what they're trying to do is take these states and secure them, I would say, for fraud.
Fraud in 2024. When else? This is the critical year.
Look at this. In Georgia, 19 Republicans arrested and charged.
In Michigan, 16 Republicans arrested and charged.
In Nevada, 6. In Arizona, 18.
Even in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, there are some ongoing criminal investigations investigations into Republicans who are yet to be charged.
And here's Rachel Alexander commenting on X. She's a lawyer and journalist.
Every conservative election lawyer I know in Arizona is being pursued with charges by the Arizona bar, has bar complaints against them, or has already been disciplined.
Carrie Lake famously said that eventually she may end up representing herself.
Because of an inability to find attorneys because they're all being chased down to get rid of their bar licenses or somehow perhaps even put them in behind bars.
So this seems to me the lawfare that we talk about some people think well it's because of Trump and maybe if he wasn't so provocative and so radioactive it's going on all over the place and and And the net effect, if this is allowed to succeed, is, number one, it will keep going.
Number two, really no Republicans will be in a position, well, it's not that no Republican is safe.
You're safe if you do nothing.
If you essentially acquiesce, you bend the knee, you succumb to this kind of takeover of the country, you don't speak up, you don't challenge it, you don't use your legal skill, you don't intervene, then they'll leave you alone.
But on the other hand, if you do, they will do their best to immobilize you, to destroy your reputation.
Now, I do want to make one point that the attorney Mike Davis has made, and I think this is of critical importance.
There is a federal statute that makes it a very serious crime to criminally, a very serious crime to interfere with people's We're good to go.
Including people at the DOJ can be prosecuted under this statute.
I'm talking about hundreds of people.
And I think that what the Republicans need to do is they need to get out, and Trump needs to say this in a rally, if you elect me, I'm going to invoke this statute and I'm going to arrest and prosecute all these people.
In other words, put it out there.
Put it before the American people.
Because later, if Trump is elected, the press goes, well, he never had a mandate to do this.
Why is Merrick Garland being arrested?
Why is Chris Mays being arrested?
Why are we seeing all these officials in handcuffs?
No, the truth of it is, they are violating federal law.
And so, again, they're going to be put before a jury.
By the way, juries in this case of our choosing, juries in Virginia, if you bring the case in Virginia, suburban Virginia, I mean.
So, in other words, this is called two can play at this game.
But short of doing that, I think Republicans are basically in for it, because the Democrats have essentially called off all the rules, and called off all the stops, as they say, and Republicans need to respond in kind.
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To learn more... I'm very happy to see that the Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, has pardoned Daniel Perry.
And this is for the, he was convicted of murder in Austin, very liberal part of Texas.
He was convicted for the killing of a 28-year-old guy named Garrett Foster.
Garrett Foster, if you want to know what this guy is like, he's a lot like the Antifa types that were encountered by Kyle Rittenhouse in Minneapolis.
You probably saw the video of that stuff.
These are basically thugs, thugs on the street.
And that's what Garrett Foster was.
Now, the Texas Monthly tries to glamorize Derek Foster.
Garrett Foster, a 28-year-old white man and Air Force veteran from a conservative family.
And they're making it sound like this is a church-going guy who was, you know, just a little disturbed by what happened to George Floyd.
But no, here's a guy, frankly, carrying an AK-47-style rifle to a rally in downtown Austin.
Alright, guns are legal in Texas, so I'm not going to say that for him simply to possess the gun is by itself bad.
It's kind of what you do with it.
But on the other hand, by the same token, if it's perfectly fine for Garrett Foster to have his AK-47, well, it's pretty fine for Daniel Perry, a 30-year-old white man, notice they're about the same age, army sergeant, who was driving for Uber and was legally carrying a gun.
Now, what happens next is what's at issue.
There's some video of this, and if you look at the video, you basically see that what Garrett Foster does is he raises his gun toward Perry.
The exact angles and so on can be disputed, and in fact, were disputed.
But the bottom line of it is, Perry says,"...I felt threatened, and so I shot the guy." And unfortunately, this is the kind of thing that happens when you have heavily armed people in an intimidating atmosphere.
And let's note that the intimidating atmosphere is created by the riders.
Not by an Uber driver, but by the riders who think that they control the space, control traffic.
They can tell people what to do.
And we've seen this all over the country.
They bang on the windshield of cars.
They tell people to get out.
In some cases, they're Pull people out of the cars.
We're not saying that this was done in this case.
But in any event, this 30-year-old guy gets convicted.
He gets 25 years.
And again, if he had been tried anywhere else in Texas, he probably would have walked.
But because it's Austin, and this is the whole point, the comic thing about this Texas Monthly article is that, you know, they admit that the Travis County DA Jose Garza is a left-winger, but here's how they write it.
The DA who brought the charges Travis County's Jose Garza did not render the verdict.
Perry had his day in court and lost.
Well, if Perry had his day in court, let's just say, for example, in any other part of Texas, and been vindicated, the Texas Monthly would be like, well, this is the bigoted jury, you know, but because it happens to be in their part of the country where, by and large, the jury is exactly the same as the prosecutor, Jose Garza.
Oh, yeah, let's give it to this guy.
He's a right-winger. Let's teach him a lesson and so on.
So we are...
This is not a case anymore.
We're not living in an America today where we go, oh, it was a jury decision and therefore the jury obviously impartially weighed the facts.
That is not the case.
Ultimately, it's almost like this is a raw exercise of power.
This guy goes before a jury, left-wing prosecutor, left-wing jury, conviction.
Okay, happily it's not the end of the matter.
There is a prison board that makes recommendations.
It's the board of pardons and paroles.
Now the Texas Monthly goes, whose seven members were appointed by Abbott.
Yes, thank you very much.
He's the governor. This is a case where power works to our advantage.
So sorry, you guys got him.
We're going to get him off.
So the board recommends a pardon.
Abbott does a pardon. Conservatives are in charge in Texas.
And so happily, this guy is free.
I actually recommend that he now go on the speaking circuit with Kyle Rittenhouse.
And so, look, am I happy that this is what it's come down to?
You know, the justice is now ultimately the raw exercise of power?
No, not at all.
However, I don't want to live in a country where the justice is always weighed on one side either.
It's actually better to have raw exercises of power on both sides than it is to have it on one side alone.
Now, even better...
Would be to a return to a more normal America where cases were judged by and large on the facts with people extending a certain amount of at least the kind of impartiality that people are capable of if they made the effort.
But that's not the America we live in and I'm afraid that these kinds of power plays are likely to persist.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
Hey guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast a social media influencer but also a journalist and documentarian.
Her name is Christina Urso.
I came across her on X where her handle is NotRadix.
Not R-A-D-I-X. And she is producing a documentary film.
It's called Kidnap and Kill, an FBI Terror Plot.
The website is kandkfilm.com.
Christina, welcome. Thank you for joining me.
I invited you to come on because I saw this video that you put out very recently on OnX.
In which you talked about the fact that you got sort of unexpectedly debanked, by which we mean cancelled by your bank.
Can you describe what happened, how you found out about it, and what explanation they gave you for doing this?
Yeah, and this is Bank of America.
So this is an account that my husband and I have had for almost a decade.
I want to say that off the bat.
It's a business account that we share.
And we've never had any issues with Bank of America before recently.
Never had any problems.
Nobody contacted me and told me that they were going to be terminating the account.
At no point did that happen.
So I'm just going about my day.
This is probably around May 10th and trying to use my card.
My card is being declined.
So I try to log into my mobile banking.
My mobile banking had been completely disabled.
My username, it was saying, didn't exist.
So at that point, I couldn't access my funds and I couldn't access my mobile banking.
I couldn't even see my account balance.
So I ended up going physically into a branch location because I thought that might be easier than trying to get somebody on the phone on customer service.
And I, at this point, had no suspicion that I had been debanked.
I thought there must be some kind of issue.
A mistake was made.
So I go into the bank and I'm speaking to the woman at the front counter.
I gave her my bank card, told her my name, and she informed me that the risk department had made the decision to terminate the account and sever the business relationship.
And nobody told me why the bank decided to do this, what prompted this decision.
They wouldn't give me any information.
And so she didn't have information, so she puts me in a cubicle and puts me on the phone with the risk department.
On the phone with the risk department, they would give me no information either.
They wouldn't tell me even what my account balance was.
They wouldn't tell me the status of some deposits I made that I was waiting to clear.
They wouldn't tell me if that had happened.
And I said, okay, well, if you guys are going to terminate my account for no reason with no notice, can I withdraw my funds and then just take my business elsewhere?
And they told me no.
They said that they would be essentially holding my funds hostage and that I would receive a check in the mail, but they wouldn't give me a timeframe of when I could expect that.
And Han, have you gotten it yet?
So I've gotten very bizarre communications from Bank of America.
After I left the bank, I went home and I called the risk department again just to clarify that this was actually happening and I wasn't mistaken.
And I recorded the call.
I spoke to someone in the risk department for five minutes who essentially told me this.
They said the risk department had made the decision to sever the business relationship and terminate the account and that it was in Bank of America's terms of service that they can do this at any time without notice or explanation.
So they were giving me sort of like a canned response.
And they did this also right before I had a bunch of auto pays scheduled to go through.
So now I'm getting payments being declined.
So I went on to Exxon and I put a thread up and I included a video because I had the presence of mind to film the interaction at the bank where they told me what happened and they were terminating the account.
I had no idea that that thread was gonna go viral the way that it did.
Well, Bank of America started calling me, telling me that, they gave me many different stories, but essentially they are trying to tell me the account has now been restored, and I still can't access my bank card, I still can't use my mobile banking, my payments are still being declined.
So as far as I'm concerned, they terminated the account, and I am going to be taking my business elsewhere.
But this has caused a lot of problems for me because I think you know, if you're an independent journalist, independent filmmaker, every small amount matters.
And for a bank to hold on to your funds, to not give you any information, and to essentially say, we can just hold on to this and then cut you a check in the mail whenever we feel like it, that is unacceptable in America.
Well, what I find very disturbing about this is that it seems to me that the only plausible rationale for why they did this is that somebody told them that you're making this documentary.
And also, this is a documentary with a kind of a startling title, a startlingly appropriate title, I gotta add, Kidnap and Kill an FBI Terror Plot.
The point being...
That the FBI are the plotters here.
You know, the FBI aren't foiling a plot.
The FBI are putting a plot into motion.
Let's turn to that.
And that is the Whitmer kidnapping story.
A story that you've pursued now for several years and are in the process of making a documentary and maybe even a documentary with multiple episodes because you've got so much footage.
Can you talk about...
What interested you in this topic?
And second of all, what do you think is the most important lesson or significance of this case?
Because it's a case in Michigan, but it's a case, I think, with much larger import.
Partly its connection to January 6th, but partly also what it shows about the U.S. government and about the FBI. Talk about your interest in the case and Also, kind of the discoveries you made as you dug into it.
Yeah, so I had already been, prior to the men being arrested, I'd been investigating FBI corruption in other areas, right?
Historical instances of FBI corruption.
So when this story broke and it was announced the way that it was announced, I immediately was suspicious.
So I started reporting on the case and As that went to trial, you know all the crazy issues that happened.
That first federal trial ending in zero convictions for the government, two acquittals, Daniel Harris and Brandon Caserta, with a mistrial on the so-called ringleaders Adam and Barry.
So after that first trial, I reached out to Brandon.
I made contact with him.
I interviewed him. And just from my interview with him, I realized there was so much that even I didn't know as somebody who was not only following the case, but reporting on it daily.
So I said to him, I've never done this before, but I think we need to make a documentary here.
And so he and I started working together.
He got me in touch with Adam and Barry.
This was prior to their conviction in the retrial.
There was all kinds of corruption with the retrial.
I was in Michigan for the verdict there.
I thought it was going to go a different way.
But... As this has progressed, I mean, it's just gotten crazier and crazier as far as the things that I've learned.
I will say I don't think they ever wanted this case to go to trial.
They waited on the state guys.
So those eight men were charged with providing material support.
And the state trials...
We're put on hold until they could secure the conviction on Adam and Barry, the men framed as the ringleaders in that retrial.
And I don't believe if they had not gotten those convictions, you can't charge the other eight men for providing material support to something that didn't happen or a jury has determined was instigated by the government itself.
Now, as far as the Things that I've uncovered since I have been investigating the case and doing the film, and I don't want to give too much away because I want to have an incentive for people to watch it when it comes out.
But I will say that it is much bigger than Michigan.
As you said, not only does this...
Parts of it seeming to be a trial run for January 6th, but it also has to do with criminalizing militia activity.
There's now a bill called the Preventing Private Paramilitary Activity Act of 2024, whose goal is to criminalize people coming together and doing defensive firearms training and medical training, which is an American tradition that has gone on forever.
Also, the government billed this as the biggest domestic terror case in a generation, which tells you, I think, the level of resources used here.
They ran it as a terrorism enterprise investigation, a TEI. So this was a big deal, and it affects more than these men.
The precedent set with the case law will affect other people in the future.
These men essentially are...
Incarcerated because of inflammatory things they said while the government was recording them in a situation they manufactured.
It's so egregious and it stems from, in my opinion, an earlier operation conducted by the FBI in 2018 and 19 to infiltrate the Midwest militia movement.
And since this case has gone through and been adjudicated, I mean, as you know, five men have been acquitted now by two different juries.
And we have five who are still incarcerated, appealing their convictions.
As far as the connection to January 6, the special agent in charge of the Detroit field office overseeing the Whitmer investigation was a man named Steven D'Antuono, who was promoted one week after the men were arrested on October 13th by Christopher Wray himself to be the assistant director of the Washington DC field office, where he oversaw another so-called storming of the Capitol.
And people forget what happened in the Whitmer case, there was a dry run for that in Lansing in April of 2020.
There was a rally called the American Patriot Rally.
This was an anti-lockdown pro-2A rally.
The FBI was there.
They had already infiltrated the Wolverine Watchmen group.
Their informant, Big Dan, was there leading the group.
And the FBI is listening in in real time.
He says, I think these guys are getting ready to do something.
He doesn't say why he thinks that or what he thinks they're going to do, but the FBI instructs the Lansing Capitol Police to stand down, open the doors, and let everyone in.
And so these men stood in line for an hour.
They went through COVID screenings, and then they went inside and occupied the Capitol building armed in a full kit for about four hours, and then they left peacefully.
But the news images, the images that went on the news the next day was like, you know, Far-right militia groups stormed the Capitol and they had pictures of the guys in there.
Well, the FBI, it seems, was also using that news coverage to try to recruit more people into the Wolverine Watchmen.
Very interesting. I think what I read most recently was that a court of appeals has now asked the government about evidence that was excluded in the case of Fox and the other guy, the two guys who are sitting in jail with long prison terms.
The judge apparently, pardon me?
In supermax prisons.
Supermax prison, that's right.
In the Alcatraz of the Rockies, in Florence supermax.
And my question is this, that it seems like a lot of the evidence of the full complicity of the federal government was excluded from their trial, and an appellate court is now saying, hey...
We think that that evidence should have been included, and the only question that we're wrestling with is, would it have made a difference in the outcome?
Now, I mean, to me, it seems hard to believe that it would not have made a difference in the outcome.
Quite obviously, if the jury knows that, hey, this was, to a large degree, cooked up by the FBI, that makes all the difference in the world.
Are you hopeful that you might see an appellate overturning of the Fox conviction?
Yes. Yes, absolutely.
Adam Fox and Barry Croft had their oral arguments at the Sixth Circuit, as you said.
That three panel judges, it seemed to me, at least from what I heard, they seemed very interested in...
The government orchestrating this.
I mean, they kind of argued with the government about the Judge Yonkers hearsay ruling, which prevented a lot of exculpatory information from coming in, not just audio of informants and showing how they were orchestrating things, how they were pushing people, but also certain text messages between the informants and their handling agents.
The defense had already filed an entire motion filled with these out of court statements they were called, statements they wanted to get in.
I believe it would have made the difference.
I think the Sixth Circuit is going to agree because again, look back at the first trial.
It ends in zero convictions and a mistrial on Adam and Barry which means it was very close.
I believe had that audio come in and those messages, it would have made the difference.
and I don't believe that those men would be in Supermax today.
So I'm very hopeful.
I think that they're going to get a new trial and the government is going to have to actually let them admit evidence, but also question their accusers, confront their accusers.
In the federal case, they kept the three lead handling agents off the stand, all of who, by the way, have been accused of misconduct in one form or another.
They should have been able to impeach those agents, but also the informants.
because ultimately those are part of the people who are accusing them and they kept off um steve robeson one of their main informants who is also a child predator and a lot of these out-of-court statements that they want to get in are things he said he was a main architect of this along with dan chapel And that's basically what they want to prevent from getting in.
But I think they're going to get a new trial, and I think it's not going to go well for the government if all of this evidence has to come in because it just shows you how they orchestrated the entire thing all the way down to calling the meetings, hosting the meetings, hosting the FTXs, paying for things, Picking people up from different states, bringing them together, introducing people to one another who had never met each other except online prior to the FBI getting involved.
So it will show exactly how they did it.
And I think that they don't want that.
But I'm very hopeful. I mean, Christina, this is a huge case, in my opinion, and I want to compliment you on not only diving into it, but adopting this kind of investigative, expository approach, because it's kind of like some of the work that Julie Kelly's done on January 6th.
The really interesting stuff is in the details, and you have to really get into it in order for people to understand the full extent of the corruption that has gone on here at the highest levels of the U.S. government and the FBI. So I want to wish you all the best for the film.
As I mentioned to you before we got started, I'm happy to be in touch.
If there's any way I can help you in advising you just about What to do with the film.
I mean, I just would like to see it get maximum reach, maximum impact.
We want to see it in theaters.
I would love to see it played in theaters in Michigan.
I mean, you want to get it out everywhere because it's of relevance to Michigan, but I think it's also of relevance to the country generally.
Guys, I've been talking to Christina Erso, journalist, documentarian.
The website, knkfilm.com.
Christina, thank you for joining me.
Thank you. The year is 1677, so we're talking about the latter part of the 17th century.
A ship is leaving London.
It carries 230 Quakers, and the king is there to meet them, and he says,"'Are all aboard, good Quakers?' And yes, they say,"'We are all friends.'" We're good to go.
And then come more ships.
And this is a migration that continues all the way to about the year 1700.
So over the next 20 years, a whole bunch of Quakers come to Jersey.
They found the colony of Pennsylvania.
They move into the Delaware Valley.
This is in the early 18th century, so from about 1700 to maybe 1720 and their numbers begin to multiply very rapidly.
This is a part of America that is very congenial.
And the Quakers begin to thrive.
Now, other immigrants come as well from other places.
Germans come, Scandinavians will come later.
And what's interesting is that these people come to sort of Quaker towns, and they don't really become Quakers, but they become Quaker-ish, which is to say they adopt the Quaker...
Not the Quaker lifestyle, because the Quaker lifestyle has many distinctive elements, but they are, in the terms of the Quakers, friendly.
So they're not in the society of friends, but they are friendly, which is to say that they have an affinity with the Quakers.
In fact, interestingly, when you have...
Town representation and so on.
And you'll have Quakers running for office.
You'll find the Germans and Scandinavians voting for the Quakers.
Why? Because they actually like the tone that the Quakers have set for this part of America.
Remember, we're talking about the inauguration of what you can now call the American Midwest.
These are the people that created the Midwest and this was the original culture to which many other people subsequently assimilated.
What was the motive of the Quakers?
Religion. Same as the Puritans.
Kind of the same as the Anglicans.
But the Quakers were very different from the Anglicans and the Puritans.
First of all, they were much less severe, much less sort of fanatical, if you will, than the Puritans.
And they were much less pompous and liturgical than the Anglicans.
The Quakers were, let's call them, extremely low-key.
And they were very low-key about their religion as well.
First of all, they were very New Testament-y in their understanding of Christianity, which means they didn't really like the Old Testament.
Not that they repudiated it, but the style of the Old Testament, Moses and the clash with Pharaoh, this was not the Quaker style.
The Quaker style was kind of gentle, easy-going, and And in fact, it was not creedal.
And by creedal, I mean the Quakers didn't care that much about theological distinctions, fine points of debate.
Their basic idea was that God is love and God is light.
Light is a big word for the Quakers because the Quakers, to this day, speak about the inner light.
When Danielle moved with me to New York when I was head of the King's College, she went to a very supposedly first-rate school in New York that was called the Friends School, Quaker School.
I had some reservations about it, but I thought, you know what, it's a really good school, so let's try it.
And every morning, they would all go into a room for about 20 minutes before the day began, dead silence, No music, no speaking, no prayers, no nothing.
The whole idea was you're just supposed to reflect and call upon your inner light.
So even today in secular New York, in a Quaker school that I'm sure is quite a long ways from the original Quakers, nevertheless this persistent belief in this idea of the inner light.
This was the essence of Quaker theology.
And it was a complete rejection of, let's just say, the Puritan idea of predestination or the idea that God has chosen some sort of an elect and only the elect are going to go to heaven.
Everybody else is damned.
The Quakers were not only against this theologically, they were against this temperamentally.
So for the Quakers, no sacraments, no ceremonies, no real churches, no clergy, no ordination, just kind of these lay missionaries who would talk about the inner light.
Now, the Quakers didn't really start off that way.
In the beginning, the Quakers in England were tormented by the Puritans.
They were tormented by the Anglicans.
And so the early Quakers were what we would today call conspiracy theorists, meaning they were evolutionary and radical.
They were primitive. They were militant.
They were aggressive. They were secretive.
They were messianic. They looked to the...
Look for redemption through the coming of Jesus, the end of the world.
But this was kind of the first generation.
And then by 1677, when the Quakers left for America, this was, I would call it, phase two of the Quakers.
The Quakers had settled down.
In fact, England had gone through a revolution, the English Civil War, and the monarchy had been overthrown.
Charles I was executed, as I mentioned earlier.
But then the monarchy was restored.
Oliver Cromwell came to a sorry end.
The rebellion against the king was ultimately repudiated by the English people.
Monarchy was restored.
That's sometimes called the restoration.
And now there was a greater attitude of tolerance for the Quakers.
And that's why the king was there at the shore, at the dock in London, to see them off.
So like... Okay guys, if you want to go to another place and look for a better life, no problem.
But not because I'm here to torment you.
If you see better shores over in America, kind of all the best to you.
So the Quakers who came to America were not fanatical.
They were... Basically, optimistic.
They saw themselves as enlightened.
They were liberal in the old or classical sense.
They were moderate.
Moderate politically, moderate theologically, and of course, the moderation that I've described in the Midwest now.
The kind of Mike Pence mentality.
Don't rock the boat. This is an inheritance of the Quakers.
Now, Mike Pence is not a Quaker.
He would describe himself, I'm sure, as an evangelical Christian.
But I'm saying this is his cultural ancestry.
Now, the...
The immigrants, as I mentioned, that came to Pennsylvania, immigrants that were German pietists and so on, and And later Ben Franklin would talk about these people and he'd be like, wow, who are these people?
They don't even speak English. They're coming to America.
And Ben Franklin was a little concerned that these people would settle down, the German settlers.
But the German settlers kind of, in a sense, merged with the Quakers.
They assimilated English culture.
But English culture for them was, of course, the culture that had been established by the Quakers.
And even when the Quakers became a minority in Jersey and Delaware and Pennsylvania, they still set the tone for those counties and for those regions.
Now, where do these Quakers come from?
They came from a group.
They came from the...
The middle ranks of English society.
So that's to say they were not rich, but they were not poor.
They came from the northern part of England, but not the far north, just north of London.
In fact, very interestingly, the...
Historian David Hackett Fisher says they came from sort of Emily and Charlotte Bronte country.
If you've read Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre, there's a very vivid landscape described.
Heavy winds, dark rain, a rural landscape with a lot of landed gentry, and also a lot of small cottages.
This is the part of England from which these people came.
And later, that same part of England became very industrial.
So big cities like Manchester and Sheffield and Leeds and a lot of the textile industry and so on developed there.
But that was not until the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century.
So in this time, which is to say we're now talking about the year around 1700, it's all rural, it's farmers, it's cottages, it's simple people, and they come to America...
And they come to places like Morristown and Allentown and Harrisburg.
And by the way, these are all names that can be traced even now to the North Midlands of England.
And... So, these are people who are very simple people.
They're farmers, they're herdsmen, they're very family-oriented, they eat very simple meals.
One of their favorites, boiled porridge and oat cakes.
The other thing you notice about Quakers, they all dress alike.
To this day.
And even then. Simple homespun suits and dresses.
The houses are sparsely furnished.
So a typical room would have like a table in the middle, four chairs around it.
The rest of the room completely empty.
On the wall, nothing.
And finally, for the Quakers, plain speech.
Short sentences, generally a subject, a verb, and an object.
No embellishment, no big words, no Dineshisms, no guffaws.
By and large, these are simple, serious people who live life in the absolute basic mode.
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