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May 24, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:11
BILLIONAIRE IN THE BRONX Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep840
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Coming up, the world of scholarship and universities and science is in more trouble than we think.
I'll talk about the scandal of scholarly papers that are routinely discovered to be dishonest and plagiarized.
Debbie joins me. We're going to talk about the lengths that they'll go to to get rid of Trump, his Bronx rally, and the illegals who keep showing up in Texas airports.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble, listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Guys, it's been quite a week in terms of all kinds of developments on the legal and the political front, the wrapping up of the Trump trial in New York.
And after closing statements, it's in the hands of the jury.
It could take days.
It could take a week.
No one really knows, but there presumably will be a verdict Coming fairly soon.
And that's going to be very interesting and very significant.
The substance of the case has been utterly preposterous.
The idea of...
It's almost like we want to get Trump.
Now, let's kind of ransack this old Stormy Daniels accusation.
Who knows if it's true or not?
But there was some money exchanged.
Let's go look at the legal filing.
Wait a minute. It's listed as legal.
So there's a misdemeanor, but a misdemeanor, well, that's not enough.
So what can we do with this misdemeanor?
Well, what if we try to show that there was a corrupt purpose behind this misdemeanor, that the idea of a legal designation or misfiling is because Trump wanted to keep negative stories from coming out about this?
Well, what's wrong with that?
So what? Well, but if he wanted negative stories not to come out, it could be that he was trying to influence the 2020, the 2016 election.
Yeah, it was a very close election, guys.
Maybe Trump would have lost that election had there been some more negative stories.
So he was violating campaign finance laws.
True, nobody said he did.
There was no federal charge about this at all.
In fact, they wouldn't have dreamed of doing it because making a payment to somebody for private matter doesn't exactly qualify as a federal campaign finance violation.
So this is the...
Inane superstructure in which the case is based.
So what this verdict is about, quite simply, is what is the level of utter shamelessness and bias on the part of the judge and the jury?
Because it depends on jury instructions and it depends on what the jury votes.
I am obviously hopeful that there will be one or more or sufficient numbers of jurors who will go We see what's going on here.
Let me talk about something else I spotted this week, and that is something that indicates that there are real problems going on in our universities, in the world of scholarship, in America, but also around the world, and in the world of science.
I mean, this is an area where there are There was a great deal of credibility.
Had you said 10 or 20 years ago, do you by and large trust the research product of our universities?
most people would say, well, yeah, that's why people come from all over the world to go to places like MIT.
Do you trust scholarly journals?
Nature, for example, is the most reputable science journal in the world, there's a journal called Sign.
Do you trust the publications in these journals?
Most people would go, well, yeah, these are our best scientists who do work, they publish it.
Isn't there such a thing called peer review where other people look at it to make sure it's all legit?
Well, it turns out that this whole system of peer review, of publishing, appears to be corrupted in multiple ways.
We're probably most familiar with ideological corruption, which is to say, with inconvenient findings being excluded.
Is there a genetic basis for differences in ethnic IQ? Don't talk about that!
Even if the research shows one thing, let's just pretend like it's another thing.
So there's that problem.
Gender differences.
The differences between men and women clearly established, not just for human beings, but throughout the animal and even the planned kingdom.
Well, yes, there are, but let's not talk about it.
This is politically inconvenient.
Let's downplay it.
Let's pretend like there's a difference between, well, sex is not the same thing as gender.
So we're familiar with this ideological territory.
But here's a startling headline in the Wall Street Journal.
Flood of fake science.
Fake science. We're not just talking about fake humanities, fake social science.
Fake science forces multiple journal closures.
I'm going to read the first line.
Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific journals, leading to thousands of retractions.
The biggest hit has come to Wiley, a 217-year-old publisher based in Hoboken, New Jersey, which is announcing it is closing 19 journals, some of which were infected by large-scale research fraud.
So, what's going on here?
Well, what's going on is that suddenly these journals, some of them are online journals, some of them are paper journals, these journals publish a lot of material.
And the material comes by and large from academics, academics who are in some cases established in their field, in other cases trying to get established in their field, and in many cases trying to make a name for themselves.
Very often when you submit for an academic job, you say, I was published in 17 journals.
I've had 18 articles that have appeared in 10 different journals over a period of the last five years.
So academics are under a lot of pressure to publish.
And as it turns out, there has developed inside of academia a whole thing.
Fake publishing industry.
So in other words, what happens is there are fake operators, fake companies, fake individuals inside of the publishing world.
And what these guys allow you to do is buy not only articles published by you, and they supply you with all kinds of material, by and large stock material lifted from other publications and And they go, you know, all you have to do basically is write a few sentences, put your name on it, and then you have an article, voila!
Or what they say is, listen, we're not going to publish your article per se, but isn't it helpful to you academically if we have lots of other articles written by other people that cite you?
And so if you like, what we can do is we can have 30 different articles that will cite your work for a small fee.
Pay us $3,000, we'll give you 30 citations.
Pay us $6,000, we'll give you 60 citations.
And academics will then go, oh wow, well that can help me get tenure at this university or that university.
By and large, tenure means a salary for life.
Or even a promotion.
I'm making $62,000, but now I'll be making $76,000 from now on.
So it's worth 14 grand a year.
Sure, I'll pay $6,000 to get all these citations.
So this is racketeering that's going on inside of publishing and inside of academia.
Very often the citations are bogus.
Someone is citing your work.
It's nothing you really did.
But on the other hand, your name is appearing in a seemingly scholarly paper.
Or they craft a paper for you.
It's just a lifted bunch of plagiarism and gobbledygook.
So in other words, they're citing all kinds of, they've learned how to use academic kind of lingo.
And so, as you know, academic lingo is often technical.
Half of it makes absolutely no sense.
And so it's very easy to just take a melange of words, put them together, and You basically get an academic sentence.
And if you keep doing this, and now of course we have the new edition of AI, where AI can scour the internet, pick up a whole bunch of words in a given field, and string them together.
Subject, verb, object.
Even though to a trained mind, if you read it, you're like, this doesn't really make a whole lot of sense.
But here's the point. No one reads this stuff.
Why? Because there are just thousands and thousands of articles.
There are more academics publishing articles than there are people really there to read them.
And reading them is not even the point.
They don't care if you read them.
You wrote an article and no one read it.
Who cares? I was able to submit it for tenure and that was really the purpose of writing the article Or even writing the book.
So by and large, these publishers have found out that article upon article upon article is total bunk.
These articles aren't real.
They are producing no new research.
They have no academic value at all.
This is an example of wide-scale academic fraud going on in not just American science, but scientific publications around the world.
And now, by and large, the publishers are catching up to it.
They're closing journals.
They're trying to catch this stuff.
But of course, as the publishers get smarter about using artificial intelligence and other techniques to catch the fraud, the fraudsters are getting smarter about using artificial intelligence to go around the people who are trying to catch them.
So this appears to be a measure, countermeasure attempt, kind of arms race, if you will, between the publishers and the fraudsters.
And who knows where it will end.
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Tabina, ready for our Friday roundup.
And this time, I must say, we are suitably attired.
Now, actually, my attire is probably less visible because when I look at my shirt, I do have a small, subtle kind of Trump sign on it.
But you have a kind of a blaring Trump shirt.
And we were... Let's see.
When did we get these? We got them a little while ago.
Well, actually, this was a gift.
I think it was Cowboys for Trump or Cowgirls for Trump.
One of those groups, they sent me this.
And needless to say, this is the very first time I wear it.
I mean, neither of us normally wear insignia.
We just don't do it. I think I got this shirt at the Bedminster...
Yes, you did, in New Jersey.
Yes, you did. Yeah, the golf course where we had a meeting with Trump.
But it was over a year ago.
Oh, two years ago.
Two years ago, yeah. Okay, finally I fished out the shirt and decided to wear it.
Hey, before, we want to talk about Trump.
We want to talk about the Bronx.
We want to talk about the Trump case in New York.
But before we do that, this week I've had a couple of guests on...
social media that I'm obviously watching from a distance but a lot of people participating I'm just a spectator it's these young people and a lot of them women making very confessional videos about how difficult it is for them to find a guy and a lot of these women are like they're angry because they're like I did everything right I work hard.
I'm very successful. I watch my weight.
I do this. I do that.
And yet, like, they're like, it's been years since a guy even asked me out.
So something appears to be like out of kilter with the younger generation.
I mean, a lot of things, I guess, out of kilter with the younger generation.
Don't get me started. But like, what is...
What is your take on this?
Because we watch this stuff and in some ways it's a little foreign to us.
It's very foreign to us.
I mean, it really is because we came from the era of, of course, there were no dating apps when we were in the dating age.
We basically met our spouses either in college or the workplace.
So it was not...
It was not something that I even thought about when I was young, you know?
So it is very foreign, but of course, you know, we have kids.
One of them is married.
Danielle is married to Brandon.
And then, you know, my two kids, Justin doesn't have a girlfriend right now.
And then Juliana has a boyfriend that we're hoping maybe becomes more than that, you know, if he's watching.
Hmm. Anyway, so...
A really nice guy.
He's a really nice guy and she would just die if she saw this segment.
But anyway, but I'm really happy that she met him because I think they're very well matched and she didn't have to go on a dating app and he didn't either and all that.
But interestingly, if you look at this guy, he's not that representative of...
Of this generation. Yeah, no.
He's kind of old school.
Yeah, traditional.
Yeah, he's someone who says, you know, when I went to college, I got a major in construction science because I didn't have connections like some other people and I wasn't guaranteed a job.
And so I needed to get a skill that I could put to use.
And so at a very young age, this guy is a foreman, a supervisor.
He's basically running the Superintendent, I think.
I don't know what it's called.
But anyway, it appears like there's a lot of men, young men today, who essentially are like, I am opting out of the dating scene and I'm opting out of marriage.
Well, it's also because some of these girls have this expectation of like this, like the kind of husband that they want is like he's six foot three and he's very successful.
He makes six figures.
He has a great body.
All these things that are not really reality in a lot of cases.
And to take it further, let's take that guy.
Who has those expectations?
Very often, that guy then goes and says, well, you know what?
I don't necessarily want...
I'm successful, so I don't actually need somebody to supplement my income.
That's not the most important thing for me.
I'm actually going to look for a simple, pretty girl who would like to be a wife and a mom.
And then these women get smolderingly angry, and they go, how dare this person have such a preference?
How I'm a much better choice because I spend a lot of time with my therapist and I do three and a half hours of exercise every day and I've got a very important job.
It's almost as if there is now like a mismatch of expectations.
The kind of women who are most eager to find the successful man are dismayed that that man doesn't want them.
Right. And yeah, rightfully so for the guy to not want them.
I mean, you know, because a lot of times these girls are narcissists.
I mean, think about marrying a narcissist.
How is that going to last?
So anyway, quite interesting because as you know, it doesn't apply to us, our generation.
And So it's kind of interesting to watch these kids kind of self-destruct in a way.
And in a time when we need the family to be a cohesive unit.
Although I do think there's a part of what they're doing that is correct.
and that is that they are reassessing the radical egalitarianism of the 1960s.
So in other words, the 1960s tried to replace the old system with a system of like shared everything, right? Now interestingly if we look at our relationship, we don't actually have that kind of shared everything.
In other words, we are very adaptive to things.
And I mean, I'll help out, but you like take charge of certain things, right?
And you help out, and I take charge of certain things.
You're like, yes, indeed.
Who runs the household? Yeah, so in other words, there are a lot of decisions which are like your domain and there are some that are mine.
Yeah, like the financial.
I mean, when you start talking financial stuff, I'm like, you know, there's like this, I have this glossy look because I don't know what you're talking about.
And then when I start talking about, oh, well, I've got to call the plumber for this.
I've got to call the electrician for that.
I've got to do this. You're like, it's almost like, don't bother me with that kind of stuff.
but as you know, if we don't have a infrastructure in our home, we can't really do our business, right?
So I have to juggle.
But I'm saying ours is based upon, like ours is a complementarity.
We never have any arguments about, you're like, well, you don't do your share of the housework.
I mean, things that I'm good at, I actually, I do.
And happily, you know.
And you do all the grocery shopping.
I do all the grocery shopping, which I don't, you don't like to do it.
I hate it. I hate it.
And that's why, you know, again, when people see you that recognize you, they probably think, where's your wife?
Why isn't she doing the grocery shopping?
Why am I pushing a cart? Why are you pushing a cart?
And then I'm like, but remember, don't rub your eyes after you push the cart because it's going to be dirty and you're probably thinking, then you push the cart.
You go to the grocery store.
But anyway. All that to say.
Trump in the Bronx.
I mean, this is an interesting site.
Massive crowds, people lining up.
And, you know, here's Trump going after, I won't say going after New York.
I don't think he genuinely thinks he can win New York, but going after the black vote.
Yeah.
say, well, we need to have better outreach.
And what they mean is opening up some liaison to the black community that the RNC pays money to do, but not the candidate making a direct pitch.
And by the way, not just to upper middle class blacks who are real estate agents and work in academia.
He's appealing to ordinary working class blacks.
Poor. Poor blacks. And saying, you need to try me.
You've tried the other guys.
And the thing about it is, they did try him.
When he was president, the black unemployment rate was super low.
I mean, it was. And so they know...
They know his policies work.
And of course, they've been so brainwashed, like the Latinos, have been so brainwashed into believing that only the Democrats have their back when in fact the Democrats use these groups to advance their agenda, right? And it's remarkable, the black vote.
What did we say it was?
Like it could be 20%?
Well, I mean, it was about, it's been about 10% by and large going back for half a century.
Right? Republicans get about 10.
You can count on 10. The Democrats can count on 90.
And that's why blacks are the base of their party, kind of like evangelicals are the base of the Republican Party.
Trump, I think, at the last count was at 22.
I think he can go higher than that.
Maybe 25. Wow, it would be.
And I read that he could have about a 46% with Latinos, which is craziness because the last president that had even 40% was Bush, W. So that is really remarkable.
If he can make enroads with these groups, I think we're going to see the next president of the United States.
What do you think about these cases and how they're playing out with Hispanics and Blacks?
In other words, here's Trump. He's like sitting in a courtroom. They're like after him for this, after him for that. I think that there's an element in these minority communities. I mean, I'm surprised to see in a typical Hispanic family or Black family, they almost always know somebody who is in prison or who's been in prison or in parole.
So they're familiar with the system much more so than typical white family.
Yeah. Well, and also familiar with the system are Cubans and Venezuelans who know that the tyrannical fascist government going after their political opponents is...
In this way, whether it be putting him in jail for doing absolutely nothing, concocting something to put him in jail, or as we just witnessed, the FBI raid, which again, we could talk about that in the next segment, but it's just crazy.
So they recognize tyranny when they see it, and I believe that that's what's happened.
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What do you make of this whole, you know, lethal force, deadly force instruction in the Mar-a-Lago raid?
As you know, there are people, and people we know, who have downplayed it, standard practice.
You have other people, Bongino, Julie Kelly, who are like, this is a big deal.
Yeah, well, you know, why don't you talk a little bit about your experience with the bureaucracy of the government and what they are able and not able to do when it comes to, like, deciding, oh, okay, this doesn't apply to Dinesh because he doesn't go to class at this time.
Sure. You know, why don't you talk about that?
I mean, in all kinds of ways, I found that the bureaucracy is robotic.
Uh-huh. There's no ability to think, even in the simplest terms.
And so you remember when we were courting, we would go out to eat, and then I had to check into the confinement center.
Not only would I abstain from alcohol, which I can't because I'm taking a breathalyzer, I wouldn't even eat candy that contained like a cordial or rum flavor.
Because I know these people have no ability to say, hey, listen, your level is so low because you obviously haven't had a drink.
Mm-hmm. No, it's like, I just don't want that thing to go off because crazy people, not crazy people, but robots are managing it.
Similarly, as you know, I would, you know, I teach a class as part of my community service.
And so I would check in late certain days because I had my class, but then in the summer, no class.
So I'd show up at the confinement center and I'd be like, you know, normally I check in at 8pm because of my class, but I don't have class in the summer.
So here I am at 6pm or 7pm, which is my normal check-in time.
They're like, it says here 8 o'clock.
I'm like, yeah, I know, but that's because I normally have a class.
But since I don't have a class, they're like, it says here 8 o'clock.
Then I realized, don't argue with this guy.
He's a complete robot.
Leave and return at the time it says on the sheet.
And your point is that this gives you some insight about how bureaucracies function, right?
So explain that. Right.
So if it says, use lethal force in any kind of raid...
Normal standard procedure for any raid to use lethal force if necessary.
They're not going to take that form and apply it differently in this raid.
Because first of all, when was the last time any president had a raid in their home?
Right. No, I know.
But that's my point, is that since it is unprecedented, it hasn't happened before, you think that Merrick Garland, who, by the way, signed off himself, would take the sheet and go, oh, you know what?
We're dealing with Trump.
This is a Secret Service facility.
We can't have the FBI going in with the possibility of using lethal force.
We need to modify...
Because we're talking about a document case, former president, protected facility, secret service, potential for all kinds of things going wrong.
Just to say, this is the way the form was printed, but you're saying that's how these people are.
Well, if that's... Now, I'm not saying that that's what happened.
I'm saying that if that's what happened, the reason it happened is because they don't have the ability to think for themselves, and all they do is follow procedure, whatever it may be.
However, in this case, I do think it was nefarious.
I do think they knew exactly what they were doing.
I think Merrick Garland knew exactly what he was doing.
And I think that he thought, well, in the event that Trump gets a little feisty, hey, stop.
Too bad. This is a little bit like what Clinton said when he burned down Waco.
He burned down that facility.
Standard practice.
I support the Attorney General, Janet Reno, for doing this by the book.
Yeah, it doesn't matter that there were women and children with this crazy man in there.
Who cares, right?
According to procedure, if he's seen as a threat, go for it.
And that's what happened in that case.
Yeah, with all those innocent casualties.
So anyway, I think it needs to be looked into and I think Trump should look into that because I think that there's something there and it's very, very creepy.
Yeah. Not to mention that if Trump wins the election, we should have a number of arrests of prominent Democrats, and the FBI should go in with the exact same instructions.
In other words, standard operating procedure.
Hey, how is it the case that you had firefights and 19 Democrats are now in the hospital?
Standard operating procedure.
That's how we've done it historically, guys.
And we were, you know, nothing to see here, folks.
I mean, I'm obviously exaggerating.
But you see, my point is that, again, this is something that if the shoe were on the other foot, the left would be screaming.
Yeah, they would be freaking out. But you know what they're not freaking out about?
And what I'm freaking out about is, as you know, I've been going to Harlingen...
I think I've done like almost 20 round trips since February.
Back and forth, yeah. Like back and forth, right?
So Harlingen is a border town.
It's near Brownsville, which is the border town.
Right. And it's a really small airport.
It is an international airport, but only because connecting flights go internationally.
They go to Mexico, they go to Canada, and so they call it international.
But anyway, the interesting thing is every single time...
That I have left that airport to come home, to Houston, come home.
There are at least a dozen or more young Hispanic men with backpacks, speaking only Spanish.
And obviously, I know Spanish because that's my native language, so I know what they're saying.
And I try to listen in to their conversations and And they're simply just talking about, when we get to so-and-so, this is what we're going to do.
We're going to try to bunk with so-and-so.
And I'm thinking to myself, why, first of all, Are they letting them in?
Like, are they letting them go through TSA? Because I, this was, oh, this was very funny.
So, or not so funny, really.
But you know how you go in, you show your driver's license to TSA, and then they let you in?
I always have pre-check because I bought it.
But anyway, I still get dinged every once in a while for like I'm, you know, like a random, you know, whatever.
So I noticed that these guys don't go through that process.
They don't have ID. They don't produce it. They go to the TSA and they obviously don't have anything.
They don't have an ID really to speak of.
So what they do is the Border Patrol takes a Polaroid photo of them and then they write something down and then they let them through.
And I'm like thinking, what in the world?
What kind of security is that?
What kind of security? You know, why are you making me do all this?
And these people are just getting in with a Polaroid shot.
You know, like, if I don't have my driver's license, they're not going to let me get on the plane.
Exactly. But these people...
So anyway, but even more, like...
Scary than even that, if that's not scary enough, is the fact that every single time I have flown back to Houston, there are at least a dozen or more of these young men.
They're not the same young men.
Right, right. Different young men.
Yeah. And presumably, they are being scattered everywhere.
I don't even think they stop here.
I think they go to Chicago or Boston, somewhere else.
But I just, I want to know why.
I just, I want to know why.
Why are they letting them in?
Why so many?
And they're not coming in with a spouse and children.
Some are. There are, I've seen some, but not many.
The vast majority are at least, you know, the planes I come on are very small planes.
They're like RJs.
Yeah. Yeah, that's right. And so they only have like 50 passengers, 50 to 80 passengers, and it's usually half the plane.
So, you know, it's very disturbing to me.
And you know that they're also not buying their tickets.
They're not buying their tickets!
Yeah, so you have free travelers with no ID. I mean, what could be a better symbol of giving preference to...
Aliens of no known provenance, no known background, over American citizens, they're getting the first class treatment, let's say, and you're getting the second class treatment, even if you buy a first class ticket.
All right, let's talk briefly about what's happening with Elvis.
Oh, yeah. Graceland.
Graceland, which I visited.
Did we go to Graceland? We didn't together.
Okay, I visited Graceland once, and it's many, many years ago.
Yeah, yeah. A strange place, admittedly.
Yeah, well, you know, Elvis was a strange dude.
He was a strange dude. You know, he was very, when he got a lot of money, he didn't know what to do with it, so he starts buying all this, like, crazy stuff, and he did buy his mom a mansion.
I mean, you know, that's kind of sweet.
He promised his mom a mansion.
And he was apparently generous to others.
He'd buy this guy a car, he'd buy that guy.
Yeah, yeah. He was a big-hearted guy.
Yeah. So anyway, so he buys this mansion and he calls it Graceland.
Yeah. But anyway, apparently...
There was an auction that was going to take place yesterday for foreclosure of the home.
Sell the property. Sell it to the highest bidder.
Wow. Is the heir.
And she found out that there was a fraudulent form that supposedly, what's her name, Lisa Marie, had signed.
But her signature was not legitimate.
It was actually a forgery.
Oh, wow. And she had offered Graceland as collateral before her death.
And because she foreclosed on it, they had the right to take it, to seize it and sell it to the highest bidder.
But Lisa Marie's daughter, Riley, said that the documents were all fraud, that her mother's signature on them was forged, and the company itself was a false entity, that it was set up to defraud the estate.
And so the judge said, yes, let's look further into it.
Let's figure out what happened.
Let's look into this company that was, it's called Nasoni Investments.
It has a PO box in Florida and Missouri, kind of sketchy.
But all that to say that they're gonna look into it and it's not gonna be auctioned off right now because it may actually be fraud.
And it's so sad that this has to happen to anyone, really.
But Graceland, especially, because this is like, you know, Tennessee's claim to fame, really.
And you don't want to be renaming the whole place the Heartbreak Hotel.
Oh my goodness.
I'm talking about the Quakers who came from England and had a decisive influence in shaping the culture originally of southern Jersey and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Delaware and ultimately the culture of the American Midwest.
And notice that when I talk about Quakers, by the way, we were joking the other time about the meaning of the word Quakers.
Why are they called Quakers?
Well, because they quake, like an earthquake, which refers to a kind of motion.
Similar, you probably also heard of another group called the Shakers.
Why are they called Shakers? They shake!
And all of this quaking and shaking is supposedly in response to divine illumination or just a kind of healthy fear of divine retribution.
So this is the origin of the term.
Now, obviously, Quakers by and large don't call themselves Quakers.
They prefer society of friends.
It's kind of a little bit like the Mormons.
It's like, hey, Mormon!
He's like, no, I'm not a Mormon. I'm Church of Latter-day Saints, kind of.
I'm LDS, buddy.
I'm not really a Mormon.
By the way, Mormon is a reference to the angel Moroni, who is some kind of angel in the Mormon system.
All right, we're back to the Quakers here, and I'm going to talk about the learning ways or the education that Quakers believed in.
First of all, they believed in education.
They believed that reason is part of the inner light that God gives us.
And so they were keen on education, but education in spirituality and education in a certain type of Basic knowledge about the world.
And here's a prominent Quaker in 1727, scolding his son-in-law.
He says, What's he saying?
He's basically saying... Scripture first.
All other books are kind of secondary.
And notice that he emphasizes the word, though of use.
So the idea of sort of liberal learning, of knowledge for its own sake, this is all pretty remote for the Quakers.
They don't want it. Books are useful.
They might help you in practices of gardening or chemistry or building.
But really... The important knowledge for you to have is knowledge of God as contained in the scriptures.
Other things are sort of a distraction.
Again, we come back to the core Quaker idea.
Avoid decoration.
Avoid show.
Avoid superfluity.
And by the way, avoid using like Dinesh does words like superfluity.
Now, the Quakers founded a lot of local schools.
I mentioned a few days ago that Danielle, when we lived in New York, went to a Quaker school called the Friends School, which is reputed to be one of the best schools in New York City.
But the Quakers were, and I think you can see why, a little bit down on higher education.
To them, again, this was like unnecessary.
You've learned what you need to learn in school.
And that's about enough.
So Quakers didn't found a lot of colleges.
Every other Christian denomination founded colleges.
And so if you go across, let's just say, even the American Northeast, you'll find colleges founded by Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Baptists, Dutch Reformed, Methodists, but not Quakers.
Very little in the way of higher education.
Alright, I talked a little bit about the food ways of the Quakers.
Let's now talk about Quaker dress.
As you can imagine, not a whole lot to talk about.
Quaker dress, very simple.
But the simplicity, oddly enough, took on its own complexity.
Why? Because there were a lot of Quaker rules about what you couldn't do.
So, for example, from a Quaker manual, there are regulations about what kind of pockets you can have.
Cross pockets are considered to be a little bit too much.
One Quaker manual says, avoid needless pockets.
So, I guess the idea is like, you might need to have one pocket to put in, you know, a dollar and a pen, but you don't need two.
Why? Why would you need two pockets?
Quakers were warned against having broad hems, deep cuffs, false shoulders, superfluous buttons, fashionable creases, wide skirts, and cocked hats.
Colors have to be on the plain side.
Hair was not to be excessively long, not excessively bushy, not powdered, and not seen to be, quote, proud.
Fashionable hairstyles, not allowed.
Fancy hats, condemned.
Even if you have a hood that goes over your head, it should be plain.
Quaker women are often expected to wear aprons when they appear in public.
Why? The idea is that I'm a domestic creature who's happened to step out into the street, but notice I still have my aprons on.
And even with aprons, no silk aprons.
Now, to say that Quaker clothing was simple doesn't necessarily mean it was cheap.
There were very wealthy Quakers, very successful Quaker entrepreneurs.
William Penn himself, he had a plain style, but exceptionally refined.
And he was willing to spend large amounts of money for clothing of high quality.
By the way, it's kind of amusing, but Benjamin Franklin, because he came from Philadelphia and was a Pennsylvanian, kind of adopted the style of the Quakers.
And Franklin himself was in many ways an extremely ambitious and vain man, but he also realized the value of camouflaging that.
And so he would dress in very simple outfits.
He was often mistaken for a Quaker.
And the other thing about Franklin is that he liked to present himself as an ordinary menial worker, even though he was a very successful scientist and publisher.
At one point, for example, Ben Franklin, this is kind of a Quaker-ish thing to do, he was spotted wheeling his wheelbarrow through the street.
And when later he was asked why he did that, he goes, well, I don't really need to do that, but I kind of like to be seen as a man pushing a wheelbarrow.
So he would put his papers in the wheelbarrow to appear like a common man.
And this is, you have to notice that whenever you have mandated simplicity, you're going to have people who are not all that simple, who take on the simple style, but it's a style.
All right. Sports.
Probably fair to say that Quakers were not into sports.
Hunting, not allowed.
Most sports like games involving a ball, kicking a ball, running with the ball, throwing a ball, putting a ball into a hoop.
The Quakers thought this was all a complete waste of time.
This is exactly the kind of diversion that they wanted to avoid.
The kind of sports that Quakers were into?
Swimming. Good for your health.
Bathing. Also good for your health.
And gardening. Why?
It's very useful. So the practicality of the Quakers.
For the Quakers, work was a form of worship.
It was something that you did in order to please God.
And in this respect, the Quakers may seem to be similar to the Puritans, who also thought of work as a form of worship.
But for the Puritans, work was also something a little more complex, because success for the Puritans was...
In some ways, a mark of election.
By election, I mean you have been elected by God.
You are part of the elect.
This is Puritan predestination.
So, who knows who are the people who are chosen by God for salvation?
We don't know. But maybe if we look at people whom God has blessed, in other words, people who have prospered and thrived, maybe it's them.
It gives you the kind of feeling of comfort that maybe you are part of the elect.
Well, the Quakers had none of this.
No predestination.
God has actually called everybody and work is seen in a certain way in a more mundane sense.
It's not a reflection of your status in heaven.
It is the way in which in your ordinary life you conduct a certain type of worship.
But Quakers adopting this approach were part of building the capitalist economy of the United States.
Philadelphia was an important capital market all the way through the 19th century until it was ultimately upstaged by New York.
Finally, for today, the Quaker idea of time.
Here, the Quakers were kind of similar to the Puritans, and their idea was we need to make time count, meaning we need to make time useful.
No wasting of time the way that they do in, let's say, Virginia and South Carolina.
We need to have schedules.
We need to have routines.
We need to go by the clock.
But for Quakers, even with time and even with holidays and even with the names of months and days, the Quakers tried to go for extreme simplicity.
Now this didn't last all that long, but there was a Quaker effort in the 18th century to adopt a new Quaker calendar in which January was replaced by, you guessed it, first month.
Now you can guess what February was called.
Second month, and so on.
The idea was no fancy names that refer to Greek mythology or the sun or any of that nonsense.
It's the first month, followed by the second, followed by the third.
And a lot of the holidays were abolished, including many religious holidays.
For the Quakers, it was all very simple.
One day comes after another, and after that, we have a day after that.
So these are simple people, but they're also people who created a very successful, and for people around them, a very admirable type of society.
Many people, as I mentioned before, who were not Quakers, who found themselves in, let's say, Quaker country, they were like, we like these people.
They're really nice. They're very open-minded.
They are tolerant. Tolerant in the old sense of the term.
They put up with stuff that even if they don't like it, they're okay with it.
In other words, that's your way, even if it's not their way.
And they're not there to molest you, drive you out of town, harass you, accuse you, ostracize you, and so on.
So it's a congenial, simple thing.
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