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May 29, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
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BIDEN’S HENCHMAN Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep842
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Coming up, I'll review the latest developments in the New York courtroom.
The Trump case is now before the jury.
I'll survey the results from Texas' runoff election from last night to ask, is the state now safe from the RINOs?
And Arizona congressional candidate Blake Masters joins me.
We're going to talk about Trump and also about the dicey politics of Arizona.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
Well this is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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The Trump case in New York is now in the hands of the jury.
Now, the last day or so, we witnessed the conclusion of the prosecution's summation.
It was an incredibly long-winded summation.
In fact, lasted hours and hours and hours.
And I think the reason it was so long-winded is the prosecution couldn't really put their finger on what precisely the felony is that Trump seems to have committed.
Where is it? Tell us what it is.
And they didn't want to do that.
Or at least they wanted to be all over the place on that.
Well, it could be tax fraud.
And well, it could be an intention to violate New York campaign finance law, even if the law wasn't in fact violated.
Or it could be an intention to violate federal campaign finance law, even though no one's saying that that law was in fact violated.
It certainly wasn't charged or prosecuted against Trump.
So it was sort of like, you know this is a bad guy.
You know he did some bad stuff.
And even if you can't really figure out what it is, get him anyway.
That seemed to me a kind of summation, a kind of presi of what the prosecution, what the district attorney, Alvin Bragg, was going for.
Now, Trump himself, in classic fashion, was texting commentary or putting out commentary on Truth Social.
One comment he made was just filibuster, meaning these guys are just going on and on.
The other was boring.
I think Trump is probably the only defendant who kind of falls asleep at his own, at the summation of the case against him.
And then I don't know if you saw Robert De Niro shows up as part of a Biden campaign event.
What? And De Niro was all flustered.
And in fact, he got into a shouting match with other New Yorkers and they were like using the New York campaign.
Well, let's call it the Bronx cheer.
And what's the Bronx cheer?
It's basically the middle finger.
They were yelling at De Niro, you're a mook, all this New York lingo.
And he got upset.
He's like, you people are gangsters.
What was he talking about?
Well, apparently, according to De Niro, you have to go against Trump.
Vote against him, convict him.
Why? Because if Trump gets to the presidency, De Niro says he will never leave.
Well, what is the basis for this assertion?
I mean, first of all, Trump is getting up there in years.
If he gets a second term, it's all he can do to carry it out.
I mean, Biden's not going to really be able to carry out a second term.
So what does it mean to say Trump won't leave?
Well, I mean, didn't Trump leave in 2020?
Yes, he did. So as Debbie puts it, people keep calling him an autocrat.
He's really the worst autocrat in the history of the world.
How does an autocrat lose the election?
How does an autocrat lose control of the ballot drop boxes?
They should be his drop boxes in which he's stuffing the votes.
He should be running the police state, not running away from it.
So, poor De Niro.
I mean, this is a guy who just seems to have...
I mean, he's a good actor and all, and I really enjoy...
I mean, I enjoy De Niro's old roles.
Of course, notably, the godfather was a taxi driver.
De Niro, in his later career, kind of pivoted to being sort of a comedian, but I was pleasantly surprised.
I mean, like, this guy actually is funny.
And it's not something I would previously have associated with De Niro.
So I'm not one of these guys who hates De Niro.
I actually like De Niro, but politically, this guy is a null set.
He's a complete dud.
Now, as I think about the case with the jury, my mind flashes back to the female juror who was interviewed on MSNBC and who said, you know, I was asked to be in the jury, but, you know, I like Trump.
And because I like Trump, I don't know if I could really be entirely unbiased.
So I told the judge that I think I might be biased, and I was taken off the jury.
And I'm thinking, what?
Uh... Why can't you like Trump and still fairly listen to the evidence?
This is just, you could call it, peculiar Republican psychology.
Virtually no Democrat thinks this way.
Democrats think more this way.
I don't like Trump.
And not that I'm going to get on the jury to get him, but I don't see why my views of Trump are going to prevent me from being able to see what's going on here and make my decision.
In other words, Democrats think that their biases are not sufficient to disable them from being able to make a sound decision. Republicans, on the other hand, are, you know, sort of the, we have to be above any suspicion altogether. And look, think of the consequence of it.
That woman could have been on the jury and she alone could have made up a hung jury.
And yet, we could be looking at...
We think about it. They're trying to go after Trump on 34 felonies for a nuisance payment to a porn star.
Go away. I don't want to hear from you.
We don't want to deal with this madness.
34 felonies. I mean, that is, in a nutshell, a summary of where our system of justice is today.
And yet, when someone is in a position to do something about it, namely this young woman whose picture I'm looking at here, she's like, I think I better get off the jury.
I'm going to leave it to others to make this decision.
I mean, this to me is unconscionable.
It's outrageous. It's hardly even forgivable.
The case against Trump itself has no merit at all. In fact, think about it.
Just apply simple logic. If it is the case that deliberately misclassifying a payment that is aimed at somehow influencing an election, the 2016 election, If that is illegal and can be criminally prosecuted, why isn't Hillary Clinton in jail right now for the Steele dossier?
Think about this. The Hillary Clinton campaign concocted this.
They paid money to Christopher Steele to assemble this dossier.
That money was classified as what?
Yes, you guessed it.
A legal payment.
Even though it wasn't a legal payment.
So the exact, quote, alteration of business records occurred there.
For what purpose? Why did they commission the Steele dossier?
To influence illicitly the 2016 election.
So you have two cases standing side by side.
The Clinton case is actually more egregious, more deliberately connected to the election.
And yet, there's no question of her even being charged.
Now, I think for Trump, the good news is that no matter what the outcome, this could actually help him.
And ironically, the more severe the outcome, the more it could help him.
So this is kind of my reading on it.
I'm not guilty, which I think is unlikely.
Trump shoots up 5% in the polls because, hey, this is obviously bogus.
A hung jury?
I think actually Trump shoots up maybe 8 points, maybe 10 points.
Who knows? And guilty?
Prison, Trump shoots up.
I don't even know how to predict the calculus of that, but I do not think it is out of the question that you could be looking at a landslide election.
Now, we haven't had a landslide election in this country in a long time.
I have to think back. We almost have to go back to Reagan.
Reagan won 44 states to Carter, 6 in 1980.
Reagan won 49 to Mondale's 1.
I don't think we're looking at those kinds of margins.
But nevertheless, we could be looking at a decisive victory won, amazingly enough, by a man sitting behind bars.
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Last night was a big night in Texas because of several runoff elections for the Texas House.
Now normally I wouldn't discuss the Texas House, you're listening to this podcast from places all over the country, but here's the significance of what's going on in Texas.
Texas is a Republican state and a decisively Republican state with a pretty substantial majority in the Texas House of Representatives and yet, and yet, you have a speaker, Dade Phelan, who is elected with heavy Democratic support, is beholden to the Democrats.
He basically gets in with the Democrats plus a handful of Republicans.
He then appoints Democrats to prominent committees.
He lets Democrats set important parts of the Texas agenda.
So he's a complete and utter disgrace.
And this is something that you wouldn't find in Democratic states.
I mean, do you know of a Democratic state where basically the Democratic chair of the House is beholden to Republicans, is elected with Republican support, where Republicans are serving on committee?
The Democrats would never hear of it.
So this is an anomalous situation in Texas.
And finally, Texans decided to do something about it.
Well, fortunately, what triggered all of this was the effort on the part of Dave Phelan and some of his sidekicks.
A bunch of them, 15 or so of them, in the Texas House.
Let's impeach the very effective conservative attorney general, Ken Paxton.
Now, the impeachment effort went through in the House, was defeated in the Senate, but then Paxton goes, I'm going to get my revenge.
I'm going to target these House incumbents that went after me.
And so you oddly have this kind of revenge motive, but of course it's much bigger than revenge and it's much bigger than Paxton.
It's really about exorcising this sort of demon of the Texas legislature, a demon that, by the way, goes kind of far back.
This isn't a formula invented by Phelan.
His predecessor also had the same formula and the guy before him.
So this is a dysfunctionality that seems to be or seemed to be built into Texas politics.
So what happened is that The Lieutenant Governor, Dan Patrick, as well as Paxton, targeted a bunch of these house rhinos.
Well, some of them are real rhinos, but all of them are in it with Phelan.
They're part of this sort of establishment.
And I think I saw one of the former speakers explain the logic of this Texas establishment.
The logic is, we get the centrist Democrats and the centrist Republicans, and we unite against the far left and the far right.
Which means that the conservatives in Texas are cut out of decision-making, and this guy, a guy named Bonin, was actually boasting about this.
He was proud of me. He said, that's the way we do business in Texas.
It's the Texas way.
We're not dysfunctional like the people in Washington.
Well... No.
This is a Republican state.
The Republican base is to the right.
It's a Trump base for the most part.
And so there was really a bunch of these Texas incumbents were up for election.
Some of them were defeated a few months ago in the primary.
Others were in a runoff.
And the results of the runoff are in, and it turns out to be kind of a mixed bag.
Well, I mean, it was a sweep against the Rhinos.
The Rhinos lost everywhere except one.
The Rhinos lost with...
Here are some of the sort of Rhinos who have voted out.
Lynn Stuckey, Justin Holland, Frederick Frazier, Stephanie Click, D. Wayne Burns, John Kempel...
And I know Brandon, my son-in-law, was very involved in one of the races.
This was the Lynn Stuckey race against Hopper.
And Hopper won decisively, almost 55% or 58% to 45%.
So it was a very good day in terms of remaking the Texas house and cleaning out the rhinos.
But there was a little bit of a dark cloud.
And the dark cloud is that Dade Phelan, the speaker of the house, He won re-election.
He won re-election by the narrowest of margins, 400 votes.
I mean, unbelievable. And Dave Covey, who came really close to beating him, was defeated.
And this means that Phelan continues in the House.
Now, will he be able to be Speaker?
He'll try again.
He's going to try to go with the same formula.
The Democrats vote for him.
But I think it's going to be harder for him to get Republicans.
Why? Because first of all, just today, Dan Patrick, the Lieutenant Governor, and Ken Paxton are out there basically saying any Republican that votes for this guy is going to be targeted next time around.
And seeing that the RINOs are basically something like 14, and I won't say 14 to 0, 14 to 1, because Phelan won.
The Rhinos are going to be very careful this time because I think they're going to realize that their scalps are going to be up for the grabs in 2026.
So will Phelan make it to the speakership again?
I'm doubtful about that, but we'll see.
The thing that I find unfortunate is that there are two things that have made this happen that enabled Phelan to win.
One is that he raised more money.
He raised $3.8 million.
The other guy, Covey, had like $1.6 million.
Now, again, that is a little too lopsided.
And there were some conservative multi-millionaires and billionaires who were behind Covey.
I think that those guys thought that they had the race in the bag.
They should have put more money in.
They should have put more money in for Covey, and he would have won.
But Phelan had the monetary advantage, and that can often be decisive in politics.
It's not always the decisive factor, but in a close race, of course, it can be.
The second factor to keep in mind is that Democrats can vote in Republican primaries in Texas, and that is a problem.
So at the recent Texas Republican Convention, there were several motions to change that.
I hope it has, in fact, changed.
Why? Because actually Dave Covey put out that they had monitored the early vote, and something like 1,400 votes they counted, Democrats who voted for Phelan.
Now, again, normally that may not seem like such a big number, but in a race that's decided by 400 votes, those 1,400 votes, well, right there, you can see those are the votes that made the difference.
If you remove those Democratic votes, Covey would have won.
So, my conclusion from all this is that the problems in Texas are better, they are on the road to being solved and that alone is progress.
I mean, as I said, this is a problem that's persisted now for something like 40 years.
So I'm glad that Texans are more aware of it, that there's an effort to solve it.
But Dade Phelan's success last night...
I mean, he isn't...
I don't know if I could call him a winner.
He's looking around at debris all around him.
And I basically posted this morning that despite his win, Phelan, which by the way is P-H-E-L-A-N, Phelan, is, I said, finished.
P-H-I-N-I-S-H-E-D. Phelan is finished.
So I hope that I'm right about that and that this guy, who has been a complete disgrace, does not become again the Speaker of the Texas House.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
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Guys, I'm really pleased to welcome to the podcast a new guest, Blake Masters.
He is a congressional candidate for Arizona Congressional District No.
8. You'll remember Blake Masters ran for Senate in Arizona, lost unfortunately to Democrat Mark Kelly, but here he is back on the campaign trail.
You can follow him on x at bgmasters and the website blakemasters.com.
Thanks for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
And then the case goes to the jury.
Now, I've said on the podcast, you know, that I think about it, an acquittal to me seems pretty unlikely just given the composition of the jury and the extreme bias of the judge.
You're probably looking at either a conviction or a hung jury, and I'm giving those about 50-50 odds.
I wonder what your take is on what's happening there.
What do you think is going to happen if you have a thought about that?
And what does this really tell us about our justice system?
Well, thanks for having me on, Dinesh.
Yeah, look, this is a kangaroo port, right?
I think it's just so crazy that it's gotten this far.
President Trump, you know, for 70 years, you know, never in trouble with the law, always doing things the right way.
And then all of a sudden, he wants to run for president a second time, right?
Because Joe Biden's been such a disaster.
And so the Dems know they can't beat him at the ballot box, right?
They know that. And so they rack up like 91% I think to most Americans, this just screams political persecution, which it is.
But okay, now zooming into the trial, yep, it's the last day, or now the jurors are going to go deliberate.
I think I agree with you.
Outright acquittal, which is what justice demands, right?
That's what President Trump deserves.
My gosh. Unfortunately, it's probably not likely because some of the jurors probably do suffer from Trump derangement syndrome, TDS, and they want to lock the guy up, again, because they know they can't beat him at the ballot box.
I do predict a hung jury.
I think there are going to be some jurors, even if it's just one or two, because the guilty verdict would need to be unanimous.
Even just one or two jurors who stand up, or the rule of law, who stand up and say, hey, this can't happen here.
This obviously wasn't a crime.
President Trump is innocent of any crimes.
I think that's the most likely scenario, certainly the one I'm hoping for.
Trump posted something, I think it was yesterday, might be this morning, that took me by surprise because it was an argument that I'm familiar with but I had never thought of.
I remember years ago, this was actually after my campaign finance case, I talked to someone very prominent here in Texas and this guy advised me, he said, look, Dinesh, you know, if you want to stay, even if they're trying to get you, Here's what you do.
Anytime you do something that has to do with accounting, consult with a prominent, respectable CPA firm.
And if they say do it, you're never going to be held criminally liable because you'll say, I consulted a professional company and they said, do this, so that's what I did.
And similarly, if you're going to take an action that involves the law, consult with a lawyer.
And if the lawyer says it's okay, you go, hey, I hired competent counsel, I followed their advice, and so...
You can't get me on a criminal case because I took professional advice.
And Trump basically said that.
He goes, listen, I had a reputable lawyer, Michael Cohen, who was at that time considered to be a normal lawyer in the field.
He advised me to follow this script, which I did, and yet this is not being allowed as a defense for me.
I thought that's pretty interesting that that defense would be disallowed, namely following professional advice and From somebody who is giving you legal advice.
Yeah, I think the advice of counsel defense is a pretty good one, but I'm not surprised to hear that, you know, the sixth communist judge, Merchant or whatever, disallowed it, right?
And I'm grateful that the jury is ultimately going to decide, not the judge, right?
The judge just, man, you kind of still expect your judges to be somewhat, or at least pretend to be fair.
Right. And Merchant's not even pretending to be fair.
I mean, with the kind of lines of questioning that he allowed the prosecution to make, but not the defense, you know, with taking this pretty good Advised Counsel defense off the table for Trump, it's just clear that Merchant is trying to put his thumb on the scale at every single opportunity.
And it's just a travesty, really, how far our judiciary has deteriorated, largely because Barack Obama and Biden have just put these ideologues, right, these activists on the bench.
Blake, let's talk about your story because you entered the world of politics sort of as a pivot.
You didn't start there.
You started in the entrepreneurial world, in the tech world.
In fact, I see that you started out with my...
Well, Peter Thiel, I knew in his Stanford days, and I also met David Sachs, because I don't know if you know, but David Sachs had written a book essentially talking about the kind of the left-wing bias at Stanford, a political...
Yeah, and so David and I would chat about that, because I had written the book Illiberal Education.
That's kind of how I met Peter Thiel.
But talk a little bit about your background.
What is it that convinced you that a pivot into the political arena was the right move?
Yeah, well, you know, I had met Peter while he was teaching at Stanford Law School and kind of became a mentee of his and went to work in venture capital.
You know, I'm technically a lawyer, but I never really practiced law.
I went to work in venture capital and...
And I loved it. And I still love investing and getting to meet new entrepreneurs and trying to screen out the good ideas from the bad.
And more than that, the entrepreneurs who are really driven from the ones who are just kind of good at sales.
So fascinating world.
I did well at it. I really liked it.
But it just felt to me around 2020.
I had moved back to Arizona in 2018 from California.
And the Arizona that I came back to was still great.
I still love Arizona. But man, it was changed.
And Yeah, some of the same changes that you're seeing nationwide.
And it wasn't the same state or even the same country that I grew up in.
And, you know, I got back just in time to see, boom, 2018 and 2020, we lost both those Senate seats in Arizona.
And when I was a kid, it was a ruby red state.
You didn't have to think too hard about it.
It was John Kyle and John McCain, right?
And I understand you could criticize some of the things that they pushed.
But, man, Republicans are so way better than Democrats.
And to lose both those Senate seats, I had a front row seat.
And then I said, no, I can't do this.
Biden had just been installed, I think, as president.
Big tech and all the ballots.
We know all that stuff.
And it just felt to me like I needed to pause my business career.
To throw my hat in the ring and try to take back that Senate seat, right?
So that's what I did.
It was the first time I really thought about politics, like maybe I could get involved here, was when Peter and I joined the Trump transition team.
After he won in November 2016, we got the call to go to Trump Tower and try to help staff the government with really confidence.
People got to staff 2,000 positions all of a sudden.
And it was an honor to help with that.
It was an honor to meet Trump world behind the scenes and to get to help with that.
But then when I was meeting so many congressmen and senators at the time, some of these people are really impressive, of course.
some aren't. And that was the big wake-up call for me. It's like, wow. And they were asking me as this 30-year-old kid, like, hey, what just happened? How did this country elect Trump? And I'm like, you're the representative. You're supposed to be having your finger on the pulse of what's going on in this country. And so everyone has this, the adults aren't really in charge moment.
No, everyone's winging it. And I had that when I saw so many of the congressmen and senators not really understand why Trump had just won. So things happen for a reason.
You know, I worked hard in 2022.
Worked really hard. We all did.
Didn't make it first across the finish line.
Of course, Maricopa County botched Election Day, and that's a whole other problem.
But it's an honor to throw my hat back in the ring, and I know I have a lot to contribute if I'm fortunate enough to serve in Congress.
I think I'm going to go.
You're getting far left wing.
I mean, look at the two senators in Georgia.
I mean, those guys are, you know, they're basically AOC with a different name.
And the same thing we see again and again in Arizona.
Think of the guy running now against Kerry Lake.
He seems to me to be a real leftist.
What do you think is, what has really happened to enable someone that far left to even have a chance?
To win in Arizona. Is it a demographic change in Arizona?
What's changed? Why is it no longer the Arizona you grew up in?
Yeah, there's been some demographic change, but I don't think Arizona's a purple state.
I just don't. I think it's still red, or it's still more red than blue.
Okay, we'll say that. I think that there's been a phenomenally effective Democrat machine that's gotten built up.
Part of it is just the money, right?
When I ran against Mark Kelly, I worked my tail off to raise 13, 14 million bucks.
Wasn't enough.
And Mitch McConnell ceremoniously withheld funding for Arizona.
He went to go waste it on Murkowski up in Alaska.
And so Mark Kelly raised 90 million and the Democrats with PACs poured more in.
And so I think that our ideas are so good on the Republican side, especially on the pro-Trump, you know, America First side, that we can win if we're outspent double or even three to one.
But 10 to one, you know, and I was a newcomer and so they were just able to get on TV and own the airwaves and I think basically a lot of people.
But they defined me before I was able to define myself.
And, you know, I think they lied about Mark Kelly.
He might be a nice guy in person.
Who knows? Who cares, really, right?
But he's a far-left voter in the Senate.
Well, that's not the Mark Kelly that Arizonans got to know through their TV because he pretends to be moderate.
So it's interesting. You mentioned Ruben Gallego, who's the communist, horrible, horrible congressman running against Kerry Lake.
We should do everything we can to help Kerry.
But Gallego knows that he's got to pretend to be moderate.
To have a chance in Arizona.
So they're hoping that McConnell withholds funding, or whoever's controlling the constraints withholds it from Kerry, and they're hoping that they can build up such a war chest that they can convince everybody that they can lie to the people of Arizona to say, oh, Ruben Gallego, he's this moderate guy.
No, he's not. He's a far-left communist.
He's probably to the left of AOC. He's a wild-eyed true believer, and he's going to try to define himself as a moderate.
That tells you they know that they can't actually be transparent about who they are.
They have to lie and pretend to be moderate in a swing state like Arizona.
We just got to pray and work to make sure that doesn't work.
I mean, you're touching, Blake, I think, on a critical factor.
And we were chatting a moment ago about my son-in-law, Brandon Gill, and his race.
You know, at the last minute, an Ever-Trump pact dropped a couple of million dollars, and they were dominating the airwaves and so on.
And it occurred to me that if Brandon was basically running a straight grassroots campaign and didn't have money...
Despite the Trump endorsement, he would have lost.
Why? Because people wouldn't even know he has the Trump endorsement.
And so it is essential for Republicans not only to have the good ideas and to have a grassroots network, but they need to be properly funded so that they can compete on an even terms.
I mean, the number of people that you can, quote, get to know is bound to be kind of small, right?
In a district, what? You're probably going to have...
100,000 plus voters.
Nobody has 100,000 friends.
You may have 1,000 and then you're doing really well, but you need to be able to get your message out.
Talk a little bit about the mechanics of a campaign.
What has been the most striking aspect of it for you once you start putting your own boots on the ground?
Yeah, well, you said it.
I wish it were possible to meet every single voter.
That'd be awesome, right?
And that's sort of what we all sign for, more of a connection with our representatives.
I think the people in D.C. have, with some exceptions, they've just lost touch.
So it'd be great to meet all the voters and it'd be great to get up and, hey, here's my ideas and my policy ideas.
And it's just, it's less like that than I think we'd ideally want it to be.
I saw firsthand in 2022 when the Dems were just nuking you, right?
10 to 1, it's really hard to compete.
We see it today.
Republican candidates are still raising less money than Dems all across the board.
President Trump might be the one exception.
I think Biden's war test is a little bigger at this point, but Trump just had a phenomenal fundraising month in April.
And so it was news when the Republican presidential nominee raised more that month than the Democrat nominee, which kind of speaks to Trump's ascendance and Biden's whatever.
Yeah. But by large, Republican candidates are underfunded.
And that's half the equation because, of course, Canada needs to work really hard to get the message out and radio, TV, all that stuff costs money.
But then when it comes around to early voting or election day, Republicans also don't have the machinery that the Democrats do.
In Arizona, for instance, we know in 2022, the Democrats, I mean, Mark Kelly and Katie Hobbs, who's now our horrible governor, they basically didn't campaign, right?
They just put commercials out, stayed in their basement.
It was the Joe Biden 2020 strategy.
But they did pay, the Democrat machine paid like a thousand activists to go around to people's doors and collect ballots.
And I'm pretty sure that the Dems break the law when they do that.
You know, you're not in Arizona, you're not allowed to take custody of a ballot and actually put it in the mailbox for the person.
And I know you've done a lot of work on this too, but they do it and it's under policed.
And so when it happens, those are just legal votes that they put in the system, right?
Well, Republicans, we care about the rule of law, so we're never going to actually take custody of their ballots.
But we could have paid the 1,000 activists.
It costs about $10 million.
This is what you want to see the RNC doing.
Show up. If you're going to have this early voting period, knock on people's doors.
Say, hey, that mail-in ballot right over there.
You've got to fill it out.
For Carrie Lake and Blake Masters, this election is important.
And if you do that and you get 1,000 people each responsible for 100 or 200 ballots, well, boom, that's the election right there.
And so we didn't do that as a party in 2022.
I think we're learning from it.
I understand the retooled RNC is trying to do it.
President Trump's on board with this.
If we do early vote gathering, And then, you know, plenty of people are going to vote on election day.
That's fine. But if we show up and actually get the votes and build that machine, well, the Dems are already doing it.
So they have no more output. Those gains are all ours.
And that's, I think, how we win by such an overwhelming margin that any other shenanigans are, you know, impossible to tip the scales.
We really need that infrastructure both while you're campaigning and then while you're gathering votes.
Infrastructure is going to be key.
Yeah, great stuff.
Guys, I've been talking to Blake Masters.
He's running for Congressional District 8 for Congressman.
You can follow him on x at bgmasters, the website blakemasters.com.
Blake, thank you very much for joining me.
My pleasure. Thank you. I'm now going to turn to the fourth wave of settlement of the United States from Great Britain.
And we've talked about wave number one, the earliest wave.
That was in the early 17th century, the Puritans coming to New England.
The second wave a little bit later, the Cavaliers, the Royalists coming to Virginia, setting up the culture of the South.
The last several days we've been talking about wave number three.
This is late in the 17th century, so in the 16th, 70s, 80s, 90s.
And this is the Quaker wave that came to Pennsylvania and then pushed further into the Midwest.
And we've talked about the distinctive characteristics of the Quakers and how they even now eerily resemble the folkways of the American Midwest.
And now we're going to turn finally to the fourth group.
In some ways, to me, the most amusing group.
And I say amusing with affection here, because this is a group that we see all over the place here in Texas, but you also see it in Louisiana and further parts of the West, the Appalachian country.
Now, these are people who didn't start in Appalachia, of course.
They actually started kind of where the Quakers were.
They landed in Jersey and Pennsylvania, but instead of staying there, they began to move.
They moved south and they moved west, and they set up in Appalachia before pushing further west and further south.
And this is the group that comes out of a very distinctive part of Great Britain, which is to say the borderlands.
Now, the borderlands of what?
Well, the borderlands that connect England with Ireland and England with Scotland.
So we're talking about people on the Irish border facing England, on the English border facing Ireland, on the Scottish border facing England, and on the English border facing Scotland.
So... This is the north of Ireland, the lowlands of Scotland, and the northern counties of England.
Now, these are people who, well, we'll learn a little bit about what they're like, but we'll start this way, and this is how the historian David Hackett Fisher describes it.
He goes... Starting in the early 18th century.
So now the century has turned.
We're now in the 1700s.
And in fact, we're, let's think about it, we're just about 50 years away from the Declaration of Independence.
Early in the summer of 1717, a bunch of Quakers...
In Philadelphia, notice that all these new ships are now arriving in Pennsylvania.
And they're coming from Liverpool, from Belfast, and northern outposts with very strange names.
Londonderry, Northern Ireland, Whigtown in Scotland, Whitehaven.
And so the Quakers kind of take stock of these people.
And one of the Quakers, a fellow named Jonathan Dixon, he writes...
He goes, these people are a swarm.
They strike him as almost like a bunch of locusts.
He says, they are strangers to our laws and customs and even to our language.
Wow! Now, is it the case that these newcomers are not speaking English?
They are. But they're speaking with such accents, such dialect, that they are virtually incomprehensible.
The Quakers who are listening to them are like, I don't even think they're speaking our language.
The other thing that strikes the Quakers is their dress.
They see felt hats, loose sackcloth shirts, shirts that are belted at the waist, baggy trousers, thick yarn stockings, wooden shoes that are so hard that they appear to be like horseshoes.
So just like you put iron on the foot of a horse, these are people wearing shoes that look like wooden blocks attached to their feet.
What about the women? Well, the women come across as a little bit, not promiscuous is the wrong word, but kind of almost gypsy-ish.
They have tight waist, they have bare legs, they have skirts that are scandalously short.
And you can imagine the Quaker reaction to all this.
They're like, who are these people and where are they coming from?
As I mentioned, their accent is unfamiliar.
It's the cadence of it that throws people off.
These new immigrants also appear to be desperately poor.
They're, in a sense, in rags.
And yet, despite their poverty, these are people who are not low down, they're not hangdog, they're not defeated.
They appear very tough.
They appear defiant.
They appear almost rebellious.
They have a certain strange haughtiness about them, a haughtiness that you would normally identify with the aristocratic class, even though these are people coming from the opposite end of the economic spectrum.
So clearly something new is underway.
These are not the Puritans, they're not the Cavaliers, and they most certainly aren't Quakers.
Well, who are they?
Turns out this is a quarter million people that are going to come over 20 or 30 years.
This is in the early 18th century, the early 1700s, starting about 1717, continuing until the 1730s and 40s.
And it's a wave-like motion coming from different parts of Britain.
But as I mentioned, these are parts that are all sort of attached or facing each other.
These are the people of the borderlands.
What is their motive for coming?
Why are they here? Why are they coming to America?
If we think back to the other groups that came to America, their motives were entirely, not even largely, but entirely religious.
The Puritans didn't come here for, quote, a better life.
They came here to build a city on a hill, a Puritan paradise, if you will.
The Virginians came here to establish essentially a little part of England with all its caste systems and hierarchies and class structures and nobility, or at least close to nobility, lords and plantations and castles.
They wanted to bring all that to Virginia, and to a degree they did.
Same with the Quakers. They wanted to set up a kind of a Quaker haven where they wouldn't be persecuted, and they didn't want to do any persecuting either.
But this group, the fourth group, the group that we're going to call the Rednecks, and...
This is a group that was not interested in sort of highfalutin motives.
Not that they weren't believers, not that they weren't Christians, but that wasn't their reason for coming.
So what was their reason for coming?
Starvation. Bitterness.
Poverty. War.
The unifying goal of these new settlers was to find a place where they could live a better life.
And their predominant goal was to be left alone, not to be stomped on, not to be harassed.
Just leave me alone.
Now, you might say the Puritans wanted to be left alone, but the Puritans wanted to be left alone to create a community where the Puritans wouldn't be leaving anybody else alone.
These guys are different in that they want to get away from authority.
They want to get away to some degree from civilization.
They want to create their own homesteads, their own camps, their own hunting grounds.
They want to thrive without overlordship of any kind.
And these are people who are accustomed to being hated, and they're accustomed to being trampled, and they're accustomed to being the victims of war.
Why? Because let's think about England.
England was constantly having wars with Ireland and Scotland.
Basically, it involved the British effort, the English effort to dominate these two smaller territories that we now consider or we generally call part of Great Britain.
This is like the law of the universe, right?
I mean, if you have small countries, just draw small circles, and a big country, which is a big circle, the big circle is going to try to dominate the small circles.
And that'll be true pretty much anywhere in the world.
It's true, no different here.
And so... The Scottish are fighting back against the English.
The English are raiding the Scottish.
The English are tormenting the Irish.
The Irish are having movements for national liberation.
And who are the people in the middle?
These are the people of the borderlands.
So these are people who are accustomed to having armies come across their land in both directions.
These are people who are used to being persecuted, but yet their spirit has clearly not been broken.
And they're going to come to America and because they're different and because they're strange and because they're uncouth and because they're frankly rednecks, they're going to be looked down upon and laughed at and they're going to be seen as deviants and kooks and they're even going to be persecuted.
They're going to suffer quite a lot of discrimination in the United States.
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