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July 11, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
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PRESIDENTIAL IMMUNITY Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep870
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Coming up my topic today, presidential immunity.
I'm going to outline the broad reach of presidential immunity as provided for by the Supreme Court.
I'm going to argue it may be strong enough even to overturn Trump's New York felony convictions.
I'll examine some pro-life dissatisfaction with Trump in the wake of the new Republican platform, and I'll make the case for why it is misguided.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
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I want to talk about a massive decision that came down from the Supreme Court while I was away.
Well, there were several important decisions, including a decision on 1512, which is to say on obstruction of an official proceeding.
The Supreme Court sort of struck that one down and said that, hey, you can't just charge people who have not Manipulated documents who have not interfered in some direct way with the proceeding.
Just to say that because they were protesting inside the Capitol doesn't make it an obstruction of beneficial proceeding.
That's not what the law was for.
And so this will have an impact on a number of the January 6th defendants in a beneficial way.
But I want to focus on the most important Supreme Court decision of them all, and this is the one on presidential immunity.
Now, by way of background, Before this decision, not only had courts, and I mean a district court at the lowest level and then an appellate court at the higher level, dismissed the concept that Trump has any immunity at all.
They basically said, not happening, it's a distraction, it's a red herring, it's bogus, there's no immunity to be had.
And moreover, the legal community, a lot of legal scholars, most of them coming from the left, but some of the never-Trumpers as well, notably Judge Luttig, they were all pretty unanimous in saying that this immunity issue is going to be just slapped down by the Supreme Court.
The appellate court decision is so clear-cut and well-reasoned that the Supreme Court is just gonna basically rubber-stamp it.
But it became very obvious just from the hearing, the SCOTUS hearing, that a number of the justices, notably the conservatives, but also Chief Justice Roberts, who ended up writing the opinion, that Chief Justice Roberts is like, you can't hold, you can't go after the president, either criminally or civilly, for things that he did In office that are part of his official duties.
You may not agree with those things.
You may even object vehemently to them.
But if presidents don't have some sort of protection, some sort of immunity, then it's open season on these guys.
And as soon as they get out of office, You could have courts, federal courts, perhaps even state courts, going after them, saying, you did this and you did that.
So, for example, Obama, you know, there were people killed in Benghazi.
Okay, we're gonna charge you with murder.
This is ridiculous.
And the Supreme Court came out with a decision that took a very strong stance, and I think a correct stance, on the issue of presidential immunity.
So let's clarify what the Supreme Court decision said.
It was, by the way, a prominent dissent from Sotomayor, who says, you know, After this ruling, I fear for democracy.
But Sotomayor, by and large, was doing nothing more than kind of echoing the leftist dismay over this decision, which to some degree, and we're going to explore to what degree, lets Trump off the hook.
In fact, Biden came out with a statement after the Supreme Court basically saying that he agrees with the dissent of Sotomayor.
But What matters here is the ruling itself.
Not only the ruling itself, but the explanation of the ruling, which clarifies, in sometimes very clear way, how the ruling is to be applied.
So here's what the Supreme Court said.
Number one, anything that a president does that is part of his core or official duties, is completely immune.
Now, completely immune here means completely immune, because there are ways to try to get around immunity.
So, for example, you could say that Trump did so-and-so act, and so-and-so act, and so-and-so act, and even though we can't charge him for those acts, We can look at his underlying motivation for doing those acts.
Let's say, for example, we can ascribe to him the motivation of wanting to overturn the election result in Georgia, or wanting to overturn the election result nationwide.
And by getting at his motive, we can somehow blame him for that, even though we can't actually get him on the acts themselves.
And the Supreme Court says, no, you can't do that either.
Not only are the acts out of bounds, the motives are out of bounds.
And so this is a quite sweeping ruling, because as we'll see, when you say that somebody's acts and motives are out of bounds, it means that even in another case, which doesn't directly bear on the president's official duties, if you have introduced official acts as part of your case, to incriminate Trump.
If you have introduced motives of President Trump that are part of those official acts, all of that has now got to be put out of bounds.
It's got to be invalidated.
It's got to be removed as the basis of any decision.
And so we're going to look at the different cases in a moment to see what impact this ruling is going to have on them.
But let me finish with what the Supreme Court said.
The Supreme Court also said There are other acts that a president will do officially, even though they may not be part of his enumerated duties.
The president's enumerated duties are not all laid out, so there are certain core functions, but there are other things you do as the president.
And the Supreme Court said in those things, even if they're not part of his core functions, they deserve what the Supreme Court called presumptive immunity.
So what does presumptive immunity mean?
Well, it means you get the benefit of the doubt.
In other words, you should have immunity.
That's the starting point.
Maybe that immunity can be overtaken. Maybe there are other considerations that would be strong enough to override the immunity, but says the Supreme Court, those considerations must be so strong that they don't interfere in any way in the president carrying out his duties of office. So the burden of proof, you could say, is very high to get a
president, not just Trump, but any president, for doing anything that is connected with their official duties.
It's very simple.
And then the court said that in private matters, the president doesn't enjoy any immunity at all.
And that, of course, makes sense.
The president doesn't get to not pay his taxes, which is, of course, a private act.
The president doesn't get to go to his neighbor and beat him up.
That's a private act.
The president doesn't get to drive.
Presidents don't drive.
They have someone driving them.
But let's just say you can't drive drunk.
All of these would be private acts that are not covered by immunity.
But the court came down strong on defending presidential immunity for anything that is an official act or a core function.
And now what this means is that all the Trump cases are now called into question because all of them, every single one of them, not just the criminal trials, even the case involving involving Judge Well, certainly the New York case involving Juan Merchant, involving Stormy Daniels, has got to be re-evaluated.
So does the Georgia case, the Fannie Willis case.
So do the two Jack Smith cases.
One, of course, being the Jack Smith case of January 6th in Washington, D.C., which is before Judge Tanya Chutkan.
The other is, of course, the classified documents case, also a Jack Smith case before This is the one in Florida before Judge Eileen Cannon.
So let's look at these cases a little more closely and I'm going to do this in this segment but also in the next one.
I'm going to start with the New York hush money case.
On the first glance, it appears that that case does not involve presidential functions at all.
Why?
Because it has to do with things that Trump did before he became president.
In other words, while in the lead up to the 2016 election, you remember the case involved an NDA, a non-disclosure agreement, Money that was paid to Stephen Cohen and then Stephen Cohen to Stormy Daniels to sign this NDA.
Supposedly, Trump was trying to, in a sense, make a campaign finance contribution to suppress negative stories about the campaign.
This was not only an alteration of New York business records, That was the misdemeanor, but also supposedly an effort to interfere in campaign finance laws.
I mean, the whole thing is far-fetched.
It's, in a way, ludicrous.
But that was the theory of the case.
But here's the point.
In making that case, the government called witnesses who were, well, here's one of them, The White House Communications Director, Hope Hicks, she testified about conversations with Trump that had occurred.
She said that Trump knew about the payment to Stormy Daniels.
She said that Trump was concerned about how, if this got out, how this might affect the public perception of him.
So, Hope Hicks is an advisor to the President.
We're talking about conversations that occurred while Trump was president.
Those are covered by immunity.
And so, this kind of stuff that was introduced in the case is off-limits for prosecutors.
And now, it's going to be up to Judge Merchant.
I don't have too much confidence in Judge Merchant, but Judge Merchant has the duty to now apply the Supreme Court's immunity doctrine to see how much evidence gets thrown out in the Trump New York case and whether or not that might have produced a different outcome.
Frankly, I don't expect Judge Merchant, I expect him to say, oh, it had no effect on the case, it's no big deal, the conviction stands.
But my point is, Trump will now have a chance to appeal that and say, hey, let's hold the Supreme Court decision side by side with what Judge Merchant has ruled, and let's see if he correctly applied the Supreme Court's immunity decision to this case.
And if he didn't, there's a chance, and there are many other chances based upon the case itself, that this would be overruled by a higher court.
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I'm continuing my discussion of the impact of the Supreme Court's immunity decision on the various Trump criminal cases.
I talked about the case in New York, Alvin Bragg, Judge Merchant.
Now I want to talk about the Georgia election interference case.
Now that case is already, as you know, in trouble.
It's in trouble because of all the shenanigans involving Nathan Wade and Fannie Willis.
The judge, his name is Scott McAfee, has agreed to have the case be appealed to a higher court.
And the higher court will decide should Fannie Willis be disqualified from the case.
And that is currently being looked at.
That's currently being reviewed.
But quite apart from that, The Supreme Court's immunity decision, even if the case goes forward, is going to have to now take into account what the Supreme Court said.
So let's look at this case in a little bit more detail.
The idea here is that Trump made efforts to interfere in the Georgia election count.
Okay, that alone doesn't seem to be official conduct, because after all, we seem to be dealing not so much with President Trump, but with candidate Trump.
So arguably, Trump is not immune on that basis.
But!
Let's look at the evidence that is the centerpiece of this trial.
Well, probably the single most important piece of evidence is the so-called phone call that Trump had with the Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger.
This is the phone call in which supposedly Trump said, let's go ahead and find 11,780 votes.
But the simple truth of this is that Trump was calling Raffensperger as the president.
This was a presidential phone call.
This concerned business that is relevant for the president.
So on the one hand, you could say that Trump is a candidate.
It's a personal matter.
But on the other hand, the president does have the job of making sure that elections are carried out properly.
Think about it.
The FBI Investigates election fraud.
The DOJ investigates election fraud.
Now what's the FBI?
It's a part of the DOJ.
What's the DOJ?
It's a part of the executive branch.
Who's the head of the executive branch?
The president.
So how can it be that the FBI can investigate election fraud, but not Trump?
How can it be that the DOJ, Trump's DOJ, can investigate election fraud, but not Trump himself?
I don't see any way of holding that Trump is somehow not permitted in his official capacity to investigate election fraud.
And if so, this phone call is out of bounds.
Why?
Because the Supreme Court said That if Trump is carrying out his official duties, he's immune.
His motivations don't matter.
His conduct is out of bounds.
His motivation is out of bounds.
This could be a very serious problem for the Georgia case.
Now let's turn to the federal election interference case.
This is the so-called January 6th case.
This is the case before Tanya Chutkin in D.C.
Now, one of the ways in which this Supreme Court stuff works is that the court basically lays out a criteria, lays out a set of conditions, and then punts the case back to the judge to then apply those criteria to apply those conditions.
We're once again dealing with a very left-wing judge, so we can assume that she's going to try to find every way for this case to go forward.
The main thrust of this case is going to be the idea that Trump supposedly had a fake elector scheme A fake elector scheme that was supposed to usurp the real electors and somehow prevent Biden from being certified.
Of course, there's also a January 6th dimension to all this about Trump trying to to stir up a kind of blockade of the process.
The problem with that aspect of the case is it falls right into the Supreme Court's obstruction of an official proceeding.
Trump had been charged, by the way, with obstruction of an official proceeding, but Jack Smith's gonna have to drop that one and throw it out because of the separate Supreme Court decision on that issue.
So we're now down to the heart of the case, which is supposedly that Trump rounded up these fake electors and was trying to pressure Mike Pence to reject the state's electoral votes and take a look at these fake electors.
Here's the problem.
Number one, Mike Pence is the vice president.
Any dealings between Trump and Mike Pence are part of Trump's official duties.
This is the president and the vice president in consultation.
So anything Trump says to Pence, Pence says to Trump.
All their dealings, quite clearly, out of bounds.
Not only the action, but Trump's motivation cannot be introduced in this case.
Big problem for Jack Smith.
What about these so-called fake electors?
Now, first of all, the electors aren't fake.
There have been many cases where elections have been disputed.
You can go back to Nixon-Kennedy.
You can continue with Bush-Gore.
And the idea is when something is being litigated, both sides produce electors and say, hey, listen, if a recount, if a re-examination, if further scrutiny shows that I won the state, these are going to be my electors.
So I'm not producing fake electors.
I'm producing, you can say, hypothetical electors who would be the real electors in the event that the court ruled by way.
So, quite apart from the Supreme Court decision, I don't really see that there's any merit here at all.
But of course, we also know with these left-wing judges, with these left-wing juries, the absence of having any legal merit.
Often doesn't matter.
Why?
Because the prosecutor wants to convict, the judge is kind of in on it with the prosecutor, the juries are happy to go along, let's get Trump.
So, this is why the Supreme Court decision is important, because it knocks out large aspects of this case.
And the question is, and this is going to be something Tanya Chutkan is going to have to look at, there's going to be hearings, both sides are going to argue, and she's going to have to decide if these so-called fake electors can be introduced as evidence at all.
Now the Trump team is going to say you can't introduce them because this is part of Trump's election oversight. Again, this is part of Trump's legitimate duties as president.
I expect that Tanya Chutkan will hold no.
She will side with the prosecution.
She will side with Jack Smith.
But again, what does that mean?
The Trump team will appeal it.
And the appeal might end up going all the way to the Supreme Court.
This time it won't be a broad decision on immunity.
It will be a narrow question of whether or not the immunity doctrine has been correctly applied in this case.
And finally, I want to turn to the federal classified documents case.
This is the Mar-a-Lago case.
This is the case in Florida before Judge Eileen Cannon.
Now, quite frankly, here I don't think that Judge Eileen Cannon needs any help from the Supreme Court.
She literally has been playing with Jack Smith in the way that a cat plays with a mouse.
The cat kind of pokes around and plays around with the mouse before, you know, kind of breaking the mouse's back.
And Judge Eileen Cannon has been running Jack Smith around the track.
She has the case completely stalled.
She's having hearings now on, A, is Jack Smith's appointment even legitimate and constitutional?
Where's the constitutional authority for it?
He's not a federal officer.
He was yanked out of private practice and just handed this Is that even allowed?
Number two, she's having hearings on whether or not this is selective and vindictive prosecution.
Because after all, if it is, it's not going to be allowed.
You can't say that Trump and Mike Pence and Joe Biden and many others have had classified documents.
But guess what?
We're going to let all the other guys off the hook and just go after Trump.
That's called selective prosecution.
And so there are motions involving selective prosecution.
And finally, there are also motions involving the mishandling of evidence.
Did Jack Smith and his team take the classified material, bring in their own documents, which had big classified writings on them, and did they stage a big photo op for the media, as if to say that this is the way the documents were found?
Were the documents kept in the correct order or have they been jumbled?
Has the FBI or other agencies interfered with those?
All of this is before Judge Eileen Cannon but on top of this we now have the Supreme Court's immunity decision and basically what the immunity decision says is that if Trump took these documents In his official capacity.
Let's say, for example, Trump is like, I'm the commander-in-chief.
I have the ability to declassify these documents.
I am doing that.
I am then taking the documents with me because I have every right to them.
Trump is going to argue that his transportation of these documents and even his possession of them falls within decisions that he made in his official capacity.
This is going to be This is going to be, once again, it's up to Judge Eileen Cannon to apply the Supreme Court's doctrine.
But the difference here is that you now have a sympathetic judge.
You have a pro-Trump judge.
And I'm saying that kind of in a candid way because I know judges are supposed not to be pro-Trump or anti-Trump.
But let's be honest here.
Judge Juan Merchan is very anti-Trump.
Judge Tanya Chutkin is blatantly anti-Trump, and so heck, Judge Eileen Cannon is pro-Trump and so be it.
I'm actually glad that there's a pro-Trump judge in the mix, and it looks like she is going to, she has plenty of basis for knocking this case down or even out without the Supreme Court, but the Supreme Court is only going to help her get there even faster.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
I want to talk about the Republican platform and specifically about the Republican platform's stance on abortion, a stance that has brought some dismay and some fire from certain quarters, not all quarters, but some quarters of the pro-life movement.
Now, first of all, the platform The 20 or so planks, the main themes, which have been summarized, made into in fact a kind of very readable meme.
It's all over social media.
I urge you to look at it.
It's a very impressive document, comprehensive.
clear, frames the issues in such a way that it's kind of hard to really disagree with them, and it appeals to a very wide audience.
The platform is written not as a kind of in-house document, not trying to take sort of the most extreme stances, but to state things in a way that most Americans would go, well, yeah, I agree with that.
This is what a platform should do, because a platform is ultimately aimed at convincing people as saying, this is what we intend to carry out.
This is not only the language and the policies that we want, but this is the spirit and the tone in which we want to advance them.
And I think that in all those respects, the Republican platform is really good.
In fact, we've seen nothing from the Democratic side to put up against it.
I'm gonna be curious to see what the Democrats do.
They're probably gonna have to come up with something of their own, but right now they just have these very generic, we've gotta vote against Trump to save democracy, which if you think about it is a completely nonsensical proposition because you don't vote to save democracy.
You vote within a democracy.
In other words, voting is part of the process inside of a democracy.
We don't vote on democracy itself.
In fact, when we think about how democracy is established in a country, it's never established by voting.
How do we get democracy in America in the first place?
By force!
We got it through an American revolution.
The revolution was violent.
The enemies of the revolution were either defeated, in the case of the English soldiers, or in some cases, the dissidents on the American revolution were banished.
They were pushed out of the country.
They were chased away to Canada.
So, nobody voted to have democracy.
Now, once you have democracy, we have voting.
So anyway, my point is the Democrats are going to have to say what policies they actually favor.
It's very hard for me to see them defending the policies they've been implementing because they, I think, are widely acknowledged across the spectrum to be kind of an unmitigated disaster.
But let's talk about the position on abortion.
Essentially what the Republican Party Does, and this is the influence of Trump and Trump's own actions in this regard, is the Republican Party rests on the overturning of Roe versus Wade, which sends the abortion issue back to the states.
And let's the states decide.
And by the way, it's important to note that this is a goal that the pro-life movement has fought for, really, for 50 years.
Going back to 1973, when Roe vs. Wade was first enshrined into law, was declared to be part of the sort of supreme law of the land, a constitutional right to abortion.
I mean, a complete abomination.
But it took a long time.
And there were many presidents, many Republican presidents along the way, who were not able to dislodge Roe versus Wade.
Trump had an opportunity.
He had the right number of justices.
He appointed them.
He said he would appoint judges that would overturn Roe.
He did.
They did overturn Roe.
So this is the most massive victory of the pro-life movement in its entire history.
So given that, you'd think that the pro-life leadership would be a little cautious to come out and start bashing Trump for doing what they wanted him to do.
him to do.
But the pro-life movement is in a little bit of an awkward position because on the one hand, they're like, yeah, we want abortion to be sent back to the states.
But guess what?
We also want to have a federal law that outlaws abortion throughout the country.
Now, if you think about this for a moment, you're trying to do two things that appear to be contradictory.
On the one hand, you're taking an issue that had been federalized by declaring an absolute right to abortion and, in fact, overthrowing the laws of all the 50 states, so abortion becomes available effectively for nine months nationwide.
Now it's not.
In fact, where I live, Texas, abortion is by and large not allowed at all.
There are virtually no exceptions and abortions do not occur in Texas.
If you want to have an abortion, you got to leave the state, go someplace else.
You can't get it very easily or at all.
in Texas. So what you have is you've got states like Texas, no abortion. You've got other states that allow it but restrict it. You've got some states, including states that were leaning pro life that nevertheless have voted to keep it, to have abortion.
So defeats for the pro-life movement, probably because the other side was better funded, probably because the other side was better organized.
So all of this puts a burden on the pro-life movement to get organized, to fight at the state level, because there is a way actually to outlaw abortion completely.
And here's the way.
Have it outlawed through the legislatures of all 50 states, and then you wouldn't have abortion in the United States at all.
But the pro-life movement, it seems, doesn't really want to have to fight on 50 playgrounds.
They would rather fight on one playground at the national level.
And so you have people like Lila Rose, whom I respect, a prominent leader of the pro-life movement, and she says, my statement on the Republican Party abandoning pre-born children in their draft platform.
I don't think this is an abandonment of freeborn children in the platform.
She really goes on to say here that the Republican position is one of decentralizing the issue, and this prevents us from having a national law.
Now, certainly in terms of logic, she's right, because what she's saying is either abortion is the unlawful killing of an unborn child, or it isn't?
If it is, does it make any sense to say, well, we're just going to have it, you know, decided by the states, legal, whether or not a state wants it or not?
By the way, Lincoln took an almost identical position on the issue of slavery.
He goes, look, this is not something that can just be left up to the states.
That was the position of Douglas, popular sovereignty, and Lincoln said that we can't choose to cancel out the choices of others.
So this is the ground that Lila Rose is standing on, and she's right to do that, but, and it's a very big but, and the very big but involves Lincoln himself.
Because here's the point.
Let's apply the logic to Lincoln and say either slavery is right or it's wrong.
If it's wrong, why allow it at all?
Why should the Republican platform only restrict the extension of slavery into the territories?
Why doesn't the Republican platform adopt the abolitionist point of view and essentially say slavery is an abomination nationwide, it should never be tolerated under any circumstances?
This was not Lincoln's position.
This was not, in fact, the Republican position.
And why not?
Because had it been the Republican position, the Republicans would decisively, by a landslide, have lost the 1860 election.
So Lincoln's view is that although something is wrong in principle, we need to outlaw it to the degree that is politically feasible in practice.
Once we do that, we can build a broader consensus to have further restrictions.
But you've got to go with the restrictions that are feasible at the time.
And at the time, there was no consensus, not even close to it.
And so Lincoln said, hey, listen, I recognize that the founders allowed slavery in the southern states.
I'm going to leave it there.
I'm not going to try to interfere in the domestic activities of these southern states.
If they want to have slavery, they're going to be able to keep it.
However, The Constitution is silent on the issue of the New Territories.
The point I want to make here is that Lyla Rose and others are blasting the Republicans for, quote, compromise.
But Lincoln, whose anti-slavery credentials are never in doubt, himself compromised.
Lincoln's point is it's not a matter of whether to compromise, it's a matter of to what degree do you compromise and what do you compromise on.
So I would argue, as an ardent pro-lifer, somebody whose sympathies are entirely with the pro-life movement, that Take a cue from the page of the civil rights movement of the 20th century.
The civil rights movement went from victory to victory to victory, each time building the momentum for the next one.
In fact, they didn't even begin by attacking segregation straight on.
They began by questioning separate but equal.
Hey, separate is not equal.
Let's make sure that black schools get the same funding as white schools.
That was the original project.
Then, let's go after segregation per se, but only segregation at the school level.
That's what Brown v. Board of Education decided.
It didn't automatically solve the problem of segregation in buses and in other areas.
That had to be dealt with separately.
So you build victory upon victory, and that's how you get to your ultimate goal.
I'm now beginning with Booker T. Washington's great work, Up From Slavery, and I'm going to start by reading from the opening pages, just because to me they are so powerful, so evocative.
They show you how Booker T. Washington really got started.
So, chapter one.
I was born a slave on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia.
What a simple, powerful opening line.
And then he writes, I'm not quite sure of the exact place or exact date of my birth, but at any rate, I suspect I must have been born somewhere and at some time.
Wow.
I mean, think about it.
All of us have birthdays.
We have pictures of our parents celebrating our first birthday, even though we don't have any direct memory of it.
We know when we were born.
We know where we were born.
In most cases, we know who our parents are.
But here's Booker T. Washington calling all those basics into question.
He does know who his mother is.
He's not sure who his father is.
He doesn't know when or where he was born.
He doesn't really have a birthday.
He says, shrugging, well, I guess I was born somewhere, someplace, sometime.
My life had its beginnings in the most miserable, desolate, and discouraging surroundings.
This was so, however, not because my owners were especially cruel, for they were not, as compared with many others.
I was born in a typical log cabin, about 14 by 16 feet square.
In this cabin, I lived with my mother and a brother and sister till after the Civil War, when we were all declared free.
Now, as Booker T. Washington outlines the, as he says, desolate, discouraging circumstances of his birth, We are so accustomed to people who do that, moving into a kind of extravagant description of complaint, a kind of plaintive cry of victimization.
Oh, my horrible owners!
Oh, the horrors of slavery!
You notice with Booker T. Washington, he doesn't go there.
In fact, he sort of goes in the opposite direction.
He goes, well, you might think this is because my masters were especially cruel.
Actually, they weren't.
Comparatively speaking, the evil for Booker T. Washington is indeed slavery.
But you'll notice that he approaches this evil in a manner very different from what we typically hear.
Well, first of all, when we typically hear about slavery, we are hearing from people who are not slaves.
In fact, their parents weren't slaves and their grandparents weren't slaves either.
They're far removed from slavery.
But here is a guy, Booker T, who actually was born a slave, who knows something about slavery, who's experienced it.
And yet, interestingly, he does not engage in what you could call Ibram Kendi-style rhetoric at all.
In fact, his rhetoric is almost the opposite.
And you can see why people like Ibram Kendi, the typical leftist of today, doesn't like Booker T. Washington because he refuses to sign on to their plaintive narratives of victimization.
Now, Booker T goes on to say, of my ancestry, I know almost nothing.
He talks about the fact that he hears whispered conversations and he says, I've been unsuccessful in securing any information that would throw any accurate light on the history of my family beyond my mother.
That's the one anchor he has.
That's my mom.
That's who gave me birth, but that's kind of all I know.
She, I remember, had a half-brother and a half-sister.
In days of slavery, Booker T. tells us, not very much attention was given to family history and family records.
He says, of my father, I know even less.
I don't even know his name.
I've heard reports to the effect he was a white man who lived in one of the nearby plantations.
Whoever he was, I never heard of his taking the least interest in me or providing in any way for my upbringing.
Booker T. Washington's dad, possibly, is not his owner, but possibly an overseer or a white guy who is somehow working on or involved in one of the other plantations.
And that's kind of all he knows.
And even that is largely speculation.
He doesn't know for sure.
Now Booker T. Washington gives a description of the circumstances of growing up.
He lives in a log cabin and he says that the log cabin had something called a cat hole.
A contrivance which almost every mansion or cabin in Virginia possessed during the antebellum period.
So apparently it was common, not just in the slave cabins but also in the big house, to have a so-called cat hole.
What's a cat hole?
Well, it's for the cat to go in and out.
So the cat hole was a square opening 7 to 8 inches provided for the purpose of letting the cat pass in and out of the house at will during the night.
He says, there was no wooden floor in our cabin, the naked earth being used as a floor.
So you get the impression of a very sparse, there's almost no furnishings.
Let's read.
The early years of my life, which was spent in the little cabin, were not very different from those of thousands of other slaves.
So, this is interesting.
We're gonna get a picture, not just of Booker T. Washington's life, but of the life of a young slave.
My mother, of course, had little time in which to give attention to the training of her children.
She snatched a few moments for our care in the early morning before her work began and at night after the work was done.
So this is slavery.
You're drafted to work, and you're working for free, and you're working from basically sunup to sundown.
That's the day.
12 hours or thereabouts.
You have a little time beforehand to yourself, you have a little time after, so his mom can attend to him a little.
But the rest of the time, he's on his own.
He says, one of my earliest recollections is of my mother cooking a chicken late at night.
And now that he's older, he's able to say, you know, I wonder where she got that chicken?
And he says, well, I guess she took it from the owner's farm.
He says, some people may call this theft.
And he goes, if such a thing were to happen now, I should condemn it as theft myself.
But taking place at the time it did, and for the reason it did, he says, No one could make me believe my mother was guilty of thievery.
She was simply a victim of the system of slavery.
Now here I think it's worth noting that Frederick Douglass, who I consider to be probably the greatest of black Americans, the greatest black American of our history, I would probably put Booker T. Washington at number two, Martin Luther King at number three.
I realize that that's not what most people Well, certainly most people on the left would have probably Martin Luther King, number one, Frederick Douglass, number two, and maybe Booker T, not even number three, much lower down on the list, because ideologically, they don't like what Booker T. Washington, well, they don't like what Frederick Douglass stood for either.
That's really why these prominent Republicans, and we'll see later, Booker T. Washington was a Republican, Frederick Douglass was a Republican.
These are not favorite figures on the left.
But Frederick Douglass had made the point that with regard to slavery, when he had stolen some of the master's pork, he goes, listen, I don't really see it as stealing.
Why?
Because, well, the master owns the pork, but the master owns me.
So he goes, I'm really just transferring the master's goods from one place, meaning the pig, to another place, my stomach.
And since both of us are owned by the master, you can't really call it thievery.
Because after all, thievery requires willfulness.
It requires a human being to do something like that.
And he goes, I'm not even considered a human being.
I'm considered to be an object owned by the master.
So anyway, a kind of wry account of so-called stealing under slavery.
It becomes a problematic concept.
Booker T. Washington doesn't really go down that road, but he does make the point that he's not going to hold his mom accountable as, oh, you're a thief, because she takes a chicken off the farm.
I cannot remember, he writes, having slept in a bed until after our family was declared free by the Emancipation Proclamation.
He goes on to talk about how he slept on the floor in filthy rags.
He says, I was asked not long ago to tell you something about the sports and pastimes that I engaged in during my youth.
Let's remember that when Booker T. Washington's writing this, He has now become a prominent, a famous figure.
He's the leading black American of his time.
He's the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, so he's the president of an educational institution.
So people ask him, when you were a kid, like, what are the sports that you played?
Here's what he says.
He says, until that question was asked, it had never occurred to me that there was no period of my life that was devoted to play.
Wow.
Here's a kid who never played.
From the time that I can remember anything, almost every day of my life has been occupied in some kind of labor.
Most of the time, he says, cleaning the yard, carrying water to the men in the fields, going to the mill, to which I used to take the corn once a week to be ground.
The mill was about three miles from the plantation.
So here's this little kid dragging corn three miles away.
And he says, if I was late getting home, I knew I would get a severe scolding or a flogging.
So here we get, and I'll continue with this discussion as I go on with the book, we get a picture of Booker T. Washington's humble beginnings.
And it's those beginnings that make his subsequent life story and his subsequent success all that more remarkable.
I think when we measure people, we often look at the where they ended up.
We don't look at where they started.
And I think that the measure of a man, the measure of a person, is not just where you started in life, it's not even where you ended.
It's really the distance that you've traveled in between.
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