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July 16, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza

50:45

HAND OF GOD Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep874

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	Coming up, I'll reflect on God's hand in saving Trump's life.
	I'm also gonna dive into the question of how the shooter got so close.
	Was it a massive security failure or something more sinister?
	And I'll also explain why I'm not sympathetic to media calls for us to come together.
	Plus a brief comment on Trump's new vice presidential pick.
	Hey, if you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
	This is Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
	The times are crazy, in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
	We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
	This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
	Big announcement just out, out just a few minutes ago, which is that JD Vance has been selected by Trump as the vice presidential nominee.
	It was a great experience.
	In my view, a very good choice.
	Now, some of you have probably seen, I've had JD Vance on my podcast at least once, I think twice.
	And he's married to an Indian woman, which is why he kind of uses the Indian pronunciation of my name.
	He doesn't call me Dinesh, he calls me Dinesh.
	Which is kind of the Indian way of saying it.
	But this is a guy who has an incredible story.
	I mean, he grows up in beaten down Appalachia, in poverty.
	If you haven't read his book, A Hillbilly Elegy, it is definitely worth reading.
	Beautifully written, evocative, funny.
	I'm tempted also at some point maybe to do it on the podcast as a sort of discussion piece.
	But in any event, in my view, a great choice.
	I actually texted President Trump this morning.
	It's about an upcoming interview with Trump for our forthcoming movie.
	And we're scheduled to do that interview early next week.
	In any event, I was texting him about that.
	But I said, hey, I said, you know, I don't know if you want any advice for Your vice-presidential choice.
	But if you ask me, I'm going to put three names in front of you.
	And they are DeSantis, JD Vance, and Vivek.
	And my reasoning is that, particularly now after this assassination attempt, you want somebody who is going to be able to carry the torch.
	Somebody who is Tough, somebody who is hard hitting, somebody who has the MAGA spirit.
	And I thought these three guys would be, for not always the same reason, the very best.
	So I'm delighted that Trump, and again, not because of me, I think he had already made his decision, but I'm glad that my sort of three candidates were, was the pool from which he made his final, final choice.
	Now, I want to come back and talk about the assassination because there is so much more to say about this attempted effort to kill the former president.
	The first thing I want to say is that There is, I think, the more I think about it, a sort of providential element to all this.
	And Trump himself alluded to this in a couple of his statements that he has put out.
	I mean, this guy is now being almost jovial about it, which is kind of amazing.
	Also, he was playing golf and one of the caddies offered this report, Trump hits a 20-foot putt.
	It goes right in the hole.
	And then he looks up and he says this, the difference between me and the shooter, I don't miss.
	This is Trump.
	Wow.
	And but I don't think it is.
	Going too far afield to say that the hand of God is in this guy, is on this guy.
	And here's Scott Adams with a really, I think, pungent and effective post on X. He goes, one thing I didn't see coming was God doing early voting.
	As if to say that God is putting in his ballot and his ballot is for Trump.
	Let's keep this guy alive, his country needs him.
	Pretty amazing.
	And then, from Dana White, Dana White is the guy who runs the MMA, the UFC, the mixed martial arts, and this guy is unleashed.
	I mean, he writes that he was on his way to Italy, found out about the assassination attempt, he saw the short video, And he goes about Trump, this image perfectly reflects exactly the man I know Donald Trump to be.
	He is the toughest, most resilient American badass on this planet.
	And I saw today Dana White talking in on a podcast, elaborating more on this, on this theme.
	Now, The only kind of historical analogy I can think of to what happened with Trump was in 1912.
	You've got to go, you know, more than a hundred years back when an assassin tried to shoot Teddy Roosevelt.
	And as with Trump, hit him, but didn't kill him.
	Teddy Roosevelt was in the process of giving a speech.
	And he got shot, but he took no notice of the shot.
	Somebody in the audience said, fake, as if to say this was somehow staged, or there wasn't a real shot, it was a firecracker.
	And Teddy Roosevelt stepped forward, lifted his arm, his shirt, showed that there was blood on it, And then he said, friends, I don't know if you understand, I've been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a bull moose.
	And then he continues with his speech.
	This is Teddy Roosevelt.
	I mean, an unbelievable guy, a guy who was, you know, a hunter and a fighter, and he would do sumo wrestling with Japanese sumo wrestlers.
	But I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Trump is in this Kind of indomitable mold.
	And it's very difficult for the country not to get the message.
	Now, let's turn to this weird business of what is really going on and how this could even have happened.
	There's a lot of talk about how foolish, how incompetent, how DEI, the secret service is.
	I myself talked about the DEI 30% quotas, and that could be applied to some of the, you know, overweight, clumsy female agents, one of whom actually was saying on audio, you can hear it, Where are we going?
	What are we doing?
	What are we doing?
	So a bewildered, baffled, clearly untrained agent.
	That's the DEI aspect of it.
	But could there be something far more sinister going on?
	I don't want to say that there was.
	But I do want to consider the possibility.
	A possibility, again, that is not generated from some kind of conspiracy theorizing, but is generated from the simple facts on the ground.
	So let's start with a fact on the ground.
	How does a 20-year-old kid outsmart the police and the Secret Service put together?
	How does a 20-year-old kid not only get there, not only get on the nearest roof, 150 or so yards from Trump, how did he know that that was the roof to go to?
	How did he know that he would be able to spend, what, three, four minutes on that roof, where he could position himself, where he could aim, and where he could fire not once, not twice, but multiple shots at President Trump?
	How is it that he knew that that roof was unguarded?
	So all of this is extremely weird.
	Right now, nothing is known about the shooter.
	In some reports, he was a registered Republican.
	Those reports themselves are somewhat ambiguous.
	Was he a real Republican?
	Did he just register to vote in the Republican primary?
	What does the social media say?
	Answer?
	We don't know.
	Why?
	He doesn't have one.
	A 20-year-old kid with no social media imprint at all?
	Or could it be that his social media has been cleaned, has been scrubbed?
	By whom?
	And why?
	So, these are all very legitimate questions.
	Now, I've seen a couple of videos, more than one, by People who are snipers or they are senior figures in protective detail.
	These are people with experience in this kind of security.
	And they're pretty clear about it.
	They basically say there's no way.
	This is not a matter of incompetence.
	Because it goes beyond incompetence.
	This is a matter that makes, from the point of view of what happened, makes no sense except If there was somebody in the police or in the intelligence agencies or in the Secret Service who was in on it, who actually was working in tandem with this kid, allowed him to get up there.
	Why?
	Because there is actually no way to get up there.
	And here's the point.
	Let's go through this.
	This is not a matter of the Secret Service doing a poor job of scanning the crowd.
	It has nothing to do with that.
	The simple fact of it is that when The president, or former president, in this case the former as well as aspiring president, is at a known location.
	The Secret Service checks out the location beforehand.
	And they look at every possible place where somebody could be to take a shot at the president.
	Well, they didn't have to look far.
	This was the most, perhaps the single most obvious spot.
	So they knew about it.
	And what they do is, their job is to arrange it so that you can't get there.
	You can't get to the place to take a shot.
	Now think about it.
	When someone gets a shot off, it's not enough to come back and shoot the guy.
	Because he's already gotten the shot off.
	It's not enough to say we got agents to jump in front of the president, because you can't jump faster than a bullet.
	So unless you see the guy in advance, you're not going to be able to jump in.
	You might be able to jump in and prevent the second shot, but you can't jump in and prevent the first shot, especially if you don't anticipate it.
	You don't know where it's coming from.
	So the point is that it is normal for the Secret Service to prevent you from being in a position to take that shot.
	And yet, you have this kid, And not only does he climb up on the roof, but there are trumpsters.
	And there's video of this, and it's on my feed.
	If you go look, just look it up on my ex feed.
	There's video of people who see the guy.
	They go, hey, there's a guy on the roof.
	He's crawling, and they're waving and pointing at him and calling the attention of law enforcement.
	And again, is it just negligence?
	Law enforcement is like, oh, there's no big deal.
	There's just a guy in fatigues, you know, in camouflage with a gun on a roof.
	What's the big deal?
	That makes no sense.
	So they're calling the attention of it, not to mention the fact, and I mentioned this yesterday, you've got a sniper on the roof, the guy who actually shoots and kills the intended assassin, He doesn't have to move his gun.
	And what that means is he already had this guy in his sights.
	And so it was simply a matter of pulling the trigger and yet this guy does not fire until the potential, the would-be assassin gets off multiple shots.
	against Trump.
	Shots that would surely have brain damaged, if not killed Trump, had Trump not inclined his head slightly.
	Perhaps he's, I think it was to look at the jumbotron, but he inclined his head at exactly the right angle.
	This is where divine providence comes in because, wow, if Trump had just kept his head where he was, the whole story, the whole future of the country, would have been completely different.
	The country would be in a completely different and I would say much more desperate predicament.
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	There are a number of implications of this failed assassination attempt.
	I've focused on Trump, and I'm going to be coming back to Trump.
	But I want to say a word about the effect of all of this on the candidacy of Joe Biden.
	You remember that before this, there was a lot of talk about Joe Biden stepping aside.
	Some people even wanted Joe Biden to resign.
	But in a weird way, the effect of all this, this whole incident, the failed attempt to assassinate Trump, is to shore up, is to consolidate, is to save Joe Biden.
	I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that that talk about getting rid of Joe Biden has diminished.
	It has gone away for the most part.
	And Joe Biden looks like he's okay.
	Well, he's not okay, but looks like he's safe as the nominee.
	It's going to be Trump-Vance against Biden-Kamala Harris.
	Now, already people are salivating the debate between J.D.
	Vance and Kamala Harris.
	All of that's going to be very interesting, but But I think one of the reasons why the Democrats are now locked in with Biden is partly because I don't think they can get their top Other candidates to jump in.
	Trump is looking so strong that these guys may decide, we're just going to wait this one out.
	You know, let Biden try his best against Trump.
	And there was a senior Democratic official quoted yesterday, basically saying, we've given up on the presidential race.
	In other words, we don't think we can win it.
	The contrast between superhero Trump And sort of feeble, pathetic, you know, man who's almost, you may say, imaginatively using a walker.
	Biden doesn't have a walker, but he sticks his hands out like he does in that sort of pathetic, you know, glacial Frankenstein walk.
	I think the Democratic official was basically going, how can you possibly salvage this?
	And by the way, I don't know if you've seen the latest Trump commercial narrated by Sylvester Stallone.
	Again, go to my Twitter feed if you haven't or if you follow me on Locals.
	I posted on Locals as well.
	It is magnificent.
	It is built around the narrative of the attempted assassination, but as a measure of Trump's character.
	And of course, who better than Rocky, who better than a fighter to narrate this?
	I think it's also wonderful that, by the way, Sylvester Stallone is quite clearly coming out of the closet, at least here, bravely for Trump.
	And as many other people are.
	I'm hearing from people that you're now seeing Trump signs in San Francisco, Trump signs in Portland, in Seattle.
	It's not that Trump has converted all these people.
	You've got a bunch of people who are pro-Trump, but they were a little scared.
	They were a little reluctant to show it, but now they're like, you know what?
	If Trump is being so brave, I need to be a little more brave to heck with it.
	And I think that is a very healthy sign for our society.
	Now, I've talked about the unending procession of claims that Trump is a dictator, Trump is like Hitler.
	I've got a few examples in front of me.
	Here's an article by Robert Kagan.
	This guy is a neocon, never Trumper.
	A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable.
	We should stop pretending.
	Now I want you to listen to these titles imagining that these Journalists or these politicians or these Democrats are speaking directly to a would-be assassin.
	Imagine if you were to say to them, a Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable.
	The guy's gonna think, okay, then what I'm doing is extremely noble.
	Because if this guy is Hitler circa 1933, isn't it considered a noble aspiration to get rid of Hitler?
	Here is Biden.
	And Biden says that it's time to put Trump in a bullseye.
	Now, how do you read that, if not to say that Trump needs to be targeted?
	Trump needs to be targeted, if not directly for assassination, he should be treated as somebody who is a menace and a threat.
	And Biden says that very explicitly.
	He basically says Trump is a threat to I mean, read it.
	Donald Trump is a genuine threat to this nation.
	Genuine.
	Coming from the president, he's a genuine threat to this nation.
	Something that you could say, for example, of Osama bin Laden.
	He's a threat to our freedom.
	He's a threat to our democracy.
	He's literally a threat to everything America stands for.
	So again, I ask you, if you say this directly into the ear of a would-be assassin, what is the normal response?
	Well, how would you expect someone like that to react?
	And so, So there has been a toxic environment created.
	Here's Mike Godwin in the Washington Post.
	Yes, it's okay to compare Trump to Hitler.
	Don't let me stop you.
	Same thing.
	Here's Nancy Pelosi.
	This is not a normal election.
	And then, quote, Trump must be stopped.
	Must be stopped.
	Not outvoted, but stopped.
	And now these same people who have put out all this rhetoric, created this toxic environment, are telling us all, tone it down.
	Let's all dial it back.
	No, we're not dialing it back.
	You dial it back.
	You're responsible for this environment that you created.
	And I don't understand the people who have called Trump Hitler for four, if not eight years, now saying things like, we're gonna beat him at the ballot box.
	Well, first of all, you tried to beat him every other way other than the ballot box.
	You tried to censor him, you tried to lock him up.
	Now you're, let's meet him at the ballot box.
	But, and also the slogan, political violence is always unacceptable.
	Well, first of all, political violence is not always unacceptable.
	The American Revolution was political violence.
	Was it unacceptable?
	The Civil War was political violence.
	Was it unacceptable?
	No.
	So, political violence, in fact, is very often necessary to found a society, to in some cases redeem a society from the kind of threat posed in the case of the Civil War by secession.
	So that's a nonsensical phrase.
	And in fact the people who say it haven't thought about it, they don't really believe it, they're just uttering platitudes.
	But Let's think about the logic of all this.
	If Trump is, in fact, a dangerous dictator who tried to overthrow democracy, who, to quote Biden, poses a grave threat to our American way of life, why wouldn't it make sense to get rid of him by any means necessary, again, to use a phrase popularized by the left?
	So, I think that the people who are saying this have either not thought it through, which is a possibility, but the real problem is that they don't mean any of it.
	Let's look at it this way.
	If a Republican If a democratic figure were facing assassination, I'm not talking about a fake assassination.
	The Governor Whitmer thing was a fake.
	The FBI engineered that.
	That was not a plot that anyone came up with on their own and tried to carry out on their own.
	So even though that's routinely invoked, That is, let's call it, made-up political violence.
	In fact, Whitmer was in on it from the beginning.
	She knew about it.
	She was being briefed regularly about it.
	She was never in any danger herself.
	So all of that is contrived.
	It's bogus.
	But if a prominent Democrat, in fact, were to be targeted and there was an assassination attempt, there would be no talk about toning it down.
	All the talk would be about, it's time to shut down the MAGA right, it's time to have more censorship, it's time to... Basically, they'd be calling for a sort of American version of the Enabling Act, which is what Hitler wanted.
	When there was an attempt by a seditious radical to burn the German parliament or the Reichstag, Hitler was like, cracked down on these people.
	That's what the left would be calling for a massive crackdown on us.
	But since it is our guy, Trump, who was in the crosshairs.
	And by the way, Biden was just interviewed about this, and he was asked by Lester Holt, he said, you know, you use this rhetoric about calling him a grave danger to democracy, and you talked about putting him in the bullseye.
	And this is Biden's answer.
	He said, well, I didn't say crosshairs.
	In other words, I only said bullseye.
	I didn't say crosshairs.
	Then he goes on to say, all I meant is I wanted to have sort of like a media focus on him.
	Well, Again, is that how an assassin would hear it?
	We need to put Trump in the bullseye.
	I can just hear this guy, this would-be shooter go, that's what I'm doing.
	I'm putting him in the bullseye.
	I've got him in the bullseye.
	And so we come back to The circumstances in which all of this was carried out, and I don't think that we can write off.
	In other words, let me put it this way as I close out this segment.
	I keep hearing that the FBI is, quote, looking for a motive.
	Now, first of all, how stupid is that?
	Are you looking really for a motive?
	You need a motive.
	I'll give you a motive.
	What you have is somebody who wanted to kill Trump so that he couldn't be the next president of the United States.
	How's that for a motive?
	But you might say, well, Dinesh, could there be another motive?
	Yeah, I can only think of one other motive.
	And that motive is the FBI wanted to kill Trump.
	And they created the conditions, or they put up this guy, or they found a way to have that carried out.
	In other words, that this was, in some sense, a coordinated job.
	Now, I can't prove that.
	But you asked me to give you a possible motive.
	There are only two possible motives.
	The guy wanted, the shooter wanted to get rid of Trump, or somebody else wanted to get rid of Trump.
	Somebody else in a very powerful position who has access to the cops and to the Secret Service, who created a failure of management so spectacular that it makes absolutely no sense to attribute it to Whatever level of incompetence.
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	As if there wasn't already enough big news, the vice presidential selection, the aftermath of the attempted assassination.
	You also have a big decision just came out of Florida, Judge Eileen Cannon.
	Wow!
	This woman is amazing and not to mention her timing is great!
	Debbie was just asking me today, do you think that she, you know, timed this or that she made this decision because of what happened with Trump?
	And no, I don't think she did.
	She has, in fact, what, a 90-page decision.
	So the decision was made before.
	But the timing of its release, superb.
	And what does she do?
	She dismisses the whole classified documents case.
	It's gone.
	It's kaput.
	It's over.
	Now, It's possible that Jack Smith will try to appeal it.
	If he appeals it, it goes to the 11th Circuit.
	But hey, that's just another round.
	The 11th Circuit could uphold Judge Eileen Cannon.
	And even if they don't, Trump will probably appeal that to the Supreme Court.
	All of this basically means that the classified documents case is dead before the election.
	That we can be sure of.
	So now we turn to Judge Cannon's reasoning for dismissing this case.
	Now, there were several possibilities.
	Before, in fact, was a range of options.
	One of them was selective prosecution.
	Trump had classified documents.
	So did Mike Pence.
	So did Joe Biden.
	Joe Biden had classified documents going back to his days in the Senate.
	Joe Biden also had no power to declassify documents.
	He was the vice president, not the president.
	So you had all this stuff going, and yet Trump, and only Trump, is the one being prosecuted.
	So Judge Eileen Cannon could have said, you can't selectively and vindictively pick out one guy to prosecute.
	is the basis on which I'm throwing this out.
	But that is not what she said.
	She could also have said that the Justice Department had admitted to mismanaging the classified documents, changing their order, putting new labels on them, apparently for like media packaging, and to create photo opportunities.
	So all of this is called rigging and doctoring evidence, or at least tampering with it, let's put it that way.
	And that could have been the basis for Judge Eileen Cannon's decision, but again it was not.
	To find the basis of our decision, we turn to something that Clarence Thomas had said in his concurring opinion in the presidential immunity case, so a different case.
	And we're now talking, of course, about Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court.
	But Clarence Thomas almost sort of As a side observation, said, you know, I'm actually beginning to wonder about this whole special counsel appointment in the first place.
	How is it even constitutional?
	Where is the constitutional basis for it?
	Now, let's be very clear.
	Thomas is not saying that there is no constitutional basis for any special counsel.
	What he was saying is that Jack Smith is a special case in that the special counsel normally, if appointed to investigate something, is a government high official who has already been through the governmental process.
	In other words, is the U.S.
	attorney for Delaware.
	Or is the number two figure in the Justice Department someone who has, in that case for example, been nominated by the President, confirmed by the Senate, so they've gone through this sort of Congressional approval process specified in the Constitution.
	Jack Smith was not.
	He was an attorney in private practice.
	Yeah, he had some experience in prosecuting at the world court and so on.
	And Merrick Garland just decided, okay, I'm naming you the special counsel.
	Almost unlimited power, almost unlimited budget.
	And Judge Eileen Cannon, picking up from Clarence Thomas, and I think this is, not that she was unaware of this, she was very well aware of it, but from Clarence Thomas she gets probably a little bit of encouragement, like, hey, there's a guy in the Supreme Court who spots this already, and so she goes, let's look for the constitutional basis for this, and it turns out there is none.
	You're not, there's no authority for an, essentially for an official of the president, in this case Merrick Garland, to decide of his own volition, I'm going to appoint a special counsel of my choosing, not even a government official, and basically what Eileen Cannon says is, look, you can have a special counsel, you can even have Jack Smith, but It's got to be appointed through a constitutional process.
	If Congress wants to appoint Jack Smith, they can.
	But it has to be done by Congress, not just by Merrick Garland.
	And now, this is causing a massive freakout on the left.
	Why?
	Well, number one, because there are many people on the left who said this was their best case.
	This was their best hope to get Trump.
	It's much more difficult than a January 6th case.
	How do you prove that he incited some kind of a rebellion?
	Trump never said, go inside the Capitol.
	Trump said, march peacefully and patriotically toward the Capitol.
	So, that case is largely bogus.
	The Georgia case, equally bogus.
	There's nothing in Trump's phone call with Raffensperger, for example, that even suggests that somehow Trump knew he lost Georgia, is nevertheless trying to find fraudulent votes.
	All they've got is the word find.
	Trump says find mean the votes, but of course Trump believes, if there's one thing we know about Trump, he believes the election was stolen.
	He believes it was stolen in Arizona, stolen in Georgia, stolen in Michigan.
	So if Trump Honestly believes the election is stolen and is, as the top official of the U.S.
	government, trying to get to the bottom of it?
	That's not illegal!
	Not only is that not a crime, that's his job!
	It's Trump's job to make sure elections are secure.
	So that's another case that is, I won't say a joke, because these cases are not a joke.
	They expend enormous effort and time and they do expose the president, former president, to enormous risk.
	But where's the merit of it?
	Where's the basis for it?
	So a lot of people thought on the left that we'll get him in Florida.
	He had possession of these documents.
	No one denies that they were classified.
	No one denies that they were at Mar-a-Lago.
	We can claim that these were, you know, Top national secrets, even though some of it is just, you know, an email or message that Trump sent to Kim Jong-un.
	Nevertheless, you know, top secret.
	The country is at stake.
	But Judge Eileen Cannon wasn't swayed by any of this.
	And so these people are freaking out.
	They're acting as if it's obvious that the 11th Circuit Court will Overruled.
	I don't think that's obvious at all because, again, if you read the actual words of the so-called Appointments Clause in the Constitution, you match it up against the appointment of Jack Smith.
	There's a mismatch.
	Something is off here.
	So, Judge Eileen Cannon, I think, is right to notice this.
	And the other part of it is that these are guys who all say, well, this is their sort of gotcha.
	Well, you know what?
	If Trump is off the hook in Florida, that means that Hunter Biden is off the hook.
	Here's Dan Abrams, by the way, longtime Reporter on Court TV.
	I'm not exactly sure where he is now.
	One of the networks.
	Using Judge Cannon's reasoning in dismissing documents obstruction case means Hunter Biden case should be dismissed as well.
	He too was prosecuted by special counsel.
	Now it's a little hard to believe that Dan Abrams is a lawyer because this is a lawyer saying this and his underlying assumption is that Judge Eileen Cannon is saying That all special prosecutors are bogus.
	No special prosecutors can be allowed under the Constitution.
	And that is manifestly not what she is saying.
	What Judge Eileen Cannon is saying is that a special prosecutor has to go through a constitutionally approved process.
	And so, for example, let's look at the Hunter Biden case.
	Who was the special prosecutor in the Hunter Biden case?
	The U.S.
	Attorney for Delaware.
	The U.S.
	Attorney for Delaware is constitutionally appointed.
	The U.S.
	Attorney for Delaware is a governmental official with governmental powers.
	So that meets the criteria spelled out in the Constitution.
	There's a big difference between that guy, Weiss, and Jack Smith.
	And so, you know, it's one thing for Dan Abrams to argue that, look, that somehow Jack Smith's appointment is constitutional, maybe by some elaborate reasoning that says that the constitutional criteria are ambiguous.
	But that's not what he's saying.
	He's basically acting like if Jack Smith is not legitimate, it follows that Weiss is not legitimate and Hunter Biden is off the hook.
	It doesn't follow at all and it completely misunderstands what Judge Eileen Cannon is saying in this case.
	So, in any case, you know, when you do a little overview of the Trump cases, They're going down one by one.
	I mean, even in the Alvin Bragg case where they have the 34 felony convictions, it's going to be, I think it's very hard to see the judge imposing any kind of sentence at the September hearing.
	Why?
	First of all, because of the presidential immunity decision by the Supreme Court, which may knock out part or all of the case.
	Number two, because already the Court of Appeals is taking up the case.
	So there's just too much legal jeopardy for this judge, even though he's a sicko, even though he's a maniac.
	Nevertheless, I don't think Eager as he is to get Trump, he's going to be able to do it, and that it could well be, and it's looking like it will be, that Trump will go into this election all clear on the legal front, and with the left's massive arsenal, their shotgun approach of 91 criminal charges having gotten, at least through November, absolutely nowhere.
	I'm continuing my discussion of Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery.
	We're now in Chapter 2, which is called Boyhood Days.
	And Booker T. says that one of the first things that people did once slavery ended was they wanted to leave the plantation.
	Now, you might be thinking they want to leave the plantation for good, but no.
	Many of the slaves continued to work on the old plantations, particularly the older ones, but even some of the younger ones.
	The only difference being, of course, now they worked for wages, no longer for free.
	They weren't slaves, they were, you may say, contract laborers, and their old slave masters would make a deal with them.
	Now, even so, Booker T says, the slaves felt like it's really important to leave the plantation at least temporarily.
	Get away for a week, get away for a few days.
	Why?
	Just to sort of make a break with the old life and to start anew.
	The other thing is they were very eager, the slaves were, to change their names.
	And this is very interesting.
	Booker T. says that in general most of the slaves just had a first name.
	It was like John or Susan.
	But they didn't have a surname.
	But after the war, they decided, well, if I'm going to be a free man, part of what it means to be free is to have two names.
	That was a kind of marker of freedom.
	And so if someone was John or Susan, they would They would take a president's name.
	They'd be John Lincoln, or John Sherman, or later John Grant.
	Before that, they had no last name.
	I mean, if they had a last name, it was the master's name.
	They were known as John Hatcher, or Hatcher's John.
	Hatcher being, of course, the name of the slave owner.
	Now, Booker T says of himself that his...
	that his own name, Booker, was his given name.
	And he didn't think he had a last name.
	And so, after freedom, he took one.
	Booker Washington.
	After, of course, George Washington.
	He says later he found out his mom actually did give him a last name.
	It was Booker Taliaferro.
	And so, that became his middle name.
	Booker T., which is Taliaferro, Washington.
	And Booker T. writes very charmingly, I think there are not many men in our country who have had the privilege of naming themselves in the way that I have.
	He settled on his own name.
	Most of us, of course, have a given name and we have nothing to do with it.
	Now, Initially, Booker T. Washington was spirited off by his mother's husband, so not his dad, kind of his stepdad, who was initially not living on the plantation, but as a free man, he found his way to West Virginia.
	And so he told Booker T. Washington's mom, you come and you bring the children to West Virginia.
	And so Booker T. Washington made this long trip to West Virginia where he got a job working in the salt mines and in the salt furnaces.
	He says, when I look at the place that we stayed, it was like no better off than the log cabin that we lived in under slavery.
	In fact, he says, in some ways it was even worse.
	There was a tremendous amount of filth everywhere.
	He says, the kind of people who worked in these salt mines, he says, Some of our neighbors were colored people and some were the poorest and most ignorant and degraded white people.
	Drinking, gambling, quarrels, fights, and shockingly immoral practices were frequent.
	And he says that he worked often starting as early as four o'clock in the morning.
	He had no education.
	He says the only number that he knew was the number 18.
	Why?
	Because each salt packer, he says, had his barrels marked with a certain number.
	And the number allotted to his stepfather was 18.
	And so they would write 18 or put the number 18 on the barrels and pretty much Booker T says, I recognize that.
	And I began to copy out that figure on the ground.
	Quote, although I knew nothing about any other figures or letters.
	He had a burning desire to learn, to read.
	He asked his mom to get him a book, and all she could find was an old, tattered spelling book, which had words and sort of how to spell them.
	And so this guy, Booker T, begins to read, memorize, and he says, I tried to learn more.
	I tried to find somebody else, but he says, I couldn't find a single member of my race anywhere who could read.
	And he says, my mother supported me.
	She shared my ambition to learn, but she was totally ignorant.
	He says, and but he says, you know what?
	I got my ambition to learn from my mother.
	I got the disposition to learn.
	He says, eventually, There was a young colored boy who had learned to read in Ohio, came to the town, and this guy was every day surrounded by a group of former slaves, and he would read, and they just wanted to hear him read.
	They just wanted to hear what it meant to read a sheet of paper or a newspaper.
	And how I used to envy this man, writes Booker T. Washington.
	He seemed to be the one man in the world who ought to be satisfied with his attainments.
	And then there was some talk about having a school for colored children, as they were called at the time.
	And there was a school that had been opened, and there was a There was a teacher in a small cabin and you could actually go and start learning.
	And Booker T. writes about this beautifully.
	He says, the experience of a whole race beginning to go to school for the first time presents one of the most interesting studies that has ever occurred in connection with the development of any race.
	And he says this school, if you looked inside the cabin, there were young people, there were old people, it was day school, it was night school, and everybody was trying to learn to read.
	And he says one of the books that everyone wanted to read, especially the older people, was the Bible.
	And he says men and women who are 50 or 75 years old were often found in night school trying to learn to read the Bible.
	Unfortunately for Booker T, he was a very good worker in the salt mines and the salt furnaces.
	And his stepfather said, I can't spare you to go to school.
	You have to keep working here.
	And so poor Booker T Washington, there is a school.
	He's eligible to go but he can't go and you see these children passing by him to go to school and you can imagine his frustration and not being able to do it.
	Now one of the teachers at the school agrees to give him some lessons late at night and poor Booker T. Washington would learn at night and work all day Finally, he's given some time to go in the day, one or two days a week.
	But here is the problem.
	He has to work in the furnace until nine in the morning, and then he has to go to school.
	Well, school starts at nine.
	So when he tried to do that, he realized he was always late, and he would miss what happened in the class, and he would find it difficult to follow or to catch up.
	And so he had to hit upon a kind of a sneaky solution.
	And he says, to get around this difficulty, I yielded to a temptation which most people would perhaps condemn me.
	But since it is a fact, I might as well state it.
	And listen to this sort of innocent prank of Booker T. Walsh.
	Not even really a prank.
	He goes, there was a large clock in a little office in the furnace.
	And so everybody depended on the clock to regulate the hours.
	So what does Booker T. Washington do?
	He adjusts the time.
	So he actually, it says nine o'clock, but he's actually getting out like at 8.30 or 8.45.
	He has time to scamper over to school.
	Unfortunately, after a few weeks, the scam is detected.
	The clock is taken away and put behind a kind of cabinet, so locked up so nobody can fool with it.
	And so Booker T. Washington's little scheme is sadly thwarted.
	He also describes how when he went to school, he noticed that everybody else had a cap.
	They're wearing a hat of some sort.
	And he goes, I don't have a hat.
	I don't have a cap.
	He goes, I began to feel really uncomfortable.
	I'm the only guy who doesn't have a cap.
	So he says, I went to my mom, and what she did, So beautiful.
	He says, she took two pairs of what they call homespun.
	So homespun is basically coarse material like jeans, that kind of cloth.
	And she took two pieces of that and sewed it together.
	And he goes, I was soon the proud possessor of my first cap.
	And he goes, he goes, I really got to thank my mom because A, she was very innovative.
	She realized I got to do something for my son.
	So she figured out to do something, but she was also frugal.
	She was smart.
	She didn't want to go into debt.
	She didn't want to pay for something she couldn't afford.
	She couldn't afford an actual cap.
	So she makes a cap.
	And here is a rhetorical approach that Booker T takes, and he does this numerous times in the book, and it's always extremely powerful.
	Since that time I have owned many kinds of caps and hats.
	At the time of this writing, he's one of the famous, one of the most famous men in America.
	One of the, certainly the most famous black man in America by far, but also a well-known figure nationwide.
	So he can certainly afford a hat, a hat.
	He can afford a cap, but he goes, he goes, even though I've, I've owned many kinds of caps and hats, never one of which I felt so proud as of the cap made of the two pieces of cloth sewed together by my mother.
	And, um, And then he talks, as I mentioned before, about the changing of his name.
	Now, Booker T goes on to talk a little more generally in this chapter before the chapter ends, and I just want to close with this.
	He has two lines that I think are worth considering.
	One is, he says, one of the things that he learned in school and at a young age is that, I'm quoting now, merit, no matter under what skin found, is in the long run recognized and rewarded.
	So right here you see this sort of Stinging rebuke of what we would today call DEI.
	He's not asking for any favors.
	He's not asking for a leg up.
	Think of it.
	He deserves a leg up.
	This is a guy starting out in slavery.
	If there's anyone who deserves sort of a hand, it's Booker T. Washington.
	But no!
	He wants to be judged by the same standard.
	He recognizes he may have to work harder, but merit, no matter under what skin found.
	And he's writing this, let's remember, in the early 20th century.
	There's a lot of racism.
	There's segregation throughout the South.
	And finally, he also says this, which is again a lesson in life that's well worth keeping in mind for anyone. I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed. In other words, your success in life isn't where you end up. It's not where you started.
	It's the in-between distance.
	It's how much distance you travel from where you started to where you ended up.
	And of course, with Booker T. Washington, you can only imagine.
	He starts off at the very, very bottom of the heap.
	It's hard to even go lower.
	And he ends up at the very top of the heap.
	And as we'll see, he achieves this through his own, not only his own persistence and his own ingenuity and his own intelligence, perhaps even his own genius, but I think most of all also through his strength of character.

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