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July 17, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:02
UP FROM APPALACHIA Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep875
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Coming up, I'll talk about the new atmosphere, the new Republican Party on display in Milwaukee, and I'll explore how Trump's choice of J.D.
Vance signals a real transformation of the party.
I call it the MAGAfication of the party.
I also want to argue there's now every reason for the Secret Service Director to step down, but there's one reason why Biden might be protecting her.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
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The Republican convention is underway, and there is just a lot going on and a lot to talk about.
I'm going to talk in a minute about J.D.
Vance and about the sort of significance of J.D.
Vance and the selection of Vance by Trump.
I think it signals a, well, the magnification, you may say, of the Republican Party, and I'll say what I mean by that.
Let me talk about a few other elements that are very striking.
I'll start by talking about my friend Harmeet Dhillon.
Harmeet Dhillon gave a prayer at the RNC, at the convention, and it was a Sikh prayer.
Now, who are the Sikhs?
The Sikh religion was a breakaway from Hinduism.
It's the guys with the turbans, and they are a minority in India, and their religion is really little more than a sort of an ethical system.
But in any event, Harmeet is a very devoted Sikh.
She's also a very devoted conservative, and she is a Trump conservative, and she has been fighting really hard through her law firm and at considerable sacrifice to herself for the Trump and the MAGA car.
She's represented Trump, she's represented other people who have been shafted by the left, and she's taken on these cases pro bono, or she's raised the money for it herself.
She's just a great person.
I actually knew Harmeet from her younger days when she was, you know, a sophomore at Dartmouth.
I had graduated at the time, but I was sort of on the board.
of the Dartmouth Review, and so I met Harmeet in that context.
And so, wow, it's kind of funny to see, because grown-up Harmeet is just sort of a recognizable version of young Harmeet, just as serious, just as intense.
But some people are actually bashing her and giving her heat for doing this Sikh prayer.
Now, I think this actually gets to the larger theme of the convention, which is to say, look, You know, we need to make some distinctions between theology on the one side and politics on the other.
I mean, it would make no sense to attack someone on the conservative side, let's say, for being a Catholic or being a Jew.
Now, you can say, we don't want a Catholic giving a sermon in a Baptist, you know, church.
Or vice versa.
Or, we don't necessarily want a Jew giving the sermon at a mass.
Alright.
But that's at a mass.
Now, what is the Republican Party?
The Republican Party is a coalition.
It's a team.
And it's a political team.
And it's a political team that not only has Catholics and Protestants, but it also has Jews, and it also has some Hindus, and it has some conservative Muslims.
And we want all these guys.
Why?
Because we actually need them.
We need them to enlarge our team in a very tough battle against a secular radical left that is against the things that we stand for in common.
And I don't just mean the political things.
Even Harmeet's ethical system is conservative.
So, I think it's short-sighted, mean-spirited, and makes no sense to bash someone like Harmeet, who has already proven her credentials and proven her loyalty, if you will, to the cause.
She's a favorite of Trump.
He likes her a lot.
I like her a lot.
And so, I thought I would make that point.
Now, this leads me to a point that Frank Luntz, of all people, made this morning, and that is, he said, I looked at the Republican Party, and he said, I looked at the people there at the convention, and he goes, it was different than any Republican Party I have seen before.
And I think I know what he means, because I've been to some of these conventions.
I'm not a regular convention goer, that's why I'm not at this one.
I tend to step back from these kinds of things and observe them.
But I've been to a couple of them, going back to the Reagan days.
And the Republican Party traditionally is a very sort of a predictable party.
You can see who the kinds of guys who are going to be at the convention.
You're going to have some veterans and some military guys.
That's the patriotic side.
And then you're gonna have some conservative intellectual types, and then you're gonna have some small business guys, and then you're gonna have some cultural conservatives, and some guys representing, let's say, the evangelical movement.
And this is the Republican standard bearers, if you will.
But if you looked at the scene, and this is what Frank Lentz is talking about, he noticed there's a remarkable number of blacks.
There are a number of working-class people, not only working-class people in the aisles, but the head of the Teamsters Union, who would never be expected to speak at the Republican Party, there he is, praising Trump, praising Vance.
And so then you see you've got some people with, like, You know, tattoos and bohemian outfits.
And there are some conservatives who are a little uncomfortable at all this.
And in fact, I saw a couple of people that I know and certainly follow on social media bashing Amber Rose because they're like, Amber Rose is a slut.
Amber Rose is not the kind of person that we want to see at the Republican convention.
Now, I don't think in fairness to these guys who are saying this, that they mean that somebody like Amber Rose shouldn't be allowed to attend.
But what they're saying is we don't think she should be allowed to speak because she doesn't really reflect the cultural conservatism of the Republican Party.
But again, my view on that is, wait a minute, what is she there to speak about?
I mean, is Amber Rose stepping up and making the case for abortion?
Absolutely not.
What Amber Rose is talking about, and this is a woman, by the way, with 20 million fans on Instagram.
So this is a woman of some influence.
I think there's a certain thought process that goes in why you have someone like that speaking.
They're there to speak about the fact that if you're in popular culture, you absorb all kinds of lies.
Lies that are not only in the media, not just at NBC News, not just at The View, but lies that creep into the culture of Hollywood.
And the culture of music, the culture of entertainment, the kind of jokes that you hear from Jimmy Fallon and the comedians.
And so, all of that gives you a certain picture.
And for someone like Amber Rose, who's not immersed in the world of politics, she picks up the lies, she believes them, she goes with them, and then begins, almost akin to a religious conversion, you begin to start asking questions.
Wait a minute, that doesn't seem right to me.
On the one thing that I know about, that's not true.
What else am I being lied to?
And so she describes in her speech this journey of, you might call it, political awakening.
Now, this is obviously very effective with a lot of people in the country who are taking a good hard look for the first time at the Republican Party.
These are People who are independents or even Democrats, but they don't like what Joe Biden is doing, but it's still a step.
It's one thing to say, well, we're not too happy with Biden, maybe we'll stay home, as opposed to saying, okay, we're going to go for Trump.
That's the crossing of the Rubicon.
That's the big step.
And so again, my view on Amber Rose, and I would apply this view in general, is that it doesn't matter if you've got a speaker who's gay, as long as they're not speaking in praise of the gay lifestyle, LGBTQ.
This is my Pride Month speech at the Republican Convention.
No!
This is somebody who's talking about, let's just say, parental choice in education, or someone who's talking about Ukraine or some other issue.
So, I think that it's important for our side, and this is especially true for cultural conservatives to be pragmatic in recognizing what is best, what is the best way to advance the conservative, including the cultural conservative agenda.
Step one, let's win the 2024 election.
Why?
Because if we do that, we now have the executive branch.
Step two, let's hold the House, let's take the Senate.
We have a chance to do both.
And then, if we have all three, all kinds of things become legislatively possible.
So, what is the point of trying to undermine or subvert our opportunity to do that, which then makes possible... It's similar to what Lincoln was saying about saving the Union.
His point is that all our rights need to be protected inside of a union.
Even the Constitution by itself is just a piece of paper.
You need a union to protect the Constitution.
So Lincoln's point is, let's protect the union.
Let's save the union.
Once we save the union, other good things, the ending of slavery, the protection of basic rights, all of that becomes more secure because we have done the first thing, the prerequisite, to getting all the other things done.
And that would be my argument for taking a wider view.
of the message we're trying to convey, and also the imagery of it.
One of the points that Frank Luntz made, and I feel funny agreeing with Frank Luntz, he's such a snake in so many other areas, but what Frank Luntz is saying is, a lot of people won't even listen to the speeches.
They're not gonna follow the kind of innards of American politics.
They're just gonna kind of look and say, well, what's the vibe I get from the convention?
And he goes, the vibe is, it's a new Republican party.
It is a diverse party, and diverse here not simply in the sense of sort of quotas for different groups.
It's diverse in the sense that you have all kinds of people there.
That's it.
And not only that, it is a party that has a strong kind of working class flavor, and that is not only ideologically apparent in the speeches, It's visually apparent by just looking at what's going on in the hallway.
So all of this, to me, is a good thing.
And it suggests an ongoing transformation of the party.
And I'll talk about it in the next segment with specific reference to JD Vance.
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Trump's election of J.D.
Vance, I think, is a very good and important step.
At a number of different levels.
First of all, I think it's a good choice to strengthen the ticket for the 2024 election.
Let's remember that JD Vance comes from a critical state, namely Ohio.
Now, I think Trump won Ohio in 2020, he won Ohio in 2016, he'll win Ohio in 2024.
But nevertheless, shoring up a critical state is not a bad thing to do.
And of course, Ohio is the Midwest.
Ohio is not all that different from, let's say, Michigan.
or Wisconsin, even Minnesota.
And so what J.D.
Vance brings is that Midwestern sensibility, which is very different than Trump's sensibility.
Trump's sensibility is New York.
It's, of course, now Trump is in Florida, but it's East Coast.
And so allying the East Coast to the Midwest And particularly to the J.D.
Vance Midwest, which is to say, someone who grew up in Appalachian country.
I don't know if you've read J.D.
Vance's book, Hillbilly Elegy, but it's well worth reading.
It's moving, it's hilarious.
The guy grew up in, well, just ramshackled poverty.
Not just, by the way, economic poverty, which is bad enough, it can be crushing enough, but economic poverty allied to cultural poverty.
Now, what's the difference?
What do I mean by cultural poverty?
Well, you have poor people around the world.
But sometimes you can take a poor guy from a slum in India or a favela in Brazil and you transplant them into an environment where they have education, they have opportunity.
And they flourish.
Why?
Because they have hard-working habits.
They have basic honesty.
They have learned basic things about life.
It's just that they're poor.
They lack resources.
But they don't lack the resource of believing in themselves.
They don't lack the resource of being willing to work hard.
They don't lack the resource of being respectful to people around them.
They don't lack the resource of being Able to defer gratification, which is essential when you're starting at the bottom.
You've got to save to build up for the future.
So they can do all these things.
Well, J.D.
Vance grew up in such a dysfunctional home where his mother was on drugs.
He was raised in part by his grandmother and his grandfather, but they had such pitched battles with each other that at one point, I believe, if I'm going by recollection here, the grandmother set the grandfather on fire.
And so this kind of madness was going on all around him and finally when he got to, he was admitted to Yale, he was so lost that he didn't even know really what to do.
Someone, I think this is a kind of a little amusing episode in Hillbilly Elegy, they come to serve wine at one of these receptions with faculty and And he says, okay, I'll have a white wine.
And they say, well, do you want a Chablis?
Do you want a Chardonnay?
Do you want a Zinfandel?
And he looks at them like, are you playing a joke on me?
Because he thought wine is like white wine and red wine.
There's no other type of wine.
There's no types of wine.
So this is the world in which J.D.
Vance grew up.
And yet, He's a guy who has an excellent education.
He's smart.
He's worked in business.
He's actually married to an Indian woman named Usha.
They have, I believe, two, maybe three children.
I'm not exactly sure.
And I've had him on the podcast a couple of times.
In fact, it's kind of funny because he has an Indian wife.
He sort of knows, he knows that Dinesh in India is pronounced more like Dinesh, Dinesh.
So he goes, hello, Dinesh.
Thanks for having me on your show.
And, um, In any event, he's a good guy.
And I remember Debbie almost casually observing after he came on the podcast, you know, this guy has a really big future in the Republican Party and he might make a really good president.
Partly because, like Abraham Lincoln, this is a guy with a, well, let's say a log cabin type of story.
He's come up from the ground up.
And this is a guy, at the same time, who has that perfect combination, I think, which is that he is familiar with the world of the elite.
He's not intimidated over there.
He has actually now lived there.
He's gone to a very good school.
He's been part of boardrooms.
And so he is not, like Trump in that respect.
Trump is somebody who went to the Wharton Business School.
Trump is somebody who has moved in culturally elite sectors of American life.
He's been on business boards.
He's dealt with the commissioner of this and the building commissioner of New York and gets calls from the mayor.
So that's the kind of mover and shaker world.
And at the same time, Trump has simpler routes on the construction side, talking to guys on the lot.
And the same with JD Vance.
He has simpler routes and I don't think he's forgotten them.
So that combination of simplicity and complexity of, you may say, working class Origins and background, and at the same time, a certain measure of cultural sophistication, so you know how to deal with these elites.
You know who they are, you know where they're coming from.
Vance has it in the same way that Trump has it.
And I think this is all a new direction for the Republican Party.
Now, a new direction in what way?
I mean, is the Republican Party ceasing to be a Reaganite party?
Is it ceasing to be a conservative party?
Not at all.
You can go back and look at pictures of young Trump with Reagan.
You can go back and you can talk to J.D.
Vance.
I'm quite sure he is a mega-fan of Reagan.
So these are people in the Reaganite mold.
And by and large, on the broad constellation of issues, they would agree with Reagan.
So, if you think about the three prongs of Reaganism, America should be strong and not be pushed around or kicked around or taken advantage of, well, I mean, that's a theme that resonates completely with Trump.
He's been talking about it all his career, the ways in which America gets taken advantage of, and that it takes a strong leader to block that.
Number two, the idea that we need a vital economy that creates jobs, and particularly small business jobs and prosperity, and that we need low taxes and low regulations to enable that.
There's no departure from that.
One of the first things Trump did in 2016, when he had a narrow House and Senate majority, passed a tax cut.
So, I don't think, and on the cultural issues, if anything, the party has become more conservative And Trump and J.D.
Vance are in that mold.
So, for example, take the pro-life issue.
It's true that there are some pro-lifers who are, like, harrumphing about Trump.
He doesn't want a federal law.
But think about it.
Did Reagan end Roe vs. Wade?
No.
Did Reagan appoint justices who would consistently vote against Roe vs. Wade?
No.
Reagan appointed Sandra Day O'Connor.
She was a partial supporter of abortion.
And similarly, after Reagan, you had the Bushes, and then we got Souter, and we got these justices, Anthony Kennedy, that dithered on these types of issues.
It took Trump to appoint, boom, Gorsuch, and boom, Amy Coney Barrett, and boom, Kavanaugh.
And that was the end of Roe versus Wade.
So talk about delivering the goods on the central issue of cultural conservatism.
Trump did that.
And J.D.
Vance, again, I think is of that mold.
So, where's the difference?
I think the only difference comes not even so much with Reagan, but a little bit with Bush, which is this kind of enthusiasm to commit U.S.
troops abroad, which, by the way, Reagan never did.
Reagan was very reluctant to do that and didn't even do that when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979.
Now, on trade, there is a greater concern on the part of Trump and JD Vance than there was in the Reagan era for these decimated working class communities.
And I think rightly so.
It was not obvious to us in the 80s and 90s that this was a serious problem.
I admit I was much more in the sort of free trade Reaganite camp.
But since then, I have re-examined, because you just see the debris, you see that these destroyed communities, it's not just the lack of jobs, but then out of that comes broken families, out of that comes wife abuse, and fentanyl, and drugs, and so this kind of cultural devastation cannot be tolerated.
Democracy, you have to have a government that looks out for the citizens.
And so that is the sort of ideological new direction of MAGA.
But again, to me, it is not a break with Reaganism, but merely a sort of recalibration of it to today's circumstances.
Really, the main feature of MAGA is it's a different temperament. It's a more of a fighter's temperament and I think it's more suited to the fighting times that we live in. It's more suited to dealing with the gangsterization of the Democratic Party. It's more a frame of mind. You think of somebody like Paul Ryan on the one hand and Trump on the other.
It's not that they're ideological opposites.
It's really that they are two radically different personalities.
They bring a whole different vision and a whole different vibe.
Basically, Paul Ryan is the vibe of the sort of dull accountant.
You know, somebody who wants to go through the budget and strike out line items.
Trump, on the other hand, is a visionary.
Trump, on the other hand, is a kind of a boss and has a completely different way of dealing with the Democrats than, say, Paul Ryan would.
So, for all these reasons, I think I welcome this new direction of the Republican Party.
If Trump had gone for somebody like, well, he wasn't going to go for somebody like Nikki Haley, but if he went even for somebody like Rubio, and Debbie and I like Rubio, and we think Rubio would have helped Trump in certain other ways, but nevertheless, I think that the choice of Vance ends up being If not the best choice, an excellent choice, and a choice of somebody that will carry the MAGA torch beyond Trump.
I mean, it's early to be thinking past Trump, and I'm not really doing that.
But on the other hand, Anyone who's making a decision of this magnitude has got to realize that whoever you pick is going to have the inside track in the Republican Party to continue the torch.
And I think by picking someone younger and by picking somebody who shares the Trumpian spirit, Trump is ensuring that MAGA, the MAGA spirit, will live on past and beyond Donald Trump.
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Get this, we're now back to talking about the assassination attempt on Trump, and the director of the Secret Service, a woman named Kim Cheadle, has given an interview with ABC News, and she says in the interview that she thought about putting snipers on the roof, the very roof where the shooter was, but she noticed that it was a sloped roof,
And so she didn't want anyone to slip and fall on account of safety.
Now let me give you her actual quote.
That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point.
And so you know there's a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn't want to put somebody up on a sloped roof.
Now this is so bizarre that it is deeply disturbing because it's one thing for someone to come out and basically say, look, you know, we got our signals scrambled.
We relied too heavily on local law enforcement.
I mean, those would be troubling, but believable explanations of what has happened here.
But I simply got on video and took a look at what goes on at the White House every day.
The White House, by the way, has a sloping roof.
And guess what?
There are people standing up there with guns.
So they're perfectly capable of standing on a sloped roof.
Then I went back and looked at where the shooter was, and while there is this part of the area that is a sloped roof, there's also an area that's completely flat.
There's no reason you couldn't have put agents or an agent there and he would have been right next to the shooter.
There's no way the shooter could have spent two or three minutes or four minutes up there using a device to measure distance and then being able to go inside and out of his backpack and then aim his gun and fire multiple shots.
I mean, there is no way.
Not to mention the fact that when we have secret service to protect the president, whose safety comes first?
So, is it the safety first of the officer?
Oh, the guy may fall off the roof!
So what?
The point is, isn't neutralizing a potential threat against the president your job?
So, now, Are we dealing with incompetence here?
Or mere incompetence?
I want to actually make the case that that is increasingly looking like it can't be the case.
Why?
Because even with incompetence, there's a limit.
There's a limit.
And the limit is When you find four or five separate levels of incompetence, then something else is going on.
Because it's just not possible for that to happen.
It's kind of like saying you've got an Olympic athlete.
And they can have a flub, right?
They have a fall, they trip and they fall down.
But it'd be very odd in a single race if an Olympic athlete had like five different flubs.
First of all, they had the wrong shoes.
Second of all, they tripped and fell down on the track.
Third, they had some sort of a heart attack a little further down the track.
Fourth, they were found to be malnourished and hadn't eaten enough to complete the... If you keep adding it up, you're like, this is completely inconsistent with what an Olympic athlete would do.
Something else is going on.
Maybe the athlete wanted to throw the race.
Or maybe someone else made a bet and told them I'll pay you a million dollars even though you're the favorite if you lose.
Something else is up.
And I would say something else is up here for a number of reasons.
Let's look at some separate Episodes that are going on.
First of all, this is all against the backdrop of the Democratic Party and the Biden regime having demonized Trump as Hitler, as a tyrant, as a threat to the American way of life.
So these are the people who are running the government.
These are the people who are the bosses of the Secret Service and the intelligence agencies and the cops.
Apparently, at the same time that Trump was speaking, some Secret Service resources were diverted to a Jill Biden event.
Again, was that just because it's Dr. Jill Biden and she deserves more protection than Trump?
Or is it because, you know what, let's get the best agents over here because we want something else to be going on over there.
Then, this is the most obvious, call it like, assassin's paradise.
This is the spot where the shooter would have the best chance of being able to shoot from the top, unobstructed, at Trump.
And that's the part that was unguarded.
Now, not only that, but the shooter was observed.
People saw him crawling up on the roof.
They pointed him out to cops and to the Secret Service.
Nothing is done.
And they pointed him out in plenty of time to do something, and yet nothing was done.
I mentioned yesterday, or the day before, if you look at the guy who shot the shooter, that guy apparently had his sights trained on him beforehand.
I say that because the gun didn't have to move.
It's not like he was looking around and trying to find the guy, and then he aims and shoots.
No, he had him in his sights, and he was trained on the guy, and then he draws his head back.
The other guy, the shooter fires first, fires again and again, and then he fires and kills him.
That's strange.
On top of that, there were reports of a policeman who began to climb toward the shooter.
And all that the shooter did is point his gun at him, and the policeman retreated, and apparently did nothing.
Apparently didn't even sound the immediate alarm.
And finally, When you've noticed a threat, even if it is the case, which makes no sense to me, but even if it is the case that it's the Secret Services policy not to fire first and so on, okay.
At the very least, you get Trump out of there.
Why wouldn't you?
Why would you take the risk of having a shooter get off some shots?
So, why wasn't, even though, as I say, the warning was given in plenty of time, there was no effort to get Trump out of there.
So, let's put all these things together and ask, is it really possible for People whose job it is.
With tremendous resources, by the way.
People who go beforehand and scope out the place.
People who check out every site.
By the way, there were Secret Service agents and law enforcement agents in the very building that the shooter used.
They just weren't up on the roof.
They were in the building, looking out of the windows and stuff.
So, the question is, how does a 20-year-old Outsmart all these people.
Know exactly where to go.
Know how he can get to a spot where he can get off multiple shots.
I don't know if you saw the movie, The Day of the Jackal, which is about an attempt to assassinate De Gaulle.
And the assassin, who is very well-trained, he's no 20-year-old.
He's done political assassinations on the world stage before.
He knows exactly what he's doing.
And when he buys his gun, the guy selling him the gun says, will there be time for a second shot?
And he goes, I doubt it.
He goes, it's very unlikely.
And in fact, There's no time for a second shot and in fact they're able to bust in and get the guy.
Now here you've got a guy who's 20 years old.
He's no seasoned assassin and yet he is able to get in a position to unload multiple shots.
So, could it be that you just have multiple levels of incompetence?
I mean, we're at a very odd place where the Secret Service's best defense is, we're a bunch of idiots.
We don't know what we're doing.
We're so incompetent, we produce layer upon layer of incompetence.
Or, There's another explanation.
And the other explanation is, it's not incompetence.
There is some level of inside involvement.
What level?
We don't know.
By whom exactly?
We don't know.
But the possibility of nefarious actors being involved in this, I think, is now moved into a pretty high probability.
A lot of investigation needs to establish who it could be.
And what could really have happened here?
And, of course, we have the foxes guarding the hen house, right?
We can't trust the FBI to do this.
We can't trust the Secret Service.
We certainly can't trust the Biden administration to do it at all.
Why?
Because qui bono.
Who benefits if Trump was assassinated?
Biden does.
The Democrats do.
And so this is, I think, what is giving Kim Cheadle the confidence to say, I'm not going to resign.
She's being protected by Biden.
Why would She's done Biden kind of a favor.
Hey, listen, I almost got rid of your big political opponent.
Wouldn't that be good for you?
Ha ha ha.
So something very...
disturbing and diabolical, I think is going on here.
And there are quite possibly some really bad people involved at high levels of the government.
And they also enjoy high levels of protection.
Because think about it, this level of incompetence in any company, they would fire you immediately.
And so the fact that it's not happening, there's not even a widespread calls for it across the board.
And like, Kim Cheadle is like, I'm not resigning.
Nothing from Biden about it.
This tells me, this increases my level of suspicion that something really insidious is at play.
Up from slavery, chapter three.
And this is called the struggle for an education.
And Booker T. Washington tells us that he was working at a coal mine.
And he happened to hear two minors talking about a new school for colored people somewhere in Virginia.
So his interest is piqued, he tries to listen, and he hears that there's a school, it's called Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia, established for the education of blacks, and particularly of freed slaves.
And the school is not free, but the cost is very low.
And you can work at the school to pay all or part of the cost of the boarding.
And at the same time, the school promises to teach you some trade or industry.
So in other words, you learn a craft, you learn a trade, and you can then earn money with it.
So it's a great deal.
As they went on describing the school, it seemed to me that it must be the greatest place on earth.
So you notice a rhetorical tactic of Booker T. Washington.
He sees someone eating a cookie, and it's the best cookie that he can ever imagine.
And here he's hearing someone talk about the school.
He goes, well, that must be just the greatest school.
It's a little bit, in a funny way, like Trump.
I mean, Trump tends to go to the limit, right?
I mean, if it's a burger at Mar-a-Lago, it's the best burger ever made.
And if he's got a good record with his endorsements, he's got a greater record than anyone else who's ever had a record.
And so, we have with Booker T, this is not exaggeration, this is a rhetorical style of of emphasizing how eager he is to go to this school.
And yet he says that although he wanted to go, I had no idea where it was, or how many miles away, or how I was going to reach it.
And he goes, I thought about this day and night.
And he said, then I heard that there was a woman in Virginia Who was originally from Vermont.
Her name is Viola Ruffner.
She's the wife of a general.
And so she is a Yankee.
She's a northerner.
And she is looking for someone to work in her house.
Kind of as a sort of a house boy, if you will.
And Booker T thinks, if I go to work there, maybe I'll earn a bunch of money, some money, a little money, and that will then enable me to go to the school, and I'll have some resources.
Well, first of all, I do have to get there, and once I get there, to enroll, and maybe to have some money to cover my expenses.
The problem is this woman, Mrs. Ruffner, is known to be extremely strict.
In fact, bordering on mean.
But Booker T is not deterred.
He applies.
He's hired.
Five dollars a month.
That's his salary.
And he says he observed the woman very carefully and he realizes she's strict, but it's only because she wants things done a certain way.
She's extremely clean.
She wants everything to be spotless.
She is a stickler for punctuality and she wants complete honesty and frankness.
So, no stealing the cookies and saying, I don't know where they are.
Nothing must be sloven or slipshod.
Every door, every fence must be kept in repair.
Now, this is You may say tailor-made for Booker T. Washington because he brings to this job a like a dedication, a focus, an industry that is probably a little hard to even imagine today.
And he says that over time he earned Mrs. Ruffner's trust.
Because she realized, A, this guy devotes himself, he works unbelievably hard, he's completely honest and trustworthy, and so she begins to rely on him more and more.
And he says, The lessons I learned in the home of Mrs. Ruffner were as valuable to me as any education I have gotten anywhere since.
So often that, as in all things, The techniques that you learn later, techniques of, say, writing a book, or making a movie, or running for president, are all dependent upon prior qualities that are far more basic.
Qualities of dedication, punctuality, not leaving a task until it's done, wrestling with the problem in your head until you've solved it, not letting it go, so to speak.
All of these qualities Booker T. Washington says, learning those things.
And even though I learn more complicated things later, these basics are going to be indispensable to me.
And then Booker T. Washington says that he was given a little bit of time to be allowed to read.
Very important to him.
And of course, he can hardly read at all.
But he begins to develop what he calls, my first library.
Now, it's not a library.
It's just got, he just has a handful of books.
There's no pattern or plan to them.
He just, it's whatever he can pick up.
And he goes, I secured a dry goods box, I knocked out one side, I put some shelves in it, I began to putting into it every kind of book I could get my hands on and I called it my library.
Many of these books I'm quite sure he had no idea how to read.
And then he says he continued to follow Hampton and make a plan for going there.
And he said he found it really interesting that a lot of older people, older blacks, who themselves, the sort of days of education have passed them by, they're not going to be able to go to Hampton.
But he says, Those people took an interest in me.
They wanted to help me.
It's almost like they can't get an education, so Booker T gets it kind of in their stead.
And this is so cool, because some of these older people would give me a nickel, others a quarter, or a handkerchief.
So, the very little that they can spare just to help him out.
Finally, he says, the great day came and I started for Hampton.
I had a small, cheap satchel with a few articles of clothing.
That's pretty much all he has.
And off he goes.
He says, my mother was at the time weak and broken in health.
I hardly expected to see her again.
Just remember, this is a time when you make a journey.
Who knows when you'll get back?
She, however, was very brave through it all.
So here you have The mother who recognizes that the son is on his way to try for a better life.
And so she's like, go, do it.
And the distance from Malden to Hampton is about 500 miles.
I had not been away for many hours before it became obvious.
I did not have enough money to pay my fare to Hampton.
Even his savings, $5 a month, didn't add up to all that much.
He is traveling on the mountains on a stagecoach.
So he can go some of the journey on a train, but some of it, no trains.
He has to go by stagecoach, and the stagecoach at night pulls up at a very ramshackled Cheap hotel, a common unpainted house with a sign that just says hotel.
And he says, all the other passengers except me were whites.
In my ignorance, I suppose that the little hotel existed for the purpose of accommodating the passengers who traveled on the stagecoach.
He's like, oh, maybe the stagecoach company has arranged for some accommodation.
Of course, he's completely wrong.
And so he goes up to the guy.
Now, he doesn't have a lot of money, very little, but he's willing to put up that money.
He's willing to sleep in a barn or sleep in an empty room.
He's willing also to work to earn a little money to pay for his lodging at the hotel.
But he goes, Without even asking as to whether I had money, the man at the desk firmly refused to even consider the matter of providing me with food or lodging.
Segregation.
So Booker T. Washington comes face to face with something that he doesn't have experience of.
He has experience of slavery, ironically, but segregation is something new.
And the guy doesn't give him any explanation, but he turns him away.
And so what does Booker T. Washington do?
He goes, in some way, I managed to keep warm by walking about.
And so got through the night.
Think of it.
Walking outside, just huddling and avoiding the cold.
Finally, he says, By walking, begging rides, both in wagons and cars, after a number of days, I reached the city of Richmond, Virginia.
When I reached Richmond, he says, I was completely out of money.
I had not a single acquaintance in the place, and I didn't know where to go.
I applied at several places for lodging, but they all wanted money, and that's what I did not have.
And then he says, I walked the streets, and I passed by many food stands where fried chicken and half-moon apple pies were piled high.
And very tempting, and so here again.
At that time it seemed to me I would have promised all that I expected to possess in the future to have gotten hold of one of those chicken legs or one of those pies, but I could not get either of these nor anything else to eat.
He's at the point where, listen, I'll give you a year of my future earnings if you can give me one chicken leg.
He's so hungry, but of course, that is just rhetoric.
And so, he is out of luck.
And so, in some ways, we are at the point where this is a turning point for Booker T. Washington.
We'll pick it up We'll pick it up tomorrow.
But it's a turning point because here he is about to enter an institution where if he's able to stay, if he's able to make it, his whole life will be different.
Reminds me a little bit of actually when I first came to America in a different way, different circumstances, obviously different conditions, but a very fateful moment for Booker T. Washington's where he is in Virginia.
He's now at Richmond.
He is Really at the doors of the Hampton Institute.
And the question is, what will become of him now?
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