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July 30, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
45:58
A MUSH FOR BRAINS PROPOSAL Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep885
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Coming up, Joe Biden has a mush for brains proposal.
What other kind of proposal would he have?
This one is to reform the Supreme Court.
I'll comment on that.
And author and Newsweek columnist Josh Hammer joins me.
We're going to talk about Biden, Kamala, and we're also going to talk about Israel and Netanyahu's trip to the United States.
Also pick up my discussion of Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery.
If you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
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Joe Biden has come out with a proposal.
proposal.
accompanied by an article that he wrote himself.
Well, he probably didn't write himself, but it's written under his name in the Washington Post.
And the article is a defense of his proposal to reform the Supreme Court.
Now, I'm going to talk a little bit about the elements of Biden's proposal because it is a proposal.
It is being presented at the very least as a campaign theme for the Democrats to pick up on.
The Washington Post, in an accompanying editorial, treats the proposal with a certain kind of gravity, as if to say that Biden isn't really running for office, so he can now disgorge what is really on his mind.
He is not subject to the pressures of partisan politics, and the Washington Post says he has produced a proposal that is insulated from politics.
We will see in a moment that that is not so.
But to just read the proposal, if you knew nothing about politics, it does seem to be facially neutral.
It appears to be proposing procedural reforms and not reforms that just advance one side over the other.
Although, again, when you look more closely and apply a little more sophisticated analysis, you will see that, in fact, they do.
It is a one-sided plan.
But before we discuss the plan, it's important to note that this plan is going absolutely nowhere.
First of all, you cannot in today's polarized environment pass a substantial law in the United States right now on any subject at all.
And why is that?
Because to make a law, to make a new law, whether it's on immigration, whether it's tax cuts, anything, You first need to pass the House.
And if you pass the House, you have to pass the Senate.
And in the Senate, it's not even enough to get a simple majority.
You generally need 60 members of the Senate because of the filibuster, because of the ability of the minority party to throw blockades on a bill that it doesn't like.
And even if you get through all those hurdles, the president has to sign it.
And even that doesn't make the law constitutional and then is subject to what we call judicial review.
Now, the proposals that Biden has made, we will see, infringe directly upon the constitutional responsibility that is given to the Supreme Court.
Basically, Biden wants to take some of that power away.
But how can you?
When the Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land... Let's remember that the Constitution cannot be overridden by any kind of law.
The only way to change the Constitution is to amend the Constitution.
And good luck with that.
Every time I hear someone say, I'm proposing a constitutional amendment, or we need, Dinesh, a constitutional amendment, I say, stop right there.
I don't really want to hear what you have to say, because a constitutional amendment is Virtually impossible to get, even when the country is much less polarized, even when people are, by and large, of the same mind.
Because you not only have to get supermajorities in the House and the Senate, you not only need the president, you need supermajorities of the states through their legislatures to approve it also.
So, you can, by and large, chuck that for now.
It's not going to happen in the current environment, or any time, I think, in the foreseeable future.
Now, the better way to understand what Biden is doing is he is throwing some red meat, if you will, to the left-wing base.
The left-wing is kind of angry about the court.
They're angry about a series of court decisions, from the Chevron decision, to the EPA decision, to the Supreme Court throwing out the obstruction of an official proceeding, the so-called Section 1512 provision.
So let's look at the proposal.
It's got three parts.
scope of presidential immunity to President Trump. And as you'll see, these proposals are aimed at sort of undercutting some of that, even though they don't explicitly say that. So let's look at the proposal. It's got three parts. Number one, no more immunity for crimes a former president committed while in office.
Well, you can see the nakedly partisan aspect of that.
Well, it's not strictly speaking partisan because it does mean that if something like that were to pass, in theory, a Republican district attorney in Texas or Louisiana or anywhere could indict Biden.
As soon as he leaves office, because he would be a former president.
He could be indicted for bribes.
He could be indicted for selling influence.
He could be indicted for treason.
There'd be all kinds of things you could indict him for.
But this is aimed at Trump.
It's quite obvious that they're upset about the immunity decision, and so this no more immunity for crimes is quite pointedly aimed at one Donald J. Trump.
Number two.
Term limits for Supreme Court justices.
By and large, when you have a Republican majority that is 5-4 or 6-3, any facially neutral limitation is going to affect the Republicans more than the Democrats for the simple reason that there are more Republicans on the court than there are Democrats.
And it's kind of like saying, like, let's say, for example, you had any kind of group that is made up of 90% Democrats, and you said, all right, let's have term limits for this group.
They can only serve one term, then everybody has to get out.
Nobody can run again.
Who's that going to hurt more?
Well, the Democrats, because they've got 90%.
So, this proposal for term limits, again, even though facially neutral, is aimed at undercutting our side.
And finally, a binding code of conduct for the Supreme Court.
The question here, of course, is who establishes this binding code, and I think, by and large, the idea is to come up with various schemes, again, to put a leash on a conservative court.
Now, I was on social media this morning, and I see someone I used to watch play tennis in the old days, and this is Andy Roddick.
And Andy Roddick is now, it seems to me, kind of a political center liberal.
He's not a far leftist.
He's actually a very sincere guy.
And he is responding to Biden's proposal and he goes, I'm seriously asking both sides.
Who's against term limits?
Who's against a code of ethics for the highest court?
Who's against rules that prevent presidents from being above the law?
And so I try, and I think in a spirit that I think he should or would appreciate, I go, well, I'll answer you.
So let me take up his questions.
Who's against term limits?
Well, I have a question for Andy.
We don't have term limits for Congress.
We do have term limits for the presidency, by the way.
The president can't serve more than two terms.
And that's been true since the FDR days.
But we don't have term limits for Congress.
So why should Congress be able to put term limits on the court when not only are there no term limits for Congress, but the court certainly wouldn't have any power to do that.
The court can say, well, you know what?
We think there should be term limits for Congress.
So you have a kind of a separation of powers issue here.
Our Constitution is based on the idea that you've got a legislature, an executive, a judiciary.
And while there is some oversight of one of the others, so for example, the president nominates Supreme Court justices and then that guy has to be passed, has got to be approved by the Senate.
So this is the way in which we have separation of powers and checks and balances.
But one side doesn't get to increase its own power by just declaring unilaterally, well, we've decided to kind of keep an eye on what the Supreme Court does to kind of decide how many terms those guys can serve.
The Constitution itself says Supreme Court justices can serve as long as they are under quote good behavior, which is to say they can serve in a sense for life.
Number two.
Andy Roddick asks, who's against a code of ethics for the highest court?
Again, my question is that the court doesn't have the power to police the ethics of Congress.
The court can't just say, take it upon itself to say, all right, we're going to call on Senator Menendez to resign because there are gold bars.
And not only gold bars, the guy has actually been convicted.
And yet he hasn't resigned.
I don't even know if he's gotten off the Judiciary Committee.
I think he's expressed some intention to resign, but my point is courts can't make these calls.
So why should Congress or the President be able to make these same calls about the court?
That would seem to violate the separation of powers.
And third, who's against rules that prevent presidents from being above the law?
And my point is, and I'm not just reading my answer, if presidents can be charged for official acts, and I mean criminally charged, then any local DA can cripple the presidency.
The point being that the immunity is immunity not for personal acts.
Which is to say the president can't go next door and beat up his neighbor and claim that he has immunity.
No.
But acting under the authority of the office to do things like supervise how elections are conducted or in foreign policy.
Imagine if the president, for example, conducts an official action and is indicted for murder.
Why?
Because of Benghazi?
Or because of a drone strike?
I think anyone can see that opening up the presidency to being charged with official crimes after the guy leaves office would have a terrible effect.
And this is in fact a bipartisan point I'm making.
This is why the Supreme Court was very careful when they were discussing immunity.
They were like, well, we're not just deciding a case for Trump alone.
We're deciding a case that clarifies what the Constitution is trying to say regarding when and under what circumstances presidents can be criminally charged, not just now, but also into the future.
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Guys, I'm always happy to welcome back to the podcast our friend Josh Hammer.
He's a senior editor, editor-at-large at Newsweek, where he also hosts the Josh Hammer Show podcast, also syndicated radio show, and he writes a weekly newsletter, the Josh Hammer Report.
He has a new book that I want to mention, and we'll be discussing it in the second segment.
It's called Israel and Civilization, The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.
You can follow him on X at Josh underscore Hammer.
Josh, welcome.
Thanks for joining me once again.
Biden has a plan to reform the court.
And I think we all sort of know what that means.
They're unhappy with court decisions.
They're unhappy with the fact that there is a conservative court with a perhaps a 5-4, perhaps a 6-3 majority, however you want to do the math.
And so they want to think of a way to change the court, but they can't explicitly say that, and so they've got to pretend like some procedural reform is needed.
What do you think about this kind of court reform scheme, and is it likely to go anywhere?
Well, Dinesh, always a pleasure to be back with you.
So, you know, if you go back to when Joe Biden was a senator from Delaware, you know, I wrote a column on this actually over three years ago.
So back in the 2020 Democratic primary, he spoke about if he were elected president, he would create this commission to study the Supreme Court, potentially leading to recommendations one way or the other on court packing.
So I did a little research at that time, and I found this very interesting speech that then-senator from Delaware Joe Biden gave on the floor of the U.S.
Senate in 2005, where Dinesh, I think you'll be interested to hear this.
He actually praised the Senate Judiciary Democrats back in 1937, who came out opposed to their own imperial presidents to FDR's proposal at that time for court packing.
And in this 2005 speech, I'm paraphrasing here, but Joe Biden says, They refused to overthrow the established inherited traditions of that august body.
They stood that day not for partisan might, but for the Constitution.
You know, here we are 19 years later.
I think the president has changed his tune quite a bit.
You know, frankly, as he has become more physically and mentally deficient, he's, you know, in the throes of a somewhat palpable senescence, I think would be a charitable way of putting it.
At this point, he is simply an empty vessel for the Democratic Party to essentially project their desires.
Now, what is happening here with these so-called reforms, I'm calling it half-packing.
It's essentially a half-court-packing measure.
It's not literally court-packing insofar as he's not proposing to actually increase the number of justices, but he actually kind of is doing that because one of the proposals is trying to seek to implement 18-year term limits on the court.
All three of these proposals, Dinesh, we can go quickly here one by one.
None of them are going to pass.
They are all extraordinarily dubious, and most of them are actually unconstitutional.
So the notion that Congress can actually statutorily amend the judicial life tenure that is there in the Constitution is extraordinarily wrong.
So the actual text in Article 3 of the Constitution says that Supreme Court justice shall serve, quote, during good behavior.
That has been unanimously interpreted by every constitutional law scholar of every persuasion to mean life tenure.
It's Constitutional Law 101.
When you have the Constitution saying something, you cannot just pass a statute to override it.
That would require a constitutional amendment.
Point number two, real quick.
Similarly, they're trying to statutorily require some sort of vague ethics reform.
Well, Sheldon Whitehouse, the radical senator from Rhode Island, has a concurrent piece of legislation where his own idea of so-called ethics reform for the Supreme Court would basically try to take the recusal decisions away from the justices and try to get either a lower court judicial panel or the justices' own colleagues to try to seek whether to recuse a justice from a given case.
First of all, this would create tremendous animosity on a Supreme Court that historically has been known to have general camaraderie and comity, even for those justices who do not see eye-to-eye on legal questions.
So Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a famous example of that, those two were extraordinarily close personal friends.
These are, after all, Dinesh, only nine justices.
These are human beings here.
And the way the court operates, I think, would be severely infringed by a congressionally mandated rule of this nature.
But the larger point is that that also is unconstitutional because a recusal decision is part of the judicial power itself of which Article 3 of the Constitution speaks.
It is part of the judicial power to decide whether you are obligated to hear a case or, by contrast, you have a duty to recuse.
So Congress can't statutorily amend that either.
All of this, though, is kind of beating around the bush a little bit there, and here's kind of the key point which you already alluded to.
The key point here, when it comes to this Biden-Harris assault on the U.S.
Supreme Court, is not actually about the Black Letter Law as I have just discussed it.
It is a pure, unadulterated power grab that is coming from a place of dramatic insecurity, that there is one institution of political, legal, or cultural salience in America, and really one institution alone, that the left does not fully control.
That is the U.S.
Supreme Court.
It's not a far-right court.
It is not even a deeply conservative court.
But it is a center-right court.
It is not a left-wing court.
And the fact that it is a center-right political or legal body, that alone, in the eyes of the modern left, which seeks to destroy, means that they must do exactly that and seek to destroy it.
When you were talking earlier, Josh, about Biden's sort of intellectual journey, or maybe I should say intellectual backpedaling, where he starts out fiercely defending in 2005 the independence of the court, and you say basically as Biden has lost his brain, he has moved further left.
I mean, I think it's interesting to note that as Federman got his brain back, he's moved further right.
So we can develop virtually a whole theory of IQ and politics just based upon these two excellent examples of two individuals who have moved in different directions basically in conjunction with the functioning of their neurons, of their brain cells, right?
All right.
Now, am I right that for any of these reforms to occur, and in some ways we don't even need to dissect them in detail,
You would need to have Congress pass a law, which would mean it'd have to go through the House, the Senate, you'd have to have the President sign it, and even that doesn't settle the constitutionality of it, which by the way would be decided by none other than the Supreme Court, that the Congress and the President are trying to sort of put a leash on, so wouldn't the Court have the ultimate say on whether or not these things are even permitted.
They seem to fly in the face of separation of powers.
In other words, the court doesn't have the power to put ethics rules on Congress, so why should Congress have the power to put ethics rules on the court?
Yeah, I think that's basically exactly right.
I mean, there's just no way that this is ever going to pass whatsoever.
It's a pure political campaign season move.
The left wing of the Democratic Party is looking for breadcrumbs to get excited about.
They have an 80 plus year old candidate who's about to be an ex-president.
They have a presumptive replacement in Kamala Harris who is wildly unpopular.
In fact, last summer, NBC News ranked her the single least popular vice president ever.
She was 17 points underwater in that particular poll at that time.
So they're just looking for things to get excited about.
And it's a little curious to me that this of all topics, I think is what they're trying to throw as red meat to their base to try to get excited about.
But that's really the only proper way to view this.
It's not a serious legal proposal.
Again, Joe Biden is not a particularly serious person at this stage of his life.
Kamala Harris, I would argue, has never been a particularly serious person.
So it's pure political campaign trail fodder.
But the American people ought to see this For what it is, which again is they are deliberately flirting with disaster here.
They are playing with fire by treating such a solemn matter as the separation of powers.
They are frivolously treating it as campaign trail fodder for their far left base.
That in and of itself is not just insulting, though it is exactly that.
It is very insulting for those of us who cherish our constitutional order.
I'm a former federal law clerk myself.
I quite literally swore an oath to that constitution.
I love our constitution.
So it's very insulting for people like me and you.
But it also ought to just be revealing as to the depths to which they are willing to go to retain and to seize power, even if it comes at the expense of undermining our tripartite separation of powers that is the very bedrock of our current government.
I mean, it seems to me at this point, Josh, that... I mean, I gotta say, I wasn't... I'm not surprised at the shamelessness of these people because it appears almost bottomless.
I mean, it's hard to even think of something that, for example, they would not do or they would not at the very least approve if, let's say, for example, they thereby could get rid of Trump.
I mean, they would be willing to go...
I would venture to say that these people would be willing to start a war if they needed to, or create an international crisis.
Their goals are, to them, so important that they would run roughshod over any of the old solemnities, whether it's court independence or anything else like that.
And so we're dealing with a shockingly shameless group of characters.
Let's take a pause, Josh.
When we come back, I want to talk to you about Israel, about Netanyahu's visit, and also have you do a little preview of your upcoming book, Israel and Civilization.
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I'm back with Josh Hammer, senior editor-at-large of Newsweek, host of the Josh Hammer Show podcast and syndicated radio show, writes a weekly newsletter, the Josh Hammer Report, the forthcoming book, Israel and Civilization, the Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.
Josh, let's talk about Israel.
The Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was here in America and it seems like he had a A kind of tense time dealing with Biden and Harris.
As I understand it, Biden had a meeting with him and canceled.
Harris refused to meet him.
I don't know if it was on Netanyahu's schedule to say, all right, well, guess what?
If you guys won't meet with me, I'm going to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump.
But that is, in fact, what he did.
Can you talk a little bit about the significance of the BB Netanyahu visit and also the The signal that is being sent by the fact that Netanyahu went down to Florida to meet Trump.
Sure.
So, first of all, you know, this was Netanyahu's first, excuse me, this was Bibi's fourth, not first, his fourth speech to the U.S.
Congress.
He actually surpassed Winston Churchill for the most speeches given to a joint session of Congress ever by a foreign leader.
Which is a pretty remarkable statistic, actually.
And, you know, in many ways speaks of his pure kind of rhetorical ability.
He's absolutely fluent in the English language.
He has a real command of his audience there.
And, you know, as someone who was just watching that speech, I was actually in Washington D.C.
at that time, but wasn't able to attend it.
But, you know, watching it, It was really encouraging, Dinesh, at a time that Israel is so vehemently and viciously criticized by so many in the media.
It was really encouraging just to see all of the applause lines, most of which actually were bipartisan.
Not all of them, but there were a lot of bipartisan applause lines right there that day in Congress.
It was kind of a flashback moment, if you will, back to the time when Israel actually was a bipartisan, not particularly politically charged issue.
Tragically, that of course has changed in recent times.
Especially since the Barack Obama presidency of 2008.
But to your other points, when Bibi got here, he was not met at the airport by Biden, by Kamala, even by the Secretary of State Tony Blinken.
He was really met by no one of significant presidential, administrative, or diplomatic heft.
As you would normally do to greet a foreign leader, a dignitary of someone's stature like that, especially someone you would think, who again, was about to set the all time record for most joint session of congress addresses ever given by a foreign leader.
I'm not sure if it was actually on his schedule when he was flying over here from Jerusalem to actually go down to visit Mar-a-Lago. I'm certainly very happy that he did do that. He actually followed in the footsteps of at least the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who did something similar there. I think there's a couple of things to note about that. First of all, you know, Donald Trump is not just running for president.
He's obviously a former president unto himself.
So there's a certain level of kind of gravitas and dignity attached to him by definition of that very fact that most current presidential candidates wouldn't necessarily have.
He also happens to be leading in most of the polls.
There is a solid chance that he is the president come January 2025, God willing.
But the most important fact, I think, and this is really the real reason, in my opinion, that Netanyahu went down to Mar-a-Lago to visit Trump, Those two did incredible things together in office together.
The two of them together, Dinesh as you know, they fundamentally redrew and rewrote the Middle East map.
They reversed a half decade of Israeli-Palestinian peace process obsession, the old kind of inside out model of peace whereby Israel has to make territorial concessions to Palestinians, and only after that will Israel make peace with its Arab neighbors.
No, Trump and Netanyahu literally reversed this.
They got the more moderate Sunni Arab states on board, the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, countries like that.
They had the most beautiful fruits of peace in the Middle East in at least a generation or two, probably multiple generations, frankly, when it came to the Abraham Accords.
So they totally, totally rewrote how Middle East diplomacy and foreign policy ought to look.
It was an absolute breakthrough.
Frankly, if Donald Trump's name was anything other than Donald Trump, he would have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for that.
I'm very confident in that actually.
But obviously it didn't happen because those two gentlemen's names are Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu.
But it was very important.
For Bibi to make that trip to Mar-a-Lago, just to make sure that they're on the same page, that they're on good terms again.
There was some friction after the 2020 election.
God willing, they will both be in office come January 2025.
And at that time, as a close observer of these issues, I would look forward to hopefully Saudi Arabia joining the Ibrahim Accords in short order.
That would really be kind of the marquee achievement of the Ibrahim Accords, I think, in a second Trump administration, with Netanyahu very much helping along, of course.
I mean, this is a very important point you remind me of, Josh, because I remember going back to the, I mean, you know, Nixon was obsessed with being the guy who fixed the Middle East, and then Jimmy Carter tried, even Reagan tried, and everyone's tried, and it seems like Trump Not only did he make a lot of headway, but here he was an outsider, right?
He essentially came to the presidency with no diplomatic experience, never having held any office as governor or senator, never having gone on a foreign diplomatic mission of any kind.
And it almost seems like he made the entire Kind of professional foreign service and foreign policy class look stupid.
Because I think I remember it was John Kerry who had given a, with great solemnity, well, we all have to understand that, you know, the Palestinians are the absolute sine qua non of any progress in the Middle East and you can't hope to achieve anything, blah, blah, blah.
And it's sort of like Trump comes in and he goes, well, actually, no, let's try this over here.
Boom.
And he gets it done.
He embarrassed them.
I mean, he made them look bad.
So, talk a little bit about that, but then also segue into your book, which seems to me to be very timely at a time when there's a need for sort of a deeper understanding of what's really going on here.
It is about Israel, but it's about more than Israel, and it seems like you're on to this big idea in your book, Israel and Civilization.
So, say a word about Trump, but then tell us a little bit about what we can expect in this book.
Yeah, so you nailed it there.
I mean, I think that Trump and his team totally, totally embarrassed the professional foreign policy class, the two-state solution cartel, the professional peace processors, the peace who have been, who were there at Camp David, who were there in the Oslo Accords.
It's such an interesting story, Dinesh, because, you know, it's basically a team of political outsiders Most of whom actually were religious Jews also.
Jared Kushner, Avi Berkowitz, David Freeman, his ambassador, Jason Greenblatt.
And somehow this group of kind of pro-Israel, philo-Semitic Jews and their Christian allies comes in, emboldens Israel the most any administration ever had, and then the dividends are not war, but peace.
It might be a little counterintuitive to the professional foreign policy class, but it's exactly what happened.
So, I do write about all of this and much more in my forthcoming book, Israel and Civilization, The Fate of the Jewish Nation, and The Destiny of the West.
It's not out yet, but you know, go ahead and put it on your radar.
It'll be out, God willing, February or March or so of 2025.
Don't have an exact publishing date yet, but sooner rather than later, certainly.
It's going to be a deep dive, not just on contemporary Israel, U.S.-Israel relations.
All of that definitely will be covered.
I talk about the Abraham Accords at great length, actually.
But it's really going to be even a more kind of philosophical and historical book as well.
We're going to start literally at Mount Sinai.
We're going to start where it all begins, where Western civilization begins with God's revelation to the ancient Israelites via Moses descending with those stone tablets with the Ten Commandments there.
And it's going to be a deep dive on how Western civilization as we know it today would not, and I argue cannot, possibly exist without both the Jews and the Christians.
So ultimately the book is gearing up towards this argument that if Western civilization wants to survive as a concrete entity against all the forces that seek to subjugate us, which are radical left-wokism, radical Islamism, and even globalist neoliberalism, those are really the three kind of menacing forces in my view, if we are to survive all of that, All of those are existential threats to our inherited Western tradition.
What I ultimately call for in the final chapter of the book is a Jewish-Christian alliance to save the West.
That's ultimately my conclusion, my argument.
So, you know, make a note of it now.
God willing, the book will be out on bookshelves early next year.
Great stuff, Josh.
I mean, I, for one, am totally on board with this.
You know, people often talk about the roots of Western civilization in Athens and Jerusalem.
And if we identify Athens with classical reason and then maybe say, well, that was the root of the Enlightenment, it seems to me that when you're talking about technology or talking about science, you're talking about the Enlightenment wing, if you will, of the West.
That is now universally accepted.
You would find Chinese scientists, for example, who do the same physics as scientists, for example, at Stanford or Berkeley.
But what is not universally accepted is the other part of it, which is the Jerusalem part of it.
Because that is not just a... There's a universal aspect, of course, to the Bible, both the Old and the New Testament.
In the sense that the God of Abraham is also the God of the world, right?
It's the same God who makes the world and makes the universe.
But nevertheless, there's a particularity to Israel and a particularity to Jerusalem in general.
And some of the world, at least, as I think you know, reacts with hostility to the Jerusalem part of the West.
And so I think I see what you're saying when you say, when Western civilization is controversial, not all of it.
Just this part of it is what sets things, if you will, ablaze.
I'm really glad you're on this topic.
Guys, the book, to keep in mind, Israel and Civilization.
My guest, Josh Hammer, Senior Editor-at-Large of Newsweek.
Josh, as always, thank you very much.
Thanks for having me, Dinesh.
Guys, I've taken a little break from Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, and it's partly because I've been It's partly because I didn't want to do this in jumps and starts.
Let me wait until my travel subsides a little bit and then pick it up.
The good thing about this book is you can pick it up.
It's a story that you can pick up at different stages of Booker T. Washington's life, and every stage is just as interesting as the one that came before.
We've covered Booker T. Washington's early life in absolute destitution and impoverishment, really starting in slavery.
Now he is a student.
at the Hampton Institute in Virginia.
And he does work there, but he also gets room and board.
But he starts off by talking about the fact that when there was vacation time, holiday time, Christmas time, the students went back to their families.
And he says he couldn't do that, not because he didn't have a family, he did have a mom, but he says he had no money.
And he said, most of the students went home to spend their vacation.
I had no money with which to go home.
And then he ends the paragraph by saying, quite poignantly, I not only had no money with which to go home, but I had none with which to go anywhere.
He is flat broke.
And to be honest, in a very General way, this paragraph really resonates with me because I had a somewhat similar experience in college, obviously for very different reasons than Booker T. Washington.
My family was middle class, but they're far away in India.
And so when we had holidays and Dartmouth and other students went home, by and large I just stuck around on the campus.
And I wasn't alone.
There were I would say a dozen or maybe two dozen foreign students for the most part who are doing the same thing as I am and we would sometimes meet up and have lunch together, things like that.
But it is a very strange and a little bit of a lonely feeling because you're on a campus and the campus is deserted.
Booker T. Washington says, not surprisingly, I tried to hide as far as I could from the other students the fact that I had no money.
So he's a little... I don't know if ashamed is quite the right word.
I don't think he wants to seem like he is lesser than they are.
And he has a coat, which he thinks, all right, well, maybe if I sell this coat, I can get a few dollars.
And so he says, after he tried hard to sell the coat, one colored man promised to come to his room and look it over.
He says, I was very cheered.
The guy shows up and he says that, The man agrees to pay him three dollars.
Three dollars.
But then the man adds this.
I will tell you what I will do.
I will take the coat and I will pay you five cents.
Cash down and pay you the rest of the money just as soon as I can get it.
Obviously Booker T. Washington realizes I can't do that.
I can't give him the coat for five cents with the promise that he will, when he can, if he can, pay me.
So he's very disappointed.
I gave up all hope He says of getting out of Hampton.
He tried to find work and he finally gets work at a restaurant.
But he says the restaurant pays him only enough to cover his board.
So in other words, he's trying to save money.
He actually owes some money to the school, to Hampton.
Not a lot, but he owes them some money.
In fact, he says, I owed the institution $16.
And he's obsessed with this.
He's determined to pay it back.
They'll probably let him out of it, but he doesn't want to be let out of it.
He wants to pay.
And then he says, one day, when he was working at the restaurant, he says, I found under one of the tables a crisp new $10 bill.
And he's elated.
He goes, wow!
I could hardly contain myself.
I was so happy.
He says, and this is very Booker T. Washington, as it was not my place of business, I felt it to be the proper thing to show the money to the proprietor.
He shows it to him.
He says, He seemed as glad as I was, but then he coolly explained to me that as it was his place of business, he had the right to keep the money, and he proceeded to do so.
So, no $10 for Booker T. Washington.
And he says that while he became discouraged, he always reminded himself that he could accomplish things he set out to do.
He says, very striking statement.
I think that's a kind of a dictum, an expression of his whole life and the expression of anyone who succeeds.
He goes, I have begun everything with the idea that I could succeed.
Now, This is not the typical slogan that you often hear today, be whatever you want to be, which is an obvious lie.
Because people cannot be whatever they want to be.
If I want to be a professional NBA player, good luck, it's not happening.
I'm an idiot for thinking that I can be.
I need to be talked some common sense into.
But, so it's not that.
It's rather you set yourself a goal that is achievable.
And then you set about learning the way you have to go about achieving it.
Very often it's the how do you get from here to there that's the hard part.
And this is true even of people who have a good idea.
I have a great idea for a business that's going to transform the world.
What is it?
Turns out it really is a good idea.
But you don't know how to do it.
You have no way of learning how to do it.
You have no intention of learning the way to do it.
And therefore it's not going to happen.
So With Booker T, the emphasis is on the getting it done.
And then he says this, I never had much patience with the multitudes of people, the multitudes of people, who are always ready to explain why one cannot succeed.
Wow, what a, what a sort of motto for the civil rights movement.
And he's foreseeing it right here.
And he's a, he's a teenager at Hampton Institute.
And he goes, there are multitudes of people whose life is, they're almost like professionals in explaining why they failed.
They apply a lot of ingenuity and even industry to explain why they can't succeed.
He goes, I have always had a high regard for the man who could tell me how to succeed.
Right here he puts his finger on the missing piece of information.
I mean, think of the civil rights movement as a whole.
It spends 70 years, basically from about 1900 to about 1970, fighting to get rights.
Seemingly, forgetting that once you get rights, the battle isn't over, it's actually just beginning.
You now have the ability to compete.
But what are the skills that you need to compete?
How do you go about competing?
How do you enter, let's say, the software business, or succeed in Silicon Valley, or on Wall Street, or in corporate America?
Or if you start your own business, how do you fill out your taxes?
How do you get credit?
How do you get money to function?
So all these things, the how to get from here to there, that's what Booker T. Washington is interested in.
That's not what the victimologists of today are interested in at all.
Booker T. Washington goes to the treasurer of Hampton.
He says, I got to tell you, I don't have the $16 I owe you now.
And they tell him, no problem.
You pay it when you can.
So notice that they don't let him out of the debt.
None of this, we're going to forgive your debts.
Kind of like Biden, you know, getting rid of student loans.
You don't have to pay.
He does have to pay.
He just doesn't have to pay now.
And they recognize, I think correctly, that this is the kind of guy who will pay.
And even if he doesn't have a signed document that makes him pay, he's going to make sure he pays.
Why?
Because he internalizes the moral obligation and makes it part of his character.
Booker T. also then says that he notices that the people who are teaching at the Hampton Institute, many of them, are doing it out of charity.
Now when he says out of charity, it doesn't necessarily mean that they weren't being paid, but it does mean that they weren't being paid what they were worth.
So you think, for example, about teachers who might be able to be, for example, in other fields, make more money, but they're like, no, I'd rather devote myself to teaching.
So there's an element of unselfishness here.
And Booker T is very impressed because these kids really need it.
And some of them aren't kids.
They're adults learning as well.
And he says, Before the end of the year, I began learning that those who are happiest are those who do the most for others.
So we see here that Booker T. Washington is, he wants to succeed, he wants to better his life, but he wants to be a better person.
So in other words, we see here in Booker T. Washington an enlarged definition of success.
It's not just moving up, It's not just getting more, it is also adding to your own character, adding to the virtues, becoming a better person.
And that is measured almost in the same currency.
as acquiring more wealth, or having a bigger kitchen, or adding to your front yard.
Those are material and observable things.
The others may be more intangible, but its effects are not intangible.
That's Booker T. Washington's point.
The teachers who are teaching, they might be doing it out of an unselfish motive, which is intangible, but the benefits are they're training young people who otherwise can do only the most basic manual labor, and now those young people can become They can become carpenters, and they can become masons, and they can become welders.
So they're learning the basics first, but they're learning trades.
And then later we will take up the question about higher education that goes beyond the trades.
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