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July 31, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
45:40
BEATING KAMALA Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep886
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Coming up, I'll argue that the Trump campaign should not underestimate Kamala Harris, and I'll tell you why.
I want to warn that the Secret Service seems to be trying to trick us, the American people, into believing a fabricated tale about Trump's would-be assassin.
And Jeremy Stolnecker of the Mighty Oaks Foundation joins me.
We're going to talk about Hamas' attack on Israel and Israel's retaliation.
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One might say that even before the Democratic National Convention, the The campaign is now in full swing between Donald Trump on the one side and Kamala Harris on the other.
There was originally some doubt and some speculation about another candidate, an open convention, will they swap out Michelle Obama?
I think none of this is really very realistic at this point.
For the reason that not just Biden's endorsement, that's unimportant, but his money, a rather large purse, has turned over to Kamala Harris.
Pretty much all the major Democrats have endorsed her.
She is going to essentially go into a coronation at the Democratic National Convention.
And now, I've said before that this is a very insubstantial and silly individual but we shouldn't get the wrong message out of this because sometimes someone can be very stupid in one way but smart in another way.
I don't know if you've seen the movie Gladiator but in that film You see the old king and he is, uh, this is Marcus Aurelius.
And he doesn't want to give the crown to his son because his son is in fact a very despicable and dubious and shady character.
He wants the, uh, he wants the leadership of Rome to go to someone who believes in Rome.
And so he picks the, um, the Russell Crowe character.
The character who becomes ultimately the gladiator.
But in a very poignant scene with his son, he says to his son, in effect, you're not ready.
You don't have the capacity.
You don't have the talent to do this job.
But the son gives a very interesting answer that kind of applies to Kamala Harris.
And the son says, well, just because I don't have those talents doesn't mean that I don't have any talents.
I have other talents.
And that could be said of Obama, that could be said of Kamala.
These are people who are, they're not, they don't have wisdom, but they do have low cunning.
And even if you talk about somebody who has, you know, let's just say, come up, you know, the sleazy way, by ingratiating herself with Willie Brown, ingratiating herself with Montel Williams, becoming a kind of a, kind of a, woman on the arm of powerful men who sort of sidles her way into power, that alone takes a certain amount of low cunning to be able
to do that, to present yourself as helpless until power swings your way.
So what I'm trying to get at is that we shouldn't dismiss Kamala Harris and underestimate her.
For one, she's going to be a contrast with Biden.
She's a lot younger than Biden, and when you were so used to Biden's trademark shuffle, were so used to Biden looking around bewildered at the podium like, which way do I go?
We won't see any of this with Kamala Harris.
In fact, it will be a A contrast, a sharp and dramatic contrast.
This woman, if anything, is excessive on the kind of bubbly side, the gesticulating side, even her loud and hysterical laughter suggests a certain type of animal sort of vitality.
And in fact, already the media is picking this up and trying to portray, now this isn't really going to work, but it's They're going to try it anyway.
And that is try to make Trump into Biden.
And what I mean is try to make Trump seem like he's the shuffling, unsteady, intellectually confused old man.
So you'll be seeing a lot to that effect because they're going to try to make this an election between a younger and newer generation.
Now, Kamala Harris is not that young, but nevertheless, she is younger, substantially younger than Trump.
So you're going to see some of that come out.
I think the other thing is we're going to see from Kamala Harris, and with the help of the media, an erasure of the record.
An erasure of the fact that Kamala Harris was Basically right there with Biden.
And not just that she was a loyalist who said to Biden, OK, you do what you want and I'll support you.
She was an aggressive advocate of letting people in and not prosecuting people.
And now they're trying to turn all of that around.
Kamala Harris is a prosecutor.
And so she's going to be tough on crime.
She's going to be tough on the illegals.
This is the sort of mythology of the Kamala campaign and it's going to be the media campaign on behalf of Kamala Harris.
Debbie and I were talking and we're like, look, you know, this is not an election to take for granted.
Why?
Because there's a certain camp on the right, and it's a pretty big camp, and it's like, we see through this nonsense.
And there's a certain left-wing camp that is in favor of the things that Kamala Harris is trying to do.
And so the election is fought over the large middle that doesn't pay that careful attention to politics.
And the question is, do they believe all the things that they've been seeing around them?
Carjackings, crime, higher prices.
And do they attach those to the Biden-Harris administration?
Not just to their, quote, record, but to their intentions and their policies and their worldview?
Or do they just listen to the news and go, oh, well, she's a prosecutor.
I guess she's going to be really tough on those illegals.
In reality, if we elect Kamala Harris, the problem of the illegals is going to be magnified.
It's going to be much worse.
And there are some people say, I don't know if we'll have a country left.
I don't know if I'd go that far, but I do think that we are at a kind of a crisis point or a tipping point.
So you don't have to engage in any kind of hyperbole or hysterics to say that things are really bad right now.
And they're going to get a lot worse if Kamala comes into the Oval Office, and at some point it's very difficult to come back from this kind of stuff.
Debbie and I have been thinking a little bit these days about Venezuela, and Debbie goes, listen, I've been telling you, all these people on social media, oh, it's so encouraging, people protesting, Debbie goes, They're going to try to arrest those people, just like they arrested the January 6th people.
And all the hope that was stirred before the election, oh, the polls are in our favor, we're going to pull it off.
No, once the system has been locked down, once they've got it sort of under lock and key, they're going to rig every election.
Why wouldn't they?
Why would they relinquish power?
So the bottom line here is that at a certain point, it's very difficult to get your country back.
I don't even know that there is a way for the Venezuelans by themselves to take their country back.
By external intervention, maybe.
But internally, no.
And we in the United States do not want to reach that desperate stage.
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We had the acting director of the Secret Service testify before Congress, and I think we are being subjected to a kind of disinformation campaign that is coming from the Secret Service itself.
If this seems like a story we've heard before, it is.
We've heard about disinformation campaigns being conducted by the FBI.
And if one hears this for the first time, there may be a certain amount of skepticism where someone goes, wait a minute, okay, I can understand that the FBI got corrupted under Obama with Mueller and Comey and now Christopher Wray, but isn't the Secret Service kind of separate?
Aren't those guys By and large, guys committed to doing a job.
And don't we know that these Secret Service agents will take a bullet for whoever the president is?
This is indeed the mythology of the Secret Service.
But let's remember this was also the exact mythology of the FBI.
The FBI were the untouchables.
They are the ones taking on the mafia.
So it's taken us a while for us to realize the The sort of political poison that has seeped through the FBI.
And I want to suggest that this may also be the case in the Secret Service, tragically and remarkably.
Now, here's my precedent for this.
This is way before anything that had to do with the attempted assassination of Trump.
Remember the raid on Mar-a-Lago?
Now, Trump wasn't there.
His family wasn't there.
But...
Some people have raised the question, oh, the FBI came in with this lethal, use lethal force if necessary instruction, and what if there was a showdown with the Secret Service?
And so I thought to myself, all right, let's look at the facts to see if when the FBI showed up, the Secret Service was like, sorry guys, you can't enter here.
We're the Secret Service, we protect this compound, and so, sorry, we're not letting you in.
You actually notice it was the exact opposite and more than that, as you burrow into the details, you realize that the Secret Service was tipped off about the raid and didn't tell Trump or his family.
In other words, the Secret Service was working not with and for Trump, But with and for the FBI.
The Secret Service was in cahoots with the FBI.
They didn't do the raid, but they sort of, you may say, put out the red carpet treatment for the FBI.
So realistically, there was never any prospect of any kind of shootout or tension.
Why?
Because the thing that we would normally assume The FBI was an instrument of the DOJ.
They wanted to, quote, get Trump.
The Secret Service was there to protect Trump.
They were going to do a different job.
No.
The Secret Service was basically helping the FBI do its job.
So that is, right there, a sort of little alarm bell or red flag or whatever you want to call it.
Now we fast forward to the Trump assassination attempt and the disinformation campaign we're being subjected to is the idea and by the way no specifics about this because the FBI goes oh we have some information that the guy was you know an anti-semite he was sort of a the implication he was some sort of a white supremacist the implication was that That this is not a guy with left-wing views.
They want to sort of sow the seed that this might even be a guy that's sort of on the far right.
And we don't really know why he would have targeted Trump.
This is why we have to keep looking for a motive.
Now, first of all, if you want to make that case, all right.
In that case, I say, show me this guy Crooks, Thomas Crooks.
Let me see his Facebook.
Let me see his Instagram, let me see the actual posts that he posted at the time that he did, and let's see the screenshots.
Where are they?
Turns out they don't exist.
The FBI is like, trust us!
Not the FBI, the Secret Service, this acting director, who by the way seems to be a clone of the woman who resigned, Kim Chi.
He's like, you know, this is our information.
Now, happily for us, we have an alternative source of information that completely busts these guys.
And that is that this guy, Thomas Crooks, apparently was posting on the digital platform called Gab.
The digital platform called Gab is not as well known as some of the other platforms, but it's a platform that's been around.
And apparently this guy has been identified by Andrew Torba, the CEO of Gab, as being Thomas Crooks.
He had a sort of a handle on Gab, but Gab has revealed the posts that this guy has done going back to 2021, 2022.
In other words, pretty recently.
And whereas the secret services information was that when this guy was much younger, he posted these supposedly far-right types of comments, but Andrew Torba has discovered that crooks Using a gab handle as late as a couple of years ago was publishing stuff and I'm just going to quote it.
This is Andrew Torba.
It was unequivocally pro-Biden and in particular pro-Biden's immigration policy.
So, this Crooks guy was anti-Trump, he was pro-Biden.
And there's a bunch of posts, and I've read through them, I won't go into them now, but reading the stuff that he posted on Gab, and then Andrew Torb is like, okay, prove me wrong, I've gone to the Secret Service, I've gone to the Freedom of Information Act, I've demanded that they produce information and reveal information, And essentially, the Justice Department and the Secret Service are climbing up on this.
They're not responding.
They're not providing any information.
And this alone is really suspicious because, again, they're claiming he's a lone shooter.
So think about it.
There's no reason to be doing further investigation because there could be a larger conspiracy.
No, they're saying there wasn't.
It was just this one guy.
All right, well, he's dead.
So what is the reason now not to say, here's his Facebook?
Here's his Instagram.
You know, here are all his posts on the old Twitter.
And let us judge for ourselves what his politics are.
No, as often is the case, what the Secret Service is doing is what the FBI does and the other intelligence agencies all do, and that is Because it's an ongoing investigation, we cannot give you information.
We're going to just put out the stuff we want to put out.
We're going to rely on you believing what we say about it.
And my advice on this is, no.
Don't believe it.
Don't believe actually a word of it because these people have done nothing to earn our trust and in reality they've done a whole bunch of things to earn our distrust.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast Jeremy Stahlnecker.
He's the CEO of the Mighty Oaks Foundation.
It's a non-profit organization that helps American military warriors and their families suffering from unseen wounds of combat such as PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder.
The website is mightyoaksprograms.org.
You can follow him on X at Jeremy Stahlnecker, S-T-A-H-L-N-E-C-K-E-R.
Jeremy, welcome.
Thanks for joining me.
The world appears to be a place in a lot of upheaval.
I thought we could start by talking about Israel and then maybe branch out more broadly.
But it looks like there has been a ratcheting up of the conflict in Israel with the recent Hamas attack and then the Israeli retaliation against the Hamas leader, Haniyeh.
Talk a little bit about what's going on over there and what do we have to worry about?
Sure.
Well, Dinesh, thank you.
First of all, it's great to be with you.
The big question that's been asked over the last, you know, 300 days or so since October 7th is, when will Israel respond on a broader scale outside of Gaza?
We know, and everyone has understood this for a long time, that Iran really is pulling the strings, whether it's with Hamas or Hezbollah.
And so we see these attacks on Israel, and the question is, when will Israel go on the offense in the sense that it will strike to the heart of of Iran and in the last couple of days we have seen some of that take place and you know thankfully we have but that's the big question and I think the big question kind of globally that everyone is asking is how far can Israel go before a regional war takes place number one and number two
What does that mean for the rest of us?
Does the United States get involved in that?
Does this become another Middle East conflict that our military is pulled into?
Questions like, should we be involved in this?
And I think broader questions, if we had a strong president and a strong administration, would we even be having these conversations?
And so there's an awful lot happening.
Israel has dealt with this since You know, since the very beginning, thousands of years they've been dealing with this.
But we, as I think outsiders, those in the West, need to understand what is happening.
The fact that Israel has the right to sovereignty, to protect itself, to defend its people, and when necessary, to take offensive action to do that.
And then we have a responsibility to stand alongside of You know, the only true democracy in the Middle East.
And so there are a lot of big questions that need to be answered and it's unfolding slowly, but it is unfolding.
When you think about Israel, and think about Israel as a Christian, I wanna ask you, how does your faith play into the way you see this sort of political and strategic issue?
Because, I mean, there are allies of Israel who are allies not because of the Bible, but allies of Israel because they believe that, for example, Israel is a solitary democracy in the region, or it's, Closely connect has been a reliable ally for the United States.
So one could make, you could call it a secular argument for Israel, but I know for a lot of evangelical Christians, it's more than that.
There is a sort of spiritual kinship between the United States and Israel.
Do you agree with that and talk a little bit about what that means?
I do agree with that.
Now I would say, just on its face, the secular argument that we need to stand with that one bastion of freedom in the Middle East makes sense.
So this is something that I always struggle with, is even a secular intellectual argument, it makes sense to stand with Israel.
But I don't think we can fully understand what's happening in the Middle East, particularly as it relates to Israel.
If we remove a biblical understanding of the region and a biblical understanding of the history, this conflict will never end.
The best that can be expected, I think, until the return of Jesus is a management of the region and a management of the conflict.
Certainly, in sure peace, and people have the right to peace and security.
But the conflict won't go away.
In fact, when we ask the question, why do the Muslim nations want to drive Israel into the sea, which they're very open about, that is a spiritual response.
They're pushing back against the nation that God, in His sovereignty, set aside as what the Bible would call His chosen nation, the nation through which the Messiah was born, the nation through which, you know, eventually, Depending on your interpretation of the end times will be restored.
And so this is very much a spiritual response.
And if we don't look at it that way, we'll always struggle with what exactly are the goals and talking about two state solutions, all these questions.
This will not end.
It can be managed, I believe.
But in order to fully grasp what's happening, we have to look at it from the spiritual perspective.
And the kinship between the United States and Israel is a spiritual kinship.
It is an understanding of not Political freedom, so much, but religious freedom, the sovereignty that is spoken of in the Declaration of Independence, a sovereignty given to us by God, and that no one has the right to infringe on that.
And so, I really do think that much of the struggle that, you know, secular media and politicians and so forth have with understanding this, is they're looking at it entirely divorced from the Bible and the spiritual aspects.
You know, you said something very interesting.
I've long thought that the Bible makes a sort of single, decisive prediction about the Jews and about Israel, namely that the Jews would return to their ancestral homeland.
It seemed very improbable over the centuries that that would in fact happen, but it did in fact happen in 1948.
However, the Bible also seems to say that this will be a pocket of unrest through the return of Jesus.
Now, I know that there are people on the left who, if they were hearing this conversation, they go, well, these people, not only are they complete kooks, but these are guys who want to, like, Blow up the place because they want the apocalypse to come like tomorrow.
They're ready for Jesus to come back so they will actually accelerate, throw, if you will, kerosene or oil on the flames because they're trying to fulfill some perverse biblical prophecy.
Talk about what the Christian responsibility is in the Middle East, sort of this side of paradise or before Jesus returns.
Right.
I don't think, and you know, to be fair, there are people on the far right of Christianity that would say what you just said, right?
And so that is something that people have said.
The mainstream of Christianity orthodoxy doesn't purport to that.
I don't think we should do anything to hasten the coming of Christ, He will return in His own time.
The Bible, again, is very clear on that.
We have a responsibility to occupy until He comes, whenever that is.
But as it relates to Israel specifically, the Bible is very clear that God blesses those nations that bless Israel.
He, in His sovereignty, chose out the nation of Israel, the children of Israel, beginning with Abraham and through the line of Abraham, to bring about the Messiah.
And as You know, history has unfolded and Israel has walked away from God or has been committed to God.
Judgment has come, you know, throughout the course of history.
And again, we can trace that through the Old Testament and even see that, I think, in the modern era.
But our responsibility as Christians is to support those that God has set aside for His own chosen and sovereign purpose.
And again, the Bible is very clear on this.
And if we look to the book of Revelation and we think about end times, again, I know there are different opinions about this and views of this, but it seems to be clear, at least to me, in the book of Revelation that God will restore Jerusalem to its prior glory, that God will raise up the nation of Israel.
Now, the nation of Israel, those Jewish folks who have yet to put their faith in the Messiah will need to do that.
That doesn't change.
But God has blessed and will continue to bless the nation of Israel, and we need to get alongside of that.
We need to support that as well, because it is only good to support what God supports.
What do you make, Jeremy, taking the, widening our canvas a little bit to the trouble spots around the world.
It looks like we obviously have a full-scale war going on in Ukraine with Russia.
We obviously have China sort of jealously eyeing Taiwan.
We've got, as you say, the possibility of a broadening conflict in the Middle East There are other issues that are not in full blaze, but they are sort of simmering right below the surface.
And would you agree that this 2024 election is actually very important, not just for the domestic concerns of the United States, taxation and debt and the border and so on, But also because it seems like the world goes into flames when one party is in charge, and it seems to be at least relatively more peaceful.
I mean, and I'm thinking not just of Trump.
I'm making a point that would be just as true of Nixon.
It would be true of Reagan.
It was certainly true of Trump.
None of these conflicts were bubbling over in the way that they are now.
And so what is your take on the significance of 2024 for the security, not just of America, but of the world?
I think we are at that point.
If you look at a pot of water that's boiling on the stove, you can tell that moment right before it really starts to boil.
I think we're right there.
And depending on how the election unfolds, either that heat will be turned down or it will be cranked up and we will be in a global crisis.
It is interesting.
And again, You know, even the intellectual argument, we could go back historically and understand the bad actors in the world, they're doing math, right?
They're trying to figure out, is the juice worth the squeeze, so to speak?
Will these actions be good for them or bad for them?
And anytime a strong leader is in place in the United States, which still, in spite of You know, the many difficulties we're dealing with is the most powerful nation in the world.
We have the ability to again either crank things up or bring things down.
We even saw peace in a sense come to the Middle East during Trump's administration.
It's not a guess as to what will happen if a strong leader moves into the White House.
Those conflicts that we're talking about, they won't go away.
Those agendas won't subside.
But while that strong leader is in the White House, it makes sense, historically, looking at those leaders you just mentioned, to believe that nothing significant will happen that will, again, crank up that heat.
However, if we continue to have an administration that is playing to the principles of appeasement, it's going to get much, much worse.
Right now, I believe, You know, kind of those bad actors, those leaders in those countries that could really make things difficult for the world are biding their time.
They're waiting to see what's going to happen in the next several months and they will make decisions as to what they're going to do based on that.
This is a, you know, we say this every cycle.
I don't know if this is the most important election of our time.
It probably is, but it is, it is an election with real consequences around the world.
Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more.
Guys, I've been speaking with Jeremy Stahlnecker.
He is the CEO of the Mighty Oaks Foundation, the website mightyoaksprograms.org.
Follow him on X at Jeremy Stahlnecker.
Jeremy, hey, thank you so much for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you, Dinesh.
Always a pleasure.
We are in the fourth chapter of Booker T. Washington's great work, Up from Slavery, a work that I think is not only a literary classic, but it is historically very important.
It's politically significant because of the lessons we can get from it, not just about Booker T. This is not just a story of one man's individual life.
But it is an alternative path from the one that has been taken by the sort of mainstream of the civil rights movement, led initially by people like W.E.B.
Du Bois and the NAACP, and later by Martin Luther King, continuing all the way with the sort of civil rights leadership of today.
Booker T. Washington represents, I think it's fair to say, and this will become more clear as we go through the book, he represents the road not taken.
The road not taken, but One of the arguments I'd like to make, and I've made this in a couple of my earlier books, is that while Booker T. Washington's path has not been by and large taken by the leadership of, let's say, the black community and certainly some of the official other minority communities, the head of the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund, the head of some of the Native American
Nevertheless, it is the path that has been voluntarily chosen by hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of legal immigrants.
People who have come to this country from all over the world, and they have, even if they've never heard of Booker T. Washington, even if they've never read up from slavery, this is in fact the path that they are following.
And this is in fact the path that I followed.
And it's probably the case, probably why this book resonates with me so much.
It's kind of a version of a story repeated with many variations over and over.
So isn't it ironic?
Here you have a guy like me, raised on the outskirts of Mumbai, India, in a small, smallish town called Bandra, and here I come to the United States knowing nothing about civil rights or history, knowing nothing about it, at least originally, Okay, let's pick it up here.
really facing the slaves and then their descendants. And then I discovered this guy Booker T. Washington and he speaks to me as if he were somebody who had had a similar if not identical experience. Okay let's pick it up here. Booker T.
Washington is now at the Hampton Institute and he says, perhaps the most valuable thing I got out of my second year was an understanding of the use and value of the Bible.
So there was a teacher that introduced Booker T. Washington to the Bible and he says, before that I never really paid much attention to it.
He says, quote, but now I learned to love and read the Bible not only for the spiritual help which it gives but on account of it as literature.
And it's interesting that Booker T. Washington appreciates the Bible, as I do, in multiple dimensions.
He sees the Bible as a sort of a recipe book.
It's God's recipe book.
And he takes it that way.
In that sense, he is a serious and a devout Christian.
At the same time, he realizes that this is probably the greatest book ever written.
The characters in it are so memorable that you would almost recognize them if they walked into the room.
The speaking voices of Abraham and Moses and Jesus are so vivid that you could never confuse them with anybody else.
They're so unique and they contain so much moral insight.
Even a figure considered to be the greatest dramatist of all time, Shakespeare, Can't compare in all his collective work with the ensemble of characters and stories and history.
Now, admittedly, the Bible isn't written by one guy.
It is written by many people, but many people inspired by the same guy, namely God.
And here's Booker T and he appreciates the Bible.
This is a guy, by the way, just getting started with his studies and he finds in the Bible a great source of not just spiritual insight but wisdom in general.
He then goes on to say that he discovered also the art of public speaking and of debate.
Now, he wasn't the public speaker, he wasn't the debater, but he says that he saw this going on at the Hampton Institute.
People would stand up and they would give a talk and he would be like, wow, how do you do that?
Remember, this is something that's going to become part of Booker T. Washington's life.
He's going to do this, probably Four times a week when he's head of the Tuskegee Institute and he becomes really the leading African American or Negro figure in the United States.
And similarly, debate.
Booker T. Washington in later life will come into clash with other groups that challenge him and in fact deride his formula for a group uplifting itself.
They'll say things which we hear even today, you can't pull yourself up by your bootstraps, even though how can you say that to a guy like Booker T.
Washington who obviously did do exactly that.
But nevertheless, you get the same kind of lecturing or hectoring insistence that that is an illusion and that doesn't happen.
So Booker T. Washington had to contend with this.
He had to debate these characters.
Now, he says that thanks to a small gift from one of his teachers, he was enabled to return to his home in Malden, West Virginia.
And he says, when he got back to Malden, he said that the colored people of the town rejoiced.
Wow!
Why?
Because he was the only educated guy in the town.
They didn't know anyone else.
So they were excited that That there was one of him.
And he says, I had to pay a visit to each family and take a meal and tell the story of my experiences at Hampton.
In addition, I had to speak before the church and Sunday school and various other places.
And he goes, he had become, you could almost call it a minor celebrity in that very small town.
And he goes, that's really not what I was interested in.
What I was interested in, he says, was work.
I wanted to earn some money.
But instead, I was trotted out from family to family.
And he says, unfortunately, when I went to see my mother, he says that his brother found him asleep in his brother's house, and he said his brother told him that his mother had died.
And then Booker T says, he says, wow, he goes, he goes, it was a real blow.
He says, because when I left for Virginia and for the Hampton Institute, he goes, I had no idea I would never see my mother again.
He goes, I knew I was going a long way.
I knew it would be a long time since I saw her, but I didn't think I would not see her ever.
And he says one of the motivations of him to be at the Hampton Institute was, he says, quote, that I might be able to get to be in a position in which I could make my mother more comfortable and happy.
So he wanted to improve her circumstances, give her things that she didn't have.
And he says she also had longed to see her children grow up and be educated and start out in the world.
And so he feels like he's missed all this and she's missed all this.
And so he says that this was, this was quote, one of the saddest and blackest moments in my life.
And then he says, for a little while after that, things kind of went downhill for him.
He said there was, he did have a stepfather, but he goes, the stepfather was himself struggling to make ends meet.
He says that they never got proper clothing.
He goes, sometimes all they ate, they had a can of tomatoes and it was like, that's your lunch and that's your dinner.
He goes, our clothing went uncared for.
Everything about our home was in a tumble down condition.
It seems to me this was the most dismal period in of my life. Now obviously it was more dismal for him to have been in slavery, but let's remember that when that was the case he was actually a young child. And so as often is the case with young children, they're children. If they're in rags, they don't really, they're not very conscious of that. And so he is now at an age where he can sort of reflect on his circumstances and he can compare his circumstances to
others and he can anticipate the future and look back at the past. And so you're now seeing a more mature Booker T. Washington in these circumstances.
In any event, he's able to He's able to get some work.
He's working in the home, in a home as just a kind of a helper.
And he also works in the coal mine.
And he says, he says, notwithstanding my need of money and clothing, I was very happy in the fact that I secured enough money to pay my traveling expenses back to Hampton.
So think about it.
This guy is saving money, but not for tuition, not for room and board.
He's just saving enough that he can return to the institution of Hampton, where, by the way, he works as a janitor while he is also studying.
He says, three weeks before the opening of the term, I was pleasantly surprised to get a letter.
And this is from the principal of the school, which is a woman, Mary Mackey.
She says to him, come early, come two weeks early.
We need to clean the buildings, get things in order for the new term.
And she says, you will receive some payment for coming to school early.
And Booker T. Washington jumps at this.
He says, It gave me a chance to secure a credit in the treasurer's office.
So in other words, it's helping him to pay the small amount of money.
What is it?
$16 that he owes.
And so he is very happy to return early to get this work done.
And then he makes an interesting observation.
And I'll close today's discussion with that.
As he says, as I learned about Miss Mackey, this is the principle.
He says, she was a member of one of the oldest and most cultivated families of the North.
So, she is from an established, maybe not rich, but certainly middle class and probably fairly comfortable families of the North.
And he says, and yet, for two weeks she worked by my side, cleaning windows, dusting rooms, putting beds in order.
He says, The work which I have described she did every single year that I was at Hampton.
The principal is actually doing menial labor right alongside Booker T. So she's not calling him and, hey Booker T, listen, you know what?
Clean the floors, clean the windows.
I have important work to do in the office.
Oh no!
She's working alongside him and he's very impressed by this and it actually sets him up for The way he thinks about life and the way that he will set up the educational institution, later to be known as the Tuskegee Institute.
The basic idea here is that physical and manual labor, including learning a trade, is an essential part of the education.
Not of everybody.
No one is saying that in 2024, everybody needs to learn manual labor at school.
No, what Booker T. Washington is saying is for any group that is starting at the bottom, You have to learn to sort of do a lot of things for yourself.
And part of it is simply for the reason that you can't afford, when you're well off and something goes wrong, you're like, get a plumber.
Oh yeah, get an electrician.
Oh yeah, get a gardener.
But all those things cost money, and not a small amount of money.
And Booker T. Washington knows this.
And his point is, that when you're starting out in life, you want to earn money, but you don't want to be draining money either.
And the way you don't drain money is that you fix things in your garage.
And if a light bulb needs changing, you change it.
And if there's some gardening that needs to be done in the front of your apartment, you go do it.
And so that's the education that he is... Well, he's seeing it by example on the part of others, he's internalizing that, and he will put those lessons to very good use.
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