All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 1, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
48:02
STOP THE STEAL Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep887
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Coming up, a stolen election in Venezuela, and my question is, is there a way to stop the steal?
I'll talk about the implications of Maduro's so-called victory in the recent election.
Former FBI agent and counterterrorism expert John Guandolo joins me with some Pretty shocking information about Hamas in America and other terrorist networks in America reaching not just to the institutions of our society, but the highest levels of government.
You're going to want to hear this.
Hey, listen, if you're watching on Rumble, listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy, in a time of confusion, division and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
I want to talk about the election result in Venezuela, both because it is important in and of itself.
It is important strategically in terms of the interests of the United States, but it's also important because the same kinds of things that the left is doing in Venezuela, they are trying to do here.
And so there's a kind of direct applicability, a direct analogy between Venezuela and America.
This is a topic that, by the way, Debbie has been on top of and on to for at least a decade, if not more.
I think it's one of the first topics that the two of us talked about when I first met Debbie in 2014.
Now, this stuff, once a country's elections are taken over in this way, it Never ends well.
Well, I say never.
I mean almost never.
There are cases where, very few cases, where an authoritarian government rigs the election, there is a massive blowback, and the government is in fact internally overthrown.
So the combination of internal pressure and an external pressure, a diplomatic pressure, pressure coming from other countries basically saying we don't accept these election results either.
Now this happened actually in Bolivia to the leftist Marxist Evo Morales.
This guy rigged the 2019 election.
It was blatant.
He was sort of caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
And there were mass protests in Bolivia.
And there was diplomatic pressure from other South American countries, but also from the rest of the world.
And Ivo Morales had to step down.
Now, will this in fact or anything like this, is this even reasonable to hope for in Venezuela?
I would argue no.
And here's why.
Venezuela is a country that is in the envious eye of Russia and China and Iran.
They don't just have their eye on Venezuela.
They are in Venezuela.
You have Iranian radicals who are serving in the Venezuelan parliament.
So this is an influence at the very highest levels of government and arguably Maduro himself is, you could almost say, bought and paid for by China So, think of it from their point of view.
Are they going to run the risk of having their puppet somehow moved out, defeated, vanquished at the polls?
No, they're not going to take any chances and they're going to do everything that they can diplomatically, but also politically, and I think even if necessary militarily, to resist the overthrow of Maduro, which would, if Maduro fell,
And if the opposition, this guy Urrutia, and of course his close ally Maria Corina Machado, actually our friend, David Strand, if Maria Corina is running Venezuela, it's like out with the Chinese, out with the Iranians, out with the Russians.
So this is a... Venezuela is now a playground of, you may say, superpowers.
Trying to dominate it for their own nefarious objectives.
Now, let's look at the election itself.
I'm looking at a very interesting article by Andreas Oppenheimer in the Miami Herald and it's called Maduro's election fraud.
And this guy makes the point.
I'm just going to kind of go through the points he makes.
Debbie and I are going to discuss this again tomorrow on the podcast.
We have our Friday Roundup.
We'll go into all of this in some detail.
But the article makes the point that it is not unknown for authoritarian rulers in South America to try to put their thumb on the scales of an election.
He says typically what they do is they recognize that they have a constituency, but the other side has a constituency.
So what they do is they say, all right, if we can somehow rig about 5% of the vote, We're going to win.
And we do that by buying off votes, by going into villages and distributing clothing.
We, you know, we do it by sort of various ways of putting pressure on the opposition trying to suppress their vote in areas, you know, for example, the polls close early or some pretext for suppressing the vote on the other side.
But it's done kind of at the margin.
What the article says is that, this guy says, I've never heard of somebody rigging the vote where he's rigging 40% of the entire vote.
In other words, this is called wholesale stealing of the election.
This is not even, you know, mules and swing districts.
This is basically Absolutely taking control of the process and just announcing a result completely different from the result that occurred and completely different from the result that one would expect.
The article written by Andres Oppenheimer, he says that the National Electoral Council stunned the country when it announced early on Monday that Maduro won the election, he got 51% of the vote and the opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia got 44%.
Now, Maria Corina Machado, who backed Urrutia, she says that she can prove that her side got 70% of the vote, and that Maduro got under 30.
So look at the difference.
Again, we're not talking about a small difference.
So, the article says, well look, this is not simply a matter of he said, she said.
It's not a matter where the regime says one thing, the opposition says another thing.
He says, There are ways to figure out who's telling the truth.
And he goes, first of all, there were multiple pre-election polls that were conducted in Venezuela.
All of them showed the opposition candidate Urrutia leading by 25 points.
A massive advantage by any standard.
He says one poll by the consulting firm ORC gave Gonzales 60%, Maduro 15%.
Wow.
And then he says this isn't just the polls in Venezuela.
He says that the organization called Edison Research, which is a respected polling firm, it does work for major TV networks in the US and other countries, they did a poll.
Gonzalez Urrutia, 64%, Maduro, 31%.
On top of that, there were exit polls.
So these aren't just polls measuring public opinion a week or two weeks or four weeks before the election.
Exit polls are a very unique type of poll, because in an exit poll, you are doing a poll in the sense that you're asking people, but you're not asking people about what they intend to do, or what they will do, you're asking people about what they already did.
Hey, you came out of the booth, who'd you vote for?
So, the person here does not have to make a speculative judgment, they just have to say what they did.
And this poll showed, which was done across a hundred polling centers across Venezuela, decisive result for, I'm quoting now Rob Farbman who did the exit poll, he told Columbia's FM radio station, quote, it was basically a landslide for Gonzales Urrutia and for the opposition.
And then on top of that, We learned that Maduro delayed the release of the voting results.
He prohibited opposition leaders from getting access to the data and the vote tallies as is required by Venezuelan law.
And he also, and this is the type of vote rigging that even Democrats try to do all over the place, he denied the right to vote to 4.5 million Venezuelans who live abroad.
Wait a minute.
These... We're not talking about people... Now, Debbie, for example, is not a Venezuelan citizen.
She's a U.S.
citizen.
She's not going to vote in the Venezuelan election.
We're not talking about people like Debbie who are of Venezuelan origin.
We are talking about actual Venezuelans who have Venezuelan citizenship, but fled Venezuela and are living abroad.
They have every right to vote in the Venezuelan election.
They're eligible to vote, and yet their vote is denied by Maduro.
Why?
Because he knows that the vote would run overwhelmingly against him.
These are people who obviously hate the socialists, they hate the communists.
That's the reason they got out of Venezuela in the first place.
But these are people who would, most of them, consider going back to Venezuela if the place were fixed, if you could restore actual democracy in Venezuela, If you could get the communists out and get all the foreign bad actors out, lots of these Venezuelans who are very patriotic toward their country would be happy to return.
So what we've seen is a real abomination in Venezuela.
And as I say, it really shows us how bad things can get and how difficult it is to come back when they get that bad.
I mean, from Maduro's point of view, the rest of the world can scream and howl, who cares?
There can be protests domestically, but that doesn't really matter as long as the regime is strong enough to suppress those protests.
In other words, this is ultimately just about power.
And then, in a move that I think is designed almost to thumb his nose at the opposition, Maduro says, I'm going to have the Supreme Court of Venezuela look into the matter.
This, by the way, is his own hand-picked Supreme Court, stacked with Chavistas and Maduro supporters, the very people who kept Maria Corina Machado off the ballot.
These people.
It's kind of like saying, I'm gonna have Merrick Garland look into this.
Yeah, exactly.
That's part of the problem.
This is probably one of the guys who should be thrown in the slammer.
And yet he's going to look into this to certify that everything is on the up and up.
The whole thing is a sick and a sad joke.
And it's a joke that unfortunately may be coming at some point our way.
In these crazy times, we all want peace of mind.
We all want security.
Security for our country.
Security for our leaders.
Security for our families.
But we also need financial security.
And think about this.
You're not financially secure if all your eggs are in one basket.
Now, gold and silver are an excellent way to diversify your savings.
They can be a hedge against inflation.
They're a physical asset that's in high demand globally, from the wealthy to central banks.
And through my friends at Birch Gold Group, you can own physical gold and silver in a tax-sheltered retirement account.
That's right.
You can diversify an old IRA or 401k for no money out of pocket into an IRA in gold and silver.
This is one thing you can do to secure your family's savings.
How do you do it?
Text Dinesh to 989898.
You'll get a free, no-obligation information kit to get started.
Learn the role that precious metals can play in your overall savings strategy.
Again, text Dinesh to 989898.
With an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau, thousands of happy customers, you can trust Birch Gold like Debbie and I do.
Text Dinesh to 989898.
Are you feeling overwhelmed by the increasing cost of health insurance?
Have you had enough of not having control over your healthcare dollars?
Introducing ShareRight.
Share-R-I-G-H-T.
It's healthcare done the right way.
At ShareRight, you're not just a number, you're part of a caring community.
And forget about paying excessive premiums.
With ShareRight, you stand to save 30 to 50% compared to health insurance.
So think about what you could do with all those savings.
But it's more than just savings.
ShareRight ensures you have access to the care you deserve precisely when you need it, from routine checkups to unexpected emergencies.
With ShareRight, your healthcare is their top priority.
Empower yourself today by taking control of your healthcare costs.
Visit shareright.org slash Dinesh to learn more.
See how much you can save.
Visit shareright.org slash Dinesh.
That's shareright.org slash Dinesh for healthcare done the right way.
Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast a friend of ours, John Guandolo.
He is, well, he graduated from the US Naval Academy.
He served as an officer in the Marine Corps.
He served for 13 years, thereabouts, in the FBI, where he developed and worked on counterterrorism programs.
And he is now a fellow at the Claremont Institute.
His website, johnguandolo, G-U-A-N-D-O-L-O dot com.
And I want to talk to him about, well, a whole bunch of things.
John, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for joining me.
You just released a big report that was featured in the Washington Times and elsewhere about the influence of Hamas and Islamic terrorism in America.
We're used to hearing about all this in the Middle East, in Israel, what's going on in Gaza, And while people are dimly aware that some of this could be coming across the border, I think they need to hear from you about the extent of the problem and what do we really know about it.
So tell us a little bit about what's in that report.
So the report focuses, because of current world events primarily on Hamas, Understanding that Hamas, the designated terrorist group by the United States and other governments, is an inherent part of the larger Muslim Brotherhood, which exists in over a hundred countries today.
And the Muslim Brotherhood's stated goal is to establish a global Islamic state under Islamic law, Sharia.
That's their stated goal.
It's in their bylaws.
And they have established significant networks all around the world, but their most dangerous and most in-depth networks are here in the United States, mostly because of the permissiveness of America that views and they portray what they do as either a civil rights or religious activity when in fact it's revolutionary, it's terrorist in nature.
I mean the Muslim Brotherhood is the foundation for the most significant Islamic terrorist groups in the world and the fact that they work with all the others so that Iran and Hezbollah And the Iranian network, they work with the Deobandis, and they all operate here in the United States.
And I would just lay on the table what may sound shocking for your audience.
You cannot name a prominent national U.S.
Islamic organization that is not tied into this hostile jihadi movement.
And that's the part that people kind of put the brakes on.
They're like, well, that can't be right.
There has to be some.
And I would say name them because in the report I list those organizations.
Explain how they operate and what they're doing, and each of these organizations has a specific line of operation that supports the jihadi movement here in the United States.
And by the way, we've identified people from Hamas on the National Security Council, working with administrations dating back to Mr. Clinton, all the way through Mr. Biden's administration, And the number of Hamas, Al Qaeda, ISIS, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Iranian slash Hezbollah, and others, including unaffiliated Muslim Brotherhood leaders in the United States, is significant.
And we can talk about that, like, their penetration.
And I'll just give your audience one example.
During the Clinton administration for eight years, Abderrahman Alamoudi was the, quote, Islamic advisor to President Clinton and Vice President Gore, and he worked In the G.W.
Bush campaign, along with other terrorists like Nihad Awad, the leader of Hamas in the United States, Sami al-Aryan, the leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but Alamoudi, who was the most significant bagman and financier for Al Qaeda in the United States, and the government stated that they had intercepts that confirmed that from Al Qaeda themselves.
Well, he was the advisor to President Clinton, involved in the G.W.
Bush administration.
He founded or led two dozen of the biggest Islamic organizations in North America.
He founded the Muslim chaplain program for the Department of Defense.
And he was involved with participating in the Middle East peace process as a, quote, goodwill ambassador for the State Department.
And he got sentenced to 23 years in prison.
I mean, he was involved in a plot to kill the Saudi crown prince because he's al-Qaeda.
Now, you have to ask yourself, if that's the case, how is the FBI State Department vetting?
How's the Secret Service vetting?
Well, it's non-functional, and so we have these kinds of people.
Today, it's much worse inside the government, and their role is to influence and gather intel.
It's a counterintelligence espionage operation more than it is anything else.
Do you think, John, and, you know, I'm reacting to what you're saying in two opposite ways.
On the one hand, it's to me a little baffling.
It's the very same Muslim organizations who say, don't lump us in with the terrorists, that's Islamophobia.
And you're telling me that these very same organizations are lumping themselves We've got plenty of causes.
We can raise plenty of money.
people connected with these terrorist organizations.
So one of my questions is, is that because the terrorist networks have a lot of sway among Muslims in the country?
Why don't they, wouldn't it be easy for groups like CARE to say, well, we want nothing to do with you.
We've got plenty of causes.
We can raise plenty of money.
We don't wanna be smeared by being linked with Al-Qaeda or Hamas.
Or could it be that the leadership of these organizations is actually somewhat sympathical with the Hamas ideology?
What is it?
The only difference is label.
They're the same.
And if you look at the objective, the publicly stated objective of ISIS, now the Islamic State, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, we go to the Shia Iranian side, Hamas, part of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim Brotherhood bylaws, Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab, Islamic Jihad, they all say they want a global Islamic state under Sharia.
So their objectives are all the same.
You brought up the Council on American-Islamic Relations care.
We know as a matter of fact and evidence in the largest terrorism financing trial in American history, which is the U.S.
versus Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, which is adjudicated in my hometown at Dallas, Texas back in 2008.
The evidence demonstrates that CARE was the fourth organization created by the US Palestine Committee, which is Hamas in the United States.
We have documents that were taken by an individual who worked undercover at CARE out of their office.
They're strategic documents where they were talking about how to better work with other Islamic organizations, including Bin Laden.
We have documents that show them directly supporting, I mean, they worked directly with, the founders of CARE worked directly with the leader of Hamas in the United States back in the 80s and 90s, Moussa Abou Marzouk, who's now the number two guy of Hamas.
Well, maybe today the number one guy.
Um, and...
And so the evidence that carries Hamas that we have in the FBI and the Department of Justice is very clear of who they are.
The fact that the Islamic Society of North America, the Islamic Circle of North America, the Muslim Students Association, the International Institute for Islamic Thought, the Muslim American Society, MGAGE is another Hamas group, Americans, American Muslims for Palestine, Students for Justice in Palestine.
We know that all these groups are hostile.
We know how they work together.
The question is, and I created the first training programs in the government on these things back in 2006 and 2007.
And the problem is when you have leaders of these groups advising the FBI The Director of National Intelligence, the CIA, the State Department Treasury, they're influencing how we create training programs for counterterrorism, foreign policy, and policing strategies, which is why all of those don't work in the United States and haven't.
When you let jihadis tell you how to find and destroy jihadi networks, you shouldn't be surprised when these efforts fail.
That's where we are.
That's where we've been.
I mean, this hasn't changed.
The only thing that's changed since I first started talking about it while I was still in the FBI back in 2002 and 2003 is it's much, much worse today.
John, when we come back, I want to ask you not just about the Muslim organizations, but just the larger body of American progressives, the left-wingers, who presumably don't want to live in a society with Sharia, but nevertheless seem to have no problem allying themselves with these kinds of groups.
And so I want you to expound on the seemingly strange bedfellows that we see with the progressives and the jihadis.
We'll be back with John Guandolo.
You've asked in my pillow.
They're finally bringing you the most requested offer ever.
Right now you can get the queen-size premium MyPillow for only $19.98.
MyPillow is made with patented adjustable fill.
It adjusts to your exact individual needs regardless of your Sleep position.
It helps keep your neck aligned and holds its shape all night long.
So you get the best sleep of your life.
But that's not all.
Get their six-piece kitchen or bath towel sets for just $25.
The brand new mattress topper for as low as $69.98.
And their famous MyPillow bed sheets for as low as $25.
And so much more.
Call 800-876-0227, the number again, 800-876-0227, or you can go to mypillow.com.
When you use promo code Dinesh, you get huge discounts on all the MyPillow products, including the premium queen size, MyPillow Just 1998.
That's the lowest price ever.
Don't delay, order today.
Use promo code Dinesh at checkout, mypillow.com.
Guys, if you'd like to support my work, here's the best way to do it.
Become an annual subscriber at my Locals channel.
It's a big election year, a new movie coming out, so great time to do it.
I post a lot of exclusive content on Locals, including content that's censored on other social media platforms.
On Locals, you get Dinesh Unchained, Dinesh Uncensored.
You can also interact with me directly.
I do a live weekly Q&A every Tuesday, 8 p.m.
Eastern.
No topic is off-limits.
I've also uploaded some cool films to Locals, documentaries, feature films.
2000 Mules is up there.
The latest film, Police State, and the new film will also be up there.
And that is happening this fall.
So if you're an annual subscriber, you can stream and watch this movie content for free.
It's included with your subscription.
So check out the channel.
It's dinesh.locals.com.
I'd love to have you along for this great ride.
Again, it's dinesh.locals.com.
I'm back with John Guandolo of the Claremont Institute.
His website is johnguandolo.com.
John, I was going to ask you at the end of the last segment about the strange alliance between a seemingly secular and really quite sort of promiscuous, easy-going, non-sharia left and then the jihadis on the other hand.
Is this just a marriage of convenience of two people who have the same sorts of enemies?
Yes, that's a good way to put it, Dinesh.
We see, and I'd like to start the discussion with this, at the ground level across the United States, from California to the East Coast and north to south, in even small towns, where the rubber meets the road, the jihadis and the communists are working seamlessly at the ground level.
And it is because they both want to bring down the Constitutional Republic.
They want to do it for different reasons.
And the Islamic movement, their doctrine, we have their published doctrine that specifically states you can work with nationalists and other groups like the communists so long as you never violate Sharia from an Islamic standpoint.
But they're doing it.
We see, we can go back just a few years where communist China enters into a strategic partnership publicly with the largest state sponsor of terrorism on the planet, the Islamic Republic of Iran.
We see in the United States the leader of Hamas, which is the executive director of CARE, Nihad Awad, saying at a Muslim Brotherhood conference, the Muslim American Society, Islamic Circle of North America conference, right before the 2016 election, Black Lives Matter is our matter.
Their campaign is our campaign, and I suspect your viewers are well aware that Black Lives Matter was created out of the largest Chinese communist front group in the United States.
Freedom Road, Socialist Organization, Liberation Road, and they've always been that.
They didn't morph into that.
Their founders were communists, Marxists, and that's what they've been.
They literally work with Chinese communist officials in the Chinese Consulates here in the United States.
So we see that.
We see CARE, ISNA, ICDA, Muslim Student Association, Students for Justice in Palestine, working with Antifa, Black Lives Matter.
We see them working with Democratic Socialists, with Code Pink, with ANSWER, with RevCom, with Rise and Resist, all these communist groups around the United States, and they're working at the ground level.
with them.
They were right there on January 6th and beyond, so we see them at the college campuses.
And I was on some of these college campuses when these riots were happening.
You've got jihadis, Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood jihadis, primarily working directly with these communist groups at the local level.
And we see it at the national level as well.
I saw just recently Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the sort of intellectual and maybe strategic guru of 9-11, gets a deal by which he spared the death penalty.
It's very difficult for me to understand the rationale for any of this because presumably any kind of information that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would have had to divulge So the answer to your question is none.
There's no justification whatsoever.
out of him in the immediate aftermath of 9-11. So here we are 23 years later, what possible justification is there for giving him any kind of a deal at all and quite frankly why is he still with us? So the answer to your question is none. There's no justification whatsoever and I go to this point Dinesh. These people whether you're talking about the military jihadis from al-Qaeda,
ISIS, Hezbollah, Hamas, whatever or you're talking about the suit-wearing jihadis from all these organizations I just mentioned previously working around the country at the state, local level in Washington DC in the White House, the national security staffs.
They all have the same objective, but they do things differently.
But if you look at the thing they say that is the blueprint for how they do everything, and the thing they seek to impose on the West, which is Sharia, if you look at the defeat mechanism for what it takes to actually defeat them, it requires you to utterly defeat them and make them feel defeated before they have to stop waging jihad.
And so I can tell you exactly how something like this is taken by the Muslim community in the United States.
It's that America is weak.
They've surrendered.
They had the ability to kill him.
There is no sense under Sharia why we wouldn't kill him given this opportunity.
So it must be that we are weak and then Sharia requires them to actually fight us more aggressively.
So our prosecutors, our Department of Justice, our governors, our presidents, our national security advisors, who have decided we don't actually—and by the way, our generals and admirals who have decided we're going to wage a war for 20 years, but we don't actually have to read the enemy's doctrine This is why we are losing.
It's why we lost in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, parts of Africa, and why we lost in other places, and it's why we're losing here.
They have to be treated brutally.
We're in a war.
They should be killed.
I think the Hamas leaders in the United States should be killed.
We should seize their finances, seize their properties, but we're not doing it.
Would you say that there is somewhat of the same problem going on in Israel?
In other words, I know that the left criticizes Israel for, oh, they're so violent, they're so brutal, they're cracking down on civilians in Gaza.
I actually worry about the opposite problem, which is to say that you had the original terrorist attack in October, and this is actually dragging out a little bit long.
And as you know, as well as anyone else in any kind of a combat situation, the public appetite for retaliation is always immediately following the outrage.
And then over time, it begins to taper off, and then suddenly the public is more open to questions like, well, Why did that poor man in a grocery store get, you know, get bombed?
And why is his store in ruins?
And so and so.
So, are the Israelis themselves holding back from the full-scale operation that they said and wanted and needed to perform?
Or are they doing it right?
I think, first of all, I think this is a great question.
I think it's a little of both.
I would have liked to see, just like I would have liked to see in America, we set a mission and you accomplished the mission, and the mission should have been to destroy the ability of the global Islamic movement to
operate both militarily and in the, which 90% of what they do is not in the military violence side, it's in the counterintelligence, espionage, subversion, influence operations, psychological propaganda operations, it's all in that realm.
So I think I would have liked to see, I would like to see Israel be more aggressive The problem is, in the information battle space, our adversaries hold the high ground.
And so, the Israelis are having to walk a very fine line of doing what needs to be done to destroy the enemy physically, while what they should be doing, and I don't see them doing as well, is rooting those same jihadis and supporters out of their own country.
Which America could have done by 2003 or 4, and here we are 20 years later, and now the Islamic movement, the suit-wearing jihadis, literally control the narrative in the United States, along with their communist allies.
So I think they should be much more aggressive, but you have to also balance the fact that they are walking this line because the enemy controls the propaganda.
And so they're having to, I mean, you've got the entire United Nations, you've got the entire Organization of Islamic Conference, which is the largest voting bloc in the UN, made up of every Islamic nation on earth, literally hammering them and the global media basically following suit.
So I think at some point you just need to do what needs to get done to protect yourself.
Very scary stuff.
I mean, who would have thought that the Muslim Brotherhood, I mean, I think if I remember correctly, founded in about 1928 by the schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna out of basically the back room of a school, would a hundred years later have become an organization of this kind of global influence and been able to have this high-level penetration of our institutions and even our government.
John, this is eye-opening stuff.
Thank you very much for sharing it.
Guys, I've been talking to John Guandolo.
His website is johnguandolo.com.
John, love to have you back and thank you very much for joining me.
Thanks for having me, Dinesh.
We are discussing Booker T. Washington's up from slavery, and we pick up the story in Chapter 4, where Booker T. has now graduated from the Hampton Institute.
And his first job, as it turns out, is a table waiter in a summer hotel in Connecticut.
He says he was able to borrow some money to make his way there.
And he says, I had not been in the hotel long before I found out I knew practically nothing about waiting on a hotel table.
So...
Here again, we have Booker T. Washington.
Think of it.
The guy has never probably eaten in a restaurant.
He has seen hotels from the outside, but probably not a lot from the inside.
He certainly has had no training at all.
And so simple a task as, can I take your order?
Greeting people, sitting them down, knowing the etiquette.
He doesn't know any of it.
He says, the head waiter, however, supposed I was an accomplished waiter.
Now this tells me that Booker T was actually probably a very dignified man, carried himself well, looked like somebody, and a lot of times you hire people on that first impression.
Wow, the guy looks the part.
But he says that the first customers he had were, quote, four or five wealthy and rather aristocratic people.
He says, my ignorance of how to wait upon them was so apparent that they scolded me in such a severe manner that I became frightened and left the table, leaving them sitting there without food.
He kind of ran away, so to speak.
And he says, as a result of this, I was reduced from the position of waiter to that of a dish carrier.
Now, This could happen to anyone.
And most people in this circumstance would be like, oh, this is horrible.
And certainly today, we would get a lot of people saying, this is only happening because I'm black.
Or to put it differently, my lack of knowledge is the result of centuries of slavery of myself and my ancestors.
Booker T. Washington does none of this.
He says, I was determined to learn the business of waiting.
The business of waiting.
And so, and did so within a few weeks.
And was restored to my former position.
So, he takes the humiliation, he doesn't let it, he doesn't, he doesn't brood on it.
That's the important thing.
Is that, sometimes when you have a reversal, you brood on the reversal.
And as a result, getting up and getting out of it becomes much harder.
He doesn't do that.
His point is, yeah, I didn't know.
So obviously, I made a fool of myself.
But the reason I made a fool of myself is because I didn't know.
So if I do learn, I will know, and the situation will disappear.
And then maybe I'll get my job back, and sure enough, he does.
And then he says, and he does this multiple times in the book, I always find the technique very effective.
He goes, I've had the satisfaction of being a guest in this hotel several times since I was a waiter there.
So imagine Booker T. Washington's feeling.
He becomes truly a great man.
He certainly becomes the best-known black man in America.
Think of it, he's invited to dinner by none other than Teddy Roosevelt.
And And so later he goes back to the hotel and it's so poignant for him to realize that, wow, he used to, you know, he used to work there.
When I was in Arizona as an exchange student, and really quite utterly broke, I did earn some money by working as first a busboy and then a waiter in a restaurant.
This was in a place called Patagonia, Arizona.
I think the restaurant may still be there.
It was called The Stakeout.
Not Steakout as in S-T-E-A-K-E, Steakout, but The Steak, S-T-E-A-K, The Steakout.
Very clever name.
Struck me even then, wow, someone's very clever who thought of this.
But in any event, it's always fun to then go back later, and I've only been back to Patagonia a couple of times since then, once to see an English teacher of mine, but to go back and then eat in that restaurant and go, wow, at one time I was, you know, I was the guy kind of Clearing the dishes on this.
So this is what's happening to Booker T. Washington.
And then he says, At the end of the hotel season, I returned to my former home in Malden, and I was elected to teach the colored school at that place.
So think of it.
He is probably the only educated guy in the town.
And so sure enough, they're like, you can be a school teacher.
And he says this was really great.
He's very happy.
He says he began at 8 in the morning.
He worked till 10 at night.
And then he says this, which again comes with a bit of a surprise, but at the same time not a surprise, because this is actually something you would do.
He says, In addition to the usual routine of teaching, I taught the pupils to comb their hair and to keep their hands and faces clean, as well as their clothing.
I gave special attention to teaching them the proper use of the toothbrush and the bath.
He goes, in all my teaching I have watched carefully the influence of the toothbrush and I am convinced that there are few single agencies of civilization that are more far-reaching.
Now, you have to look at this in context because what Booker T. Washington is saying here is something that seems very basic but I think is actually quite profound.
When you're starting at the very bottom, the most basic things that other people take for granted, that are, you may say, for the rest of us, infrastructural goods.
You and I have grown up, we jump out of bed, we brush our teeth.
We understand that a bed has sheets and then has a covering.
We understand that when you take a bath, you use soap, you put on deodorant.
Booker T. Washington's saying is, my people, his people, poor blacks in the South in 1901, didn't have any of this.
And so they have to be taught.
It's not enough to teach them 1 plus 1 is 2, 2 plus 1 is 3.
You also have to teach them when you get up, you need to brush your teeth, you need to be clean, you don't want to go around in dirty clothes.
So he's doing all this.
And then he says, pretty soon people came to him and told him, hey, it's not enough to have a school.
We need a night school.
And so the adults would come to school at night.
So here's poor Booker T. He's teaching in the day.
He's teaching again at night.
And he says, on top of that, and then this year you get the workaholic element of Booker T, because a normal person faced with morning classes and night classes wouldn't do this.
He says he also started a debating society and began to also teach at two Sunday schools.
So, he's a Christian, he loves the Bible, so this is a way for him to do that.
And in addition, he says he gave private lessons to several young men who wanted to apply to the Hampton Institute.
They're like, hey Booker T, we want to be like you.
We don't just want to learn a few basics, we want to learn as much as you know, and we want to go to Hampton, like you did.
So he's like, OK, well, I'm going to have to teach you above and beyond what you're learning in school.
And so he does that.
And he doesn't really worry about getting paid.
He goes, I taught anyone who wanted to learn anything that I could teach him.
And then Booker T. Washington has an interesting pivot here where he says something that I will touch upon but then probably I might have to pick up tomorrow.
He says, it was while I was at my home in Malden that what was known as the Ku Klux Klan was at the height of its activity.
Now let's remember that Booker T. Washington is writing around 1901.
The Ku Klux Klan was founded in the aftermath of the Civil War by a Democrat, by a Confederate general, Nathan Bedford Forrest.
And the Klan had a big revival in the 1870s and the 1880s.
Not a revival, it just grew.
It became a powerful organization.
And then, interestingly, the Republican Party, this is not under Lincoln, but later under Grant, And under some of the Republican presidents of the late 19th century, they passed laws to limit and restrict the Ku Klux Klan, and the Ku Klux Klan basically collapsed.
It collapsed in the South.
So there was no Ku Klux Klan, or no discernible Ku Klux Klan.
There might have been a little bit of remnants of it, but you'll see Booker T. Washington talks about the fact that he will end this chapter basically by saying, there's no Ku Klux Klan.
Now, little does he know that under the next president, well, the next progressive president, which is to say Woodrow Wilson, who was elected in 1912, the Ku Klux Klan will have an ugly revival.
In fact, it'll become stronger than it was even before.
But notice, it's the Democrats who started it, it's the Democrats who continued it, it's the Republicans who shut it down, it's the Democrats who got it started up again.
But Booker T. Washington is writing this book in the interregnum between the two clans, what is sometimes called the original clan, and then the revival of the clan after, by the way, the movie called Birth of a Nation, which was featured at the White House by Woodrow Wilson.
So, here's Booker T.
He's describing the Klan and he says that the Klan reminded him of the quote slave patrols of whom I used to hear a great deal during the days of slavery.
Now the reason Booker T says he used to hear about it is he was only a kid so he Even though he was directly touched by slavery, he wasn't a slave in the adult sense of the term, where the adults would talk about, oh listen, you can't get off the plantation.
If you are caught off your plantation, one of these slave patrols will get you, and then they will return you, and then you're going to get flogged or whipped or punished in some way.
So this is what Booker T is referring to, but he's referring to it by hearsay.
And again, notice here how Booker T does not He does not take on victimization.
He could easily say, well, I was myself a slave and, you know, the slave patrols were terrifying.
No, he doesn't pretend to do that.
He knew he didn't know them.
He knew about them.
And so he doesn't exaggerate his direct involvement with the slave patrols.
But he says the Klan was like that.
And he says that like the slave patrols, the Klan operated mostly at night.
And he says a lot of its objective was to crush the political aspirations of the Negroes.
In other words, to prevent black people from voting.
And why?
Because the black people after the Civil War were voting overwhelmingly for the Republican Party.
So Booker T doesn't mention Democrats.
He doesn't mention Republicans.
There's a reason for this.
He is writing in a very general sense to the country, if you will, as a whole.
He's very careful that he has a black audience and a white audience, both.
He has kind of a mission, and we'll talk later about what that mission is, with each of those two different groups.
But he doesn't want to get mired in a partisan fight, even though he, Booker T. Washington, is a Republican.
He's known as a Republican.
He's not bashful about being a Republican, but it's not the Republican, quote, voice in which he is writing this book.
▲
Export Selection