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Aug. 7, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
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GOOD NEIGHBORS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep891
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Coming up, I will analyze Tim Walz's claim that one person's socialism is another person's neighborliness.
What?
Also want to cast a skeptical eye on the U.S.
government's claim to have foiled a plot to assassinate political leaders, including Trump.
Hmm.
And how Booker T. Washington anticipated the sickness of the modern civil rights movement.
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I want to talk about this strange partnership between Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.
I don't know if you saw the rather bizarre and, of course, staged phone call in which Kamala Harris is inviting Tim Walz to come on the ticket.
And of course she is giggly about it.
We got to do this together she says as if she's you know inviting him on a date.
And then a little bit later I see the two of them at a rally and I see Kamala making her usual kind of giddy over-the-top
Kind of silly expressions and Tim Waltz Watching him his reactions are very unnatural exaggerated waving of his arms He guffaws for no reason as if it's almost like he he is Programming himself for life with Kamala.
I mean, it's it's painful to watch really But there's a there's a certain insane dynamic going on We'll have to wait and see whether there's a certain group of Democrats who like this and think that this is somehow, you know, you could call it progressive chemistry.
But to me, it is a little crude.
It's sort of theatrical in the bad sense of the term.
It looks fake.
And finally, it is crass.
Because you've got two, I won't say hollow men, that's the phrase of T.S.
Eliot, but you have two rather hokey people who are trying to sound cool and trying to play off each other in a rather embarrassing way.
Now, quite apart from the embarrassment of the situation, We have the ideas of Tim Walz, and the ideas of Tim Walz match the ideas of Kamala Harris very well.
To be honest, they are both leftists, they are both not very far removed from socialism.
Tim Walz has asked, and I mentioned this yesterday but I didn't really discuss it, is asked about, are you a socialist? And he says, well, one man's socialist is another man's neighborly, neighborliness. I think that's the phrase he used, neighborliness.
Now, this is something that is to me intriguing.
First of all, if you're a socialist, why don't you say that?
Why aren't you proud of it?
There are some people who are proud of it.
These are the so-called squad.
But they're not doing all that well.
I don't know if you saw Cory Bush, one of the kind of key members of the squad.
Was just resoundingly defeated in her primary.
So she is out.
She is not even going to be the Democratic nominee.
And so the squad, which I think was started out with four, is now down to three.
And pretty soon it may be down to just one.
And I'm predicting that last surviving member will be AOC.
But back to Tim Walz, it looks like some of these Democrats realize that socialism is an ugly label.
It's not a label that they want.
And so what they have to do is make it sound better and different than it is.
And they do it by linking it to neighborliness.
In a socialist society, taking up the kind of Marxian dictum, which is from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
By the way, a dictum that has been fully endorsed by Kamala Harris.
She talks about the fact that we don't just need equality, by which she means equality of opportunity.
We need equity.
We need everyone to be equal.
Equal in resources, equal in circumstances.
And so that is sort of strict socialism.
But to do that, you have to force people.
Right?
If you have, let's just say, three guys or ten guys and each of them has a different number of marbles, you got to go to the guy who has more marbles and take them and give them to the guy who has less marbles and force is an essential element of this.
So socialists realized that if you simply say, hey guys, why don't the guys with the extra marbles just kind of put some of your marbles into the front And then this way we can distribute them to the ones who don't have it.
They fully recognize that the people with more marbles, particularly people who feel, and very often rightly so, that they earned those marbles, you're now taking away from them something that they have earned.
In other words, something that they feel, and again rightly so, entitled to.
So, So socialism, unlike neighborliness, is a coercive transaction.
But here's something else I want to point out about neighborliness, and that is that neighborliness comes with accountability.
And let me give an example which I think will dramatize the point, and you see the sharp contrast here with socialism.
So let's say for example that my neighbor, you know, waltzes over to my house and says, hey Dinesh, you know, I'm in a really awkward situation, I've really messed up my life, you know, I'm pregnant, I've got a kid out of wedlock, I don't have any money, and so would you be willing to give me like $500 a month so I can help, you know, look after this kid?
Now, first of all, I would be hesitant to do that, but I might agree under certain circumstances and go, okay, all right, I'll do that.
But I would be looking for signs of responsibility, for signs that this person is trying to put their life back together so that this dependency would be eliminated.
But let's assume that a year later, Uh, she waltzes back to my front door and goes, Hey Dinesh, uh, whoops, you know, pregnant again.
Uh, I need another $500 to keep me going.
So now, you know, I'll be kind of looking to you to give me a thousand dollars a month.
And of course I'm making up these numbers, but I think you get the point.
I would be like, absolutely not.
Why?
Because I thought I was helping you get out of a problem and you have taken it as a subsidy for a destructive and irresponsible lifestyle which you cannot afford to sustain.
And so I don't want to be the enabler of your sort of irresponsibilities and so that's it.
I'm kind of closing the door here.
But notice the government doesn't do this.
Under socialism, the government is like, sure, you can have a second kid, we'll increase your payments, and frankly, we'll increase them even more if you have a third.
So, notice right away that when you have entitlements, entitlements don't come with any responsibility at all.
Again, I don't expect Tim Walz to fess up to any of this, but here we come to the task of what the Republicans need to do, and that is they need to expose the radicalism.
They need not only to show That there is a strong socialist thrust in the policies of guys like Waltz and Kamala Harris.
And it's not classic socialism.
It's not, you know, Marxism circa the middle of the 19th century.
It's what I call in my book, United States of Socialism, identity socialism.
Socialism merged with identity politics.
This is why, for example, Waltz and Kamala Harris are for the porous and open border.
Their idea is let's import voters.
Marx never thought in these terms.
He never, you know, in fact he didn't even think of socialism as being strictly allied with democracy per se.
He thought it would kind of embody a kind of democracy because everyone's equal and so in that sense there's a democratic element to socialism.
But he didn't think of socialist societies as having free elections of the kind that we do.
But The modern socialists have figured out a way to diffuse identity politics with socialism.
And Tim Walz does it with a populist rhetorical thrust.
Now, what this means is that what we're going to be seeing, I think, with Walz versus J.D.
Vance is two types of populism.
You could call it conservative populism and progressive populism.
And this is an interesting theme because populism simply means responding to the people, taking the people's concerns into account.
But there are obviously different ways to do this.
And if we look through history, populists come in many different shapes and sizes.
I think I'll pick this theme up tomorrow and spell it out some more, which is, what does a conservative populism look like?
What does a progressive populism look like?
Because, again, I've been talking about J.D.
Vance versus Walz, but you could say this is also true of Trump, and I predict that Kamala Harris will adopt a populist rhetoric.
Uh, going into November as well.
They recognize the power of populism, even though they've been sort of deriding it all along.
They're gonna have to embrace it for the election.
And so the election may well come down to two very different definitions of what populism means.
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I want to talk about a strange case that I just learned about in the New York Times.
Justice Department charges Pakistani man in alleged plot to kill U.S.
leaders, including apparently Donald Trump.
Now you might remember during the attempted assassination, this is the assassination by Thomas Crooks who fired multiple shots at Trump.
Grazed him on the ear, killed one person and injured others.
But at that time, right after that came out, there were some reports coming out of the Biden regime, out of the Biden administration, that Iran is plotting to assassinate Trump.
And I remember talking to Debbie about it and I go, you know, I'm a little skeptical of this.
Not skeptical of Iran's intentions, because W was like, well, you know Iran would love to get rid of Trump.
He's their archenemy.
And they would love to continue with the kind of Obama, Biden, Kamala Harris, you know, coddle Iran policy.
And I said, no, that's not the point I'm trying to make here.
The point is, I think that these guys are trying to draw attention away, not just from the extreme negligence that led to the attack, to the attempted assassination on Trump, but something that seems to go beyond negligence.
I mean, think about the Secret Service, for example, diverting assets away from Trump and toward Jill Biden.
Think about them denying requests on the part of the Trump people for additional security.
They're like, no, we're not going to do it.
Think about the fact that the gunman who shot Crooks seemed to have him in his sights and yet let him get off not just one but a bunch of shots before he then took him out.
Think about people pointing to the gunman beforehand.
Think about the knowledge that they had about this guy who was surveilling the facility.
So all of this doesn't really Doesn't really add up.
And it doesn't add up to this day.
Even though we've seen testimony from Kim Cheadle, we've seen testimony from her replacement, the new acting director, very little real information has come out about what went down.
And so now we're supposed to deflect to this new thing.
And here is the new thing now, which is to say, this guy, 46 years old, Pakistani guy, Asif Raza Merchant, has been arrested in New York.
He's charged with attempting to assassinate US leaders, including Trump, and apparently he was either working with Iran or put up to it by Iran.
That part of it seems a little bit unclear.
As I read the article, and I'm reading it admittedly with a skeptical eye, because when I hear things like, you know, the FBI implanted informants, this guy was supposedly telling the FBI informants, in other words, undercover agents, listen, I want to pay you money to go do a hit on Trump or to go do a hit on these other leaders, and then the FBI busts him.
This is a classic.
We've heard this story before.
We've heard about how the FBI did this to Muslims in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, essentially entrapping them into terrorist schemes and then going busted.
We know that there was an element of this going on in the January 6th.
episode.
We also know about the Gretchen Whitmer frame-up in which these, you know, basically these angry yahoos were were steered toward this kidnapping plot.
Gretchen Whitmer knew about the plot in advance.
She was, you know, she was, and then, but the whole thing was a staged operation with active involvement from multiple Undercover assets.
And now when we follow this story, I'm very skeptical of this.
I'm very skeptical of what they're saying happened.
And in fact, I'm skeptical because I'm asking myself questions like, did this guy plot all this and then the FBI busted him?
Or did the FBI put him up to it and then busted him?
Or alternatively, he's not the problem at all.
The FBI actually is the problem, and they are putting out this kind of story to throw suspicion on, because after the attempted assassination, we go, you know what, I wonder if there were people high up in the police state, high up in the deep state, who were part of this.
Not a system-wide conspiracy, but just some very powerful people who let this happen, or perhaps even in some way enable it.
And if that's the case, then the people who are behind the scheme are going to say, well, you know what?
We need to get people off this topic.
We don't want them looking at us.
What we want them looking at is, you know, some other lone gunman or someone that Iran put up to this.
So, here is a scenario that I think is worth considering.
And again, you know, we are in a new environment where we have to think this way.
I regret a little bit having to think this way, but I feel compelled to let my mind spell out these scenarios, because I think we have to not embrace them automatically, but match them up against the facts that we know.
Always keeping our eye open for facts that go the other way, or facts that seem to cut against the theory.
And here's the theory I want to simply air out, if you will, as a thought experiment.
And that is that some powerful people in the police state, high up in the government, were aware of what Thomas Crooks was planning.
And they could have easily picked it up in something he posted, they could have picked it up if they were surveilling him in some way, in any event, or they picked it up even once he began to start scouting the grounds.
So they know what's going on, but they let it happen.
Because they would like to see Trump out of the picture.
They have every motive to do that.
He has vowed to shut down the police state if he comes into, if he's elected again.
And so these people also know about this Pakistani guy, and normally they might be like, you know what, we'll let him try his luck, because Brooks may not have succeeded, but maybe some other guy will.
But now in this environment where everybody is looking at what's the Secret Service doing?
What are the intelligence agencies doing?
What kind of protection is Trump getting?
They're like, well, you know what?
This is the right time for us to take one of these guys whom we actually know about and bust him.
Because by busting him, everybody then goes, oh wow, well look, you know, the Secret Service may have blown it and the intelligence agencies may have blown it with regard to this one guy, the Pennsylvania guy Crooks, but you know, they've snapped into action now, they're on the job, they've got this guy.
Because think about it, when you look at the facts, He's offering a $5,000 down payment to apparently assassinate a whole range of officials whom he admits have protection.
So you're not talking about low-level officials, you're talking about high-level officials.
And the idea that he's going to be able to, quote, hire these assassins For $100,000 with $5,000 down, to me, is on the face of it, questionable.
The whole thing sounds too stupid for me to just believe and go, oh yeah, you know what, this is exactly what the... Because this is a guy... Look at this one.
I'm going to read a sentence from the article.
During a trip to New York, Mr. Merchant asked the informant, this is the FBI informant, to drive him around to clubs in Brooklyn to recruit potential hitmen.
Total BS.
And people to engage in an unspecified criminal scheme that could earn participants up to a million dollars.
If I'm a Pakistani looking to make assassinations in America, am I really going to go with some limo driver slash FBI agent?
Take me to some clubs in New York.
I want to find some guys who might be willing to do assassinations for me.
You know, I'm going to pay them $100,000, each five grand down.
This is, if you wrote this in a movie script, it would be rejected flat out.
Why?
It's unbelievable.
It's too dumb.
It doesn't make any sense.
And so, I am very skeptical of this story.
I'm not saying it's not possible.
It is possible.
But quite frankly, I don't really believe it.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H, Dinesh.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast a new guest, and her name is Rebecca Matthew.
She is an author, and she has a new book of short stories that is called The Rapture of the Deep.
Rebecca grew up in Grand Cayman.
She's been surrounded by books.
She went to Harvard.
She is also someone who posts on social media.
Very interesting stuff.
You can follow her on X at R, the letter R. Quietly reading.
Tells you a little bit about Rebecca right there.
And then also a website, Rebecca Matthew Author.
Rebecca, thanks for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
I first came across your posts on social media and I detected in them a kind of a sensibility I'd like to bring out in our discussion.
Maybe the best way to begin is to start asking you about your new book, a collection of short stories.
What made you think about writing a book of short stories?
What were you hoping to achieve?
So I had this kind of body of work that I'd applied, and I actually have a copy here, just arrived today, that I'd worked on over the last like five years as I was doing the graduate program at Harvard.
I did that kind of part-time while also teaching and I have children, too.
So, I had all of these stories that, you know, I'd had some eyes on and felt pretty proud of and thought that it would be nice to put them together into a format where I could give them to people to read.
And I'm a very eclectic reader myself, so I kind of write a lot of different things.
So, there's some science fiction in here, some dystopian literary fiction, there's one thriller kind of suspense story, which was something a little different and fun for me.
So there's a little bit of something for everyone. I try not to be overtly political in my writing.
I think that when you write and tell a story and it's too obvious that you're trying to make a point that that can detract from the actual message that's there. So even even though obviously I come to this with a particular world view.
Which you can see in my posts, and I certainly lean very conservative.
I try to write in a way where what I feel is accessible to people.
So I'm showing it through maybe the characters and decisions they're having to make.
I do have a story where a young woman has to decide if she's going to have an abortion or not.
And I'm not trying to preach at people, you know, even though I personally believe it's wrong.
I'm trying to show why this decision to keep this child is the right one for her, even though society is pressuring this teenage girl to give up her baby.
So things like that, for example.
Rebecca, when I think of short stories, this may be too crude a way to make a division, but it seems to me like the traditional short story had a sort of a beginning, a middle, and an end.
And typically it would deal with some sort of an episode, very often a crisis or a turn in life that poses a special problem, and then it would end with a resolution of the problem in which the reader was often encouraged Maybe not heavy-handedly, but nevertheless to draw out some kind of a moral.
And that's the sort of traditional archetype of a story.
But then you have kind of the, I would call it the Chekhov model of storytelling, where he picks up somebody's life kind of in the middle.
The guy's like at a train station, for example.
And then some things happen to that person that are interesting and it's engaging to read, but it just suddenly leaves off.
And you don't know what's going to happen, and there is no strict beginning, middle, and end.
And so, I was curious, who are some of the short story writers that you like, that you've used as models?
Are you more in the traditional mode I just described, or a little more in the Chekhovian mode, or a little of both?
I think I do a little bit of both in this collection.
So I have some that do have a clear beginning, middle, and ending, and then others that just kind of end and leave you, you know, kind of coming to your own conclusion.
And as a reader myself, I kind of like both, so it was fun to play around with both and experiment with both.
I'm a huge Hemingway fan, and I've actually just started a project that's kind of historical fiction based on a love affair he had when he was very young.
So I love his short stories, I love the brevity and conciseness, and I tend to be a little wordier.
That's something that I've certainly worked on, is paring back the language and getting straight to kind of the heart of what I want to say.
The first story in here, which is called His Name is Nukilik, I'm really proud of because I think that I do that fairly well, and a lot of inspiration is drawn from someone like Hemingway.
When we think of political conservatism, many people think in terms of public policy, but they don't think in terms of art.
And it seems to me that in your social media, as well as in your writing, there is a kind of A quiet sensibility.
I kind of envision you sort of in a quiet place with a lot of importance on books and reading.
In fact, you had a post here about, you know, you say, hey, I found this Airbnb in an English town and it's, you know, it's very picturesque and it's full of books.
And you talk about another point, you say you may want to own a bookshop where you'd actually buy books out of your own bookshop and But our culture has pushed so much away from that.
In other words, it is, we're not living at a time when contemplation seems to be valued, reading itself is seen as something that people kind of don't have time for, you know, I'm on my phone, leave me alone.
What do you think is the way to convey the beauty and benefits of this sort of quiet sensibility at a time when our culture is tugging in a different way?
Sure, I think that's such a great question.
And I'm also an English teacher, so it's something that I struggle with constantly with my students, is this balance, you know, of trying to work on them, able to maintain this sort of like quiet contemplative mode, which is so antithetical to what we're used to in our society and our smartphones and computers and everything else that we're inundated with all the time.
And I think it's really like anything, you know, like going to the gym, going to church, you're training yourself.
You know, if you do this every week, if you go to the gym every day, if you go to the church every single week at the same time, it just becomes part of your lifestyle.
So I think it's choices that we make And teaching kids early on how to do that, how to set your phone in a different room and spend even 10 or 15 minutes a day just reading something that you're physically holding.
There has been good research on the importance of actually holding a physical book.
As much as I think, you know, Audible and e-readers can be great, there's something just really wonderful about the tangible presence of a book in your hands.
And I think that There are a lot of good accounts on X and on social media who are trying to do this.
Artists who are trying to kind of bring back this interest in a more contemplative life.
And I do think that there's a desire among young people for this, that they just don't have the skills that they may need in order to incorporate it in their life.
I mean you're making a point which I think, you know, it may well be that in a culture that is addicted to social media and posting and sort of almost an ADD type of culture that There actually might be a strong appeal to going in the opposite direction and sort of tasting and savoring the virtues of contemplation.
Let me close out by asking you to comment on Well, I'm only asking you to do this because you posted something about it.
I just saw the vice presidential candidate, Tim Walz, and he was deriding J.D.
Vance and saying about Vance, you know, this guy is, you know, he's making fun of his own parents and so on.
And he was referring to J.D.
Vance's book, Hillbilly Elegy, which I think is a book that you like and I like as well.
Partly because it seems like JD, even though coming out of a turbulent life and an impoverished background, nevertheless found a way to discover a certain elegance and beauty, which is conveyed in the way that that book is written.
So could you say a word, not even in the political vein, but just about Hillbilly Elegy and what you think of it as a book?
Yeah, absolutely, and I actually just finished it a few days ago, so perfect timing, and I really enjoyed it.
I feel like people who are commenting negatively, I'm curious if they actually read it from start to finish, because I feel like if you're reading it with an open mind, and I think before he was the VP nominee that there were a lot of liberals who did appreciate his book and then changed their minds, You know, based on his politics, which is interesting because it doesn't change what he wrote.
And it's extremely inspiring, right?
It's the American dream.
I mean, he came from nothing.
And I don't think he was critical at all of his family in it, that he is honest.
And that he's also incredibly grateful for his country and his family and for all that he had.
He talks about serving in the military or he was in the Marines and, you know, seeing people overseas when he was, I believe, in Iraq.
And the children there and how that gave him such a deep appreciation from for where he came from and for his country.
And there's something incredibly beautiful about that.
He understands the working class American in a way that I think no other politician probably in a long time has.
So there's something really special about him.
And I think that, you know, they're trying, of course, to pull out everything possible to criticize him about.
But I think those criticisms are pretty weak.
I mean, to me, the impressive thing about not just that book but about his life as depicted is that, you know, it's one thing to come out of poverty because you can be born in great poverty.
I think of some slum kid, for example, that is, you know, in a village in India.
But that kid does have a mom and a dad.
That kid does have a network that is supporting you even in those dire circumstances so that when your circumstances improve and you have opportunity, you thrive.
The remarkable thing about JD is when I read those opening chapters of the book, this is a very dysfunctional environment, I thought to myself.
So to climb out of that Not just material poverty, but I'd have to say cultural poverty is doubly hard.
Rebecca, this has been really fascinating and I really appreciate your joining me.
Guys, I've been talking to Rebecca Matthew.
She is the author of The Rapture of the Deep.
This is a book that, you know, this is a book that reflects a, I would say, a conservative aesthetic.
And it's such an important part of conservatism, not just the political, not just the historical, which I cover a lot on the podcast, but also a conservative sensibility.
And a love of reading.
So check out the book.
It's available on Amazon.
I see the link right here.
In fact, I shared it today on my social media.
The Rapture of the Deep, Rebecca Matthew.
Rebecca, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you so much.
I appreciate it.
I intend today to complete Chapter 5 of Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery, and we're in a very important section where Booker T. is talking about the tendency of blacks relatively newly out of slavery to look to the federal government for their deliverance.
He notices this in the immediate aftermath of slavery.
He says he's hoping that this will pass and that blacks will start developing, in a sense, their own institutions, their own strengths, cultivate their own talents, take advantage of the rights that are now available to them as not before.
But as he will realize himself, and he will realize this Even for the rest of his life, long after the publication of Up from Slavery, which was published in 1901, Booker T. lives well into the first half of the 20th century, and yet he says some very insightful things as early as 1901,
Which are pretty remarkable for us to read now, to realize that this guy was onto a problem that would become a very big problem, is a problem even now, a hundred and twenty... Think of it, we are a century and a quarter away from this book, and yet it jumps out at us as if it were describing the world that we live in.
It is in some ways antique.
It reflects a world that we don't experience, we don't know.
At the same time, it points to issues that are enduringly important.
So, let's dive into it.
Booker T says, the temptations to enter political life were so alluring that I came near yielding to them at one time.
But I was kept from doing so by the feeling I would be helping in a more substantial way by assisting in the laying of the foundation of the race through a generous education of the hand, head, and heart.
Here Booker T has come to a realization that I have come to in my own way because many times people will say to me, Hey Dinesh, if you thought of running for office, I mean, why don't you run for Senate?
Why don't you run for Congress?
And I say, well, When I think about the Senate, about Congress, I see people who can do what I'm doing, what I would do.
They'd vote the right way.
They're solid on issues.
They would be dependable.
They'd be effective.
Now, not all Republicans fit this description, but some do.
And there's certainly others in the wings who could do that job.
But I say to myself, well, when I write a book, I convey a set of ideas that I think it is sort of my calling to convey, at least convey in that way.
Same with my films, same with the stuff I do, same with my speaking.
I try to bring a unique voice to things.
And that voice would obviously be lost if I were to exit the public domain and sort of reenter it, if you will, in elective office.
And here's Booker T. Washington saying kind of the same thing.
I don't really want to run for office because I'm, at heart, he thinks, an educator.
But he's a unique type of educator.
Why?
Because he says he wants to educate the race through the hand, the head, and the heart.
Now, that is a very remarkable trio.
The hand, the head and the heart.
First of all, normally people think of education as only involving the head, not the heart.
You don't really go to an elite college to have your heart educated.
In fact, people think the heart doesn't need to be educated.
A heart comes, if you will, naturally.
Those are our emotions.
We all have them.
So what is there to educate?
Of course, the ancient Greeks would have strongly disagreed.
In fact, they thought, Plato thought, for example, that regulating the emotions is one of the most important things that you can learn.
And Aristotle as well.
And for Aristotle, your emotions weren't just something that needed to be, you might say, wrestled to the ground.
On the contrary, Aristotle thought your emotions need to be sort of Delicately managed, almost like a man leading a woman in a waltz, so that your emotions should be under control, under rational control.
Aristotle wouldn't hesitate to say under masculine control.
But, at the same time, the head should guide and not sort of tyrannize over the heart.
But Booker T. Washington adds one more thing, the hand.
And that's odd.
And what he means is working with your hands.
He means manual labor.
In fact, he wouldn't shrink from the term manual labor, including the most simple type of manual labor, putting one brick on top of another, digging a hole.
But of course the hand isn't just good for that.
The hand is also good for skill labor, for labor that requires the head and sometimes also the heart, particularly if there's creativity involved.
Creativity isn't just a function of the head but also of the heart.
And after a notice that Booker T. Washington says these things that are very interesting and perhaps even profound, but he doesn't elaborate on the profundity of it.
He doesn't spell it out.
He goes, oh yeah, the hand, the head, the heart, and then he leaves it to you to think through what he might mean by that.
He says, I saw colored men who were members of state legislatures and county officers who in some cases could not read or write and whose morals were as weak as their education.
So quite clearly Booker T thinks morality is a part of good education.
And then he tells a really funny anecdote about about uh overseeing a a building and there were some brick masons who were yelling out to each other and he goes one of them kept saying hey governor get me more bricks hey governor get me more bricks and he thought governor what an odd thing is that just some kind of a colloquialism just a phrase that you use you're calling somebody governor and then he realizes that the guy was the lieutenant governor of that state
In other words, that guy had been sort of grabbed out of nowhere by the Northern Republicans, placed in high office in the state.
But of course, once he left office, he had pretty much nothing to do.
He wasn't really particularly well-educated.
So he now goes back, perhaps, to being a brick mason.
But of course, he keeps his title.
And so people are, hey, governor, pass me the bricks.
So here is, again, that kind of very I would call it gentle irony.
Booker T. Washington is slightly mocking this, but he's not deriding it.
He's not condemning it.
He sees the sort of irony of the situation.
A guy who's lieutenant governor of the state, and here he is, you know, slapping bricks onto a wall, and yet he maintains his title.
He's probably very proud of it.
And so Booker T. then says, Again, pulling back in his characteristic way, of course the colored people, so largely without education and wholly without experience in government, made tremendous mistakes, just as any people similarly situated would have done.
This is Booker T. Washington, in a sense, applying kindness to the situation and saying, hey, listen, this seems silly.
There's an element of kind of the preposterous here, but guess what?
This is not unique to blacks.
We didn't make these mistakes because we're dumb and everybody else is not.
No, any group starting at the bottom would make similar mistakes.
And then he says, we need to have a system in this country, and particularly in the South, where race is not considered.
The way he puts it, he doesn't talk about colorblindness, but he does say this.
He says that, more and more I am convinced that the final solution of the political end of our race problem, Will be for each state that finds it necessary to change the law bearing upon the franchise to make the law apply with absolute honesty and without opportunity for double dealing or evasion to both races alike.
Same rules.
Let's apply them to everybody.
And he says any other course which is unjust either to the Negro or to the white man.
So discrimination, unjust treatment, state-sponsored deprivation in either direction.
He says, quote, will be like slavery, a sin that sometime we shall have to pay for.
Wow!
So Booker T recognizes that even though there has been a great deal of discrimination against blacks, against the Negro, the solution is not to try to discriminate the other way.
Now obviously he is writing almost three quarters of a century before what we call affirmative action.
Affirmative action begins with Lyndon Johnson.
The first policy is Richard Nixon in the early 1970s.
So Booker T. Washington is not experiencing that, but he is experiencing a discussion of like, what should the government do for the black man, for the Negro?
Booker T. Washington is preceded here by Frederick Douglass.
Who gave a famous speech in which he said that the government should do nothing for the Negro.
In other words, he said, you've done enough for us.
In other words, you have harmed us enough.
Now, get out of our way.
That was the Frederick Douglass kind of defiant doctrine.
Booker T. Washington is saying the same thing.
But notice that he's not saying the same thing in the same words.
Booker T's style is more genteel, it's more diplomatic, it's more aimed at persuasion, at cajoling, and sort of gently bringing you over to his side, and he's kind of a master at doing this.
Now, I mentioned a moment ago I was hoping to finish Chapter 5, and I realize, no, I'm a few pages away from doing that, so I'm not going to attempt to rush.
I'm just going to pick it up and finish this chapter tomorrow.
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