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Aug. 8, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
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PATRIOT GAMES Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep892
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Coming up, I'll compare the military records of J.D.
Vance and Tim Walz and explore the issue of Walz's stolen valor.
John Pierce, who represents many conservatives targeted by the Biden-Harris regime, some January 6th defendants, he's going to join me to talk about the case of the praying grandma who's facing a harsh prison sentence for her pro-life activism.
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Now, you have to recognize that part of the reason that they're big is because they bring big cultural celebrities and singers and figures that young people follow and so you've got this sort of star power that is adjoined to Kamala Harris and
Tim Walz. Now the Democrats have long had a, if not a monopoly, a stronghold on the cultural celebrities of our culture.
You simply have to make a list of their celebrities and our celebrities to realize that there's really no, there's no even match here.
And so on the one hand I say that's a big crowd and it's clever because the Democrats get a lot of people to hear Kamala Harris and Tim Walz but then I go but Then they get to hear Kamala Harris and things go downhill from there because there's no way for Kamala Harris to avoid being Kamala Harris.
Now Tim Walz is better than Kamala Harris.
He's got a better style, he's got more effective rhetoric, and he has a sort of a populist tinge to him.
But we're learning a few things about Tim Walz and I want to Going to those a little bit.
The first thing is that this guy is a chronic...
Exaggerator.
And by chronic exaggerator, what I mean is that he says that he was things that he clearly was not.
So, for example, he's been going around claiming that he was a head coach who won the state championship.
Somebody just took the trouble to look it up.
It turns out he was a coach, but he was like some junior assistant coach.
He was not the head coach.
So what is he doing?
He's sort of promoting himself to head coach, at least rhetorically.
Kind of in the expectation that the real head coach won't step in and go, no, that was actually me.
And that everybody will be quiet about it so that he can get the political mileage of having won the state championship.
He started out young and he's got a natural talent.
Well, I mean, he does have some talent and he could claim some credit, but it would be better if he claimed credit by saying what he actually was.
And the same appears to be the case when we're talking about his role in the military.
Now, Tim Walz was in the military the same way that J.D.
Vance was in the military.
But the real difference between the two guys is that J.D.
Vance actually served in combat situations.
And there are many people who served alongside J.D.
Vance who testify to this.
J.D.
Vance has photographs of himself in these locations.
And Tim Walz doesn't.
Why not?
Because he didn't go!
Now, the facts about this are somewhat being argued about, but the press is finally having to admit, after a lot of the, oh man, this is a decorated combat veteran, and they realize that he inflated his title, he claims to be something he actually wasn't, And he claims to have been in Iraq.
In fact, here's a Bloomberg article at the time the Iraq war was ongoing, and he stood out as Command Sergeant Major Waltz, recently returned from serving in Iraq, and then guess what?
This article, Bloomberg goes back and stealth edits it and they take out Iraq and they claim that he was in Italy.
Which means he obviously wasn't in combat because we aren't fighting the Italians and we haven't since World War II.
So this is a way that they're trying to... and I hate the way that the media does this because this is just straight out Pravda is Vestia.
I mean, this is sure... this is like, you know, Joseph Goebbels 2.1.
Very disgusting to see how these people do this.
And it shows, you know, sometimes people think back and they go, you know, I wonder how people joined the Nazi party.
I wonder how they... I wonder what self-respecting person would go work for Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda.
And now I say, I know, it's these guys.
These guys would happily do it.
In fact, this is kind of their talent.
And now, back to Tim Walz.
The issue here is this.
Apparently, Tim Walz was in the military and then he quit and, quote, retired.
Retired at an abnormally young age, but nevertheless retired just a couple of months before the unit was deployed to Iraq.
So, the media now, having been forced to admit that Tim Walz was not in combat, which is, by the way, the impression he's been giving all along.
If you listen to his speeches, and I've seen various clips of things he said, and by the way, not just said now, but said when he was first running.
In fact, he... So this is the stolen valor issue.
To claim that you Had titles you didn't have, to claim that you were deployed to places you weren't deployed, to give the false impression that you did more is to steal the valor of the other people who actually did those things.
And I think this is a real issue.
Now, it may not be as egregious as it was with John Kerry in 2004, but nevertheless, stolen valor is stolen valor.
And Tim Walz has been doing it all along, his whole career.
Now, the way that the media is trying to cover for the guy now is what they're saying is that, yeah, he didn't avoid combat.
He wasn't trying to duck or run away from being called to Iraq.
He didn't know that he was going to be called.
But it turns out that this is false, because military units, when they are called, are given what are called warning alerts, or warning orders.
So they send out a notification, hey listen, your unit is going to be called shortly, so sort of be ready.
In other words, Make family adjustments, do what you have to do to adjust your financial situation and so on because you could be called and you're going to be in a sense out of the country and you're going to be serving in another country and obviously communications will be more limited and so on.
So usually months in advance the military will tell you.
And so Walsh knew that his unit was going to be called and I think he decided time to retire.
Time for me to get out.
This way, I won't be called.
And in fact, he wasn't called.
And in fact, he didn't serve.
And so...
So, we now have a reason why Tim Walz quite likely quit the military.
He didn't want to serve.
And again, that's okay.
You're allowed to quit.
There's nothing dishonorable about quitting in and of itself.
But we have a volunteer military.
We're not in a draft as we were in Vietnam.
But the point is, if you do that, don't then act like you did serve.
Don't pretend that you were in Iraq or in Afghanistan.
And the same thing, this is a guy who has also given the impression, again, in very subtle ways, so that you get the idea that he's saying he was in Afghanistan.
He'll use words like, when we were in Afghanistan, and what he means is the country.
But you think, well, he was in Afghanistan.
So this is how people use a certain rhetorical sleight of hand to give you a false impression.
And there's a really good article I also want to highlight.
It's New York Post, no surprise.
How Kamala Harris and Tim Walz fiddled as Minneapolis burned.
And I think this is actually something that's closer to home.
It's something that people could see for themselves.
I mean, a whole city, in effect, aflame.
Remember good old CNN?
This is the mostly peaceful protests and you can see buildings engulfed in flames, cars burning.
Well, how did all that happen?
Well, the answer is the leadership of Minneapolis, including one Tim Walz, allowed it to happen.
In fact, you could go further and say even encouraged it to a degree because it was, after all, in the passion and solidarity of George Floyd.
So here they take this creep, this criminal, and they elevate him into a saint, they're building statues to him, and you have all these Nancy Pelosi and others genuflecting before St.
George Floyd, and Tim Walz was right in there with them, and so was Kamala Harris.
This is how these two are really matched at the hip.
They're made for each other.
They're sort of a, you could almost call it a partnership made in hell.
And Kamala Harris is raising money to pay bail for the, think of it, you're raising bail money for thugs and for arsonists.
So I'm not saying they are the arsonists, they didn't set the fires directly, but they are the enablers of the arsonists.
In the one case, as governor, Walz is like, go ahead, burn the place, I don't care.
And Kamala Harris says, burn the place, not only do I not care, but if they arrest you, I'm gonna help you get money so that you can defend yourself and get out.
and not be held accountable for your arson.
So this is a very ugly duo, ugly in the moral sense of the term, of course.
And the question is, with all the kind of inflated media propaganda for these two elevating them, oh, you know, she's a tough prosecutor.
Debbie and I, by the way, are watching the Olympics and we see these ads for Kamala Harris.
And it is such a case of... This is a fabricated Kamala Harris because they're acting like she's really tough on crime.
She's a...
So you can count on her to bring those tough-on-crime policies.
Well, has the Biden-Harris regime shown tough-on-crime policies?
Not at all.
These are people who are on the side of the criminals, but they're letting people watching the Olympics think that they're actually tough on crime.
And then Kamala Harris is going around saying things like, you know, I will lower your electricity bills.
Well, wait a minute.
Who's been in the White House for the last four years if not you and Joe Biden?
If you could have lowered electricity bills, why didn't you?
Why haven't you?
What is it that you're gonna do that you haven't done already?
So, all of this is being put forward to the American people and the real question is how much of it is getting through?
How much of the propaganda is convincing people or are people able to see this and go, actually, Not really.
This doesn't really work.
We see through it and we're not gonna buy it.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast John Pierce.
He is a celebrated attorney, a trial lawyer, founder and managing partner of John Pierce Law.
The website, by the way, johnpiercelaw.com.
He's a graduate of Harvard Law School.
Also served in the military and, as I mentioned, the website johnpearslaw.com.
He represents a bunch of January 6th defendants.
He also represents some pro-life defendants who have been indicted under the FACE Act and that's what we're here to talk about.
John, welcome.
Thank you very much for joining me.
Let me start by asking you a little bit about the larger landscape and, in fact, I'm thinking here specifically about January 6th and the January 6th defendants that you represent.
I know the Supreme Court made an important decision in effect knocking out the so-called obstruction of an official proceeding interpretation by the Biden-Harris Department of Justice.
To what degree?
Has that already filtered down all the way to the individual January 6th defendants?
Or is there a considerable lag time before these guys begin to see some genuine relief under that Supreme Court ruling?
That's a great question, Dinesh.
So, it should have had an immediate effect.
What should have happened is the Department of Justice should have immediately dismissed all of the 1512 charges that were pending.
They should have immediately themselves moved for resensing of folks that had been convicted on 1512 rounds.
But of course, as you can imagine, that didn't happen.
And so, Really, what's happening is the DOJ, unfortunately but unsurprisingly, is doing everything they can to strategize, to try to figure out some, in my view, illegitimate way to still fit a lot of these cases within the 1512 statute.
The Fisher case, as I'm sure you read, was a very, very clear case.
It essentially held what it should have held, which is that the 1512 statute was a post-Enron case statute that was really meant to deal with the specific instance of something like document destruction.
And that's not the way they applied it in these January 6 cases.
So, what's happening is we are pushing for those charges to get dismissed and to have resentencings occur, etc., but it's a very slow process.
What is the DOJ's rationale?
Because, I mean, they need to do some verbal and legal gymnastics to try to argue that post-Enron document destruction somehow applies to a bunch of people who go marching into the Capitol, seemingly haven't destroyed any documents at all, haven't, you know, done any sort of defacement of anything, and then they leave.
How is the DOJ, however creatively, trying to say, well, yeah, but they actually did destroy documents after all?
So, you're exactly right.
It is a real gymnastics exercise, and I think the reason you know it's a really extreme, difficult gymnastics exercise is that we really haven't seen yet how they're going to try to argue that.
I mean, they're going to try to argue, they have to try to argue, that to some extent, just participation in First Amendment activity being at the Capitol that day Somehow implicated some documents that related to the certification process, which, you know, as I say that, I mean, it just, it just, it, you know, it sounds ridiculous, just as I say it, and it is.
So, you know, I think they're, you know, they're, they're, they're very clever people.
And so they're working on that right now.
And I'm sure, you know, we'll see what they come up with.
I don't think they're going to be so brazen as to try it in every single case.
I think that that would just be so brazenly absurd that the district court judges in D.C.
would really not look at that well.
But they're going to try to do it to some extent, I think.
Very interesting.
Let's come to the case that we want to talk about today.
And this is the case of the so-called praying grandma.
This is Rebecca Lovrenz.
Describe the case.
Kind of assume that my listeners and viewers are very intelligent but know nothing about the case.
So start by describing who this woman is, what is it that she did, and what is it that got her hauled into court, tried, and convicted.
Yeah, it's really, in my view, kind of the most extreme case and perfect example of what's occurring right now with the regime, the White House, the DOJ, the FBI going after patriotic Americans who are simply expressing their opinions, their political opinions and their religious opinions.
So, Rebecca Lovins is a very devout Christian woman.
She's a great grandmother in her 70s.
She's a bed-and-breakfast owner from Colorado, and she feels very, very passionately About America.
She feels very passionately about God's place in America.
She feels very passionately that the election was stolen.
And she is a very strong supporter of President Trump.
And all those things are things that we all have an absolute constitutional right to hold those opinions and to express those opinions, of course, under the First Amendment.
And so she very simply decided to come to D.C.
on January 6th by herself to pray for the country, to pray that we can see our way through this time, to pray for everyone, for our elected officials, for folks on both sides of the aisle, and to pray for the country.
And so that's what she did.
She went to the Capitol grounds.
You know, at all times, she was behind the barriers, and she simply, at times, whenever they were opened up, or the doors were opened up, she did move along with the crowd as the police were letting folks in, and she was completely peaceful.
And she's simply great.
She was inside the Capitol for maybe, I forget the exact time, but it's a very short time.
It's like five or 10 minutes.
Absolutely no violence, absolutely no property destruction.
A totally peaceful woman.
This is a delightful, just wonderful person and an American.
And in any event, That's all she did.
She was determined to fight, and we fought extremely hard for her at trial, put on a great case, fought a lot of tough evidentiary issues, and the jury actually deliberated for about four days.
So clearly we had some jurors that were thinking very, very hard about this case, but ultimately they did come back with a conviction on four misdemeanor counts, so she was convicted.
And she really got some traction in the public in terms of her case.
President Trump actually tweeted about the case, because it really hit home that there was this grandmother who was really just... All the evidence was she was just there to pray for the country.
And the Department of Justice spent God only knows how many millions of dollars to investigate and prosecute her, and now wants to throw her in prison for 10 months in federal prison.
I also understand that they are making an effort to somehow make her pay back money that was raised by setting up maybe a give-send-go or something equivalent to that to raise funds and somehow they're claiming that that was inappropriate or illicit.
Describe what is actually happening and what is their basis for trying to do this and are they going to be able to get away with it?
Sure.
So, by the way, the maximum statutory fines for these cases could total up to $300,000, and I expect that the DOJ is going to seek as much as humanly possible.
But yes, so one of the most sort of outrageous aspects of what the prosecution is doing in these sentencings.
Is they are asking judges to take a look at how much folks raised, you know, on these gifts and go accounts, for example, primarily for their legal defense and costs and whatnot.
And they are asking the judges to find these folks, you know, that whole amount of money or Some substantial amount of that money.
And so, you have a situation which is so unfair because you have these Americans whose lives have been destroyed, who essentially have no way to earn a living, whose families have turned on them in many instances, whose communities have turned on them in many instances, who've informed on them.
I mean, this kind of police state, like your great movie, I mean, this police state type of situation, and then they're being prosecuted by the world's largest law firm of 10,000 plus lawyers that has an unlimited amount of billions of dollars to go after them.
And they are simply scraping and clawing, and we are doing everything we can to help them mount a strong defense under the rule of law. And even though every single thing is in the government's advantage, including a venue, which is very, very difficult for these defendants in the District of Columbia, they still, after the fact, after they get their convictions against these regular Americans, they still want to come back and fine them for the money that they were able to raise to try to
defend themselves and try to put their lives together a little bit.
Let's take a pause when we come back with John Pierce.
I want to ask him why would judges go along with this?
Why wouldn't they see that you're talking about wrecking somebody's life and these are people who at the very least deserve every chance to be able to mount a defense.
So we'll be right back with attorney John Pierce.
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I'm back with attorney John Pierce, managing partner of John Pierce Law, the website johnpiercelaw.com.
John, we were talking about this outrageous attempt by the DOJ to impose massive financial penalties on families that are doing nothing more.
They're not trying to profit from the case.
They're trying to raise some funds to defend themselves.
The question is why would judges, who can obviously see what's going on, not rally to their side?
I guess I'm asking with a certain amount of trepidation that the DOJ is counting on these judges to be sort of wink-wink.
In sync with them.
It's like, here we are and we're counting on you to do your part to land- We're landing our blows and we want you to land some further blows on these people.
Isn't that, in fact, what is- what seems to be going on?
Yeah, so, you know, and as I'm sure you can imagine, Dinesh, I practice in front of all these judges.
I have many cases in front of them and, you know, I'm an officer of the court and I do have a great amount of respect for these federal judges in D.C.
I, you know, practice in front of them.
I often disagree with many of their decisions and I'm sure they disagree with many, you know, of my arguments, but that's the way the system works.
I will say I think what is, you know, judges are still human beings and while I For example, in Rebecca Laverne's case, Magistrate Judge Faruqui, I have great respect for, and I think he knows that, and I think he has respect for how hard we fight when we go into his courtroom, and I believe that he tries to apply the law in a completely fair way.
But you've got to remember, all these judges are, of course, human beings, and we all come into any exercise with You know, kind of our lifetime of experiences and biases and, you know, whatever that might be.
And I think that the fact of the matter is that, you know, D.C.
is is, you know, in the view of the people who live in D.C.
and these judges live in D.C., D.C.
was attacked.
And, you know, it's a very tough venue and that's why we move for a change of venue in all these cases.
You know, these judges by and large, you know, they're from D.C.
They live in D.C.
and, you know, they're of the capital of the country.
And so, you know, it's very challenging.
It's very challenging for lawyers.
It's very challenging for defendants in that venue.
So, I don't think, for example, that In this case, Magistrate Judge Faruqui is trying to be, or is going to try to be unfair to Rebecca Labrenz.
I just think that these judges tend to really put stock in the positions that the DOJ takes.
I think they're used to doing that, and that's what they tend to do.
So it is very challenging for us.
I mean, I'd like to elaborate on what you said and put it a slightly different way.
You know, I was in D.C.
from, gosh, I guess it's now 1985 to about 2000, and you develop a certain, let's call it D.C.
sensibility.
You know, this is the hallowed halls of government, and these are almost like sacred spaces, and you also get the idea that And I remember seeing statues of people all over DC and I was in my 20s at the time and I would almost revere these people thinking, oh my gosh, this guy must have done something amazing, you know, for the country.
It's over time as you move out of DC and you begin to realize, wait a minute, What this guy did was he used his power as a senator, you know, to essentially use taxpayer money to get some bridge built that was then named after him as if they used his money to build the bridge.
So when you're outside of D.C., you develop a somewhat different perspective.
But I think what you're saying is that there's an insider mentality.
In which, from the point of view of people in DC, they're sort of in the hallowed halls of government, and these January 6th yahoos came from the countryside, sort of, from their view, quote, attacked the Capitol, and so it's difficult for them to see it as, you know what?
This is actually ordinary citizens exercising their First Amendment rights.
They were there to demand government accountability, which they had every right to do.
And so it's almost like you're talking about a mental dislocation between DC on the one hand and the rest of the country in the other.
Do you sort of agree with that way of looking at it?
I agree with that a hundred percent.
I think it's human nature.
I think it does occur over time, and I think it's sort of a built-in, you know, just sort of way that different folks kind of look at the country and the world.
So, for example, you know, I'm from the Rust Belt.
I grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania, the son of a state policeman and a physical therapist.
I represent a kind of written house in Kenosha.
You know, and in my view, and I think in the view of many, you know, Many, many more Americans have the opposite view.
It's the small towns like Kenosha or Erie, Pennsylvania that are the hallowed, sacred grounds.
I mean, it's those towns.
It's the heartland of the country.
When those places were being burned to the ground, like in Kenosha, that was an attack on this country.
That was something that was an attack on a sacred part of this country.
Hopefully, we will get back to the point where we all have a great amount of respect for all of our government institutions, and of course, the capital of the nation as an important place.
But this sense that it is somehow above or more important or more special than the heart of this country that built the country and makes it tick, I think, of course, it's not the way I look at it.
And like you said, I think it's human nature.
I think it's sort of baked in with respect to when you spend a lot of time in DC.
So again, I don't, and I've never suggested that these federal judges are being intentionally unfair or corrupt or anything like that.
I just think it's very challenging when your perspective is that worldview John, as an attorney, let me ask you a question about Trump.
people from such different places with such different kind of, you know, outlooks on the world.
John, as an attorney, let me ask you a question about Trump.
When Trump was first hit with 91 charges, I think I thought, probably you thought, many people thought, there's just no way this guy is going to get out of this.
There are... it's too many shots coming out of the shotgun, you know?
He might get away with a few, but he's bound to be riddled with bullets at the end of it.
It's hard to see how he can mount a viable candidacy a second time with all that.
And yet, somehow Trump appears to have Deflected, repelled, in some cases gotten things turned over, certainly kicked him all past the election, even in the one case, the Bragg case, where he got the 34 indictments.
He sort of turned the whole process into a major joke so that it hasn't significantly hurt him at all.
And this larger scheme of using lawfare to get Trump a legal form of warfare appears not to have achieved its objective.
Did you see this coming?
And if so, I mean, don't we have to regard this as an almost Herculean achievement to be able to flip all these cases on their head and or at the very least keep them out of the November 2024 election?
Yeah, I'm so glad you asked me that.
Yes, I did see it coming, and part of that is perhaps because of the unique perspective I've had on this.
You know, I've been fighting this battle for about seven or eight years ferociously.
So, you know, I represented George Papadopoulos and got him pardoned ultimately by President Trump.
I represented Carter Page and all of his spice abuse litigations and saw the depths of, you know, the corruption and the cover-up in the government and the media.
With respect to that, I represented Tulsi Gabbard against Hillary Clinton and Google.
For the Russian asset comment and for censoring her search results after the first debate back then.
Represented Mayor Giuliani in the Ukraine probe that ultimately we helped make go away and on and on and on, right?
Of course, Kyle Rittenhouse and his January 6th cases.
So, I think the culmination of folks like people on my team and others Folks like you with your great documentary.
I think that we have very effectively, almost asymmetrically taken out these narratives and these pillars that the left thought was going to allow them to really roll the country and roll President Trump with this lawfare theory of 2024.
And I think they didn't anticipate.
I think Elon Musk purchasing Twitter and X was a huge development, and so I think there's been a huge awakening as a result of all those things.
But once I saw this pattern that you, again, so well put forth to the country in your documentary, Police State, I knew that there were things happening behind the scenes that were going to undercut that.
And then when they really started to go after him, Overtly and arresting him and charging with all these things.
I kind of saw it as an act of, you know, desperation of a quartered sort of animal.
And to me, that was almost a good sign because I knew ultimately they were going to overreach.
And I think this year they just overreached with all that.
And I think that, yes, I mean, it certainly was a miraculous thing that he worked his way through that.
But I think it's a culmination of many years of a lot of folks really seeing this and fighting against it over the past seven or eight years.
Very interesting stuff.
Guys, I've been talking to John Pierce, trial lawyer, founder and managing partner of John Pierce Law, the website johnpiercelaw.com.
John, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you, Dash.
I'm discussing Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, and someone might ask, this is all very interesting, but what are we learning from it?
What is the importance of this book?
Well, the importance of this book is it tackles a very simple question.
How do you build a civilization from the ground up?
Kind of from zero, from nothing.
And that is another way of asking, how does an individual starting out with nothing come up in life?
Now, these are hardly abstract or theoretical questions.
I mean, here's a thought experiment.
What if somehow, by some cataclysm, the United States is completely leveled to the ground?
Destroyed.
Everything is gone.
Nothing remains.
We have to build a society from the ground up, from nothing.
Like, where do you start?
How do you... What do you do first?
What do you do second?
And similarly, you have a whole generation of young people coming up who are not initiated automatically into kind of an existing developed civilization.
They, too, don't know how to start.
So on an individual basis, you now have to ask, what is it good for them to do first and second and third?
Well, Booker T. Washington is not starting with the society completely destroyed but he is starting with the society completely destroyed for the black race and so in his experience we can learn from this situation and here he is now at the Hampton Institute and he's learning a lot of really valuable things and then he says in the fall of 1878
uh... having he's now he's he's finished with hampton he's teaching school but he wants to keep studying and so he gets an offer to attend an institution in washington dc although interestingly he doesn't say which one But what he does say is when he got there, there was no industrial training at all.
They were teaching stuff, and he says, quote, the students in most cases had more money, were better dressed, wore the latest style of all manner of clothing, and in some cases were more brilliant mentally.
So their, maybe their literary flair was better.
They had maybe a little deeper philosophical understanding.
And, Bud says Booker T. Washington, Hampton, it was the standing rule that students would pay their own board, their own books, their own clothing.
And how did they do that?
By working at the same time that they are studying.
And he says, therefore, the students in Hampton had more character.
It was better, he says, for character building.
So for Booker T, education isn't just about the mind, it's also about character formation.
And he says the students seemed to be more self-dependent, whereas the students in Washington were, quote, less self-dependent.
And he says, the students in Washington were more attuned to outward appearance.
They're more stylish.
They're more chic.
They knew more about Latin and Greek, but they seemed to know less about life.
So you get an idea here of Booker T. Washington's kind of philosophy again.
He's not against Latin and Greek, but he is against Latin and Greek before you learn to brush your teeth.
He is against Latin and Greek before you learn basic, the basic things of life, not just the basic things of home life, but the basic things about work, punctuality, responding to authority, getting a task done on time, that kind of thing.
Now, Booker T. Washington then kind of generalizes his point to say that in Washington he also observed that a lot of the people who come there, white as well as black, are looking for government positions.
And he says, this made Washington a very attractive place for members of my race.
And he says, but there was a superficiality about the life that over there that greatly alarmed me.
Let's look and see.
Here's a guy who's very attuned.
to rising up out of poverty.
And let's see what he sees that kind of sends a red flag.
He says, I saw colored men who were not earning more than $4 a week spend $2 or more for a buggy on Sunday to ride up and down Pennsylvania Avenue in order that they might try to convince the world that they were worth thousands.
Basically, show-offery.
And ironically, show-offery, this kind of vanity, is more prevalent among people who have less than it is among people who have more.
People who have more don't need to show off.
But people who have less are like, no, I gotta convince my neighbor, I gotta convince my friends that I'm loaded.
So this is going on even at that stage.
And then he says, I saw men who, but a few months previous, were members of Congress who are now without employment and in poverty.
What a tragedy.
He says, the members of this class had little ambition to create positions for themselves, but wanted the federal officials to create one for them.
Again, a recognizable trait even today.
I want somebody else to do something for me.
And then he says, How many times I wished then, and have often wished since, that by some power of magic I might remove the great bulk of these people into the country, districts, and plant them upon the soil, upon the solid and never deceptive foundation of Mother Nature, where all nations and races that have ever succeeded have gotten their start, A start that at first may be slow and toilsome, but one that is nevertheless real.
What a great sentence and what a great formulation.
The idea is that we are implanted here in nature.
Nature is what we start with, right?
And if you think of early man, early man had to function in nature, in very harsh and predatory conditions.
And against nature, what do we have?
What can we offer?
And the answer is human nature.
So human nature has to do with ingenuity, adaptability, creativity, figuring out ways that we, who are not the strongest of all the animal species, can nevertheless survive in nature.
And what Booker T. Washington is saying is that we should sort of always remember that that is the starting point of human civilization, and it's also the starting point for us as individuals.
And this is not to say that in modern civilization when you have cities and you have computers and so on, you have to imagine yourself in some kind of caveman condition.
So we're not talking about nature in that sense.
So what are we talking about?
Here I'm going to draw on the philosopher Rousseau, who says that we don't live in nature.
And Rousseau is sometimes misunderstood to be saying, hey, listen, let's go back and live with the bears.
Let's go back and live with the, you know, with the animals somewhere out in some primitive environment.
And Rousseau goes, no, that's not what I'm saying.
You can live in Paris.
You can live in Vienna.
But, says Rousseau, let us not forget the voice of nature in us.
In other words, that we remain at some level creatures that have to survive, have got to adapt, have got to figure out how to improve our condition step by step.
So Booker T. Washington, interestingly, at this point I can I almost guarantee you he's never read or perhaps not even heard of Rousseau, but nevertheless he has captured this insight.
And then he says, in Washington I saw girls, who he says, whose mothers earned their living by laundering, by doing people's laundry.
And then he says, and then the girls were taught the art of laundering.
And then he says, but the moment that they had learned this, they all wanted costly dresses, costly hats, costly shoes.
And then he says something that could have come straight out of the mouth of Gandhi.
He says, in a word, while their wants had been increased, their ability to supply their wants had not been increased in the same degree.
What's he talking about?
Perpetual restlessness and perpetual unhappiness.
So Gandhi makes the point that we have wants and then we have the ability to supply our wants.
And we spend most of our time trying to increase our ability to supply our wants.
But Gandhi says there's another way to achieve contentment.
Reduce the wants.
Now, Booker T doesn't go that far.
He doesn't say it's wrong to want nice dresses, it's wrong to want nice hats, not at all.
But what he says is, you don't want your wants to gallop so far ahead of your means.
It's kind of like some guy who's starting out in life and he wants to get a car.
Now, he can afford to get a car.
But what he can't afford is to get a Mercedes, but that's what he wants.
And so he's frustrated, he's restless, he considers what he has to be inadequate, even though it's getting him from here to there.
And this is what Booker T. Washington is saying is, A good recipe for happiness and for contentment is to try to bring your wants and your ability to supply them into a certain kind of balance, into a certain kind of congruence.
By the way, this is also a great way to avoid debt.
Because a lot of times, Debbie and I sometimes have this conversation, not with regard to ourselves, but we have about debt, not just international debt, but individuals getting into debt.
And my point is always, you don't have to do it.
Debbie's like, well, yeah, because, you know, you need to buy a couch and you go on an installment plan.
I go, yeah, but, you know, you end up spending three to four times the price of that couch.
So she's like, well, what else can you do?
Well, and the answer is really simple.
No couch.
Don't get the couch.
Live without the couch.
Why?
Because if you can't afford the couch, you certainly cannot afford to pay four times the price.
In fact, if somebody were to change the price tag on the couch from $1,200 to $4,800, you would freak out.
But that is in fact what the price is.
That's the price you're signing up for.
And so the wisdom of Booker T. Washington comes in really handy here, not just as a way of understanding the black community and the civil rights movement and society, but a way of understanding how we, starting slow, starting at the bottom, or starting young, can improve our circumstances in a serious and intelligent way.
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