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Aug. 9, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
45:03
THE ARSONISTS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep893
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Coming up, Debbie and I are going to do our Friday roundup.
Lots to talk about.
We'll talk about how Trump and Vance can beat Harris and Walz.
Debbie thinks a lot of the hatred of Trump is based upon his, what he did with abortion.
We'll talk about that.
I'm also going to continue my inspiring account of the life and lessons of Booker T. Washington.
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Dabin, I hear for our Friday roundup and we wanted to start by talking about Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, but we kind of broke into a conversation we were having right before we started recording.
We're talking about the Olympics, and I was telling Debbie that Well, first of all, it's so much fun to watch.
And I might have mentioned to you guys that I was initially thinking of boycotting the Olympics, and I didn't really watch for the first few days, and I missed out on some of the swimming and some of the gymnastics.
But now with the track and field going, I'm sort of into it.
And so we typically watch, well, we watch about an hour or so in prime time and catch up on the events of the day.
But we were talking about how tough it is and because you also get a glimpse of the level of training that goes into it hours and hours and it's all for this sort of few moments when you get to show your stuff and if for some reason you falter I mean, you got to wait another four years.
And not only that, but your body is not kind to you.
So, every four years, it's a little less, you know, agile than four years past, right?
And I mean, I guess when you're in your 20s, it's not so much.
But I mean, I think even then, actually, because, you know, age is not kind.
You also made the comment, they were talking about athletes this week, and they were like, this person may be over the hill at 32, and you were like, actually, our kids are hovering around 30, and we don't think of them as old, but I guess in athletic terms, they are.
No, it's really pretty incredible.
Well, one of the things we've noticed pretty much every day this week, this past week, are Kamala Harris ads.
Talk about that.
In fact, your first reaction was, where are the Trump ads?
Yeah, I was like, hey, how come we don't have any Trump ads during the Olympics?
I realize that her ads are paid for by a PAC.
Where's our pack?
You know, why aren't we doing it?
I mean, some of the Trump ads, and I showed you the one which is narrated by Reagan.
Yeah, but the thing is, only we see those ads.
No, no, I was going to make that point that the Trump ads are really good.
But of course, this shows you why in politics, You know, politics is lubricated by money.
And you need money to be able to deploy ads.
Because having the greatest ad doesn't work.
Even the greatest candidate doesn't work if you aren't able to get your message out.
Now I think Trump is, you know, Trump is very effective at getting his own message out, but...
You need ads.
Yeah, totally.
And the Olympics would have been a great audience.
Yeah, exactly.
And the thing about it, I know you said, oh yeah, those ads are bad, but they do make her look a little bit less dumb, you know?
Yeah, I mean, it's obviously scripted.
You have Kamala saying things like, I don't just want people to survive, I want them to get ahead, and I'm for creating more opportunity.
And of course, they stress the abortion issue.
You made a point, though, Yesterday or the day before that I think is very striking.
The key theme of these ads is we don't want to go back.
Well, that, yeah.
But say what you said about that.
Yeah, so I'm like, really, you don't want to go back?
You mean back to when things were less expensive and when you could put gas in your car for under, you know, $3, $2?
$3, $2. Cities were safer. Cities were safer. The border wasn't as poor as people weren't pouring in.
Millions of illegals weren't coming in. You know, we felt like our daughters were safe from being raped in a park from these illegals that are apparently...
Taking money away from the homeless and blacks and giving, you know... So I guess if you don't want to go back to that, to a better America, then sure, vote for common law.
But this is all part of their, this is their built-in progressive framework, right?
What does progressive mean?
It means moving away from the founding.
So to them, they're always, in a sense, moving ahead from their point of view, and anything that we say is just not an alternative America, it's not A versus B, it's we are going back And they are going forward.
At least that's, this is in their own twisted framework.
That's how they see it.
So yeah, going forward in what it is now.
You know, in other words, more expensive.
More of what they're doing.
Exactly.
So more expensive, more crime, more illegals.
Yeah, I want that.
Don't you?
I mean, I would put it slightly differently.
If you want to be kicked in the rear end non-stop for the next four years, then vote for these guys.
Because that's what they do to the ordinary citizen.
But you know what's really interesting?
So I don't know how I got in their mail list.
No idea.
Apparently they think that my email is a Democrat email, I guess.
I don't know.
I've been trying to unsubscribe, but I can't do it because every time I try to go unsubscribe, they want my full name.
You know, first name, last name, and they want the email, and I'm thinking, but they already have that.
Why do they want that again?
So, it's very suspicious.
It could be that they're just trying to make it, you know, as often happens, it's like, you know, when we went to Australia, I bought this Australian health insurance.
Insurance, yeah.
And it was necessary to get the visa, the business visa that I needed.
And now I realize when you go on their website, there's no easy and obvious way to cancel.
And of course, Australia is 17 hours ahead.
So they make it difficult for you to get off of it.
And then they have automatic billing.
So I think the same thing is going on here.
They want to make it hard for you to get out of their system.
And they have apparently.
But talk about their messaging.
Their messaging is kind of crazy.
First of all, Tim Waltz calls Trump and all of us that support Trump or support a conservative viewpoint, weird.
He calls us weird.
Oh, no.
So this is not just Tim Walz.
I mean, he may have started it, but this has become almost a consistent theme.
Trump is weird.
J.D.
Vance is weird.
And think who's saying this.
This is the party of the trans.
This is the party of like, you know, women with testicles, you know.
These people, just look at their picture.
Look at the pictures of the Antifa arrestees.
Are they not weird?
So, I mean, look at a Trump rally and look at the people in the crowd versus a Harris rally and look at the people in the crowd.
Look at the way that even Tim Walz behaves.
If you notice, his bodily reactions are not normal.
Even when he's standing behind Kamala Harris, even when he's not on stage, he reacts inappropriately.
You know how people react in the old cartoons where they, if they're surprised, they go They give you a sort of an outrageously overacted expression.
Now that could be because in the old days TV sets were really small and you couldn't pick up an expression if it wasn't exaggerated.
He's like that.
He does these exaggerated facial expressions.
Oh honey, but that's not weird.
I'm just saying, if you look at it and you go, that is not a normal person.
Yeah, no, well, and then get this, you know, in the email, he says, these guys are just plain weird, all of us, right?
Because he's going to protect access to abortion.
Okay, that's one of, that's the main point.
You know, so all of these were, you know, so working families, cutting taxes for working families, I'm thinking, the Democrats never want to cut taxes for working families.
So that's a little weird there, in and of itself coming from him.
But anyway, Well, and also, think about it.
He's the governor of a state.
By and large, when we're talking about taxes, we're talking about federal taxes.
Yeah.
So, this guy hasn't done anything to cut federal taxes.
In fact, how could he?
How can he?
Yeah, it's true.
And certainly, Kamala Harris has done nothing to reduce federal taxes.
In fact, the Democrats... I don't know.
You'd have to go back to John F. Kennedy for a democratic plan to cut taxes.
Sometimes the Democrats will say something like, and Joe Biden has said this, that, I will not raise taxes on anyone making under 200 or $400,000.
Even that's deceitful, but nevertheless, I will not raise is not the same as I will reduce.
But you have to remember that John F. Kennedy was anti-communist, and he was also anti-entitlement.
He didn't believe in entitlements, which is very communist, by the way.
Yeah, he was a patriot.
He was a patriot, so that's a little different than today's Democrats, for sure.
Anyway, he goes on to say, Trump and JD Vance are selling a twisted version of freedom, where far-right extremists can invade your doctor's office.
Again, he's going after the abortion issue.
Yeah.
Take it from a small-town guy, they know nothing about what working families need.
So he somehow It puts the abortion issue with working families and what they need.
And if you tell me that that's not weird, I don't know what is.
I mean, the problem with all these things is they never spell out what they mean.
Do they mean that in order to have a working family you have to sort of kill the extra kids that show up?
Because, I mean, if that's what you mean, say that.
Say, listen, you know, the birth control could not work, you have an extra kid, you know what?
You need a way to zap that kid, because otherwise you can't stay as a working family.
I mean, be explicit about what you're getting at instead of speaking in this kind of folksy, ambiguous rhetoric.
So this is the fake populism that these guys represent.
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Debby and I are talking about Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, and you were describing this sort of propaganda that you're getting through email where they're claiming that we have a twisted conception of freedom and they have a true grasp on what freedom means.
So let's hear from them about what freedom really means.
Yeah, so he goes, Kamala and I believe in a different kind of freedom.
The freedom to keep communities safe from gun violence.
First of all, that doesn't really address the problem of gun violence at all.
Well, not to mention that the cities that have gun control, let's take Chicago, they've got all these gun control laws, they have massive gun violence.
So how is, if you take an actual case, how are those laws preventing Chicago from having Innumerable violent woundings and homicides occurring daily.
It's not.
So that's a fabrication.
Right.
It's a fabrication.
And the thing about it is they're going to attack the freedom of a law-abiding citizen from having a weapon for protection.
That is like key right there.
That's the thing they're trying to take away.
Exactly.
And they act like that will make the society safer.
So let's think of a community.
You've got criminals with guns.
You've got law-abiding citizens with guns.
The democratic solution, let's identify all the law-abiding citizens and take their guns away and claim that that's going to make the city safer.
That's true.
And they claim that this is freedom.
Exactly.
And the key is that taking away your First Amendment right is freedom.
Is freedom to them?
Yeah.
Because you know that the criminals are not going to discard their guns.
And they know that.
Because, for example, what efforts are the Democrats making in Chicago to round up the criminals and take away all their weapons?
They're not.
None.
They're making no effort.
Let's go on to the other definitions of freedom.
To give every child a chance at getting ahead.
Well, first of all, I'm going to stop the break right there, because then the next sentence is the freedom to trust women to decide when and how they start a family.
So they're not really giving every child a chance to get ahead, right?
But even focusing on this getting ahead, I mean, since when have the Democrats been the party of upward mobility?
How are they helping people to get ahead?
You know, I've been talking about Booker T. Washington the last couple or at least several weeks on the podcast.
Think of what he would make of these characters.
Think of the... He would not even know how to comprehend the demented...
sick approach that they have, which does not say to somebody, hey listen, you're starting out at the bottom, let me give you the tools so you can become, and this is Booker T. Washington's term, self-dependent.
Right.
Right?
The Democrats don't want self-dependence.
No.
In fact, that to them is the enemy.
Exactly.
They want you to be dependent on them.
Honey, those stories that we hear time and time again of immigrants that come with nothing Even Elon Musk, by the way.
Yeah, you were telling me that Elon Musk... Yeah, yeah, he came with nothing.
And for people to actually make something of themselves without using the government's help, I think is remarkable.
But they frown on that because they want to be the end-all, Of everything.
In fact, every time you tell them a success story like that, they become very uncomfortable and they say things like, well, don't think that you just pulled yourself up by your boots.
Exactly!
The government did that!
You didn't build that, right?
That was Obama's way of saying, and it was all sleight of hand because what he would say, basically this is Obama's argument, he would say, well you didn't build that because A school teacher helped you.
You didn't build that because you used the roads.
You didn't help that because you used the infrastructure of society.
And my point is, wait a minute.
Everybody pays into a system that offers an infrastructure of society.
So, you can't say that Elon Musk owes The roads, because everybody else had the same right to use those roads.
He obviously made better use of the roads to get where he is.
And he didn't keep getting money from the government.
In other words, okay, so he drove on the road, but after that, it's all on him.
Right.
And the roads is not something that the government gives us.
No, we pay into it.
We pay into the system and the government uses our money to build the roads.
So then, so anyway, keep going.
Yeah, yeah.
So anyway... Then we go back to the abortion issue.
Back to the abortion issue.
The freedom to trust women to decide when and how they start a family.
So that... I love the euphemism here, right?
In other words, they don't say, The freedom to allow women to get rid of kids they don't want to raise, right?
Yeah.
They say the freedom to decide when to start a family as if, think of a couple, they're like, you know, I think what we should do is let's, you know, let's take a trip and then two years later we'll start a family as if it's just part of this Yeah.
This kind of planning that everyone does in a normal way.
Exactly.
Or even to put it differently, they're saying that a married couple, right?
They have a couple of kids.
They get pregnant.
They're like, you know what?
Right now is just not the time.
Let's kill this baby.
Yeah, they can't be explicit.
In fact, one thing interesting about the Olympics is we're seeing these Kamala Harris commercials about abortion.
And at the same time, have you noticed a number of prominent health care commercials are running which talk about developments in neonatal care.
And they talk about how these days you can do neonatal surgeries and so on.
So I'm thinking to myself, if anyone just sits back and It just takes a moment to reflect on this.
You're not doing neonatal surgeries on the extension of a woman's, you know, appendages.
You're doing neonatal surgeries on an infant who is waiting to be born and is going to be born unless you intrude rudely and shut its life off, right?
Now, talk about a point you make to me, which is I often say that the controversy over Trump is over the man.
But you say that, you know what?
There is a hidden issue here.
There's a single issue that's driving the left's hatred toward Trump.
And what is that?
That is Roe v. Wade.
And that is the fact that Trump put in a Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade.
It's all about Roe v. Wade.
It's all about his ability to undermine their very I don't want to call it their very existence, you know, because obviously they have other issues, but the abortion issue is something that they come back to time and time again.
It's their sacramental issue.
It is their sacramental issue, and it's very strange because it does remind me of the days during Margaret Sanger when When sterilizing women against their will was something that was common and done or you know just population control.
So it's just it's so just incredibly morbid.
Well, I think in a way, you know, Reagan talked about overturning Roe, but he wasn't able to do it.
Yes.
And in fact, to be honest, even Reagan's appointees to get that done were not that good, namely Sandra Day O'Connor.
And so, you know, here you got Reagan, and then you got the two Bushes, and they talked about it.
But even then, their judicial appointees were ambiguous.
Souter, Anthony Kennedy.
The thing about Trump is Trump sort of came in and delivered, right?
And he was not the person expected to deliver.
He had no pro-life background or history.
He wasn't seen as being religiously very devout.
People were unsure at the beginning if he even was really a Republican.
And yet this guy, the most implausible guy, becomes the hero of the pro-life cause.
I won't even say the hero of the pro-life movement because weirdly there's some pro-life people now who are like, well, Trump doesn't want a federal law on abortion.
And I'm like, you fought for the overturning of Roe versus Wade for half a century.
It's been delivered and now your job is to go out into the states and campaign for the laws that you want that reflect the sensibility of the people in those states.
Why aren't you doing that?
Why are you pushing for a federal law that has exactly zero chance of being enacted?
And it would only have a chance if you had a Republican House and a Republican Senate and a Republican Presidency to boot.
So at the very least you should be working tirelessly to get those things if you want to go beyond what you already have.
But I do think it's very insightful that of all the issues The Democrats care most about this one, and this is the one unforgivable sin.
It's almost like the Bible talks about the unforgivable sin.
This is Trump's.
This is it.
But you know, I've been fighting with the pro-life cause for a while.
For the pro-life cause, yeah.
For the pro-life cause for a while.
When you say with, people think you're fighting against them, but no.
Yeah, yeah, no, no, no, no, of course not.
Because, you know, even in Texas in 2014, I witnessed the brutality of these people on the left that bust all of these folks from all over the country, Antifa-like, you know, where they would chain themselves to the, they'd barricade themselves to the railroads.
The door and so on.
The door and all of that, because Texas was trying to pass very, at the time, very benign Pro-life laws that would say, listen, if you're going to have an abortion, you have to be a certain distance from a hospital.
You had to be ambulatory because if something went wrong in the clinic, you had to be able to get an ambulance ride to the hospital and be able to be saved.
And even that produced this.
Massive ferocity.
Massive.
And just, you know, horrible.
And so the Democrats have been fighting this for a long time.
And, you know, even before Trump was elected, they were very adamant about making sure that no Republican president could overturn Roe v. Wade via the Supreme Court.
Yeah.
I mean, I agree with you.
This was a massive blow to them and one from which they not only haven't recovered, but Even, you know, we've talked about how their revenge against the ordinary, you know, grandma who's praying outside a clinic.
Yes!
It's like, we have to punish these people.
Yes.
Look at Bevelyn Beatty!
Williams, what happened to her?
41 months for shouting slogans outside the Margaret Sanger Clinic in New York.
And we've seen that clinic.
We've actually filmed outside that clinic.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
But 41 months, outrageous.
Outrageous.
By the way, if you can help Bevelyn, go to GiveSendGo slash Bevelyn, what is it, Bevelyn Beattie?
Beattie Williams, yeah.
Bevelyn Beattie Williams.
And we've contributed and we urge you to do the same.
All right, when we come back, we'll talk about some lessons from our trip to Australia.
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I'm back for the last segment of our Roundup, Debbie and me, and then of course I'll close out with my continuing discussion of Booker T. Washington.
We thought we'd do a little bit of a lighter segment and reflect now that it's been a few weeks.
On our trip to Australia, and a trip that you had a lot of apprehensions about, but I think ultimately you ended up enjoying because at the end of it you're like, I think I might like to go back!
Yeah, yeah.
The apprehensions were mostly because of my mom.
That's true.
Because I was very afraid that something would happen while we were there.
And, you know, thank God that that didn't take place.
You know, that she passed away after we came back and I was able to be with her.
But that was definitely something that was in the back of my mind the entire time.
That being said, it was a lovely place.
I mean, it really was.
And I do want to go back.
Yeah, well let's think about what we found so appealing about it.
We started out up in the area that is, Australians call it Cairns, up in the Gold Coast.
It's where the Great Barrier Reef is.
It's where a lot of the animals are.
And it's also where our sponsor, this Australian billionaire, Clive Palmer, he's from that area.
He has a company called Mineralogy that owns a lot of the minerals in Australia.
So we started out in Cairns.
We did have an event in Cairns, but it was By the standard of our events, it was small, like 1,500 people.
The other events were all 2,500, 3,000, 4,000.
The Sydney one was, of course, the biggest.
The Sydney one was of course the biggest.
And we did this trip with Clive Palmer and with a medical doctor named Melissa McCann who's become friends of ours and we now text with her and her husband back in Fort Jared.
And then of course Tucker Carlson and Tucker brought his wife and did he bring his three daughters?
His three daughters, yeah.
And they brought some friends.
And they brought some friends, so they were a little bit of a gang.
And so we then leapfrogged, we went from Cannes to, if I remember correctly, we went to Brisbane, and then Adelaide, and then Perth on the other end of the country, right, on the western end of Australia, and then back across the country to Sydney.
Yes.
And we closed out at Sydney.
The group went on to Melbourne, but we had a family reunion, so we skipped the Melbourne event.
You made the comment that you thought Australia was something like, it's almost like America a generation ago.
Yeah!
What did you mean by that?
Well, I said it's like America was 20 years ago.
Yeah.
You know, I really, I got that vibe.
The other thing that I thought was pretty amazing was how plugged in everyone was to our politics.
Like I thought, I really, if I had no idea that I was in Australia, I could have sworn that they were Texans.
Well, we met two Australian senators, and they're in the Australian Senate, young guys, and they are both not only massive Trumpsters, but they were telling us that in Trump's campaign leading up to November, they intend to come from Australia to go to a rally To cheer for Trump!
That's right.
They want to be here when the election happens.
They want to be here.
So I thought that was amazing.
And their knowledge.
I mean, we met this guy, Jared.
He's the husband of one of the speakers.
But his knowledge of the details of American politics is hilarious.
Yeah, it's funny.
We almost laughed out loud.
I mean, this guy would get into Things about Obama's birth certificate.
My favorite was Big Mike.
He was absolutely convinced that Michelle was a man and we had some amusing exchanges about that.
But I think the point you're trying to make is, and I worried about this before we went, is I thought to myself, you know, they say that humor doesn't travel well.
So I'm going to be speaking to large groups in a completely different setting.
And so this is a problem.
Both Tucker and I probably were thinking about How do we present our ideas in a way that resonates?
But as it turned out, it was a very easy task.
We almost had to do very little of that.
And I did a little, almost a stand up for three or four minutes on Trump.
The audience was like going nuts.
Well, they all love him.
They all love Trump.
That is, that is a certainty.
I mean that, you know, no doubt.
But they are, they're patriots.
And the, the interesting thing is that even though they're, they're, I guess the, I would say a Congress is a little different than ours.
It's more, it's parliamentary, isn't it?
Exactly.
Right.
So it's not, it's not the two party system like what we have.
It is, although there are multiple parties.
Right, there's multiple parties.
And so they all align themselves with each other.
It's a little bit like Venezuela, actually.
And Israel.
You need a coalition to get to power.
The prime minister, not the president.
I think it's interesting what you said about them being like Texas, and I want to explain that in this sense, that the Australians love to call each other mate.
And I think that that's a phrase that comes right out of their origins.
Think of it, the British round up a bunch of undesirables and dissidents and convicts and put them on ships and say, off you go to Australia.
And they probably all called each other mates.
They were shipmates.
So the language of the original journey has remained, you know, they say it in the Australian, Yeah.
It's like M-I-G-H-T, might.
But they're also pioneers, right?
They love the outdoors.
Yes.
Most of the Australians are sort of country people even though there are a number of Australian cities The cities are always attached to large amounts of wilderness and so they're outdoor people and they're frontier type of people.
This is where the Texan element kind of comes in.
And the Texan sort of redneck has an exact counterpart in Australia.
They do.
Very recognizable.
Very recognizable.
Same sensibility.
Yeah, exactly the same.
And they're just very nice people.
Really, really nice people.
And the other thing I notice is they're extremely patriotic people.
They make Australia great again.
Yes, very much so.
And that's very true.
The optimism reminds me of the Reagan era.
It does.
It reminds you of an America, it's almost America before Obama.
Yeah.
Because for all America's problems, America had...
It's not just an optimism, because you can have an optimism when you're at the edge of the precipice, and then that makes you foolhardy.
It was a justified optimism.
America was, in fact, on top of the world, not only in the Reagan years, but in the post-Reagan years.
And that carried over, I think it even carried past 9-11, even though 9-11 was kind of an ugly shock to the system.
The truth of it is, we felt and we knew that we were stronger than that.
And the corrosion really began, it began slowly, and people didn't really see it coming.
This is, I think, ultimately why I think history will look back on Obama as a very dark turning point.
Divisive, yeah.
Yeah, not just divisive, because Lincoln was divisive, but Obama was a poisonous influence, I think, in American society.
It's safe to say we don't like Obama.
You know, when Obama was first elected, I was not hostile to him at all.
Oh, I was.
And you were, because you recognized, you heard the Hugo Chavez accents in Obama immediately.
I did not.
And initially, I thought, you know, this is an interesting turn.
And, you know, we were all a little exhausted with Bush.
So, I mean, obviously, I didn't vote for Obama.
But I thought, let's see what he does.
I was intrigued.
And but soon enough I began to realize something is off here and that's what set me on the journey of, you know, my book The Roots of Obama's Rage and then later 2016 Obama's America.
Well, interestingly, even with that, I was like, yeah, honey, I mean, Hugo Chavez was an anti-colonialist.
Right.
You know, so that they have that in common as well, you know, and as is Maduro.
And, you know, pivoting from from Australia to Venezuela, I mean, this whole Venezuelan election thing, I'm following it very closely.
And it's interesting how people are like, oh, the parallels of Venezuela.
And I'm like, yeah, I've been talking about the parallels for like a decade, if not more.
You have been on this topic.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, when you started, you were almost a solitary voice.
drawing these parallels and you made a presentation, you were giving presentations all over Texas and now it's become very evident Trump talks about it, he talked about it in my one-on-one conversation with him for the movie. Exactly. So it's now become conventional wisdom. And I've tried to reach out to Maria Corina and apparently you know she is in hiding. This is the rival candidate to Maduro.
She was prohibited from running and so she had a surrogate run in her stead, but she's the real opposition leader in Venezuela.
She is, and she's in hiding because Maduro wants her dead.
He certainly wants her in prison, if not dead, and so she's in hiding right now.
And so, you know, I just ask for prayers for her because I can't imagine having to go through something like that, knowing that the reason you're doing it is for freedom in your country, and you have a true dictator.
Venezuela is in a dictatorship, folks.
I mean, it really is.
And even the left is not defending it in this country.
I think they are forced to admit... Well, what is the Biden administration doing about it?
Nothing.
Zero.
Well, not very much.
They're, quote, expressing concerns.
And what good does that do?
We're now in Chapter 6 of Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, and now we're entering a new phase of Booker T. Washington's life.
He is now an educated man.
He is recognized to be an outstanding member of his race, and he is now going to find himself sought after, given jobs and appointments.
He's going to meet interesting and important people.
So no longer is he scrambling and scrounging to get a meal.
No longer is he sleeping under a bridge.
No longer is he in complete deprivation.
He has now worked his way and studied his way out of extreme poverty.
He gets a letter from General Armstrong.
Inviting him to be a teacher at the Hampton Institute.
Wow!
So he's gone from being a student, then remember he went back to his hometown and became a school teacher there, but now he's invited to teach at Hampton.
And he actually has a little bit of money, so he says, now I was able to ride the whole distance on the train.
And he goes on to say, I contrasted this with my first journey to Hampton.
And he says, what a change in the life and aspirations of an individual.
Not just because he's gone from being a student to a teacher, but because when he first went to Hampton, he couldn't even afford to get there.
He had to take a train and then try to, you know, talk his way into getting a stagecoach.
And he didn't know where to sleep when the other people checked into a hotel, if you remember.
He gets a warm welcome from the teachers and students at Hampton.
And he says, he notices that the whole plan of Hampton, which is the combination of industrial education, basic education, working your way through school, is kind of a unique formula.
He says he didn't know about anyone else, any other institution following this formula.
By the way, later Booker T. Washington will use the same formula, or at least a modification of this formula, for his creation of an institution, a very important institution in the 20th century which is the Tuskegee Institute that he, Booker T. Washington, becomes the founder and the head of.
But now he describes here a very interesting experiment that is going on at Hampton.
By the way, when he's at Hampton, he is a teacher, but he's also pursuing his own further studies.
So this is a guy who likes to learn and constantly wants to better himself.
This is important because, by and large, when you're a teacher, you're not gaining capital.
You're expending it, if you will.
You're sharing the knowledge you already have with students.
But what Booker T wants to do is he wants to do that, but he also wants to be himself a student, which is to say to be acquiring new knowledge.
Now, there's an experiment that's going on at Hampton, just beginning at Hampton, and it's General Armstrong's idea.
And it's a little bit of a wild idea.
General Armstrong wants to start educating Indians, meaning Native Americans, at Hampton.
Now let's think about it.
Hampton is really an institution for, quote, colored people, which is to say for blacks, and all the students there Until now, are black.
And so, not only does Armstrong want to try something new, but he's going to bring in a very different group, which by the way, very different history, and very different issues that American Indians as a group deal with.
But Armstrong is like, you know what?
It is an experiment.
We're going to try it.
But what he wants to do is he wants to bring... Here's Booker T. Washington describing it.
He secured from the reservations in the Western states over 100 wild and for the most part perfectly ignorant Indians.
Now, today we wouldn't put it quite this way because, oh, they're wild.
But Booker T. Washington here doesn't mean wild in the sense of wild and crazy.
He means wild in the sense of uncivilized.
These are people not exposed to the ingredients of civilization.
And they're also, quote, perfectly ignorant.
And by ignorant here, he doesn't mean it as an insult.
They're ignorant.
He means that they truly are starting with no knowledge.
They're, and to use a term from the philosopher John Locke, they're just tabula rasa.
They're a blank sheet of paper.
And they're coming in as if to say, educate me.
Now, what's Booker T. Washington's job?
Well, General Armstrong draws him aside and he goes, hey, Booker T., I have an idea for you.
These people don't just need a teacher.
They need a, quote, house father.
Think of it.
What a term.
You have to live with these guys in a dorm, and you have to sort of be like their dad.
Because they have had fathers, of course, but their fathers have educated them, you may say, in the ways of the wild.
They're not educated in what it is like to function in a school.
That's your job.
You become their, you may say, school dad.
And Booker T is a bit hesitant, but guess what?
He goes, I did not know how to refuse General Armstrong, so I agreed.
And then he goes on to say, He says, at first I had a good deal of doubt about my ability to succeed.
He says, I knew that the average Indian felt himself above the white man.
And of course, he felt himself above the Negro, largely on account of the fact that the Negro, having submitted to slavery, a thing which the Indian would never do.
Now here we're on to something quite interesting and important, which is to say that for many, many centuries, and this was part of the architecture of racism, the white man was able to say to the black man, I'm superior to you.
Why?
Because I've built civilization and you haven't.
Look at the contrast between Europe and Africa.
So there appeared to be some basis for this claim of white civilizational superiority, but of course the American Indian never accepted this.
Why?
Because the American Indian basically said, who is to say that civilization is better in the first place?
We, the American Indians, live according to nature.
We live in the wild, but there's a certain nobility, there's a certain closeness to nature.
Who is to say that our way of life, we reject the standard of civilization itself, and therefore we are not only superior, we are superior to the white man, because we are living closer, if you will, to the elements, and You know, here again we have echoes of Rousseau and Rousseau's idea that civilization ruins people.
Remember Rousseau, basically the idea is that you are at your best when you are in your natural state closest to nature and then civilization comes along and kind of corrupts people.
Corrupts people how?
Well, mainly by changing their standards to be always in comparison with somebody else.
When you're living in nature, it never occurs to you, hey, guess what?
I've captured a rabbit, but look at the guy over in the next tribe.
He's captured a bison, so he's got more meat than I do.
You don't even think like that.
You think like, well, I've got my meal for the day, so I'm good.
And so, Rousseau says when you come into civilization, suddenly it's like, well, you know, I'm wearing pants, but the other guy has a belt.
I'm wearing a dress but that person has a frilly skirt and so suddenly you are discontented not because you don't have what you need, you do, but because you don't have something compared to someone else.
So, in any case, Booker T. Washington observes that these Indians Don't have that built-in sense of inferiority.
But then, they also have a certain contempt for blacks.
Why?
Because the Indian goes, hey listen, the white man came to the continent, came over here, and guess what?
They tried to enslave us!
But they were not successful.
Why?
Because we American Indians don't allow ourselves to be enslaved.
First of all, we're too smart to be enslaved.
We run away.
They can't catch us.
Number two, if they do force us to be enslaved, we perish.
Why?
Because we're not suited to slavery.
We contract diseases, we just won't do the work, we just drop dead.
And that is more noble than becoming a slave which is submitting to enslavement.
So this is kind of a taboo issue even today to discuss in the literature or to discuss in a classroom.
Can you imagine if just what I just said on the podcast right now, if I were to stand up and say at Yale, I'd, you know, I'd have to have, like, private meetings with the American Indian students and the black students.
Why did you say those things?
Blah, blah, blah.
But this is a real issue, and Booker T. Washington knows it is, and he doesn't hesitate to bring it up.
And he brings it up in the context of it's an obstacle to education, because he's like, these are people who don't want to take any instruction from anybody.
You say to them, hey, listen, I'm going to teach you civilization.
The Indians go, well, we don't need it.
We don't want civilization.
Just give us some education and let us go.
And so Booker T. Washington knows that he's got kind of a task ahead of him.
When I come back, now I won't be doing the podcast Monday, Debbie's going to, it's going to be a special issue of the podcast.
Debbie is going to sit right here with Mayra Flores.
They're going to talk in studio for the whole podcast.
I'll be back on Tuesday.
But when I'm back on Tuesday, I'm going to pick up Booker T. Washington's adventure in attempting to educate at the Hampton Institute, Native Americans.
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