THE UNITED STATES OF SOCIALISM Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep895
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Coming up, I'll talk about Trump's discussion with Elon Musk on X from last night.
And I'll also ask the question, or begin asking the question, is Kamala Harris a socialist?
Newsweek senior editor Josh Hammer joins me.
We're going to talk about a potential Iran attack on Israel and whether that portends a large-scale war in the Middle East.
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I wasn't here yesterday.
As you know, as you probably know, Debbie and Mayra Flores were in studio.
A fascinating conversation about a lot of different things, but also really about the Hispanics emerging as a decisive factor in U.S.
politics, and this is especially so here in Texas.
Myra pointed out to us that the size of the Hispanic population for the first time just recently surpassed the white population.
And that means that we need Hispanics for Texas, and we also need them for the long-term future of the Republican Party.
Lots to talk about.
I'll start on a slightly amusing note.
The Olympics are over.
Debbie and I watched some of the closing ceremony, which was admittedly somewhat comical because it was a little bit of a Gen Z type of event, and we were kind of chuckling at the personality of these Gen Zers.
Now, the Gen Zers, by the way, performed amazingly.
And the U.S.
Gen Zs were stars of the show.
What was it, 40, 38 to 40 gold medals?
Just a tremendous number of magnificent performances.
I think the, really the heroine of the games was Sidney McLaughlin, Levrone.
And what a beautiful way, in multiple interviews, and Debbie and I were sharing some of these back and forth, Just boldly testifying about her faith and about Christ and about how winning is important, but it's not the most important thing.
And I was thinking to myself, you know, my mind actually flashed back to the movie Chariots of Fire.
And I was thinking, wow, we have in this woman from, is she from California, honey, or Florida?
We're not really sure.
In any event, she is a modern-day Eric Little.
Remember Eric Little, the Scottish guy, the Scottish runner who wouldn't run on Sunday and became a sort of a global hero and a Christian hero?
Well, the age of heroes in that sense is not completely gone, and this was a really striking thing to see.
On a somewhat less elevated note, the Algerian biological male with XY chromosomes that won the gold medal by pulverizing a bunch of women, I saw a really weird article about this guy and the article said that his female sparring partner came to the discovery that this was a man.
And so she's like, what's going on here?
Why am I boxing with a man?
How can a man be fighting in the female division of the Olympics?
And according to the sparring partner, the Algerian trainers said, oh, you know what?
This guy is a man, but his genes have been altered.
And she's like, altered?
How?
And they were like, it's because he lives high up in the mountains.
Supposedly, as a result of living at high altitudes, he has had some genetic and chromosomal changes according to these... Now, Debbie was like, I thought that the Algerians are Muslims.
I thought that they, you know, I thought that they would be against all this madness.
Why are they okay with it?
And my answer is this.
The Algerians are having a great joke.
At the expense of the West.
They're sitting back and going, listen, these Westerners are so crazy that they will allow a Muslim guy to go into the women's ring and pummel their women and knock them to the ground if they... All we have to do is say that this guy, quote, identifies as a woman.
And all we have... So we found this guy and he, you know, he apparently does have some sort of genetic Abnormality.
An abnormality that I described as having testosterone, but the testosterone receptors are not, in a sense, expressing it.
And so he does have some female biological equipment, but he's also, chromosomally, he's XY.
He's not XX.
One of his victims, if you will, was holding up just with her hands like this, the X sign kind of like saying, hey, listen, I'm XX.
And if you want to know how this guy beat me up, it's right here.
Kind of her way of protesting against the unfairness of the event.
All right, that's it for the Olympics.
Let me...
Let me now talk about, well, I want to talk about Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, but I'm going to talk first about Trump and about the really very interesting lengthy discussion that he had just last evening with Elon Musk on X. This was one of those X spaces.
And I haven't listened to the whole thing, but I've listened to chunks of it.
The first thing that strikes me is just how At ease, Trump is on a wide variety of topics.
This was not one of those, you know, policy interviews.
Rather, Trump and Musk are like two guys, you know, at one point in the discussion they talk about their mutual love of trains and they get into it.
And it's sort of fascinating to listen to because you can see that they are both animated by the topic and are speaking with genuine curiosity, genuine excitement, and also genuine knowledge.
They're knowledgeable about the stuff they're talking about and one of the things that becomes obvious is the the wide amplitude of Trump's knowledge and interest.
This is not a guy, normally when you talk to political guys, they are They've got canned presentations on various policy type of issues, but if you ask them about something that's not on that menu, They get very flustered.
And so if you ask them about sports, or if you ask them about something to do with new technology, that's outside their wheelhouse.
They become really inarticulate.
And in some ways, they also lose interest.
Why are you bringing that up?
What does this have to do with me running for office?
But with Trump and Elon Musk, you get none of that.
You get the idea that you've got two Two people who are, they are human beings in the round.
By that I mean they've had a, they've had wide experience.
They are both geniuses of a type.
And in fact, Debbie, we're talking about it over our lattes this morning, Debbie's like, they're both visionaries.
And no surprise, they're both billionaires.
In other words, not only are they a visionary, someone who can envision something, But I think the number of visionaries is much larger than the number of billionaires for a simple reason that lots of people have ideas that they don't do anything with.
So think of all the people who have great ideas for a business.
If only there was a business that did this!
Well, okay, why don't you do it?
Oh no, I don't have time to do it.
I'm really, I gotta go to work tomorrow.
So most people have ideas, and sometimes very good ideas, but the task of taking the idea and putting it into effect, let alone testing it in the market and vindicating it by finding a customer base that responds to your idea, this is the peculiar genius.
Elon Musk has been crossing swords with a guy This guy is like chief scientist for Google.
Now this guy is sort of, I mean, he is in his own way a computer genius.
But on the other hand, he's not a builder.
He doesn't create anything.
He is essentially an academic.
And so he mocks Elon Musk and says, this will never work.
That will never work.
And Elon Musk is like, until you build it, you don't know if it's going to work or not.
You haven't built a thing.
You are essentially a sort of MIT geek.
Who knows a lot, but knowing a lot or even having visionary ideas is not quite the same thing as getting it done.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H, Dinesh.
I want to talk in this segment about Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.
And the question I'm posing is actually a bigger question than I can answer in one segment.
So I'm just going to tease it today and then pick it up and discuss it in a little more detail.
It's the question of, are these two socialists?
And would their election represent An importation of socialism to America.
What in an earlier book I called United States of Socialism.
Is that where we are headed?
I mean, the whole prospect seems deranged in that, just a generation ago, it looked like capitalism had completely annihilated socialism.
And it had annihilated it not through intellectual debate or just academic discourse.
It had annihilated it on the ground, in that you could look at innumerable side-by-side examples of capitalism versus socialism, and everywhere capitalism succeeds and socialism fails.
North Korea and South Korea, classic example.
And examples in Asia, examples in Africa, examples really all over the world.
So wouldn't it be odd if in the wake of all that somehow we have, through a collective amnesia, forgotten all that, it's all somehow gone, and socialism makes this amazing comeback here in the third decade of the 21st century.
Now Kamala Harris has said more than once, I am not a socialist.
She says, I am a capitalist.
And she said that, I think, to distinguish herself from the squad.
If you remember, you've got Cori Bush, and you've got AOC, and you've got some of these squad, Rashida Tlaib.
And they don't shirk.
They don't hesitate from the socialism label.
So, the progressives, Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, they're like, no, no, no, we don't belong in that camp.
But the question is not whether they are full-blown socialists, It's rather, are they going to be moving us and how far in the direction of socialism?
Now, socialism can be understood in many ways.
I want to just focus on the actions of Tim Wallace and Kamala Harris in Minneapolis in 2020 in the wake of the George Floyd fracas.
Massive lawlessness in Minneapolis, in Minnesota.
Massive hike in the murder rate.
It jumped 75% in 2020 and then rose again in 2021.
And even though the crime rate has stabilized since then, it's still 50% above 2019 levels.
So this has been an enduring rise in not just the crime rate generically, but in the murder rate specifically.
The arson, the looting destroyed businesses, many times small businesses, businesses that begged the government to come to their help.
And Tim Walz, who was then the governor, refused.
He didn't deploy the Minnesota National Guard until much of the damage had already been done.
When he did so, he deployed a paltry number of guardsmen.
And here's a business owner, Ricardo Hernandez, So, you might ask now, what does all of this have to do with socialism?
Well, it may not have much to do with socialism, but it has to do with socialists.
And by that I mean Tim Walz knew That a lot of these BLM and Antifa riders... Let's remember that BLM and Antifa have their roots in socialist movements.
The founders of BLM, by their own admission, were trained as socialist organizers.
So these are far-left socialist thugs.
And Tim Walz decided, they're my thugs.
They may be thugs, but they're thugs on our side.
And so we need to, at the very least, look the other way, and perhaps even to enable them in certain ways.
And when you're dealing with the enabling, you see it even more clearly in the actions of Kamala Harris than you do in the case of Tim Walz.
Tim Walz, you could say, didn't do the things that he was supposed to do.
So his failure was an act of omission.
I won't send in the National Guard.
With Kamala Harris, it's an act of commission.
What does she do?
She raises bail money for the arsonists, for the rioters.
This is the Minnesota Freedom Fund, the so-called MFF, and $35 million was raised by this group.
And who got the bail?
Well, according to the New York Post, Darnica Floyd got bail money.
This is a guy charged with second-degree murder and accused of stabbing a man to death.
He was sentenced to prison in 2021 on the charge of aiding and abetting murder.
Bail was provided for Christopher Boswell, a twice convicted rapist who was charged with kidnapping and sexual assault.
He was released on $350,000 bail.
Later in 2023, he was sentenced to prison for criminal sexual assault.
Lionel Tims bailed out for $10,000 after committing a felony third-degree assault aboard a bus in Bloomington.
Less than a month later, he was rearrested after he nearly beat a local bar manager to death.
So you can see that these are...
These are not upstanding members of society.
They're the worst of the worst.
So isn't it telling that you've got a left-wing bail fund and it's bailing these types of characters out?
In other words, this is the kind of lawlessness that the Democrats approve of.
It is their lawlessness.
It's lawlessness on behalf of their objectives.
And these are the people who want now to take the reins of the country at large.
And so the questions we have to raise are, are they going to burn America to the ground in the same way that they were willing to stand by almost Nero style and fiddle?
But more than fiddle, because Nero didn't burn Rome.
He's just fiddling.
He's enjoying the spectacle.
But even Nero didn't raise bail money, so to speak.
He didn't actively abet the people doing it.
Whereas in this case, with Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, they are right in there with the rioters and with the arsonists.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome back to the podcast Josh Hammer, senior editor-at-large of Newsweek, where he also hosts the Josh Hammer Show podcast, as well as syndicated radio show.
He also writes a weekly newsletter, the Josh Hammer Report.
The new book coming out shortly, Israel and Civilization, the Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.
Josh, thanks for joining me.
It looks like things are Heating up in the Middle East, there have been some reports about Iran threatening to retaliate for Israel's strike on the Hamas leader.
The United States reportedly is sending some, well, it's sending the USS Abraham Lincoln, maybe some other artillery and weaponry to the region.
What do you make of all this?
Is Iran going to be foolhardy enough to want to start a regional, perhaps even more than that, war?
Or do you think that this is a kind of saber-rattling exercise?
You know, it's very tough to say, Dinesh.
You know, we've been kind of on pins and needles here for weeks now.
I mean, Israel took out, well, to be clear, Israel has not formally taken credit for, but we broadly expect, I guess I shall say, that Israel took out Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas political chief, in Tehran a couple weeks ago.
That came quite literally within hours of taking out a top-ranking Hezbollah militant outside Beirut.
That particular Hezbollah militant, actually, Shakur is his last name, Have a massive U.S.
ransom payment on his head because he has the blood on his hands going all the way back to the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing all the way back then.
So, you know, in the span of just a few hours, Israel took out two of the top jihadists in the Middle East and the entire region has essentially been on tenterhooks now for two and a half, three weeks or so as we await to see what possibly comes as a result of it.
Now, a sane and rational U.S.
foreign policy, Dinesh, in a situation like this, especially given what I just said about the fact that there were 241 dead U.S.
Marines back there in Beirut in the early 1980s, a rational U.S.
policy would stand by our ally that is broadly considered to have taken out these two jihadists, And to say to our mutual enemies in Tehran and their broad proxy, their sprawling network of jihadists, don't mess with us.
That would be a sane policy.
But the Biden-Harris administration is trying to have their cake and eat it too.
Yes, they are sending the USS Abraham Lincoln.
I believe the USS Theodore Roosevelt is also there.
There are multiple aircraft carrier striker groups, a nuclear submarine has been chasing over there, getting their ASAP.
So the weaponry is in place, but at the same time that they have this deterrent posture there, they're also begging them not to do anything and they're trying to do this whole kind of song and dance routine with Hamas, trying to get this ceasefire agreement.
There's a big meeting this Thursday.
So They can't get their message straight.
On the one hand, they have this deterrent weaponry there.
On the other hand, they're basically begging for a ceasefire and a de-escalation.
Those two messages are completely mutually incompatible.
Ultimately, at the end of the day, and it's very hard to predict these things, I do not think it's going to be a devastating strike or anything like that from Iran.
The Iranian regime, look, they're not rational.
I mean, these are fanatical Islamists.
They actually do believe in the whole 72 virgins and heaven and all that.
This is not a Cold War era geopolitical chessboard.
At the end of the day, if they care about anything at all, they probably care about their own survival.
And they don't take the Biden-Harris administration particularly seriously, but at least they saw back in April that the US did team up with the UK, France, and actually also Jordan and Saudi Arabia in intercepting that 300 to 400 missile and rocket volley.
that the Iranians shot at Israel.
So I think there's probably going to be some sort of strike from Lebanon, Hezbollah.
I think that's probably going to escalate even further.
That could lead to a full-out war on the northern border to the extent that the current situation does not already constitute that, which it might.
But I don't think that an actual massive strike from inside Iran itself is coming.
I could be wrong, of course. I pray that I am not.
Yeah, I mean, I tend to agree.
The Iranians don't want to get into an all-out straight war with Israel, it doesn't seem.
They look like they prefer to play this game where they use surrogates to make their strikes for them.
And what their longer game, it seems to me, is to somehow try to tilt the whole global balance of power against Israel and to try to isolate Israel.
Do you agree that that is their sort of strategic vision?
And further, that their strategic vision is not going all that badly in that when you consider Israel's number one and most reliable ally, namely the United States, the regime that's currently in charge is at the very least kind of dithering on its position toward Israel.
Yeah, and you know, emphasis on at the very least, right?
I mean, I probably even have some harsher words than that, to be honest with you.
But, you know, it was Avril Haines, who's the top-ranking DNI, or Director of National Intelligence, if I have her title correctly there.
I mean, she had a report maybe a month, month and a half ago, basically ascertaining that the Iranians are largely funding a lot of the so-called pro-Palestinian protests, which have been rocking America's university campuses for the better part of a year now.
And of course it makes sense.
I mean, Dinesh, you're a pro at this.
I mean, this is straight out of the Soviet Union's playbook.
I mean, back during the 1960s, the Soviets would do this exact same tactic.
They would try to sow the seeds of civic discord here in America.
They would literally disseminate literature in largely black neighborhoods, trying to gin up racial resentment.
Oh, the white man is putting you down.
This is a well-known Kremlin tactic.
From the Khrushchev era back in the 1960s or so and the Iranians are doing it yet again when it comes to kind of exploiting the useful idiots and Prime Minister Netanyahu in his speech before Congress a few weeks ago used that exact term.
I actually love the fact that he used that term in describing these people as the useful idiots for the Iranian regime because they are doing it all over again.
Everything that has been happening here in America has Iran's footprints all over it.
You know, back in April, I can't remember the exact day.
It was in mid-April, but there was this one day where there was clearly coordinated activity all across America.
They shut down the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.
They were marching down on Wall Street in lower Manhattan, O'Hare Airport in Chicago.
They shut down the roads there.
There was this one day in mid-April.
And my friend Carolyn Glick, the well-known Israeli conservative commentator, had a very interesting insight where she linked to one of her sources who was kind of a regime dissident inside of Iran, if I remember.
And he was kind of intercepting communications in Farsi, the native language in Iran, basically saying that that particular day in America, these protests, was to an extent itself orchestrated from the Iranians.
And they were laundering it through intermediaries, through actors.
Look, Iran is not a first world country, but we underestimate them at their peril.
They do have a certain level of sophistication.
There was a bombshell story that broke out last September in Semaphore, if I have the publication correctly there, that Iran had actually infiltrated The corridors of power right in Washington, D.C., there were Department of State, Department of Defense staffers whose positions were essentially being funded by the Iranian governments there.
One of them was actually dragged before Congress and forced to resign, if I'm not mistaken.
So, you know, they are operating in a more sophisticated level than people give them credit for.
But at the end of the day, I do not expect that they wish to get into an existential war, at least at this exact time with Israel, because at least as it currently stands, they would lose that war We're all but assuredly.
I mean, it seems to me, Josh, that this issue of these jihadis having a certain low cunning is certainly borne out in the fact that they have been able somehow to establish an extremely unlikely alliance with some real Sodom and Gomorrah progressives, right?
I mean, you would think that as the jihadis approach these guys, their first instinct would be, There is no way that we have anything in common with these freaks.
You know, so if we're going to find friends, we're going to have to look elsewhere.
But no, it's like they are like they look past all that and they're like, you know what?
We can make common cause with the left.
And and then maybe at the end of the day, we will have to have another fight with those guys.
But in the meantime, let's take out our mutual adversary.
So, I mean, that takes a certain amount of You may say tactical Machiavellian strategy to not only envision that, but pull it off.
Yeah, totally.
So, you know, it's Dr. Judy Jasser, who's been in the game for a while now.
He just ran for Congress out in Arizona, lost in his primary, unfortunately.
But, you know, he's been using this term Red-Green Alliance for a long time now.
I remember running an op-ed of his in Newsweek a handful of years ago on this exact topic.
The red, of course, referring to the woke commies, the woke communists, the green referring to the Islamists, to those who espouse political Islam and radical Islamist sentiments.
These two things, as you rightly point out, not only do they not have anything in common, they are directly at loggerheads with one another.
You know, it really is farcical to an extent.
I mean, if we go back seven years ago or so, you know, the face of the original Women's March, you know, the one in Washington, D.C., was Linda Sarsour, who wears a hijab and is a radical Islamist.
You know, I mean, Islamism and modern-day feminism do not exactly get along well.
There are a lot of things that those two things do not agree on.
But as you as you accurately point out, it's kind of the enemy of my enemy is my friend sort of situation here. It's a little bit of kind of an Alinsky-ite ends justify the means sort of logic going on as well. You know, you mentioned my book at the outset, Dinesh. It's a forthcoming book, Israel and Civilization, the fate of the Jewish nation and the destiny of the West.
And in one of the concluding chapters of the book, I basically identify three core threats that face what I call Western civilization today. And Western civilization broadly being the biblical heritage, Jews, Christians, and so forth there.
And those three threats are in no particular order, wokeism, Islamism, and global neoliberalism.
And really, none of those three things have a whole lot actually in common with one another, but they are all fundamentally, to a certain extent, aimed at undermining the West's traditional heritage, aimed at undermining traditional Christianity, traditional Judaism, churches, synagogues, the Bible, Scripture, our broader legal, ethical, moral inheritance, and so forth there.
So, you know, If they're aligned towards that particular end, and that end being the uniquely evil end of the destruction of the West, if they are aligned towards that end, these forces can indeed make common cause with one another.
The last thing I'll say on this is, it was actually the Columbia University SJP chapter, the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, the egregiously misnamed student group, which is really just a pro-Hamas organization, But, you know, they let the cat out of the bag last week, the Columbia University chapter.
They had an Instagram post in it.
I'm not making this up.
They literally wrote verbatim, we are Westerners fighting for the eradication of Western civilization.
I mean, that kind of gives away the game right there.
You know, every so often the mask falls off.
That's very much a mask off moment.
I mean, I remember at Stanford University, this goes back to the 1990s when I wrote my first book, Illiberal Education, that they were being led by Jesse Jackson and others in shouting, hey, hey, ho, ho, Western cultures got to go.
Now, when they did that, they were not referring to the culture itself so much as the Western culture curriculum at Stanford.
And what they wanted to do was mobilize against Removing these requirements of studying the great books.
And I remember at that time I thought, well, okay, they're, you know, they're trying to remake the university.
But isn't it interesting that as we fast forward now, the remaking of the university was a prelude to remaking society at large.
You're not just trying to get rid of the Western Civ course.
You're trying to get rid of free speech.
You're trying to get rid of freedom of assembly.
You're trying to You're trying to actually take down the architecture of the West.
Yeah, totally.
And, you know, due process too, of course.
I mean, one of my kind of, you know, personal, one of my kind of, I guess, red pill moments, for lack of a better term.
I've been a conservative my entire life, since I was 12 years old.
You know, 9-11 happened when I was 12, and immediately I saw right then and there that evil exists in this world.
And once you realize that there is this dichotomy between good and evil, you're basically a conservative, whether you realize it or not.
But in any event, personally speaking, and kind of my journey, You know, one of my like truly kind of, almost kind of self radicalization moments was the 2018 Brett Kavanaugh interrogation where Kamala Harris, frankly, and Cory Booker and many of the others, you know, listened to Christine Blasey for the whole hashtag Believe All Women campaign.
And they threw out 5,000 years approximately of civilizational norms pertaining to innocent until proven guilty.
That is ultimately what they are after.
It's not just Israel.
It's not just the Jews.
They truly are after the eradication of freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, as you said.
Obviously your second amendment right to keep and bear arms, that goes without saying.
But even something as simple that we once took for granted as your actual due process, innocent until proven guilty rights, that to me was yet another kind of major mask off moment.
And again, that really is what the woke Irani, the Islamists, they're both going at it.
And that's why they find themselves, you know, locking arms and joining forces to try to tear down the entire edifice that we have all built.
Guys, I've been talking to Josh Hammer, Senior Editor-at-Large at Newsweek.
You can follow him on X at Josh underscore Hammer.
The book to keep an eye out for, Israel and Civilization, The Fate of the Jewish Nation, and The Destiny of the West.
Josh, thank you very much for joining me.
Always a pleasure.
Thank you.
I'm picking up my discussion of Booker T. Washington.
We are in chapter six of his Up From Slavery.
And in my view, this is one of the, you know, if I were to recommend ten great books about America, let's say to someone who is not exposed to America, This would probably be, well, in the upper half of my list because it's so accessible.
Anyone can read it, as I did originally in India, long before coming to America.
And yet, its themes are not, in the end, just about Booker T. Washington.
They have a much wider reach and resonance.
Now, when we left off, Booker T. Washington has agreed to take on the supervision.
In fact, he has the title of being the, quote, house father for a group of Native Americans, American Indians.
And he says at the beginning that this was kind of tough because these people are coming from almost a different cosmology, a different universe.
They had a different psychology.
And yet, says Booker T. Washington, he says, within several weeks, quote, I had the complete confidence of the Indians.
And I think I'm safe in saying I had their love and respect.
So how do you do this?
How do you accomplish this?
Well, he tells you his secret.
Let's find out what it is.
It's actually a very good practical lesson for life for all of us.
He says, I found that they were about like any other human beings, that they responded to kind treatment and resented ill treatment.
Now, this appears to be a truism, a statement of obviousology.
Treat people well and they will respond to you.
Booker T is going to refine this statement into something a little bit more nuanced and important.
Here's what he says.
He says, the things that they disliked the most, I think, were to have their long hair cut, to give up wearing their blankets, and to cease smoking.
So the Indians were like, we'll listen to you, we want to learn from you, but let us have our blankets, and we don't want to cut our hair, and we don't want to stop smoking.
And Booker T. Washington's response is, okay.
Okay, why?
Because his point is, you got to distinguish what is essential from what is secondary.
Sure, in the ideal, you're going to be like, I want everyone to have short hair and look very kind of mannerly.
I want to cut out the smoking, which is obviously not healthy.
But Booker T. Washington's point is, I need to get through to these people.
I'm trying to introduce them to the basic ingredients of civilization, and they're not going to come over in one jump.
This is not like a fence where they just vault over the fence and they're like, okay, I'm yours, do, you know.
No.
I mean, I even think of the early Christians when they went out, and think about it, they went beyond The Middle East, they were encountering pagans, they were encountering Hindus, they were encountering polytheists, people of, you know, Bedouins who had sort of no religious framework at all, or at least no recognizable one to the early Christians.
They had to figure out a way to communicate and get through to these people, and this is really what Booker T. Washington is dealing with.
And he makes this comment.
He goes, no white American ever thinks any other race is civilized until he wears the white man's clothes, eats the white man's food, speaks the white man's language, and professes the white man's religion.
I hear Booker T sounds a little bit like a liberal, but he's not.
He's simply saying, look, when you are trying to communicate a culture and a philosophy, let's take the example that I used a moment ago about Christianity.
Which is more important?
To convince this other guy who doesn't speak your language, doesn't have your religion, doesn't have really any framework?
Which is more important?
To teach him to wear pants and a shirt, eat with a knife and fork, say good morning and good evening?
Is that more important?
Or is it more important for that person to recognize that there is a transcendent being, a God, who made them, who made the universe, who has laws, that if you follow those, not only are you being obedient, but it will make your life better.
Those are the sort of essentials that you're trying to get across.
And if you have to do it to some guy who's, you know, wearing a turban or dressed up in a kind of loose cloth wrapped around his waist, who cares?
This is what Booker T. Washington is saying.
He then says, he says, when it comes to learning trades and mastering academic studies, he goes, I found there was little difference between the colored and the Indian students.
So they're very different from each other, but guess what?
They can both learn and they can both develop a practical affinity for trades.
And then Booker T. Washington, in a sort of slight pivot, tells an anecdote involving Frederick Douglass.
And it's not immediately obvious why he is telling you this anecdote, but the moment you hear the anecdote, I think the reason does become clear, and that is that Booker T. Washington is saying that when you are trying to get through to people, don't assault their dignity.
Don't make them feel like they are somehow degraded or lesser people because then it creates a barrier that it's difficult to get across or it's difficult to overcome.
And so he goes, this reminds me of a conversation I once had with the Honorable Frederick Douglass.
And I'm like, whoa, hold on.
You've got Frederick Douglass, the great black hero of the 19th century, friend of Abraham Lincoln, the great abolitionist.
Until I read this, I didn't even know that there was any connection between these two men.
Booker T. Washington, by the way, was, you know, he was six years old when Frederick Douglass was out there distributing pamphlets and agitating for the end of slavery.
So, they're not the same generation.
And yet, interestingly, they met.
And let's figure out what happened.
At one time, Mr. Douglass was traveling in the state of Pennsylvania.
And he was forced, on account of his color, to ride in the same baggage car in spite of the fact that he had paid the same price for his passage than the other passengers who had paid.
Okay, so what happens is that there is a kind of colored baggage car.
This is the early days of segregation.
And there is a kind of a white car.
Frederick Douglass pays the fee to be in the main car.
And no, they're like, you have to go sit in the black car.
Now, this is so embarrassing because Frederick Douglass is not only a friend of the former president Lincoln, he has been the ambassador to Haiti, he's been a senior diplomat, he's actually one of the most, he holds a great eminence and is recognized to do that in the United States.
So the moment that white people who are sitting in the kind of white man's car hear about this, they get out of the car and they walk over to the black car to talk to Frederick Douglass.
And when some of the white passengers went into the baggage car to console Mr. Douglas, and one of them said to him, I'm sorry, Mr. Douglas, that you have been degraded in this manner.
Mr. Douglas straightened himself on the box upon which he was sitting.
Think of it, he doesn't even have a seat.
They're just some boxes on the ground, and he's sitting on one of those.
And Douglas replies, they cannot degrade Frederick Douglas.
The soul that is within me no man can degrade.
I am not the one that is being degraded on account of this treatment, but those who are inflicting it on me.
So what is Douglas saying?
He's basically saying, look, who are the low class people around here?
Not me.
If they grab me and stick me into this car, they're not degrading me.
Yeah, they're using force upon me in the sense that I'm not allowed to enter the other car.
But the people who are doing that are, you may say, showing their true colors.
And so Douglas here, it's not that he doesn't recognize the ill treatment.
He does recognize it.
But he doesn't allow it to crush him.
And he doesn't allow it to undermine his dignity.
And you can see right here that Booker T. Washington agrees.
He's of the same mind.
This is actually going to be critical to Booker T. Washington's own philosophy going forward.
In fact, it's more identified with Booker T. Washington than it is with Frederick Douglass.
But isn't it interesting?
This is one way in which you can identify the conservative.
This is the conservative habit of mind.
Now, to the liberal, they don't see it this way, for the simple reason that to them, the only issue is the rule.
Segregation.
And so, for the liberal, if the rule is unfair, and the rule is degrading you, you're degraded.
You have no way to respond other than to feel degraded.
And so, the reaction of of Frederick Douglass and the approval of that reaction by Booker T. Washington is a bit of a surprise.
You've got a person who is admittedly being ill-treated, who nevertheless does not feel degraded, and why not?
Because they believe, rightly I think, that there is an inner part of them, i.e.
the soul, and you can't touch that.
I mean, this is what Solzhenitsyn says about the gulag.
He says, okay, you got me.
My hands are tied behind my back.
You've stripped me down to my underwear.
I'm sitting in, you know, I'm looking at a barbed wire fence and I can't get out.
And so, in every way, you can torment and inflict pain on my body.
There's another part of me that's inside of me and that is unassailable.
You can't reach that.
You can't touch it.
That part remains free.
And so this is the thing that Booker T. Washington is getting at.
The difference is that he doesn't really He doesn't expound philosophically on any of this.
This is kind of why I'm doing it.
What Booker T. Washington does is, in a very kind of folksy way, he tells you the anecdote, and then he sort of moves on.
And he allows you to sort of dwell on it, think about it, and try to draw what you can out of it.
And I find, reading this book page upon page, there's just a lot to draw on.