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Aug. 14, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
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ROAD TO VENEZUELA Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep896
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Coming up, Trump is filing a case against the DOJ for the Mar-a-Lago raid.
I'll also talk about socialism and Kamala Harris.
Author and political commentator James Lindsay joins me.
He's going to talk about a new film available on Salem Now that is called Beneath Sheep's Clothing.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy, in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
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I want to talk in this opening segment about a new development involving Trump and the various cases that he's involved in, and then I want to talk about Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and the issue of socialism.
Now with regard to Trump, he is He has filed an intent to file a lawsuit against the DOJ for the Mar-a-Lago raid.
And the Mar-a-Lago raid, we know, was completely unconscionable.
There was no reason for it.
The Trump people were in negotiations about which documents belonged with the NARA, the National Records people, the archives, and which documents belonged with Trump.
This raid was just a raw exercise of brutality and power, and it came with a lethal force instruction.
That's that little detail that makes the whole thing even more creepy, which was, use lethal force if necessary on the former President of the United States and his family and his entourage and his protective detail.
So let's digest that for a moment.
And then what happens, and one of the good things about these kinds of cases, is that when you have a legal filing, you learn a little bit of new information.
The new information we learn is that Trump is spending 60 million dollars a year defending these cases.
And that's part of what he points out in the lawsuit, that this is not only a huge consumption of time, but also of expense.
And try to imagine anyone else, any other candidate, for example, facing this kind of liability.
I mean, Trump is a billionaire.
He can endure this kind of thing.
He can deal with it and still stay economically afloat.
But when you're looking at these verdicts, you know, put up 125 million dollars as a bond.
I mean, most people would just utterly kind of fold under that kind of legal pressure.
And it is a measure of Trump's, not just his tenacity, but also his means that he can hang in there.
The other thing we learn is that the FBI acting ombudsman, this is a sort of FBI overseer, his name is Maury, M-O-R-E-Y, Chancellor Nat Maury.
We have a an internal document that that he sent to Paul To one of the senior officials in the DOJ, Paul Abate, A-B-B-A-T-E.
I'm not quite sure how to pronounce that.
Anyway, in any event, here's what he says.
He says, I am getting a lot of comments from within the FBI that this Mar-a-Lago raid was completely outrageous.
And he quotes some of these comments.
Did this really just happen?
Am I dreaming?
The FBI served a search warrant on a former president?
The news is saying it's about documents.
Did this really just happen?
Another FBI source.
I've just about lost all faith in our leadership.
Obviously they forgot Crossfire Hurricane.
If he took documents, give him a call and ask for them back.
Seriously?
My own agency?
A bunch of Democrat political hacks.
This is from inside the FBI.
Here's another comment from an FBI agent.
When you're at it, please ask them why we break out all the tools and enforce a federal misdemeanor of someone walking through the Capitol on January 6th, but people can violate, the statute is cited, 18 U.S.C.
1507 every day, harass Supreme Court justices in broad daylight, on the news, and nothing, all caps, nothing is done about it.
So all of this is somewhat reassuring because it actually shows you that the FBI is not of one mind.
There are people in the FBI who are like, this is wrong, and they're going to the ombudsman who's in charge of overseeing all this, and this guy is then telling the people at the top of the DOJ, this is what I'm hearing.
What is the rationale for what you're doing?
It's obvious that he, the ombudsman, is on the side of these people making the protests.
And the good thing is, this is the kind of document that Trump can introduce to show that it was the Democrat political appointees at the highest level that wanted to do this to him because he was their chief political opponent.
So the thrust of the lawsuit is, This was a harassment tactic.
And as a result, you owe me damages because of what you've done.
The legal expenses and perhaps a lot of the other logistical inconveniences and the other costs, both in terms of time and in terms of money.
So we'll watch this to see where it goes.
Now, I mentioned the issue of socialism.
And Kamala Harris.
And Kamala Harris has repeatedly said, I am not a socialist.
Now, for some people, it might be, well, Dinesh, there you go.
She's told you herself, she's not a socialist.
But the point is, socialists often deny that they are socialists.
Not always, but usually they do.
Castro, at the very beginning, denied he was a socialist.
In fact, he said he was not a socialist.
It's only once he got power and was able to consolidate his power that he was upfront about his socialist convictions.
Hugo Chavez, the same.
Denied he was a socialist and only founded the Socialist Party of Venezuela, what was it, honey?
Several years, many years after he came to power.
So he came to power in the late 1990s.
The Socialist Party of Venezuela started in the 2000s.
So, this is in fact a pattern.
And you might ask, well, what is the reason for the pattern?
Well, the reason for the pattern is that the socialists seem to know that socialism isn't cool.
Socialism isn't popular.
People don't want socialism.
And so, the only way to Get it is through stealth socialism.
Fortunately for them they can move towards socialism increment by increment denying that that is their destination.
It's kind of like I'm heading to Chicago and you know I'm leaving New York and yeah I'm on the way and I'm going from highway to highway on my way to Chicago but people ask me I'm like oh no no I'm not going to Chicago I'm Headed in that direction, but I give an independent rationale all along the way.
Oh, I'm going to Raleigh.
Oh, I'm going here.
I'm going there.
And this is the Kamala Harris tactic.
What is really clear is that the socialist move, which began quite decisively under Obama.
I mean, look, one can find a socialist anchor in the Democratic Party going all the way back to FDR.
In fact, going all the way back to Woodrow Wilson.
The progressive ideology is a cousin of socialism and has been from the beginning.
What they have in common is the managerial state.
Now, of course, one of the distinctions is that the welfare state was democratic, but of course there are people who are advocates of democratic socialism, in which the people vote for socialism, socialism is then introduced at the behest of the people, and then you get the socialist policies, one after the other.
But the point I'm trying to make is that there's a trend in this direction that began under Obama.
It's escalated dramatically under Biden.
It has all the signature elements of the new type of socialism that we're dealing with in our own age.
Not the classical Marxism, but the identity socialism described in my book, United States of Socialism.
Read about that, get that book because it lays out the type of socialism that we're dealing with now.
The type of socialism that the socialists believe is sellable, is a socialism that can implement itself.
And so it's pretty clear that if Obama is ratchet number one, Biden and Harris are ratchet number two, and then Harris-Waltz will be ratchet number three.
And they say it.
They say things.
One of Kamala's big slogans is, we are not going back.
It's kind of a peculiar slogan because most people would like to go back.
Things have obviously deteriorated dramatically under Biden, but she means something a little different than that.
I think she means, we're going to go further down the socialist road.
To her, what is back, in the back of her, is markets, it's capitalism, It's Christianity.
It's traditional society.
She means we're not returning to any of that.
And in that respect, it seems to me quite accurate to describe this as a march toward socialism.
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I want to talk about something that I alluded to yesterday, which is the issue of this Algerian boxer named Khalif and Iman Khalif.
And the issue of whether this guy, Iman Khalif, fighting in the women's division of the Olympics is a man or is a woman.
Khalif's trainer has said that this guy has, quote, a problem with chromosomes.
A problem with chromosomes.
And the trainer goes on to say that not only has Khalif been barred from fighting in the women's division in a number of boxing federations, so the IOC, the International Olympic Committee, was not in the mainstream in allowing him to do it.
But the trainer also says that when he went to a training retreat in Madrid, he was found to be so strong that they couldn't have him spar or train with any female boxers.
He was too vicious.
He was hitting too hard.
He was obviously hitting with the strength of a man.
And so they had him spar against Jose Quiles, who is one of Spain's top male boxers.
So what we're getting at here is that the IOC had a lot of evidence.
Here you've got these other federations saying, you know what, this guy is really not a woman.
Then you've got the evidence that he's in fact training with male boxers, no surprise, because he has XY chromosomes.
And then to me the most amusing detail of all, a female boxer who did fight This is a woman, she did a sparring match with him in Sofia, Bulgaria.
The female boxer says her name is Joanna Nwamure.
So she's of African descent, but living in Bulgaria.
And she says that she objected to fighting this guy.
And she says that the Algerian team came and told her that this guy, Khalif, is a woman because his chromosomes were biologically altered by living in the mountains.
Now, this woman named Joanna says, I'm just quoting her, she says, Khalif has some kind of internal issues, which is a way of saying that he does have a medical problem.
Apparently, as I mentioned before, this Khalif may, at least according to one sort of diagnosis or one medical analysis that I read, he could have testosterone, but his receptors didn't Kind of latch on to them or express them.
So he actually has female genitalia, but he has male chromosomes He has XY chromosomes and and so Joanna goes, but he is a man She says I think we played three to four sparring sessions.
I can confirm that this is a man male plow power men's techniques everything she goes on to say She goes on to say, Iman is not a man, she's a woman and lives high in the mountains.
She says, everywhere there are people who live in the mountains. This is absurd.
So the idea that somehow by living high in the mountains your chromosomes get altered and men become women and presumably women become men, it's just utter nonsense.
It comes back to my theory that the Algerians were kind of having fun here.
They realized, listen, these stupid Westerners are willing to allow a male boxer into the female division.
Okay, fine, we'll get one of our tough guys.
We happen to have this guy.
He's the perfect candidate because, after all, this is a guy, even if you look at his pictures when he was really young, he's in a dress.
So, hey, there's proof.
He's obviously thinking of himself as a woman.
And so, but the woman, Joanna, who's commenting, she says, you know, there are people who don't understand combat sports.
So let me explain.
She says, it's basically like pitting a motorcycle against a bicycle.
And this, to me, is actually a very dramatic and clear way to put it.
What she's really saying is that there's a kind of inherent unfairness to it.
There's no competition.
Just as somebody riding a bike couldn't possibly compete against somebody riding a motorcycle, similarly, someone who's genetically a woman is not going to be able to fight in general against someone who's a man.
Now, again, you can find obviously very strong women and very weak men, but when you're talking about competitive sports, you're not going to have very strong women and very weak men.
You're going to get very strong women and very strong men.
And that's when the differences become decisive.
So...
So this controversy, I think, has illustrated the fact, and I think the IOC is a little bit wounded by all this, because I've seen very defensive commentary by the head of the IOC.
Essentially, what he's saying is that, look, this is not a transgender issue.
And in fairness, Iman, this is a rare case of a guy who apparently was raised as a girl.
In fact, there is a description in one of the news reports about the fact that when the doctors told him that he had male chromosomes, he was kind of confused and shocked.
He didn't understand how he could have male chromosomes because he thought of himself as a girl.
So, this is a rare case.
This is not a case of someone who just decides in their teens, you know, I think I identify as a woman and so I'm a woman.
No, and this is apparently one of those maladies that produces someone who is genetically male, but apparently has female sex organs, has been raised as a girl.
And so it's a confusing case.
And the head of the IOC was like, listen, you know, we want to do the right thing.
We're only trying to let women fight in the division.
This is not a case of somebody who is trans.
We are, based on the evidence we reviewed, we're concluding that this Iman is a woman.
So evidently he's using passports, early childhood photos, and that sort of thing, and not going based upon... So the real issue becomes, like, what is the science saying in this peculiar case?
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H, Dinesh.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast James Lindsay.
He is a political commentator and author.
He's also a mathematician.
He's written eight books on a variety of subjects, education, postmodern theory, critical race theory.
The newest book, The Marxification of Education.
And James is also featured in a new film.
It's called Wolf in Sheep's Clothing, and it's available on Salem Now.
So just go to SalemNow.com.
The movie is called Wolf in Sheep's Clothing.
By the way, you can follow James on X, at ConceptualJames.
James, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you for joining me.
Let's talk about this notion of a wolf in sheep's clothing.
I see that Kamala Harris, for example, has repeatedly said, I'm not a socialist.
I'm a capitalist.
And so you have a candidate, and in a way a party, that seems to be moving in the socialist direction, not only on economic but on cultural matters and social and moral issues, and yet denying that socialism is its destination.
My conjecture is that that is because they have to deny it because they know that socialism isn't popular, people don't want socialism.
Is that why the wolf has to put on sheep's clothing?
Because otherwise people would go, hey, there's a wolf!
Yeah, well, that's one of the two reasons that somebody like Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party would, but in general, yes, that is.
This model of kind of being a wolf in sheep's clothing has come directly from the Fabian Socialist model, which is also known as English Socialism, which was very famously portrayed as what it would look like if it got totalitarian power by George Orwell.
He called it Ingsoc for English Socialism and he depicted that in the book 1984.
So that's the Fabian Socialist model, their crest, their coat of arms.
People should go look it up.
Type in the Fabian Socialist coat of arms in any search engine and what you're going to find out is that it is a shield with a wolf in sheep's clothing.
That is literally their coat of arms.
And the reason is that they knew that they had to infiltrate corporations and boardrooms.
They knew that they had to infiltrate government.
They had to infiltrate, as Klaus Schwab put it, they have to penetrate the cabinets.
And they have to work their way in.
And then their other motto is, when we strike, we strike hard.
Which is why you see this slow, slow, slow progression where it doesn't, you're not quite sure if it's socialism and then Keir Starmer becomes prime minister with a major labor win.
The labor party was a Fabian project actually and it's still heavily supported and Keir Starmer is a Fabian socialist and wham, they strike immediately and you have this massive consolidation of power because when they strike, they strike hard.
The symbol on that motto where they published it is with a turtle.
So they move very slowly, but when they hit, they hit hard.
So that's one of the two reasons.
The other reason is because we actually have a new model.
Communism has taken up a new model.
It is what I call corporate communism, or sometimes communism 3.0.
And they realize that the way to take over the West is because the business of America is business, is through corporate power.
Government power alone isn't going to do it with a massive free enterprise system.
You have to take over the corporations as well.
So the infiltration method requires them to hide who they really are so they can get inside.
And as they say, not just boring from within, boring within, but also doing the job and bringing their ideology to transform institutions from the inside out.
Which is exactly what we've seen.
In China, they call this one country, two systems.
That was Deng Xiaoping's description of it.
You'll have simultaneously a communist system to run the government and a national socialist or fascist system of corporate power to run the corporations at behest of the government.
And so this model since the late 1970s and maybe 1980s has slipped under the radar of Western thinkers trying to diagnose what's going on, but that's what it is.
I mean, this is very interesting, James, because it seemed, if we flash back to the middle of the 20th century, that Maoism in its classic form, which of course developed as a socialism of the countryside, was radically antithetical to corporations, to big business, and so it didn't seem to be a model with any sort of export power, so to speak, that anybody else outside of China would take it up.
But I think what you're saying is that the post-Deng Xiaoping model, which is China encourages business, but in a sense links arms between business and the state.
That is something that we're seeing here.
My question is this.
Most people who go start a business or go into corporations or get out of business school, they're by and large motivated by making money.
They accept that business is all about profit.
You got to make a good product and the Silicon Valley guys think that no less than the Wall Street guys.
So where is there room in that for these Fabian socialists to creep in?
And how do they take over these enterprises that would seem to be institutionally committed to the business of making money?
Well, that was the mystery.
The Fabian Socialist Society was established in 1884, hence one century later being 1984 for George Orwell's title.
And they weren't able to figure this out really until the middle 2010s, which is when the ESG phenomenon actually was the laws were changed in investment by Barack Obama.
And it opened up the ability to do ESG investing on a scale that's never been considered before.
So before that, it wasn't possible to make this profitable for the individuals involved.
It's profitable for them, not for their corporations because now they don't have to make a good product and pay attention necessarily to the American especially or Western consumer market.
They're paying attention to what their stock prices are doing and how they're fluctuating and what rewards they get in terms of executive compensation by being ESG compliant.
So these big financial entities, these asset managers like BlackRock and Vanguard and State Street can pull them around and create an incentive structure that's more profitable for the players involved to do that than to run a good company.
Simultaneously, they've built up this productive socialism, if we might use that kind of oxymoronic term under the Deng Xiaoping model in China.
And you have the largest consumer economy and the largest world's manufacturing base for cheap labor happening in China.
So the Chinese being the Deng Xiaoping said all of what he was doing would be for the glory of socialism and to advance what he called communism with Chinese characteristics.
Since they have this massive two-pronged lever, which is a giant consumer economy of over a billion people and the manufacturing base of the world, they can set the terms.
If you want access to their market or if you want to be able to do your manufacturing, your primary manufacturing in China, you have to play by the Chinese CCP's, I should say, model.
You have to agree to what they are.
For example, former Congressman Dennis Kucinich, Was talking on the Tim pool Tim cast show a few months ago and said that when he was in office now this was a while ago 10 years ago when he was in office Boeing representatives would come and lobby his office frequently to change the rules because part of the price of admission for Boeing to the Chinese market would be to hand over
Various details of how Boeing aircraft are made the usual scam is if you want to have a Boeing aircraft That's going to be taken up by say Air China That's fine But Boeing has to give us the instructions on how to manufacture the landing gear and the landing gear will be made in China So now they get that intellectual property of how to create advanced landing gear which of course they apply in the Chinese military
That anecdote, as you describe it, I think I would normally interpret in a different way, that this is the classic case of large powers trying to jostle for power in a kind of dangerous world.
However, I'm struck by something that Obama once said.
He was quoted in the New York Times saying that he had a sort of a secret envy for the way things were done in China.
And I think he was talking about the fact that you don't have separation of powers.
You don't have checks and balances.
Basically, the leadership decides, we're going to do it this way.
So do you think that the American left is self-consciously Knowingly saying, hey, the Chinese have got it going on.
They've figured out this new type of socialism, which, as you mentioned, is actually somewhat close to fascism to the degree that it represents a marriage between the private and the public sector.
But with the public sector remaining firmly in charge, Do you think that American elites recognize that the Chinese model is one that they're trying to implement here, and that globalism is maybe the umbrella under which this model becomes universalized?
Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
You, by the way, also heard Justin Trudeau praise the Chinese model.
You've also heard Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock and a fellow for the or the actually a chairperson for not chairperson, but a executive member of the World Economic Forum and the Council for Foreign Relations say markets like totalitarian governments.
So we force behaviors.
Corporations won't do what they should without being forced.
So we're in the business of forcing behaviors.
And so, yeah, I think that they do.
Covet this and they do like this model, but what a lot of people don't understand is this model for Deng Xiaoping didn't cook up this model He did pull back away from many of Mao's kind of cult of personality and strict programs that he had But he didn't cook it up on his own He was doing it in conjunction with the United States State Department at the time namely Henry Kissinger who was a mentor to both Klaus Schwab at Harvard, but also to
So, Henry Kissinger, along with David Rockefeller, visited Deng Xiaoping.
Brzezinski was there as well.
Allegedly, T.H.
Chan, for whom the T.H.
Chan School of Public Health at Harvard was named after, was there as well.
And this model was developed.
in kind of a committee as an opportunity to help both sides.
The West would be able to get rich by creating this consumer market and being able to sell products in it.
And of course, Deng Xiaoping was out foxing these guys and fully understood that it was going to create a gigantic power of leverage for the Chinese and to be able to push this system everywhere.
So then you see Obama and you see Justin Trudeau and you see Larry Fink salivating to have this kind of system for the West so that they can profit off of it in both political power and in financial corporate arenas.
I mean, this is very interesting because I remember flashing back to the 80s and 90s when this sort of trade opened up in a big way between China and the West, the libertarians in the United States were extremely excited.
And they thought that this would be the globalization of free trade.
Wonderful for China and wonderful for the United States.
It would create a prosperity boom in America because products would now cost half of what they cost before because they'd be made with cheaper labor.
And the Chinese would benefit not only economically, but there would be new pressures created by an emerging Chinese middle class to make China more democratic.
You'd see more respect for human rights in China now.
None of this has even happened and it almost seems like the formula that the libertarians thought would move things in the freedom direction was hijacked to move things in a more tyrannical or totalitarian direction.
Do you agree with that analysis?
And how did the libertarians get it so wrong?
Well, I think that, you know, I think they underestimated how committed to socialism Deng Xiaoping and his his acolytes that followed him actually were.
I think that they thought that, you know, the people would be able to rise up.
But the Chinese people had been extraordinarily transformed by the Cultural Revolution and They now had a leader who appeared to be delivering goods to them that they didn't have before.
So why buck the system?
We have this great government that's now delivering the goods and making us not just comfortable, but in many cases, fabulously wealthy and really raising China up and raising China up very quickly.
And so they became extraordinarily big fans.
It's at least half of the population of China, even with the strict security and surveillance state that they have, is a huge fan of how the Chinese government runs things.
And so the libertarians didn't understand what it's like to have a system that can deliver the goods, but that has totalitarian ideology driving it.
I mean, it's almost like saying that, you know, tyranny with prosperity is better than tyranny with poverty, right?
In other words, if the Chinese became habituated to tyranny over the long span of 50 years of Maoism, and then suddenly they'd realize, hey, we have washing machines, we have nice cars, we have Chinese millionaires and even billionaires, we have the right to travel all over the world, we have Louis Vuitton bags, suddenly they realize that this is not so bad compared to what we had before,
In some ways, I wonder if the libertarians were even wrong about human nature in the sense that I think that the underlying assumption was that human beings have a natural yearning for liberty.
The moment you open up the society in any way, give them a modicum of prosperity, they're going to want their rights.
They're going to want freedom.
And maybe that's not true.
Yeah, perhaps not.
They also, I think, misunderstood the level of commitment that American and other Western business leaders had to their respective countries.
It turns out, I think, that once you get to be a big enough deal financially, you don't have any particular tie.
If the U.S.
goes south, you can just go to China.
You can just go somewhere else.
And so they didn't have any particular loyalty to doing this for the glory of America, whereas Ironically, given that they're a communist country, China did have this is all for the glory of China and specifically for the glory of socialism, which is going to be advanced more and more by this.
And so they misunderstood the nature of the American business elite as well, which saw this reservoir of potential profits and jumped on them with very little loyalty to what it meant for the United States and its long-term viability as a country.
I mean, this proves Adam Smith right again when he says that the businessman is not only not loyal to his country, he's not even loyal to the free market that enables his own prosperity.
The moment the businessman gets a subsidy from the government, he's going to jump on it and take advantage of it.
And I think the great irony you're pointing out is that while the American business CEOs don't want to make America great again, the Chinese want to make China great again, or greater than ever before, perhaps.
Guys, I've been talking to James Lindsay.
The movie, which you should watch, Wolf in Sheep's Clothing, it's available right now on SalemNow.
You can go to watch.salemnow.com and find it right there.
James, thank you very much for joining me.
Thanks, Dinesh.
I'm discussing Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery.
We're in Chapter 6.
And the last time I narrated the anecdote told by Booker T. Washington about a conversation he had with Frederick Douglass.
When I first came across this, I didn't realize that the two men had even met.
And as far as I know, this anecdote does not appear in any of the writings of Frederick Douglass.
We only know about it because it's relayed here by Booker T. Washington.
So Douglass told Washington and Washington included it in this, uh, in this autobiography.
Washington has a real gift for anecdote, and he doesn't resist telling anecdotes that are slightly on the salty side.
I don't mean obscene or vulgar in any way, but I mean ironic, playful, sometimes even a little controversial, and he always does it with a kind of gentle, tongue-in-cheek tone.
Here's a classic example, which comes right after the discussion of Frederick Douglass.
There was a man who was well known in this community as a negro, but who was so white that even an expert would have hard work classifying him as a black man.
That line alone is kind of amusing because, first of all, Booker T. Washington is acting as if there are resident experts who can look at somebody and tell if they're black or white.
What he's getting at here is, and he never mentions this, but he's talking about the sort of absurdity of the one-drop rule, the idea that any admixture of black somehow makes you a black man.
And yet, some sort of rule like that was needed to enforce segregation, because if there's a color spectrum from black to white, well, where do you draw the line?
Who gets to sit in the black compartment?
Do you have to be 50% black or 75% black?
And how's the conductor going to know?
So they essentially solved that problem by saying, hey, listen, if you have kind of any visible black at all, then you're black.
So Booker T knows all this.
And this is the background against which he's giving us this anecdote.
The man was riding in the part of the train set aside for colored passengers.
So the guy sees himself as black.
He's probably raised in a black family.
He goes and sits in the colored car.
When the train conductor reached him, he showed at once that he was perplexed.
This has to be somewhat humorous.
The conductor's like, wait, I seem to see a white man sitting in the black compartment.
And Booker T goes, if the man was a Negro, the conductor didn't want to send him to the white people's coach.
At the same time, if he was a white man, the conductor didn't want to insult him.
by asking him if he was a negro.
So, here's Booker T, and you can see what he's doing.
He's actually making fun of the one-drop rule, but he's doing it not in a kind of polemical or ideological way.
He's just telling an anecdote, and from the anecdote, you can glean, you can see that this rule makes no sense.
The official looked him over carefully, examining his hair, nose, and hands, but still seemed puzzled.
I mean, the humor continues.
Here you have a conductor and he's like, bending down and peering at this guy like, is he white?
Is he black?
And then here's how the problem gets solved.
When I saw the conductor closely examining the feet of the man in question, I said to myself, that will settle it.
So Booker T. Walsh was like, well, you know, there's one thing that's a total giveaway, and that is a man's feet.
Now why the feet?
This is kind of my guess.
It's because the rest of you can be tanned by the sun.
But if you're wearing long pants, your feet are going to be covered no matter what.
So the feet are going to be kind of a giveaway.
And then he says, And so it did, for the train man promptly decided the passenger was a negro.
Let him remain where he was.
And then here's Booker T. Washington's very surprising punchline.
I congratulated myself that my race was fortunate in not losing one of its members.
So, notice here that we might expect Booker T. Washington to go in one direction, like, to say something like, well, this just shows you the tragedy of segregation or the impossibility of the one-drop rule.
None of that.
Booker T. Washington basically goes, well, I guess we were on the verge of losing this black guy.
He was going to be sort of stuck into the white column.
But, no, we get to keep him.
So, hey, we, you know, we're plus one.
That's the very light humor that Booker T wanted.
Notice that Booker T knows that this is a very sensitive topic.
He's not going to go for like a major knee slapper, open ridicule, none of that.
He's going to go for gentle irony coming right out of the anecdote.
It's as if he's just telling you a story.
But these stories are not any sort of stories.
They're carefully picked.
There's a great deal of art that goes into this book and I think it is the art of moral education.
In other words, what Booker T. Washington is doing is he's teaching us we have to do a little bit of work in going beyond what he's actually showing us to figure out why he's showing us this and what does it actually mean.
And then he goes, an example of what I mean.
is shown in a story told of George Washington.
So here's Booker T going from one anecdote to another, but these are anecdotes separated in time.
The first anecdote, obviously, is around the turn of the 20th century, the late 1900s.
Booker T, of course, is publishing the book in 1901.
So I'm sorry, the late 1800s is what I mean.
But then he goes a century earlier or more to tell a story about George Washington.
George Washington, who, meeting a colored man in the road, who politely lifted his hat, lifted his own in return.
So here's what happens.
Washington is going down the street.
A black man comes by, lifts his hat and doffs his hat to Washington.
Washington lifts and doffs his hat to the man, and the two of them keep walking.
Now, some of his white friends who saw this happen criticized Washington for his action.
In reply to their criticism, Washington said, Do you suppose I'm going to permit a poor, ignorant, colored man to be more polite than I am?
Now, this is very interesting because what is Booker T. Washington conveying In this anecdote.
Why is it here?
What is the point of it?
Well, the point of it, ultimately, I think, is that Booker T is writing here both for a white and a black audience.
And he's trying to educate both.
But the education is not the same.
He's trying to educate blacks in the idea of self-improvement.
How do you go about improving yourself step-by-step?
What is the logical progression of bettering your life?
And he's educating whites in what is the best way to treat blacks.
And what he's getting at here is a point that was made in a different way even by Thomas Jefferson, namely, noblesse oblige, which is to say Booker T. Washington is saying, I know that a lot of you white guys in the South think of yourself as superior to blacks.
Nothing I can say at this point is going to convince you otherwise.
So, what I'm going to try to do is teach you that even if you think you're superior, not that Booker T. Washington is ever agreeing that whites are inherently superior.
He probably would agree that in terms of education, refinement, speaking the English language, culture, whites are ahead of blacks.
There is no dispute really about that.
But what he's trying to say here to the whites is, even if you think that you're inherently better, there is a good reason for you to treat black people well, and that is your own dignity.
Do you actually want to be outmatched by some working-class black guy?
He takes off his hat, he shows that he has more gentlemanly politeness than you do?
No!
So the point of telling the Washington story, I think, is to Ask whites in the south to follow the example of their fellow southerner.
Notice that George Washington is from Virginia.
He's a southern gentleman.
No wonder his friends are like, are you really going to take your hat off to a black man?
And Washington's like, yes, I am.
I'm going to show him the same politeness that he's showing me.
And then Booker T goes on to talk about, he comes back to the scene where we sort of last left him.
He is in charge of this group of American Indians.
And he is their, quote, house father.
He's supposed to not only educate them in the matters of learning, but also in matters of behavior, civilization, and culture.
And he says at one point, one of these Indian boys got ill, and he had to take him to Washington D.C.
for medical treatment.
And he says, during my journey to Washington on a steamboat, when the bell rang for dinner, he says, he waited, and he said that once the passengers had finished their meal, remember this is segregation, he's not allowed to eat with the white guests, and so he's like, all right, I'll wait, and he waits, and then he says, he and my charge, the Indian fellow, the two of them walk out together.
And then he says, the man in charge politely informed me that the Indian could be served, but I could not.
And Booker T says, I never could understand how he knew just where to draw the color line, since the Indian and I were about the same complexion.
Here's Booker T. back again, talking about the indistinctness of this color line, the sort of inherent absurdity of the way in which it is enforced.
He goes, if you're actually going by color, this Indian fellow, meaning American Indian, and I, Booker T. Washington, by the way, has a white father and a black mom.
So he's not, he's, you know, he's Obama's color.
He's intermediate between white and black.
And so he's like, yeah, I'm about the same complexion as the American Indian.
So why are you singling me out and not that guy?
And the answer is, there is no reason.
The reason is basically simply that segregation was implemented to be enforced kind of against blacks.
It wasn't really aimed at the American Indians.
So the American Indians were sometimes affected by it, because after all, they weren't white per se.
Certainly racially, they're different than whites, but they weren't black either.
And so a lot of times they fell on this side or that side of the line.
No one really cared.
And in this particular case, the guy in the steamboat goes, well, we can serve this guy.
He's clearly not black.
You seem to be, so we're not serving you.
And Booker T. Washington gives a second example of how this happens to him at a hotel.
They stop by, the American Indian gets to go into a room, and Booker T. is told, sorry, there's no room for you at this hotel.
You know, there are some people, when they write about Booker T., they act as if he is okay with segregation.
It's very clear that he is not okay.
He recognizes that this is a fact of life.
He also recognizes that it came out of the bitterness of the Civil War.
He also recognizes it's not going anywhere anytime soon.
So he has to figure out how to deal with it.
And here we see Booker T. in his own way Exposing the absurdity of segregation even as he is compelled in some way to live with it.
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