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Aug. 21, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
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JON VOIGHT ON REAGAN Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep901
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Coming up, the two Obamas were on stage last night at the Democratic National Convention.
I'll give you my review of their speeches.
The legendary actor John Voigt joins me.
We're going to talk about his role in the upcoming new film, Reagan, starring Dennis Quaid playing the lead role.
I'll continue my analysis of Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery.
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The Democratic National Convention is fully underway.
And day one was the insincere tributes to Biden, which I talked about yesterday.
By the way, you know, Biden can probably be found now in some dumpster outside of Chicago.
But it was an attempt to give him a lot of fanfare, act like he had Very nobly put the interests of the country ahead of himself.
And you know, there are different ways to look at this.
Trump and some other people have been taking the line that Biden is being shafted.
This is an undemocratic coup.
I'm not quite even sure how to look at it because it's almost to me that the Democrats operate as a regime or a gang and they have apparatchiks who are their front men.
It's a case where It's like a mafia, but the Don is not the fellow who is fully directing the mafia.
In fact, on the contrary, you could almost say that the organization is directing the Don.
The Don is the guy who has the title.
He's the one who has the meetings.
Maybe to some degree, he makes decisions.
He's certainly the face of the mafia family, but the family has a kind of dynamic of its own.
And the family goes into a huddle.
And the family, remember, went into a huddle to pick Joe Biden.
And so the family went into another huddle to throw him out.
And so to me, he was unceremoniously dumped in very much the same way that he was ceremoniously elevated in the first place.
So, yes, is it undemocratic?
Well, historically, I would have to say no, because historically, Presidential candidates were picked in back rooms by, you know, what was often called the dark, smoky rooms where you have the kind of elders of the party.
Even go back to Abraham Lincoln, the elders of the Republican Party all met and they decided, well, listen, this guy Seward, who's our leading candidate, is a little too extreme.
We're worried that he may not be able to carry some of these Western states that we need to win.
We need maybe a Western man rather than an Eastern man.
There's this guy, Abraham Lincoln, and so they met with him and they came away convinced that he was the guy.
There's a kind of a funny line that one of them, one of the East Coast Republican leaders said to the group, he's like, well, you know, we We could have picked a handsomer guy, but not a better guy than the one we've just met, namely Lincoln.
And so, the idea that parties pick their own candidate using whatever mechanisms they want and then put that candidate in front of the country, I don't think is inherently a violation of democracy.
Now, admittedly, in recent decades, that system has evolved so that each of the two parties doesn't just pick a candidate in the back room, but rather what they do is they have primaries.
And Republicans do have normal primaries.
Democrats apparently don't, or at least they've stopped doing it in the normal fashion.
They were doing it for, you know, a couple of decades since I came to America, but then abruptly, starting with Biden, they have stopped.
And that is notable.
That is worth noting.
So Biden gets the boot.
I think we can set aside all this kind of false praise of Biden.
As I mentioned yesterday, Biden had no intention of leaving.
He was essentially
Pushed out and So we move on to day two and day two belonged to the people who pushed him out now Pelosi was one of those people but I'm really speaking of Michelle and Barack Obama and what I thought was interesting is that they both Had major speeches They were essentially sort of back-to-back in terms of being headliners and this was Obama day at the at the convention now
The Obamas quite clearly have the devotion of the base of the Democratic Party.
You just have to look into the crowd to see the almost apostolic enthusiasm for both Obamas.
And in a way, I think what is interesting about these two characters, Michelle and Barack, they're very different, one from the other.
But nevertheless, they both have a certain, I would have to say, low cunning that you admire from a distance.
Neither of them is particularly bright.
Michelle Obama, if you go back, you can read her college thesis.
It's there.
It's online.
And even though she went to Princeton, if you read her college thesis, you realize this is basically work at the level of the 8th grade.
So you're dealing really with a kind of low-grade dummy.
Christopher Hitchens commenting on the thesis, and I quoted him saying this before, he says, it is not written in any known language.
And I think he knew, Hitchens knew, that he was being a little iconoclastic, but he also knew that anyone who reads the thesis was going to agree.
So Michelle is one of these people who has Very low level of ability, but has been advanced through DEI and affirmative action all her life.
And therefore, this woman is brimming with confidence.
She even says things like, well, you know, we've discovered that we're often the smartest people in the room.
I mean, think about that.
For me to listen to this, it's a little hard for me to digest this kind of stupidity.
But nevertheless, she sort of has a point in that she finds herself at the World Economic Forum, she finds herself in all these elite gatherings, all these important people from, you know, Hollywood to Silicon Valley to Wall Street listen, you know, with eyes wide open, agog, when the Obama speak.
So it's easy to see where they get this idea that they are somehow the anointed ones.
Not just the anointed one, Obama, but a kind of anointed couple.
And of course, there was some speculation, probably dying down now, that somehow even Kamala Harris was merely a sort of placeholder, and that once the convention came around, she would be unceremoniously dumped, just like Biden, Uh, showing the door, and somehow Michelle Obama would become the candidate.
Now, I am kind of amazed at the confidence with which people make these kinds of claims, and then somehow when they're shown to be absolutely wrong, They never back down.
They never go, well that was really stupid on my part.
I don't know what I was thinking to say something so ridiculous.
They simply move on and make other preposterous predictions going forward.
And you'll notice that on this podcast and in general, I try to avoid making You know, refutable statements that are going to embarrass me down the road.
So if I don't know, I won't say.
And if something seems unlikely to me, I'll say that.
And again, you know, it could be that something seems likely to me and it doesn't happen, but I'm not telling you it's going to happen.
I'm just telling you it's possible, or I think this is the way it could go, or these are the reasons why I think this outcome will occur.
So when we come back, I'll talk a little bit more about, I'll talk about what the Obama's talked about.
And I also want to talk about the fact that we should not be misled by rhetoric, we should also look at the policies that are somewhat below the surface, but still there for all to see policies that would do great harm to the United States.
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Go to SalemNow.com at SalemNow.com I'm talking about the Democratic National Convention, and last night was the night of the two Obamas.
Now, in a way, both of them were rapturously received by the audience, but their tone was somewhat different.
Michelle Obama's tone was Essentially appealing to a certain type of social justice.
And her big theme was that we've got to include everybody.
And her theme was also that we can't take more than we're due.
Now, right away, for anyone who knows anything about the Obamas, you realize these are people who live at the highest level of lavishness.
Multiple residences, Calorama, Martha's Vineyard, chefs, private chefs, they travel by private aircraft all over the place, they vacation in all the hotspots in the world, And they are worth really tens of millions of dollars.
They are almost like manna from heaven provided with a 50 million dollar Netflix contract over here.
Money in that dimension.
It's almost like it just rains down on them.
So, it's a little bit hard to listen to them talk in this way.
It's kind of like someone who arrives by private jet to lecture you about why you shouldn't use too much gas in your stove, or you should get an electric car, and you say, well, what about your carbon footprint?
So, Michelle Obama's talk, although well-received by that audience, remember, that's kind of a bubble, was drenched with hypocrisy.
And so was Barack Obama's, but in a less obvious way.
In a way, Obama's theme was related to Michelle's, namely the theme of everyone advancing.
But Obama was, in a way, in his own kind of sly way, Much more cunning about the way that he presented his idea.
He goes, this is now a country which allows people with funny names.
I think he means himself and Kamala Harris.
Yeah, they have funny names.
But nevertheless, the country is big-hearted enough to accommodate these funny names.
Now, Obama goes on with his message and his message is a conservative one, or a conservative-sounding one.
And Obama has always done this.
He did this at Harvard Law School when he convinced conservatives to vote for him for president of Harvard Law Review.
He did this in 2004 at the Democratic National Convention.
He did this at his conventions in 2008 and 2012.
To listen to Obama, you would think you're listening almost to a moderate Republican.
But he's not.
It is all smoke and mirrors.
It is all deceit.
And the point is, really, we know that by now.
We can't pretend, you know, it's kind of like in 1953 or 1952, if you listen to Castro, I am not a socialist, I am not a communist.
There are a lot of well-meaning people who thought, well, maybe he's not.
And then he turns out to be.
But once Castro has been dictator for a decade or two decades and then he says I'm not a communist, well he didn't do that, but if he did, people would be like, what are you saying?
We have been able to observe your actions.
So when Obama now preaches against division, you know that he is the fomenter of division.
He's the arsonist who's showing up as the firefighter.
When Obama talks about inclusion, he doesn't mean including us.
He actually means that he wants to mobilize the powers of the government to exclude those of us that he sees as outside of his American remaking of America.
And so this is a very kind of double-edged rhetoric.
It's almost like you've got to listen to this guy and translate as he goes along.
And so I was doing this both with Obama and Michelle and wondering if that Obama kind of secret sauce was still going over.
I mean, it goes over in the convention to be sure, but is it going over in the country?
I'm less sure about that.
I think a lot of people already have their antenna.
going or already at high alert with regard to Obama.
But we also need to pay attention to the policies that are coming out of this convention and are coming specifically out of Kamala Harris.
Capital gains, 44.6%.
44.6%.
That would be among the highest capital gains rates in the world.
Now, the capital gains rate essentially is the rate on which you are taxed from investment income.
And it has a lot to do with whether or not you're encouraged to make investments in the first place.
I mean, investments are risky.
You know, you can put money in safe places and get 5%, 6% and everyone would do that but you think, oh wait, I may have a chance to make 20% or 30% so I'll take a lot of risks that I might even lose my capital or half of my capital or much of my capital.
Now imagine if you took that risk And you make a dollar, and then the government says, OK, well, give us 44.6 cents of that dollar.
I think to myself, well, wait a minute, that changes the whole equation.
It made sense for me to take the risk if I had the prospect of a bigger gain, because I'm weighing the potential for a bigger gain.
I would much rather go for a safe 5 or a safe 6 and not make the investment in the first place if even if I succeed, they're going to take almost half of what I just made.
It makes no sense for me to do it at that level.
Even countries in Europe, countries that are considered quasi-socialist, have much lower capital gains rates.
And so this also has the implication that money then begins to move elsewhere.
You think, well, wait a minute, why don't I invest my money in Europe?
I'll pay taxes over there on that money.
In other words, you redeploy your resources and people with large amounts of wealth can make those kinds of decisions very easily.
So that's an example of a very destructive policy.
I'll pick this up tomorrow and talk about the U.S.
Citizens Act.
That is also being promoted at the DNC.
And this is a plan that would grant citizenship to millions of illegal migrants.
It would shift the electoral dynamics of the country.
It represents, I think, the single greatest move on the part of the Democrats to create, in this country, a one-party state.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast an Academy Award-winning actor, a legend, Jon Voight.
He began his Broadway career in the 1960s, but he became a household name after Midnight Cowboy.
He starred in a bunch of incredibly successful films, Heat, Mission Impossible, Transformers, Pearl Harbor, and he continued his success on television with the hit crime series Ray Donovan.
He's starring in the new movie, this is what we're gonna talk about, Reagan.
The website is reagan.movie, and that's a place where you can get ticket information.
This movie is going to explode on the scene this month, the end of this month.
John, welcome.
It's delightful to see you.
It's been a little while.
I think we last crossed paths at one of the premieres for one of my films in LA, but you're looking good.
And of course, I'm very excited to see the movie Reagan.
I'm going to get the link very shortly, but I don't have it yet.
Let me start by just asking you a question about the peculiar landscape in which we find ourselves now.
Can you speak for a moment to what you think the stakes are in 2024?
And then we'll talk about the Reagan film and its relevance and applicability to today.
Okay, Dinesh, first of all, it's great to see you.
I'm a big admirer of yours, as I've told you before, and your films have made a great difference in educating folks throughout the land, and I'm very grateful for it, too.
So anyway, I just want to thank you for that.
And in regard to the temperature of this time, obviously, we're in a very difficult time.
And I think that as I was doing research for the film Reagan, I play an ex-spy who had been given the responsibility of following Reagan to see if this fellow who was advancing in leadership positions would be of any concern for the Soviet Union, and he certainly was.
And in doing my research, I did come across this fellow who left the Soviet Union and came to the United States eventually.
His name is Yuri Bezmenov.
You might have known him.
And he described what the plans were for the Soviet Union from the KGB, and they were quite ominous.
And they had to do with, you know, causing division in our country and supporting things that would eventually erase the love of country in the young people of our country.
And they seem to have taken root.
And as I look now at this country at this time, and we see the anti-Semitism that's jumped out at the university level, we can say, what happened?
And I can trace it back to this dumbing down of our country and our children and guiding them against our country.
So this KGB infiltration was very purposeful, and it seems to have taken root.
So now we're facing some real difficulties, and we need to have the right people involved now to take the helm of the country.
That's my perspective on it.
I mean, John, what you're saying is so interesting and ironic because Reagan, of course, won the Cold War.
Margaret Thatcher said he won the Cold War without firing a shot.
Many of us at that time, we celebrated.
We thought, wow, our system has won.
Their system has lost.
We're the future.
They're not.
Reagan himself... And I might say this, Dinesh.
You know, as I go across the country, I've done some things in Bulgaria, which was formerly under communist rule.
And they know everything about it, and they see what's happening in our country, and they identify it as the takeover of the communist system.
And people throughout the world who have been under the communists know the misery that they've suffered, and they're warning us.
People come in the streets of Bulgaria and grab me and say, gee, I hope you can turn the corner and get rid of this thing.
Do you think, John, that people don't recognize this kind of communist imprint because they think of tyranny in terms of like a Stalin overcoat, a kind of foreign accent, and here we've got the shuffling Biden, we got the cackling Kamala Harris, and it's a little difficult to think of them in terms of a sort of a red scare.
How do we alert Americans to the really dangerous situation in which we find ourselves now?
Well, Dinesh, I say, you have to call Dinesh D'Souza and have him do another movie.
Uh-oh!
Dinesh has been trying to educate people all along the way now for many years.
So thank God for all of those films that you've made.
And I think that it's a real battle.
The universities have been polluted, and they've taken over the press.
In some ways, their energy has contributed to the takeover of the press.
So we have to watch our steps now.
We have to be very alert, and we have to restore our love of country.
John, I'm happy to say we've just put the finishing touches on a big film.
It's going to be in wide theatrical release the end of September.
So we are responding to, if not popular demand, at least your demand.
Let's talk about the Reagan film.
It's a very interesting narrative device where you're telling the story of Reagan, but from the eyes of a Soviet observer of Reagan, and that's the guy that you play, namely Viktor Petrovich.
Petrovich.
Petrovich, there we go.
Talk about that narrative device, and how does that help illuminate Reagan seeing it from that angle?
Well, you'll have to go see the movie to see how we do it.
But I did some, you know, I went to school on a couple of people, one being Yuri Bezmenov, who was a fellow that came here that was a Soviet spy and turned and warned us about the Soviet Union.
I recommend that people read his work.
He taught it, and he's very eloquent and very clear.
And presents us with a situation that became what we're in now.
So he tells you how it was done.
Propaganda works, Dinesh.
I think you understand that very well because of your, you know, studies and your work and your presentations.
You understand it very well.
But it unfortunately does work.
And our kids are not getting the same education that I was getting when I was When I was going to school, and I so wish we could get back to that, America was presented in a very positive light.
We were very proud to be Americans.
And this generation of people are being given a negative view of America.
From the beginning.
So we're in a tough spot, but Americans have a way of rallying.
That's our spirit, and that's our heritage.
And I think we'll come back very strongly now, so that's what I'm hoping.
I mean, I'm certainly optimistic as you are, John.
I mean, I came to the country in 1978-79, and that, of course, was the doldrums of the Carter era.
Reagan, of course, helped pull us out of all that, so we've done it once.
before. Would you agree if I sometimes think of Reagan, I won't call him a peacetime general because of course he was dealing with the Cold War and that was a very serious sort of challenge that had lasted for 40 years ever since World War II, but in some ways the domestic climate is far more roiled now under Trump.
Oh yeah.
How do you, when you think about Reagan and Trump, they're, it seems to me, similar in some ways and yet different in other ways.
Would you comment on how you see the relationship, if any, between those two men?
Well, I guess we could do a little of that, but, you know, I want people to know that this movie It's an entertainment, and it's a very moving entertainment, a portrait of Ronald Reagan and Nancy.
And the two people that play this, you know, Dennis and Penelope Ann Miller, they're wonderful together, and it's a love story.
It's a very moving piece.
So it's not It's not meant to do anything on a political level necessarily.
Certainly he was a Republican in a similar time, so you're going to make comparisons.
But the wonderful thing about Reagan is I've never met a person who didn't like him who met him.
He was a charming man.
He was a very kind man.
For me, one of the favorite things in my life, if I have to keep videos of things, I would say his response to the Challenger disaster, when this rocket ship went up and exploded just after the launch.
And he had to address the nation in that very dark time.
and give us some hope through it.
And he did it magnificently.
And that's what he was capable of doing, of lifting us into another understanding of things.
And And the people who worked for him almost are all active right now in some aspect of politics.
Amazing group of people that he kind of grandfathered in, you know?
So he was an amazing guy.
The fellow who I have been in support of over these past years, It seems, is Donald Trump.
And Donald Trump is the man of this hour, I think.
Are they similar?
They're similar in their love for the country.
And their understanding of what the country stands for.
They're similar in that way.
And they're both people who will do anything, go to any length, to put this country on the right track.
John, you make the very important point, and people often forget it, that a movie is an entertainment.
That's why people go to movies.
You can have some messaging, you can have a morality lesson in a film, but ultimately the film has got to work as a narrative, as a story, and I'm really excited to see how this one works.
And it seems like you're telling the story As a love story on the one side, Reagan and Nancy, but also as a, you know, on the large landscape, Reagan is dealing with the Cold War.
Is that the central theme of the film?
The sort of external theme of it?
Yes, I think that's right, and my telling of it is from the inside.
I know what happened because of its effect on the Soviet Union, and it is the story of the taking down of the Soviet Union, because that's the story of Reagan, you know.
I remember, John, flashing back my mind back to the movie Patton.
There is a little bit of an echo for me because if you remember in that film there is a sort of a German general who is tasked with following Patton and telling the German leadership who Patton really is and the guy keeps warning them that Patton's a really dangerous guy and they don't get it.
They don't understand what he's saying and it's a very Powerful narrative device, and it looks like, in a different way, you're using that device in this film.
Let me just summarize here by saying, guys, the film is just called Reagan.
The website is reagan.movie.
We've been talking to Jon Voight, Academy Award-winning actor who plays a central role in this film.
Tickets are available now, so go to reagan.movie.com.
dot movie and get your tickets and then look for my own film coming out later in September.
So it's a lot of good stuff coming up, leading up to the 2024 election.
John, it's always a pleasure to talk to you and thank you so much for joining me.
Yes, Dinesh.
Much love to you and thanks for everything.
God bless.
I'm picking up Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery at the point where he has now just opened the Tuskegee Institute, but at this point it's not a full-blown institute, it's just a small school, almost a ramshackled construction attached to a ramshackled church.
And when the school opened, he says, there were about 30 students.
Now, only some of those were students per se.
He says that they decided that they wanted to have students who had had some schooling, so not people who are coming in where they don't know the alphabet, they're beginning from absolutely nothing.
No, he says we want people who have had some education, but there were quite a few adults, and not only adults, there were people enrolled in the school who were themselves teachers, and these teachers brought their students.
Now Booker T. Reilly observes that, quote, when with the teachers came some of their former pupils and when they were examined it was amusing to note that in several cases the pupil entered a higher class than did his former teacher.
So in some cases the pupils were smarter than the teachers and ended up knowing more and so were in a more kind of advanced grade.
And he says it was also interesting to note how many big books some of them had studied and how many high-sounding subjects some of them claimed to have mastered.
The bigger the book, the longer the name of the subject, the prouder they felt of their accomplishment.
Now, here again Booker T. Washington is doing something that he's done before and will continue to do.
He seems to be deriding, you know, highfalutin titles, big name sounding books.
And he is doing that, but he's doing that for a very concrete and, I think, sensible reason.
Let's follow his thinking about it and then I'll comment on it.
In fact, he says, one of the saddest things I saw during the month of travel, which I have described, was a young woman.
who had attended some high school, sitting down in a one-room cabin with grease, I'm sorry, a young man, with grease on his clothing, filth all around him and weeds in the yard and garden, engaged in studying a French grammar.
Now, this is exactly the kind of line that, years later, would provoke the indignant rage of W. E. B. Du Bois, who happened to be the first black guy who got a Ph.D.
from Harvard.
He's the author of The Souls of Black Folk and a number of other books.
He became Booker T. Washington's most prominent antagonist.
And Du Bois was the kind of person who would say of this, that Booker T. Washington is trying to keep blacks, like, down on the farm and semi-ignorant.
Not totally ignorant, because obviously he's starting a school, but from Du Bois' point of view, he's not allowing or encouraging blacks to reach higher education, liberal education.
Knowledge of things like Homer and Shakespeare and Greek and Latin, which for Du Bois was the mark of cultivation.
It was the pinnacle of human achievement.
So why would you want blacks to get ahead but not get that far ahead?
So, in a sense, Du Bois accuses Washington of only promoting the stunted and limited development of blacks.
This, I think, is an injustice to Booker T. Washington.
It is true that he is depreciating, maybe even gently mocking the idea of studying a French grammar.
But look at the circumstances.
Here's kind of what he's saying.
You've got a really poor kid.
And this kid is in completely degraded surroundings.
Surroundings that he is in a position to improve.
So you're sitting in a place where you've got weeds in your yard.
You could easily clear the yard, cultivate the yard.
You've got grease on your clothing.
You can learn to wear clean clothes and bathe.
You're sitting in a one-room cabin.
So in other words, what Booker T is kind of getting at is what good is this French grammar to you in these circumstances.
Booker T. Washington is not saying, hey, once you have cleaned up your yard, once you have gotten your life in order, once you own books, once you have actually mastered the multiplication tables, once you can read and write, you can know how to write a letter, you know how to pay a bill, you know how to do your taxes, and then you decide, you know what, I'm going to go for higher studies and study French, This is not what Booker T is complaining about at all.
Notice that what he's complaining about is attempting to do these things for show, not with a view to anything meaningful or practical or productive, nothing that's really going to improve your life and, what is always in the back of his mind, to improve your race.
Now notice here that when I say improve your race, Booker T. Washington does not hesitate to identify blacks as a group.
I think what he's saying, and I think he means this in a universal sense, every group has a certain kind of natural attachment to its own.
You know, I grew up in a particular town in a suburb of Bombay.
It was called Bandra.
I'm very attached to that place.
Its smells and sights and sounds are familiar to me.
All my friends were from there.
The school I went to, and so it was actually a school that was called St.
Stanislaus, named after a Catholic saint.
And so we were called Stanislites and so to this day I'm on a WhatsApp feed with the Stanislites and I just from a distance follow their lives and I sometimes chuckle at things that they say and I wonder what happened to friends of mine.
So this group sensibility is not a bad thing if it is kept in its right perspective and if it doesn't become a sort of a cult.
And for Booker T, there's nothing wrong with having a certain sense of racial identity.
Now, he goes on to talk about the students and he's continuing very much in the same theme.
He goes, one subject which they like to talk about and tell me that they had mastered was, quote, banking and discount.
So they want to give him the idea, they're trying to convince their teacher, Booker T. Washington, hey, we know banking, we know double entry bookkeeping, we know how to talk about the discounted value of money.
And he says, but I soon found out that neither they nor almost anyone in the neighborhood in which they lived had ever had a bank account.
So...
You learn how to do all these banking transactions, but you don't have a bank account.
So, in other words, your knowledge is uprooted from the reality that you're living in.
In registering the names of the students, I found that almost every one of them had one or more middle initials.
When I asked what the J stood for in the name of John J. Jones, it was explained to me that this was one of his, quote, entitles.
Now, entitles, notice that that comes from the term entitlement.
Of course, even entitlement comes from the idea of having a title.
Notice the title is a vestige of aristocracy.
What's your title?
Well, that guy's a Count.
Well, that guy is a Marquis.
Well, that guy is sort of lower royalty.
Well, that guy is the Dauphin.
So these are the debris, the inheritance of aristocracy.
And one of the strange things, and for Booker T. Saad, is that when you have a guy who has absolutely nothing, it becomes really important for him, first and foremost, to get these so-called entitles.
So, you know, you don't have a penny to your name.
It's kind of like the way I sometimes think about some of these younger people today, where they're like know-it-alls, and they're always talking about all the things they've done.
And I'm like, you know what?
You don't have a job.
You don't have a 401k.
You have no stability.
You're living in your mom's basement.
You don't have the confidence to make your own doctor's appointments.
So why are you speaking so authoritatively when you have done really so little?
to make your own way in the world. And this is what in his own environment and you know flashing back more than a hundred years ago Booker T. Washington is making exactly, exactly the same point. Now having made this point and made the point in a you know this is a there's a bite to the way that he writes because even though he's he's writing there's a kind of soft sarcasm here but it's unmistakable.
Whenever he does that Booker T. Washington will always pull back from it and he does it it here now and he says notwithstanding what I have said about them in these respects I have never seen a more earnest and willing company of young men and women that these students they were all willing to learn I was determined to start them off on a solid and thorough foundation so this is Booker T's true motivation
You know, he's not one of these guys who's like, I know more than those guys.
They're such idiots.
You know, they don't know what they're doing.
Man!
Not at all.
His view is, you know what?
It's okay to have all these kind of deracinated or uprooted and almost removed from reality kind of conceptions, it's okay, as long as you genuinely want to know a better way to go forward.
So, once it's explained to you, hey listen, you need to build a solid foundation and then you can build on top of that.
There's actually, in a sense, nothing wrong with having three names.
There's nothing wrong with studying a French grammar.
But it's not a substitute for making your own way in life.
I mean, you see this even today with a guy, you know, his name is Jerry P. Jones and he changes his name to Amiri Baraka Mfuzu.
You know, he's discovering his African name and you're like, well, okay, but how does that change your life?
I mean, is this just a stylistic change or it's kind of like changing your hair from straight to Rastafarian?
What are you actually doing to improve yourself?
So Bogarty is very conscious of this.
His goal is not display, posturing, showing off.
His goal is the actual improvement of the individual and the race.
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