All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 23, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
48:40
THE BEST AND THE WORST Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep903
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Coming up, my review of the Kamala Harris speech last night and indeed of the Democratic National Convention as a whole.
Should Trump do anything differently?
Also, Debbie and I talk about our joint evaluation of the U.S.
Presidents, all the way from Washington right through Biden, the best and the worst.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
this is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy, in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
So the Democratic Convention has wrapped up.
It's come to an end.
The culmination, the climax if you will, was the Kamala Harris speech last night.
And I listened to it and I think it was a pretty good speech.
By that I mean that when I watch this kind of stuff, I mean, I obviously know exactly what is going on.
This is a veneer, it's a facade, it's a presentation, but hey, that's what a convention is all about.
We should try to put ourselves in the minds of independents, of centrist democrats.
How would they view a speech like this?
Now, in the audience itself, of course, rapturous reaction, wild applause.
And, you know, I would rate the speech as probably a 6 out of 10, but that's because Biden has set such a low standard.
I mean, in other words, these days, in a kind of debased environment, if you get somebody who just seems energetic, Affable, can read from a teleprompter, doesn't flub anything particularly.
And of course Kamala Harris can do that.
I mean, she's not retarded.
She's someone who can deliver.
She's, despite the fact that when she's not on a teleprompter.
When she's by herself, when she's thinking for herself, you can see her, well, let's call it absence of mind.
You can see her heavy reliance on tried-and-true cliches that she repeats again and again, unburdened by the past.
And I don't know if you've listened to her classic dialogues on the nature of time.
It's extremely humorous from a certain kind of distant point of view.
But as I said, with Biden, he is such a mumbler and bumbler that people are like, Wow, Kamala is a veritable Cicero by comparison.
The speech was actually very devoid of policy content.
No surprise, they're kind of running away from the policy side of things.
No, she wasn't the border czar.
No, we don't want to talk about the attempt to, you know, legalize all these illegals.
No, we don't want to talk about confiscatory taxation.
So there's a bunch of policies kind of hiding behind the speech, and I meant to kind of touch on them today, but I don't think I will.
I'm going to go into them in more depth next week, the actual policy agenda.
But because there's a couple of big things happening over the weekend and now, and I wanted to highlight those in addition to the Kamala Harris speech.
As I assess the convention as a whole, I think that it was An effort to rouse the faithful and it was an effort to somewhat camouflage the radical policy agenda.
Now the radicalism was there and if you listen to the speeches that occurred earlier in the day, so not the evening primetime speeches which are all scripted sort of for the mainstream audience, then you have a lot of people saying radical things, you know, people who say things like, in fact one guy even said, he sort of spilled the beans where he goes, he goes, listen, we've just got to stop acting crazy.
He says for the next 70 days. After that we can go crazy again. So think of what he's saying.
He's admitting that the Democrats have all kinds of kooks on their side.
He's telling the kooks to stop behaving like kooks because they're so, in a sense, on camera.
They can return to their kookiness, their Their cultural kookiness, their moral kookiness, their spiritual kookiness, it can all start up again once the American people have turned off the television, once they're sort of safely out of sight.
Remember, in a representative democracy, elections occur every two, every four years.
And the rest of the time, the bandits get to do pretty much whatever they want.
This is our only chance to weigh in and to speak up.
There could be a very important development coming today.
It's going to be coming a couple of hours after I record this podcast, so I don't know what it's going to be.
But the rumor is, the report is, that it's going to be Robert F. Kennedy dropping out of the race and possibly, possibly endorsing Trump.
He's certainly not going to endorse the Democrats, and in fact there has been, I've seen a number of of interviews, some of which, some of these segments I've shared, in which Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but also Nicole Shanahan, his choice for VP, and particularly her, Nicole, speaking very bluntly about the way in which their side has been shafted by the Democrats.
And by shafted here, I don't just mean sidelined or ignored, excluded from debates.
I'm talking about the fact that they're They are planting operatives inside the Kennedy campaign.
They are spreading false rumors.
They are filing lawsuits.
They are using tactics of intimidation.
So, all kinds of bludgeoning.
The kind of thing that we're used to as Republicans getting from the Biden regime, they're also doing to their own.
The idea here is to sort of muscle Kennedy out.
And so, Nicole Shanahan, I've got to make a bit of a confession here.
When RFK Jr.
first named her, I looked her up.
She seemed like sort of a digital mogul.
She seemed like a little bit of a progressive activist.
And so I was very down on Nicole Shanahan and thought, wow, this woman is going to yank Kennedy to the left on all the cultural issues, except Except the maybe two or three on which he's actually quite sound, things like COVID, things like the intelligence agencies of government censorship.
He's good on that stuff, but he's gonna be bad on literally everything else.
But now when I listen to Nicole Shanahan, I'm like, wow, this woman is, not that I was necessarily flat out wrong about her, but she has come a long way.
And she sounds like a kind of a Trumpster.
She sounds like, listen, we gotta throw in with Trump to teach these people a lesson.
They keep talking about democracy.
Let's have some real democracy in the Democratic Party for a change.
And if they don't, they need to be ousted for the kind of gangsters that they have become.
So, we'll watch eagerly.
To see what Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
decides.
I mean, I suppose there's two options or just drop out, endorse nobody or drop out and endorse Trump.
And I hope he does the latter.
I also have seen a number of influential kind of RFK Jr.
followers say, hey, if he endorses Trump, we're going with Trump.
So clearly this is a movement that does have some traction, does have some power.
Some people compare it to the parole factor in 1992.
I don't know if it would count for as many votes as Perot got, but hey, it could count for 5, 6, maybe even 10% of the vote, and that would make a huge difference in a close election.
A final point I want to highlight.
And this is a response to Tom Sowell's op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today where Tom Sowell basically says Trump is risking this election.
He is sort of throwing it away and he is focusing way too much on Kamala Harris and and making jibes and making one-liners and attacking the candidates rather than kind of laying out his vision for the country.
And now I have immense respect for Tom Sowell. I actually know him quite well.
We've lost touch in recent years, but it's only because Tom Sowell is now very much in retirement.
I don't like to pester or bother him, and it's quite rare for him to step out in the public arena.
This op-ed, as far as I know, is the first Wall Street Journal op-ed he's done in quite a long time, so he clearly feels this very keenly, and it's not that I disagree with him, I simply think that this is a case where it's not one or the other.
There's no reason that we shouldn't attack Kamala Harris for the kind of hollow person that she is.
There's no reason we can't use the weapons of expose, of ridicule.
In fact, the most common form of ridicule of Kamala Harris that I've seen, I mean, And there is some satire, there's a woman on X who does an excellent imitation of Kamala Harris, and so she does the parody version of Kamala Harris, but the parody version is pretty close to the real Kamala Harris, and most of the kind of most devastating exposes of Harris are nothing more than threads or combinations of her talking.
So, she makes herself look bad.
It was like the old idea that, yeah, I really insulted you in my book because I have long quotes from you.
So, I'm insulting you, in a sense, by quoting you.
And simply by quoting you, that's sufficient to show how dumb you are.
So, I think there's no reason that Trump can't do that.
But, I agree with Saul, you cannot do that at the expense or by avoiding the other.
And the other is not merely a, we had a great run the last time around, you should say that, and people do remember that, but here is my agenda.
Here are the four things I'm going to do going forward.
One good thing that Trump has is the credibility that when he said he would do it before, he did it.
So people will believe that he's actually doing these things.
When Kamala says things like, I want to lower grocery prices.
No, she is not.
She doesn't even know how to do that.
There's no mechanism to do that.
This is just hollow rhetoric.
With Trump, it's not hollow rhetoric, but he needs to lay before the country.
This is what those guys are going to do.
And this is what I'm going to do.
When you think about it, it's not even a difficult choice.
Are you feeling overwhelmed by the increasing cost of health insurance?
Have you had enough of not having control over your healthcare dollars?
Introducing ShareRite.
It's healthcare done the right way.
At ShareRite, you're not just a number, you're a part of a caring community.
And forget about paying excessive premiums.
With ShareRite, you stand to save 30-50% compared to health insurance.
So think about what you could do with all those savings.
But it's more than just saving.
ShareRight ensures you have access to the care you deserve precisely when you need it.
From routine checkups to unexpected emergencies, with ShareRight, your healthcare is their top priority.
Empower yourself today by taking control of your healthcare costs.
Visit shareright.org slash Dinesh to learn more.
See how much you can save.
Again, visit shareright.org slash Dinesh.
That's shareright.org slash Dinesh for healthcare done the right way.
There's a communist plot to take over America.
The new documentary, Beneath Sheep's Clothing, exposes the dark truth.
Marxist-Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of American students.
American schools have been turned into Marxist-Maoist re-education centers.
Here's the thing about communism.
When it comes knocking at your door, it doesn't say, Hi, I'm here to impoverish, enslave, and murder you.
It says, I'm here to liberate you from oppression.
You take over the colleges of education, then you take over all the teachers, then you take over all the students, and thus you get the future.
Beneath sheep's clothing reveals the communist infiltration of America's education system, churches, and media.
Will a political revolution be next?
Or will we the people wake up and reclaim our freedoms?
Destroy the opposing country through unconventional methods.
Take America without firing a shot.
Don't miss Beneath Sheep's Clothing.
Available now.
Watch it today.
Go to SalemNow.com at SalemNow.com.
We are as a country in the process of picking a president and that causes us, rightly so, to intensely focus on the two candidates right in front of us.
One of them We'll be chosen to lead the country into the future, but it's also always good to keep a little bit of a broader perspective on the presidency, how we've got here, where we're going.
Now, Debbie and I sometimes engage in this sort of exercise where we evaluate presidents and we try to rank them and give them a score.
And interestingly, recently we got a mailing, or you did actually, from PragerU Which is apparently the Prager people are compiling or asking different people to weigh in on their evaluations of presidents.
They're trying to look for sort of the best and the worst.
Yeah, but I think it's kind of a surprise.
I don't think we're supposed to be public about that yet.
Well, the surprise is probably on the overall rankings.
They're probably polling like, I don't know, 20 people or 50 people, who knows.
So, we're disclosing our results, which I think is totally fine because they're not private to us.
We're quite comfortable about it.
Without going into the list, which I think we want to dive into, because we want to evaluate presidents and give them a score.
But before we do that, who are your presidential favorites who, like, jump out of the pages of history and are just at the top of your list?
Well, my four top are George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump.
Interesting.
So you would single out those four as like, they're on your best list.
Yeah, if I had a portrait, which actually I have a portrait of George Washington, right?
And I can't put Simon Bolivar in there.
He was my favorite Venezuelan president.
Yeah, but say a word about him because people may not know who Bolivar was.
He was the liberator of South America.
It just so happened that he was caraqueño, like me.
But, not only was he a liberator of government control from Spain, which he did, he liberated all of South America, but he also emancipated slaves, which was amazing in and of itself, because a lot of people don't realize that.
There is a place off the coast of Galveston called the Bolivar Peninsula, And if you don't know what the Bolivar Peninsula is, it's the peninsula where Bolivar, it should really be Bolivar Peninsula, put some slaves to free them.
And so it's called the Bolivar Peninsula, and I'm sure a lot of people don't even know that.
Yeah, so in your office, at home, you have a giant portrait of Washington side by side with Simón Bolívar.
Yeah, so it's Washington and Simón Bolívar, and of course I have a photo of Ronald Reagan shooting a rifle, and then of course, you know, we have a lot of Trump photos everywhere, so... Well, I think as we think of presidents, our evaluations are... Notice not a single Democrat's in that list!
Uh, that is true.
Well, Washington came before the modern party system, of course.
Yeah, but I don't think he would have been a Democrat, just saying.
No, no, that's quite right.
In fact, I don't think any of the founders would have.
No.
I mean, think about it.
They were too devout, really.
Well, here's an example of why that is so.
People may think, why are you saying that?
Just because, you know.
Here's why I was saying this.
There was a very vociferous debate between the two parties, and specifically between Jefferson and Hamilton.
Jefferson, of course, representing the Jeffersonian party, and Hamilton representing the Whigs, I mean the Federalist Party.
And they were arguing about whether the country should be able to have a national bank, right?
Oh, yes.
So Jefferson goes, read the Constitution, I don't see any power to create a national bank.
End of story, you can't have a bank.
Right?
So think of it, he's a constitutional literalist.
Show me where it says, I don't see the words bank in the entire Constitution.
Now, Hamilton argues, Congress is given the power to sort of promote the general welfare and pass laws that are, quote, necessary and proper to achieve that.
So Hamilton says that, I admit that there isn't an explicit power to form a bank, but there is an implied power.
So think of what's going on here.
You have two guys arguing about the Constitution.
But neither of them are saying things like, the Constitution is a living document.
The Constitution changes its meaning over time.
We get to say what the Constitution means regardless of whether it's in the Constitution or not.
No!
They agree that the Constitution is absolutely authoritative and supreme.
They're just arguing over the meaning of the text.
So, in a way, what I'm saying is they're both conservative in the modern sense of the term.
That's right.
And that's what I mean when I say that the... Now, as we do our rankings, obviously the significant ones to look out for, you know, most presidents are going to be probably somewhat okay.
They're going to be...
In the mediocre, let's call it the 5 to 6 category, right?
So we're looking here now for the 9s and 10s, and we're of course looking for the 0s and 1s, the absolute worst of the lot.
So I'm gonna give you, we actually did this together, we came up with joint ratings.
And I'll focus on the real highlight.
So George Washington, we agreed to give him a 10, right?
That's right.
Founder of the country, man of exemplary character.
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson get an 8, as does Madison.
Monroe gets a 7.
We gave Andrew Jackson a 4.
I think rightly so.
I mean, first of all, an unadmirable man as a slave owner and a particularly... You should have given him a zero.
Well, yes.
Now, there were admirable aspects about him.
Like, for example, there was no doubt that he loved the country.
And he fought in the Revolutionary War as a young man, not as a president.
And so, he's not entirely a bad guy, but he was the founder of the Democratic Party, which can't be a plus.
That has to be considered.
He was the main jackass, right?
He was the original jackass.
Now, if it seems that we are being against all the Democrats, this is not really true.
We're against most of them, but not all of them.
Here, for example, is an exception.
James K. Polk.
Now, James K. Polk was president for only one term.
He is, to some degree, my favorite Democrat.
And the reason for it's pretty... Here's the reason for it.
He presided over the war against Mexico, which brought thousands of miles of Mexico into American territory.
He also negotiated for large parts of Arizona and also the Northwest to now be acquired by the United States.
So, by and large, within four years, this guy Almost double the size of the country.
So think about it.
A lot of American prosperity and wealth and power.
The reason we're a superpower on the world stage.
We couldn't have been a superpower if we were half the size of what we are now.
And who did that?
Well, James Polk did that.
And that's a huge thing to do.
Because with a lot of presidents, you can say, we'll take someone like Monroe.
He's a good president.
He was a member of the original founding generation.
But if you were to say, well, what did he do?
Well, the Monroe Doctrine, you know.
In other words, you're lucky to be able to come up with even one idea that they came up with.
But this guy actually... Acquired land.
Acquired land.
And so, and again, Polk was, in fact, he was a southerner.
He was a slave owner.
I'm not saying there was, he had negative aspects to him.
Now, guys like Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, these are what I call the mediocrities.
People who, they just don't stand out.
I actually only know of them because of street names.
Like in Harlingen, there's a bunch of street names.
After all the presidents.
Yeah!
So, on Pierce, on Polk, I mean, you know, I had no idea really what they did or...
Yeah, and some of them served very briefly, but you're right, even if you ask educated people.
Okay, Millard Fillmore, because I remember at one point some conservative group was giving out a Millard Fillmore award, but it was kind of a joke.
Oh.
So it was intended, I don't even remember what the joke was about.
Yeah, we don't know what he was about.
Alright, so here comes one of the worst presidents, the predecessor to Abraham Lincoln, James Buchanan.
Now, this guy was very bad news on many fronts.
But he was very bad news because a lot of the mobilization for secession was occurring under Buchanan.
And he was doing nothing to stop it.
Now, Buchanan was not a southerner.
He was, I believe, from Pennsylvania, if I'm not mistaken.
He was a northern guy.
But he was, whether it was out of weakness or whether it was just out of ideological sympathy for the Democratic South, nevertheless, he created, well, he probably didn't create, he accelerated the conditions.
And that's what put, when Abraham Lincoln left Springfield to go to Washington, he said, I am leaving with a task ahead of me greater than the one that faced Washington.
Which was actually true.
I thought about that line for a while.
Thought, well, Lincoln is basically saying his job was bigger than Washington's.
But Washington was fighting a guerrilla war against a British army, which although very strong, stronger than his own, was fighting thousands of miles away from home territory.
So the British, you know, they liked having America in their pocket, but they weren't going to risk the country over it.
So they didn't fight that hard, you know, and Washington knew that.
He knew, basically, if I just annoy them, I harass them, I make their life difficult, it will tire them out, they'll go home.
The Civil War was not like that.
No, it was not.
Because the Civil War was, the reason the Civil War was so grueling is because there was no way to defeat the South without invading the entire South.
This was not a matter of just going on a battlefield and defeating an army.
So Lincoln knew all this.
Let's take a pause here.
When we come back, we'll pick up our discussion.
We're discussing our evaluation of the presidents.
You asked and MyPillow listened.
They're finally bringing you the most requested offer ever.
Right now you can get the queen-size premium MyPillow.
This is the most popular pillow for just $19.98.
Wow!
MyPillow is made with patented adjustable fill.
It adjusts to your exact individual needs regardless of your sleep position.
It helps keep your neck aligned and holds its shape all night long so you get the best sleep of your life.
But that's not all.
There are deals all around.
Get the six-piece kitchen or bath towel sets, just $25.
The brand new mattress topper, as low as $69.98.
The famous MyPillow bed sheets, for as low as $25.
And there's so much more.
Call 800-876-0227, the number again, 800-876-0227, or go to mypillow.com.
When you use promo code Dinesh, you get big discounts on all the MyPillow products, including The premium queen-size MyPillow, only $19.98.
That's the lowest price ever, so don't delay.
Order today.
Go to MyPillow.com.
Don't forget to use the promo code.
It's D-I-N-E-S-H, Dinesh.
Guys, in this big election year, with the big new movie coming out for me soon, I'd like to invite you to check out and join my Locals channel.
I post a lot of exclusive content there, including content that's censored on other social media platforms.
On Locals, you get Dinesh Unchained, Dinesh Uncensored.
You can also interact with me directly.
I do a live weekly Q&A on Tuesday.
No topic is off limits.
I've also uploaded some cool films to Locals.
I've got Dinesh's movie page up there, 2000 Mules, the latest documentary from last year, Police State, and of course the new film will be up there as well.
Hey, if you're an annual subscriber, you can stream and watch this movie content for free.
It's included with your subscription.
So check out the channel.
It's dinesh.locals.com.
I'd love to have you along for this great ride again.
It's dinesh.locals.com.
Debbie and I are doing kind of a unique Friday roundup this week.
We're discussing, in not great depth, but some depth, the various presidents of the United States, giving a sense of how we would rank them on a scale of one to 10.
We were tasked to do this for PragerU.
You sent in our numbers.
Now we thought, hey, it'd be fun to actually talk about these on the podcast.
I'm gonna skip over some of the, again, relative mediocrities.
Think of it, James.
And sometimes the country, you know, the country very interestingly in its history, in times of prosperity, has had these kind of mediocre presidents who really didn't have to do much.
And it was okay that they didn't do a whole lot because the country was coming along okay.
It's been, and this is part of the argument for the providential hand on America, it's like in times of crisis, We, you know, we get a Washington, you know, we get a Lincoln.
Perhaps it could be said we get a Trump.
So, in the middle of our history, we have, look at this, this is a secession, a succession of presidents, not a secession, but a succession after Lincoln.
Andrew Johnson, of course, was his successor, and Andrew Johnson was terrible.
Andrew Johnson was a southerner, and Lincoln put him on the ticket to show that he was.
Lincoln didn't want to make it seem like the Civil War was just a straight-out north-south fight.
You know, he honestly believed that we want the whole country to do well.
And so, so anyway, Johnson was terrible, Ulysses Grant was by and large pretty good, although there were some accusations of corruption, but here we go.
Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Chester Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, and then William McKinley.
So just like six guys who you couldn't even say one good line about, right?
But then you have Teddy Roosevelt.
And now Teddy Roosevelt, I mean, he was a good president, but I think he was even more amazing as a man.
And we talk about the Trump assassination attempt.
Teddy Roosevelt in 1912.
Teddy Roosevelt already served two terms.
But then you had William Howard Taft, and this was the 1912 election campaign in which Woodrow Wilson would be elected.
But the reason Woodrow Wilson got elected is that the Taft Republicans and the Teddy Roosevelt group split the vote.
So I'm not too happy with Teddy Roosevelt over that, but he was running in 1912 and an assassin fired a shot at him.
And the bullet actually entered his body.
So Roosevelt then informs the audience, I've been shot, but he says, I'm going to continue with my speech.
Oh my goodness.
That sounds very Trumpian.
It's very Trumpian.
I mean, it resembles Trump's fight, fight, fight.
It's like, get me up, right?
And so there's an echo of this.
Roosevelt was part of the so-called Bull Moose Party, so he goes, it takes more than a single shot to kill a bull moose.
Oh my goodness.
That's Teddy Roosevelt.
So a man of just ferocious, you know, willpower and physical strength.
Very interesting president indeed.
And of course, one of the, if you had to pull out the handful of Republicans, I mean, let's think about it.
You have obviously Lincoln first.
Yeah.
But I would say Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, fast forward to Reagan, Fast forward to Trump.
I mean, those are the four standout Republicans of our history.
The other guys fall into the shadows.
Not that they were bad.
Actually, I'm not even a strong critic of George H.W.
Bush, because although I think he was a very poor politician.
I mean, think of it.
How do you lose the 1992 election to a young whippersnapper who's in a sex scandal, Bill Clinton?
And Bush had just presided over the whole dissolution of the Soviet Empire, in which he did an amazing job, great job, but somehow he couldn't put that across to the American people, and they decided, okay, we've had enough of you.
Well, I think it was mostly, wasn't it because of the taxes that he lost?
Yeah, the country... And Ross Perot?
The country had gone into a recession and the recession was not that severe but it was a little bit long and so people were feeling it.
And so it was just a matter, you're right, it was a matter of timing.
The country would eventually and rather quickly climb out of it had the election been six months later.
Well I do think if Ross Perot hadn't entered the picture he would have won.
He would have won anyway.
Yeah.
All right, Franklin D. Roosevelt, we give him a two, but that is based upon, I would call it inside information.
By that I mean, Roosevelt has this sort of canonical status.
I mean, we do not agree here with the textbooks which would give him like a nine.
He's often singled out as one of America's greatest presidents, maybe behind Lincoln.
Which is nonsense.
He was, in fact, a terrible president.
Bad on so many different levels.
In some of my earlier books, Death of a Nation, even Hillary's America, which is subtitled The Secret History of the Democrat, it lays out the big lie which talks about FDR's ties to fascism.
Now, we give Harry Truman a six.
Eisenhower is 7.
We give JFK a 7, which is a high score.
And again, that's... For a Democrat.
For a Democrat.
But he was a tax-cutting Democrat.
What do you like about JFK?
Well, you know, he was anti-communist.
I mean, he stood on that, right?
That was a big thing.
He was extremely patriotic.
Really, those are the two main things.
Yeah, he cut taxes.
He cut taxes.
So he was rather fiscally conservative.
Right.
And I do believe he was a nationalist.
Yeah, and by today's standards, I mean, for example, I don't think he would have been flustered by the idea of America first.
No, he was actually America first.
That was the big thing.
That's the reason that he fought communism so much.
In fact, ironically, he would probably think, why do you need a slogan like that?
Aren't we all America first?
You know, he would be a little bewildered.
But see, I don't think in the times, I think everybody thought America first anyway.
I mean, if you watch the Nixon-Kennedy debate, they're both America first.
Exactly.
All right, on to Lyndon Johnson.
I think we give it three, and even that's a bit generous.
This guy was bad news.
Bad.
He invented the... I went to his alma mater.
You went to his alma mater, and when I spoke there, when was it, like a few years ago?
It was probably in 2017.
Right.
Yeah.
It was very interesting because didn't the dean and the president and all these people from the college, they came and they came because of you, not because of me, but they want to hear what I had to say.
And I lambasted Lyndon Johnson, but I did it with facts.
I just laid it out.
And of course there's a big, isn't there a big statue?
Of course there's a big statue.
There's a street named after him.
There's, I mean, a library named after him.
It's, you know, the school is basically his school.
We give Nixon a 6, Carter a 2, Reagan a 10.
So not too many people get 10s, but Reagan gets a 10.
George H.W.
Bush a 7.
Bill Clinton a six.
I think deserved.
I think on the balance Bill Clinton was a decent president.
Now some of it was he was dragged kicking and screaming.
Yeah, he was basically held up by Congress, by the Republican Congress.
But again, just again, just italicizing how much the Democrats have really shifted.
Like if you look at the Democratic National Convention now, you don't see a single American flag.
They're not flag-waving at all.
Now go back to the Bill Clinton 1992.
Not only are they not flag-waving, but nowhere do you have in God we trust or any of that.
Right.
So they're secular at best.
Yeah.
I don't want to say satanic, but like I could go there.
But they're definitely not patriotic.
Well, I mean, you know that there are satanic elements in the sense that you would not be surprised to find, basically, let's say, a group of witches at the Democratic convention, right?
Oh, absolutely not, yeah.
Or satanists.
Absolutely.
They would fit right in.
Whereas if they went to the Republican convention, they would be completely out of place.
Exactly.
In fact, everybody would be like, what are you doing here, you freak?
Yeah, exactly.
No, it's true.
And they call us weird.
Now, is it really true that we gave Barack Obama a flat zero?
Because if that is true, that would mean we gave Joe Biden a zero.
So, in other words, we are saying that we consider these two to be the worst of all American presidents.
Now, what if we give Jimmy Carter?
Because he's right there with them.
We gave him a two.
Okay, well, I would give him a zero only because of his I mean, I do think that he was very influential in getting us into these really conundrums around the world.
Well, look at it.
You could say he destroyed three countries, right?
And with a reverberating impact on many countries.
Which are the three countries?
Iran, Venezuela, and the United States.
And look at the impact.
I mean, we're dealing with Iran 50 years later.
And Venezuela 25 years later.
And that Iranian revolution could have been stopped in its tracks.
And Iran could have been a modern, developed, westernized country, not without problems, because western countries have problems, but not without those problems.
And certainly not the kind of nuclear tip threat that Iran has become.
And Venezuela has now become a sort of a front for Iran.
It is a front for Iran.
Not only is it a front for Iran, but economically it's destroyed because socialism destroyed it.
And I don't care what people, you know, there are a lot of people out there that, oh yeah, Venezuela's not socialist.
It is socialist.
It is.
It may not be communist, but it's definitely socialist.
And it's actually a dictatorship now.
All thanks to Hugo Chavez.
All thanks to Jimmy Carter, because he is the one that ratified that election.
He went down there with the Carter Center.
And said, nothing to see here, folks.
It's all good.
And there we go.
From then on, fraudulent elections every time.
And the same with the mullahs in Iran.
I mean, they came in riding, by the way, a wave of a lot of popular support for the simple reason that they were successful in mobilizing the country against the Shah.
Right.
However, it turned out to be a free election.
Not an election, but a popular movement, you could say, comes to power, and then that's the end of elections going forward.
Iran has elections now, but they're no different than the Venezuela elections.
They're rigged elections.
They're staged elections.
Yeah, I don't really know what's going to become of Iran.
I do know that there's a huge Christian movement in Iran.
I mean, people are literally switching to Christianity from Islam.
So, that in and of itself is remarkable and amazing.
We could talk about that some other time, but that's about the only thing that is...
I think the big picture is that as we look at all these presidents, from the 0s to the 10s, we've had a couple of 0s, and that's why the country is in the mess it is now.
And we have another 0, or at least a potential 0, Kamala Harris, running I think against a potential, an actual 10.
And so the choice before the American people couldn't be more stark.
And if the American people go with Kamala Harris, I mean, in a fair election, if Kamala Harris wins, that then becomes the American people sealing its own fate.
In other words, it's not because you had two horrible choices, and listen, we had to go with one of them.
You actually have a really bad choice, and you have potentially a very good choice, and you, for whatever reason, stupidity is not really an excuse in a democracy, right?
Because whether you do it out of stupidity or malice, you get what you vote for.
Exactly.
You get the result and then you have to live with it and sometimes it becomes so bad as in the case of Venezuela where even though you have good leaders now who want to fix it, you can't.
You can't.
One of the things I really like about Booker T. Washington is that he is a really good storyteller, not just stories about his own life, but also the way he tells an anecdote.
He's got an almost Reaganite style, and I'm quite sure he was an outstanding speaker.
We know in fact that later when he gives speeches it was very dynamic and one of his speeches given at the Atlanta Exposition became a sort of a national sensation.
We'll get to that.
But he's even good in writing his stories and in other words putting stories in his book.
And here's one.
This is illustrated by a story told of a colored man in Alabama who one hot day in July when he was at work in a cotton field suddenly stopped Looked toward the skies and said, Oh Lord!
The cotton am so grassy, the work am so hard, the sun am so hot.
I believe this darky is called to preach.
Now this is, you could almost call it plantation humor.
What Booker T. Washington is getting at is that a lot of people who were slaves and even after slaves when they were sharecroppers, they found the work really hard and in the south it's really hot and so you're looking for a way to get out of the sun and get into you may almost say one of the more tame domesticated professions where you don't have to do this kind of menial labor Hey, I'm called to be a preacher.
I'm beginning to feel the call right about now.
It's summertime and the Lord must be calling me to get out of the sun.
So, this is Booker T. And again, it's very interesting that he doesn't hesitate to do this kind of a joke in this kind of a book.
Now, He is back talking about the founding of Tuskegee, which began with a ramshackled one-room schoolhouse attached to a dilapidated church.
He says, we needed more space.
More people were coming almost every day.
And he says, we found that there was for sale on the market an old abandoned plantation.
And it had a so-called big house, but there wasn't much of a big house because the big house had been burned during the Civil War.
But he says, but it was a good location and the price was cheap.
$500 for the land and the plantation, or at least what was left of it.
And Booker T goes, but we had no money.
We were strangers in the town.
We had no credit.
He goes, although $500 was cheap for the land, it was a large sum when one did not have any part of it.
Kind of a reminder that things may not even cost all that much, but if you don't have it, it's a lot for you.
So what does Booker T. Washington do?
He writes a letter to the treasurer of the Hampton Institute, General J. F. B. Marshall, a white man.
And he says, here's the situation, I want to buy this land, I want it for the school, I want it for Tuskegee, but we don't have the money.
Can you, would it be possible for Hampton to lend me $200?
He says, he got a prompt reply from the general who said, He was not authorized as the treasurer to part with any funds from the Hampton Institute, but he was happy to provide the $200 out of his personal funds.
And Booker T. writes, Up unto that time I never had in my possession so much money as $100 at a time, and the loan which I had asked General Marshall for seemed a tremendously large sum.
The fact of my being responsible for the repaying of such a large amount of money Weighed very heavily on me.
So, Booker T takes it seriously.
It doesn't matter that the money is provided not for him, but for the Institute.
He's going to have to figure out a way to pay it back.
And then he says that they acquired the plantation, the rundown plantation, and they got to work.
He got the students at Tuskegee and he says, let's start by cleaning out the place.
Let's clean out the hen houses.
Let's also plant crops.
And he says the students were a little baffled.
They look at him and they say, well, We're here to study.
We're here for an education.
What do you mean clean out the land?
What do you mean clean out the hen houses?
What do you mean plant crops?
We're not farmers.
And Booker T says it seems like I had sort of offended their dignity.
This is a tricky matter because Booker T. Washington knows that dignity is very important for people who have been, or at least are coming out of slavery.
It's important for them to feel that sense of dignity, but Booker T. Washington's point is that the aversion to menial labor is the wrong kind of dignity.
So how does he correct them?
Does he give them sort of a lecture?
Does he tell them, hey listen guys, dignity can be found even through menial labor?
He does none of these things at all.
In order to relieve them from any embarrassment, each afternoon after school, I took my own axe and led the way to the woods.
So he teaches by example.
He goes, I'm the principal of the school.
I'm the founder of the institute.
Guess what?
I'm going to be digging alongside you.
I'm going to be cleaning alongside you.
I'm going to be planting alongside you.
And the students are like, whoa, if you're going to do it, then well, I guess we can do it too.
And so they cleared 20 acres.
They planted crops.
And he says, Miss Davidson was devising plans to repay the loan.
So this is the woman that he will He will later marry and how does she repay the loan?
How does she plan to do it?
Her first effort was made by holding festivals or suppers.
She made a personal canvas among all the white and colored families in the town of Tuskegee and got them to agree to give something.
A cake, a chicken, bread or pies that could be sold at the festival.
So, think about this.
This is all very legitimate because you are raising money for an educational, which is to say charitable institution, and whatever you can donate to the degree of your means, please do.
Booker T says, of course, the colored people were glad to give everything that they could spare, but I want to add that Ms.
Davidson did not apply to a single white family so far as I now remember that failed to donate something.
Now, this is a very telling statement, because we are talking here about the post-Bellum South.
We're talking about the place where racism is supposed to be widely prevalent and epidemic, and of course we can't deny that there was, we see this even in the segregation laws, there was in fact racism, but still, even so,
What Booker T is saying is that when you see blacks doing something for themselves, trying to improve their lives, trying to be productive, not just for themselves but also for the community, you find that not just other blacks but whites And what's striking here is it's not that he says that, you know, out of every 10 whites, you know, three of them, three to five of them step forward.
No.
He says, I cannot think of a single example of a white family.
Think of it.
By and large, these white families are, for the most part, very poor.
Why?
Because even if there was plantation wealth in the South, Most of it, virtually all of it, was destroyed in the Civil War.
The South was actually in a terrible condition in the aftermath of the war, and poor whites and poor blacks were very often economically pretty much in the same boat.
And then Booker T. Washington closes out the chapter this way, and I'm just going to read.
I recall one old colored woman who was about 70 years of age who came to see me when we were raising money to pay for the farm.
She hobbled into the room where I was, leaning on a cane.
This is Booker T. Washington in his sort of great storytelling mode.
And these aren't, by the way, these aren't fictional.
He's describing actual incidents, but note the sort of artistry with which he relays the story.
So she hobbles into the room, leaning on a cane.
She was clad in rags, but they were clean.
She said, Mr. Washington, God knows I spent the best days of my life in slavery.
God knows I's ignorant and poor.
But she says, I knows what you and Miss Davidson is trying to do.
I knows you is trying to make better men and better women for the colored race.
I ain't got no money, but I want you to take these six eggs.
What I's been saving up and I wants you to put these six eggs into the education of these boys and gals.
Wow!
What is this?
What are we reading?
We are reading the biblical story of the widow's mite.
The widow has very little to give, just a mite, just a penny, but she gives what she can.
She gives all that she has and Jesus says her gift is bigger than people who gave Twenty times.
Fifty times more.
Same here.
You've got a woman.
She's poor.
She's ignorant.
This education will not benefit her in any way.
But she is impressed by the nobility of the enterprise.
She donates six eggs.
And Booker T. Washington, great man that he is, goes, Since the work at Tuskegee started, it has been my privilege to receive many gifts for the benefit of the institution, but never any, I think, that touched me so deeply as this one.
▲
Export Selection