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Aug. 27, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:30
GLOBAL TYRANNY Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep905
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Coming up, I want to talk about the recent confessions of Mark Zuckerberg in the context of the issue of an emerging global tyranny.
I'll examine the argument of pro-life activist Lila Rose, who says pro-lifers may want to sit out the 2024 election.
And political commentator Caitlin Sinclair joins me.
We're going to talk about the significance of RFK Jr.
and Tulsi Gabbard endorsing Trump.
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I want to talk about the threat of global tyranny, but I want to do it in the context of a new revelation from one Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, now called Meta.
So, Mark Zuckerberg just sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee.
That's a pretty remarkable letter.
I was actually tempted to read the letter, but I don't think I'm going to.
I'm going to just give you some of the key aspects of it.
The first one is that he says, well, I'll read you a few sentences of it.
In 2021, senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, and here's an interesting little phrase, including humor and satire.
And then Zuckerberg goes on to say, ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take the content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement.
and He goes, I believe the government pressure was wrong and I regret we were not more outspoken about it.
And he says we made choices that with the benefit of hindsight we wouldn't make today.
And he says that we are not going to fall for this again.
We are ready to push back if something like this happens again.
Now that's only the first part of the letter.
So the letter begins by saying, the Biden-Harris administration pressured us.
We succumbed to that pressure, although we were also responsible ourselves because we made decisions.
We censored Americans.
And then in an interesting turn, he discusses the Hunter Biden.
Laptop story.
And he says, yeah, we were guilty.
We, we throttled it.
We throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story intentionally, even though we now realize that the laptop was authentic.
So what is, what is actually going on here?
There are all kinds of ways to think about this and to read it.
And we've got to be a little bit careful.
So here's one possibility.
Mark Zuckerberg did all this very willingly.
He was quite complicit with the whole project of the left, not just censorship.
By the way, a theme I haven't even mentioned that's in the letter is Zuckerberg goes on to say that he put a whole bunch of money in to guarantee, as he saw it, the proper administration of the 2020 election.
He did not have, he says, a partisan motive.
He was just trying to help out.
But he realizes now that many people have been very critical, including me, others, many others, that this was a partisan maneuver, that it was a device not merely to install mail-in drop boxes, but specifically to install that in-democratic heavy jurisdictions and moreover to infiltrate election offices. He doesn't discuss the specifics of it. He basically says my motives were good but since I
now realize that this is susceptible to being seen in a partisan way, I'm out.
I'm not doing this again.
I don't wish to try to put my thumb on the scale of American electoral politics.
So, the letter by itself appears to be kind of a very welcome, like is Mark Zuckerberg seeing the light?
Are his eyes opened?
Is this a letter of sort of mea culpa?
But of course, the other possibility is Mark Zuckerberg is reading the tea leaves.
He's like, you know what?
I actually think that Trump might win this election, and it's going to be very bad for me because if I make myself a deadly enemy of Trump and the MAGA movement, well, that means that they're going to see me as their deadly enemy, which means they're going to try to take it out on me when they come into power.
So this is a time for me to come clean and sort of say, No, no, no, I did not intend to do this.
We made some serious errors that we're now willing... So that's one way to look at it.
It's the idea that Zuckerberg is just a crafty, self-interested scoundrel and he's sort of protecting, as they say, kind of protecting, covering up his rear end because he fears what may be coming.
A second possibility is that you have a guy like Zuckerberg and he needs to be renamed Zuckerberg.
He's an idiot.
He's a smart guy in one way, in a technical way, but he's like...
His IQ may be high, but his EQ is really low.
He's a human robot of sorts.
And so what's happened is that all these cunning people around him at Facebook have hijacked the idea of this platform and have established this whole censorship regime.
They're working hand-in-hand with the Biden administration.
They're happily censoring conservatives.
And Zuckerberg is somewhat late to the party.
Now, this may seem so crazy to say, But I think something like this honestly happened to Jack Dorsey at Twitter.
Jack Dorsey appeared to be, like, genuinely shocked that other cunning characters, including the Indian woman Vijaya, who was the legal counsel, this guy Rath, what is it, Yol Rath, or whatever his name is, the guy who was in charge of trust and safety.
I mean, these scoundrels had kind of hijacked the whole Twitter censorship machine.
Now, of course, Jack Dorsey was, you know, he had become a billionaire because he started Twitter.
So there he was on the beach.
And of course, you know, he's walking around with his tattoos and going through his holistic yoga classes and so on.
But was he fully aware of all the algorithms that were being put into place?
Some of which, by the way, are still in place at Twitter.
Not all of it has been fully dismantled by Elon Musk.
So, It's possible that we have this phenomenon of the tech mogul who allows their inner circle to be taken over.
So, I think that what Zuckerberg is admitting here is actually pretty significant.
He's admitting that not only did he do censorship, but the censorship was at the behest of the government.
It was censorship aimed at influencing the outcome of an election.
So, just kind of turn the tables for a moment.
Imagine if Zuckerberg came out and said this.
Except he said that the Trump administration was responsible.
They made him do this.
They forced him or pressured him to censor the Democrats.
Think of the deafening outcry.
Think of all the hearings that would be called.
Think of the immediate volcano of reaction, not just in the media, but also among Democrats in the House and in the Senate.
It's kind of a little bit of a measure of how beaten down our side is.
that we don't express this kind of outrage.
In fact, we almost give it a sense of a familiar smile of recognition.
Well, yes, of course, we know that this is what they're doing.
And so we have become almost somewhat habituated to this kind of political one-sidedness, this kind of political abuse.
And so So, what we see from Zuckerberg here, I think, is very damning admissions.
Whatever his motive for making them, he's, in a sense, saying that even if he doesn't want to in the future put his thumb on the scale of an election, he already did.
He already did.
The 2020 election, the legitimacy, quite apart from 2,000 meals, quite apart from the from machines and quite apart from all of that, right here is election interference of a most significant sort.
I mean, think about the level of communication that is controlled by these digital platforms.
Just take on the one hand Facebook and on the other hand Google.
Those two together control probably 30% of all the communications that are happening in the country.
And I'm including all the mainstream media.
I'm just saying on those platforms alone, when you consider the number of people on these platforms, the reach of these digital platforms is absolutely huge.
And one reason I think it's not inappropriate to speak in global terms is these platforms have global reach.
Facebook, after all, is not confined to America.
You've got, what, one out of every three or four people on the planet who are on Facebook?
Google is controlling searches of people all over the world.
So the tyranny that we're dealing with here is not tyranny confined to America.
But, of course, we as Americans are perhaps in the best position to stop it.
And let's hope that Zuckerberg, for whatever reason, is at least coming back onto the right path.
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I want to speak briefly about a somewhat nasty and acrimonious dispute that has arisen on the right over the pro-life issue.
J.D.
Vance was being interviewed on Meet the Press and he was asked whether he would veto a national abortion ban.
And JD Vance said, yes, we don't support a national abortion ban.
We think that the issue, in effect, should be left to the states.
Now, this brought a pungent rebuke from Lila Rose, noted pro-life activist.
If you don't stand for pro-life principles, you don't get pro-life votes.
Now, this is a kind of a troubling statement because it seems to be saying that pro-lifers, it seems to be An advocacy of pro-lifers to maybe sit out the election.
You don't get a pro-life vote.
I don't think the pro-lifers are going to go vote for Kamala Harris or for the Democrats when they have mobile vehicles performing abortions at the Democratic National Convention.
But I think Lila Rose is saying that there's a kind of a line if you don't be if you're not committed To at least the eventual outlawing of all abortions.
You're not a true pro-life person.
This is kind of what the issue is all about.
And it's too big an issue for me to try to resolve in a single stroke.
I think I'll be saying more about it in the days ahead.
I just want to address a specific post that's put up by someone who's a very good and eloquent pro-life advocate.
Her name is Anna M. Lulis, Anna M. Lulis, at Anna M. Lulis on X. And she says this, in quote marks, abortion should be left up to the states.
That's the Dobbs decision.
That's the implications of overturning Roe.
She says that is equivalent to, quote, slavery should be left up to the states.
And then she comments, Morality doesn't change by state lines.
Abortion is wrong.
Ban it.
This is a very complex issue.
And I say complex because when you're dealing with an issue like this, you have three separate threads that have to somehow be pulled together.
One is the philosophical or moral thread.
Namely, abortion and slavery are both intrinsically wrong.
But then, you have, I'm gonna call it the legal thread.
And the legal thread is, while abortion and slavery might be wrong, what does the law, and specifically the supreme law of the land, otherwise known as the Constitution of the United States, say about it?
And the legal issue is not the same as the philosophical or moral issue.
And then on top of that, you have a third issue.
Which I'm going to call the pragmatic issue.
But by the pragmatic issue I mean simply, I don't mean some sort of philosophy of pragmatism, I mean rather just this.
What can in practice be achieved at a given time?
That's the pragmatic issue.
Let's look for just a moment at how Abraham Lincoln addresses these three issues with regard to slavery.
In other words, here's Ana Lula making a direct analogy to slavery.
So let's examine the Lincoln position.
On the philosophical and moral issue, Lincoln is in complete agreement.
He takes, you could call it the pro-life stance, slavery is wrong, period.
It's wrong in every case.
On the legal issue, however, Lincoln takes a somewhat different position.
In fact, here when we take the statement quoted by Anna Lula, slavery should be left up to the states, Lincoln did not agree that slavery should be left up to every state.
It's true.
In fact, Lincoln was opposed to the doctrine of popular sovereignty that was being argued by Stephen Douglas, according to which each state would decide for itself about slavery.
Lincoln was opposed to popular sovereignty, but, and it's a very big but, Lincoln was not opposed to popular sovereignty in all cases.
Lincoln agreed that in the South, slavery should be up to the states.
Lincoln agreed that in the South, in Alabama and the Carolinas and Oklahoma, those states should decide for themselves if they want to have slavery, yes or no.
So, even though Lincoln believed that slavery was wrong in every case, he was willing to let the southern states decide the matter for himself, and so was the entire Republican Party in 1860.
It was merely opposed to the extension of popular sovereignty to the new territories.
So the argument of Lincoln and the GOP in 1860 was, we are going to stop the extension of slavery.
It was kind of a containment strategy.
We're going to contain slavery from spreading outward and infecting, you might say, these new territories which don't already have it.
And so, we now turn for a moment to the pragmatic aspect of all this, and I think this was Lincoln's real point.
Did Lincoln actually want slavery in Oklahoma and North and South Carolina?
No.
But Lincoln realized, A, that the founders had made a compromise and allowed it there, and B, there was no widespread moral support, even in the North, of forcing the South to end slavery inside of the South.
So, for Lincoln, that was the pragmatic reality.
For Lincoln, Lincoln realized, I don't have the power to do that, even if I wanted to.
And so, when I disavow my intention to do it, I'm disavowing my intention to do that which I could not, in any case, do.
So, I'm not resolving the abortion issue, but I'm just giving you a way to think about it.
I'm taking the exact analogy that is used right here by Anna Lewis, and I'm saying, look at the way in which, although the Republican Party was the anti-slavery party, and its anti-slavery credentials were in no way in doubt,
Nevertheless, this party set about trying to achieve the philosophical or moral goal in a manner consistent with the Constitution and the law and taking into account the pragmatic realities of the situation.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome back to the podcast, Caitlin Sinclair.
She's a spokesperson for Turning Point Action, the website tpusa.com.
You can follow her on social media, at csinclairtv.
And she used to work for One America News Network.
She speaks a lot about issues, particularly related to the younger generation.
Caitlin, welcome.
Thank you for joining me.
Let's start by talking about the sort of alliance now between Trump and a couple of very prominent Democrats.
I'm thinking particularly, well, Tulsi Gabbard to some degree, but especially Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who obviously represents maybe the most iconic Democratic family in the country.
The Democrats themselves are downplaying this.
In fact, a Democratic spokesman said something to the effect of like, good riddance, this guy is like a weirdo, he's a marginal guy.
I don't see it that way.
I think this is a big development.
Do you agree?
And what real difference does this make?
Yes, Dinesh, I absolutely agree.
I think you looked at how the Democrats treated someone like RFK Jr., right?
They treated him like a parasite and Republicans welcomed him with open arms.
I think the scariest thing to the Democrat establishment and to the mainstream media and to all the Hollywood elites We're seeing RFK Jr.
on that stage here in Arizona last week with Donald Trump.
I think that was the scariest moment for them all.
And what that moment really represented, I think, to the Americans at home watching was the moment that us as Americans put our differences aside and agreed to take on the deep state and formed such a powerful and patriotic alliance, like you said.
And what does this really mean?
Well, it sends a message to all Americans out there that this is the time in this country to do just that.
This is the time in the country, like you see in all the movies, Dinesh, right?
If you ever watch one of those movies where you have a bad guy and a good guy, and some of the good guys decide to put their differences aside and come together to take on evil, I think that is exactly what we witnessed here in this country last week.
And I think Americans at home watching are going to echo that message.
I mean, one of the interesting implications of what you just said is that, you know, for really a generation or more, we've thought of the ideological differences between the two parties as the dividing line in any national election.
But I think when you use a phrase like putting differences aside, what you seem to be saying is there's a sort of a reconfiguration here that there is a kind of wing of the Democratic Party that is on the side of good and we can ally with them without compromising or giving up our principles.
I mean, here's Robert F. Kennedy standing on the Trump stage speaking to a MAGA audience and being wildly cheered.
That means that this is not some kind of a Imagination by Trump to go, hey listen, you know, I'm gonna split the differences with this guy.
I mean this guy resonates with the MAGA crowd.
What does that tell you?
Well, I think what it tells us is how, again, you don't need to fit this perfect, conservative, evangelical mold to be able to come to the MAGA side, to be able to join the Republican and conservative movement.
And look, I was at the DNC last week, Dinesh, and there was such a stark difference, not only in the messaging, but just having to witness these protesters, these Democrats, these angry liberals take to the streets protesting, you know, just so angry.
And to see the riot cops and the riot gear and all of the extra officers that were called into the city of Chicago last week protecting Kamala Harris, protecting Bill and Hillary Clinton, protecting Democrats from other Democrats.
You did not see that at the RNC, and you don't see that, quite frankly.
You don't see Republicans and conservatives attacking each other, right?
This is a party that welcomes everybody, and I think For me, and I think for my generation, the messaging coming from RFK Jr.
is so inspiring, right?
And when you heard the speech last week, I mean, what was so scary to the Democrats about that message?
What was so scary about what he was saying?
Because the messaging really is what?
It's ending and putting a stop to endless wars, ending censorship, reforming our food supply, Taking a look at why we are poisoning our children, why so many young adolescents are on antidepressants, SSRIs, can't form a real relationship, can't form a real sentence, are coming out of school with, you know, more degrees on paper, but zero life skills, zero life lessons, zero coping mechanisms, while we're all so depressed.
I mean, these are fundamental questions that we all should be asking.
So what was RFK Jr.
asking us to do?
He was asking us to love our children more than we hate each other.
And that is a message that I know resonates with my peers and my colleagues and my contemporaries.
And I don't know why it scares the left so much, but I think that's a question we should be asking.
I mean, we learned something from this, right?
If we made a list of 20 public policy positions, I'm willing to bet that you and I would be on one side and we would disagree with probably Robert F. Kennedy on more than 10.
So he would be probably a fairly traditional Democrat on a lot of policy issues.
However, policy issues are not equal.
Right?
If you look at the key issues, dismantling the police state, you know, going after censorship, we find that our basic liberties are being threatened here.
Look at all the lies that came out during COVID.
So on the issues that matter the most, this guy is on the right side.
And what I found particularly kind of moving was His recent post where he was giving, as he saw it, a kind of Democrats perspective on MAGA.
So it's one thing for him to say, hey, listen, Trump is going to include me.
I'm going to bring my issues to the table within the MAGA fold.
But he was like, MAGA's misunderstood, because it's nothing more than reigniting the engines of American optimism, of prosperity, of making your life better than your parents' life was, of creating productivity, of America being an example to the world, but not necessarily the policeman of the world.
So he laid all this out, and I'm like, wow, that's about as good an interpretation of the MAGA movement as I've seen come from anyone.
I could not agree more.
And Dinesh, you and I have talked about this previously, right?
What does make America healthy again really mean when you break it down?
And to me, like I said, we talked about this previously, there is such a lack of talking about these subjects right now.
Talking about Installing the family unit as a centerpiece in society, right?
Talking about God and faith as a centerpiece once again.
Talking about how we can all be connected.
There is such a loss of connectivity for my generation and for the generation coming up behind me.
Everyone feels this overwhelming sense of hopelessness and loss of connection and not forming real relationships.
And then, of course, talk about, you know, the chemicals in our food supply, the SSRIs, the antidepressants, birth control, all of the substance abuse that we're facing, why every single college student feels the need to be addicted to one or two vices, Dinesh.
And these are all the questions that RFK Jr.
is raising.
And is committed to answering for us.
So make America healthy again.
Make America great again.
I think these are absolutely acronyms and phrases that have been misrepresented.
And it's because of the mainstream media.
It's because of all the noise.
It's because of how angry so many on the left are and the Twitter wars and the TikTok videos that are meant to divide us.
Having someone like RFK standing on the stage with Donald Trump saying, I put my differences aside because I know what's at stake here.
RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and many other Democrats that have left their party, they understand what's really at stake here.
Look, Joe Biden walked away from his party in the hopes of saving the party.
RFK Jr.
walked away from his party in the hopes of saving this country.
So, Dinesh, to me, Trump 2024 is no longer a Republican ticket.
It is an American ticket.
And I think all of your listeners would agree with that.
The Democrats, if you really look at them today, seem to have repudiated so much of their kind of old stances.
In other words, let's go back and think of what the Democratic Party stood for, not even in the days of FDR, but even LBJ and subsequently through Clinton.
It was sort of like, we're fighting for the poor.
We're fighting for the little guy.
We're against these concentrations of power.
In fact, they were very much the anti-war party in the Bush era.
They were like, we don't approve of the Iraq war.
We're not even sure we like what's going on in Afghanistan.
So this is what the Democrats sort of stood for.
This was their ideological sort of framework.
Now they've essentially repudiated pretty much all of that.
And even though they continue to parrot the rhetoric of being against the rich, if you look at the Democratic Convention, you know, all the suites on the upper floors are bought by multi-millionaires and billionaires who are quite literally looking down on all the Democratic activists as if to say, you guys are our pawns.
You know, we are the only people that your candidates actually return our phone calls.
Try getting your phone call returned by, say, Kamala Harris.
No, it's not going to happen, but she'll return Alex Soros's phone call.
So hasn't the Democratic Party become a sort of a kind of a cartel that just uses rhetoric and issues, but ultimately just naked, brutal power is all they stand for?
What else do they stand for, if not that?
Well, to me, the Democrat Party has become the party of hollyweird liberals and elites, Dinesh, and such out-of-touch Americans.
We had the DNC last week, where we had Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, and the Clintons trying to talk to us, the American voters, about victim, about how they have been victims, With their multiple, exactly, multiple million dollar mansions, they can't relate to the average American.
And I think what voters love about Donald Trump is for the entire time he's been involved in politics, he has been real, he has been raw, and he has been authentic.
And he does not pretend to be someone he's not.
He does not pretend that he didn't come from money, and he has not succeeded, and he has not achieved the American dream.
In fact, that is what he wants for all of us.
But when you have a Michelle Obama and an Oprah, like you just mentioned, taking the stage, talking to us about being victims, I mean, I really hope that the American people can see past that because nothing screams more out of touch than going home to your Martha's Vineyard mansion where, by the way, of course, they didn't want the illegals and the migrants to take place or to house them there.
So nothing screams more out of touch than that.
So right now, I think this is a game of chess that we're seeing play out.
You had Donald Trump, who has been authentic, has stuck to the vision, has stuck to the America First agenda.
You had the Democrats have no choice but to have to throw in Kamala Harris and install her into the party.
Then you had the DNC take place, and they had a hand in all of that, bringing all their elites and, again, their Hollyweird liberals to the stage.
And then what did Donald Trump do?
He stole all of the momentum back with this unification message.
So this is a game of chess that we're seeing play out, and we're running out of time here.
So I really hope Americans tuned into the DNC, honestly.
I really hope they did, because when you're sitting at home and you can't afford groceries, you can't afford to fill up your gas tank, and there's a crime rate skyrocketing across this country, you're scared to send your kids to school, I don't think they want to hear from Oprah whining about, again, how this country has done her wrong.
Turns out Americans don't want to hear, Dinesh, how bad their country is, how racist their country is, when they're sitting at home facing crises after crises.
I mean, I think when you use the word authentic with regard to Trump, this is the key to the guy.
Because, of course, he lives in a mansion, right?
Mar-a-Lago's as nice as any Obama mansion on Martha's Vineyard.
In fact, nicer.
But the key to Trump, I don't know if you saw the video that was just up on social media yesterday.
Trump is in a Vietnamese restaurant.
Right?
And I was trying to imagine a Democrat.
A Democratic candidate in the Vietnamese restaurant would probably come dressed up in a Vietnamese outfit.
Right?
They would probably start off with some Vietnamese greeting.
Right?
Then they would congratulate the Vietnamese family for being successful.
Since minorities are all downtrodden, they would be shocked and astounded that a single Vietnamese family had managed to pull itself up to success.
So you would get all this artificiality, all the stagecraft, all this kind of BS.
But here's Trump.
He comes in, he's dressed the normal way with his red tie.
He looks like Trump.
You know, he doesn't do any pandering.
He just talks to these guys as if they have something in common with him, which is they're Americans.
He speaks that kind of American language that he could have given the exact same remarks in a completely different venue, having nothing to do with the Vietnamese.
And it would be the same message.
And there's something very kind of endearing about that because Trump is clearly not putting on an act.
That's right.
Again, Donald Trump has stuck to the same agenda, which is America first, the same vision, which is making this country safe and secure once again.
And my favorite thing, Dinesh, about the Democrats, and we witnessed this last week, is their multiple accents.
I mean, come on, we have to love that.
Kamala Harris seems to have multiple accents.
We had Barack Obama last week having multiple accents on the DNC stage.
So that's my favorite part.
And then the flip-flopping, the hypocrisy.
We heard for how many years about how the border walls are racist.
And then what did we witness last week at the DNC?
Walls built up at every single street corner to protect Democrats.
Of course, defund the police was another of their favorite slogans.
And then we had multiple officers with riot gears on every single street corner, again, protecting the Democrats.
So the hypocrisy and the multiple accents and the inauthentic behavior that we see time and time again from these elites, I really think the American people are fed up because more than an America First agenda right now, I think Americans are craving authenticity.
They're longing for authenticity, which is also why you see the mainstream media and the big networks and as their ratings are in the toilet because we can't relate to We can't relate to the inauthentic nature of the mainstream media telling us one day that there's nothing to see here and Joe Biden is perfectly capable to run for office and the very next week talking about his cognitive decline.
So there's a lot of problems here with trust and just craving those authentic conversations.
And yes, Donald Trump can walk into a restaurant and connect with people because at the end of the day, Democrat, Republican race, we are all the human race, and no one better understands that than Donald Trump.
Good point, Kaitlin.
Guys, I've been talking to Kaitlin Sinclair, the Turning Point spokeswoman, the follower on X at C Sinclair TV, the website TPUSA.com.
Kaitlin, as always, thank you very much for joining me.
Thanks, Dinesh.
We're in Chapter 9 of Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery.
And when we left off, Booker T. Washington was expressing a certain degree of satisfaction at having repaid a loan that he got from General Marshall for $250.
And Booker T. Washington comments now about this business of loans because very often Tuskegee is struggling, they need money, there's a building under construction, they've got to do repairs, and so they have to borrow money.
And borrowing money is not a bad thing, but for Booker T, borrowing money is a very serious business.
In fact, he talks about the fact, he says that before the building was completed, he goes, more than once our hearts were made to bleed, as it were, because bills were falling due, we did not have the money.
Perhaps no one who has not gone through the experience month after month of trying to erect buildings and provide equipment for a school, when no one knew where the money was to come from, can appreciate the difficulties, etc.
So, this was an issue that played upon his mind.
He goes, during the first years at Tuskegee, I recall night after night I would roll and toss on my bed without sleep because of the anxiety and uncertainty we were in regarding money.
But, says Booker T. Washington, the fact that they were engaged in this enterprise, he approached it with hope, but he also approached it with pragmatism.
The key to taking loans is making sure that you pay them back, and you pay them back on time.
In fact, he says, That one of the things he was most proud of at Tuskegee was that the school was building up credit.
Now, he doesn't mean building up credit in the sense that we think of, oh, I got a credit score of 800, that means I can take a massive loan.
He means credit in the sense of believability.
If you take a loan from somebody for $250, and the guy says, listen, I wanna make sure you pay it back in a year, and you pay it back in nine months, guess what?
That $250 is always going to be available to you, because the next time you go to that guy, he's going to be like, oh, sure, the last time you paid me back, even before the loan was due.
So Booker T. Washington quotes a man named George W. Campbell.
He was one of the men, remember, that Booker T. said, I trust a black man and a white man.
This was the white man.
And he says that George Campbell told him, Washington, always remember that credit is capital.
And what he means is exactly what I just said, which is that when you have good credit, almost think of credit here as credit and debit.
And think of credit here not in economic terms purely, but in moral terms.
Someone is crediting you with something, and what is that something?
Trustworthiness, reliability, diligence, industry.
So credit is capital in the sense that credit builds up your reputational goodwill.
And that's the point, I think, that Booker T. Washington, he realizes that not just for himself, not just for Tuskegee, the school, but for the black race, for the whole group, you've got to build up credit.
And that means what he wants to do is he wants the black citizens of Tuskegee, and indeed of the country, to show the country, hey, listen, in freedom, We are of service to you.
To you, meaning to the nation.
We are a net plus.
You need to look up to us because we are doing good work that is helping all of us.
Us included, but you also.
And so, this is Booker T. Washington's vision.
And notice that he has the vision in the broad sense, but he puts it into effect at the granular level.
In other words, he lives by it.
He pays his debts.
The school pays its debts.
And so, Booker T. Washington is not like some of these guys who are sort of, you may say, preach about virtue, but are not exemplars of it.
He clearly is an exemplar of it also.
The first animal that the school came into possession of was an old blind horse given to us by one of the white citizens of Tuskegee.
Then says Booker T. Washington, Perhaps I may add here that at the present time the school owns over 200 horses, colts, mules, cows, calves, and oxen, and about 700 hogs and pigs, as well as a large number of sheep and goats.
So, Washington is very aware that he is writing from the point of view of having built a very successful institution.
But he's also giving you the account of how this institution begins in very simple and humble ways.
And this is, by the way, true of pretty much every successful enterprise that is built from the ground up.
Right? I mean think about some of even the great digital companies of our era.
They started out in someone's garage. And I don't just mean, you know, Facebook starts out of a dorm room. In college, I know that Michael Dell began his computer business when he was at, I think, UT Austin.
Bill Gates started out in a garage.
Hewlett Packard started out with two guys who came together in a garage.
So Booker T. Washington is, in his own way, describing a similar enterprise.
Starts off with one blind horse donated by a white guy who wishes the school well.
Southern white guy, think about it, who wishes the school well.
And then Booker T. Washington talks about the fact that there are white guys in Tuskegee who help them in various ways.
He says, there was a southern white man who was operating a sawmill not far from Tuskegee.
He came to me and said he would gladly put out the lumber necessary to erect the building on the grounds with no other guarantee for payment than my word that it would be paid for when we secured some money.
So, this is extremely generous.
Booker T. Washington has no money, and he doesn't have any collateral.
The white guy can't say, hey, listen, if you don't pay the money, I'm going to take your what?
There's nothing to give him.
And so the white guy comes in, and he says, I've got lumber.
I'll bring it.
I'll start building for you.
And you pay me when you get the money.
So this, I think, is a...
The beauty of this story is, for Booker T. Washington, he puts it in here to praise the white guy.
But notice that really it is also a reflection on him.
Because the white guy is, and probably this is a white guy, you know, marinated in the culture of the Old South.
This is only, we're only talking about a couple of decades after slavery.
This is a white guy who has such reputational trust and respect for Booker T. Washington and what he's trying to do.
that he goes, essentially, I'll donate this lumber until you can pay me.
And then he says, on another occasion, he says, there was an old antebellum colored man.
So it's not just the white guys who are helping, it's the blacks also.
So an old antebellum colored man.
What does he mean?
He means a colored man who used to be a slave.
That's why he's antebellum.
Ante meaning before the end of slavery.
Came a distance of 12 miles and brought in his ox cart a large hog.
Wow, can you just imagine the scene?
When the meeting was in progress, he rose in the midst of the company, so they're actually in a sort of a town square, and the guy shows up with a hog.
And then he stands up and he says he had absolutely no money which he could give, but he had raised two fine hogs, and he had brought one of them as a contribution toward the expenses of the building.
And Booker T. Washington, of course, gratefully accepts the gift.
Again, we're talking about people who have very little to give.
I mean, think about this guy.
He has two hogs.
He gives one.
And that is, I mean, that's 50% of what he has.
So the level of generosity, it's often said, and I think it's quite true, that when it comes to charity, the poor give more.
And this is a little counterintuitive because, of course, when you're looking at institutions, you have, oh, well, this guy gave $5,000.
This guy gave $50,000.
Yeah, but the guy who gave $5,000 is a millionaire and the guy who gave $50,000 is a billionaire.
But the guy who makes $35,000 a year and gave $100 is giving a bigger percentage of what they have.
It's going to cost them more.
They're going to miss out on something because of what they gave, whereas the guy who gave $5,000 or the guy who gave $50,000 is not going to.
Their lifestyle is completely unchanged.
And then Booker T. Washington begins a section, which I'll go into tomorrow, where he talks about the fact that we also, he says, went north in search of money.
In other words, we went to sympathetic quarters in New York, in Connecticut, in Boston.
And Booker T. Washington's point man, or point woman, I should say for this, is his future wife, Miss Davidson.
It's kind of funny, but Debbie was looking at Booker T. Washington, and she goes, well, Dinesh, you know, he had three wives.
And I was like, what?
And she's like, yes.
And it turns out, and this is actually addressed a little bit later in the book, Booker T. Washington marries a black woman, but she gets sick and dies.
Olivia Davidson becomes his second wife.
She subsequently dies and then he marries again.
So it's not that the guy was divorced or had certainly not had multiple wives at the same time.
Rather, when you first encountered Booker T. Washington in this book talking about Olivia Davidson being his future wife, I didn't realize that he had been married before.
But he has and his His wife dies.
But he's describing now how Olivia Davidson becomes the emissary of the school to potential well-wishers and donors in the North.
And he goes on to describe the kind of Painful business of raising money and how difficult it is to do even for a worthy cause and yet how gratifying it is to find people who have no stake in the matter.
You've got people who live elsewhere.
They're not going to come to Tuskegee.
Their kids aren't going to go to Tuskegee.
But they notice that something kind of noble and wonderful is happening over there.
Someone, in this case Booker T. Washington, is building something quite unique, quite new, that offers real hope and, quite frankly, would have been of immeasurable value to the black community and to the United States if the Booker T. Washington formula for success had been adopted by the black community.
Alas, that was not the case with the civil rights leadership And a lot of the problems that blacks are facing today, I think, are the direct result of having listened to the wrong kinds of people and not followed the very worthy path set forth, and this is part of the reason why we're reading this book, set forth by Booker T. Washington.
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