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Aug. 28, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
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MANIPULATING TRUTH Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep906
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Coming up, I'll review special counsel Jack Smith's new superseding indictment in the January 6th case against Trump.
And research psychologist, computer analyst, and author Robert Epstein joins me.
We're going to talk about Google's scheme to influence the 2024 election in favor of the Democrats.
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I want to talk about Special Counsel Jack Smith and I hesitate for a moment even to use the word special counsel because Jack Smith has been booted from that position by Judge Eileen Cannon in Florida.
In fact, she dismissed the whole case, the so-called classified documents case, on the grounds that the appointment of Jack Smith is unconstitutional.
Now that Ruling applies to that case and applies to Florida.
It doesn't automatically apply everywhere else.
And so Jack Smith is still special counsel in the Washington DC case.
This is the January 6th case.
The supposed efforts by Trump to to rig the election and to interfere in the electoral process.
Now, Jack Smith has filed what is, in legal terms, called a superseding indictment.
It's kind of like saying, I filed an indictment, the Supreme Court has stepped in with its broad immunity ruling, arguing, not arguing, but declaring that Trump has Broad-based immunity for any actions taken as president.
And Jack Smith, that set him back.
So what he has done is he's kind of gone back to his old indictment and done a kind of a cut and paste.
He's essentially said, all right, I got to take some stuff out because I had stuff in the old indictment where Trump is clearly acting in his official capacity.
Let me sort of just remove some of that and then refile the indictment.
The superseding indictment means, like, ignore the old one.
Here's the new one.
Let's work off of this one.
And Jack Smith knows that in doing this, he's got a sympathetic judge.
He's got a left-wing judge.
He's got a judge that is almost like his legal dance partner, so to speak, in which I won't say that Jack Smith is completely leading her.
They're both kind of leading alternatively, but they are working as a team.
And he knows that, and he knows he can kind of count on that.
He couldn't obviously count on that with Eileen Cannon, who's a Republican appointee.
Now, there is a rule in the Justice Department's manual which says, I'm now quoting, that prosecutors should avoid taking actions that, quote, have the purpose of affecting any election or for the purpose of giving an advantage or disadvantage to any candidate or political party.
This would seem right away to be contravened by Jack Smith's action.
He's filing a case and it is very close to the election.
In fact, some places have early voting that begins as early as September 20th, so just about three weeks from now.
But the Justice Department is taking the position, no problem, we're not violating this rule.
Why?
Because this is not a new case.
They're acting like, well, we had an old filing, that's what got the case going, that was months and months ago.
Now, true, we've had to sort of redo the case because of the Supreme Court's intervention with the immunity issue, but redoing a case is not starting a new case.
resorting to this sort of technicality, namely that this is an old case that is simply being refurbished while taking a Supreme Court ruling into account.
One striking thing, and I've got the whole superseding indictment.
It's about 35 pages long.
You can actually find it online and read it.
It's pretty interesting.
And a lot of it is a recycled kind of farrago, a kind of a jumble of Nonsensical and one-sided assertions.
I mean, just to give you a classic example, it has about a page that focuses on the call that Trump made to the Georgia Secretary of State, Raffensperger.
And it emphasizes the line where Trump says, I need you to quote, find me 11,000 and some votes.
Nowhere does it mention that Trump very clearly says multiple times on the call, and the transcript of the call is available online.
You can read it for yourself.
It's not that long of a call, and you can see Trump's remarks.
Trump says repeatedly, I won Georgia.
You know that I won Georgia.
All I want you to do is find valid votes that are not being counted.
So the whole point of the Jack Smith indictment is that, and I can just quote from it, These claims were false, meaning the claim that Trump won the election, and the defendant knew that they were false.
If you remove that, the whole case collapses.
It can't be that Trump contested the election, Trump believed he won, they believed they won, there was a legitimate argument about this, the argument may have gone one way, could have gone the other way, the courts could have ruled in Trump's favor, they happened to rule the other way.
So, There'd be nothing criminal about this.
You can't exactly try to put someone in jail because they contested an election.
You have to show that they not only lost, they were aware that they lost, and they were merely doing this to in some way muck up are election procedures.
They were doing it to subvert the legitimate results of a free and fair election.
That's the underlying premise of the whole case.
And one bizarre aspect of this indictment is that it still has the so-called section 1512 charge here that Trump is somehow obstructing an official proceeding.
And you might remember that the Supreme Court threw that out on the basis that that requires the presence of documents that were altered, that were interfered with, that were tampered with, and so regardless of whether or not Trump said, Trump of course did not say, go inside the Capitol, occupy the Capitol, Trump didn't say any of that.
But even if he did, that doesn't have anything to do with documents, that doesn't have anything to do with When you have a bunch of people walking into the Capitol, they did not get their hands on any documents.
They were not in a position to alter them in any way.
All of this, by the way, goes back to the precedent of the Enron case, I guess it was, when this law was, when the statute was passed. But Jack Smith is taking a cue from one of the Supreme Court justices. This is This is Justice Katonji Brown-Jackson.
She voted with the majority that Section 1512 could not be used absent actual interference with documents.
But she had a very kind of sneaky paragraph in her concurrence, and this was a paragraph that she wrote just herself in a kind of individual concurring opinion, where she basically said that, you know, it could be that in January 6th there was a proceeding underway, which is the proceeding of the Electoral College, and
There are some documents and there are some records and there are some objects that are used in that proceeding.
And if you can prove that there was an obstruction of those, that somehow Trump is responsible for interfering with those documents, Then maybe the section 1512 would apply.
And it looks like Jack Smith was like, aha, yup, let me go for it.
So he is pushing the envelope.
Now, I think the Supreme Court has done its best to pretty clearly say, kind of get off the grass.
This isn't really going anywhere, and that is quite clearly the majority opinion of the court.
But you have to see here the aggression of these leftists.
I mean, they don't stop at anything.
Their point is, we might lose, but let's push ahead anyway.
And I think Jack Smith's goal here is he knows that this case is not going to trial before the election.
So what's he hoping for?
How is he hoping to influence the election outcome?
Answer, he wants Judge Chutkan to have an evidentiary hearing on the issue of immunity.
He wants to have a sort of a mini trial, maybe even a two-day trial.
Before the election.
That way he can put a bunch of evidence on.
He knows the media will be heavily in attendance.
They will amplify the results of this hearing.
So this is his best effort.
He can't go for a conviction.
He's not going to get a conviction.
So nothing of that sort is going to happen before November 5th.
But what he's hoping to do is make one small salvo against Trump, one more legal interference, one more effort at a Hail Mary pass, despite the very clear admonitions not to do this on the part of the Supreme Court.
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Guys, I'm really pleased to welcome back to the podcast Dr. Robert Epstein.
He's Senior Research Psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology.
He's a Harvard PhD, former Editor-in-Chief of Psychology Today.
He's had positions and taught at Boston University, University of California, Harvard.
And he has a tech watch project, which is the first 24-7 online monitoring system dedicated to focusing on Google and other big tech companies from manipulating elections, indoctrinating our children.
You can follow him on X at Dr. R. Epstein or the website mygoogleresearch.com.
Dr. Epstein, thank you for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
We are moving into the final phases of a big and important election.
And of course, everyone is concerned with the role that these digital platforms are going to play.
Obviously, not just in the mere facilitating of information, but in the manipulation of algorithms and the manipulation of outcomes.
I see just a couple of days ago, Mark Zuckerberg admitted that he was pressured by the Biden regime to censor Americans, that he acceded to that pressure.
He even says that they gave in to the FBI's pressure and throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.
I've always thought that while the problems at Facebook and Instagram are severe, they are nothing compared to the problems at Google and the ability of Google to manipulate what we see and what we know about what's going on.
Talk a little bit about your research and what people should know as we move toward November.
Well, first of all, thank you for having me back on.
And I really should point out that since I was last on, which I think might've been roughly a year ago, my team has made really miraculous, unbelievable progress in building the world's first nationwide monitoring system.
We're basically now doing to these companies what they do to us and our kids and our grandkids 24 hours a day.
They surveil us, Google alone surveils us over more than 200 different platforms, most of which no one has ever heard of.
And now we're surveilling them.
And they learn a lot about us by surveilling us and they use that information very aggressively and we're learning a lot about them.
I have a big monograph coming out soon, which, in my opinion, settles the issue about whether they're suppressing conservative content.
I show Absolutely conclusively that they are on a massive scale and they're manipulating votes on a massive scale.
And this is not just, you know, me fantasizing.
This is now based on collecting data from these companies.
The data they're actually sending, by the way, to the computers of We have a politically balanced group of more than 15,000 registered voters in all 50 states.
That's where we get our data from now, 24 hours a day.
And those data show unequivocally that Google and to a lesser extent other companies are suppressing conservative content and they are using all kinds of new techniques to shift votes in this
presidential election, this presidential election alone, Google can shift between 6.4 million, which is about how many votes they gave, by the way, to Joe Biden back in 2020, they can shift between 6.4 million and 25.5 million votes.
in this election.
Now we're collecting the evidence, and what we're trying to do now is work with attorneys general, members of Congress, Federal Election Commission, to try to pressure these companies to stop their manipulations.
We have stopped them before.
We want them to stop so that we have a free and fair election, so we have a level playing field.
I can't guarantee that they will stop, but I can guarantee this.
We will have the evidence, court admissible evidence on a massive scale.
We have so far preserved more than 98 million of what Google employees call ephemeral experiences that literally show the content that they are sending to registered voters, content that is normally lost forever.
That's why they call it ephemeral at Google.
That means fleeting.
And we're preserving it.
That's never been done before, never.
And certainly not on this scale.
So no matter what happens in this election, we will have the evidence of, you know, Trump used to talk about election rigging.
Well, This is the real rigging.
And you know who's figured this out recently and started saying this is Vivek Ramaswamy.
He's no longer talking about ballot stuffing and ballot harvesting, all that stuff that the tech companies want you to focus on.
They want you to focus on that stuff so you don't look at them.
And Ramaswamy has finally figured it out and is now saying publicly, no, it's the tech companies.
It's the tech companies.
They are the real culprits here.
And they're the ones we need to watch.
And they're the ones we need to stop.
One of the things about Google is, I think it's, in fact, this is what makes it perhaps more insidious, is its relative invisibility.
I mean, people know about Google, they talk about Googling something, but on the other hand, first of all, Google doesn't have as prominent a face as the other platforms, right?
Elon Musk is the face of X. Zuckerberg is the face of Instagram and Meta or Facebook.
Now Google is, you know, they've got this guy, who is running Google, but most people wouldn't even know his name.
So Google, in that sense, has a greater degree of anonymity.
And not only that, but if Facebook gives you a strike, and I've had them before, you know, you get notified, or they try to pull your platform down, or they give you a, you know, they shrink your exposure for six months or something like that.
With Google, whatever they're doing, nobody's even aware of it.
People just go, you know, I'm searching for Trump assassination.
And then you realize, you look it up and you're like, wait a minute, first of all, either nothing comes up as if this never happened, or if it comes up, it's taking you to here's how you can contribute to Kamala Harris.
So, so there is this kind of, um, Ability to curate information.
It's almost like the old dictionary.
You look up a word, but you don't realize that they're manipulating the meaning of words so that what you, quote, learn about things is being predetermined by someone else who's putting their thumbs, if I may say so, on the scale.
So, am I right in thinking that this is what puts Google in a sort of a separate camp from the other digital platforms?
Both its monopolistic power, relatively speaking, and its invisibility.
Well, first of all, in the case of the Department of Justice versus Google, a decision was recently handed down by a federal court declaring Google to be a monopoly.
Now, Google, of course, will appeal that, but there is no question, we've always known it for years, more than 92% of search worldwide is done on Google.
And the next most popular search engine gets about 2% of search, so they have no impact on anything.
Google is having a tremendous impact on the thinking and behavior and attitudes and beliefs and purchases and votes of not just Americans, but of billions of people around the world.
And there are no rules, no regulations, no laws to stop them, at least not in the United States.
And yes, you are correct.
What they do is virtually invisible.
And that's why what we are doing, which is capturing ephemeral content, the fleeting content that they use to manipulate us and they use to shift votes, And that is not stored anywhere and that normally disappears forever.
We're capturing that.
So, you know, you've identified the biggest problem of all.
Google is the biggest mind control machine, most powerful mind control machine ever developed by humankind.
And the data we are collecting show without doubt that they're using these powers they have to shift people's thinking and to distract us, which is even worse.
That's what magicians do.
They say, look over here, and that also is happening because Google, because they determine what content, you know, people see or don't see, they determine what content goes viral.
Google is saying, look over there, look at voting machines, look at ballot stuffing, and they're They don't want you looking at them.
That is the reason, because they have so much power, and so many techniques, by the way, for shifting those.
Let me give you an example right the second that we are detecting, and this will show you the value of monitoring.
Right now, we are detecting on Google's home page, which is seen more than 500 million times a day in the United States, We're seeing registered-to-vote reminders being sent to Democrats, and I lean in that direction myself, registered-to-vote reminders being sent to Democrats at two and a half times the rate that they're being sent to Republicans.
Now think about what impact that has over time and then look forward a little bit.
Those are going to turn into partisan mail-in-your-ballot reminders.
And those are going to turn into, and this is the real killer, those are going to turn into partisan go-vote reminders on election day alone.
If Google is sending out Go Vote reminders on its homepage in a partisan fashion, that can easily give their candidate of choice, and of course we know who that will be since 96% of their donations go to Democrats, That will easily shift, on election day itself, more than 450,000 votes to one candidate.
That's the kind of power that we're talking about here.
And except for us having a monitoring system in place, and we're the only team that's ever built them, No one would know.
See, that's what you were pointing out.
No one would know that they're sending out go-vote reminders in a partisan fashion, because how would you know unless you're monitoring?
We'll be right back with Robert Epstein to talk more about this.
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I'm back with Dr. Robert Epstein, Senior Research Psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology.
Follow him on X, Dr. R. Epstein, or website mygoogleresearch.com.
Dr. Epstein, You know, this is all so creepy and so terrifying.
And you're, as you say, a virtually solitary ombudsman who is tracking this.
Now, here's my question.
The ordinary citizen may say, well, I feel helpless.
Like, what's my recourse?
I can follow Dr. Epstein's research.
I can see what's going on.
Is there anything I can do beyond that?
And second, What if you are asked to speak at a convention of Republican Attorneys General, and they hear exactly what you told me, and they go, hey, we are ready to do whatever we can.
What is it that you would recommend we do?
Because, of course, Google might say... Of course, Google doesn't claim to be partisan.
They always say, oh no, we're very neutral, we don't take sides.
Let me play the devil's advocate from their point of view and let's say they were to say, yeah, we're a private company, Dr. Epstein.
We are entitled to have our own preferences.
We're entitled to direct people to see the things that we like.
Of course, we're manipulating the algorithm.
So what?
What can you do about it?
And moreover, we want Kamala Harris in the White House because she's going to have policies more favorable to us.
Nothing we're doing is against the law.
You can scare people all you want about what we're doing, but we're just going to go right on doing it.
So, my question is, how would one respond to that kind of arrogant declamation?
Well, first of all, that arrogance guides everything they do.
So let's not kid ourselves.
That is exactly how they think.
But, you know, I've been in touch with AGs and members of Congress and others for a long, long time, almost 10 years.
What they are saying to me is that in the past, when people have gone after Google in the U.S., they've never really had any data.
They've had some whistleblowers, you know, they've had some screenshots, like lately, you know, when you were searching for a Trump assassination attempt, you know, you were not getting information.
You were getting information about Abraham Lincoln.
So those are anecdotes, though.
When people have gone after Google, they've mainly had anecdotal data that doesn't hold up very well in court.
So now the people I'm working with are very excited about what we're doing because we're collecting millions of instances.
You know, this search suggestion issue about the Trump assassination, you know, that's an anecdote.
But we're collecting search suggestions by the millions.
And we are analyzing, we're getting better and better at analyzing that content, and of course we're seeing extreme political bias.
If people want to take a look, by the way, at the data we're collecting, and it's a real-time dashboard, I'm very proud of this.
Please go to Americas, with an S, AmericasDigitalShield.com.
That's where people should go now, because this is new.
I introduced this to Congress last December.
It was my second time testifying.
It's Americas, with an S, DigitalShield.com.
And I'm happy to say at that congressional hearing, they actually came up with the tech they needed and set up big screens and they showed people this real-time dashboard which shows the amount of data we're collecting and it shows the political bias on Google, on YouTube and other platforms and we keep expanding and improving this data collection system.
So the point is, our authorities are going to be able to go after Google, not with anecdotes, but with Court admissible data on a massive scale.
This changes the entire game.
And the bigger this system gets, the greater the threat we pose to these companies, which makes us all, frankly, a little nervous.
We've had some disturbing incidents.
We are constantly under attack from hackers.
We had a very serious hack about a month ago.
that was extremely sophisticated.
This was not, you're not a high school student.
This was a very sophisticated hack.
So yeah, we're under attack, but you know, that's a game we know how to play.
This is tech versus tech.
That's a game we can play.
And tech, as fast as they move, we can move just as fast.
Laws and regulations, those are like turtles.
They don't move very fast at all.
So the point is that there is a way of changing the game here.
Americasdigitalshield.com, that's the first place people should go.
And then I'm going to answer your question at a different level because I know a lot of people are concerned about You know, their own privacy, the fact that they and their kids are being surveilled so extensively.
If you go to myprivacytips.com, myprivacytips.com, you will get to an article that I wrote which begins with the sentence, I have not received a targeted ad on my computer or mobile phone since 2014.
That's me writing.
So what I do in this article is I teach people how they can use the internet, how they can get their kids to use the internet to protect your privacy.
You know, let's start with us.
Let's protect ourselves.
Start there, give them less data, because that's where their power comes from.
It comes from the surveillance.
And that's why we built the monitoring system, because that allows us to get some power finally over them, and basically to make them accountable to the public for the first time.
You do that with Sunlight.
Remember the famous phrase from Justice Louis Brandeis 100 years ago, which was sunlight is the best disinfectant.
He was a Supreme Court Justice.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
That is what We are doing.
We have built a huge spotlight and we're shining it on Google and other companies.
We are finding extremely, extremely disturbing data, especially data going to children and teens, because lately we've actually expanded.
So we're now looking at content going to the devices of children and teens with their parents' permission, of course.
And again, we're finding extreme violence.
We're finding explicit sexual content.
We're finding content really that parents have no ideas there.
And we believe that Google is actually trying to indoctrinate our children.
We don't really understand the messaging yet because this is fairly new for us.
But look at it this way, Dinesh.
We're so divided as a country.
We can't agree on anything.
And Washington probably will never pass laws and regulations to actually restrict these companies.
But everyone cares about kids.
That's a bipartisan issue.
And I think we can get people together, you know, among our nation's leaders who are concerned about kids.
And I think that's how, finally, we will Put real constraints on these companies.
And of course, we'll keep monitoring them so that we can measure compliance with whatever laws or regulations are eventually passed.
From what you're saying, though, Dr. Epstein, it seems to me that we're dealing with a threat much, I mean, even bigger than that, because Google is the closest thing to what Orwell had in mind when he's used the phrase Big Brother.
You know, you have an entity that has monopoly power, But no accountability.
I mean, if you're in Congress, it may be that you have minimal accountability because you're up for election only every two years, or maybe every six years if you're in the Senate.
But at least there's some.
There is a yanking mechanism by which the citizen can go, OK, you're out of there.
I've had enough.
It doesn't seem that that exists with Google.
Now, in the past, the attorneys general of Louisiana, of Missouri, have tried to use the lever of saying, that these tech platforms are in collusion with the government to promote censorship and that contravenes the First Amendment.
The Supreme Court seems to be not entirely there in completely accepting this argument.
And my question is whether there may be a different line of attack that somehow, I mean, let's just say that Trump makes his way across the finish line.
You've got a Trump DOJ.
Could they go after Google on the basis that Google is Interfering with democracy by rigging elections, interfering in elections, exercising monopoly power.
I don't just mean monopoly power in terms of corporate profits.
I mean monopoly power over the public square of ideas.
Absolutely, and there are some things that can be done.
I just had dinner the other night with Ken Paxton, who's the Attorney General of Texas, has an office of 800 attorneys, and someone told me he sues Google just for the sheer joy of it.
So he's a fearless man.
And I just had a call yesterday from the governor of Louisiana, who was there prior to that, their attorney general, he's also been very, very aggressive.
So there are people out there and there are theories, there are legal theories.
So for example, they are violating campaign finance law, that's very clear because they're making huge in-kind donations without declaring them.
Now it's true that Google would say, yeah, but they cost us nothing.
When we put a go vote reminder on our homepage and it's seen 500 million times, that costs us zero.
That's not the issue.
The issue is what would they charge you or me to put a message on their homepage?
What, a hundred million dollars, a billion dollars?
So there's that issue.
And then there's another one.
And you actually just hinted at it, which no one ever has when I've been interviewed before.
So I compliment you.
And that is this, the data that they collect and that they use to manipulate us, those data have become essential.
So whenever goods or commodities or services like telephone communication, water, gasoline, whenever services or commodities have become essential, Governments around the world step in and they take charge of those services or commodities.
They regulate them because we can't live without them.
So there have to be protections.
So in other words, we're talking about consumer protection issues here.
And this is not monopoly stuff.
This is different, different area of law.
And the fact is that General Paxton was very, very open to this idea when I mentioned it to him.
The real The solution to the Google problem is, for a government, it could be the European Union.
If we can't do it here, some other big government entity could do it, to declare their index to be a public commons.
What is their index?
That's the big database that they update every second, that they use to generate search results.
If that were declared to be a public commons, Just like, again, we're talking about controls over essential commodities, telephone communications, things like that.
If their index is declared to be a public commons, then around the world, other companies, high school students, would be able to access the data and build their own search engines.
And now, search would become, A, competitive again, which it used to be, And there'd be thousands of search engines all focusing on niche audiences and trying to get our attention.
Doesn't that sound like something we know?
Isn't that the way the news media works?
Exactly the same.
And doesn't the news media draw all of its content from the same place, but then they package it differently?
That's exactly what would be happening here.
That index has to be made a public commons.
I publish An article proposing this in Bloomberg Businessweek.
If you go to epsteininbusinessweek.com, you'll come straight to that article.
So this is a serious proposal.
So there are a couple of legal avenues here.
And by the way, that would also be very light-touch regulation compared to other possibilities.
That's very light-touch regulation.
So yes, you're right.
If Trump is in office and the DOJ is aggressive, There are some steps, some meaningful steps that could be taken.
And I'm not a Republican, I'm not a conservative, and I'm not a Trump supporter, but it does make me a little nervous if the Democrats are in office that they might not be so concerned about these issues because they get massive donations from Google.
In 2016, Google was Hillary Clinton's largest donor.
We're talking about Google executives in Democratic administrations controlling a lot of federal agencies in Washington.
The Democrats are very tied in with big tech, and I am afraid That if the Democrats stay in power, that all these concerns that I've been raising are just not going to go anywhere.
That's frightening to me.
Because I put America and our system of government and our freedom and our free speech, I put that ahead of any particular party or candidate.
And that's why I'm speaking out and that's why I'm working on these systems.
Well, I mean, if I was a Democrat, then quite apart from the financial contributions and even the kind of lobbyist leverage, I would say to myself, hey, if Google is sending out get out the vote notifications two times to my team as compared to the other team, why do I want to interfere with that system?
That system is serving.
It's my pleasure.
Beautifully. Wow, this is such an eye-opening conversation.
Guys, I've been talking to Dr. Robert Epstein, senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology. Follow him on X at Dr. D.R. R. Epstein.
Dr. Epstein, thank you so much for joining me.
It's my pleasure. Nice to talk to you again.
I'm hoping to finish today, Chapter 9 of Booker T.
Washington's Up from Slavery.
When we left off, his future wife, Miss Olivia Davidson, was traveling north to raise money for the Tuskegee Institute.
Booker T. tells us, the first gift from any northern person that was received came from a New York lady whom Miss Davidson met on the boat that was bringing her north.
They fell into a conversation, the northern lady became very much interested, and before they parted, Miss Davidson was handed a check for $50.
And then Booker T goes, this became a part of her life to take these journeys.
And let's remember, these were journeys that were taken by and large in a much more laborious way than we would today, and mostly by train.
And this became her, well, partly her vocation.
She becomes a kind of a fundraiser for the Tuskegee Institute.
And it's a very Tiring job.
Booker T says in addition to this she taught Sunday school and she was a bit of a frail person.
Never very strong, he says, and often she was just exhausted by this being in perpetual motion, so to speak, raising funds for Tuskegee.
A lady upon whom she called in Boston, Booker T writes, afterward told me that when Miss Davidson called on her, They arranged to meet in the parlor and when the lady showed up, Miss Davidson was so exhausted she had fallen asleep.
So, what you have here is people very dedicated to this cause.
And Booker T goes on to say that, he goes on to say that, The reason that they were so dedicated is, he says, we are trying an experiment.
And what's that experiment?
Testing whether or not it was possible for Negroes to build up and control the affairs of a large educational institution.
So notice that Booker T is not trying, you know, DEI.
He's not saying, hey, I'm an educated black man.
You need to hire me to be the president of Vanderbilt University.
No, he's like, I'm going to build my own institution.
We are going to do this for ourselves.
And he says, quote, I knew that if we failed, it would injure the whole race.
Now, this is worth thinking about for a moment, because why?
Why would it injure the whole race?
Let's say here's Dinesh, and I come to America, and I try to become successful, let's say, in some area of business, and I fail.
Well, does this make Indians look bad?
No.
It just means that that didn't work out for me.
My project didn't go anywhere.
But Booker T realizes that he's in a somewhat different position.
First of all, they're not that far away from slavery.
Second of all, it is one of the precepts of racism that blacks cannot do it on their own.
They are mentally incapable.
They are inferior.
They just don't have it.
They can work for a white man's institution, but they can't build their own.
And so, even though slavery is over, well, racism is not.
And Booker T knows all this.
And yet, notice how constructive his response is.
His response is not to go around declaiming against racism, denouncing the white man.
He's not, quote, agitating, agitating, agitating, to use a phrase that came from his rival W.E.B.
Du Bois.
He's doing none of this.
What he's doing is he's essentially saying, Let's prove to the white man, not by rhetoric, not by, I'm the same as you, and you're a bigot if you think otherwise.
It's kind of like saying, let me enter the field of competition and demonstrate by effort and by success that I can do it.
It's kind of like if someone were to go around saying, blacks are not as good boxers as whites.
Blacks can't run as fast as whites.
Okay, and then let's go to the Olympics and you see, well, the 100-yard dash, the 200 meters, the 400 meters, black guy wins them all.
Obviously, that particular pillar of asserted black inferiority collapses immediately.
In fact, you don't need any kind of rhetoric.
People stop saying that because it's quite manifestly untrue.
And so, you may say that the way that Booker T. Washington is trying to refute racism is not through Rhetoric or agitation, but rather through demonstrated accomplishment.
You say we can't do it?
We're not going to say a word about that.
We're not going to refute you.
We're going to demonstrate by action that we can do it.
And then we're going to see if you want to keep saying it, which will make you look foolish, or if you will just stop saying it because you too now recognize that it doesn't make any sense.
So, that's why he says, I knew that if we failed, it would injure the whole race.
I knew that the presumption was against us.
I knew that in the case of white people beginning such an enterprise, it would be taken for granted that they were going to succeed.
But in our case, I felt that people would be surprised if we succeeded.
And here Booker T doesn't say explicitly, but I think he knows and he is implying That it's not only whites who expect blacks to fail.
It's blacks also.
Why?
Because having been in a position of enforced inferiority for a long time, you begin to think yourself inferior.
You begin to say, well, wait a minute, I am probably in some ways cut out to be in this position because guess what?
That's the position that I'm in.
Why am I in it and not the other side?
Why is it that blacks are being enslaved by whites and not the other way around?
I mean, these questions are natural ones to creep into your mind.
And so Booker T knows that there is a sense of expected failure from whites.
Blacks are not able to do it and that opinion is to a degree shared by blacks.
So he says, all this made a burden which pressed down upon us and sometimes it seemed at the rate of a thousand pounds to the square inch.
So, in a sense, by tragic necessity, Booker T. Washington, he didn't apply for this job.
He didn't seek this out.
He becomes, in a way, the bearer of the reputation of the black race.
Why?
Because he is a Southerner.
He is a former slave.
He is taking up not the position Let's remember, let's flash back into the antebellum, the period during slavery, when there was a small percentage of free blacks.
About 8-10% of the entire black population was free blacks.
And these free blacks were mainly in the North, but also in what we now call the Midwest.
And of course there were a few, not many, in the South.
Most of the blacks in the South were slaves.
So the slaves were the majority.
And so the reputation of the blacks, even after slavery, didn't depend upon the small number of free blacks.
but on the large number of now freed former slaves and their descendants.
And those guys have no better representative, no better leader than Booker T. Washington.
As I say, he didn't apply for this position, but in some ways, whether or not blacks in the South are seen as successful or as failures is now somewhat inevitably riding on his shoulders.
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