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Aug. 30, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
46:09
THE NEW ABOLITIONISTS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep908
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Coming up, Debbie and I are going to do our Friday Roundup.
Are the pro-lifers today the new abolitionists and is it a good thing?
We're also going to talk about Generation Z, Gen Z. Are they the problem or are they the victims of a problem?
And finally, we'll talk about some of the chaos in airline travel and whether it's a symptom of a larger problem in our society.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
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Debbie and I are here for our Friday roundup and it's a chance for us to pull back and talk about some of the issues of the week and issues that are general that we may not cover during the day-to-day podcast during the week.
Also, Debbie has been very busy the last couple of weeks.
You are the executor of your mom's Things and so you have well we were down in Harlingen and you emptied out her apartment but it turns out there are so many things that have to be done from insurance to and it seems like one task after another you're you're kind of Clearing the deck, but it's a bittersweet experience for you.
On the one hand, it's reconnecting you with your mom's past.
Hey, look at this.
This was her high school graduation, or this was, and on the other hand, it's like, wow, the person whose life is represented here isn't there anymore, so.
Yeah, it was really tough, yeah.
And it is, it is something.
It shows you that the process of grief is not immediate.
It's stretched out, and in fact, It's ongoing.
It is ongoing.
It is ongoing.
And everything, you know, I want to call her to let her know about things.
So, anyway.
Sorry, guys.
I wasn't planning to talk about mom and lose it.
Well, it's also the case that you would often call her on the way to the podcast.
Sometimes we would drive separate cars, but sometimes together.
Let's talk about an issue that I've mentioned earlier in the week, and I think it's a very important issue, because not only does it have practical implications, which is, are pro-lifers going to sit out this election?
I mean, this is almost a preposterous topic, but there have been some pro-life leaders who have, I don't think that they really mean for pro-lifers not to vote, but what they're trying to do is to use the threat of pro-lifers sitting it out To push the Trump forces in what they see as a necessary more pro-life direction.
Here's what they're concerned about.
And that is that Trump and JD Vance are both taking the position that The abortion issue has been, at least for now, resolved.
And by resolved, what they mean is, hey, we used to have abortion legal in all 50 states, really pretty much for all nine months, with very rare exceptions.
And so, What we now have is we've changed that.
We've changed the court.
Abortion has been sent back to the states.
Here in Texas, for example, there's pretty much no abortion at all.
Other states, you have restrictions, the heartbeat bill and so on.
And there are other states which are more liberal states, more blue states, abortion on demand.
And so, for Trump and Vance, the task is, you know, hey, pro-lifers, now go into the states and make your case.
Win the battles at that level.
But I think what Lila Rose and others are saying is, no, if we could maybe save effort if we can get a national bill passed.
I think the problem with this is you've taken an issue, you've decentralized it, and now you're turning around and trying to re-centralize it, and you're trying to create a law when there is not only no popular support, there's no political possibility that that's going to actually happen.
Yeah, exactly.
I think for them it may be all or nothing.
It seems, right?
Because you would think that just the fact that I never thought that Roe v. Wade would be overturned in my lifetime, and it was, you would think that the pro-life movement would go, okay, This is a great step towards eliminating abortions.
But as I've always stated, and you know that I'm one of the most pro-abortion people, pro-life, pro-abortion, oh excuse me, pro-life people, anti-abortion people, person, pro-life person.
You've taken part in pro-life events and you went to the Texas Capitol and others.
So I'm right there with the pro-life movement except for the fact that I don't believe it's an all or nothing until and when society understands that abortion is murder.
And when that doesn't happen, or until that happens, people are not going to have the stomach for it.
They're just not going to have the support for it.
Because right now, the majority of Americans think that it's health care, that it's a woman's right to choose, that the government has no business in a woman's womb.
Until we are able to say, the womb, the child in the womb is separate, is a separate entity from the woman, and if you are killing that entity, you are killing a person, and it's a pop, you know, everybody believes that, then, then go after it nationally.
So you want a six-month-old unborn child to be given the same You may say constitutional and moral status as, let's say, a one-year-old.
Exactly.
Because just as no one would say that a two-year-old has more life or is more valuable than a one-year-old, they're of equal value because they're both life and they're human.
And if a person murders a one-year-old, they can get the death penalty.
Why?
Because they've murdered a human being.
Now, you asked an interesting question and I want to push our discussion in this direction, which is, you said, are the pro-lifers, and some of the people I'm talking about, are they like the new abolitionists?
Now, interestingly, I think this is a label that they would welcome.
They would go, oh yeah, were abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, you know, were people who were absolutely committed to the end of abortion.
And I think that their assumption is that the abolitionists were models of human rectitude that we should all admire.
And I want to say that this is actually not true.
The abolitionists, in fact, were The people who had we listened to them, slavery would not have ended in the United States.
They were... Let's remember that Abraham Lincoln never called himself an abolitionist.
In fact, was always careful to distinguish himself from the abolitionists, and he didn't like them either.
Now, he understood that their motivation was good, and Lincoln shared with the abolitionists the idea that slavery is wrong.
The same motivation.
They agreed.
Yeah, exactly.
But let's look at why Lincoln didn't like them.
Number one, the abolitionists were enemies of the U.S.
Constitution.
The abolitionists were advocates of what you could call the higher law.
So the Constitution, be damned, let's put it that way.
Some of them actually burned the Constitution.
Number two, the abolitionists were the original secessionists.
Now this is sort of hidden in our history, right?
You look at textbooks, it never says this because the secessionists are supposed to be the southerners, they're supposed to be the slaveholders, they're the bad guys.
But no, the southern secessionists didn't come up with the idea.
Who did?
The northern abolitionists.
Why?
Because the northern abolitionists were like, let's secede from the south.
In other words, we don't want a country with slavery.
You got slavery south of the Mason-Dixon line.
Why don't we just cut the country in half?
We take off.
We'll have an anti-slavery country in the north.
So when people ask, where did South Carolina get the idea that they could secede from the Union?
from some of the early New England abolitionists who advocated the exact same thing.
So how can Abraham Lincoln take the view that secessionism is really bad when the southerners do it, but it's really great when the northerners do it?
No!
Lincoln's view was we are a constitutional republic.
For all our flaws, we need to have principles that are better than we are, and we need to move in that direction through constitutional means.
So the point being, and this is a good lesson for the abolitionists of today, namely, that you want to make progress?
Yes, you can.
But the way to do it is within the orbit, not just of what the Constitution says, but also what is practicable.
Lincoln was always keeping in mind, he's like, I want to get us from here to there, but we might only be able to get from here to here.
And then someone After me is gonna have to take us.
So even think about it.
Lincoln ended slavery, true, at the end of the Civil War.
But Lincoln did not give civil rights or voting rights to blacks.
That came after Lincoln.
But who paved the way for that?
Lincoln did.
Now if Lincoln had gone for all of that at the beginning, I want blacks to be able to intermarry with whites.
He would have lost out.
He would have lost everything.
In fact, he would have lost the support of the North.
So there's no way he could have been elected president under that platform.
Interestingly, we see a lot of people making the analogy between slavery and abortion, and it is an analogy, but there's a lot that we can learn from that analogy if we look at it a little more deeply.
Yeah, that's a good way to look at it.
And maybe the pro-life movement can take note from that, that, you know what, it will come someday, but today you need to support the party that advocates for life, and then things will happen.
Right.
Let's move things in the right direction.
And you build victory upon victory.
Look at the civil rights movement.
At first, they ended segregation.
Then, after that, they were able to get integration.
And then later, they were able to get the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and then the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Bill of 1968.
Had they gone for all that in the beginning, they would have gotten none of it.
Exactly.
And what happens if they don't support Trump?
By default, they're supporting Kamala Harris, who is the most pro-abortion woman on the planet.
And think of how demented and sick it would be to do anything, including staying home, that produced that result.
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Go to SalemNow.com at SalemNow.com For our second topic, Debbie and I have chosen kind of a general topic, but I think one that you'll find interesting, because although we are on the same page on this topic to a point, I think we also have an important difference on it, at least a different way of looking at it.
And the topic is something we talk about quite a bit, Gen Z. Now, just to define things for a moment, the generation that was born in the late 90s and right around the year 2000, that's the millennials, right?
That's Gen X.
Yeah, so 1996 is the cutoff.
Cutoff for the Millennials, okay.
And Gen Z is the youngest generation.
And you've been reading, well we have some experience of Gen Z, of course.
And Millennials.
And Millennials.
But you've also been reading some of the defining characteristics of Gen Z. So let's talk about Gen Z and let's talk about whether some of the sort of derision that is expressed toward Gen Z, like those guys are just not as good as earlier generations, certainly not as good as a generation of their parents, see whether that critique is valid.
Mm-hmm.
Well, first of all, I cringe at the thought of these kids taking over the country at some point because, number one, I've read that they are extremely progressive, they're pro-government, pro-big government, and so that scares me.
That scares me a lot.
So you're worried about the fact, so you're not as worried, or maybe you are both, are you worried about the fact that these guys are like, they can't get anything done, they can't make their own appointments, they, in other words, they're inept even at their own lives, so let alone taking over the United States of America, or is it the political, because someone could actually be very competent.
Look at Obama.
Obama's actually competent in a certain way, but in a bad way.
He's competent in taking the country in a bad direction.
Do you, are you worried about Gen Z, the fact that they can't get it done, or are you worried about the fact that they're left-wing, or both?
Oh, both.
Both.
Both, oh yeah.
You're saying the combination is horrible.
Well, let me read you this.
So this was actually a Pew Research Center research that they did back in 2020.
It says, among registered voters, found that 61% of Gen Z voters ages 18 to 23 said that they were definitely or probably going to vote for the Democratic candidate for president in the 2020 election, while only about a quarter, actually 22%, said that they were planning to vote for Trump.
So and millennial voters similarly were much more likely to say they support Democrats.
So, this worries me a lot, just in general, because they are more apt to believe the whole, you know, global warming is caused by humans, okay?
They also are very much in the, oh, let the kids decide whether or not they're male or female, And why don't we have more than two boxes of, are you a woman?
Are you a man?
Are you an it?
Are you a they?
Let's go through all the pronouns.
They're more likely to support that, including, and this is according to Pew, Republican Gen Zers.
So isn't that pause for concern?
Well, let me offer a thought here and have you react to it, and that's this.
You know, we often think that, and particularly us two in particular, we say, hey, you know, we came to the country, we started out with very little, we built up our own lives, and so we are like can-do type of people.
It's part of the reason why we're conservative.
We believe in the pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps.
However, and I was telling you this I think yesterday or the day before, we did have something that we took for granted that we never mentioned, right?
Which is to say that we grew up in close-knit family structures.
In some cases, actually for both of us in particular, extended family structures.
You had uncles and aunts around you.
And so even if there was, as there was in your case, a divorce in the family, nevertheless you had grandparents on hand.
And so the fact that you were loved and cared for was never in question, right?
And it seems to me that that is a huge thing that we had that a lot of the Gen Zers don't have.
And what I mean by it is that we had at least one parent, and often two, that would, like, give their life for us, and we knew it, right?
And so what we lacked was opportunity.
So when opportunity came our way, we were like, okay, I'm ready to grab it.
Now, let's look at these Gen Zers, right?
A lot of them, I think, are the emotional debris of not only families that are broken up, but that don't care about them.
So they are spiritually poor.
Their dad takes off and their mom has boyfriends coming in one after the other and she cares more about dressing up to go on a date than she does about getting the kid from school.
So think about that.
That imposes a spiritual cost.
And here's my point.
You know, when you're in that situation, even when opportunity comes your way, you have this kind of almost emotional and spiritual insecurity.
So, as a result, you experience a kind of loss of place much more than we ever did.
We never doubted that if we were given opportunity, we could thrive.
Well, I disagree with you.
Well, number one, I have a Gen Z-er.
Okay?
And I provided a lot of love and support, maybe a little too much, and maybe that's the problem.
Because not all the Gen Zers come from broken homes, okay?
And even the Gen Zers that come from homes that provided love, even extended families, grandparents, whatever, I think the problem is that Because our generation had to like take the, you know, what is it?
The bull by the horn, you know, we had to do our own research.
We didn't have the internet.
We had to do all of those things.
I mean, no one would have dreamed of like filling out our mortgage for our first home.
We had to do it ourselves.
No, no, no.
We had to call for our own appointments.
We had to call the manager of our apartment building if the air conditioner went out.
We didn't call our parents first, you know, that kind of thing.
I think what happened is that because we did that, we somehow wanted to shield our children from having to do any of that, and have to shield our children from ever having to worry about finances.
And because we did that so much, we shielded them from life.
So, you know, and I'll give you an example, you know, Juliana, dealing with my mom's death, I don't want to deal with it right now.
You know, saying things like that.
I've cried my last tear.
I cannot do this anymore.
This is just too hard on me.
It's like, you know what?
This is life.
Life is not all roses, you know?
And so, I think that in a way, our generation did a lot of damage to these kids.
And, you know, when I was telling you Well, I wonder if your explanation and mine are the same.
It seems like they're opposites, right?
Because on the one hand, I'm saying that they're deprived.
You're saying that they're spoiled.
But what I'm saying is, those two things do go together.
Let me put it this way.
It's possible for someone to be To be lavished with goods, you know?
And we're not talking about our own cases.
Actually, our kids are, you know, we are talking about outliers, and our kids are, for the most part, outliers.
But we see out there a whole generation, and this is just a generation, I think, that doesn't trust its parents in general, in general.
And I think they don't trust the parents because they feel like the parents have not lived by the ideals.
that they have preached to this younger generation.
So the younger generation is like floating and looking for another way.
It's a little bit like, I mean, I've been talking about Booker T. Washington, as you know, on the podcast.
A good example is blacks.
Blacks have all kinds of, I mean, particularly inner city, dysfunctional cultural behaviors, right?
But every single one of those can be traced Two, not only the specific conditions faced by blacks under slavery, but then the way that the civil rights movement responded to those conditions.
And in fact, someone made the very insightful observation that a lot of blacks in the inner city act not like slaves, like slave owners.
So think about, what is the main aspiration of a slave owner?
Do no work.
What's the aspiration of an inner city guy who doesn't want a job?
Do no work!
What do slave owners care about?
Little trophies that make them look great because they have nothing to do with their time.
So I have a deer head on my wall, right?
What does the ordinary black guy in the inner city care about?
I've got some expensive Nike sneakers that are like a trophy.
So when I walk out, everybody can go, wow, look at my sneakers.
So what I'm getting at is, yes, you have dysfunctional behavior, but the dysfunctional behavior has an identifiable cultural and moral root.
And the reason I say this is because there has to be a way that we can appeal to this generation.
We have to because, number one, the other thing that I didn't mention was that a quarter of Gen Zers are Hispanic.
Right.
A quarter.
So it's a bigger portion.
So it's a bigger portion, yes.
And as you know, I keep saying that if Republicans don't reach out to Latinos, we're going to lose this country.
We're going to lose Texas and we'll lose other states and eventually the country.
And so I do think it's super important to educate these Gen Zers.
And I don't know if you can get the Gen Zers to socially, you know, kind of like we were talking about the pro-life movement before, you know, like not all at once, but little by little convincing them of things.
Because, as you know, they will be the end of this country if we don't do that.
Because, look, they're pro-government, pro-big government, right?
Pro-progressive, pro-liberal, or, you know, in a lot of cases, very socially liberal.
So if they continue this trajectory, This country will definitely look like Venezuela in 20 years.
I mean, I agree.
And all I'm saying is that this is exactly the way that the black community was 30 years ago.
And notice how it's starting to pull out of that, right?
It's shifting.
Where people are like, you know what?
I've been kind of... And so there are reasons why blacks congregated into the Democratic Party starting in the 30s, by the way, and all the way continuing through most of the 20th century.
But now some of them are, to put it bluntly, leaving the plantation.
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Last week I went to Harlingen, Texas.
Debbie had already gone earlier before me.
In fact, you rented a big van and you drove it all the way down, what, six hours?
A long drive.
And I thought it was kind of funny because you called me and you're like, I forgot my gun!
And I was like, uh, you mean?
Well, you know, because traveling to South Texas, going through, you know, King Ranch and all that is, it's kind of dangerous for a woman to, not only I had my luggage and I had this big, you know, it was a Wagoneer, it wasn't a van, but it was this big, you know, massive SUV.
And so I don't want to stop at any gas station because I'm afraid to get followed and all those things.
So I was all set to take my gun.
As you know, I'm a licensed gun owner, so I have a legal gun.
And in Texas, you actually don't need it, but I still have it.
And I had every intention to take my weapon.
And I'm probably an hour in and I'm like, oh no, I forgot my gun!
But then we solved the problem by saying, listen, don't stop.
Make sure you don't have to go to the bathroom in those last three hours of your journey and you did that.
So I join you a few days later.
Yes, but you fly.
I fly, I fly.
And I'm there for really three days, but guess what?
My luggage does not arrive, right?
And just to make a long story short, well, first of all, I had to wear the same clothes for three days.
Same underwear, same socks.
Yeah, I told you to go commando and you refused.
I refused.
Nor did, I mean, the other option of course would be like to go to Walmart or to go to Target and just, you know, buy some clothes.
But see, the first day I expected the luggage to arrive, the second day.
Well, honey, and you have to remember that this is a one hour flight.
And you didn't connect.
I didn't connect.
You didn't do anything.
It was from point A to point B, And finally we realized luggage not coming so I'm like all right I called the airline and United as it turns out and I tell United listen you know what I'm going to go back home so no point sending the luggage to Harlingen Texas send it now to our house No sooner do we arrive home that we get an email, success!
Your luggage has arrived in Harlingen, Texas!
Yeah, it went to the hotel.
It went to the hotel.
So, we were talking about the fact that we have now come to expect things to go wrong, not just in the airlines, but in the normal routine of American life.
You order something, you get the wrong thing.
If you get the right thing, it goes to your neighbor's house instead of yours.
If it doesn't go to your neighbor's house, say, something is wrong with it, or it's broken.
You just ordered a bunch of glasses, and they were supposedly unbreakable.
Right?
They arrive.
Shattered.
Not all of them, but one of them shattered into like a hundred pieces.
Unbreakable glass, supposedly.
All right, and then you've been reading about a lot of these airline problems, including some that are not even on the public horizon.
The latest one, of course, involving these astronauts, right?
Yeah, this is a Boeing problem, but it's not a Boeing 737.
This is actually Boeing Starliner that sent astronauts, right?
And it was supposed to be an eight-day mission, I think.
But it's gonna turn into a year mission.
What?
They cannot get these people back from space.
I mean, think about that.
Imagine the guy up there who went up there for eight days and then, you know, he's sending a message back basically going, what about my dental appointment?
I've got my haircut.
You know what I mean?
My birthday is coming up.
I've invited people to come over to the house.
Forget that.
And imagine the atrophy.
Now, I know that they do exercise, but it's got to be a little different with no gravity up there.
But I mean, look, yeah, but it's one thing, an astronaut, there are missions that last long, right, where someone goes and they recognize, but what we're getting at here is... These people weren't prepared!
Yeah, right, you blast these people out into the sky, and they're expecting to be back in one week, and now you have lost the ability to retrieve them.
And this is presumably because of the motion of the earth and the rotations.
In other words, why is it going to take a year?
I'm only guessing here because I haven't read the article.
I'm guessing that it's going to take a year because what they need is for the earth to revolve around the sun and come back to the place where it was.
Remember, the earth's moving.
Yeah.
Right?
Now the Earth rotates, and that gives us day and night, but the Earth also revolves around the sun and comes right back to its original spot, and that's probably, if it's one year, that's probably the reason they have to wait a year.
Well, this says they're gonna spend at least eight consecutive months aboard the International Space Station as their Boeing Starliner spacecraft returns to the Earth empty.
So it returned to Earth empty.
Oh, I see.
But it said, the plans to bring Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams home can happen no earlier than February of 2025, at least eight months longer than the initial eight-day trip they signed up for.
So not a whole year, but eight months, basically.
So anyway, presumably they have provisions and so on to keep them alive, but I think the point we're getting at here... I think it's because there's something wrong with the Boeing Starliner and they don't want to put humans in there.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Well, do you think that a lot of people, when they see this stuff with airlines and so on, they just automatically say D.E.I., right?
Uh-huh.
There are others who come back and go, wait a minute, wow, you can't just blame everything on DEI.
Well, I think you actually can, and here's why.
Let's look at, you know, you have two phenomena, right?
One is a breakdown of the normal flow of goods and services.
Lost luggage, planes careening off the runway, windows blowing out.
So you have all these problems.
On the other hand, you go look at these company brochures, and what's the big change?
We're into DEI.
We are determined to have the most diverse Air Force.
So, when you see a change in the outcome and you then see a change in the strategy of the company, it's reasonable to connect what the company is trying to do with the outcomes that are being produced by that same company.
So, in other words, it's logical.
No one is saying that a cause and effect has been directly proven in every case, but we're saying this is where it is logical to suspect that this is where the problem lies.
Yeah, well, you know, and it's a little, I don't know if you heard a couple of days ago, two people were killed in a hangar, I guess, a warehouse that housed Delta planes.
And it was like the- Wasn't it in tires that exploded?
They exploded, right?
Yeah, I saw that.
So it's like, okay, well, first of all, what happened there?
Like, what happened?
Is there just no quality control?
What's going on?
So there's that.
There's also the fact that they don't seem to have just care to, like, make sure that things, that the bolts are secure, that the restrooms don't back up.
Because lately I've been reading about the toilets, like, flooding the airplane.
Well, did you read it?
There was an expose by a magazine that sent some journalists into the Boeing airline plant.
The people who make the Boeing planes.
And they interviewed the people working at the plant who are apparently well aware of these problems and basically said things like, you know, Things are not the way they used to be.
The people who run this place are not people who love planes.
It used to be that the guy who went to work for Boeing was like the kid who made an airplane when he was three.
And knew every part of the airplane.
Exactly.
And loved planes, loved flying.
But what's happened now is they just hire people very often, try to get cheaper people for the best price.
And so it's people who don't care about planes.
They could have come over from Procter & Gamble.
They could have come over from Walmart.
And this applies, by the way, not just to the worker, but to the CEO.
The CEO who's running a company has nothing to do with the product made by that company.
He's often a finance guy that they pulled from Wall Street.
So not a mechanical engineer?
No, he's someone who can read a balance sheet.
Okay, no, I want a mechanical engineer that specializes in aviation to be the CEO.
And so this is the problem I think that we're seeing.
We're seeing a move away in our society from the idea of qualifications and competence and merit.
And we're going to pay very dearly for this because guess what?
The rest of the world is not into this.
Right?
The Chinese are not into this.
And so, they'll make better planes.
And a day will come when suddenly you'll realize it's no longer Boeing and Airbus.
There are seven Chinese companies that are making planes for the whole world.
Yeah.
That's going to be a very sad day.
And what makes it sad is, you know, it's one thing you run a race, you're a really good runner, and you used to be the best, but someone comes along and they're better than you.
But if you stop running the race, you stop training, you start saying things like, running is not the important thing.
Winning is not the important thing.
What really matters is that, you know, is that it helps my self-esteem to run.
What really matters is that we've got people of all these diverse backgrounds showing up for practice.
And then when you lose the race, you realize, you know, I kind of threw it away.
And that's what makes the whole thing more.
Or perhaps you weren't qualified to race in the first place.
You have the first position, and if you lose it, you may never get it back, and yet we're throwing it away.
I'm in Chapter 10 of Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, and he's talking about building buildings that will form, collectively, the Tuskegee Institute.
Ultimately, at the time of his writing the book, there's about 40 buildings on the campus.
But in order to build buildings, you have to master the art of brick-making.
And there are a couple of pages on this somewhat obscure topic, and when I first started reading, I thought, I'll be skipping over this section.
I don't really want to be talking to my listeners and viewers about brick-making, but it turns out that, as with Booker T. Washington, he's often talking about something more, something bigger.
He goes on to say that there was no brickyard in the town, the work was hard and dirty, it was manual labor, it was not pleasant to stand in the mud pit for hours with mud up to your knees.
Quote, more than one man became disgusted and left the school.
And he says, besides this, brick making was really hard.
We tried it, it didn't really work, it required specialized knowledge, particularly in the burning of the bricks.
He says, and once you do that, he says, the burning of a kiln requires about a week.
So they try it, it fails, they try it again, it fails again.
And they try it a third time, and it fails a third time.
And then he says, most of the teachers said to him, basically, Booker T, let's skip it.
Let's move on.
We can't make bricks.
And Booker T goes, no, I think we're going to continue.
But he doesn't have any money.
He doesn't have money to buy more bricks.
So what does he do?
He says, some years ago someone had given him a gift of a watch.
He goes to a pawn shop.
He says, I got cash for the watch, $15.
And I said, let's use this money to renew the brick-making experiment.
And he says, I rallied our demoralized and discouraged forces and began a fourth attempt to make bricks.
He goes, this time I'm glad to say we were successful.
But he goes, before I got a hold of any money, the time limit on my watch had expired.
I have never seen it since, but I have never regretted the loss of it.
Why?
Because it kept the experiment going.
And he says, brick making has now become such an important industry at the school, that last season our students manufactured 1,200,000 bricks.
1200,000 bricks.
In other words, over a million bricks.
And he says, and now brick making is through Tuskegee and through our students who have now graduated, it's essentially an enterprise that is being carried out all over the South.
And now we get to the part that the reason I couldn't leave any of this out is because of the lesson he draws from it, which is much beyond brick making.
The making of the bricks taught me an important lesson.
Many white people who had no contact with the school, and this is important, no empathy with it, they didn't care, they were not for the school, they might not be against it, but they didn't care one way or the other, came to us to buy bricks because they found out that ours were good bricks.
They discovered we were supplying a real want in the community.
The making of these bricks caused many of the white residents of the neighborhood to begin to feel that the education of the Negro was not making him worthless, but that in educating our students we were adding something to the wealth and comfort of our community.
Now, as you can see, a sort of an important lesson emerging here and let's try to put our finger precisely on what it is.
He says, they traded with us and we with them.
Our business interests became intermingled.
We had something which they wanted, they had something which we wanted.
And this in large measure helped to lay the foundation for the pleasant relations that have continued to exist between us and the white people in that section and which now extend throughout the South.
So what is Booker T. Washington laying out here?
Not just a business strategy.
It's partly that.
It's an anti-racist strategy.
Think about it.
You got somebody who doesn't like blacks.
Those people are no good.
There's no point educating them.
They're inherently stupid.
If you educate them, you're just going to create a con man.
You're going to create Obama.
Well, there is the risk of that.
But what Booker T is saying is that, no, there's a different way to go.
There's a way to educate blacks in such a way that they are productive.
They are productive and they're able to supply things that the community wants.
And it's not just that you want to buy bricks from them because this is a big DEI enterprise.
Oh, let's help the black man.
Let's help to uplift.
No.
You buy bricks from the Tuskegee, guys, because they're quite simply the best bricks you can buy.
They're the best bricks for the best price.
Here is Booker T. Washington in one of the lines that I think you could almost pull out and put on a billboard.
My experience is that there is something in human nature which always makes an individual recognize and reward merit, no matter under what color of skin it is found.
This is, in a nutshell, the philosophy of Booker T. Washington.
Namely, notice what he's not saying.
He's not saying racism doesn't exist.
He's not saying racism is easy to fight.
What he is saying is that if there is a way to fight racism that's going to be effective, It is showing that the premise is wrong.
Blacks are stupid.
Oh really?
Well here's a bunch of really smart black guys.
Blacks can't do anything useful.
Well here's a bunch of blacks making buildings and making bricks and you're buying them and you're using them for your house.
So obviously that's not true.
The best way to answer the charge of black inferiority is through a demonstration of black meritocratic performance.
That's what Booker T is going for here.
The same principle of industrial education has been carried out in the building of our wagons, carts, buggies.
He talks about on the farm and at the school he got dozens of these vehicles and every one of them has been built by the hands of the students.
Aside from this, we supply the local market with these vehicles.
The supplying of them to people in the community has the same effect as the supplying of bricks.
He says, and the man who learns at Tuskegee to build and repair wagons and carts is regarded as a benefactor by both races in the community.
So it's really not a story about bricks at all.
It's a story about making stuff that is useful to other people, making stuff that other people want to buy.
So, what Booker T. is doing here, without engaging in any kind of polemics, I'll do the polemics for him.
There are kind of two pathways for black development.
One pathway, government assistance, government jobs.
Let's go and man the welfare state.
Sadly, that became the path that many blacks did take, directed, by the way, by a misguided or misguided elements in the civil rights movement.
What Booker T is saying is that blacks would have been better off to build their own businesses.
And in fact, even under segregation, there was a powerful network of black businesses.
The only problem was that they were limited in serving the black community.
So if you went, for example, to Durham, North Carolina, and there's a scholar who's written a very good book about this, just studying black business in North Carolina under segregation, you had black restaurants, black barbershops, black banks, black insurance companies.
Now again, these were in part, it was an imposition imposed by the necessity of segregation, but these were flourishing businesses.
And in the aftermath of segregation, these businesses could have offered banking and insurance and many other services to blacks and whites alike.
That didn't happen.
Why?
By and large, because the people who were in those businesses were recruited by the civil rights activists.
Hey, go to DC.
Hey, you can work in the housing department.
Hey, you can work in the education department.
And so what you created was the black bureaucrat Something that didn't really exist, at least on a large scale before, has now become widespread.
Washington D.C.
is full of these black bureaucrats walking around, and although they work for various departments, it's a good question what they do.
You work for the energy department.
Do you produce any energy?
No.
You work for the education department.
Are you educating anybody?
No.
You work for the transportation department.
Are you providing any transportation directly yourself?
No.
So, what are you doing?
What do you do all day?
Answer, I write memos, I go to meetings, I attend seminars, I went to a workshop, I do this, I do that.
So Booker T would have said, basically you have become, although a paid person, you are an unproductive individual.
And so no wonder society or people in society look and see you as not contributing much.
Why?
Because frankly you're not contributing much.
But on the other hand, if you made bricks, and if you supplied insurance, and you had black morticians, and you were essentially productively supplying things that people want and need to make their lives better, then they go, wow, you are contributing to us, you are contributing to the community, you are contributing to the country.
So Booker T. Washington's point is, this is the road we should take, but sadly it became in the 20th century, or in the latter part,
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