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Sept. 3, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
48:31
A QUESTION OF CHARACTER Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep909
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Coming up, who has the better character?
Kamala Harris or Donald Trump?
Mark Cuban has a survey on X in which he tries to get an answer to that question.
I'll give you my answer.
I'll use the case of Brazil to illustrate the point that a democratic regime can also be a tyranny.
An attorney and media personality, Simona Mangiante, joins me.
We're going to talk about her new documentary film.
It's called Hunter's Laptop Requiem for Ukraine.
Hey, if you're watching on YouTube or Rumble, listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
I'm calling this episode of the podcast, A Question of Character, because what I want to do is to assess the character of Trump, a character that a lot of his critics think is self-evidently and demonstrably horrible and bad.
Now, I was provoked to do this segment by the billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban.
This is the guy who's also on that TV show Shark Tank.
And Mark Cuban is, he's left of center.
He's not really a leftist, but I think he enjoys being in the left-wing camp because it gives him all kinds of social accolades that he wouldn't get if he were right of center.
In other words, the guy is an opportunist.
But he thinks of himself as highly principled, highly engaged, highly intelligent and debating critics, and also very strategically clever.
And so in an apparent move of what I'm sure he thought was strategic genius, he framed a question that he posted on X, on the platform X, as a poll.
Here it is.
Whose persona... Now, first of all, the word whose, as you know, is spelled W-H-O-S-E.
Whose persona and character, but Mark Cuban doesn't know this.
He writes W-H-O apostrophe S. Whose.
So, you know, my point is the guy is not as bright as he thinks he is.
He doesn't have the grasp of the basics of grammar, but leaving that to the side.
Whose persona and character would you like to see young children grow up to have?
And he has Trump, and he has Kamala Harris.
Now first of all, think of how stupid it is to do this, because Kamala Harris has levitated her way up into politics.
She was basically a kind of arm candy, as they call it, for Willie Brown.
This is a woman with really no shame and complete willingness to sort of use physicality and use her apparent sexual prowess to try to make her way up the ladder.
So is this something you aspire to for your daughters?
No.
But nevertheless, I think Mark Cuban thought, there's no question about it, Trump has a horrible character, so this is a poll that's going to decisively show him up.
And guess what?
Trump...
wins in decisive fashion.
I forget the actual numbers, and the numbers are not that important.
But there's something like 65 to 35, 70-30, Trump basically whops Kamala Harris.
In other words, Trump is believed by followers of ex-Mark Cuban's own followers as having a better character than Kamala Harris.
I'm sure this was like a massive blow to Mark Cuban, or at least it thwarts his seeming kind of strategic move.
And so what does Mark Cuban do?
He questions the poll.
He basically says, how come there were 804,000 votes but only 656,000 engagements in the analytics?
So he's obviously digging into the analytics to see what possibly could have happened.
And then he comes to the idea that there were probably many anonymous voters in the poll.
And so he rages at Elon Musk, you've got to throw these anonymous voters off of X!
So think about what Mark Cuban is doing without really quite intending to.
He's actually agitating for voter ID.
He's saying a bunch of people voted in this poll, but they shouldn't have been voting because they're anonymous, they're not willing to put their names on the line.
These people need to be kicked off X, which is to say off the voter rolls.
And so, without really recognizing it, Mark Cuban is making an argument for voter ID.
By the way, I'd write about the same time.
Here's RFK Jr.
now diving into this topic.
And what I like about RFK Jr.
is that, as with Elon Musk, you see a kind of expanding political awareness.
RFK Jr.
has not been big on the issue of election fraud.
This is a new one for him.
He's been really good on the deep state.
He's really good on COVID.
But here's RFK Jr.
And he says, in a recent interview, ATM machines on every block never get hacked, and yet somehow we can't secure our elections.
He goes on to point out that Democrats are always saying, oh, this guy's an election denier, that guy's an election denier, and Robert F. Kennedy goes, who denied the election of 2000?
Who challenged the elections in 2004?
He says, if it wasn't unpatriotic to do that, why is it unpatriotic to question the election of 2020?
Quote, the entire city of Las Vegas is built on machines that can count, right?
And machines that never make mistakes and never give you too much money back.
So we can do it.
And then he goes on to say why we need paper ballots, why we need audits, why we need to check the election.
Great stuff from Robert F. Kennedy emphasizing the issue of election integrity in, as far as I know, a completely new way for him.
But let's come back to the fundamental issue that Mark Cuban raised at the outset, which is whose persona and character would you like to see young children grow up to have?
And this is all based on the idea that Trump is defined by vices.
Trump has these vices.
And what are these vices?
Well, when you enumerate these vices, you realize that the vices are either ancient or old hat.
Or the vices are, in fact, political virtues.
Let's look at what I'm talking about.
Okay, let's start with Trump's vices.
Trump is a philanderer and a playboy.
Well, no one claims that Trump is a philanderer and a playboy now.
So the argument is Trump was a philanderer and a playboy in his younger days.
Okay, well if that's the case, then Trump is a reformed philanderer and a reformed playboy, and is it fair to hold him accountable for that now when he no longer is those things?
Well, Trump is an egotist.
Well, what do you think protects Trump in the relentless attacks that he gets day upon day upon day?
If he wasn't an egotist, if he didn't have his own kind of personal wall that was built around him, how would he even survive without being shriveled, without being completely destroyed?
Trump tells lies.
Trump is a known exaggerator.
But he exaggerates with a certain sense of knowing, wink-wink acknowledgement.
So when he says something like, the burgers at Mar-a-Lago are the best burgers anyone's ever eaten.
I don't think Trump is making a scientific statement.
He's not saying that there have been actually burger tests conducted by experts and they've decided, no, what he's doing is he's being a salesman.
He's exaggerating, he's exaggerating for effect, but he's exaggerating in a manner that everybody knows he's doing it.
And that's the point, when there's common knowledge that this is an exaggeration.
Hey, this is the best burger I've ever eaten!
When everyone knows that, then it's not a lie, it's a mutually acknowledged game of You may say, salesmanship that Trump is doing.
Now, again, while people focus on Trump's vices, there's very little focus on Trump's virtues.
Look at what a family man he is.
Look at the way that he attends to his children, who are well-raised, for the most part, his grandchildren.
He's very attentive to them.
They're very affectionate toward him.
Even with Trump's ex-wives, notice that they're all on his side.
Ivana when she was alive.
Marla Maples.
These are Trumpsters.
They support Trump.
They're on Trump's side.
Trump takes care of Tiffany, Marla Maples' daughter, with Trump.
And then Trump takes care of his employees.
He's a big-hearted guy.
You're hard-pressed to find a single guy who works for Trump.
Go to his hotels.
And I'm not talking about Trump's lawyer, Cohen.
I'm talking about the ordinary guys at the desk.
The guy who takes you up in the elevator.
The guy who loads your luggage.
Ask those guys what they think about Trump.
They're uniformly enthusiastic about Trump.
They're excited when Trump comes in the door.
Trump is very generous with them.
Hands out $100 bills.
In other words, it is a case where Trump has this largeness of heart.
And then Trump.
Look at the assassination attempt.
Trump is a man of, I would say, almost incomparable bravery.
I don't think Dana White was exaggerating when he said that Trump is the greatest fighter of all time.
Because what he meant is that it's easy to fight in certain domains.
Well, not easy.
It takes a tremendous amount of training.
I'm talking about, you know, to fight in a ring, or in mixed martial arts, or as a boxer, or even as a sumo wrestler.
That's fighting of a certain kind.
But there is the ultimate kind of fighting because you're up against something that is out to crush you.
Crush you financially, crush you legally, lock you up, ultimately assassinate you.
I mean, destroy you in every way possible that goes way beyond mixed martial arts.
Oh, I got the guy to tap out.
Well, that's it.
Okay, yeah, the fight's over.
The fight against Trump is never over and never stops.
And yet he never stops.
And so I think that's what Dana White meant when he said that this is courage.
Remember, Aristotle lists courage as the highest of all the virtues of a dimension that we don't really see, certainly in any other political figure, but maybe in no other figure generally.
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The social media platform X, Elon Musk's platform, is now banned in Brazil.
This is not to say that no Brazilians can go on X, but they have to do it using a VPN.
They cannot have X in the normal way.
They can't just download it as an app.
The app is banned and unavailable.
Now, who decided this?
Initially, it was decided by this guy, Alexandre de Mores, who is the chief judge in Brazil.
And this is a guy who, even though he's not the top figure in Brazil, obviously the top figure in Brazil is Lula da Silva, the supposedly elected president of Brazil.
I say supposedly because there remain questions about the most recent election.
In Brazil, in which Lula prevailed over Bolsonaro.
But nevertheless, this guy, Alexander de Moraes, apparently enjoys a wide sweep of powers and can issue declarations.
And he has been doing this.
He has been going after members of the opposition.
He threatened to arrest a prominent senator named Doval.
And why?
For no other reason than Doval was talking about corruption in the police, corruption that was being directed by none other than Alexander D. Moret.
So he's basically preventing an inquiry into his own corruption by trying to ban and arrest The man who is raising these objections.
This is the kind of thing that we're dealing with.
And it may seem odd to some people, because it may seem like, how does this one guy have this sort of unlimited power?
Well, if you follow the tweets of Elon Musk on this matter, you do get the impression that this guy, Maurice, has become, in effect, the dictator of Brazil.
Maybe he's doing it at the leave or at the permission of Lula da Silva.
Maybe he's doing it because he has powers of his own.
But either way, he's a one-man despot.
And I do agree with that.
I do agree that Moraes is completely out of control.
In fact, it's kind of funny.
When you see him, he's draped in a robe of black that makes him look a bit like Darth Vader.
And he has a kind of an indecent smile.
So he looks the part, this guy.
And yet, I think it is also true that he is part of a corrupt regime.
The problem we're dealing with here, when we're dealing with the same problem in the United States, it's not merely the corruption of Biden, it's not merely the corruption of Kamala Harris, it's the corruption of a system and a regime.
The word regime here suggests a certain lack of legitimacy, and I think it is the correct and appropriate word.
Why?
And I don't mean it solely because, hey, the election result really didn't turn out that way.
In other words, this is not merely a form of challenging the most recent election either in Brazil or the 2020 election in America.
I mean something different by regime.
And we need to think about a regime as an expression of tyranny.
Regimes do tyrannical things.
What are those things?
Mass surveillance, going after dissidents, establishing a system, widespread systems of censorship, criminalizing political dissent.
This is what regimes do.
And because they trample on people's basic rights, this is what makes them illicit, what makes them illegitimate.
And yet, there's a problem here.
Because these seem to be Democratic regimes.
I don't just mean the name democratic as in the Democratic Party, but rather these seem to be regimes that have consolidated their power through the democratic process, one way or the other.
Maybe they fixed the elections, but they still won.
They ushered themselves into power through democratic mechanisms.
So, if that's the case, how can we call them a regime?
How can we call them tyrannical?
Well, the answer is that, and this is an answer that the American founders were very familiar with, there are two kinds of tyranny.
There is the tyranny of the one, and there's the tyranny of the many.
Now, no one is saying that in America or in Brazil, the ordinary American citizens are tyrants.
But the tyranny of the many refers to the fact that one can, through the democratic process, no less than through a monarchical or oligarchic process, through the democratic process, you can have tyranny.
In other words, democracy and tyranny are not opposites.
They're not incompatible with each other.
Think about, for example, an Islamic democracy.
The Muslims voted in.
The votes are fairly counted.
And yet, once the regime is consolidated, what does it do?
It passes laws that say you have to be a Muslim or your head will be cut off or you'll have to pay a special tax.
Gays will be thrown out of windows.
Women's rights are restricted.
People are not allowed to have free speech or free assembly.
Would you call that a free country?
No.
It is democratic, yes.
But it's also tyrannical.
Another way to put it, it is an illiberal democracy.
And this is what we're dealing with in Brazil.
So when I see today, Brazil's Supreme Court panel upholds judges' decision to block X nationwide.
And it's really to the shame and disgrace of American media outlets, this one by the way is AP, in which they're acting like Elon Musk is at fault.
X is the problem.
When you read the The way that the article is written, it's pro-censorship and anti-X.
I'm reading you a single sentence.
The broader support among justices deals a blow to Musk and his supporters who have sought to characterize Justice Alexander D. Moraes as a renegade and authoritarian censor of political speech.
Well he is.
And what's happening now is the Supreme Court is getting behind that authoritarianism.
So this is the regime problem.
When you have, ultimately, a tyrannical system, a tyrannical system that may have been installed democratically, but nevertheless tramples on the rights of dissidents.
Censorship, of course, is a prime exhibit of tyranny.
Then it doesn't matter whether one guy's doing it.
It doesn't matter if the Supreme Court approves of it.
It doesn't matter if the Parliament approves of it.
Why?
Because in a free society, the government shouldn't have these kinds of powers.
Dissent should be permitted.
In fact, dissent is the oxygen of a democracy.
Free speech is the oxygen of a democracy.
And so, when a democracy seeks to establish Essentially permanence, a one-party state by shutting down dissent, then you have tyranny, even if it is tyranny in the name of democracy.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome back to the podcast our friend Simona Mangiante.
She is an entrepreneur.
She was a former government official, in fact legal advisor for the president's office at the European Parliament.
She is now a documentary filmmaker and the latest project is called Hunter's Laptop.
Requiem for Ukraine.
It's going to be released widely on Locals, Pay-Per-View, a bunch of other platforms including Salem.
You can follow on X at Samona Mangiante and the website agape.com.
Simona, welcome.
Thanks for joining me.
You know, every time I hear about new entrepreneurs moving into the documentary space, I'm thrilled because I think this is such a powerful medium and I'm really glad you're getting into it.
Let's talk about the latest project, Hunter's Laptop.
Requiem for Ukraine.
And I'm assuming that the starting point here, and I've watched the trailer, Debbie and I watched it together, a really powerful trailer.
It's got Rudy Giuliani, it's got Steve Bannon, it's got a bunch of others, all just not only revealing new information, but tying some threads together.
Now, most people have heard about Hunter Biden's laptop.
Talk about where, what is the kind of specific storyline that you're pursuing here with this documentary?
Thank you so much for having me, Dinesh, and mostly it's an honor to talk to a filmmaker like you, who did incredible, incredible films in the same political teams.
So, The Haunted Laptop of Requiem from Ukraine is a political documentary that goes far and beyond the title.
Let's say it doesn't, it's not simply focused on the Scandal surrounding the story of Hunter Laptop itself but reveals a tangled web of political corruption, media manipulation and international intrigue because we set the table not only with the key figure like Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon nationally and whistleblowers like Miranda Delvine, journalists
like Miranda Delvine and John Salomon, but also with international figures like this Ukrainian politician Andriy Derkach, today sanctioned by the United States, who participated in the same investigation that got Rudy Giuliani in trouble simply for exposing corruption.
This documentary is produced and directed by Igor Lopatynok and Sean Stone.
I participated in this project as an interviewer.
So I had this privilege to sit with this number of people who had insightful information, not only about the laptop story itself, but also about how power and influence can be weaponized in ways that undermine democracy and finally obscure the truth.
Hunter Laptop simply raises actually at the end vital questions about our political integrity and how actually big powers like big tech and big media and also the Deep State, the recording team of the Deep State, ultimately can interfere in our democratic process and suppress critical information.
I'll make you an example.
At the time that the Haunter Labs stories came out, it was around 2020, when Emma Morris brought this laptop to Rudy Giuliani's house.
The story was suppressed, not only by the media, so we have a collusion between media power, but also by the police.
Police didn't take this information in consideration for accountability.
So we have this double binary of inaccountability and media suppression that definitely falls under my notion, at least, of election interference, when we consider the timing of this, that this happened.
So this film is all about unfolding the game of undermining, the sick game, ill game, by the Democrats of undermining our democratic process and ultimately deny access to critical information and to, you know, manipulating also our institution to a political end, which is well known as LOFER, and we have Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon talking about it.
Simona, it seems like there are multiple players involved here, right?
There's of course the Biden family, and I'm assuming you agree that this isn't just Hunter Biden pulling this off, you know, he's a crackhead.
He's obviously the front man and the bag man for the Biden family.
So that's one entity.
Then you have the police agencies of the government, which is local police, FBI, multiple agencies involved here.
Then you have the US media.
Then you have the foreign actors.
And I guess what I'm puzzled about is how this kind of network interacts with each other.
Because it seems like they're very decentralized, they're very large, they have different types of management.
Do you think that there is a sort of, how does this collusion work?
Are these people who just happen to be on the same side and so they have the same interests?
Or is the collusion more direct than that?
Well, thank you for this question, actually.
We assume the essence of this movie, which is not simply about Hunter, as you said.
Hunter is actually portrayed also in this tragic aspect, as the victim as well.
But also, everything that this laptop unfolds is deeply consequential to understand the corruption of the political system.
And all it comes, as you say, to the deep state.
Well, you ask me, what do you think is the connection between all these different bodies that cover up the story or ensure the impunity for the story?
Well, it all comes from the deep state led by the Democrats.
That's why even abroad I had a speaker qualifying our current system as demo-corruption.
I've never seen anybody on the other side being investigated or being politically persecuted for talking against Donald Trump or against Trump supporters.
Actually, they've been demonized, they've been widely characterized as deplorable or all the most undermining names.
None of these institutions have been placed against these people.
Even when Mueller started this fake investigation, right?
Who has been held accountable?
We see Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Mueller himself still holding their ground free, while many protesters on January 6th that were simply walking around the Capitol are in jail right now.
So when we talk about demo-corruption, I'm confident saying that this deep state is lead by the moment by the system.
And that's why Donald Trump is the biggest threat, because it's not that Donald Trump is not controllable, it's not controllable by the deep state.
And I hope that this film will open eyes about how deep is this entanglement and how interconnected are those powers that are attempting to our democracy and actually reducing that in a dictatorship behind there, of course, being masters of marketing that can portray his as Something completely different.
But all it comes to that in accountability from institution, media manipulation.
So we have all these factors that play out to undermine our access to critical information, even to make decisions.
We talk a lot about election interference many times.
We blamed Russia that had nothing to do.
We blamed a lot of people in the Trump campaign.
But we didn't point a finger at the real players that are interfering in our election, and they denied our access to information.
How many people would have voted for Joe Biden in 2012?
We know that anyway they didn't vote in many, but how many of those who voted would have voted either way if they knew about the story of the laptop?
Which also has Evidence of crime of Joe Biden.
It's not simply about the son.
Actually, that's important to understand.
We're not talking about the scandalous facts related to his degenerate behavior.
This is not the point of the film.
The point of the film is how we found evidence of corruption that goes to his father, the big guy.
Simona, you are a perfect person to be doing the interviews here because perhaps unwittingly you and George Papadopoulos were sucked into this scheme.
In fact, you were almost the entry point of the scheme, the Russia collusion hoax began with an effort to try to have various prominent figures, very often from foreign intelligence agencies.
People know about the intelligence agencies here, but they need to know about names like Alexander Downer and Joseph Mifsud and the Israeli guy was part of at least a guy who was posing as an israeli businessman The guy from Cambridge University, Halper.
So all these guys were sitting down with George, and were basically saying, you know that you've been working with the Russians, or we have some dirt that shows that the Russians are involved with Hillary Clinton.
Is this dirt that you may want to use to spread?
They were trying to entrap George, and by extension you as well, So you got a kind of an up-close look at this operation almost before anybody else did.
Now looking back on that, is it the case, do you think that there was on our side, meaning among conservatives, among people connected with Trump in some way, a little bit of A naivete about how deep this corruption went.
I mean, even Trump, it seemed, in the first term, was not aware of the degree to which his own DOJ, his agencies under his own direct control, were actively working against him.
Absolutely, you made a great point.
We have skin in the game, unfortunately, and it's not a nice one.
We learned the hard way what it means to be the targets of the Deep States.
These states include all these actors that set you up for crime you never even thought to commit.
They create actors that come into your life unaware, and you mentioned a few.
Now, could we expect this to be so targets.
Not only George has been the patient zero, but others.
You mentioned Downer, you mentioned Halper as well, the same professor overseas that targeted George and Michael Flynn, the honeypots and all this type of Hollywood scripted actions that now we know were a complete setup.
We have a Mueller report that led nowhere, we have a Durham report that was not satisfactory as expected, but still And also, we have this recent report from this investigative journalist, Matt Taibbi, which actually named all the people that were targeted by agencies as a CIA to be spied on in the Trump campaign.
We come to the Soviet Union technique, find me the man, show me the man, I'll find you the crime.
So we are living this era in United States of America and here we are approaching a new presidential election while Joe Biden is replaced by Kamala and we are forgetting
We're trying to wash out all the legacy that the same kamala carrying her shoulder for being the vp and participating to the same corruption we have seen unfolding with joe biden not to mention the catastrophic state of the united states of america today in terms of any other policies but yes we were naive we were very naive because we it's very difficult i mean unless you're really rotten as they are it's really difficult to understand these dynamics before you really hit hard
Simona, let's close out by me asking you two questions that to me are somewhat connected.
The first one is, when we think of the Australian intelligence agencies and the British intelligence agencies, do you think that this is all part of a single globalist regime, or Do you think that these are agencies that want to keep the U.S.
government happy?
So the U.S.
government goes to them and goes, hey, guys, listen, we need you to do us a favor.
There's this guy, George Papadopoulos.
Let's bring a trap on him.
You know, we owe you one.
You know, so that that would be a way of the United States outsourcing, you could say, some of its intelligence.
So that's that's my first question.
And the second one is, do you agree that with the Democrats now, it appears like we have a mafia, but without a mafia Don, in the sense of Don Corleone?
Because it looks like people like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are themselves pawns of the regime.
So they're not the Don calling the shots and everybody's following.
It's like somebody else put them into place.
They move out Joe Biden, they move in Kamala, So, the face of the regime is not the regime itself.
Well, to answer your first question, I do not believe that these agencies are randomly serving the United States will to make a favor.
There is a globalist agenda that wants to lead the world in a certain direction.
And of course, the focus on is again on the United States as the leader of the world in many way.
And I hope that will be without trying to be the leader of the free world, which now we are actually emulating the Soviet Union.
Talking about the mafia, yes, the Democrats are a mafia, but they don't have codes of the mafia, even the mafia has some codes, so they don't tell I'm Italian, so I talk about my background here.
There is no decency, no sense of decency at all, and also we have no boss, the deep state, the bureaucrats running the country, not the elected officials.
And of course, there is all a system and we've seen it with the DNC, the Democratic Convention, we've seen plays the same actor, Obama comes to the field and then we have all these so-called celebrities nobody cares anymore about that are here endorsing this unqualified Annoying woman who does nothing but laughing all the time and it's just like a lack of visions and accountability for what she has done.
She was probably the most insignificant vice president in the history of the United States.
We never heard anything she has done.
She has never traveled to Europe.
She's somebody who doesn't even probably hold a passport.
I don't know.
She's completely unaware of what is going on, but it's the perfect path that she follows.
So I hope that these years, and the memory of what happened in these years, that people like you helped arriving through your incredible work or your films, and you know, many activists in our movement, keep reminding people of what America is about.
Because in the end, that's not even about being Democrats or Republicans, it's about being Americans, and being actually governed by this deep state corrupted system that is following a globalist agenda.
Simona, you're closing out on a point that makes me chuckle, and of course I think this is where you are bringing a sort of Italian angle on this, which is really fascinating.
Because you're right, when you watch the Mafia movies, you're fascinated because there is a certain code of honor Both an attachment to family that is fundamentally decent and also the sense that we don't randomly, you know, even in Scarface, you know, Al Pacino's like, I'm not going to kill the woman and the child, you know?
This is the limit.
I won't go there.
And I think what you're saying is the Democrats are so indecent that it's kind of unfair.
The comparison to the mafia is unfair to the mafia.
And not to the Democrats.
Guys, I've been talking to Simona Mangiante.
Her website, agapebysimona.com.
Follow her on X at Simona Mangiante.
And look out for the film, Hunter's Laptop, Requiem for Ukraine.
It's going to be playing on Locals, ultimately on Salem, a whole bunch of other platforms.
Simona, great to have you on the podcast.
Always a pleasure.
Thank you so much for having me.
My pleasure, Ganesh.
Thank you.
Here's Booker T. Washington in Chapter 10 of Up From Slavery.
The individual who can do something that the world wants done will, in the end, make his way regardless of race.
Now I think this sentence in a way sums up Booker T. Washington's philosophy.
And that is that, by the way, it's not the philosophy that there's no racism.
It's not the philosophy that the way of blacks is easier or even just as easy as that of any other group.
It is rather the idea that the world operates on supply and demand.
It operates on need.
And if you can make yourself useful to somebody, they may not like you.
They don't have to like you.
But they will pay you.
They will recognize your worth because it is not just your worth in the abstract.
They're not looking at some sort of a study that says the blacks are worth just the same.
No, they're recognizing your worth to them.
And it is also the case that they're more likely to like you better because they see that you are contributing to them, you are contributing to the community, and you are making your own life better.
So there's something inherently admirable about someone who does that.
So this is what Booker T. Washington believes.
And again, I emphasize, imagine if the black community had from the beginning adopted this credo and run with it.
Imagine if all the great black leaders from Frederick Douglass, through Du Bois, through the NAACP, through Martin Luther King, Malcolm X. Now, obviously if you do a survey of these black leaders, Frederick Douglass was closest to Booker T. Washington in this philosophy.
But Douglass was very preoccupied, as he had to be, with the battle against slavery.
And I think once that battle was done, in a sense, Frederick Douglass went off and sort of built his own life.
In a sense, he demonstrated by example what a towering free black man could do in America.
He became a diplomat.
He became a prominent figure in the government.
He became, of course, a nationally recognized figure and a symbol of the anti-slavery movement, he was a prominent member of the Republican Party, so he did all these things.
But that's different than what Booker T is doing, which is, Booker T is not all about Booker T, not at all.
Booker T is about building an institution, and very consciously in his own mind, building a race that will be an example to the world.
Now, I think if Booker T. Washington were alive today, he would shake his head.
He would say, you know, the problem is that the mainstream of the civil rights leadership, and I think, regrettably, he would include Martin Luther King in this.
took blacks, in a sense, on the wrong track.
Now, let's be very clear what we mean by the wrong track.
Obviously, Martin Luther King was right to oppose himself to segregation and to establish what eventually came about, came about in the 1950s and 60s, so more than half a century ago, legal equality for blacks and whites.
By the way, Booker T would recognize that in his own day, he didn't have that.
There certainly wasn't legal equality, not in America, but especially not in the South.
But, think about what happens once legal equality is obtained.
Once you have equality of rights under the law, then Booker T's philosophy, which is debatable in 1901.
In 1901, there was a sort of a legitimate debate between Booker T. Washington and Du Bois.
Du Bois, of course, emerges with his critiques a little bit later, several years later with the publication of The Souls of Black Folk.
There's a legitimate debate.
Which is more important?
Black self-development or rights?
But once you have rights, there's no debate.
Because there's only one thing left, and that is development.
So, you have the rights.
The question now becomes how you're going to equip yourself to take advantage of the rights.
And in this, there is no alternative.
I emphasize, no alternative at all to what Booker T. Washington is saying here.
And yet, through the Democratic Party, the blacks found an alternative.
And they found an alternative that they were egged into by the civil rights leadership.
And that is the alternative of government jobs, Government dependency, welfare, the welfare state, victimology, DEI, the whole paraphernalia of, quote, solutions that has fought against poverty for 70 years while never defeating poverty.
In fact, poverty won that battle.
That has fought against cultural dysfunctionality, at least arguably.
I would say that instead of fighting against it, it has promoted dependency and the dysfunctionality that comes out of that.
All of that is antithetical to the philosophy of Booker T. Washington.
This is really why we're reading this book, because it represents the alternative that was tragically sidelined, even by a figure as important and on the balance as decent as Martin Luther King.
Let's continue with Booker T. One man may go into a community prepared to supply the people there with an analysis of Greek sentences.
Now, Booker T is being a little bit anti-intellectual here because he's sort of him saying, you know, you don't need to know Greek.
What's the point?
You know, you're in a poor man's country, meaning you're in the black community.
You want to be going around showing that you know Greek?
Really?
The community may not at that time be prepared for or feel the need of Greek analysis, but it may feel its need of bricks and houses and wagons.
Now, when Booker T puts it this way, I agree completely.
The key words here are At that time.
The community may not at that time.
They don't have anything.
Greek sentences is not exactly at the top of the list.
What's at the top of the list?
Bricks, houses, wagons.
Greek sentences can come later.
And Booker T goes on to say, every student at Tuskegee, no matter what his financial ability may be, must learn some industry.
So the philosophy of Tuskegee is study and work, including manual labor, side by side.
Now when I say manual labor, manual labor can be skilled or unskilled.
So there's some elements of unskilled labor, go dig a ditch over there, but there's also masonry, there's carpentry, there is work in other types of metals and so on.
But, says Booker T., this provoked some resistance at the school.
Some of the parents came to the school and protested.
They said, wait a minute, if I can pay for my son or my daughter to go here, they shouldn't be doing manual labor.
They shouldn't be doing industry.
And Booker T. says, I gave little heed to these protests, except I lost no opportunity to go into as many parts of the state as I could for the purpose of speaking to the parents and showing them the value of industrial education.
So Booker T is on it.
It's not like the pressure's gonna make him bend.
The pressure doubles his enthusiasm for making the case.
I gotta go persuade the students and persuade their parents.
All this persuasion is not really very easy.
And fundraising requires persuasion, and that isn't easy either.
In the summer of 1882, Miss Davidson and I, both Davidson and I, went north to raise money.
On my way north, I stopped in New York to try to get a letter of recommendation from the officer of a missionary organization.
The man not only refused to give me the letter, but advised me most earnestly to go back home at once, and not make an attempt to get money, for he was quite sure I would never get more than enough to pay my traveling expenses.
Anyone who raises money for any purpose whatsoever knows this feeling, which is you're trying hard to raise equity or donations for a purpose that you think extremely important and worthwhile, and you run into know-it-alls who don't help you in any way, but explain to you why your project cannot succeed, and why you should immediately abandon it and quit, because it's a hopeless enterprise.
It's demoralizing to hear this kind of counsel, and it takes a great deal of inner strength to believe in your enterprise enough where you go, you know what?
Thank you for your advice.
I'll take it to heart.
But you forge ahead.
This is what Booker T. Washington does.
And he says that he kept going.
And he says, he also points out that when he went to hotels in the North, he says, I was greatly surprised when I found I would have no trouble in being accommodated at the hotel.
So, of course, there's no segregation.
So they're like, sure, Mr. Washington, your room is number 38.
And off he goes.
And he's like, wow, how different things are in the North where you don't have segregation from the South.
So Booker T is very conscious that America in the postbellum period is not just a single place.
There are important differences, regional differences, differences in laws, and he's got to deal with that.
Tomorrow we'll pick up a new section in chapter 10.
I might be able to finish chapter 10 tomorrow, where he begins to talk about establishing Tuskegee as a boarding school.
So in other words, not only do people study there, they live there.
There have to be dormitories, and so Tuskegee now doesn't just need a single building where all the classes are held.
It needs multiple buildings, and it needs catering facilities.
It needs to become almost, I won't call it a city, but a kind of town, if you will, on its own.
And for Booker T. Washington, the defining feature of this town is self-sufficiency.
Let's try to make sure that as much as possible, everything that we, the buildings that we inhabit, the clothes that we wear, the food that we eat, the medical supplies that we rely on, all of this is coming from within Tuskegee itself.
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