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Sept. 4, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
48:18
BROKEN TRUST Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep910
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Coming up, I want to talk about the democratic scheme to change election rules.
It began with COVID, of course, but they've exploited it and it's continuing this year.
I'll tell you more details.
Journalist Cheryl Atkison joins me.
We're going to talk about her new book on the influence and malevolence of Big Pharma.
The book is called Follow the Science.
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. America needs this voice.
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.
As we approach the 2024 election, probably the number one question on people's mind is quite simply, is it going to be a fair and free election?
Is it going to be an honest election?
Or is it going to be a rigged election?
An election that resembles the 2020 election?
An election whose outcome cannot be trusted?
Let's begin with the simple fact that the kind of deep vein of mistrust now runs through American politics.
And the reason for this deep vein of mistrust is that our system functions in a way that invites mistrust.
There's a very interesting article I want to tell you about in Tablet magazine.
Tablet is a Jewish magazine.
The article is called Broken Ballots, and it's by a fellow named Justin Metz.
And early on in the article, he begins by talking about recent elections in Taiwan.
And he says that Taiwan has no absentee voting.
There's no such thing as sending in your ballot.
You have to vote in person.
There is a strict check of your ID.
The polls open at 8 o'clock in the morning.
They close at 4.
That's when the ballots are counted.
The officials have a certain time limit to count all the ballots.
By 8 p.m., the results of all the precincts are conveyed and tabulated and aggregated, and the election commission comes forward and announces the result at 8.30.
By 9.30, he says, the Taiwanese are in bed, having completed their election and knowing its result.
Now, when we hear this, we sort of have a rueful chuckle about it because this is not very far from the way it used to be here.
And yet, now, our elections are a massive jumble.
They're not like that at all.
And, as a result, there is vastly greater opportunity for manipulation, for cheating, and for fraud.
This is actually not just my opinion.
It's not just the aftermath of 2000 Mules.
This was the opinion of a bipartisan commission That was created in the early, I think, 2005, I believe it was.
Jimmy Carter was part of that commission.
James Baker.
So it had Republicans and Democrats.
And the point of the commission was to look at the election system in the aftermath.
You remember there was the closely contested Bush-Gore election of 2000.
And so the commission was intended to look at the elections and propose remedies.
And You might think that the bipartisan commission said, oh no, we need absentee ballots, we need mail-in voting, we need extended voting periods.
The opposite.
The commission concluded that we need to tighten up our system.
We need a national voter registration database that is routinely checked to make sure that it's an honest database of actual eligible voters.
The Bipartisan Commission emphasized the need for proper and legitimate forms of ID.
It also made the following statement, absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.
And by the way, we're not just talking about the Bipartisan Commission.
There were articles in the 2000s going all the way up to 2012.
Here's the New York Times in 2012, quote, Votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised, more likely to be contested than those cast in the voting booth.
The flaws of absentee voting raise questions about the most elementary promises of democracy, and so on it goes.
The point I'm making here is that it was widely recognized, something that is in fact logistically obvious, namely that when you physically go into a booth, you're behind the curtain, you can't take fraudulent materials with you, you can't swap out ballots, you're under complete scrutiny and observation.
When you walk in, you're supposed to present some form of voter ID, so there is a kind of There is checking built into the system that you don't have when you have absentee ballots.
The problem is that our system has deteriorated to such a point.
Well, here are a couple of examples really from the article.
I'm just going to read a few sentences.
Yet in California, New York, Pennsylvania, and Nevada, it is now possible to vote in person without any form of identification.
In Michigan, you can vote without a photo ID as long as you sign an affidavit saying you don't have one.
It goes on to talk about the long periods of early voting.
It also talks about, I'm now quoting again, 36 states, including every 2020 four-spin state, in the presidential election now, either has all-mail elections in which a ballot is automatically sent to every registered voter, Or, no excuse absentee voting, in which any voter can ask to vote by mail for any reason.
Again, flashing back, we've had absentee ballots, but absentee ballots were thought to be for people who were unable.
to show up in person.
So maybe if you're stationed abroad, you need an absentee ballot.
You're in the military, you may need an absentee ballot.
You're chronically ill, you might need an absentee ballot.
But apart from that, everybody else should be enough of a citizen, sufficiently vigilant about our democracy, show up in person, cast your vote.
And now, The article goes on to make an interesting point, and that is that many of us think that the breakdown of our system was the result of COVID.
And the author of this article, Metz, makes the point that this is not true.
He says, in fact, that the Democrats—now, he doesn't call them the party of cheating, but it's quite clear that they are—the Democrats have been pushing to change these rules for quite a long time.
It's just that when they were pushing, they would make incremental progress here and there.
They might win a case over here.
They might manage to get a bending of the rule over there.
What COVID did is it provided them with a tremendous opportunity.
And I think also looking back in COVID, you can see how some of the fake and bogus reasons that were given.
Oh, we need a six-feet rule of social distancing.
And then later, Dr. Fauci goes, well, there was really no science behind that.
So, then the question becomes, if there was no science behind this, why was everybody pushing it, including you?
And then the answer is, if you've got to stay six feet away from the next guy, how can you stand in line to vote?
So, in other words, all of this stuff that seemed initially not that much related directly to voting was, in fact, pushed In order to help change the voting rules of the 2020 election.
And here we are in 2024, and although there are a lot more eyes on the election, the RNC is clearly doing a lot more and prioritizing this issue far more than it did in 2020.
Still, we can see the vulnerabilities of our system.
By the way, This is the point that will be dramatically made in our new film, which is coming out shortly.
The vulnerabilities of our voting system continue even into the 2024 election.
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Consider this.
Without God, can we have a democracy?
And if religion is removed from Washington, who pays the ultimate price?
There's a new movie out called God's Not Dead, In God We Trust.
It's the story of a small-town pastor pushed into the political arena to run against a powerful regime, forcing faith and religion out of American politics.
There's no better time for this movie.
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I just found out moments ago that there is a new school shooting in the Atlanta area, and there are several casualties.
The number seems unclear as of this point, and of course, I believe that there's someone who's been taken into custody, but that's pretty much all that we know.
My goal is to talk not about that shooting, because not enough is known about it.
We'll find out later, I suppose, more information.
But I want to talk about the recent release of the 90-page set of writings, what is sometimes called a manifesto, but it's a wider ensemble of writings by the... the releases by the Tennessee Star.
And this is the Covenant School shooter, the trans shooter, Audrey Elizabeth Hale.
This is someone who was born a biological female, claimed to be a transgender male, And, of course, very interestingly, this manifesto, this collection of writings was withheld by the FBI, withheld by the local police.
And not just by the FBI and the local police.
It is interesting how the whole judicial establishment, and including a judge, a prominent judge in Tennessee, has been trying to block the release of this information and block it on various sort of bogus pretexts.
The first bogus pretext is it's an ongoing investigation.
This is what they always say.
They don't want information to come out.
It's an ongoing investigation.
Sometimes the ongoing investigation is so ongoing that information never comes out.
Think about the shooting in Las Vegas.
You're like, what shooting in Las Vegas?
Exactly.
That's what they want you to think.
They want you not to even remember the shooting.
Why?
Because you got no further information about it.
But it was a shooting with a lot of casualties, and we haven't heard one word about it since.
So, essentially, there was an effort here to bury this manifesto.
But it's the conservative editors of the Tennessee Star who made sure, and they've had to face litigation, they've had to face an angry judge who threatens to To penalize them for publishing this information.
There's also the claim, and again it's a bogus claim, of copyright violations.
It's sort of like saying, well there are certain people who quote own these writings and therefore you can't publish them.
Wait, what?
When you have a matter of public interest, You have a shooter.
This is now a matter of police investigation and of public concern.
The shooter has writings that throw light upon his or her, I don't know how you say it exactly, but the motives of the shooter.
It's all there in black and white, and the job of the media is to report on this stuff.
There's a near absolute First Amendment right to cover this kind of material, so kudos to the Tennessee Star for doing it.
They've been on this story, by the way, for weeks and months, but this latest trove of information, 90 pages of writing, and a very clear picture begins to emerge, and I think this clear picture is exactly why they've tried to suppress this kind of material.
I'm not going to read extensively from the manifesto, but I'll give you the picture.
Here are a few lines.
Kill those kids.
Those crackers?
Going to fancy private schools?
So, let's look right here.
There is an anti-white, meaning these are crackers, going to fancy private schools.
So, the idea here is that this is the traditional kind of left-wing spin.
We're against the rich, we're against the bourgeois.
This is what I've previously called identity socialism.
It's a socialist thrust, but with the twist of identity politics.
With those fancy khakis and sports backpacks with their daddy's Mustangs and convertibles.
F you, little S-H-I-T-S.
I wish to shoot you weak-ass dicks with your mop yellow hair.
Want to kill all you little crackers, bunch of little F-A-G-G-O-T-S with your white privilege.
F you, F-A-G-G-O-T-S.
This is all straight out of the writings of Audrey Hale.
And so, what do we get out of this?
We get a picture of somebody who's anti-white, anti-Christian.
Very interestingly, not hesitating to use sort of words like the F word about gays, doesn't hesitate to use those terms, but it's using them in a somewhat different way.
Audrey Hill goes on to say how she fantasized about her, quote, imaginary penis.
So, this is someone, again, who is emotionally disturbed.
She's born and this is someone who is undergoing a kind of imaginary, sort of, you may say, in-the-mind transition.
And she talks about how she hates her, quote, conservative parents who insist upon thinking about her as a daughter, where she obviously wants to be a male.
It's quite clear, listening to the rhetoric in these 90 pages, that this is someone who has been radicalized by the LGBTQ or the fringes of the LGBTQ movement.
She buys into the lie that all of society is against her.
She buys into the lie that sexuality is something that is fundamentally... your biological sex is something that you can either alter through an imaginative effort, that this is something that society is conspiring to foist upon you, that medical doctors are, quote, assigning a gender to you.
And so, Well, look, there's obviously in these cases an internal conflict.
But the internal conflict is not between you and society.
The internal conflict is between you and you.
The internal conflict is between your mind and your body.
You're clearly born one way.
Your sex isn't sort of a sign.
The doctor isn't sort of tossing a coin.
The doctor is Giving you a designation based on observation.
The doctor is looking at your biological equipment and going, this is a male, this is a female.
So the clash is internal.
And that's so so you've got really ultimately a someone who has a A problem.
Is it a psychological problem?
Is it a biological problem?
Is it solved by changing your biology to bring it in line with your psychology?
Is it solved the other way around by changing your psychology?
I think that's been the traditional approach of psychology and of medicine.
You've got ultimately a misunderstanding about who you are and it's your mind that needs to be corrected and not your genitalia.
The bottom line of this story is that you've got a person Who is very disturbed, and who is motivated by LGBTQ extremism.
Who says that she hoped, or he hoped, or hoped to make the Columbine shooters proud.
So, this is someone who has contemplated doing a school shooting for a long time.
In fact, apparently did some psychological counseling and spoke about this, even though it wasn't reported for this.
Apparently, the authorities didn't know about it.
And so, the ultimate shooting was just the end of a long train of planning and preparation, and probably a sort of someone falling further and further into the abyss of craziness, of despair.
And one has to say also of vengefulness.
Vengefulness against what is perceived to be a bourgeois and white and Christian society.
And so this was an ideological lashing out on the part of Audrey Hale and this is exactly why they tried to hide it.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast a good friend, Cheryl Atkinson.
You know Cheryl's work.
She's a crack journalist.
She has five Emmy Awards, an Edward R. Murrow Award for investigative reporting.
She's worked at CBS, PBS, CNN.
She also happens to be a fifth-degree black belt in taekwondo.
Wow!
We're here to talk about her new book.
It is called Follow the Science.
How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails.
You can follow her on x at Sheryl S-H-E-R-Y-L-A-T-T-K-I-S-S-O-N.
Sheryl, thanks for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
You know, when Debbie and I were talking about this book, Debbie's like, wow, Sheryl is really taking on some formidable adversaries who probably don't take too kindly to being investigated, let alone exposed.
What made you take on this mammoth and somewhat intimidating project?
Very unlike me, isn't it?
HarperCollins had the idea for a book really that looked at the scandal and fraud during COVID, but we agreed in talking about it that that's being done and has been done quite well by others, that this should encompass a bigger problem that's facing us, that I think the scandal of it is our doctors either pretend not to notice or are ignoring it.
And it's our public health crisis in America, how chronic diseases have exploded, even as we've never spent more on insurance, healthcare, pills, and doctors.
And I posit in the book with, I think, great citations and evidence that this is due to corrupt influences and a square or rectangle of influences, which include Big Pharma, political figures, and several other things.
But the main thing that isn't well discussed previously is the medical establishment.
So when our politicians, Big Pharma, and media work together, we know the result.
But add in the medical establishment, which we saw during COVID, and how they're pulling strings in ways and being influenced in ways that are often invisible to patients.
And it's a recipe for disaster when it comes to public health.
What do you think, Cheryl?
This stuff is so baffling that I find myself scratching my head because I can sort of understand, okay, Big Pharma, these guys are in it for the money.
In some senses, if you have drugs that are really expensive, they rake in the dough.
I could kind of understand why they loved COVID in a sense, because it created a massive demand.
They love the mandates because if you're forced to take a vaccine, that's kind of like saying, here's a forced customer for you, Moderna.
Here's a forced customer for you, Pfizer.
So I sort of understand that financial incentive.
What I don't understand is, you know, if you're the editor of one of the prominent science magazines, The Lancet, for example, or Nature magazine, or you're an academic at Scripps or in UC San Diego contributing articles about virology, What makes you go corrupt?
How is it that you become part of the system when seemingly, and maybe it's only seemingly, you have nothing to gain from it?
Slowly over time, the same forces that have learned to control the media and political figures have also peaked their nose under the tent when it comes to virtually every aspect of medical care.
That's the scientific journals, that's med school, that's the medical associations, the non-profits.
Evidence of that was really starting to come to light many years ago.
You had The former prestigious editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Marsha Angel, the current editor of the British journal Lancet, Richard Horton, he's a doctor as well, both saying basically that most, much if not most of the science in medical journals today are not to be believed because of corrupt pharmaceutical influence and that they as journal editors have tried to fight it.
But the journal industry, which gets a lot of money from the pharmaceutical industry, has been co-opted and therefore they're publishing studies The academic environment has also been corrupted.
Publishing studies that may not be accurate.
Scientists are not allowed to publish studies when the findings come out negative on a drug that they've been paid to research because the contracts are now buttoned down so tightly.
And then another factor, you know, I examine in depth what doctors are taught in med school, which believe it or not, one of the most popular references is the Merck manual written by Merck Pharmaceuticals.
And I unearthed the fact that there's a lot of important omissions in this Merck manual for doctors, but also there's completely false information, provably false information on drug adverse events and so on.
So, I think there are problems from top to bottom when we're looking at our medical system.
You know, if I flashback to my kind of early education in different types of political and economic theories, there is a school of thought called public choice economics.
And one of the themes that it advanced, and this is going back now several decades, is the idea of agency capture.
An agency capture means that you have these agencies like the FDA, the CDC, and the moment that they start getting private money, private institutions realize, well, guess what?
We can sort of capture these agencies, even though they're supposed to regulate us, we can actually control them.
And we do it using our leverage and our dollars, and we use it also by giving jobs to their guys when they get out of government.
But what you're describing is actually something that goes far beyond agency capture, because even the idea of agency capture doesn't include scientific journals.
It doesn't include academic research centers at MIT and Caltech and Berkeley.
What you're talking about is a sort of a web of influence exercised by these powerful pharmaceutical companies that stretches its tentacles into academia and the media.
Yes, and you know, look at the scientific environment that is so corrupted.
I've so far gotten two scientific studies corrected because I, an ordinary person, read through them and saw flaws in propaganda and mistakes that the peer reviewers didn't catch and the scientific journals didn't catch.
I'm working on a third correction as well.
The second correction I just got information happened in the last couple of days took a year.
And it was basically the government taking our money and giving it to academic institutions.
I say legally laundering the money to sometimes private academic institutions like Columbia, who then say they don't have to respond to freedom of information requests.
They don't turn over their scientific data, which makes makes actually the study null and void.
In most scientific realms, although that's not how they play the game now.
And then they put forth propaganda through these studies that have flaws and problems.
They're putting out a narrative, and I'm trying to help expose that.
You could too.
You've done a lot along the lines of exposing government corruption, but I'm trying to encourage ordinary folks like me to read through this stuff and call them on it and force them to acknowledge what they've done wrong.
The study, the correction just came out, was a government-funded study that tried to, in my view, disparage the Amish approach to COVID, which proved far superior to what the rest of the country did because they didn't follow any CDC guidance.
And fared no worse and arguably much better in terms of toll on their health and then made more money as a community than they ever have in history.
So, that tells us a lot.
But then the government funds a study that implies the opposite, even though the data didn't say the opposite.
So, these are ways that I think the information landscape is being shaped.
The scientific journals are not to be believed in many cases anymore.
And it's invisible to most of us, unfortunately.
Do you think, Cheryl, that the main driving force here is the money or the ideology?
And let me give you an example that might sort of dramatize what I'm talking about.
Let's take, for example, the immediate skepticism in the media, but also from the so-called scientific or scholarly community against something like hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin.
Now, it seems to me that there are two possible explanations for this.
One is, ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are really cheap drugs, and so Big Pharma doesn't stand to make a killing out of those drugs, but they do stand to make a killing out of vaccines that cost a whole lot more.
So that's the financial explanation.
The ideological explanation is, gee, the moment that Trump Yes, I would argue they are one and the same.
it becomes taboo. Trump has said it's good, therefore it has to be bad. That's the ideological motive.
Of these two motives, the money motive and the ideological motive, which one is supreme?
And are we seeing a kind of entanglement of the two?
Yes, I would argue they are one and the same. The narratives created about Donald Trump and how things should be hated if he utters them or how things should be called crazy if he says that, Those are driven by the same financial interests that are driving everything else.
I argue and have long said that in 2015, the narratives that were created about Donald Trump were created.
People didn't adopt them and think they were true about he has mean tweets and he's got a bad personality, but those were not driven because of those reasons.
Those were driven by financial interests that did not want a Donald Trump or someone who didn't come up through the money system, including pharma.
They didn't want them holding the most powerful office in the land because they couldn't pull strings with them.
They weren't responsible for him ascending to that position.
So because Donald Trump was an outsider, and this is happening around the world, in my view, I've been reporting for my show Full Measure in Europe and there's South American cases where these establishment figures that are reliant on the same financial interests are working very hard to make sure independent politicians Don't come to office and destroy the good thing they have going.
So, they have these psy-ops, you could call them, psychological operations, that they understand very well what plucks the feelings of people, what makes them feel as though they don't like somebody or build sentiment against a certain political figure.
And I think they've done that quite effectively against Donald Trump, who, prior to 2015, was very beloved by the same characters and figures who now say that they hate him.
Sure, I'd like to ask you to just talk about your own kind of evolution as a journalist.
And I say this because it seemed to me, and to some degree I would say this was true of me in a different way, I came up through the sort of think tank world.
And I always thought that, you know, American politics is a kind of, it's an argument between two sides that have rival ideals, equality of opportunity over here, equality of outcomes over there.
We emphasize liberty, they emphasize equality.
And so, but there is a kind of agreed upon, If there's not an agreed-upon set of facts, there's an agreed-upon procedure for figuring out what the facts are.
And we argue within those parameters.
Have you had something similar to me, a kind of shaking of confidence that this is in fact how our system operates, or at least operates now?
And how has that changed you as a person?
Well, I've described in the past how I came to realize the government Doesn't always tell the truth, as silly as that sounds.
As a young reporter, I thought there was some sort of unwritten law that the government always had to tell the truth.
So, putting that aside, I still retain the belief until the early 2000s that the medical profession, without me having examined it, was quite pure.
That scientific studies were to be believed, that our doctors were well-informed.
That federal health agencies had our best interests at heart.
And as I was assigned to cover stories at CBS News and investigate medical scandals and corruption.
I was shocked at things.
I learned that mistakes I made because I didn't ask the right questions and things that I learned about what's happening with our health behind the scenes.
And what I didn't follow the science was trying to take people along that path with selected examples.
I can't write about all of them, but some outrageous examples that opened my eyes and brought me to be a skeptic when it comes to doctors on our health system.
Obviously, there are many great doctors, many great people, but in general, the system is broken and most doctors who are independent would agree.
And I wanted people to understand, I didn't start here as a skeptic.
I started as a believer, not thinking any of these things were true.
And as I uncovered evidence and learned that my whole worldview was incorrect about public health, I thought it was really important to share that.
Do you think, Cheryl, as we close out here, do you think that this puts the ordinary citizen in a difficult position?
And I say that because, by and large, most people are busy, right?
You have your normal life to live, and so you pay attention, you could call it sideways, ...to things that you're not an expert in.
You pay attention sideways to who's running for the Senate, and you pay attention sideways to, well, I gotta take this vitamin and not that one, and you pay attention sideways to, this is what I do if I want to lose some weight, you know, here are two or three things I need to pay attention to.
But what you're saying now is that, you know, if we can't trust our institutions and we have to become, in a sense, all independent researchers on our own, It puts a very heavy burden on the citizen because you can't trust the guys in the lab coats, and you can't trust the professors, and you can't trust what you hear on the television news in the evening.
So you feel a little bit adrift and frustrated because you're not in a position to seek out the accurate information in every case on your own.
That's what's so disappointing about my profession because we used to be sort of an equalizer where we would Do that oversight and help summarize for people different facts and views so that they could have the information to make up their own minds.
We're not playing that role anymore.
There are things people can do.
And unfortunately, like you said, it does require a little bit of work for busy people, but I don't think there are many things that are more important.
There are some simple things you can do to understand how to do the critical thinking necessary.
To get through the sources and the narratives that are vomited at you every day and to seek better information or to understand which information should be weighted, meaning weighted as maybe more accurate.
There are sources you can refer to.
I've tried to put some of those in the book.
And then there are steps you can take to report your own adverse events or those of people you know when your doctor's not doing it.
Your doctor's supposed to do it.
They're not doing it.
You're supposed to report every adverse event that comes up after you take a medicine, even if you don't think it's related.
Same with vaccines to these federal databases so they can unearth these trends.
But the doctors aren't asking.
They're not reporting.
You can do it.
You know, there's some simple things we can do.
So it's daunting, but I think the fact that so many people's eyes were open with the corruption during COVID, that they're looking for better solutions and many independent doctors have broken away from the mainstream system and are trying to come up with better studies and solutions as well.
So I think answers are forthcoming.
We just have to look a little bit harder, like you said.
Guys, a really good starting point is right here.
It's Sheryl Atkison's book, Follow the Science, How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails.
Guys, I've been talking to Sheryl Atkison.
Follow her on Next at Sheryl Atkison.
Sheryl, always a pleasure.
Thanks for joining me.
Thanks, Dinesh.
In continuing my discussion of Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery, we are in Chapter 10, and Booker T. Washington is describing the effort to create a school with a lot of students, a lot of buildings, a boarding site where students can live, and so you don't just have sort of day schoolers who commute, but rather people who live on campus.
And Booker T's philosophy here is let's build the buildings, let's make the furniture, let's be virtually self-sufficient in this Tuskegee complex.
But he says the things at the beginning were a mess.
They went wrong at every turn.
And he says that, you know, it was disheartening for him.
He comes in and discovers that breakfast is a failure and he discovers that the chairs are not properly made and so they're out of joint or they're not properly aligned.
He talks about a young woman who Who went to the well to draw some water because the water was not properly available at breakfast.
She goes to the well and even the well is dry and then she says, quote, we can't even get water to drink at this school.
And Booker T. Washington says, I think no one remark ever came so near discouraging me as that one, because this gets to just the elemental fact.
If you can't get food to eat and water to drink, I mean, how are you expected to function as an academic institution?
How are you expected to even learn anything under those conditions?
And, um, He gives another example.
He says Mr. Bedford, who was one of the trustees at Tuskegee, he says has a bedroom that's right above the dining room and he says early in the morning he's awakened by a kind of an argument between two boys.
He goes down to find out what the issue is and it turns out they are fighting over the sole coffee cup.
There's only one coffee cup.
Both of them want it.
And they're both arguing.
One guy goes, well, I haven't had a cup to drink from in three days.
And again, Booker T is like, wow, we really are starting from the bottom up, aren't we?
And then he goes on to say that even though there were all these hardships and looking back on them, they seem almost ridiculous.
I mean, many of us have an experience, perhaps not quite as dramatic or harsh as Booker T's, but somewhat similar.
I mean, I think back, for example, to my early days in America, when I went off to Dartmouth College with virtually no money in my pocket.
And I'm like, it's going to be cold in the winter.
How am I going to buy boots?
And how am I going to buy a ski jacket?
And this is exactly what Booker T is talking about, but at a much more fundamental and elemental level.
And yet, he says, as I would say today, looking back, he goes, you know what?
I'm glad of it.
I'm glad I went through it.
I'm glad we did it because it has actually made us stronger.
It's made us appreciate today what we have far more.
It has taught us the value of a dollar.
So all these things, all these lessons that there is quite honestly no other way to learn A hardship proves to be, and in some cases, for some of us, it's not true hardship, it's relative hardship.
It's hardship compared to everybody else, but nevertheless, this hardship, whether absolute or relative, proves to be a kind of a very effective instructor, a very good teacher.
And he says, summarizing again his philosophy in the manner that he does so effectively in this book, it means a great deal, I think, to start off on a foundation which one has made for oneself.
So, let's reflect on this statement for a moment.
Most of us start out life with a very elaborate foundation that is set up for us by others.
And to some degree, that's a very good thing.
We learn good manners from our parents, and we learn good eating habits, and we learn cleanliness, and we learn... We also have a certain amount of emotional stability.
We never have to worry where our next meal is coming from.
We have a roof over our heads, and this is what parents work really hard to provide.
And that's what Debbie and I work hard to provide.
We try to provide a... We try to provide for our children things that we didn't have. And so this is the sort of parental project, the parental enterprise.
And yet what Booker T. Washington is sort of saying is that this is a double-edged sort of blessing, because on the one hand, this is what parents want to do for their kids, and yet at the same time, the kids, in a sense, don't have not built a foundation themselves.
They are operating off of a certain bedrock of stability that has been created for them.
They become, to that degree, more dependent on that stability.
And when the stability is removed, when they don't have it, which sometimes happens as you are sent out into the world, you suddenly realize, oh, whoops, I've got to pay for my own mortgage.
What?
Isn't a house ready-made for me?
I've got to go out and buy one, and I've got to take on debt that I'm going to have to pay that with interest.
So, this becomes a little bit of a daunting project for people who have not built their own foundation.
What Booker T is saying is, here at Tuskegee, we built our own foundation.
And notice that he's doing it himself no less than any others.
He's not instructing other people to do it.
He builds with his own hands alongside the teachers and alongside the students.
When our old students return to Tuskegee now, he writes, as they often do, and go into our large, beautiful, well-ventilated and well-lighted dining room and see tempting, well-cooked food, largely grown by the students themselves, and see tables
Meet tablecloths and napkins and vases of flowers upon the tables and hear singing birds and note that each meal is served exactly upon the minute with no disorder and with almost no complaint coming from the hundreds that now fill our dining room.
They too often say to me that they are glad we started as we did.
So, this is the perspective of the old students, the perspective of hindsight, the perspective, you could say, of the pioneers of Tuskegee who, when they got there, there was nothing there, and the buildings were dilapidated, and they had to build with their own hands.
And now, when they're older, You might think that they look at these younger students who are in well-lighted rooms with well-cooked food and envy them and go, wow, we didn't have that.
And I'm sure there's a degree of envy or at least a degree of a sense that, wow, look at how far Tuskegee has come.
But then, of course, they can take a certain amount of justified pride in recognizing that the reason that Tuskegee has come so far is because of them.
They're the ones who built Tuskegee, and in this case, literally so.
It's not just that, hey, I went to school, you know, in 1985, and the school has come a long way.
Well, it's come a long way, but no thanks to you.
But it's a whole different matter to say, when I got to the school, there weren't any buildings, and there really wasn't a proper yard, and things weren't clean, and there weren't hedges and flowers, and things weren't done on time, but we made it so that those things were improved and changed.
So, this is Booker T. Washington, you know, building a civilization in miniature at Tuskegee, and his point is he wants to set an example.
For blacks, yes, but really for any group that's starting out.
And notice that the Booker T Enterprise is not entirely an individualistic enterprise.
It's not, hey guys, each of us as individuals should pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.
There is an individual element, and Booker T. Washington himself is nothing if not an individual.
He's a very unique guy.
As I look across the kind of landscape of prominent figures in the Black community, really over 150 years, I can't think of anybody else quite like him.
He is sui genre.
He is unique.
He is a kind of beacon of light on his own.
And yet, and yet, For Booker T, it is always we and not I. For Booker T, it is a joint enterprise.
It's a collective enterprise, but it's not collectivist.
And by that, I mean it is private individuals working together.
And look at all the different elements that he has to draw together.
He's got to draw together the donors.
That's money.
He's got to draw together the teachers, the administrators, the well-wishers, and the students.
And he has to create this whole thing out of nothing.
And let's also remember that today, when people create institutions, there are models to follow.
Like, oh gee, I'm starting a new company out of my garage?
Well, I'm following in the tracks of Hewlett-Packard, and I'm following in the tracks of all the other companies created out of garages.
But not for Booker T. No one has previously done anything like this.
This is a man coming quite literally and directly out of slavery.
He's doing it for himself.
And so, he is pioneering a new path.
And all of this makes it all the more regrettable that his path becomes the path not adopted by the mainstream of the civil rights community in the 20th century and now in the 21st.
And that is to their great detriment because it remains the recipe for success, not just for blacks, but for everyone.
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