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Sept. 12, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
55:27
CALLING ALL CHRISTIANS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep916
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Coming up, I'm going to reveal how the parable of the classic Western, the classic Western movie applies to our contemporary situation and to Donald Trump.
Producer, director, and actor Scott Baio joins me.
We're going to talk about the 40 million Christians who are not registered to vote and how mobilizing a fraction of them can help save the country.
Hey, if you're watching on YouTube or Rumble or 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.
Have you had a chance yet to watch the trailer for Vindicating Trump?
I hope you have.
I was happy to see it's now up to 1.9 million views on X. I'm hoping it'll cross 2 million views today.
And of course, it would be great if President Trump were to share it and or Elon Musk.
So I'm kind of working on that, but neither have shared it yet.
Trump actually saw it, liked it, responded to me, but hasn't shared it yet.
But in any event, the website for the film is VindicatingTrump.com and you can watch the trailer there.
You can also pre-order the book there.
That's a tab at the bottom.
You can choose Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
The book is out the first week of October, but if you order now, you'll be one of the first to get it.
So, and it goes beautifully with the movie and it couldn't be more timely.
So, in fact, what I'm going to talk about now.
In this opening segment is a kind of an extended question, if you will, that I put to Trump.
And I also discussed it with Laura Trump, his daughter-in-law, who is now the co-chair of the Republican National Committee.
There's a little scene in the movie in which she, Laura Trump, responds to it.
And I'll let you watch the movie to get that part of it.
But I want to talk to you about the analogy, because I think it's an analogy that is a pretty good metaphor, a pretty good symbol for the current situation in which we find ourselves as a country.
Before I came to America, I was a... Well, I had very little exposure to America.
My exposure was mainly in the form of things I read.
and also movies.
And I think of the movies, the two types of movies I was most familiar with as a kid were war movies, but also Westerns.
And I saw the Westerns in a kind of naive light.
They were thrilling to watch as just great adventure stories, great drama, exotic, for me, settings and exotic cultures.
The white man's culture, no less exotic than the culture of the of the American Indians and occasionally of the Hispanic cowboys that showed up in the movies as well.
But as I got older, I began to think a little bit more about the meaning of these stories and particularly as reflected in some of my favorite Westerns.
Well, I'm not an expert in the genre by any means, but I've seen a bunch of these movies, and some of my favorites are Clint Eastwood for a few dollars more, there are great John Wayne westerns, there is The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, there is Shane, a number of others.
But if you look at the western genre, There's a certain type of a standard plot that I want to outline because I think it has a very interesting resonance for our politics today.
So let's think about a typical Western, and it starts off with a small town.
And this town has a name, or sometimes doesn't have a name.
But the name could be Shinbone, it could be Pleasantville.
The name generally signifies a certain stability, a placidity.
The town is doing well, and it's a great place.
And people in it seem to be functioning normally, functioning happily, not that they don't have problems, but nevertheless, family life goes on, and there's a kind of an old crusty sheriff, typically some 60-year-old guy with gray hair and a toothbrush mustache, an old rifle, and he's all that's needed to keep Shinbone great, you might say.
But then something happens.
And this is typically in the very beginning of the movie.
Some outlaws show up.
Some bad guys show up.
They are mercenaries.
They are motivated by money and greed and power and cruelty.
And they take over the town.
They beat up the old sheriff, they take over the saloon, they take over the provision store, and usually there is some act of ruthless cruelty in the beginning of the movie that shows you.
What's the point of that?
The point of that is to show you that the normal happiness and placidity of the town is wrecked.
Shinbone, in other words, is no longer Shinbone.
There's a new sheriff, and by new sheriff I mean a new set of gangsters who have displaced the sheriff, who are now in charge.
And that is the reality that the town has to contend with.
Now, the town doesn't really want to face this.
Because they can't.
They're not strong enough.
They don't know how to defeat the gangsters.
And so there's a degree to which the town tries to appease the bad guys, evade the crisis that they face.
There are some western movies where there's a guy who's trying to, well, think of High Noon.
In High Noon, you have the hero who is willing to help, but nobody wants him to help.
They, in fact, want him to leave because they want to live in the pretense that the situation that they're facing is not real, even though it is real.
At high noon, the gangsters are going to show up.
They are going to shoot up the town.
There's no getting around that.
And so far in the narrative, I need to spell out who's who.
Well, the town, of course, is America.
And the bad guys is the tyrannical regime that is represented today by the left and the Democratic Party.
And who's the old sheriff?
Well, Paul Ryan, the old Republican establishment, the people who go along and get along, the people for whom it has been business as usual, who have now been sort of displaced, but who don't recognize, or who do recognize, but are a little afraid to face, because they don't have either the ability or the will or the courage to stand up to what is happening.
They insist it's not.
And then, this is always the critical moment of the film and the time that the Western takes off, we have the arrival of a stranger, an outsider, a newcomer, coming kind of over the hills.
This is John Wayne.
This is Clint Eastwood.
This is the guy who is A mysterious man.
And somebody whose motives are really unclear.
And somebody that the town is ambivalent about.
This is a guy that the gangsters immediately recognize to be their threat.
The gangsters immediately know that this is the guy we have to deal with.
This is the guy who could topple us.
This is the guy we have to confront and, if necessary, finish off.
And the gangsters try all kinds of ways to do that.
Sometimes they try to buy off the guy.
Sometimes they try to beat him up and convince him to leave.
And sometimes they try to eliminate him.
They try to kill him.
And this is ultimately, of course, what leads to the great showdown, the great fight, the great draw at the end of the film.
And but what's interesting is that the town always views the man, the outsider, with some ambivalence.
And some of this is understandable.
In fact, it's kind of funny if you think of Trump as the outsider, which he is, which he was, coming in from the outside into politics.
A lot of the fears that the town has about the newcomer are exactly what the left, not the left, but even the Republican establishment will say about Trump.
They'll say things like, well, you know, we don't know a whole lot about him.
He's, and this is very true in the Western, he's not a family man.
Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, very typically, sometimes they will fall in love with somebody in the town, but more often than not, they won't.
They have, the outsider has no family.
In fact, sometimes he doesn't even really have a name, or only a first name.
Nothing is known about his background.
Is he fleeing some kind of tragedy?
Is he a murderer?
None of this is really known.
What the town does know is that he's against the gangsters, and so to that degree, they're on his side.
But what they don't know is whether he is on their side.
Let's remember that in the closing scene of the film, when the hero finishes off the gangsters, And again, this is absolutely key.
Notice he doesn't threaten the gangsters and they leave.
He essentially wipes them out.
He conducts full vengeance.
And vengeance is a very fundamental theme in Western movies.
And that's when people say, well, Trump is seeking vengeance.
As if that is somehow inherently bad, as if what Trump should be seeking is something other than vengeance.
I mean, look what they're trying to do to him.
Look what they have been doing to us.
Why isn't vengeance, a certain measure of vengeance, simply another word for retribution, for justice, for just desserts, for what goes around comes around?
The Western movie never shrinks from the idea that you have to extract vengeance, and in many cases, extreme vengeance.
But then we come to the closing scene of the film, which is always very telling and almost always is the same.
What does it mean?
We basically have the lone rider having accomplished his task right away.
Now, why is that important to happen?
Why doesn't he stay?
I mean, there's a case for staying, right?
Because, hey, you've gotten rid of the gangsters, but you haven't gotten rid of all possible gangsters.
New gangsters could show up, but the town might need you.
You know, you might, you haven't yet made Shin Bone great again.
You might be needed to stick around and take on these new gangsters that might show up.
But interestingly, our hero never does that.
He takes off.
He's gone.
Why?
Well, here I think the key message is this, and that is that the hero could have become a gangster himself.
Having shown himself to be stronger than the gangsters, he could easily establish himself, I'm the new head gangster!
And this is the worry that the town has.
Are we seeing a guy who's merely a new form of gangster, stronger than the gangsters we had before?
And the significance of the hero writing off is, no, it's not my town, it's your town.
Having gotten rid of the bad guys, I'm giving it back to you.
That's what it actually means to make Shinbon or Pleasantville great again.
So I think if we think about all this, it is an interesting, a provocative, and in many ways an apt metaphor.
of what is going on in America today.
Anyway, in the film, I posed separately.
I posed this exact schema, this exact analogy to Trump.
I posed it to Laura Trump.
Their responses are in the film.
So if you haven't yet, go to VindicatingTrump.com and clear your calendar for the weekend of September 27th.
That's when the movie opens.
You need to see it opening weekend.
Take a bunch of friends, take a bunch of family, take a couple of skeptics with them, buy their tickets for them.
We'll have tickets, by the way, on sale next week and I'll be announcing it on the podcast and on social media.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast the actor, the producer, the director, Scott Baio.
He is in the new film, God's Not Dead, In God We Trust.
You can follow him on X at Scott Baio.
He's been a, well, you know Scott Baio for 30 years.
He's been acting and producing and writing and directing from child actor to teen idol to adult superstar.
In 2005, TV Guide named Baio one of the greatest teen idols of all time.
He was even inducted into the Man Show Hall of Fame.
And, uh, whoa.
Very interesting. I was unfamiliar with all these things about you, Scott, I suppose.
That's a tough introduction to live up to, Dinesh, but I appreciate it.
Yes, yes, certainly.
All true, all true.
His website, scottbaio.com, the website of the movie, godsnotdead.com, and you can get tickets for that right now.
Scott, great to have you.
Thanks for joining me.
Let's start with an incident that just happened, and that is that God's Not Dead was going to have a red carpet premiere, I believe in Washington, D.C.
What happened?
Well, we had a beautiful room set up, and I think what I'm told is that the other side, the Democrat side of the building, decided that they did not want to show a Christian movie in the facility, so they kicked us out.
And we had a scramble and Speaker Johnson and Jim Jordan kind of helped us and got us another room, which wasn't quite as nice as the first room.
And they just didn't even want to show the movie anywhere on the property because of what the film What the message of the film is, and I find that to be a little disrespectful, but par for the course, you know?
The film basically, Dinesh, it's a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington movie, David A. R. White plays Pastor Dave, and he's just a pastor and he gets pulled into running for Congress against a gentleman who wants to take God out of everything.
And now I'm not a, I'm a Christian, and I'm not a holy roller, I'm not a Bible thumper, but I believe in God, and I believe in Christ, and I believe all that stuff, but you know, I think people should preach or practice whatever they want to practice, but that, and he gets sucked into the political world, and the movie becomes the movie, and how the story unfolds, and I play David's, I mean, the bad guys, the bad politician, his campaign manager, but
I think the reason I'm telling you all that, Dinesh, is because while making this movie, I learned that there are 40, 4-0 million Christians that don't vote.
And I don't think that, and this movie is about Christians using your voice, affect change.
You must be complaining about something in the country.
You have the power to change that.
And I think The Democrats don't want that message out there, and who knows how the Christians are going to vote?
I don't know, but I guess they're assuming they're going to vote Republican, and I think that's the reason why they shut it down, or tried to shut it down, but we're still going to do some kind of screening.
Yeah, but isn't that interesting?
Because if a movie is sending a message, hey Christians, you need to get out and vote, you need to participate in the public arena, you need to make your voice heard.
It's interesting that the Democrats go, oh no, we don't want to encourage that message.
Let's remember the Democrats are always talking about expanding the franchise, making sure that everybody has a voice.
Kamala Harris tweeted today out on X, she goes, I will be the president for all Americans.
So there's this kind of attempt on their part to say that they are the party of the people.
I think you and I know that that's just mere rhetoric, but I think that this particular incident kind of illuminates how the prospect of Christians getting energized and getting involved is somehow seen as threatening by the other side.
Yeah, and I always think, Dinesh, that it's a much larger picture than this film.
I have, listen, I'm just an actor, I have certain beliefs, but I truly believe that the reason they want God taken out of everything is because once you do that, and once you control life and death situations, you control Abortion on demand.
Abortion into the ninth month.
Abortion after birth, according to the former governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, which is a fact and he said it and it's on video.
I think once you do all of those things, then the only, I guess for lack of a better word, the only entity you can turn to is government.
And then government becomes God.
And you are beholden to government for everything as opposed to being a God-fearing person.
And at that point, it's over.
The country is founded is over.
I think what you're saying, Scott, and it's a very interesting point, is that God is, if you believe in God, God is going to be your highest allegiance.
And so other allegiances are important.
I mean, we have allegiances to family, we have allegiances to our community and to the school we went to, but they become subordinate or second to the allegiance to God.
And what you're saying is that if you remove the allegiance to God, Then the state kind of takes the place of God, and the state claims your highest allegiance, and that is not a long step away from the state basically saying, we own you.
It seems to be creeping that way, and all the policies coming from the other side.
I mean, they call us fascists and a threat to democracy, And it's the exact opposite.
As you know, Dinesh, it's all projection.
It's, I tell you what you're doing, that's bad, but I'm doing it.
I say, Dinesh is doing A, B, and C, and it's horrible, but it's really what I'm doing.
And that seems to be the rulebook.
And again, I believe in abortion, the health of the mother, and incest and rape and all that, of course, but I think there needs to be a lot more.
And I think Trump's policy on this is right.
It's a state's issue.
Let people decide.
And if my state happens to not agree with what I think, that's the people speaking.
And that's what democracy is.
And we really are not a democracy.
We're a representative republic.
I think that's right.
We're a country with at least, and I don't know if it was always like this, but now we have quite a lot of moral diversity in the country.
By that I mean, let's just say that the common social ethic of New York City is completely different than the social ethic of, say, Texas.
Right?
And I think the idea of decentralizing the abortion issue and letting the states decide is in deference to the democratic process and saying, all right, well, the more conservative voters of Texas can have more conservative laws, and the less conservative voters of New York can have less conservative laws.
And that is a way, actually, for people who don't agree on basic moral principles to coexist.
Uh, and that's what the effect of overturning Roe with the so-called Dobbs decision, uh, does.
So, uh, the Democrats, it appears on this issue, are taking the very radical position that we should insist upon abortion on demand for all nine months for the whole country.
Right.
Right.
And, and, and you're, you're right.
And the, The Democrats say we don't want government in our life, right?
That seems to, we don't want government, we want to be, well, but that's government in your life.
Having a federal, federalizing it is making it part of your life, and taking it away from government, which is what the Supreme Court did, is what you want.
So I'm not sure what your position is.
Why are you not you?
I'm trying to know what you're arguing, what you're so upset about.
You've got what you wanted, but it seems like, I mean, if Joe Biden had done that, it would have been the greatest decision In the history of the United States.
Would have been the greatest thing that ever happened.
The states, the people now run it.
But because it was Trump and his judges, you know, that's the process.
He gets to pick his judges.
It's the worst thing ever.
And I mean, I guess that's politics, right?
I mean, I guess that's the way the game is.
But at some point, Dinesh, let me ask you a question.
Do you think there's any healing of this, of this country?
Do you think there's any way of, you know, because if you think 20 years ago, 25 years ago, I'm a Republican, you're a Democrat, okay, no big deal.
I don't believe in this, you don't believe in that, okay, I'll see you later.
Do you think there's any way to fix this?
Well, I think that if we start with the abortion issue for a minute, my thought about it is this, you know, if you could put normal Democrats and Republicans, I'm talking about voters, around the table, they probably could find some common ground on the issue.
In other words, you know, let's agree that it's a life, let's agree that it's a human life, Let's agree that there may be certain circumstances in which it may need to be allowed.
So I think that ordinary Americans sitting around a table could find some common ground.
The problem is the Democrats are being led by radical institutions like Planned Parenthood that will not allow any kind of middle ground.
And so it seems to me that on that issue, and that's a metaphor for the larger state of the country, It's the media that is radicalizing the Democratic voter.
If you say to the Democratic voter, do you really think it's a good idea in an election season to take your political opponent and lock him up?
Do you think that's a good principle of American politics?
Would you be happy if we did that to you?
He'd be like, no, no, that would be, that's horrible, we shouldn't have that happen.
But yet, the ordinary Democrat goes, oh yeah, Trump has 91 indictments, you know, I think that that's, He shouldn't be such a criminal.
Now, they get that idea from the media, which is drumming that into them day after day.
This man is a habitual criminal.
And so, I think that is feeding the deep vein of division in the country.
Let's take a pause, Scott.
I want you to respond to what I just said when we come back.
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I'm back with actor and producer and director Scott Baio.
Follow him on X at Scott Baio.
The movie we're talking about is God's Not Dead, In God We Trust.
The website godsnotdead.com.
The movie is opening today, September 12th, so get your tickets, go see this film, go see the film this weekend.
And, Scott, we were talking about the division in America, and it seems to me that there's a part of you, and I think a part of all of us, that goes, this isn't the way the country used to be.
We all know and grew up in an America and have seen an America when things were not poisoned in this way.
I gave you just a brief thought about why I think it's like that.
What do you think?
In your circles, among your friends, what do you think about the prospects for healing the divide?
Well, I think the best point, the great point, is the media.
The media is constantly, it's not media anymore, it's just propaganda, and it's constantly dividing, and us against them, and who's against this, and black and white, and this group, and that group, and everybody seems to be put into a, you know, I have this discussion with, and I'll answer, with friends of mine who are liberal, and I'll say, you know, I'll prove to you that I'm more liberal than you are.
As conservative as I am, I'm more liberal than you are.
They go, really, go ahead.
You see gay people as a group.
You see black people as a group.
You see Hispanics as a group, in a box, and whatever else, LGBT, well, everybody's in a box.
Everybody.
And you separate these people.
I don't.
I just see Americans.
I don't care what you are.
I don't care what your faith is.
I don't care what you look like.
If you're a good person, and you respect our laws, we're friends.
And I'll go to battle with you on what you believe all day long.
This happens to me, Dinesh.
In the cigar lounge that I go to, there's guys from all walks of life.
And we smoke a cigar and we'll go at it politically and you're crazy and yell at me with names and this and that and on and on and on.
And when the conversation's over, when somebody has to leave, get up, hug and a kiss, see you tomorrow.
When you, when you get, you're right, when you get people together, it's different.
I think, I think, I think the media has so poisoned everything that we do and I mean like in watching this debate, oh it's historic, oh it's this and it's that and it's so dramatic and everything is so over the top and oh she said that, I mean it's, it's all crap.
It's just, It's just, it's meaningless.
But... I mean, I have two thoughts about the debate I want to mention to you.
I mean, one is that there was media bias in the past.
I remember media bias in the Reagan era.
They'd call Reagan a buffoon and a fool and a washed-up actor and, you know, a guy who sort of didn't know what was going on and took naps all day.
But the level of propaganda, as you say, has reached a fever pitch.
It's gone to a degree that it never was before.
And the second thing is that although we think of the media as dividing, they're doing something worse than dividing us.
They are demonizing one side.
So it's not just division, right?
Because you could step into a group and go, all of you move to one side, and all of you move to the other side, and that's a divide.
But it's completely different if I come to the group and say, let's divide this group into two.
Now I'm going to tell you why the people on this side of the room are monsters.
Why they are evil, why they're like the Ku Klux Klan, why you should have nothing to do with them.
So it is not just the division, it's the demonization, I think.
And we saw some of that in the debate.
The two moderators basically taking up their truncheons and ganging up on Trump as if it's, hey, we're in Kamala's camp, even though we're supposed to be moderators of this so-called debate.
I mean, it becomes laughable.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know if it's laughable.
It's kind of scary when you're putting your whole body on the scale for one side, not just the finger.
I thought the moderators were And you know, everybody says, if you're blaming the moderators, you're losing.
I'm like, sorry, the moderators were a little out of control.
But I think you're right, Dinesh.
The funny thing is, nobody knows you.
Nobody knows me.
Right?
I'm a dad.
I'm a husband.
And I'm not the devil.
And I think we've gotten to that point where, you know, my life has been threatened because I believe in a guy that has some of the same ideas that I do.
But I'm Satan because I, you know, I like President Trump.
And I say to people, you know, if you can take Trump out of it, do you like what he does?
Yes.
Well, then what is your problem?
Him.
What?
What, because he makes jokes because he's loud and brash?
What?
What is it?
Because the media has told you he said there were good people on both sides of the argument?
He called Nazis good?
That's a lie!
And so, you know, what you just said is 100% Dinesh.
It's divide, and then you get those people there, and these people over here, you say, you're bad people.
You're monsters.
That's exactly what it is.
Scott, let's turn to the movie, and I want to ask you something about the God's Not Dead franchise, going back to the original movie and now the new movie, which I think is really, in some ways, the most urgent, the timeliest of all the God's Not Dead films.
What do you think is the secret to the success of the God's Not Dead series?
It seems to have really tapped a chord starting with the first film.
There are a lot of Christian films made out there, a lot of films that try to convey a similar type of message, but God's Not Dead has struck a chord, perhaps more than any other.
Why is that?
Dinesh, if I had that answer...
I'd make a hundred of them.
I don't.
I didn't make them.
I would tell David A. R. White to make a hundred of them.
And he's trying to.
I don't know.
I always think, yes, there's a lot of Christian movies.
Yes, there's a lot of movies.
But it always goes back to the story.
What's the story in the movie?
And if it's a good story, then it's usually a pretty good film.
And I think these films resonate.
I think it was the first one clicked really well.
And I think what happened with David and company is whether there's some divine intervention or he's just a lucky guy, every God's Not Dead movie has always, and not playing this way, has always come out right before something important that relates to the movie.
So I think that helps.
I think, you know, we just ran into some, excuse me, we were going through the Capitol building, the people's building where they won't show the movie.
And there was two women standing there and they saw myself and they saw David A.R.
White and they were, you know, wanted to say hello.
And they were so excited for the movie because they want to see just some good entertainment and they're faithful people.
And I think that's one of the reasons why movies like this, and this is a very good movie also, by the way, Dinesh, and not because I'm in it, but it's a good movie.
So to answer your question, I honestly don't know, other than the fact that they're good movies and they have very, very important and pertinent messages in them.
Yeah, absolutely.
And you highlighted at the very beginning of our conversation the 40 million Christians who are not registered to vote.
If even a fraction of them, 20 million, 10 million, decide to get involved, it could make a huge difference in a critical year.
So it seems to me the movie is Sending a message to the Christian community, hey, it's your country too, and there's no reason for you... And there are Christians who come up with all kinds of excuses for why they shouldn't be involved, even though I think that by not being involved, you're ratifying the outcome, no matter how negative it is.
If you end up with a government that persecutes Christians, well, sorry, but you helped to make that happen, not by your action, but by your inaction.
That is the exact point, Dinesh.
Right there is the point of the movie.
Look, out of 40 million of them, I can't think they're all happy as clams.
And for whatever reason, they're not getting involved whether politics is a dirty business or they're just afraid of something.
Whatever principle they're standing on, they need to get off that principle.
But you're exactly right.
So the things that they're complaining about are probably what you just said.
is that they're coming after Christians and these people are sitting back.
So if you get whatever percentage of those people to get out, and you don't even have to get out, you can mail in your vote, you can go to the post office and drop off your ballot, which I think is probably the smarter way to go now.
But if that were done, they could affect the change that they keep complaining about.
And they took something that Trump said completely out of portion, out of context.
Thank you.
He said, if you vote this one time, you won't ever have to vote again.
Remember that?
And they took it as, well, if he wins, he's gonna not have any more elections.
What he meant was, if you Christians vote, In the ways that we think you can, in effect, change, then you can take it easy.
Because you'll have the things that you want.
And things that you want are just not to be persecuted, to just practice your faith, and to keep God from being eliminated in America.
And I think those are the most important issues for them.
And I think they need to get motivated.
So at the end of the movie, there's a QR code where people can register to vote.
Excellent.
Guys, we're talking about God's Not Dead and God We Trust.
The website to get tickets, godsnotdead.com.
I've been talking to Scott Bale, actor, producer, director.
Scott, thank you very much for joining me.
Dinesh, it's always a pleasure to see you, my friend.
You take care of yourself.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H, Dinesh.
Have you ever had to raise money for a business, for a new venture, for a cause, for a charity?
Well, Booker T. Washington's next chapter, 12, is just called Raising Money.
And it's interesting not only because of what it shows about raising money, something that a lot of us do or have to do, and Not always do well, because there is a kind of art to it, and Booker T. describes quite vividly the best way to do it.
But I think his chapter is useful beyond that, because it's ultimately a chapter about persuasion, about human nature, about what gets people who are successful and have money To part with it.
To give you some.
To say, OK, I'm going to bet on you.
I'm going to put some money in your business.
I'm going to put some money in your movie.
I'm going to put some money in your charity.
So, let's dive into it.
Booker T now has an institution.
It's the Tuskegee Institute.
It's gotten beyond its early stage.
It's now, you know, putting up buildings.
And they're putting up a dormitory, which Booker T learns will cost about $10,000, of which he has exactly none.
Not to say that he's broke, or the institution is broke, but its money is already allocated.
So, they don't have the money to build the building.
We decided to call the proposed building Alabama Hall.
Now, this alone is the shrewdness of Booker T. Washington.
He wants to identify with the South.
He wants to say, here we are in the South.
We're not enemies of the South who are in the South.
We're not kind of northern pawns in the South.
We're not carpetbaggers.
We're Southerners.
And hey, here we are in Tuskegee, Alabama.
This is going to be Alabama Hall.
Now, they get some funding from the local black and white people in Tuskegee, but not surprisingly that is not close to enough.
And then he gets a letter from General Armstrong who tells him that he's going to be traveling through the north And he tells him, I want you to come to Hampton immediately because I want to talk to you about this.
So Booker T goes to the Hampton Institute.
General Armstrong tells him that he's going to be doing a tour through the North.
He wants Booker T to come with him.
But here's the key.
He says that we're going to be raising money not for the Hampton Institute, but for Tuskegee.
So Booker T. is surprised.
Imagine my surprise, he says, when the general told me the meetings were to be held not in the interest of Hampton, but in the interest of Tuskegee, and that the Hampton Institute was to be responsible for all the expenses.
So look at this.
Hampton is going to pay for the trip.
And perhaps they will reimburse those expenses, but Hampton is going to keep none of the proceeds.
All the money raised goes to Tuskegee.
So, by and large, this is a Hampton Institute venture to help Tuskegee.
The sheer kind of unselfishness of this is what takes Booker T. Washington by pleasant surprise.
He goes, a weak and narrow man would have reasoned that all the money which came to Tuskegee in this way would be just so much taken from the Hampton Institute.
Namely, hey, we at Hampton want to get donors too, and so if we raise money for Tuskegee, that's less dollars in the Hampton pocket.
But he goes, that's not how General Armstrong saw it at all.
The General knew that the way to strengthen Hampton was to make it a center of unselfish power in the working out of the whole Southern Problem.
What's the Southern Problem?
The challenge of rebuilding or building for the first time the potential of the black population of the South and in the process also restoring the white South.
Why?
Because let's remember the white South was also destroyed after the Civil War and there's a long process of rebuilding.
The South was a backward part of the country for a good bit of the 20th century.
It really wasn't until the 19, well really the second half of the century, the 1960s and onward, where the South began to dramatically pick up steam.
But think about it, that was a hundred years.
After the Civil War.
Meetings were held in New York, Brooklyn, Boston, Philadelphia, other large cities.
And at all these meetings, General Armstrong pleaded together with myself for help, not for Hampton, but for Tuskegee.
Now what's really good about the trip is not that it raised a great deal of money, but that it introduced Booker T to a lot of people that he was then able to go see himself.
And he says that, after that kindly introduction, I began going north alone to secure funds.
And he says, during the past fifteen years I've been compelled to spend a large proportion of my time away from the school in an effort to secure money to provide for the growing needs of the institution.
Now this is the The sort of, I don't know if it's a dirty little secret, but it is the nature of heading these days, and even in Booker T's day, any kind of building, any kind of large and substantial enterprise.
Let's say you're president of a company.
A lot of times, a lot of what you're doing is meeting with investors, raising money.
You're president of a college.
Pretty much all you do, well, not all that you do, And I speak from some experience here, most of what you do is raise money because colleges hemorrhage money.
And so you're constantly replenishing the money that is spent.
And Booker T realizes, hey, I've started this institution, but if I thought I was going to be like an educator, no, I'm going to be kind of a fundraiser.
And so he reconciles himself to that.
Now he says, And here he takes on again his familiar kind of, aw shucks, wry tone.
It's a little bit Reaganite here.
As far as the science of what is called begging can be reduced to rules.
So, this is kind of amusing.
First of all, he thinks, he says, this is really, you could almost call it the rich man's form of begging.
Why?
Because you're begging for not a sandwich or a dollar You're begging very often for large amounts of money that is needed to sustain a growing institution.
And he wants to develop rules because he thinks that, like everything, there's a certain sort of technique to it.
Now, the word technique can be understood in two ways.
One is kind of a gimmick.
You know, how do you put a fast one over these rich guys and get them to contribute?
That technique can be understood in that way.
That is not the way in which Booker T. Washington understands it.
His view of technique is, what is it that will persuade somebody that you are a worthy cause and that they want to partner with you?
Now, I emphasize this because a lot of times people think that when they raise money, even for a charitable institution, They think that the donor is somehow just being generous and the person raising the money is kind of in the position of the mendicant or the beggar.
But I think what Booker T is getting at here, and I can confirm this is true, the best way to do this is to recognize, no, Try to get people to see that we're in it together.
We are jointly undertaking an enterprise.
You have something that I don't have, namely more resources that I need.
And second, I have something, whether it's talent, whether it's time, whether it's the creativity to be able to carry out this project, that you don't have, or at least that you may have but can't deploy in this project.
So us coming together is not me doing a favor for you and it's not you doing a favor for me.
It is both of us putting in what we can to make this work.
And that's what Booker T is getting at here.
He goes, first, always to do my whole duty.
And second, not to worry about the results.
So, what we're getting here is an important rule, not just for effective fundraising, but for psychological kind of self-assurance.
In other words, don't sit around saying, I had a meeting, I'm now going to sweat for three days about whether or not I'm going to get this investment or get this gift.
Because first of all, there's nothing you can do about it.
You've already made your case.
You've done your job.
So Booker T, when you've done that, just go on and do something else.
Don't sit around going, ah, it's Tuesday.
I haven't heard back.
It's Wednesday.
Well, I wonder if I'll get a call on Thursday.
No.
The call will come.
Or the call may not come.
Either way, move on.
So, not to worry about the results.
That's the meaning of that.
He says, all worry simply consumes and to no purpose.
That's what I just said.
And he says, He says he got this idea that you shouldn't worry about things by observing the very rich men that he would go to ask for money.
He says, after considerable experience in coming into contact with wealthy and noted men, I've observed that those who have accomplished the greatest results are those who, quote, keep under the body, by which he means those who never grow excited, never lose self-control, are always calm, self-possessed, patient, and polite.
And then he says something very interesting.
I think that President William McKinley is the best example of a man of this class that I have ever seen.
Now William McKinley is the President of the United States in the last few years of the 19th century.
Let's remember Booker T. Washington is writing this book in 1901.
And so, his closest experience is with President McKinley, Republican president, probably someone that Booker T admired and looked up to.
We don't know, and I don't actually know a great deal about McKinley, and certainly not about McKinley in terms of his personality, his calmness, his self-assurance, but we're learning here from Booker T. Washington that he was that kind of a guy.
And let me close by just noting here Booker T's comment, my experience in getting money for Tuskegee has taught me to have no patience with those people who are always condemning the rich because they are rich.
Familiar?
And because they do not give more to objects of charity.
He says in the first place, those who are guilty of such sweeping criticisms do not know how many people would be made poor and how much suffering would result if wealthy people were to part with all At once, with any large proportion of their wealth, so as to disorganize and cripple their great business enterprises.
That's an important point.
And then he says, then there are also very few people have any idea of the large number of applications for help that rich people are constantly being flooded with.
I know wealthy people who receive as many as 20 calls a day for help.
More than once when I go into the offices of rich men I have found half a dozen people waiting to see them and all have come with the same purpose, that of securing money.
So, what Booker T is getting at is, we often Think of the rich, and I sometimes do, at least in proportion to their resources, as being somewhat of cheapskates, but Booker T is making the important point that these people are inevitably swamped.
And if they're not swamped by political requests, they're swamped by church requests, and they're swamped by missionary organizations, and they're swamped by distant relatives who have businesses and projects and needs of their own, it never ends.
I remember Oprah Winfrey once making the comment that she said, you know, I didn't realize that when I became successful, I would become, quote, the bank.
You're like a bank and this is in fact a plight and sometimes a welcome plight but I think for many rich people it can't be all that pleasant where everywhere you move and everyone you meet kind of wants in some way to shake you loose of your money.
Now the point Booker T is making is not that he is not going to ask for money, he is.
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