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Sept. 26, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
56:40
CROSSINGS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep926
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you
coming up big movie opening tomorrow friday and And in fact, the movie is showing in some places, some theaters today.
So you can be an early bird and see it today.
I'll tell you details about all that.
Also want to reveal the significance of the two crossings, the two journeys, if you will, that changed not only Donald Trump's life, but also ours.
I'll expose the truth about the third assassination attempt.
Yes, the third assassination attempt.
You may not even know about it.
I'll give you the details.
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.
Tomorrow, guys, is the big day.
Thank you.
Vindicating Trump opens in, well, it's closing in now on 850 theaters this weekend.
But I should mention that even though tomorrow, Friday, is the official opening of the movie, quite a few theaters are showing it today.
There are showings in the day, some showings just at night.
It's kind of an early get out the gate type of screening for a movie, and it's quite normal.
It's not unique to our film.
So you can be an early bird and be one of the first people to see Vindicating Trump in the theater today, but If you can't, make sure to go this weekend.
This weekend is really critical for the film.
We've put it in a lot of theaters.
I want to emphasize that this is a film that is made for the theater.
Obviously, if you can't see it in the theater, there'll be other ways to see it, but it's completely different to see a film, let's say, on a computer, let alone on a phone.
But even on a big screen TV, it's completely different than seeing it in the theater.
Not only is the theater a much larger screen, not only is there superior surround sound, not only are the acoustics made for that kind of format, but you can see it with like-minded people who are wrestling with the same kind of issues.
And so seeing it sort of just me, or even just the two of us, is totally different from seeing it in a large group.
And I think you know from my earlier films that the reaction in these films is really telling.
It is not uncommon for the whole theater to break into applause.
Sometimes there's like a stunned silence at the end.
And all of this is a way of conveying the emotional as well as the intellectual, psychological power of the film.
Theaters are a I'm going to call them a new megaphone.
They're an end run around the media, which is a way of saying they are an end run around the censorship.
You can't be blocked in the theater.
You can't be interrupted.
You can't really effectively be disrupted either.
And the reason is really pretty simple.
Theaters are in the real estate business.
They're in the business of filling seats.
It's in their interest to have people buy tickets.
And so theater managers, theater owners have no tolerance for anyone who's trying to prevent that from happening any more than a manager of, let's say, a grocery store or a mall is going to be happy or going to be tolerant of someone who's trying to disrupt people from getting to the mall.
That's not going to happen.
So this is a way for our message to get out there.
Without it being shut down, de-amplified, suppressed, all the usual cunning schemes deployed by the digital platforms.
This is a theatrical experience.
And by the way, I'm glad to see other movies, too, making their way into the theater.
But this is one that you must see.
Some people ask me, did you have trouble getting this film into the theaters, particularly because it's an election year, it's a film that's not just about Trump, but it is vindicating Trump.
It could not be more clear in making the case for Trump.
And I admit that when we first made, well, when we made Trump Card, The whole message was so radioactive that some of the theaters at that time, this was in the immediate aftermath of COVID, were very scared just of the name Trump.
Trump's name is almost taboo in the Hollywood community.
We have developed, over time, very good relationships with the theaters.
I think part of it is that this is really the, well, it's my eighth documentary film, beginning with the Obama film, continuing with America, Hillary's America, Death of a Nation, 2,000 Mules, and so on.
And so the theaters have recognized that we are a kind of A tried-and-true commodity or tried-and-true partner.
In some ways, they'll say, well, Michael Moore is sort of the filmmaker on the left.
Dinesh is the filmmaker.
I don't really always like this comparison, me and Michael Moore, really.
But nevertheless, the theaters go, you know, these are films that have proven their way along the way.
And so we've been able to get a lot of theaters.
And we've added a lot of theaters and this is quite important because I'm getting a few messages to the effect, hey, you know, I looked last week, I looked last weekend or last Friday and I couldn't find a theater that was right near me.
You should not have that problem now.
And what I mean is that on Monday, they generally do these things at the beginning of the week, we added some 300 or 330 more theaters.
So we're now at 830, 840.
We'll close in probably close to 850 theaters.
So we're now at 830, 840.
We'll close in probably close to 850 theaters.
And that's a really good number.
Why?
There are a couple of thousand theaters in the country.
There are, of course, more screens than are theaters because some, obviously, theaters typically have multiple screens.
And sometimes with a Disney movie or a big new movie coming out from From Hollywood, they'll take multiple screens in the same theater.
We don't really need to do that.
We're happy to take one screen in all the major theaters.
And we have a pretty good idea of where our films do well.
And by the way, do not think that... Some people think that our films open mainly in, like, red America.
You're gonna find it easily in, like, Oklahoma or Alabama, but good luck finding it in L.A.
or New York City, and this is not true.
Our films do very well in Portland, they do well in Seattle, in L.A., in New York City.
We have something like 12 theaters in the Dallas area.
And it turns out there are plenty of conservatives in New York City.
They may not be a majority, but they're certainly enough to fill a theater in multiple showings over a weekend.
And so my point is, don't make prejudgments about where the film is available.
It should be available in a place where you can get to.
Now look, for some people it's gonna be, I gotta drive 30 minutes, I gotta drive 20 minutes to get there.
Particularly if you don't live in a major city or even a major town.
And in that case, we're counting on you to go ahead and do that.
Go ahead and see the film, even if you have to...
Make a plan to do so.
But see it this weekend.
It's really gonna... Well, first of all, you're gonna love the film.
It's been part of our filmmaking strategy.
And I say ours because we're a small film team.
Debbie is part of it.
My friend and partner Bruce Schooley is part of it.
Our team, we make these films in a very cinematic, theatrical, entertaining way.
So I never feel like I need to make a case to you that is something like, go see the film out of a sense of obligation and duty because I want you to support my work.
Sometimes people use that kind of rhetoric, but it's not my rhetoric because This film is well worth the 12 bucks or 13 bucks that you're gonna spend to watch it.
It's a really good movie.
And I've always had the view that good documentary films have the same features as a good, the same elements as a good feature film.
So when you see a good feature film, what does it have?
Well, it has a plot, which is to say it has a storyline.
It has interesting characters.
It has an arc.
An arc is a sort of developmental motion of the film that goes from stability to crisis to an attempt to resolve the crisis.
It has suspense.
It has a climax.
And all of these things make a feature film good.
Feature films that are not so good lack these elements.
When you look back and say, what was wrong?
Why didn't I enjoy that film?
Answer, no plot.
Well, I recognize that all those elements need to be present in nonfiction, in a documentary film as well.
And so we work hard to make our films That way, to make them highly engaging, that they never let up.
They go from beginning to end, really without stopping.
They have a powerful conclusion or climax.
All of this is what makes the film, I think, good.
And some people say distinguishes our films from the run-of-the-mill, run-of-the-mill documentary.
We had some really good fortune in this film in two ways.
We have some highly informative but also entertaining and insightful recreations of the movie.
I was on Mike Gallagher's show, a part of my promotion of the film this morning.
This is on Salem Media.
And he's like, Dinesh, I just watched the film.
He goes, I'm blown away.
He goes, how on earth did you make a film that looks like it was completed like this morning?
He goes, you have stuff in the film that I would have thought there's no way to include that kind of material.
And I told him, I go, Mike, you know, in the recreations, we were eerily Prophetic.
I mean, we were prophetic without knowing we would be prophetic.
We're not claiming to be prophets.
But we anticipated things like the attempted assassination attempt, which would seem crazy.
How can you possibly do that?
And yet, when you watch the film, you realize it's in there.
And then if you ask me, hey, Dinesh, did you put all this stuff?
Did you actually shoot all these scenes after?
I would have to tell you, and I'm telling you now, no.
We actually shot some of them, believe it or not, before.
And we ourselves are, like, stunned at the relevance of these recreations and the way in which they... We thought we were talking about possibilities without realizing that these possibilities would become actualities, actual attempted, not one, not two, but in some ways, and I'll touch upon this today, three assassination attempts.
We were also very fortunate, by the way, with the Trump interview.
We were supposed to do it earlier.
We were a little frustrated that it didn't come through immediately.
Of course, Trump had not only a campaign schedule, but a legal schedule.
Well, it came through after the first assassination attempt, after the Republican National Convention.
In fact, at the perfect time.
I think Trump was in the perfect mood For this interview, and I think it's an interview, at least as far as I know, unlike any other, Trump gives you a window.
You can kind of see the tumblers of his mind working in the course of the interview.
And that's always very interesting to see.
But you can also see, I think, a little window.
If you peer hard enough, A little window into his soul.
A part of Trump that maybe out of a certain type of manly resistance, he doesn't like to put on public display.
I was very keen to bring it out because I said to myself, it's really important for Americans to see Trump in the round.
To see these aspects of Trump's personality and character that are not always and not even often apparent.
Well, there it is in the film.
The film is vindicating Trump.
You can get tickets by going to vindicatingtrump.com.
That's the website.
It's like a one-stop shop.
Very easy to get tickets.
Just plug in your city or your town zip code.
Boom!
The theaters come up and just go for it and get tickets for the family and friends.
I also just got in the mail this.
Uh, which is the book and it looks great.
Now this is an advanced copy.
Authors typically get their books before the books are, you know, warehoused and mailed out.
So the book is not out yet.
In fact, it's a, it's a couple of weeks from being out, but you can pre-order it.
From where?
Well, from Amazon, from Barnes & Noble, and from the website VindicatingTrump.com.
Scroll down, there's a couple of tabs.
You can pre-order the book.
My advice is go on the website, order your movie tickets first and make your plans, and then go ahead and order the book.
It will just land on your doorstep as soon as it's available, and the two complement each other beautifully.
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What do they want to do?
They want to end lifetime tenure so they can end the court's conservative majority.
Very bad news.
Remember when Hugo Chavez reformed so-called Venezuela's Supreme Court?
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I've titled this episode of the podcast Crossings, which is maybe a little bit of a strange or enigmatic title.
But I'm going to, in this segment, discuss two separate crossings.
That I think are defining elements of Trump's life and in some ways of the fate of the country as well.
Trump is often thought to be the creature, the product of his father.
And there are good reasons to think that he is.
His father was Fred Trump.
His father was a very successful real estate guy.
Trump, of course, made his name and his fortune, really amplified his father's fortune, made it even bigger, also in real estate.
And of course, Trump has been heavily influenced by his father, and he has said so himself.
And yet there are important differences between Trump and his father.
And this is really what I want to stress.
The way in which Trump is self-made.
He's a product of his own imagination.
And we can see this in the ways that Trump is different from his dad.
I think this is, by the way, also an answer to the people who say that Trump is just a product of nepotism, that somehow he inherited his whole fortune from his father.
That's simply not true.
In fact, in his earliest property acquisitions, particularly the Commodore Hotel in New York, Trump's father refused to be part of it.
I'm now quoting Trump from his book, The Art of the Deal, quoting him about his father.
He goes, he refused to believe I was serious.
His father thought, you're nuts.
And why did his father think that?
Because Fred Trump had made a very successful business with low, not low income, but moderate income and rent controlled apartments in Queens.
And Fred Trump said this is a great business because a lot of these people are basically on subsidy or they're on retirement, they pay regularly, they're older, so they're dependable, so we can make a steady profit, we can make a flourishing business, but let's Stay in our place, so to speak.
In other words, Fred Trump advised his son against going into business in cutthroat Manhattan.
So what does Trump do?
He crosses the bridge.
That's the first crossing and goes into Manhattan.
This is how he sort of changed his life.
He changed the fortunes of the Trump company.
He created the Trump brand.
He became a national figure.
He, in fact, created one of the most successful brands in the world.
Now, he didn't do that by leaving behind his father's teachings or virtues.
Fred Trump was a frugal man.
Trump is frugal.
He was a cautious man.
Trump is, believe it or not, quite cautious in his business dealings.
I'll cite a single line from The Art of the Deal.
And by the way, this story is told in abbreviated form in my book, Vindicating Trump.
It's not, frankly, in the movie because the movie focuses on the present.
It focuses on multiple forms of assassination, what we call character assassination, political assassination, legal assassination, and then finally actual assassination.
That's a kind of dividing template for the movie.
But the book has more room to go into early Trump and young Trump.
And here's a line from Trump.
He says, many people believe in the power of positive thinking.
He goes, I believe in the power of negative thinking.
And what does he mean?
What he means is that when you go into a deal, always consider the downside.
Because while you always hope for the upside, there's always the possibility, and in some cases the probability, that you have to deal with a downside or the downside.
And so that's the power of negative thinking.
You never lose sight of what will you do if things do not go the way you expected.
Now this is Donald Trump, but it's also Fred Trump talking.
Nevertheless, Fred Trump was not the type of guy who would have ended up on Oprah.
Or Ellen, or Charlie Rose, or that was, Trump was able to recognize Donald Trump, that I have a flamboyance, I have a sales flair, I have a certain kind of larger-than-life quality that makes me different from my dad, and opens up possibilities that my dad didn't have.
So this is the first significant crossing for Trump.
In a sense, it made Trump.
And when I say it made Trump, what I really mean is that Trump made himself.
Trump didn't just walk the path of success, he sort of carved out that path.
He created the path and then he walked on it.
Which brings me then and now to the second crossing.
And the second crossing is best understood in the form of a couple of questions that arise about Trump.
Questions that are not all that easy to answer.
So let me frame the questions and then I'm going to talk about the crossing that really explains the questions in a single image or at a single glance.
Here's one question.
Why are so many people so dedicated, so loyal, so attached, so much of the view, almost the view, that Trump can do no wrong?
Trump himself kind of joked about it.
He's like, well, I could shoot five guys on Fifth Avenue and my supporters wouldn't care.
Now, I don't think he's referring to all his supporters, but he's saying there's a certain group of my supporters who are, in a sense, joined at the hip to me.
And the question is, why?
Why Trump?
These are the same people who might vote for another Republican.
They certainly do vote for Republicans, for the House, for the Senate, but they're not attached at the hip in the same way.
That's question number one.
Now we go to question number two.
Why is it that many of the same people who used to love Trump in the old days, who salivated over Trump, who wanted to be seen with Trump, who genuinely and spontaneously thought, this is a great guy, this is a guy that we not only like to be around, but we admire, Why have so many of those same people turned on Trump?
Why do they detest Trump?
Why do they no longer see him as one of them?
Why have they done what they can to take him down and challenge his cultural celebrity and, if they could, dissipate his reputation and destroy it?
What's going on there?
Well, let's turn to Trump's second crossing.
And this is Trump coming down the elevator in that iconic scene.
It's right in the beginning of the movie.
I, of course, refer to it in the book.
But this is where movies have it over books.
Movies are, in a way, better.
And here's why.
I can tell you about it in the book.
And, of course, you remember it.
But in a movie, you can sort of see it.
And I want you to sort of see it right now in your mind and think about it.
Because here's what's happening in that iconic scene.
By the way, that happened in 2015 when Trump first announced he was running for president.
And I think, just chronologically, that is the moment.
at which Trump's reputation turned.
That is the moment in which the people who previously loved him began to turn against him.
And the question is, what do we see in that picture that helps us to understand that?
Well, Think about the cultural elite at the top of the escalator.
So there's Oprah, there's Charlie Rose, and there is all the comedians and some of the biggest rappers, and the boxing promoters, all the guys and all the hip actresses and actors.
And all the politicians that wanted to be seen with Trump.
And not just that they wanted to get a check from Trump, because they get checks from other people without necessarily running to be seen with them and be photographed with them.
So all the cool people are at the top of the escalator.
And what does Trump do?
He departs from that group.
He gets on the escalator.
He goes down, which is to say he descends.
And he descends where?
Well, let's imagine at the bottom of the escalator that you have the, well, I'm going to call it the forgotten American.
So, these are the people that politics has ignored.
These are the people who don't have an existing kind of connection to the system.
These are people who have seen jobs go abroad and not come back.
They have seen their jobs wiped out in some cases by a technology, by globalization.
These are people who have seen their standard of living either stagnate and in some cases decline.
And then they look to the Democratic Party, which is supposed to be the party of the little guy, and they realize the Democratic Party has helped to do this, and has no interest in them, or in their lives, and this is the crushing blow.
Really, neither does the Republican Party, or neither has the Republican Party in the past.
And then suddenly out of nowhere you see descending, coming down the escalator this unlikely ally, this unlikely champion, this billionaire and he takes up their cause.
I think you can see right here the reason why so many people are so...
Umbilically, if I can use that term, attached to Trump, because when their situation was, in some cases still is, desperate, this guy, who's in a sense not one of them, and didn't even need to do it, has taken up their cause, and has taken up their cause against the elites that he was previously a part of.
So now we turn to the second part of the question, which is why are the people at the top of the escalator so furious with Trump?
And the answer, in a way, is obvious.
The question answers itself.
It's because they see him as a class traitor.
Hey, where are you going?
You are one of us.
You are part of our cozy system where we have all benefited.
We have all, in a sense, seen our own fortunes flourish.
And now you have not only left our side, but taken up the cause of the pitchfork people down there, the sort of wretched of the earth, and you are taking up their cause against us.
So right here in a single, I think telling an image, one can understand both the strong attachment to Trump on the part of so many, but also the fear and loathing and sense of betrayal against Trump for many of the people who were his previous friends.
This is just a snapshot.
of the kind of stuff you'll get from the book, Vindicating Trump, and also that you will see in the movie.
I think you can see that what I'm trying to provide here is not the kind of familiar boilerplate analysis that you get so often and in so many places today, but help us to see American politics and Trump with fresh eyes.
Help to see what's happening in the country with fresh eyes.
So you will be informed, you will be energized, you will be a powerful person to spread a message, and a message that people haven't really heard before, at least not quite this way.
And one way to think about the life of Donald Trump is in terms of the two crossings that have shaped, decisively shaped, his life.
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How many attempts have there been on the life of Donald Trump?
I mean, I, I feel almost.
a sense of a peculiar sense in raising this question because nobody should have attempts on their life let alone people who are running for president let alone former presidents and there is a whole apparatus symbolized by the Secret Service that is there to prevent these attempts from not only from succeeding but from really getting off the ground
And yet, there have been not one, not two, but as I'm about to say and disclose, three attempted assassination attempts.
And in saying this, I'm not speaking in some roundabout or metaphorical way.
True, in the film, I use the framework of assassination to talk about, for example, character assassination.
Legal assassination.
Now what I mean by character assassination is that not I don't just mean that that people are on the left or Democrats are blackening the name of Trump.
I specifically use character assassination because I'm talking about the kind of rhetoric that is planted and there and reasonably expected to convince kooks and lunatics to actually think I can be a hero if I take a shot at this guy.
So I'm talking about the kind of portrayal of Trump as Hitler circa 1933, that kind of poisonous rhetoric.
And then, of course, legal assassination.
And by legal assassination, what I mean is, again, not just quote lawfare.
Well, first of all, lawfare is derived from warfare.
But in its real extreme form, lawfare is aimed at taking you out.
And for the left, it's again not just a matter of let's ruin Trump's businesses or even let's lock Trump up until the election.
Let's lock him up for life.
So think about it.
When somebody commits murder, you're usually faced with two options.
The death penalty.
That's a kind of assassination, I suppose.
Or, being locked up for life.
Life without parole.
Which is seen, in a sense, as its equivalent.
So, it's another way of saying that when you give someone a life sentence, you are, legally, the equivalent of doing them in.
Of getting rid of them permanently.
So, but yet, even though there are these other forms of assassination, when I say that Trump has been subject to three assassination attempts, I'm talking about three actual assassination attempts.
Now, we know about the first two.
And we also know about Trump's, well, nothing short of heroic reaction to the first two.
This, by the way, is particularly the first assassination attempt I discussed with Trump in very illuminating detail.
And Trump's conduct in the face of these first two assassination attempts is just sui genre, by which I mean it's in a league of its own.
It's unique.
No other person that we know, maybe no other person that exists, would react in this way.
Let's start with the second assassination.
What normal person responds to it by complaining about being interrupted in his golf game?
What normal person says, I was about to make this great putt, and then they yank me off the field, when the Secret Service is telling them that there's a man two holes down who is waiting to kill you, who has been waiting to kill you.
What normal person, what other person would post on social media zero for two, almost keeping a kind of scorecard and grinning, hey, I'm a little ahead, buddy.
You've had two tries without success.
Ha ha ha.
Only Trump.
Only Trump would do that.
And we all know about Trump's really, I would say, almost Homeric reaction in terms of its ancient bravery, the kind of bravery that you see on the battlefields of the Trojan War, really on both sides of the war, his bravery in the first assassination attempt.
But now we turn to the third one.
And as it turns out, the third assassination attempt was by this Pakistani guy.
A Pakistani guy who was apparently put up to it by Iran.
Now, interestingly, this third assassination attempt was disclosed, but was not disclosed as an assassination attempt by the Biden administration itself.
And it was done right around the time of the first actual assassination.
In other words, the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, by the guy named Crooks.
And when the DOJ first disclosed it, they disclosed it in such a peculiar way That I thought when I first saw it, that this is some kind of a joke, this is some kind of a fraud, this is a deflection, this is a look over here, don't look at what actually happened in Butler, Pennsylvania.
And the reason I thought that, well, two reasons.
One is that they never disclosed that Trump was the target.
Now we know now, in fact it's now been admitted by the authorities that Trump was the target.
But if you read the DOJ press release, and you can easily pull it up, by the way I discussed this on Tim Pool's Timcast a couple of days ago.
out of his studio in Virginia.
When the DOJ first disclosed the arrest of this Pakistani fellow, they go, well, he was plotting against top government officials.
Apparently, they knew at the time that this was not a generic plot against top government officials.
It was a plot directed at Trump himself.
But they suppressed it.
And why they suppressed it is itself going to be very interesting.
Why did the DOJ try to hide who the target of the assassination was?
Before I get to that, I want to highlight that the news articles about that arrest of this Pakistani guy were so strange that no one could really believe it on the face of it.
Go back and look at those articles and you will see that they say that this Pakistani guy had apparently made connection with an FBI informant.
Now, he didn't know it was an FBI informant.
I think he thought this was like an Uber driver or this was some guy who was gonna take him around.
And he's telling the Uber driver, let's go to various clubs in New York because I want to recruit assassins.
to take out, well evidently, Trump.
There might have been some other people in addition to Trump, but Trump was definitely on that list.
So can you imagine the craziness of some Pakistani guy telling a supposed Uber driver, you know, let's go to all these clubs and I'm gonna find assassins at these clubs to take out Trump and take out some other guys.
This is, this is really unbelievable.
And by unbelievable, I don't just mean shocking.
I mean, it's unbelievable.
You cannot really believe it.
It's too crazy.
It's too dumb.
It's too implausible.
It makes no sense.
So when I first read these things, I'm like, nah, this, this is just, uh, this is just crazy.
This is not something that clearly doesn't make sense in the way that it's being described.
But evidently, Iran was somehow connected with this Pakistani guy.
And I think here we get to the heart of why the Biden DOJ tried to hide the fact that Trump was the target.
Because if they admitted it, what would they be admitting?
Well, they would be admitting that the Iranians are scared of Trump.
The Iranians don't want Trump back in the Oval Office.
Another way to put it is the Iranians want Biden.
They want Biden-Harris.
They want Harris.
They want a continuation of the kind of weak need, ineffective, uncomprehending.
They want the kind of weakness That has defined American foreign policy over the past four years, that has allowed Iran, that has bankrolled Iran, that has encouraged Iran, that has moved Iran much closer toward the full acquisition of nuclear weapons.
All of this is presumably Iran's objective here.
And this is the objective that the Biden DOJ, which by the way, you know, we have a Justice Department, like all the other agencies, Homeland Security and so on, that do not function In any kind of independent mode.
They are all in full campaign mode for Biden and now for Harris.
And their actions should all be understood in that light.
That's why they suppressed who was the target of this assassination attempt.
And one sort of post script to all this.
And that is, I want to take note.
And I haven't really seen much comment about this because it's somewhat of the dog that didn't bark.
I want to take note of the eerie and disturbing silence of the GOP in the face now of really three assassination attempts.
I mean, think of it.
If there had been one assassination, had there been one attempt against Biden or against Harris, the screaming on the part of the Democrats would be deafening.
On the House, on the Senate floor, demands for hearings, demands for accountability.
How could this happen?
Fingers of blame, all of that.
And it would go on nonstop through the election.
Meanwhile, with one or two exceptions, Josh Hawley will talk about some whistleblowers over here, and a couple of other guys who will.
But by and large, the GOP leadership?
Silent.
Have you heard a word from, say, McConnell about this?
But not just McConnell.
How many senators have you heard from about this at all?
How many House members?
Your house member, have you heard anything from him or her about it?
Probably not.
So this, I think, is an indication of the kind of support, or should I say lack of support, that Trump sometimes gets from his own team.
There's a lot of work to be done on our side to kind of come to terms with the gravity of the situation we're facing.
Because think about it, an attempt to assassinate Trump isn't just an attempt on Trump.
It's an attempt, first of all, to wipe out the GOP's chances of having a shot at the presidency.
That's what that's about.
That's why the assassins target Trump.
He's the most dangerous guy.
He's the very scary guy.
He's the chance of getting across the finish line.
He's the guy we have to go after.
The Iranians agree with that.
So do the sort of domestic terrorists, the domestic assassins who are trying to target him here in this country.
And so, As Trump says, I'm now quoting a line that is in our movie trailer.
It's a very dangerous time for our country.
That is Trump.
You'll hear more from him in the movie.
And as it turns out, that particular statement, although chillingly true, is something of an understatement.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H, Dinesh.
I'm continuing my discussion of Booker T. Washington's up from slavery.
We are now in the latter part of the book and in some ways the climactic part of the book.
Booker T. Washington's great Atlanta exposition address, great but also at the same time controversial.
The last time I talked about this I discussed his supposed, not really defense of segregation, but his toleration of it, his willingness to put up with it, his Articulation of a philosophy that could be carried out even in the depths of segregation.
I'm going to pull back a little bit to Booker T. Washington's reaction when he was first invited to give the speech.
He says, the receiving of this invitation—this is to speak to thousands of people, the leadership, not only of the South, but many prominent journalists from around the country, as well as prominent figures from the North—the receiving of this invitation brought to me a sense of responsibility.
He says it would be hard for somebody else to appreciate.
Why?
Here's what he says, and I think it's very moving.
He says, I remember that I had been a slave.
My early years had been spent in the lowest depths of poverty and ignorance, and that I had little opportunity to prepare me for such a responsibility as this.
And then this astounding sentence.
It was only a few years before that time that any white man in the audience might have claimed me as his slave.
And it was easily possible that some of my former owners might be present to hear me speak.
Wow.
He then goes on to say that he was filled with trepidation because he knew that whatever he would say, in some ways Booker T. Washington had been speaking at some times to black audiences, at other times to white audiences, but here, for the first time, he was going to speak to both.
And on his way to Atlanta, Booker T says he met a white farmer who said to him, quote, in a jesting manner.
So the white man is kind of...
Speaking ironically or speaking playfully, but you'll see that he's not speaking entirely playfully.
This is a kind of a serious point.
He goes, Washington, you have spoken before the northern white people, the Negroes in the South, and to us country white people in the South, but in Atlanta tomorrow you will have before you the northern whites, the southern whites, and the Negroes all together.
I'm afraid you've gotten yourself into a tight spot.
Wow!
What he's really getting at is that there is a natural tendency on the part of any speaker to tailor your message a little bit to your audience.
And yet, when you have all the different audiences, and to some degree, audiences that are not only different but sort of set against each other, that don't see the world the same way, in some ways see the world in opposite ways, How is Booker T. Washington going to kind of square this circle, as they say?
Well, here is his message, which I think can be distilled from just a few lines in the Atlanta Exposition Address.
No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
Booker T. Washington here is doesn't have to defend the dignity of writing a poem.
He knows that everybody who writes poems thinks that that's important, it's profound, it's cool, even if they write horrible poems.
But what he's doing is he's defending the dignity of labor.
He's saying that just as writing a poem has a certain expressive significance, It has a certain inherent dignity, even if the poem is not Wordsworth or Shelley or Coleridge.
He says, there is as much dignity in tilling a field.
So he's trying to introduce this notion that labor is itself dignified, is itself creative, requires its own type of skills, and should not be looked down upon.
And then he goes on to say this.
It is at the bottom of life that we must begin and not at the top.
Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.
Two very important lines.
The first one I've stressed before that one of the reasons Booker T. Washington is equating manual labor with writing a poem is he wants to be able to convince people who are a long way from being able to write a poem don't know much about alliteration, symbolism, iambic pentameter.
And Booker T. Washington goes, you don't need to know those things right away.
They're not the first things you need to learn.
The first things you need to learn is to look after yourself, to get by, to make food, to survive, to look at nature and say, I can get something out of nature and provide for myself and for my family.
And, um, So that's the meaning of it is at the bottom of life we begin, not at the top.
It's kind of obvious, but in some weird way it is good to have it clearly stated.
And then he goes on to say, nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.
Again, this is not a denial of the existence of grievance.
Booker T. Washington knows blacks have plenty of grievances and valid grievances at that time of American history.
But all he's saying is that there's also now opportunity, opportunity that there wasn't there before.
In the time of slavery and what he's getting at is that the measure to which you can take advantage of opportunity is based on your willingness to seize it.
Imagine there's an opportunity right in front of you.
Here's a chance for example let's just say I'm speaking here sort of symbolically to run in the Olympics.
And you go, oh no, I can't do that.
I haven't had the same level of training as all the other athletes.
And all of that may be true, but Booker T. Washington is saying, look, you previously couldn't participate.
You're now being allowed to participate.
Why not focus on building the skills that would enable you to run fast and be competitive?
He goes on to say, no race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized.
He's saying, you know, if you have something to provide, it could be that at the beginning, the guy who doesn't like you is going to say, I'm not going to buy from that guy.
I don't like that Washington fellow.
But after a while, it occurs to him that, you know, Washington is providing a service.
He has a product.
It's actually a little better than what I got right now.
And so, why not?
Why don't we give the guy a try?
This is not about whether I like him or not.
When you hire a carpenter, you're not interested in whether the carpenter is a nice guy, does he have a good family life.
Does he go to church?
Is he an atheist?
If you can make a good table, you're like, okay, this is the best table I can buy for the price I'm willing to pay.
And this is what Booker T. Washington is getting at.
You can see how Booker T. is here a believer in free markets.
Why?
Because free markets create competition.
And competition means that if you have the best service to provide, people are going to want to hire you.
And then this line, which I think is in a way fundamental, sums the whole thing up.
It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges.
Let me state this in a somewhat different way.
The case against Booker T. Washington, which was made by Du Bois and many others, was that Du Bois emphasized, before anything else, we need our rights.
Our rights come first.
We will worry after that, if we worry at all, about what we do with those rights.
And Booker T. Washington is not entirely disagreeing, but he is disagreeing in part.
Why?
Because he's saying, look, first of all, there are some rights that you don't have that you're not going to get now, and that should not prevent you from taking advantage of the rights that you do have.
Point number two, once you have rights, those rights are sort of useless to you if you don't exercise them well.
You have a right to free speech, but let's say you have nothing to say.
Well, in that case you can speak, but you're going to sound like the kind of talk that comes out of madhouses.
Or anyone who listens to you becomes immediately bored and turns away.
So you have the right, but what good is the right?
Or you have the right to engage in commerce, but you've got nothing useful to sell.
You've got no service that you can provide.
You have no skills.
What you have to sell, nobody wants to buy.
And Booker T. Washington's point is, what good is having the right to be in commerce, the right to contracts, the right to transact, when you don't have the skill, the knowledge, The creativity to make things that people need and want.
So, once again, it is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours.
Booker T has been accused of, like, ignoring rights, but he says very clearly, rights are important.
All the privileges of the law, whatever privileges are available to the white man, should be also available to the black man.
The white man has the vote, and he should have it, and so should the black guy.
The white guy has the right to transact as he will, so should the black guy.
So Booker T. is very much defending, without using the term, he is defending the colorblind ideal.
But he's also emphasizing that rights by themselves don't do the trick.
Here's why.
The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house.
Now, this is a very interesting statement because a lot of blacks at that time, led by the sort of Du Bois faction and later by the NAACP, Why are we being excluded from the opera?
Why is it that there is a white section and a black section?
And Booker T goes, you know, you have a point.
But guess what?
It's not the most important point to be making.
You know why?
Because right now, going to the opera is not the most important thing to lift the black population out of poverty.
It's not how you get to the first rung on the ladder.
It may be the 8th rung or the 9th rung, and that may be a big issue in Boston, where Booker T. Washington, where W.E.B.
Du Bois has already graduated with a Ph.D.
from Harvard, he's part of a sort of, well, he himself used the phrase, a talented 10th, a sort of black elite.
Alright, so Booker T. is saying, those are your concerns, and they're legitimate as far as they go, but they don't go all that far.
Why?
Because the vast majority of black people are in poverty.
They need to learn a trade.
They need to learn a profession.
So, the opportunity to earn a dollar, to actually acquire wealth, a modicum of wealth, to become self-sufficient, Booker T. Washington is saying, is that that is far more important than the, quote, right to be seen on Saturday night at the opera.
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