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Jan. 15, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
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PETE’S DEFENSE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1001
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Thank you.
Thank you.
Facing the Senate.
I'll talk about Pete Hegsett.
I'll also mention Marco Rubio and Pam Bondi.
Political scientist Carol Swain joins me.
We're going to talk about her new book about academic plagiarism and DEI. It has a hilarious title.
It's called The Gay Affair.
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The Trump cabinet confirmations are in full swing.
Pete Hegseth, who went up first, is done.
And I normally don't like to...
I'm not in the prediction business.
I try to do more analysis rather than predictions.
But nevertheless, I think that it's fair to say that this guy is going to go through.
It's possible that he might lose a single Republican vote.
I don't think he will.
I think he's going to get all 53. I wouldn't even be surprised if he gets Fetterman, which would give him 54. And it's probably going to be 54 votes for Pete Hegseth.
And I've got to say, Hegseth did extremely well.
Some of his memorable statements, I'm going to quote a couple of them that jump out at me.
Here's one.
We won World War II with seven four-star...
Generals.
Today, we have 44 four-star generals.
There's an inverse relationship between the size of the staff and victory on the battlefield.
We don't need more bureaucracy at the top.
We need warfighters empowered at the bottom.
I mean, Pete could have gone even further.
I mean, basically, the generals we had in World War II knew how to win a war.
The multiplicity of generals we have today, these bungling fools, Think of it.
Has the United States really won a war since World War II? Vietnam?
Nah.
You could say Operation Desert Storm was a victory, but that was a victory against a very weak opponent, namely Saddam Hussein.
And it wasn't a total victory.
It didn't remove Saddam Hussein from power.
We bombed the Taliban out of existence, but guess who's ruling Afghanistan now?
The Taliban.
The United States did occupy Iraq, but guess who's running Iraq right now?
Well, Iran, through some Iraqi Shia proxies.
So our military hasn't been doing all that well, I think one has to say, in full candor.
And this is what Pete is getting at.
It's not doing well not because of the soldier.
The soldier does his job.
And does this job well.
It's doing well because of these bureaucrats and fools who are calling the shots, very often not even out of the military, but out of the White House, out of the Obama administration, out of the Biden administration.
They tried to get Hexet with all kinds of little zingers.
One of them was, hey, are you wearing an extremist white supremacist tattoo?
And here's Hexet.
He goes, yeah, it's a tattoo I have right here, Senator.
It's called the Jerusalem Cross.
It's an historic Christian symbol.
In fact, I recently attended the memorial ceremony of President Jimmy Carter, and on the front page of his program was the very same Jerusalem Cross.
Boom.
So this is what I mean when I say Pete was just kind of running circles around these clowns.
And then they tried to get him on the old issue of women in the military.
You're against women in the military.
And Pete, I think, took the very strong ground here.
He goes, look, the issue is not women in the military or men in the military.
It's standards.
And he makes the point that you need to apply the same standards to everybody.
Now, at one point, Kirsten Gillibrand was like, no one has quotas.
We don't lower the standards.
But the fact of it is, the military does lower standards.
I've actually looked at charts where they talk about the various And why are they applying two sets of standards?
Because if they applied one set of standards, I think it's probably fair to say You wouldn't have women, or you certainly wouldn't have many women, in the military.
You'd have some.
Because arguably they're going to be a small number.
If you make bell curves, you find there's a small number of women who can meet that standard.
They can meet the demand.
Remember, this is not a male standard.
It is a highly exacting or demanding male standard because most men can't do those things.
So no one's saying that all men can do it and all women can't.
No.
The point is if you set a very high standard, you will find that only an elite group of men can do it and virtually no women.
And this is the reason the military is like, okay, we've got to have a sliding scale.
It's basically affirmative action.
And so Pete, by saying the same standards should apply to anyone, made it impossible really for anyone to go against him on that.
Who would argue, no, we don't need the same standards?
I think Pete was also very good to bring out the point that the thousands of troops who were fired...
Over the, as he put it, experimental COVID vaccine, he says we have to apologize to them.
We have to reinstate them with full pay and rank.
So this is Pete not backing down and recognizing that a real injustice was done in the wake of COVID. Some of our best troops were truly let go for not taking the vaccine, and that that is a wrong that needs to be...
And finally, I want to quote Senator Mark Wayne Mullen, who exposed what seemed to be the kind of trump card, if you will, of the Democrats, which is, hey, Pete, aren't you a womanizer?
Didn't you have an affair with your wife?
Isn't it true that you have come to events in the evening drunk?
And Senator Mark Wayne Mullen basically, well, I'd have to say he went there.
I'm now quoting him.
How many senators showed up drunk to vote at night?
Don't tell me you haven't seen it because I know you have.
How about a divorce for cheating on their wives?
A big number!
So here is Mark Wayne Mullen bringing it home.
Exposing the hypocrisy of these senators.
Hey, listen, if you think it's a required standard of being on the job that you never have a drink or you never show up in the evening, we're not talking about drinking in the morning, we're talking about drinking in the evening, how about you apply that standard to yourself?
Are you qualified to be a senator under that same standard?
And if marital fidelity is the standard, how many people in the Senate need to raise their hand and step outside of the ring?
I would venture to say that while this would apply to both Republicans and Democrats, it would be more true of Democrats than of Republicans.
Finally, Elizabeth Warren tries to get Pete Hegseth.
She goes, you have said that every general who serves should not go directly into the defense industry for 10 years.
Are you willing to make that same pledge?
And Pete Hegseth goes, I'm not a general, Senator.
And the whole room starts laughing because obviously what Pete Hegseth is doing is laying out a standard for these so-called professional generals.
Who don't get paid a whole lot of money in the military, but figure out a way to leverage it right into a high-paying lobbying job, if you will, in the defense industry as soon as they step out.
Now, Pete is coming from a high-paying job.
He's a well-paid media figure.
He makes a couple of million dollars a year.
If you look at the disclosure that he did, he got, I think, $4 million over two years.
That's about $2 million a year.
So this doesn't really apply to Pete.
Pete is a political opponent.
He's coming in as head of the Defense Department.
He's probably going to go back into media, quite honestly, when he's done.
But nevertheless, Pocahontas tried to do her usual gotcha on Pete, and it really didn't work.
Now, I also got the first glimpse, although I haven't watched enough.
I want to watch more today.
Marco Rubio is already up there and talking, and so is Pam Bondi.
I watched some of the opening statements.
You get an idea of where they're going to go with Pam Bondi, and I'll pick this up tomorrow and do an analysis, both of the things that Rubio is talking about, and assess Rubio's chances, which I suspect are going to be terrific.
In fact, remember, Rubio is a senator, so how many senators, how many of the fellow senators are going to vote against him?
I think in the case of Rubio, he might even pick up a whole bunch of Democratic votes, And then I'll also talk about the prospects of Pam Bondi.
Early indications, it appears, that the main attack on Pam Bondi is that she is going to be overseeing one new FBI director named Kash Patel.
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Debbie's like, what's this next segment all about?
And I'm like, well, it's about the polar bears.
And she's like, the polar bears?
What are you going to say about the polar bears?
And I'm like, well, you're just going to have to wait and see.
Now, really my topic is climate change.
And climate change is being cited as the reason for the Los Angeles fires.
Except that here is a news report.
And that is an L.A. fire arson suspect named Juan Manuel Sierra is not only here illegally, he's been in trouble with California law enforcement 17 times in the last 8 years.
Robbery, vandalism, assault with a deadly weapon.
This is one of the guys setting fires, by the way.
And ICE says they asked California officials to deport this guy, but they refused.
Citing California's sanctuary state law.
I think that this guy, Juan Manuel Sierra, should change his name to climate change.
Right?
Then that way the left can go, who did it?
Climate change.
All right.
Which brings me to the polar bears.
Now, the reason I want to talk about the polar bears is because over the past 25 years, One of the things we've seen from the climate change movement is they hammer a story for years, and then when the story becomes impossible to defend, they quietly drop it and never mention it again.
So if you've been following this debate, there are certain themes that you get from the climate change people.
Number one, the polar bears are vanishing.
That's a big one.
The second one, and this was big between about 2000 and 2010, The Australian Great Barrier Reef is losing all its coral.
That was another big one.
And a third one, the danger of people dying worldwide due to heat deaths.
Because, of course, the planet is getting warmer.
So those are the three things I want to talk about very briefly.
Let's start with the polar bears.
Well, someone decided to actually go count the polar bears.
To see how they were disappearing or the rate at which they were disappearing.
And they discovered that the polar bears are actually increasing.
This is the opposite, by the way, of what Al Gore showed in his book, not his book, well, his book and his movie, An Inconvenient Truth.
In fact, he shows the polar bear floating away to its death.
It's on the road to extinction.
And the World Wildlife Fund echoed this nonsense.
But the truth of it is, we don't hear about polar bears now.
Why?
Because the polar bear population, which was about 12,000 in the 1960s, has more than doubled.
It's now over 26,000.
So the polar bears are actually doing fine.
Debbie and I were in Australia last summer, and we are going, well, it wasn't summer there, but it was winter in Australia.
We're going again for a brief trip to Australia next month, and we were in the area of the Great Barrier Reef.
If you go check it out yourself, and by the way, this is The Guardian.
The left-wing magazine published an obituary to the coral in the Great Barrier Reef, except you go look for it now.
It's all there.
Not only is it all there, the Great Barrier Reef has more coral cover now than at any point since they began checking this in 1985. And in fact, the record for the most coral, 2024. We got to see it.
Finally, let's talk about the weather-related deaths.
Here's a fact that it's worth wrapping your head around.
President Biden said recently that extreme heat is the number one weather-related killer in the United States, end quote.
Now, Biden is noted for making statements that are just whoppingly false.
He said recently that he has done more to secure the border than anyone.
This is the kind of thing Biden will just say.
And even the Democrats kind of cringe because they're like, then where did the 8 million illegals come from?
They didn't come here under Biden.
When did they come?
Who brought him in here?
Who allowed them through?
So Biden is in his own never-never land.
I don't know if this man is just a chronic liar.
I suspect that he is, going back to his early days.
But I think it's also that his mind is blown.
I think Joe Rogan put it very well, where he basically said, this is a guy with, you know, it's almost like your cell phone when it has almost no battery.
That's Biden.
He's a human cell phone with no battery.
He just needs to be plugged in.
And you can always tell when he's plugged in because he snaps to life when he's like, wow!
And then he, in staccato fashion, barks out a few things and then it's like, yes, we plugged in again.
That's Biden.
But here he is talking about these weather-related deaths due to extreme heat.
Except here is a very simple fact.
Extreme heat has been estimated to kill about 6,000 Americans each year.
And extreme cold kills 152,000 Americans.
I mean, it only makes sense, right?
We're not talking, by the way, about the simple fact that people, quote, freeze to death.
We're talking about that extreme cold makes it more likely that you get cold-related ailments.
And those are the things that get you.
So extreme heat can be a problem.
People who live in the desert know that.
And there are parts of America that get very hot.
Phoenix, Texas.
And there are other parts of America.
In fact, most of America, as you probably know, is rather cold.
This is why Debbie goes, Tanesh.
I don't know what our future holds, but we really cannot live like north of Texas.
We can only be moving like further south in Texas, or we need to be moving to Florida, or we basically need to relocate to Mexico because any place north.
And then Debbie further goes on to say that she doesn't see a difference between like...
60 degrees and 30. She says it's the same.
Once you go below like 68, it's like all the same.
She insists this is true.
Me wearing a coat anyway.
She has to wear a parka either way is her point.
So the summation here is simply this.
I'm not trying to here resolve the issue of climate change.
I'm simply saying that a lot of these...
Careless claims that are breathlessly taken up in the media and are endlessly promulgated, recycled, amplified turn out upon scrutiny to be utterly false and then the left never admits it, never apologizes, never does a correction.
They just stop saying it when it becomes impossible to continue with the lie.
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From all of us here at MyPillow, Guys, I'm delighted to welcome back to the podcast my friend Carol Swain.
She is a very distinguished scholar who has taught at major universities from Princeton to Vanderbilt.
She has published a series of important books and we're going to be talking about the latest one.
You can follow her on x at carolmswain, the website carolmswain.com.
And let me give you a couple of titles of the earlier books, The Adversity of Diversity, How the Supreme Court's Decision to Remove Race from College Admissions Criteria Will Doom Diversity Programs, and earlier, Countercultural Living, What Jesus Has to Say About Life, Marriage, Race, Gender, and Materialism.
But the new book, and Carol, I gotta say, Debbie and I were laughing out loud when we saw the title.
The title is...
The Gay Affair.
And of course, at first glance, Debbie's like, what is this, Tinesh?
And I'm like, Claudine Gay!
Of course, Debbie.
So we chuckled at the double entendre here.
And you just told us a moment ago that this represents your foray into romance novels.
Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, it's not my first romance novel.
I stick with nonfiction, and that gives me plenty to stay busy.
This is good, Carol.
Well, I want you to refresh us on this story.
Most people will remember Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard University, got kind of caught in a plagiarism scandal.
I think she tried to hang in there for a while.
It got worse and worse and worse.
What people might not remember is that you were involved in that scandal in the sense that I believe some of her plagiarism was from you.
But anyway, tell us a little bit more about what happened just to bring us up to date.
And then I want to probe the significance of plagiarism and its connection to DEI. And the book, The Gay Affair, depicts the journey of me finding out...
The emotions I went through, I finally hired a lawyer, I was going to sue Harvard, and then I was persuaded that was not wise, and instead I decided to write a book.
But I was living my normal life, and I was actually working on my memoir until December 10th, 2023. I received a phone call from Dr. Art Laffer that asked me if I had heard that the president of Harvard Had plagiarized her dissertation.
Then he goes and guess who she plagiarized?
You.
And he referred me to Chris Rufo's ex-acamp.
And that night I started getting phone calls and I was among the people who was plagiarized.
I don't know the exact total, but I know there were 47 instances of plagiarism.
That helped bring down Claudine Gay, but she was already in hot water because she had given disastrous testimony before Congress that that created a problem because she could not condemn anti-Semitism that was taking place against faculty, students but she was already in hot water because she had given disastrous testimony before Congress that She could not articulate what Harvard's policy was when it came to protecting Jewish people.
You know, Carol, as I was chatting with Debbie about this before this interview, Debbie was under the impression that we might have met in 2016 when we, of course, featured you as a star in our film Hillary's America.
And by the way, to this day, I have people who say that that is the film that has haunted them over the years, and they specifically refer to the sections in which you described in harrowing detail the history of the Democratic Party.
But I said to Debbie, I said, no.
You know, when I was at the American Enterprise Institute in the 90s, It's the book that was plagiarized by Claudine Gay, and the plagiarism took place 26 years ago.
The book was Black Faces, Black Interests, the Representation of African Americans in Congress.
It won three national prizes, including the highest prize a political scientist can win.
And it has three Supreme Court citations.
And it was my big tenure book at Princeton.
I got early tenure on the basis of that book.
And it identified the tradeoff between Black descriptive representation.
And Black substantive representation.
And it applied to any minority group.
You can have more members of your group in office and less representation.
And so the book argued that political party was more important than the race of the representative, as long as Blacks held the views that they did.
The book concluded they'd best be represented by Democrats.
Consequently, it didn't make sense to draw majority Black legislative districts.
And I argued that whites could represent Blacks, Blacks could represent whites, and that race was not important.
That got me labeled as a conservative during a time when I was a good Democrat.
Never a Democrat without common sense, though.
Well, this is the key, and that's what I told Debbie.
I don't know if I said Carol was a liberal, but I said Carol was definitely not a sort of ideological conservative in those days.
It appears like you have undergone quite a journey, if you will.
I think you once told me that your Christian faith was pivotal to all this.
Talk a little bit about that and also about what happened when you were hired by Vanderbilt.
Well, first I want to say that when I published that book, it put a big target on my back.
I was attacked by white progressives and by black political scientists who had been gatekeepers.
And they were just jealous and perplexed that this black woman that they never heard of was on the faculty of Princeton and she was tenured.
And so I was not a Christian believer then.
I was an agnostic.
But I was always a truth seeker.
And in the late 1990s, I went through an experience and I had a Christian conversion experience.
And by 2000, I was a divided Christian believer.
First, I transitioned from being a Democrat to being an independent.
And in 2009, I became a Republican, not because I thought they were perfect.
But because I thought it was important to align with the party that was closer to my Christian values.
And then I believe when Vanderbilt hired you, they probably thought they were just filling a kind of a prestigious black woman slot and finding, in your case, someone who was genuinely qualified, but then surprise, surprise, they get a conservative and a Christian.
Yeah, I kind of feel sorry for them because when they approached me in 1998, I was going through...
I was on my spiritual journey, but it was not public.
And so from the outside and from looking at my writings, you couldn't tell what was going on inside.
So they hired me.
I went to Yale and got a master's in law.
And that was after having been a professor at Princeton and having my Ph.D. And while I was in New Haven, I became a devout Christian believer.
And in 2000, I showed up on the Vanderbilt campus.
Not the woman they hired.
And when I say that I was a divided Christian, I did not proselytize in the classroom.
But it was clear that I was not aligned with my colleagues ideologically.
And so that made for some tension.
But things did not really come to a head for me in academia until after Obama was elected.
That's when I saw academia change.
And I divide the world into pre-Obama.
Post-abomb.
Very interesting.
Carol, let's come back to Claudine Gay here a little bit because in a way, I almost see Claudine Gay as the kind of polar opposite of Carol Swain.
You've got somebody here.
I think you even used a striking phrase.
You said that she is a victim in some respects.
Now, a lot of people would say, How can she be a victim?
First of all, she is elevated to the pinnacle of academia, Harvard University.
Even now, having stepped on as the president, she's getting, what, a $900,000 salary.
This woman is a racketeer, not a victim.
But explain the sense in which you mean that she is a victim and was to some degree used.
I have to tell you that while I was at Princeton, before I left for Vanderbilt, I heard of Claudine Gay.
And she was described as this brilliant Black woman at Harvard.
All I could hear about was this brilliant Black woman at Harvard.
And Claudine Gay was perfect for progressives in that she went to Phillips Exeter Academy.
Her undergraduate education was Princeton and Stanford.
And then the PhD from Harvard.
She's the offspring of immigrants, Haitian immigrants.
But she comes from Haitian aristocracy.
And so she was fast-tracked because she just fit everything that progressives wanted.
And I see her as a victim because I think that they pushed her too far.
If you look at the record that she presented to Stanford for tenure, that would not have gotten her tenure at a Tier 1 university.
When I went through, and it's clear to me that in the mid-1990s, when there was this big discussion about affirmative action, and I believe you were certainly part of that discussion, Bowen and Bach published The Shape of the River, where they made this strong defense for race-based affirmative action.
They argued that unless you had race-based affirmative action, you would have no Black leaders.
They totally discounted the historically Black.
Colleges and universities.
So they put a lot of pressure on institutions to fast-track Black scholars.
And I think that she was fast-tracked.
Standards were lowered.
And some of the problems we have in academia with people who are in positions of power, they have Ivy League degrees or they have elite institution degrees, but they're clearly not qualified.
They clearly have not been held to the same standards.
And in that way, I see Claudine Gay as a victim of progressives.
And in the case of Claudine Gay in my research, what she did was use my research to set up a straw man.
Her research question for her dissertation is framed around a conclusion in my book, Black Faces, Black Interest.
And as far as the verbatim pleasurism, it's probably five instances of that that's in the book and a side-by-side.
I have letters from the lawyers.
I have my complaint that would have been filed in federal court.
I lay out my case.
And I also argue that we should not call her Dr. Gay because to get a doctorate, you have to defend path-breaking research before a committee.
And so there's a rigorous process.
Her dissertation didn't just plagiarize me.
It plagiarized other scholars.
And so it's a problem calling her Dr. Gay as far as I'm concerned.
Now, on the face of it, the two things here, plagiarism and DEI, appear unconnected.
Because, of course, there are cases of people who have done plagiarism.
Obviously, white people have done plagiarism.
Plagiarism is the lazy man's out, if you will.
It's an easy way to...
I mean, essentially, it's academic theft, isn't it?
But I think in this case, what you're suggesting, and it seems absolutely right on point, is that when you have a woman...
Who is pretty smart, but nevertheless all this pressure is brought to bear on her.
You are the anointed one.
You are the one who is expected to take the helm.
She looks for shortcuts to be able to deliver the goods, and the plagiarism becomes the shortcut.
Is that a theme that you develop in the book, that this becomes ultimately the refuge of somebody of whom too much is being expected too quickly?
I mean, I have a lot on Claudine Gay, but I also talk about plagiarism and academia more broadly.
And you're correct, it's not identified with one particular race.
What I focus on is the fact that with higher education, there was a time that institutions policed plagiarism.
And if a journalist was caught plagiarizing, they would lose their job.
And when high-profile people like Doris Kearns Goodwin, Stephen Ambrose, Kevin Cruz and people like that were outed.
Then the institutions, the elites, have gradually relaxed the standards.
Claudine Gay, I was certain after I read her work that she would be fired.
But Harvard came out, defended her, and said she had merely engaged in duplicative language without attribution.
And so they redefined pleasurism to make it sound nicer rather than address it.
And the Harvard's handling of Claudine Gay, that incensed me for a while.
I relaxed, but January 2nd, 2024, she resigned, and in part, she blamed racism, and that's why I decided to follow a legal path.
At first, I was going to sue Harvard using copyright law, but...
As we dug into it, it became very clear that that was not a good strategy for me, because under copyright law, it's loser pays, and I did not want to end up paying Harvard's legal expenses.
Plus, I would have needed anywhere between $150,000 to $250,000 just to go to trial.
And copyright law does not protect the theft of ideas.
Plagiarism is not a felony.
It's not a misdemeanor.
It's a breach of ethical standards and morality and integrity.
It has to be policed by institutions.
That's very interesting.
And in fact, now that I think about it, that is right.
What you're saying is plagiarism, in a sense, is legal.
It is a violation of academic integrity, but it's not something that is against the law.
Guys, we've been talking to Carol Swain and the book, fascinating, you've got to look at it, The Gay Affair, Harvard Plagiarism and the Death of Academic Integrity.
You can follow Carol Swain on x at carolmswain, the website carolmswain.com.
Carol, as always, a great pleasure and thank you for joining me.
Thank you.
It's my pleasure.
I'm continuing my discussion of The Big Lie, and I talked yesterday about the appeal of antisemitism to the Nazis and to the fascists, mostly the Nazis.
The fascists were not inherently antisemitic, although they later developed an antisemitic streak when they allied with Hitler.
And the point I made about it was that the fascists got a psychological benefit out of anti-Semitism.
It became a sort of justification for their own inferiority.
They were able to say, yeah, the Jews are doing better than us, but not because they're smarter, they work harder, they collaborate better.
No, it's because they're evil, they're wicked, they're swindlers.
Now I want to talk about racism and the Democratic Party, and I want to show you...
How racism served exactly the same purpose, psychological purpose, in the Democratic Party.
In fact, racism was the key to the Democratic Party's hold on the so-called solid South for most of the 20th century.
Now, we're going to go back a little bit into Democratic Party history, and some of it's a little unpleasant.
I'm not going to shrink from it, because I want you to be exposed to what it sounded like in years past.
Democrats, prior to World War II, spoke about blacks in a way that today we would find deeply shocking.
Here is Democratic Senator James Vardaman responding to the Republican President Teddy Roosevelt's 1901 dinner meeting with Booker T. Washington.
Here is Vardaman.
I'm just as opposed to Booker T. Washington with all his Anglo-Saxon reinforcements as I am to the coconut-headed, chocolate-colored, typical little coon, Andy Dotson, who blacks my shoes every morning.
This is par for the course.
Democratic rhetoric, early 20th century.
Here's Democratic Senator Benjamin Tillman.
Now that Roosevelt has eaten with that nigger in Washington, we shall have to kill a thousand niggers to get them back to their place.
Boom.
Horrible stuff.
And right out of the mouth of a Democratic senator.
Here's Senator Theodore Bilbo, close ally, by the way, of Franklin Roosevelt, during one of his re-election campaigns.
He says...
We need to do violence against blacks to stop them from voting.
Remember at the time blacks were voting Republican.
Quote, white people will be justified in going to any extreme to keep the nigger from voting.
You and I know what's the best way to keep the nigger from voting.
You do it the night before the election.
Red-blooded men know what I mean.
These are the Democrats.
This is how they talk.
They do not hesitate.
They are the worst of the worst.
Here's Democratic Senator Robert Byrd.
Quote, the conscience of the Senate.
The guy lionized by Obama, by Hillary, by Bill Clinton when he died in 2010. And here is Robert Byrd.
He says, when the idea was floated to have a racially integrated military, this is Byrd.
I'm loyal to my country and know but reverence to her flag, but I shall never submit.
To fight beneath that banner with a Negro by my side.
Rather, I should die a thousand times and see old glory trample in the dirt never to rise again than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen of the wilds.
This is a Democratic senator from our lifetime and one that is lionized by Democratic leaders today.
And here are titles of some books published by progressive Democrats in the early 20th century.
I'm just going to read you some titles.
Charles Carroll's The Negro a Beast, 1900. Robert Shufeld's The Negro a Menace to American Civilization, 1907. Charles McCord, The American Negro as a Dependent, Defective, and Delinquent, 1914. And Shufeld again, America's Greatest Problem, The Negro.
Wow, that's 1915. When you read these days' history books written by progressive scholars, who, by the way, write most of the history books, you get the idea that sort of racism is an intrinsic feature of American history.
It's somehow part of the American psyche.
It goes all the way back to the American founding.
Here's the leftist legal scholar, Derrick Bell, quote, racism is an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of this society.
Here is Joel Covel in a book called White Racism.
Racism is ultimately indivisible from the rest of American life.
Here is Cornel West, leftist scholar and activist.
America is, quote, chronically racist.
But we look in vain for this kind of racism outside the Democratic Party.
It's all coming from prominent Democrats.
Not all of them, by the way, in the South.
Some of them, maybe most of them.
But we don't find this racism coming from Republicans.
And even more important, we don't find this kind of racism coming from the founders.
Now, this is really important because the leftist attack is on the founders.
Notice the leftists never highlight the racism of the Democratic Party.
The kind of quotes that I give you are rarely recycled again and again and again.
Why?
Because that would immediately point the finger at the Democratic Party.
They don't want that.
So they go back to the founder.
Thomas Jefferson was a racist.
All right, let's look at Thomas Jefferson and see how racist he was.
This is the most smoking gun quotation on Thomas Jefferson.
Notice that when I write these books, when I do this kind of stuff, I don't hide the evidence.
I want to find the most racist thing Thomas Jefferson ever said.
I'm going to quote it to you verbatim, and then I'm going to analyze it.
So here we go.
This is from Notes on the State of Virginia.
This is Jefferson.
I advance it therefore as a suspicion only.
That the blacks, whether originally a distinct race or made distinct by time and circumstance, are inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind.
First of all, right away, you are dealing with a man of superior nuance and intelligence.
The comparison between what Jefferson says and the quotes I gave you earlier from prominent Democratic figures, those guys are absolute brutes.
Jefferson is not a brute, and we need to pay attention to what he's saying.
First of all, he is allowing for the possibility that blacks are inferior to whites, quote, in the endowments of body and mind.
But is he saying that he knows this to be true?
No.
Here's what he's saying.
I'm quoting again.
What a sort of pregnant or...
Interesting phrase.
Jefferson is saying, I'm trying to explain differences between blacks and whites.
There are these differences.
We can see differences in the level of, let's just say, civilizational development between Africa and the West.
It's the white man that's exploring the world and not the Africans.
It's the white man that went to Africa and conquered, not the Africans who came to Europe.
So all of this needs some kind of explanation, some kind of anthropological account.
And Jefferson is saying, it's possible.
I have to admit, I suspect it, but I don't know it to be true.
So this is Jefferson, and he is the most racist.
Of the founders.
None of the other founders.
I can't find a single one that agreed with Jefferson about this.
In fact, Hamilton says, basically, and I'm paraphrasing here, if blacks are inferior, he says, that's the result of the conditions under which they have found themselves, and if they had better conditions, it would remedy the problem.
Certainly, the founders never created anything like the Ku Klux Klan.
As a form of terrorizing and exterminating blacks.
These institutions of anti-black terrorism are inventions of a later era and a new party founded in the 1820s, namely the Democratic Party.
Now, I want to turn to, and I'll only touch on this subject here because I'm going to pick it up tomorrow and go right into it.
You can ask the same question of the democratic racists that you asked of the German anti-Semites, namely, what did they get out of it?
Like, how did racism help to maintain the Democratic Party's hegemony or dominance in the South for nearly three generations after the Civil War?
Isn't it interesting the Democratic Party was...
Unshakeable in the South.
In fact, it went even past the Reagan era.
Some people think, oh no, the racists all became Republicans in the 1960s because they didn't like civil rights.
All of this is nonsense.
First of all, the Democrats did not become Republicans in the 60s and 70s.
That movement began in the 80s, continued in the 90s, wasn't completed till the end of the 90s, so for reasons quite different from the civil rights movement of then almost 25 years earlier.
But what we're trying to investigate here is the political benefit or the political purpose of racism.
Sometimes when you listen to scholars today or media figures, it seems like racism is just some kind of ingredient that's there.
It's some inexplicable feature of American society.
It just kind of came out of nowhere.
It's just an ingredient of the soul.
No.
Racism is actually a cultivated frame of mind.
It is a kind of ideology.
It is manufactured.
It is encouraged.
It is used for partisan purposes.
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