The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - Who Was Frederick Douglass？ My Chat with Author & Lawyer Timothy Sandefur (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_770)

00:00:00.000 I'm Dr. Gadsad, author, professor, and advocate for freedom of thought.

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00:01:11.500 Hi, everybody.

00:01:12.380 This is Gadsad.

00:01:13.600 Today, I have another fantastic guest with me.

00:01:17.140 Timothy Sandefur.

00:01:18.900 How are you doing, sir?

00:01:19.660 Very good.

00:01:20.700 Thank you for having me on.

00:01:22.120 Pleasure to have you.

00:01:23.500 Today, what I'd like to talk about is this book, which is not your latest book.

00:01:27.580 You have an additional book after that that came out in 2022.

00:01:31.420 But let me just, this is Frederick Douglass.

00:01:34.880 Regrettably, too few people know about him, or not enough people know about him.

00:01:39.880 Let me just mention briefly who you are.

00:01:42.080 You're the Vice President for Litigation at the Goldwater Institute's Sharf-Norton Center

00:01:46.980 for Constitutional Litigation.

00:01:48.480 You are the author of many books, including Cornerstone of Liberty, Property Rights in

00:01:53.240 the 21st Century America, The Right to Earn a Living, The Conscience of the Constitution,

00:01:58.840 and The Permissioned Society.

00:02:00.020 What's the title of your latest book?

00:02:01.820 I didn't have a chance to write it down.

00:02:03.560 The latest one is called Freedom's Furies.

00:02:05.960 It's the story of how the modern libertarian movement was largely started by three women

00:02:12.120 who all knew each other and wrote books the same year, 1943, that kind of kick-started

00:02:17.360 the free market movement in the modern world.

00:02:19.820 Beautiful.

00:02:20.120 So maybe we could start with what is the Goldwater Institute, since you play such an important

00:02:25.020 role there, and then we'll dive into this beauty right here.

00:02:28.760 The Goldwater Institute is a free market organization headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, and we do

00:02:34.440 research, litigation, and legislation to promote and advance freedom, both in Arizona and across

00:02:41.800 the United States.

00:02:42.600 Probably our most prominent, well-known success is the right-to-try legislation that was adopted

00:02:48.840 a few years ago that allows terminally ill patients to use medicine that has been approved

00:02:53.840 for safety, but not yet for sale by the FDA.

00:02:57.320 That was signed into federal law, oh gosh, five or six years ago now, and that was one

00:03:02.500 of our projects.

00:03:04.080 So is it, I mean, I'm assuming you probably have different divisions.

00:03:07.360 There is a legal division.

00:03:08.980 There is a sort of spreading libertarian ideas division.

00:03:12.400 How is the Institute organized?

00:03:15.120 You're right about that, and I'm one of the head lawyers at the Institute, so I do litigation,

00:03:19.640 suing the government for a living, which is the greatest job in the world.

00:03:22.560 I would do it for free if I had to.

00:03:24.180 In fact, we sort of do do it for free because we don't charge our clients.

00:03:27.300 We represent them pro bono to set important legal precedent.

00:03:30.640 And then in my spare time, when I have some, I also try to, as you said, advance the general

00:03:35.980 ideas of liberty by things like writing books about Frederick Douglass.

00:03:40.480 Right.

00:03:40.880 So we'll get to Frederick Douglass in a second.

00:03:44.200 You're, I think, associated, I saw in another bio somewhere where I was doing some Google

00:03:49.960 searches on you.

00:03:50.980 You're associated with ASU, correct?

00:03:53.460 Arizona State University.

00:03:55.320 That's right.

00:03:55.600 I served as a professor there last year.

00:03:57.580 And I think we may know some common people in that last, I think it was February, I was

00:04:05.280 invited by Professor Jonathan Barth to speak at the Center for American Institutions for

00:04:13.620 America.

00:04:14.100 Is that who you were connected with?

00:04:15.700 Yeah, that's right.

00:04:16.260 There's actually, you know, ASU is really fortunate that we have a large number of centers that

00:04:23.880 is, you know, dedicated professors who are devoted to teaching people about freedom and

00:04:29.580 teaching people about free speech and economic liberty and all these other issues.

00:04:33.980 And the area I was teaching in was in the economic liberty area.

00:04:36.740 Got you.

00:04:37.940 Okay.

00:04:38.280 So before we get to this guy right here, by the way, am I right in saying he looks sort

00:04:45.420 of like an aristocratic, regal, I mean, just his morphology, right?

00:04:51.800 The way he looks, you think he's like a Nubian king from somewhere in, right?

00:04:55.920 And in fact, that's an important point about Douglas.

00:04:58.840 Douglas was actually the most photographed American of the 19th century.

00:05:02.800 He loved having his picture taken.

00:05:04.660 And every time he had an opportunity to, he would have a photograph taken.

00:05:08.280 And a few years ago, they published a book that contained all of the known photographs of

00:05:12.240 Douglas.

00:05:12.800 And amusingly, there's only a single one in which he's smiling.

00:05:16.440 Every one of them, he has that serious regal look.

00:05:19.460 By the way, the cover of my book has a picture that he took in Hillsdale, Michigan, when he was

00:05:24.000 speaking there in the 1860s, because my alma mater is Hillsdale College.

00:05:28.360 And I just, I also happen to think it's the best photograph of him that I've ever seen.

00:05:32.140 So we managed to get permission from the school to publish that picture on the cover.

00:05:35.600 You know, I didn't know that he was connected to Hillsdale.

00:05:40.880 I was privileged to deliver a plenary lecture organized by Hillsdale in Naples, Florida, where

00:05:49.900 I got a chance to meet the president of Hillsdale, Larry Arndt, and so on.

00:05:54.540 I'm currently, by the way, a visiting professor and global ambassador at Northwood University,

00:06:00.960 which is also a university that is founded on many of these, you know, freedom.

00:06:05.900 It's known as the Free Enterprise University.

00:06:09.160 Maybe you could tell us a bit about Hillsdale.

00:06:11.320 I know this is not supposed to be a promo, a free promo for Hillsdale, but they're certainly

00:06:15.520 doing some good stuff.

00:06:16.500 Tell us about that.

00:06:17.180 I want to then talk about Chapman, and I promise we'll come back to Frederick Douglass.

00:06:21.160 Take it away.

00:06:21.740 Sure.

00:06:21.980 Well, Hillsdale is best known for being a very prominent free market school that teaches

00:06:26.700 about individual liberty, private property rights, and economic liberty.

00:06:30.400 I'm a graduate from class of 1998, and then I'm a graduate, as you mentioned, of Chapman

00:06:35.000 University, which is in Southern California.

00:06:36.900 I went to law school there.

00:06:38.660 And so I'm rather proud to boast that both of my degrees come from colleges that were started

00:06:42.480 by abolitionists.

00:06:44.020 Wow.

00:06:44.460 So here is, I don't think I've ever mentioned the name publicly, but hey, after a few years,

00:06:50.740 maybe it passes the statute of being courteous.

00:06:55.220 I had, regrettably, a very negative experience at Chapman, although I was very, very excited

00:07:00.260 to be connected to them.

00:07:01.920 In 2011, they reached out to me on one of my visits to Newport Beach.

00:07:07.900 I was a visiting professor for several years at University of California, Irvine, and I

00:07:12.620 lived in Newport Beach, and so I knew the area well.

00:07:15.220 And so at the time, the president of Chapman was Jim Doty, and the chancellor of Chapman

00:07:21.500 was Daniele Strupa, who subsequently became the president of Chapman.

00:07:25.600 Do these names ring any bells for you?

00:07:27.520 Oh, yes.

00:07:28.060 Absolutely.

00:07:28.460 And so both Doty and certainly Strupa were supposedly incredibly excited at the prospect

00:07:36.940 of hiring me.

00:07:38.140 They were developing these sort of center of world-class excellence, and they wanted me

00:07:42.420 to build one based on my work at the intersection of biology and consumer behavior and so on.

00:07:48.260 And it was all done.

00:07:49.920 It was all set.

00:07:51.160 My wife and I are excited.

00:07:52.580 We're returning to Newport Beach.

00:07:54.700 And then, as often happens, although they never admitted to this, some faculty members

00:07:59.620 got very upset that the really nasty Gadsad was coming to Chapman.

00:08:05.180 They short-circuited that thing. 0.86

00:08:08.400 And for the next five years, Strupa and some of the senior folks tried to bring me to Chapman

00:08:14.720 every time for it to fail.

00:08:17.980 So I'm thinking that maybe they don't quite have the testicular fortitude that Hillsdale

00:08:24.740 has.

00:08:25.400 Is that a fair assessment or a minor?

00:08:27.880 Well, I wouldn't know.

00:08:28.940 I graduated from law school in 2002, so it was a while ago.

00:08:33.420 And I didn't go there to the undergraduate school, so I can't speak for that.

00:08:37.220 But they do have, when I was there, it was certainly the most fair law school for a person

00:08:44.260 who believes in individual liberty and free markets that you could imagine.

00:08:47.240 There was a large number of faculty who took these ideas very seriously.

00:08:50.840 And for those of you out there listening who don't know what the legal world is like, what

00:08:55.060 it's like in the practice of law, it is typically, it is so far to the left that you really,

00:09:01.380 you have a hard time imagining how bad it is for those of us who believe in individual

00:09:06.900 rights, economic liberty, private property.

00:09:09.320 Those concepts are regarded as antique superstitions at best by the overwhelming majority of law school

00:09:16.080 faculty.

00:09:16.520 And I was very fortunate not to have that experience at Chapman.

00:09:19.940 And I'm a very proud alum of Chapman University.

00:09:22.480 Beautiful.

00:09:22.940 All right, let's get into this guy.

00:09:24.820 Tell us the story of Frederick Douglass, and then we can talk about why he's not as known

00:09:29.380 as he should be.

00:09:30.720 Yeah.

00:09:31.040 So Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland in 1818 to a enslaved mother whom he never saw

00:09:39.760 after the age of seven and a white father whom he never found out who he was.

00:09:44.820 He grew up in Baltimore.

00:09:47.800 He was sent to Baltimore at an early age to be sort of the servant boy for the son of some

00:09:55.380 relatives of his master.

00:09:56.360 And he lived in Baltimore for a while, and he immediately took to the idea of learning.

00:10:02.900 The story, as he tells it, is that the woman, Sophia Auld, who was his mistress in Baltimore,

00:10:09.860 started teaching him to read the Bible.

00:10:12.160 And when her husband found out, he exploded.

00:10:15.400 He said, how dare you teach a slave to read?

00:10:17.640 If you teach a slave to read, pretty soon he'll be wanting his freedom.

00:10:21.420 And Douglass later remarked that this was the first anti-slavery lecture he had ever heard.

00:10:25.620 So he became determined to learn how to read, and he tricked the neighborhood white children 1.00

00:10:31.100 into teaching him the alphabet.

00:10:33.140 And he began secretly learning to read from abolitionist newspapers and abolitionist speeches

00:10:38.560 that he found in the papers or books of the area.

00:10:43.240 And when he became a teenager, he became so much determined to oppose slavery that his masters

00:10:48.500 decided to punish him and sent him to live with a man named Edward Covey.

00:10:55.080 who ran what was sort of a torture facility in rural Baltimore to break slaves, to make them enslaved.

00:11:04.720 And the way he would do this was to break their spirit.

00:11:07.720 So he would beat them every week for infractions, real or imaginary,

00:11:13.280 and in an effort to try and destroy their sense of self and their desire for a better world.

00:11:18.420 And Douglass, in his memoirs, he says this actually worked against him.

00:11:21.820 It basically broke him down until one day when he passed out from heat stroke working out in the fields,

00:11:28.460 and his master beat him for that.

00:11:30.900 And Douglass finally decided to stand up for himself, and he fought back.

00:11:35.460 And he and Covey fought for, Douglass says, about an hour until Covey finally stumbled away, unable to beat Douglass.

00:11:43.860 And Douglass said that the lesson he learned from this is, he used to quote a line from the poet Lord Byron,

00:11:50.340 he who would be free must himself strike the blow.

00:11:53.700 And from that point for the rest of his life, he was determined to value himself and to defend his freedom and the freedom of his enslaved brethren.

00:12:02.060 So he escaped on the Underground Railroad, first to New York City, and then moved from there to New Bedford, Massachusetts,

00:12:10.260 where he got a job working, well, he got odd jobs.

00:12:13.180 He worked cocking ships.

00:12:15.060 He worked pumping the bellows at a blacksmith shop and so forth.

00:12:18.720 And he finally, he joined the anti-slavery movement, which is headquartered in Massachusetts.

00:12:22.620 And he became a lecturer for William Lloyd Garrison, who was the head of the Massachusetts wing of the abolitionist movement.

00:12:31.180 Now, here's what I think is really interesting about Douglass.

00:12:35.380 Garrison was a, he believed that the Constitution of the United States was an evil document because he said it was pro-slavery.

00:12:43.220 And Douglass at first agreed with that.

00:12:45.080 I mean, he was 20 years old.

00:12:46.080 He didn't, he hadn't really read that much about the Constitution.

00:12:48.240 He agreed with all that.

00:12:49.140 And he then went on a lecture tour to Europe.

00:12:52.600 And he was in Europe for almost a year.

00:12:54.620 And he came back from Europe and he had changed his mind.

00:12:57.920 And the reason he had changed his mind is because he had met in Britain.

00:13:00.600 He had met with a lot of people who had been, who had worked within the system as anti-slavery activists and had accomplished a lot.

00:13:08.420 So Douglass then returns to the United States and he's like rethinking what Garrison had taught him.

00:13:13.160 And he joins the New York wing of the abolitionist movement.

00:13:15.980 And the New Yorkers were led by a guy named Jarrett Smith.

00:13:19.420 And Smith believed that the Constitution was a fundamentally anti-slavery document and a good thing. 1.00

00:13:24.840 And Douglass embraced that position.

00:13:26.660 And that was the position he held for the rest of his life.

00:13:29.320 Douglass, of course, goes on to become a very important spokesman for the black community during and after the Civil War.

00:13:35.920 Ends up becoming basically the ambassador to Haiti and retires a prominent, highly respected scholar and author and orator, always believing that the U.S. Constitution was a good and anti-slavery document.

00:13:50.880 His phrase was the Constitution interpreted as it ought to be interpreted is a glorious liberty document.

00:13:56.460 So basically, Douglass would get an F in any test taught today in any university in the United States.

00:14:06.420 That's exactly right.

00:14:07.580 He would be he would be shunned because today's intellectuals have adopted the Garrisonian view that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document and therefore evil.

00:14:15.860 And Douglass said, you know, for what he said, take a look at the Constitution and find the word slave or slavery in it.

00:14:21.740 And it doesn't appear anywhere in the U.S. Constitution.

00:14:24.500 He said, therefore, those who argue that the Constitution is pro-slavery are kind of in the position of a person who claims to own property and then produces a deed that contains no description of the property.

00:14:35.280 He said the burden of proof should be on those who claim the Constitution is pro-slavery and find me the proof.

00:14:41.180 He said there's only four clauses in the Constitution that even obliquely mention slavery, and those have innocent explanations. 0.99

00:14:47.360 Now, let me pause to explain how how lawyers interpret the Constitution.

00:14:51.160 You start out with rules of interpretation in order to interpret any written document, especially the Constitution.

00:14:57.460 And the first rule is only that which is written down on the page is the Constitution, not the subjective personal intentions of the people who wrote it, just the words on the page.

00:15:09.340 And then the second rule is that you interpret the Constitution as pro-slavery or pro-freedom, rather, as pro-individual rights whenever you possibly can.

00:15:18.620 In other words, you interpret it as innocently as you possibly can.

00:15:22.260 You give it a good faith interpretation.

00:15:23.980 So with those two rules in mind, you look at the four provisions of the Constitution that seem to be pro-slavery.

00:15:29.860 That's the three-fifths clause, the fugitive slave clause, the import-export clause, and the clause that prohibits the repeal of the import-export clause.

00:15:39.480 And what I mean by the import-export clause is there's a provision that prohibits Congress from interfering with the slave trade until the year 1800.

00:15:46.720 So Douglass says, well, you look at these clauses, the three-fifths clause that counts a slave as three-fifths of a person for purposes of apportioning Congress.

00:15:55.380 It does not use the word slave.

00:15:57.280 And in fact, it rewards states that abolish slavery, because if you abolish slavery, you would get more representation in Congress.

00:16:05.360 It certainly does not protect or preserve slavery in any way.

00:16:09.180 Or take the fugitive slave clause.

00:16:12.640 It also does not use the word fugitive.

00:16:15.220 It says persons from whom labor is due.

00:16:18.540 And as Douglass pointed out, labor is not due from slaves, because they're the victims of an injustice.

00:16:23.260 Labor is due from apprentices or indentured servants.

00:16:27.260 And in fact, it is true that runaway apprentices or runaway indentured servants was a big problem in colonial America.

00:16:33.820 So it makes sense for the Constitution to refer to them.

00:16:36.940 And so anyway, you go down the list and you find these innocent interpretations of the Constitution.

00:16:41.580 And although those might seem like a stretch, you have to remember your rule of interpretation,

00:16:46.500 that you interpret the Constitution as pro-freedom whenever you possibly can.

00:16:51.420 In the alternative, notice how hard it is to make a pro-slavery argument for the Constitution.

00:16:56.820 That's even more of a stretch, right?

00:16:58.800 It doesn't mention slavery anywhere.

00:17:01.120 It casts about it no protection.

00:17:03.600 And there are provisions of the Constitution that are inconsistent with slavery,

00:17:07.660 such as the due process clause that says you can't deprive people of freedom without due process of law.

00:17:12.800 Slavery obviously violates that. 0.96

00:17:14.600 The privileges and immunities clause in Article 4 says that no state can deprive an American of the privileges and immunities of their citizenship.

00:17:22.280 Well, blacks are Americans.

00:17:23.900 So states can't deprive them of their rights.

00:17:27.100 And yet slavery did, right?

00:17:28.860 So Douglass makes this argument that if you interpret the Constitution correctly,

00:17:32.320 it's actually fundamentally anti-slavery and gives the federal government the power to abolish slavery if it wants to.

00:17:40.520 And then he said in 1861, when the Civil War started, he said, see, I was right.

00:17:45.080 Because it was the southern states that had to try and get out of the Constitution in order to protect slavery.

00:17:50.600 So that proves that he was correct, according to Douglass. 1.00

00:17:53.480 So everything that you just said, what percentage of American universities would have a course where the gist of everything that you said would be found in the syllabus of some course versus the exact opposite of what you just said?

00:18:10.280 Probably not a large number.

00:18:11.700 I was not taught it in school.

00:18:13.500 I learned most of this on my own.

00:18:15.940 In fact, after law school, I had really not known.

00:18:18.620 And this is not some trivial thing.

00:18:20.860 This is not some obscure movement, by the way.

00:18:23.000 I mean, these pro-Constitution, anti-slavery people like Frederick Douglass or like Senator Charles Sumner, these were the people who wrote the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

00:18:33.540 So if you want to understand the U.S. Constitution, if you don't understand the pro-Constitution, anti-slavery view, you don't understand it at all.

00:18:41.640 And yet I wasn't taught it in law school or in college or in high school or anything.

00:18:45.460 I basically had to learn it on my own.

00:18:47.200 So if we were to put him within the pantheon of historical American figures, be it in terms of the, you know, social justice and so on, and the proper use of that term, not the sort of the woke sense, or in the more just general great Americans, does he have his rightful place or is he a forgotten individual?

00:19:10.120 Actually, yeah, it's actually worse than either of those options.

00:19:13.040 The real problem is that he has been co-opted by the left.

00:19:17.140 The left tries to use Douglass in order to prove that the evil, the fundamental evil of America and the way that this has been accomplished by historians and scholars, and I use historians in a very loose sense.

00:19:30.000 I mean, we're talking about people like Howard Zinn, you know, the way that they use Douglass is to focus on his early life.

00:19:36.640 And I mentioned that early in life, he agreed with Garrison that the Constitution was evil and then changed his mind.

00:19:42.080 And what you will find in your typical textbooks is they'll talk about Douglass's early life and then totally ignore what came after that.

00:19:49.480 Or even worse, some scholars have tried to dismiss him or even said terrible things about him.

00:19:55.340 There are some scholars I mentioned in the book, some scholars who say that Douglass was actually, he secretly wanted to be white.

00:20:00.140 And that's why he endorsed the Constitution out of this nefarious, self-hating, sort of, he was somehow a racist because he believed that, you know, it's truly insane.

00:20:11.260 And yet you find this nonsense still being propagated.

00:20:14.160 I mean, or you get Douglass often ignored.

00:20:16.920 Like the 1619 Project, for instance, mentions Douglass's name, I think, one time and does not address any of the substance of his views.

00:20:24.800 And it was only after my book came out, by the way, that Nicole, Hannah, Hannah Nicole Jones finally actually read Douglass.

00:20:34.360 And she put this on. In fact, this we're approaching the university.

00:20:36.760 It was around Christmas time of I think it was five years ago now that she put on Twitter that that she was reading Douglass.

00:20:41.580 And and, you know, I tweeted back. I was like, well, you know, that's a good thing.

00:20:46.500 You know, he was he was pro-Constitution. She she honestly she had obviously never heard of it.

00:20:50.760 Of course, she's in the habit of deleting all of her tweets in order to not be held accountable for what she says. 0.99

00:20:55.800 So you can't find this online anymore.

00:20:57.520 But it was only a few years after my book came out that she even bothered reading Douglass and discovering that there's this whole range of black political opinion dating back to the before the Civil War.

00:21:08.180 That says, you know, maybe America is not a fundamentally racist, evil country.

00:21:13.140 Since you mentioned black Americans. What do you think of this guy?

00:21:18.680 Oh, yes. Yes. I think it's impossible not to admire Dr.

00:21:22.920 Sowell and Walter Williams and and the school that he has inspired.

00:21:28.020 You know, he's as you probably know, he's still alive.

00:21:31.340 And one of the published a book he just published. How do you do that?

00:21:34.840 God, I hope I have half as much intellectual energy when I'm that age.

00:21:37.840 I think I think five percent would be pretty good.

00:21:39.880 Yeah, I have. Here's another guy that specifically because you're talking about sort of black individuals, although, of course, they transcend race.

00:21:48.000 Although this guy was rather racially motivated.

00:21:51.180 Do you know who this gentleman is?

00:21:52.960 No, I heard you mention him during your preview, but I have not heard of him.

00:21:56.980 OK, so you might. So Steve Biko, let me tell you a quick story, because I'd love to see if we can draw parallels between all of these heroic figures.

00:22:05.300 So Steve Biko, I first heard of him, as I as I mentioned in that prelude, I first came across his work in a 1987 movie called Cry Freedom.

00:22:15.240 He was a anti apartheid activist who was killed by the apartheid regime, you know, tortured and so on.

00:22:25.620 Now, he resonated with me because, well, he was I often implore people to activate their inner honey badger because being a honey badger is to be fierce.

00:22:36.800 I mean, in this case, ideologically defend your principles, don't cower and so on.

00:22:40.960 And he wrote a book called I Write What I Like. Right.

00:22:44.860 Which is very much sort of the the call to arms for my entire career.

00:22:49.920 No one is going to stop me from saying a word.

00:22:52.880 Now, the only now what was beautiful about.

00:22:54.960 So then I just discovered we were at a book antiquarian place owned by a friend of mine and my wife, as she's browsing, she goes, oh, I think you like this guy.

00:23:04.520 Right. And so I ended up buying this biography from the from the 70s and and then read it recently.

00:23:12.080 Now, Biko and Douglas share this sort of very noble, as I mentioned earlier, not not so much in their their morphology, but in the way they conduct themselves.

00:23:23.400 Right. Biko talked about sort of raising the black man's consciousness.

00:23:27.440 Right. I don't have to justify who I am and so on.

00:23:30.060 So but some have accused them of being a socialist, of being anti-white, although I didn't really read into that.

00:23:39.220 Would Frederick Douglass be considered someone who in trying to elevate black people was trying to put down white people or was he sort of a universalist?

00:23:49.300 We're all equal, commonly linked in our universal brother.

00:23:52.660 Well, very emphatically, he believed in racial equality and did not believe in what is often called a black pride.

00:24:00.400 In fact, he was really concerned about this because there were movements to that effect during his own life that tried to inculcate a sense of basically pro black racism in within the black community.

00:24:10.920 And Douglass was was very much opposed to this and very worried about what it would do if it caught on in his day.

00:24:17.080 And he similarly, he you know, there was efforts both before and after the Civil War to force black Americans to colonize, to leave the United States and colonize Africa or or Central America or or after the war to persuade them to do so.

00:24:32.200 And Douglass was also emphatically against that.

00:24:35.000 He said black Americans are American citizens and should cherish their American citizenship.

00:24:39.720 They've earned it, God knows, by their true blood, sweat and tears, and they should never be persuaded to let it go.

00:24:46.980 And he said the problem with the colonization nonsense or the black pride nonsense, he said, is that it teaches black Americans that there is no country for them, that they aren't entitled to the American dream.

00:24:59.640 And it and it doesn't inculcate any hope. 0.96

00:25:02.720 It simply teaches them cynicism and despair. 0.71

00:25:04.900 And he said, and white supremacists will take advantage of that. 0.99

00:25:08.680 If the black world teaches black people that black people have no role in America and that America is a white supremacist nation, Douglass said, well, then we are surrendering. 0.99

00:25:19.060 I mean, then what what ability do we have to withstand the white racists? 0.94

00:25:23.340 Instead, our position should be that we're all Americans, all entitled to the Constitution and all equally entitled to our freedom.

00:25:30.480 And you mentioned the nobility thing.

00:25:31.900 That was very crucial.

00:25:32.980 I think that Douglass's most important contribution as an intellectual was his connection of the virtue of personal pride with the value of political freedom.

00:25:44.200 I don't know in the history of libertarian thought, I know of no thinker before Douglass who emphasized that connection to anywhere near that degree.

00:25:53.380 I mean, you can find in John Locke or Thomas Jefferson, you know, they do say, you know, you have to value yourself if you want to defend freedom.

00:25:59.760 But Douglass is the only one who says this is absolutely crucial, that you have to believe yourself worthy of freedom if you're going to defend that freedom.

00:26:09.120 And my greatest, my most interesting example of this is he wrote an article encouraging black Americans to enlist in the army during the Civil War.

00:26:19.400 And he gives a whole list of reasons of why you should join the army.

00:26:22.960 And what's interesting to me is what's not on the list.

00:26:26.040 Nowhere does he say you should join the army to serve your country because Douglass would have said we don't owe it to the country.

00:26:32.480 The country has abused us so miserably through slavery.

00:26:34.620 Instead, all of his examples, all of his reasons are essentially you owe it to yourself.

00:26:40.460 You need to build a sense of personal pride and you have to learn how to use guns to defend yourself and all these sorts of things.

00:26:46.740 Those are the arguments that he musters because he emphasizes so much the value of psychological independence relating to political freedom.

00:26:54.940 As you were saying, that link that you talked about, I literally got goosebumps because in maybe using other words, well, not maybe, in using other words, I think that's exactly what Biko was espousing.

00:27:10.720 And so I would love to see whether it be you or someone else who's an expert on either or both to draw that explicit.

00:27:18.140 Yeah, it sounds like I have to read this book.

00:27:19.940 I really do.

00:27:20.860 And I'm just going to put it up for you one more time.

00:27:22.500 It's Donald Woods was a white Afrikaner, but who was very, very liberal, anti-apartheid, who was the editor of one of the major newspapers.

00:27:33.140 They forged this incredible brotherhood between the two of them, friendship.

00:27:38.680 So I think there's really some interesting links.

00:27:40.820 Now, let's link Frederick Douglass to some of the contemporary wokeness that we see.

00:27:47.460 And before I do that, let me talk about another, of course, historic Black American, Martin Luther King, right?

00:27:53.260 In the I Have a Dream speech, I mean, literally every single tenet of wokeness is exactly the opposite of what Dr. King said there.

00:28:01.300 I'm going to assume, without having read the primary sources of what Frederick Douglass talked about, he would be primarily anti-woke, yes?

00:28:11.420 Oh, yes.

00:28:12.520 But that's not to say that he would have agreed with King in everything by any means.

00:28:17.020 So what I think is really interesting about Douglass as an intellectual compared to Martin Luther King on one hand and Malcolm X on the other is that he would have totally agreed with King's argument that the Declaration of Independence, as King puts it in the I Have a Dream speech, that the Declaration is a promissory note that America must make good on, that all men are created equal, that blacks are Americans just as much as whites are and are entitled to their liberty.

00:28:44.540 But he would have disagreed very firmly with King's anti-violence peace ideal.

00:28:54.380 Douglass very firmly believed in the right of self-defense and of taking up arms to defend yourself, and he would have agreed very much with Malcolm X in that regard.

00:29:02.420 On the other hand, he would have strongly disagreed with Malcolm's black nationalism.

00:29:06.180 He would have firmly disagreed with the idea that, you know, Plymouth Rock landed on us and this sort of thing.

00:29:12.300 Douglass would have said that this country is our country, too, and we have the right to defend it, including with physical violence when that proves necessary.

00:29:21.100 Right. Beautiful.

00:29:22.380 One last link between all of these great gentlemen, and then we can move on to maybe some contemporary political realities.

00:29:28.520 Thomas Sowell talks about, I hope I don't botch the story, but how when he moved to New York City, one of his uncles or some older mentor had taken him to the New York Public Library where he sort of was amazed, boy, there's this building with all of these books that I can just take out and read.

00:29:48.320 And, of course, that led to his at least cognitive emancipation, right?

00:29:53.000 He becomes in letters and he reads.

00:29:55.060 I mean, you told somewhat a similar story in terms of how Douglass, you know, learned to read.

00:30:01.760 And, of course, that leads him to these great heights.

00:30:05.540 How do we teach the black community in the United States that it's through knowledge, through education that we can all elevate ourselves?

00:30:15.840 And before I cede the floor to you, I often tell the story, and forgive me to those who have heard me mention it before.

00:30:22.840 So I'm Jewish.

00:30:24.280 We come from a history of, you know, putting a lot of effort on learning and so on.

00:30:29.660 When after my MBA, my mother had heard that one of my older brothers was trying to convince me to work with him in his company rather than immediately pursuing my PhD.

00:30:40.260 She takes me to the side, you know, with great worry and says, you know, do you want people to remember you as somebody who dropped out of school?

00:30:47.700 Because for her, having had a, you know, a bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science and an MBA and stopping at that point would bring great shame to the fact.

00:30:57.880 Right. And so, whereas, of course, what regrettably much of today's black culture has internalized is a sense of the exact opposite of that. 0.61

00:31:08.660 I'm a victim and so on.

00:31:11.040 How do we get them to appreciate what both Douglas and Sowell understood?

00:31:16.480 Learn, enrich your mind and you will be free.

00:31:19.040 Well, I think that's a hard question for me to answer.

00:31:22.760 Obviously, I don't live in the black culture myself.

00:31:25.340 And so I feel awkward trying to prescribe for people.

00:31:28.540 But I would say that I don't think that this is a lesson the black community is unaware of.

00:31:33.440 I just think that the black world, and this is true also, by the way, of many sections of the white world, is kind of torn between these two visions of what life should be like.

00:31:44.760 And you might you might label them loosely the optimistic and the pessimistic vision and the optimistic vision that says, you know, there is opportunity out there.

00:31:53.680 And if there's not, you can make it.

00:31:56.200 You can make those opportunities if you go out there and work hard enough and you can have success and vindication in life.

00:32:02.240 And then there's the nihilistic view, the negative view that says, you know, the game is rigged.

00:32:06.820 There's no hope and so forth.

00:32:08.180 And I think there's that tension within the black community.

00:32:10.920 And I do think it's unfortunate that it's since at least 1966, let's say, maybe 68, so much of I would put it this way.

00:32:20.100 So much of white attention has been devoted to the nihilistic sector of the black public community, of the black public opinion world. 0.98

00:32:29.920 So that when you look at a movie or a TV show that's supposedly about black life in America, it's very often it'll be made by white producers in Hollywood.

00:32:40.440 And they're trying to be authentic. 0.88

00:32:42.160 And in their minds, the authentic black world is the life of thuggery. 1.00

00:32:46.560 There was this movie that just came out about this just recently.

00:32:49.340 I can't think of the title of it now that it was nominated for an Oscar.

00:32:52.000 That's about this, about a black writer who finds that the only way that he can sell his novel is.

00:32:57.320 Oh, I saw it.

00:32:58.580 I saw it with my wife and children.

00:33:00.180 Yes.

00:33:00.400 It was a marvelous commentary on exactly this phenomenon that it's not necessarily that the black community has embraced the culture of thuggery, although there is too much of that, of course. 1.00

00:33:10.100 But that's also true in white communities.

00:33:11.580 But the real problem, I think, is that elite opinion in Hollywood and elsewhere thinks that the authentic black experience is over here on the on the on the misery end of the spectrum, on the hopelessness end of the spectrum.

00:33:25.260 And so I've always thought it ironic that they use the term woke for this attitude because it's not woke.

00:33:31.540 It's dreamlessness.

00:33:33.480 Right.

00:33:33.900 If you read Ta-Nehisi Coates, who is the ultimate anti-Frederick Douglas, Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has made his entire living off of total nihilism, nihilism to such a degree that he basically cheers on September 11th in his first book.

00:33:47.420 Right.

00:33:47.920 If you read Ta-Nehisi Coates gets the National Book Award, he gets treated like a great intellectual and so forth.

00:33:53.620 This is a perfect example of what I'm talking about.

00:33:55.880 He teaches dreamlessness.

00:33:57.840 The word dream is an epithet in his book.

00:34:00.320 It's a curse word in his book.

00:34:01.620 And, of course, when most people think of the word dream in America, they don't even think about the term American dream.

00:34:06.720 The first thing they think of is Martin Luther King.

00:34:08.660 Right.

00:34:09.180 So and he treats this with contempt and scorn.

00:34:12.280 And so he's dreamless and thinks he's awake.

00:34:16.680 But it's not the case.

00:34:18.060 In fact, he's in the worst kind of sleep, which is a dreamless sleep.

00:34:22.340 And he is a sleepwalker, essentially.

00:34:24.760 And there's a there's a poem by Vatchel Lindsay that touches on this where he says the world's worst crime is is not that the young die, but that they die so dreamlessly.

00:34:34.960 And that's what that's the world Coates wants.

00:34:38.000 Coates is and the anti Frederick Douglass woke 1619 crowd.

00:34:41.680 That's what they're aiming at is the dreamless life.

00:34:44.100 Whereas Douglass would have said America is consecrated to a dream.

00:34:49.080 America is three things.

00:34:50.520 It's the it's the physical environment, land, rocks, trees and rivers.

00:34:54.460 And it's the people, the physical human beings.

00:34:57.360 And then it's a third thing, which is the dream.

00:34:59.380 And every other nation in the world has those first two things already.

00:35:02.820 What makes America unique and separates it and makes it great is that third thing, the dream, which is what Coates and his ilk reject.

00:35:10.000 And what Douglass, I think, articulated greater than any other American, with the possible exception of Martin Luther King.

00:35:15.440 Wow.

00:35:15.740 What a what a muscular endorsement of America.

00:35:19.140 You should you should be going out on the political circuit.

00:35:22.480 Have you ever thought about going into politics?

00:35:24.960 I could never be elected to anything because I believe these ideas too strongly.

00:35:29.020 Well, I say almost something similar when people say, hey, why don't you run for a Canadian prime minister?

00:35:35.080 So I say, are you kidding me?

00:35:36.200 I wouldn't last one second.

00:35:37.400 I'm way too honest.

00:35:38.920 Right.

00:35:39.340 Like literally five minutes in politics.

00:35:42.220 I write.

00:35:42.960 You know, I would I would insult everybody.

00:35:44.940 I mean, it's not insult, but offend everybody and so on.

00:35:48.260 OK, let's let's link some of these things to what's going on.

00:35:52.480 Currently, what's your mood like, given the recent November 5th elections?

00:35:57.860 And we can take it from there and talk about other things.

00:36:00.080 I'm a little hesitant, but, you know, I think there's there is much good to be accomplished.

00:36:04.700 I'm not sure that it will be accomplished.

00:36:07.120 Why are you hesitant?

00:36:07.920 Because I'm afraid that the coming administration is not going to be as respectful of the Constitution as it ought to be, and that at best, what we can hope for is a system where everything gets bogged down in petty disputes.

00:36:23.040 I think the kinds of change that we need in the United States are important, drastic in some cases.

00:36:30.640 They're they're deep rooted.

00:36:32.000 And in order to accomplish that, what you need is a leadership that is devoted to ideas, that understands these ideas very thoroughly and is willing to stick to principle no matter what.

00:36:44.480 And I don't think that the that this or any other candidate offered that.

00:36:50.040 And so we'll see, you know, there were there was good that was accomplished last time around.

00:36:54.740 I think the appointment of Justice Gorsuch is a fine example of the good that can be accomplished.

00:37:00.740 And he's done a lot of good on the bench.

00:37:02.920 But I also think that when we talk about things like, you know, tariffs, which are taxes, just more taxation of the American working class to support the politically well entrenched, when you talk about that sort of thing, that's that's not what we need in this country.

00:37:17.300 And so, you know, we'll see.

00:37:18.800 It's I think it's going to be a lot of chaos, unfortunately.

00:37:21.820 And chaos is not what we need.

00:37:23.140 What we need is a dedicated leadership that understands free market ideas and individual rights and is willing to push for them.

00:37:28.540 Do you think that Doge might very quickly be able to cut a lot of the inefficient, useless fat that currently exists?

00:37:37.120 No, I think that they'll be able to identify a lot of inefficient and useless fat.

00:37:41.900 But really, the problem isn't so much. 0.93

00:37:44.540 Well, I guess it depends on how you define inefficient, useless fat. 0.88

00:37:47.220 I mean, we're talking about entire departments of the federal government that ought to be shut down.

00:37:51.400 You know, the Cato Institute just recently, I think last week, just published a list of suggestions for Doge to consider.

00:37:57.200 And that would be great to see those implemented.

00:37:59.200 I just I have maybe I'm too cynical, but I have little hope to see that we'll actually see those things implemented.

00:38:04.620 I think what we'll see is a report a report will get written and then things will get bogged down by special interests who pretend to be Republicans when they're actually Democrats and so forth and so on.

00:38:15.180 The usual sort of.

00:38:16.460 Yikes, that's cynical.

00:38:17.680 I was hoping that we could be floating on a cloud of positivity.

00:38:21.020 Well, and I want to be what I'm I don't mean to be cynical.

00:38:24.300 I mean, to be realistic.

00:38:25.080 What I'm very serious when I say that the changes that need to be made are changes that need to be made by people who understand the policy, the law, the Constitution, and aren't satisfied with just, you know, drinking liberal tears and all this sort of superficial nonsense that we've heard so much in the past decade or so.

00:38:43.860 We don't we are not going to accomplish people by any we're not going to accomplish good by alienating people and treating them badly.

00:38:50.480 That's what the other side does.

00:38:52.000 And for us to adopt the other side's tactics and say, well, they did it.

00:38:56.980 So it's OK for me.

00:38:57.920 That's first of all, it's a very childish thing to do.

00:39:00.140 And secondly, it's very counterproductive, because if you become the enemy while fighting the enemy, then you have not actually won.

00:39:06.720 All you.

00:39:07.060 In fact, then your enemy has won because the thing that gets implemented is the enemy's thing.

00:39:11.620 So if I if I if in order to defeat Democrats, I become a Democrat and then I get elected.

00:39:16.660 Well, now, guess what?

00:39:17.560 The Democrats been elected because that's what I've become.

00:39:19.660 Right.

00:39:20.100 So there's that's what I mean when I mean, we have to be realistic about this and we have to approach reform, understanding the policy and the challenges that that are presented to us.

00:39:31.680 But I don't I don't see a lot of that in the leadership that's so far been promised.

00:39:35.080 I've seen things like, you know, the the attorney general nominee and those sorts of things.

00:39:41.100 So we'll see.

00:39:42.240 Maybe maybe my the great thing about being pessimistic is that you get pleasantly surprised instead of being disappointed.

00:39:48.300 That's your expectations low and then feel good.

00:39:50.960 Right.

00:39:51.580 Yes, we know this from consumer behavior.

00:39:55.080 If Frederick Douglass, I'm going to come back to contemporary issues, but I want to link it back to to this beautiful.

00:40:00.160 And what I love about it, by the way, is you can get the gist of his life in a much less intimidating sized book.

00:40:07.880 Right.

00:40:08.640 And that was my goal.

00:40:09.740 I wanted to see if I could do Douglass in 100 pages, which I did not quite manage to do, but pretty close.

00:40:15.060 Of course, of course, any listener should should also definitely consult Douglass's own autobiographies.

00:40:21.260 He wrote three of them, actually, in his lifetime, and they are all just masterful.

00:40:25.200 Yes, beautiful.

00:40:25.740 So if he were to be nominated, I hope you appreciate this, to be nominated into the incoming administration's cabinet.

00:40:36.680 Maybe I'll start by giving my prediction where he would have been nominated and then you can either agree or disagree.

00:40:43.840 I think I got no disrespect to Senator Rubio.

00:40:48.460 I've got secretary of state written all over this guy.

00:40:51.000 What do you think?

00:40:52.100 Yeah.

00:40:52.480 You know, his.

00:40:53.160 Hey, his experience was foreign policy.

00:40:54.840 He was ambassador to Haiti.

00:40:56.180 So, you know, there's that.

00:40:57.940 Yeah, I think something like that or maybe attorney general.

00:41:00.960 You know, I think that would be a fantastic role for for a modern day Frederick Douglass to be attorney general.

00:41:08.200 You know, in fact, the closest modern figure, the closest figure in today's American politics to Frederick Douglass is probably Clarence Thomas, who has a large portrait of Douglass on the wall of his office.

00:41:20.400 It's at the U.S. Supreme Court building and has quoted Douglass more than any other justice in American history.

00:41:25.280 So I you know, that would be great to see a Frederick, another Frederick Douglass on the U.S. Supreme Court.

00:41:31.240 Oh, wow.

00:41:31.660 That's cool.

00:41:33.000 All right.

00:41:33.560 But are there any other things in terms of contemporary issues that are keeping you up at night?

00:41:38.000 I mean, I'm sure many, many.

00:41:39.200 And then we can maybe delve into some personal issues.

00:41:42.060 What makes Timothy tick in the morning and so on and so forth.

00:41:45.280 But maybe we could start with what are some what are some of the give me the top two, three things that are keeping you up at night?

00:41:52.360 Well, at the Goldwater Institute, what we do is primarily we focus on state level issues.

00:41:57.820 We were particularly focused on state constitutions.

00:42:00.440 A lot of people look at the U.S. Constitution, but they forget about state constitutions, which often contain better protections for individual rights than does the federal constitution.

00:42:10.340 And so we litigate issues involving things like government subsidies to private businesses, which are actually illegal in most states.

00:42:17.840 And yet people don't realize this.

00:42:19.920 And so we litigate a lot of cases involving this, what's called the gift clause, which are clauses of state constitutions that forbid the government from giving away things.

00:42:28.540 And so we litigate a lot of issues, a lot of cases involving that.

00:42:31.580 We're doing cases in Arizona, Texas, New Jersey, across the country on that issue.

00:42:37.060 Parental rights is a particular focus of the institute, protecting the rights of parents to be in charge of their children's upbringing and education and not government bureaucrats,

00:42:46.100 who for many years have often claimed that they know better than parents and can even keep information secret from parents about what's going on in the public schools.

00:42:55.720 We're litigating cases in the Third Circuit Court of Appeals about that in the courts all across the country.

00:43:02.440 And then economic liberty is another issue that I particularly consider important.

00:43:07.120 I think economic freedom, the right to earn a living, is as crucial a right as your right to free speech, private property rights, freedom of religion.

00:43:16.500 And or certainly it's more important to most people than the right to vote.

00:43:20.940 If you think about how few people actually vote and yet everybody thinks of the right to earn a living, to get a job or to start your own business as a crucial element of the American dream.

00:43:31.400 And so a lot of our energies at the institute are devoted to protecting that.

00:43:34.900 And that's a lot of what I work on, too.

00:43:36.900 Well, I'm glad you mentioned this, the third one last, because it segues into arguably the most painful existential reality that I ever faced a few years ago.

00:43:47.980 Wow, that's a terrible buildup. Now I feel sorry for you. What happened?

00:43:51.960 Well, thank you for your empathy.

00:43:53.660 So this book right here, The Parasitic Mind, which is, you know, went on to be a huge success because I am I reside in Canada, but the publisher is in the U.S.

00:44:05.940 I got all the royalties tax free because my U.S. publisher wouldn't tax me because I'm not a resident or citizen of the U.S.

00:44:14.720 But Canada, under its world income provision, right, I mean, I could move to Mars on one of Elon's ships and if I make money on Mars, that money is largely Canada's, right?

00:44:29.400 And so I had this money that was sitting in my bank account for many months and then came tax season, right?

00:44:37.500 And now I want you to imagine this, Timothy, there is literally in my personal bank account at the time I've since incorporated, there's the Quebec government and the Canadian government.

00:44:50.340 And I just hit a send button and this very large number, which would have secured my retirement.

00:44:58.700 Now, I want to put it in perspective.

00:45:01.180 And here I'm usually a very smiley guy, but I'm going to keep it together.

00:45:05.260 It would take me, in terms of the savings that I make from my salary as a professor, well over 10 more years of working as a professor, given the number that I hit and it went send and all that money disappeared.

00:45:26.760 It just went, okay?

00:45:27.860 Now, for about, I mean, literally for a week or two, I was unrecognizable.

00:45:35.020 My children were worried because I just couldn't make sense of a reality where already on my professorial salary, you're taxing me well over 50%.

00:45:45.840 Then I went and tried to do something.

00:45:48.680 Now, there is something unique about taxing book royalties.

00:45:53.040 Any taxation is problematic, certainly to that kind of punitive level.

00:45:57.160 But when it's your words, when it's your thoughts, when it's me writing about my experience in Lebanon and the fruits of that initiative,

00:46:08.480 the government gets to keep more of it than I do, by the way, it came out to about 58%.

00:46:16.000 The highest rate that you get taxed in the Quebec and federal governments are 25% and 33% respectively.

00:46:25.920 So when you add up my income tax, my property tax, now we have two layers of sales tax, which amount to about 15%.

00:46:37.360 So after you've taxed me at nearly 60%, what's left with me, if I go out and spend, you take 15% of that.

00:46:47.160 When you add up all the taxes, I'm lucky if I'm left with about 30 cents to the dollar.

00:46:53.440 So that at the end, when I'm looking at the final statement, Timothy, and I say, my God, I'm this well-known professor with this massive international bestseller.

00:47:04.080 Where is my money?

00:47:05.260 How come I have, because people say, how come you don't leave the United Canada?

00:47:09.900 Why don't you move to the US?

00:47:11.220 You're this famous professor, blah, blah, blah.

00:47:13.220 Because my bank account doesn't conform with that reality that you think I should have garnered.

00:47:20.260 So could there ever be a world, Timothy, where this insane criminal enterprise is reversed, where I am made whole again,

00:47:30.680 or are we doomed to be parasitically taxed forevermore?

00:47:34.760 Could there be such a world?

00:47:35.940 Yes, but not in California.

00:47:40.340 You're describing all this stuff.

00:47:41.660 It sounds like my former home state of California, the way you describe it.

00:47:45.300 Yeah.

00:47:45.460 Well, of course, of course, a better world is possible, not just in this, but in many other ways.

00:47:51.000 Ideas got us into this mess, and ideas can get us out of this mess.

00:47:54.480 But it takes the will to respect those who earn the wealth that others redistribute.

00:48:02.780 And one of the crippling problems we have in our culture today is the lack of respect for the hard work and individual enterprise that go into creating wealth,

00:48:14.880 and the right in that wealth that that creates, not just under the doctrines of socialism, obviously,

00:48:21.400 but under its other cousins, ideological cousins like wokeness included, that say that what you are basically belongs to the state, right?

00:48:34.700 You didn't build that philosophy that says that because the government builds a road and you drive on that road,

00:48:41.260 therefore you owe your life's earnings to the government.

00:48:44.100 That attitude has become very pervasive in our society, and it ultimately boils down to,

00:48:49.360 you mentioned how it feels to have your own words taxed.

00:48:52.160 I mean, this is, in a philosophical sense, this is saying that your mind belongs to the state.

00:48:56.960 Yes.

00:48:57.840 And therefore, the product of your mind and the product of your labors belongs to the state,

00:49:01.880 so that what you earned for your own retirement gets taken and paid half for the retirement of a bunch of bureaucrats

00:49:07.800 and then half into the pot for the retirement of people who didn't earn it.

00:49:11.400 It's a disgrace.

00:49:12.900 It's unbelievable.

00:49:13.780 And I mean, what, I think what, I mean, I try to think of what are some psychological,

00:49:18.460 if not, as you said, ideas are either good or bad, but what are the impediments to very quickly reversing this?

00:49:26.000 And so here's my, I think, profound and very simple explanation.

00:49:32.240 It's a, look, socialism is a Ponzi scheme.

00:49:34.980 It's the ultimate Ponzi scheme, right?

00:49:36.620 Now, if 95% of the people have a net benefit from keeping the Ponzi scheme alive,

00:49:45.480 because the other 5% of suckers are the ones that you take all the money from to redistribute.

00:49:51.880 So, for example, if I post, look, does it make sense that I'm left with very little money having written this book? 0.98

00:49:58.000 And people say, you're such a whiner.

00:50:00.040 You're so entitled. 0.89

00:50:01.500 You're a famous professor.

00:50:03.400 You know, why don't you put into the system?

00:50:05.380 Well, yeah, obviously, because you're taking my money and it's going to you, right?

00:50:09.840 So how could you ever have a movement that reverses this when the great majority of people

00:50:16.960 who would be the shapers of changing that movement have no benefit in changing it? 0.63

00:50:22.680 Yeah.

00:50:23.100 Well, you know, yes, you know what?

00:50:25.180 You are entitled to the earnings of your own labor.

00:50:28.420 Yes, you are entitled to those earnings.

00:50:29.960 Absolutely.

00:50:30.280 You know, I think now I don't pretend to be a psychologist, but my own theory is that the root psychological cause of this is the sense of personal worthlessness

00:50:41.320 that is a part and parcel of the philosophy of altruism, which teaches people that they live for the sake of others, that the moral justification for your existence is what you do for other people, which is a lie and has been perpetuated by those in power seeking to retain power for eons.

00:51:01.120 Because by teaching you that you belong to the state, not just not just in a physical sense or that your earnings belong to the state, but that you are morally worthless if you stand up for your right to exist for your own happiness.

00:51:13.580 I mean, the reason for why America speaks of the pursuit of happiness, right, the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, whereas in Canada, you have peace, order and good government, right?

00:51:23.820 Those are psychologically worlds apart from each other.

00:51:27.760 And America was fundamentally based on the principle that I have a right to pursue my own happiness, which, of course, brings us back to Douglas, because this is what Douglas means when he says he who would be free must himself strike the blow.

00:51:39.240 What he means is you have the right to live for your own sake. You do not belong to other people, not just in a political sense, but in a moral sense, you that the philosophy of altruism and the sense of self-worthlessness that it inculcates is false and is basically invisible shackles on you.

00:51:57.280 And actually, to bring this back to Douglas, by the way, I mentioned at the very beginning that Douglas loved photography.

00:52:04.680 One of the most interesting things Douglas ever did was he delivered a series of lectures on the philosophy of picture making, which I think are the most interesting, certainly among the most interesting things he ever wrote.

00:52:17.520 And his idea was basically what you and I might call a romanticist notion.

00:52:23.280 What he said was human beings are unique because we envision, we create a vision of the self we want to be, and then we try to embody those values.

00:52:33.880 There was a philosopher, Iris Murdoch, who said man is a being who creates a picture and then tries to be like the picture.

00:52:40.480 And that's exactly what Douglas thought. And so that's why he loved great heroic stories like Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas.

00:52:48.920 Those were his favorite writers because he said he had this heroic vision of what it means to be a human being, as opposed to the nihilistic vision we were talking about earlier that sees man as helpless and as a figure, basically a puppet of circumstances.

00:53:05.160 And that the only way we can seek salvation is to enslave ourselves for the benefit of our fellow slaves and that I owe my life to satisfying other people and so forth and so on.

00:53:17.080 Douglas had a very different vision of the world. He said life is full of joy and possibility and opportunity if you will embrace it.

00:53:24.900 And the first step toward doing that is saying I exist for my own sake, for the pursuit of my own happiness, and I have a right to do so.

00:53:32.820 And nobody has the right to take that away from me, whether it be in the form of deducting money from your bank account or in Douglas's case, actually shackling you with with iron chains.

00:53:43.460 Well, two points to follow up. Number one, did you know that Thomas Sowell is a big photographer as well?

00:53:51.320 Did you know that? Excellent. No, I didn't. That's one of the things.

00:53:54.080 That was Barry Goldwater. Is that right? Wow.

00:53:56.800 He was a Barry Goldwater.

00:53:58.440 I claim to have a big love of photography in that, in the abstract sense, I really love the idea.

00:54:04.640 We used to play a game in my family when the kids were very young, where we would each have, you know, a few minutes to take one photo of anything in the house.

00:54:16.380 And then those four photos, so we have two children, my wife and I, we would send them to an impartial arbiter who was usually my wife's parents.

00:54:26.000 And then without them knowing who it was, they'd have to judge which was the aesthetically more beautiful.

00:54:30.780 That's great.

00:54:31.800 That was really fun.

00:54:33.080 And so I can really appreciate, you know, the idea of sort of finding a moment and freezing it.

00:54:39.120 I, although I haven't really practiced much photography, the second point I was going to make is that, and this kind of segues into my next book.

00:54:46.340 My next book is titled Suicidal Empathy.

00:54:48.460 The idea being that empathy, as long as it is targeted to the right people and in right measure, makes perfect evolutionary sense.

00:54:58.500 So here I'm going to bring in my evolutionary psychology perspective.

00:55:01.180 So it's not as though, you know, we are not empathetic creatures, but we are not orgiastically and indiscriminately empathetic towards all.

00:55:11.300 It makes perfect evolutionary sense for me to be more than willing to jump in front of a moving bus to save my children than I am to save a random stranger.

00:55:20.080 That doesn't make me a callous, selfish individual.

00:55:23.100 It makes me a Darwinian sentient being.

00:55:25.440 And so in a sense, what parasitic taxation and the social welfare state and so on do, they are anti-human nature because you and I and everybody else walking on earth, short of those who benefit from the parasitic taxation, have not evolved to say, you know what, let me go out and write these great books so that it could benefit random strangers.

00:55:46.700 I mean, not in terms of the ideas, but in terms of the rewards, the pecuniary rewards that come with me selling those books.

00:55:53.960 So I could not agree more.

00:55:56.840 You're absolutely right.

00:55:57.680 And what really is probably the the the cap on the the moral offense of those who say otherwise is that they label their doctrine of self-sacrifice love.

00:56:09.440 And they say, well, you need to love your fellow man more because you're so greedy and selfish.

00:56:14.300 And this is a doctrine of mutual enslavement that's being taught to us under the under the name love.

00:56:19.400 Just imagine what it would be like to actually love a person in the way that they're speaking of to say to to your girlfriend, you're going to propose to her.

00:56:29.000 You say, well, well, dear, I would I'm going to propose that we get married, not out of any selfish desire on my part, not because it makes me happy as a greedy, selfish person.

00:56:38.880 But for your sake, for the sake of for you, as a as an act of charity, because I love you in this selfless sense, it's a sacrifice to me to be married to you.

00:56:49.420 But here's what a good person I am that I'm going to do it anyway.

00:56:52.860 Imagine somebody saying that. Right.

00:56:54.420 And yet very romantic.

00:56:56.240 That's their image of what it means to be a human being.

00:56:59.320 I find that just repulsive.

00:57:01.140 All right. Last question, because I'm looking at the time.

00:57:03.500 We're almost at the one hour mark, but this boy has this flown.

00:57:06.920 We'll love to have you back.

00:57:08.940 You were mentioning the pursuit of happiness as being enshrined within the American ethos.

00:57:14.740 My latest book, my previous book was called The Sad Truth About Happiness, where I tried.

00:57:21.080 I had the goal to actually write a book about happiness when people since Epictetus and Seneca and Aristotle have been writing about happiness.

00:57:29.300 Hopefully I had something insightful to say.

00:57:31.320 What is it when Timothy Sandefur wakes up in the morning?

00:57:38.640 What is it that makes him happy as he looks over the looming horizon of that day, of that week, of that year?

00:57:45.720 I am I am incredibly fortunate.

00:57:48.060 I'm one of the great good fortunes of my life is that not only do I get to do something that I love for a living and that I care deeply about and that, you know,

00:57:58.060 I love the history and the law and the philosophy of freedom, and that's what I get to do for a living.

00:58:02.460 But I'm also incredibly fortunate that I have a wife who shares that with me.

00:58:06.900 In fact, she works alongside me here at the Institute.

00:58:09.520 Actually, technically, she's my boss, believe it or not, both at home and at work.

00:58:14.220 But she shares that vision with me.

00:58:16.540 And so I have that is a huge benefit, a huge blessing in life to not only have a career that you love and care about, but have a partner who cares and loves that cares about and loves that thing also.

00:58:29.400 So I count my blessings every day.

00:58:32.060 And the secret of the secret to happiness, the true secret to happiness is gratitude.

00:58:37.860 And so I try to practice that every day and be grateful for the great things that I have in my life.

00:58:42.360 Well, it's funny.

00:58:43.020 Your answer is actually one of the chapters in my happiness book, because I talk about the two decisions that you'll make in your life that are most likely to either impart great happiness or great misery,

00:58:54.880 depending on whether you make the right or wrong choice, is choice of spouse and choice of profession.

00:59:01.040 And that's right.

00:59:01.780 That's what you led with in terms of your answer.

00:59:04.220 Hey, Timothy, what a joy it is to have met you.

00:59:07.040 Thank you so much for coming on.

00:59:08.220 People, go out and get this book, Frederick Douglass, Self-Made Man.

00:59:13.980 Stay on the line so we can say goodbye offline.

00:59:16.200 And we'll do an invitation to come back anytime.

00:59:18.640 Thank you.

00:59:19.520 Cheers.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - December 17, 2024

Who Was Frederick Douglass？ My Chat with Author & Lawyer Timothy Sandefur (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_770)

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