All Episodes
Previous Next
Dec. 10, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
52:59
THE IDEOLOGUE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep977
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Thank you.
behind the assassin who killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
I also want to talk about the aftermath of the Daniel Penny case.
Scott Horton, he's director of the Libertarian Institute, joins me.
We're going to talk about Russia, Syria, and Ukraine.
Hey, if you're watching on YouTube or Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
I want to talk about a couple of things in this opening segment.
I'll begin with a very, I gotta say, tongue-in-cheek and amusing post from Trump.
It has to do with Justin Trudeau.
And you'll notice that Trump refers to, quote, the great state of Canada.
And when I first saw this, I didn't quite get it.
I thought Trump was being complimentary and praising the great state of Canada.
But that's not actually what Trump is saying.
Here we go.
It was a pleasure to have dinner the other night Governor Justin Trudeau of the great state of Canada.
So then I get it.
Trump is trolling Trudeau and implying that Trudeau is part of a state that is now part of America, the great state of Canada.
Trudeau is the governor of that state.
And while I'm chuckling over this, I'm also thinking, though, about the way in which Trump so successfully forced Trudeau to do things that Trudeau has not done in all these years.
Trump basically does it with a single stroke.
I'm going to put 25% tariffs on all Canadian goods.
Right away, Trudeau gets on a plane.
Boom, he's at Mar-a-Lago.
Essentially, he's there to, quote, negotiate with Trump.
But it's not much of a negotiation because Trump makes it clear, number one, you've got to go back to your country if you don't want these tariffs.
You need to seal the border.
So it's something that Trudeau, by the way, should have been doing in the first place.
He absolutely refuses to do.
He's been criticized by Pierre Poliv and the Conservative Party.
But, of course, Trudeau had managed to eke out a majority.
So he doesn't really care about his domestic opposition, but he does care about Trump.
And so in a single kind of masterstroke, Trump...
Essentially, not only gets his will achieved, but gets Trudeau to do something that is good also for his own country, which is by sealing the border.
Think about it.
Sealing the border of Canada not only prevents Canadians from coming into the United States, but it also prevents others from coming into Canada.
Canada too has been porous, if you will, to all kinds of unwelcome outsiders.
Let me turn to this very strange episode of this guy Luigi Mangione, the fellow who has been arrested and charged with murder in connection with the United Healthcare CEO. It's worth noting that this guy Mangione, and by the way, Debbie, just looking at his photo, goes, I think this guy's Italian.
I don't know if she got that from the shape of his face or from his unibrow.
He kind of has these fuzzy eyebrows that are a little bit of an Italian giveaway, and he has the lean Italian face.
Of course, it didn't help that when he shot the other guy, he said, ciao.
No, no, he didn't do that.
That was my little obit or dictum or my little addition just for humorous effect.
Before the name.
But Debbie did call it that the guy's Italian and sure enough he's as Italian as they come.
And in fact, somebody else made the rather sardonic remark that, you know...
Count an Italian to show his face by trying to flirt with a clerk.
And, you know, he pulls off his mask and there he goes.
He's on surveillance.
That's how people know what he looks like.
That's how the guy at McDonald's in Altoona, Pennsylvania, recognized him.
Apparently someone just goes, hey, that guy looks a lot like the, wait a minute, I think it is the same fellow that I've seen on TV. And now this guy, Luigi Mangione, went to an Ivy League school, University of Pennsylvania.
And initially I thought, you know, we better look at, did he take some healthcare classes?
I wonder if his professors are left-wing fanatics.
But when you scroll through his feed, and he has a Twitter feed, I don't know if it's been taken down or not, but we were looked at it before that happened.
I don't think it is down.
But in any event, If you go through it, you can see that ideologically, he's a very mixed bag.
It's very difficult to pin him down.
One thing we do know is he comes from a rich family.
His grandfather was a real estate developer who owned country clubs and a radio station.
Interestingly, his family business, through his dad and his mom, Includes nursing homes.
So isn't that interesting?
He is, this family, the Mangione family, is in the healthcare industry themselves.
And his mom was on the board of the medical, was a supporter of the medical center in Baltimore.
She was on the Baltimore Opera, the Walters Art Museum.
So On the one hand, there's all this railing about, oh yeah, these healthcare CEOs make off like bandits, and so they're the rich.
Well, this guy comes from a rich family.
This is not the case of some guy who was desperately poor, trying to get some kind of urgently needed treatment for himself or his family, was somehow denied, and then in a rage.
That may be the stereotype in AOC's head, but that is not really what the facts are in this situation.
Now, we do know that this guy hates the healthcare industry.
It's not clear why.
I've seen some reports.
He has back injuries and he's had some back surgeries, so whether he considers Those having gone wrong, who knows?
And quite honestly, it's at some level, who cares?
And I say this because, okay, I had a back surgery, so what?
I'm gonna go find the insurance company CEO and gun him down on the street?
I mean, there's no real connection there at all.
What we do know is that this is a guy who said quite clearly that these people had it coming And moreover, I'm looking at a review that he did on Goodreads of the Unabomber's book.
And in the review, Luigi Mangione writes this.
He goes, when all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive.
Now, he's summarizing the Unabomber, but he's summarizing it in agreement, positively.
Like, this is what the guy's saying, and yep, he's right.
To go on, why should we have any qualms about burning them down to survive?
And he says, violence never solved anything is a statement uttered by cowards and predators.
So this is a guy who has been one way or the other.
Whether it's through the education system, whether it's through his experience, whether his surgery rendered him angry and desperate.
But nevertheless, he is an ideologue.
There's no question about it.
And while the source or the roots of his hatred of the healthcare system may not be clear, what is clear is that this is a guy that he targeted.
Debbie was like, I wonder if he just waited for the first guy to come across the street going to that conference.
No, because that guy could have been an accountant.
He could have been anything.
I think he knew the identity of this guy, probably knew exactly what he looked like.
He took a lot of steps to plan this thing out.
At some level, he was the kind of intelligent guy you'd expect him to be, valedictorian at his school and going to a very good college and coming from a well-established family.
But on the other hand, he was also extremely stupid in other things that he did.
So as a result, at least in today's day and age, with surveillance, with technology, with geotracking, it was not exactly difficult to track him down, and eventually he was tracked down.
As I mentioned yesterday, the roots of this healthcare problem go really back to Obamacare.
And so there is some legitimate grievance against the healthcare system, and there's some legitimate grievance against healthcare CEOs.
Why?
Because they made a Faustian bargain with Obama.
But I just want to stress that this Faustian bargain was not made at the behest of the healthcare companies.
They didn't go to Obama and said, hey, help us to force everybody to buy health insurance.
Obama went to them.
He was the propositioner, if you will.
He was like, I want to get Obamacare passed.
To do this, I need the support of the healthcare CEOs.
Let me go and show them why it is in their interest to let me pass this law that makes it mandatory for all Americans to have insurance and why this will bring a bonanza of profits to them.
Obama, in the end, is the original culprit.
There is a silent health threat that affects one in three Americans.
What is it?
It's an overworked liver.
It affects your weight, energy levels, clear thinking, and sleep.
Our livers are getting bombed every day with GMOs, sugars, toxins, fluoride, many other things if you feel a little sluggish drained can't seem to get rid of those extra pounds i would recommend trying liver health formula and seeing its benefits for yourself it's a premium supplement with eleven Clinically proven botanicals to support and detoxify your liver, helping you feel revitalized.
Here's what Stephanie has to say.
I found out I had liver issues.
I researched and started taking liver health formula.
Six months later, my doctor was amazed.
I lost 20 pounds.
My liver is healthier and I cut sugar and carbs.
Of course, results may vary.
You can try Liver Health Formula and receive a free one-month supply of omega-3s.
How do you do it?
Go to getliverhelp.com slash Dinesh and claim your free bonus gift.
That's getliverhelp.com slash Dinesh.
Here's the deal.
Open an IRA in gold with Birch Gold and get free silver shipped directly to your home.
That's right.
It's the most wonderful time of the year.
The only time of the year that Birch Gold gives away a free one-ounce Silver Eagle for every $5,000 purchased.
And here's the best part.
You don't have to pay a penny out of pocket.
Simply convert an existing IRA or 401k into a tax-sheltered IRA in physical gold and Birch Gold will send you your free silver coins Directly to your home.
Now, you might be thinking, why do I need to diversify into gold?
My guy's headed to DC. Things are looking good.
Well, here are the facts.
We have an administration that is trying to reverse a $36 trillion national debt in just four years.
That's like a field mouse trying to stop a freight train.
We have a huge amount to pay just as interest on the debt, let alone the principal, Take action to protect your savings now.
Text Dinesh to 989898 before December 18th for a free information kit on gold and to claim your eligibility for free silver on qualifying purchases from Birch Gold.
Do this before December 18th.
Again, text Dinesh to the number 989898 for peace of mind.
It lasts a lot longer than four years.
The headline in the New York Times reads as follows.
This is in connection with Daniel Penny.
And it kind of has to be seen to be believed.
I'm going to hold it up here if you can take a look at it.
Because it's just so typical and yet so offensive.
I'm going to read the headline.
Jury acquits man who was choking Ryder on Subway.
So, this is their description of what happened.
According to them, Jordan Neely was, quote, a rider on the subway.
And he was gratuitously, it seems, choked.
And then the jury let him off.
This is what you would get if you were to just read this headline.
Knowing nothing about the situation or the circumstances.
So this is...
And by the way, the AP headline was very similar.
So these news outlets just can't help themselves.
They are...
In today's day and age, where there's a lot of sources of information and people know what's going on, perhaps in the old days they would do this kind of stuff and you wouldn't even know better because you would be, well, I read it in the New York Times.
It's all the news that's fit to print.
But now this stuff is...
People know enough that they weren't born yesterday and they have other sources of news.
So right away, the preposterousness of this becomes apparent.
Now, the New York Times and AP are, of course, echoing.
They're echoing the propaganda of the left.
They're coming from the left, and so no surprise.
Here's AOC. Jordan Neely was murdered.
Well, Jordan was houseless and crying for food.
He was not crying for food.
And this whole idea that he was houseless, this is AOC avoiding the term homeless, he's houseless.
Apparently that's the new preferred term.
And this really gets me to the, well, first of all, on the case itself, Jordan Neely This is a post on X. Jordan Neely deserved better than the violence of being denied access to stable housing and health care and then dehumanized for it.
Well, here's the community note.
He punched a 67-year-old woman in the street in 2021. He was given free access to stable housing and health care at a treatment facility in the Bronx.
He abandoned the facility after 13 days.
So, in this particular case, quite clearly, this kind of effort to sanitize Jordan Neely, make him the victim, this is really what's going on, isn't it?
The effort here is to, which is what the left does all the time, there's a hero here and there's a criminal.
The hero is actually Penny.
The criminal is Neely with a rap sheet, right?
But the left always wants to make a swap.
Let's make Penny into the criminal, charge him, prosecute him.
That was Alvin Bragg's idea and also the idea of Daphna Yoran, the prosecutor.
And then let's take the criminal and make him a hero.
He's a needy man.
He was crying out for food.
So, the jury didn't buy it, and I don't think anyone else is buying it.
In fact, what is being exposed here is the left's classic schema and how it distorts reality.
Now, the San Francisco Chronicle did a series some time ago on the homeless.
And they pointed out that housing is made available to the homeless.
And when you give them housing, this is what happens.
First of all, the housing is immediately drenched in extreme squalor.
People start urinating on the floor, doing all kinds of stuff on the walls.
The homeless begin to get into fights with each other.
They stab each other.
They smash each other's eyes.
They die of drug overdoses.
They're often evicted.
If you have even the most basic rules, those rules are not followed and these guys get evicted.
And then finally, no surprise, they threaten and abuse staff.
So this is the sorry experience of these homeless shelters.
And it's because these people aren't homeless in the kind of romantic sense of the term.
This is not Charles Dickens, after all, where, oh, you know, I'm homeless.
I'm searching for a home.
I just don't have a home.
No.
Many of these people have gotten into a kind of desperate and violent cycle of drugs and alcohol and addiction and threats and petty crime and sometimes serious crime.
And all of this feeds into each other.
But you have to realize at some point they cut themselves off from society and it's very difficult to help them.
They are essentially a menace to society.
And there are these guys.
Everyone sees them.
Most of us try to kind of keep our distance.
It's not that we don't want to help.
There is no easy way to help.
All these governmental solutions don't seem to have really helped.
And moreover, the people who proclaim that they are devoted to the homeless turn out to live in a kind of la-la land.
They don't ride the subway.
Do you think that Alvin Bragg rides the subway?
Do you think Daphna Uran rides the subway?
No.
They have this sort of proletarian conception of Jordan Neely is the victim.
He is the proletariat.
Daniel Penny is the kind of evil white man.
And so this is the cartoon way in which they see the world.
It is out of sync with reality.
And I'm very happy that the jury, apparently a jury that was predominantly made up of women, There were several blacks and persons of color, as they say, on the jury.
And this multiracial, female-dominated jury said that Daniel Penny was innocent and free to go.
Are you feeling overwhelmed by the increasing cost of health insurance?
Have you had enough of not having control over your healthcare dollars?
Introducing ShareRight.
It's healthcare done the right way.
At ShareRight, you're not just a number.
You're part of a caring community.
Forget about paying excessive premiums.
With ShareRight, you stand to save 30% to 50% compared to health insurance.
Think about what you could do with all those savings.
But it's more than just savings.
ShareRight ensures you have access to the care you deserve precisely when you need it, from routine checkups to unexpected.
With ShareRite, your healthcare is their top priority.
Empower yourself today by taking control of your healthcare costs.
Visit ShareRite.org to learn more and see how much you can save.
Visit ShareRite.org for healthcare done the right way.
MyPillow is excited to announce the MyPillow Christmas Extravaganza is finally here.
These are practical presents that you can give everyone, friends and family.
Get the season's flannel sheets for as low as $59.98.
They won't last long.
Get them while you can.
The famous MySlippers, these haven't been on sale for over a year.
They're regularly priced $19.98 for a limited time now.
Just $59.98.
The six-piece towel sets back in stock, limited quantities, just $29.98.
With hundreds of MyPillow products, there's something for everyone on your Christmas list from bathrobes, duvets, quilts, down comforters, and so much more.
The number to call is 800-876-0227.
Again, it's 800-876-0227.
Or go to MyPillow.com.
Make sure to use promo code Dinesh.
You'll save on all the MyPillow products.
Flannel sheets as low as $59.98.
Six-piece towel sets just $29.98.
And that's not all.
They're extending their 60-day money-back guarantee until March 1st, 2025. Plus, all orders $75 or more ship absolutely free.
Guys, I'm happy to welcome a new guest to the podcast.
His name is Scott Horton.
He is the...
Institute.
He's also editorial director of antiwar.com.
He podcasts on The Scott Horton Show, which you can check out at scottthorton.org.
His new book, Provoked, How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine.
It's available on Amazon.
By the way, you can follow him on x at scotthortonshow.
Scott, welcome.
Thanks for joining me.
I'm delighted to have you on.
I wanted to have you throw some light on Russia, Ukraine, but also Syria.
Let's begin, if we can, sort of at the beginning because to kind of hear the conventional narrative, this all started when this gangster Vladimir Putin decided to invade Ukraine.
The United States and the European allies rushed to the defense of Ukraine.
We are fighting a necessary and defensive war and this justifies the commitment of substantial resources to Teach Putin a lesson.
Teach other aggressors a lesson.
This is, loosely speaking, not just the neocon, but I would say largely the Democratic, the Biden-Harris account of this conflict.
But you show in your book that there is a lot more to this story.
So tell us how this all got started.
Okay, well, first of all, thank you so much for having me.
I'm very happy to be here with you.
The story is a long one.
The book is about 475,000 words, a little more, complete with about 8,000 citations to show my work throughout the book.
And I basically take you through all the way since the end of the last Cold War.
And beginning with H.W. Bush and through Bill Clinton.
And I am experimenting with different ways of trying to tell this long story short, Dinesh.
I guess, you know, the thing to say would be, throughout the administrations, since H.W. Bush, In violation, yes, and I know this is disputed, but I'm right and the others are wrong.
In violation of solemn promises, they expanded the NATO alliance.
They fought the Balkan Wars against the Russians' allies, the Serbs.
They instituted shock therapy economic policy that truly crippled, horribly crippled Russia in the 1990s when they should have been befriending them.
And then...
Then W. Bush came in.
He tore up the anti-ballistic missile treaty and in effect also tore up the START-2 treaty, which would have banned multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles.
We have multiple warheads from one rocket.
Those would have been outlawed by START-2.
And Bush Jr. sacrificed all that for this harebrained missile defense scheme, which...
In a way poses a potential threat, and this is a complicated thing, but they call it missile defense, and they have what's called Aegis Onshore.
That's like our best missile defense and radar systems on our Navy ships, right?
They call it Aegis Onshore, and it's Sparrow, missile defense, anti-ballistic missile missiles, right?
However...
They're fired from the Mark 41 missile launcher, the MK 41 missile launcher, which can also host Tomahawk cruise missiles.
And so when we install these missile stations in Romania and Poland, without any kind of verification and inspection regime in place, it represented at least a breaking of the spirit of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, Reagan's great achievement from 87, that kept short and medium range missiles out of Europe.
And which Trump ended up tearing up in his last year in office.
But then, Bush also did what are called the color-coded revolutions.
Now, Clinton actually started this in Serbia, but Bush was the worst defender, W that is, in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan in 2003, 4, and 5. And the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, importantly.
And then he also, in his last year in office, despite the advice of the ambassador to Russia, the entire embassy in Moscow, the National Security Council staff in the White House, according to Fiona Hill, who was the head of the staff there and bragged about her warnings later that she had predicted the terrible consequences.
And, oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mention, the former ambassador to Moscow was William Burns, the current CIA director.
He was W. Bush's ambassador to Moscow.
And he warned Condoleezza Rice, and apparently he wrote in his memoir that he thought that she agreed with him.
And we know for a fact that Secretary of Defense Gates agreed with him because he slammed Bush in his memoir for this.
And that is the sort of half promise, and not a full membership action plan, but a promise that someday we will, in fact, bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. This is known as the Bucharest Declaration.
And so the entire, never mind the foreign policy establishment, the entire Bush administration was against it, except for Bush and Cheney themselves.
And I guess, you know, Newland in Cheney's office, possibly.
And, well, I'm not sure where she was at that time.
Well, Scott, let me dive in here to ask you...
- Okay, go ahead, go ahead. - No, no, just a question to set a context here because psychologically this is a little bit puzzling to me.
You know, as you know, the United States went ferociously to war with Japan and Germany in World War II, leveled those two countries, and then almost instinctively at the end of the war began a process of not only helping to rebuild those countries, and then almost instinctively at the end of the war began a process of And of course, Japan and Germany have been allies ever since.
Why is it the case that after the Cold War, a war that was, you know, one, quote, without firing a shot, to quote Margaret Thatcher...
Why would the United States, in this peculiar way that you're describing, you're giving kind of the details of it, but why did the United States take a completely different approach to Russia than it had taken to two earlier adversaries that were in many ways far more destructive?
That's such a great question, and I talk about that in the book as well.
And what you're talking about, the way America treated Germany and Japan after the Second World War, I was raised on this when I was a kid.
You know, my grandfather was in the Second World War, like a lot of people.
And, you know, this is the history of the thinking at the time was they completely humiliated and blockaded and brutalized Germany after the First World War.
And You know, normally they would never admit to blowback from their terrible foreign policy consequences, except in this case, they can blame it on the Senate for not joining the League of Nations.
That's the narrative.
That if only America joined the League of Nations, then it would have been more fair and then Germany would have been kept down and that would have prevented the Nazis.
So that's the part of the story.
They allow the first part of the story, that it was the punitive nature of the victory of World War I. That set up the backlash in Germany and helped lead to the rise of the Nazi party and Adolf Hitler.
They'll admit that much out of you know against interest only so they can pin the whole failure on Henry Cabot Lodge and the Senate for not going through with the rest of Wilson's program.
But in any case it was widely understood And even taught in government school when I was a boy, at least, that everyone knew that they had really messed up at Versailles and that they would not make the same mistake at the end of World War II. So it was a very deliberate policy to build up Germany and Japan and make them our friends.
But you notice, at the end of the Cold War, it's a different circumstance in that we don't have American troops occupying and reconstructing Russia, right?
We have a rump Soviet Union in the Russian Federation, no longer commie, But we don't really have dominance over it the way we have dominance over Germany and Japan.
So we can rebuild them as long as they agree that we get to leave a garrison there, you know what I mean, and have real political dominance in their countries and certainly over their foreign policies.
The Bush senior and the Bill Clinton administration, Dinesh, they both invoked the lessons of Versailles.
They both said, yeah, we better not make that same mistake like they did before.
But then they went ahead and made that same mistake again.
Because look at it from their point of view, right?
You got the Soviet Union completely abandons Eastern Europe.
America's not going to listen to Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan and just come home.
They're going to stay in the NATO alliance.
They're going to make sure that the NATO alliance, i.e.
the American empire, is the dominant military force in Europe.
We don't want Germany and France and Britain and Poland jockeying over power and Russia.
We don't want them jockeying over power so we will dominate it all just like we have since World War II. But then There's the question of all these Eastern European countries between Germany and Russia.
What's supposed to happen to them?
And they knew they were lying, by the way, and I demonstrate this in the book and other scholars before me, I'm no scholar, but real scholars before me have demonstrated this, that they knew they were lying when they made these promises to...
First the Soviet Union, then Russia, that we would not expand NATO, and that, in fact, the point would be moot because we're going to turn NATO into a political organization, sort of like the EU plus America, and we're going to have a whole new security arrangement under what was then the CSCE, the Conference for...
Security and international cooperation in Europe.
It's now the OSCE, same organization, the previous iteration.
And then later the Partnership for Peace.
And under these proposed schemes, which they never really meant to implement, this was always sort of public relations for the rubes in Russia.
They said, we're going to bring you in along with everybody else.
We don't need an alliance anymore because there's no enemy.
So now we're going to have a security partnership where we'll all just kind of work together and Ukraine will be de facto independent.
Pardon me, and de facto neutral.
They were already independent.
They'll be de facto neutral because they'll be brought in along at the same time as Russia.
So any controversy over the East and the West pushing and pulling over Ukraine will be moot because we'll already be in the same organization together.
But see, also look at it this way.
From their point of view, as they're shining the Russians on a promising myth, If they're really going to do that, that means they really have to share decision-making power with Russia.
And they're not willing to do that.
You know, they still have thousands of hydrogen bombs.
They still literally are the nation state of all of Northern Asia.
Right?
And they still would wield enough power and influence in the group that America would not be able to just have their way all the time.
And so instead of bringing them in in this partnership, they kept them on the outside.
But then that meant, just picture the map of Europe in your head.
That meant we're moving the line further and further east, but they are always on the outside of it.
And if they have a government that's friendly to them, we'll just overthrow it.
W. Bush in 2004, Obama...
Ten years later overthrew the government in Kiev.
And we can talk about that in detail if you want, when they won't go along.
So from the point of view of the Russians, and this is, seriously, and I know you have a conservative audience, and I'm an American, I'm a Texan.
I don't give a damn about Russia.
I want people to understand this sincerely, right?
I never was a Saddam Hussein apologist either.
I was just telling the truth about what a threat to us he wasn't.
And it's the same thing here.
I don't care about Russia.
This is not about sympathy.
This is about empathy.
This is about being a grown adult man and trying to understand the other side's side of the story, if for no other reason, so that you can have better statecraft on your own side in order to understand their motivations and anticipate their future actions.
You have to do that.
And so, from the East looking West, This is an assault.
This is America at least encroaching and encroaching and from their point of view, surrounding Russia.
And really, if you look at it, you think about the shape of the border between Ukraine and Russia, where Ukraine is to the south there.
You know what I mean?
It's not a straight line down to the Black Sea.
So this is like quite literally surrounding them.
And Moscow has no, you know, natural defensive borders.
It's wide open plains.
There's no hills or mountains or rivers or anything protecting Moscow from Eastern Europe.
And so they've been invaded over and over and over again in a way that the Americans, we just don't have this experience in our life.
They have been invaded, of course, by the French and the Germans twice and whatever their conflicts with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and whoever dating back into the eons, right?
And the Golden Horde from the East and the rest of that, right?
So by nature, their nation state is incredibly paranoid, if only for their Virtually indefensible borders, right?
And so our side, just to wrap this up real quick, is I should say, people like Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger, who were the leading lights of the so-called realist school, the centrist foreign policy establishment at the Council on Foreign Relations, not the neocon hawks, although they agreed with the neocon hawks about this.
All the neocons also wanted this.
But people like Brzezinski and Kissinger, who really were at the forefront of pushing for NATO expansion, and many others liked them too, but I invoked them because they're the most influential names that you could have.
They both said Well, we gotta come up with a special case for Ukraine.
We should come up, just like we had a deal in the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the last Cold War, we had a special deal over Austria, where they would remain independent and neutral, neither in East nor West, they would not be occupied by the Soviets nor the Americans, and they would play it cool with both sides so as to not...
Cause a contest over the land.
And they all recognized that, boy, in the case of Ukraine especially, we have all these special circumstances such as this heavily ethnic Russian population in the Far East and South of the country, such as Russia's absolutely most crucial, vital interest in their naval base at Sevastopol.
Now, some American planners and theorists might say that's why we got to take Sylvester Paul away from them to weaken Russia and neuter them and beat them back and hit them and break their leg and keep them crippled.
And others might say, actually, no, you know what?
That's way too far east to be a vital interest of the United States of America.
It's picking a fight that, quite frankly, as we can see in front of us, we're not willing to win for the Ukrainians because of the risks to our own nation if we got into a real war with Russia.
And so we're just putting them in a situation of being in an impossible fright, right?
It's like teenage boys nose to nose, and then somebody pushes one of them into the other and make them fight.
And that's America.
America's the guy pushing his friend into the other guy and getting his block knocked off here, basically, is what's happened.
Scott, let me frame this a little differently.
People are talking right now about the fact that, oh man, Putin has really lost one of his buddies because Assad has fallen in Syria.
And I'm sure that Putin, like every other leader of any country, is trying to make friends where he can find them, particularly when he feels that his country is under siege.
I'm actually more concerned about this very solid Russia-China alliance that appears to be developing or maybe even developed.
I saw that Lavrov in a recent conversation, I think with Tucker Carlson, was basically saying, you know, yeah, we're now kind of in the arms of China because I remember back to when, you know, It was part of Nixon's supposedly brilliant strategy to go to China and make sure that we separate China from the old Soviet Union.
Bifurcating these two great powers, Russia in the north and China to the east, would seem to be a wise move on the part of the United States.
And yet here, one of the consequences of Ukraine, of the sanctions, has been to draw Russia and China closer together with, I think, very bad repercussions for our self-interest.
Do you agree?
Yeah, absolutely right.
And, you know, I'm not too concerned personally.
I'm just a non-interventionist.
So I really am not, like, I don't have any reason to fear Russia and China getting along, because what are they going to do?
Limit American influence in Central Asia?
Well, I don't care about that, right?
On the other hand, though, all other things being equal, and from the point of view of the empire, yeah, look, they completely blew it.
They've ruined everything they touch, you know?
The reason they're so hyped about overthrowing Syria now is because they were upset that they were the ones who gave Baghdad to Tehran.
So they've been trying to make up for that error ever since, right?
Same thing here where they say, you know, and by the way, this reflected Trump's thinking.
We had to suffer through all of this nonsense about that he was a Russian spy and an agent and all of this stuff.
But he actually said he was quoting Kissinger.
And I completely, I believe him that he had this conversation with Kissinger.
Kissinger told him...
You're so smart and tall and rich and the most successful president ever, Donald Trump.
And you're so smart to peel Russia away from China.
We should...
I mean, after all, they're part of Christendom and not exactly the West, but they're part of European civilization, Eastern European civilization.
And so we should be...
And they're run by a conservative...
Very pseudo-Republican form of government, but they have somewhat elections and a parliament and a constitution and things like this compared to the Chinese dictatorship, which still flies the red flag, even though they're not exactly a Marxist economy.
And so...
Trump said, shouldn't we be friends with Russia or at least friendly with Russia to keep them from moving too close to China?
And Kissinger said, yes, Donald Trump.
That's what I think, too.
So then Donald Trump said, see, I'm so smart.
I got that figured out.
And the smartest guy in the world just told me how right I am about that.
And then he says that out loud and everybody goes, oh, you're a traitor.
And of course, you know, the FBI and the CIA and the Democrats had their reasons for framing him on that whole scam and all that.
I have 75 pages in the book all about Russiagate if people are interested in that.
It was a complete hoax from top to bottom, as I'm sure your audience understands.
But the thinking there, Donald Trump was just thinking like an American strategist.
And so there are others in the government.
And in the foreign policy establishment, who they just can't differentiate.
They just hate them both so much, and they, I guess, aren't thoughtful enough or don't care enough if we push Russia and China against each other.
They're not willing to play ball with anybody in order to weaken the other or those kinds of games.
So they apparently don't even regret.
I mean, look at the way Joe Biden and his, and we all know how senile he is, but he's also been around a long time and has, you know, I'm not going to say a deep, but a long time superficial grasp of these issues.
And he's got eggheads like Jake Sullivan and people with him.
So it's not like this was completely thoughtless, right?
Like they knew they thought they knew what they were doing when they did what?
It was like a full frontal kick.
To kick Russia out of Europe forever.
You are not part of our civilization.
We're gonna wage a total economic war against you and don't come back.
Go east and stay there.
And we're gonna, you know, force this economic catastrophe on you and this strategic defeat on you and your country was the plan at the start of the Ukrainian war.
The thing is, the Russians were prepared.
They had already opened up pipelines to China dating back 10 years ago.
There's a great article by The War Nerd saying, well, game is up.
You can't threaten Russia anymore because they can just sell their gas to the east now.
They don't have to worry about you.
And that's what they've done over the last three years is just expand their trade ties with India, with China, and with everybody else in Asia as much as they can to make up for their lost markets in Europe.
And so the...
They haven't broken them economically.
I guess they succeeded in kicking them out of Europe, at least for now.
And I don't know that they have a real military alliance with China, but certainly they have a warmer and warmer friendship as Putin and Xi continue to insist.
And then that means also that They can help with each other's war efforts, at least to some degree, right?
China is at least, through trade, helping to subsidize Russia's war effort, as are we, by the way.
You know, America and our European allies, we're all still buying Russian oil, too.
Just we got to pay an extra markup because it's got to go through third countries first and this kind of thing.
And the whole world overall is just paying higher gas prices because of the war, which is helping to, including Americans, which is helping to subsidize the war on both sides and keep it going.
So, you know, whether, you know, an alliance with Russia makes it more likely that China is now going to go to Taiwan or something like that, I don't know.
The Hawks like to talk like that and say that's why we always have to win everything everywhere or else other bad guys will do other things in other places and this kind of thing.
But I'm not usually too impressed by those type of arguments.
That's the kind of stuff that kept us in Vietnam for 10 years when we shouldn't have been there at all.
Yeah.
Wow.
Very interesting perspective.
I mean, I'm assuming, Scott, this is also partly why there's this big now chorus on the left.
Basically, Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian asset.
I mean, it's also depressingly familiar and pathetic.
Well, let's not do it today.
I'll have you back because I think, look, I think we need to shake this tree and open up this perspective.
And I have no fear at all about looking at things I mean, in my earlier work, I tried to look at things from Bin Laden's point of view.
I don't see any reason we can't look at things from different points of view to open up this discussion.
This has been really helpful and provocative.
Guys, I've been talking to Scott Horton, director of the Libertarian Institute.
Follow him on X at Scott Horton Show.
The book, Provoked, How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine.
Scott, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you so much for having me.
I'm on to a new chapter in The Big Lie, and this one is called Mussolini's Journey, and it's about Mussolini, but it's also about the origins of fascism.
We're going to learn how this movement got started and who were its chief apostles, if you will, who brought it to power, what was the relationship of fascism to Mussolini, but also to Hitler.
Now, I begin by noting that the first fascist movement was a party called the Fasci di Combatimento, the fascist fighters, if you will, fascist combat squad.
And this was the first official fascist party.
And so you can say this represented the founding of fascism.
The date?
1919. And the leader of this movement, We're good to go.
And his fellow Marxists all recognized that he was one of them.
In fact, once he set up his new party, the fascist party, this fascist got a letter of congratulations from Lenin, which only would have happened because Lenin recognized him as a fellow socialist.
Now, who was this man?
Well, you guessed it.
He was Il Duce Benito Mussolini.
Mussolini had been raised in the socialist family at a young age.
He was a Marxist in his education as well as in his writings.
He rejected his Catholic faith and he authored pamphlets repudiating his native Catholicism.
He was exiled to Switzerland for a couple of years, where he collaborated with the Italian Socialist Party from abroad.
He also wrote for a socialist weekly in New York called Il Proletario, the proletariat.
And then he went to Hungary.
Well, it was called Austria, Austro-Hungary at the time, and worked for the Socialist Party there.
And he edited a publication called The Class War.
He He wrote so much in these early years that if you look at the collected works of Mussolini, his writings now fill about seven volumes.
So there's no mistake about who this guy was or about his background.
We don't hear a lot about Mussolini in connection with socialism, but this is who he was, a Marxist and a socialist.
He was appointed to the Italian Socialist Party Board of Directors.
He became the editor at the age of 29 of Avanti, which was the official publication of the Socialist Party.
And so this is all a surprise if you are a product of modern education and you think, oh, you know, communism is on the left, fascism is on the right.
Right away you have a problem, which is, wait a minute.
The founder of fascism, Mussolini, has this lengthy socialist and communist pedigree.
How do you reconcile this with being, quote, on the right?
Did Mussolini make some kind of journey?
Did he break with the left and move to the right?
As we will see, this is complete nonsense.
Mussolini did not break with the left.
He did not break with Marx.
He had a disagreement with the socialists in Italy, but the disagreement had to do with whether the socialists took their orders from Moscow or whether they put Italy first.
Mussolini was an Italy first kind of socialist, which is to say he was a national socialist.
So here you have a guy who was the leader of the socialist movement in Italy and this is also a guy who didn't like climb aboard the fascist bandwagon.
He created it.
Now For people who identify fascism with Hitler, which is kind of the normal thing that you get in contemporary rhetoric, Trump is a fascist, Trump is just like Hitler.
And so you have the idea, the premise of that is false, that somehow Hitler is the quintessential fascist.
Not so.
Hitler never really thought of himself as a fascist, per se.
He saw himself as a National Socialist.
Now, I will admit that fascism and National Socialism are kind of ideological cousins.
They have important things in common.
They both, for example, have a centralized state.
They both affirm the philosophy of collectivism, for example.
So they have a common point of origin.
But a key difference, and I've mentioned this before, Is that fascism has no intrinsic connection with anti-Semitism.
You might find a fascist who happens to be an anti-Semite, but the anti-Semitism is not growing out of his fascism.
It's just he is a fascist who also happens to be an anti-Semite, just like someone could be a fascist and also happens to be something else.
But National Socialism of the German variety was rooted in anti-Semitism.
Anti-Semitism was, in some ways, its core.
Now, Hitler was just a local organizer in Germany when Mussolini came to power, and Mussolini established the world's first fascist regime in 1922. He had a famous march on Rome.
By the way, Hitler later would kind of imitate that.
Hitler tried to do a march on Munich, very much modeled in Mussolini's march on Rome.
Hitler tried this in 1923, and he ended up in Landsberg, So Hitler's early effort failed.
Mussolini succeeded.
And Hitler admired Mussolini.
Hitler saw Mussolini as way ahead of him.
Hitler called Mussolini the leading statesman in the world, to whom none may even remotely compare himself.
Hitler looked up to Mussolini, at least in these early years.
When Hitler first came to power in 1933, he had a bust of Mussolini in his office.
And Hitler himself was referred to in the German press as Germany's Mussolini.
So Hitler took it as a compliment, at least initially, that he, Hitler, was a kind of German equivalent of Mussolini, the great statesman.
And in other comments, Hitler said of Mussolini that he was the unparalleled statesman and the last of the Caesars.
So here is Hitler comparing Mussolini all the way back to...
Julius Caesar and perhaps also Augustus Caesar.
Now, this power imbalance in favor of Mussolini changed when Hitler had, through a series of spectacular military adventures, conquered Austria and Poland.
Well, he didn't conquer Austria, but he annexed it.
He invaded and conquered Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Norway.
And of course, most famously, France.
Hitler became, in a sense, the dictator of virtually all of Europe.
Only the island of Great Britain stood outside of Hitler's clutches.
And at this point, you could say the pendulum or the seesaw moved the other way.
Hitler became, in a way, the senior statesman, and Mussolini was...
The junior statesman, because Italy could not summon that kind of power that Germany did.
Hitler became, in a way, the master, and Mussolini became the subordinate.
But not in the beginning.
In the beginning, Mussolini was more famous than Hitler.
Mussolini was recognized as the founding father of fascism, and therefore we need to think of Mussolini as the original and the prototypical fascist.
When we pick this up, I'm going to talk about how fascism had roots not just in Italy, but also in France, in Belgium, in Germany, and also in England.
There were fascist movements throughout Europe, and they all had the common thread of being on the left and highly shaped by Marxism and fully committed to socialism.
Subscribe to the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast on Apple, Google, and Spotify.
▲
Export Selection