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Dec. 19, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
52:24
NOT SO MAGIC MIKE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep984
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Thank you.
Thank you.
Magic Mike Johnson's continuing resolution boondoggle crashed and burned.
I'll reflect on the declining power of the media and the rising power of the X platform.
And Will Upton, the political editor of the National Pulse, joins me.
We're going to talk about the CR, the continuing resolution, but also about Fannie Willis.
And Luigi Mangione.
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I am very happy to announce or note that the continuing resolution, this gargantuan omnibus bill, this big spending boondoggle this gargantuan omnibus bill, this big spending boondoggle from now through March of 2025 has come crashing down.
Um.
It is off the table.
It is not going to be voted on.
I saw this morning Steve Scalise saying basically we're back to the drawing board.
And it is worth reflecting on what a remarkable development this is.
For all of my adult lifetime, I have seen these omnibus bills.
I've seen the kind of a depressing formula that I want to describe.
It's a formula that involves Republican leadership and complicit Republicans basically saying First of all, the timing of these things.
They almost always come around Christmas time when everybody's trying to get out of there.
And so they're deposited on the congressmen and senators at the last, last minute.
There's no time to debate it, but it's like you have to vote for it.
Either you vote up or you vote down.
There are usually some enticing elements in it, like disaster relief in this case, or some support for farmers.
And so this politically attractive appetizer Is used to smuggle in all this terrible and awful stuff.
Absolutely disgusting.
Just to give you one example from this current bill, the Mike Johnson bill, I'm going to call it.
It essentially would have blocked RFK Jr. from being able to do anything, pretty much, on the issue of vaccine injuries.
It says the secretary may not revise the vaccine injury table.
It says that you cannot include any vaccines, add them to the table, for which the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has issued a recommendation.
Basically, it goes on to say, any injuries or death related to a vaccine administered at the time when the vaccine was a covered countermeasure Shall not be eligible for compensation.
So it's basically a way of preemptively cutting Robert F. Kennedy Jr. off at the knees.
And this was being sneaked into this bill.
So this bill is an unmitigated disaster and it's really to the disgrace and shame of Mike Johnson that he was lobbying for it.
Now he was lobbying for it not because he liked it per se, but as I mentioned out of just cowardice and timidity and fear.
This is why we're calling the thumbnail of today's podcast, Not So Magic Mike, because he's no magician, he's the anti-magician.
But the point I'm getting at here is this, and that is that these things always pass.
And they pass because no matter who complains, by and large, the elected officials put their head down and they go, we got to do it.
The leadership wants us to do it.
They'll take it out on us if we don't vote for it.
Besides, there are hundreds, if not thousands of lobbyists who have all put their own pet Very often, multi-million dollar projects.
I mean, just ripping the taxpayer off right and left into these bills.
This happens all the time and with sort of depressing regularity.
And all of them are hovering over the bill, waiting to see if any congressman shows that they're not going to vote for it.
They're like, okay, we won't give that guy money next time.
And so all these congressmen hungry for re-election money are tempted to And have all the incentives on one side to vote for this bill.
And so, as I mentioned, they always succeed.
Until now.
So this is amazing.
We are in a new phase, and it's worth noting how we got there, how we defeated this bill.
It's not because the Republican establishment types recognized, oh, you know what?
We've been educated by Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk.
We realize that there's a lot of stuff in this bill that we didn't realize was in there.
Not at all.
These people are shameless, and they're used to voting for these bills, and they know exactly what they're voting for.
They may not read the whole bill.
What they do is basically, they read into it to find out if their pieces of pork are in it.
And they don't care if anyone else is.
So in other words, nobody cares about the taxpayer here.
That's the guy who's being looted, by the way, and that's the guy who's not in the negotiations.
The reason that the Republicans freaked out is pretty simple.
Number one, there was a concerted campaign on the part of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy against it.
Number two, because of the freedom of speech on X, there was a massive public uproar.
Let's remember, there are tens, well actually hundreds of millions of people on X, and there was an absolute firestorm on X of blasting these congressmen and also exposing the particular items in the bill, which you normally, by the way, never get to see.
The media, of course, is all on board with these massive omnibus bills.
They don't really focus on, they don't do a list of the horrors in these kinds of bills at all.
They want them to pass.
And so they act like this is some sort of a responsible debate over protecting the American people.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
So the American people get a chance to fire back And third, of course, and very significant, Trump.
Trump weighs in.
Trump goes, this is stupid.
Trump basically says, listen, the Democrats are holding a threat over your head, sort of Damocles.
You know, you're going to shut down the government, Mike Johnson.
And Trump goes, so?
Shut down the government.
Who's making you shut down the government?
The Democrats.
So let them.
Let him shut down the government and then we'll come in 35 days from now and we'll fix the whole thing and we'll get all the credit for it.
So Trump, in his whimsical way, states the political common sense of the matter.
And once again, look at this bill.
$60 billion to Ukraine?
Think about that.
The blanket immunity for the deep state, unconstitutional emergency powers, mask and vaccine mandates, gain-of-function research, funding of 12 biolabs, and all of this, all of this stuff that could never pass on its own is all...
Bootstrapped or tied up to hurricane relief and farmer relief, and it's like, hey, I voted for farmer relief, or if you vote against it, leadership will leak to the press.
This guy's against aid.
He's against the farmers.
He's against hurricanes.
No.
The point is, this kind of business as usual needs to stop.
You want to pass aid for the farmers?
Write a bill with that and put it out there.
Let's debate it.
You want to do hurricane relief?
Write a bill about that.
Put it out there.
Let's debate it.
You want to fund biolabs in the Ukraine?
Okay, write a bill about that and see if that passes.
So, in other words, the racket has got to stop.
Senator Mike Lee has a very good term for this, and I want to read his post from this morning.
Today, we witness the demise of a tyrannical cartel known as the law firm of Schumer, McConnell, Johnson, and Jeffries.
And there you have it.
I think this is a very accurate description, not of the rank-and-file Republican, not even of the rank-and-file Republican congressman, because the rank-and-file Republican congressman himself or herself is roped into these deals.
Where leadership says you are either with us or against us.
And if you don't vote with us, you'll get the worst committees.
You'll essentially become a pariah.
You'll have zero influence and you won't be able to represent your constituents all that well.
This is the nasty game that leadership, by the way, Republican and Democrat, plays.
And then the Republican and Democratic leadership work with each other.
So this is the element of truth.
In people who say that we have a uniparty, I've resisted this distinction and I don't think it's true in all respects.
By and large, the Republicans as a team are the good guys.
By and large, the Democrats as a team are the bad guys.
Even if there are some, quote, good Democrats, they're on the bad team.
And even if there are some bad Republicans, they are by and large on the good team.
So politics is fought in teams.
That being said, at the leadership level, you have this kind of corruption, and so it is a big win for us.
There are Democrats who are whining about this now, saying, oh, this is going to mean military people aren't going to get their paychecks, or even this completely false idea that the government is somehow going to grind to a halt.
It isn't.
A government shutdown is, quite frankly, no big deal.
And if some people lose out on paychecks, those paychecks can be replenished in a new bill that comes along in January.
So this is a case where the collapse of this boondoggle I think is a boon and a benefit to all of us.
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I want to talk about the X platform and also about Elon Musk and his role on and in the X platform.
Here's a post from this morning by Bill Ackman, the entrepreneur and investor.
Imagine if all bills were required to be footnoted with references to which congressman added a provision to the bill.
We could then see from whence the pork comes.
Now, this is a spectacular idea.
In other words, What happens right now is a kind of horse trading.
I think this is where the founders' scheme has gotten toward it.
The founders expected this, and you can see this in Madison's discussion in Book 10 of the Federalist Papers.
Madison basically says that it is very difficult for any faction To gain control of the government and rip off the taxpayer.
These are my words, not his.
Because faction can be set against faction.
You want to build a stupid bridge that nobody needs in your district?
I want to build a dumb library in my district and name it after me?
Well, you're not going to vote for me and I'm not going to vote for you.
Except, this is where the modern innovation, which is to say corruption, creeps in.
If you and I make a deal.
I'll vote for your stupid boondoggle and you vote for my stupid boondoggle.
And then both our boondoggles get passed and we both get to rip off the taxpayer even more.
So this is what we have in a nutshell going on with our budget.
And what Bill Ackman is saying is that the whole system relies on anonymity.
In other words, nobody knows that I've inserted a clause that is completely wasteful, but it's for my benefit, for my re-election benefit.
Not even really for my constituents' benefit, for my benefit.
And you've inserted clauses, and every other guy has inserted clauses, and Ackman is like, the scheme would be ruined.
If everybody who puts in for a corrupt and nefarious and useless and wasteful and expensive scheme has to sign their name to it, then, and I can totally see here the opportunities for DOGE, for the Department of Government Efficiency, you identify the provision of the bill.
This guy wants to fund biolabs in Ukraine.
And by the way, he's the congressman from the great state of Illinois.
He's the congressman from the great state of Texas.
Now we know who's doing it, and we can see why they're doing it, and they can hear from their constituents about it, and they can be primaried or targeted for...
For challenge when they come up for re-election.
Congressmen will hate this because, of course, it ruins their scheme.
But this is an example of a really great idea.
And where does it appear?
On X. So X has now become a very powerful force.
I believe if it wasn't for X, I'm not even sure that this CR, this continuing resolution, would have gone down.
Now, I'm not saying that X or Elon Musk was the sole or even the most important factor.
I think the most important factor was, quite frankly, Trump.
Once Trump came out against it, it was essentially dead in the water.
There is no group of congressmen.
There's certainly no significant body of Republicans that want to be crossing Trump at this point.
They recognize that in the 2024 election, they didn't win.
Republicans didn't win.
Trump won.
And this is very well worth noting because normally, in a successful election, you gain seats in the House.
We did not do that.
We have a very razor-thin majority in the House, pretty much the same as we had before.
In the Senate, we gained a couple of seats, but even there, Trump's influence was critical in getting, for example, Moreno across the finish line in Ohio and even the Pennsylvania seat that was narrowly won by McCormick.
These were cases where the Trump factor was critical.
So people don't really want to be crossing Trump.
Trump was clearly the most important figure here.
But I would say the second, Elon Musk.
And maybe even more than Elon Musk, the Elon Musk platform.
Now, the key post by Musk himself was when he said that congressmen who vote against this bill deserve to be primaried.
This would be a telling statement coming from the owner of any big platform, but it's especially terrifying when it comes to Elon because he also happens to be the richest man in the world.
And part of what he's saying, even without directly saying it, is I can help fund primary opponents against Republicans who vote against this bill.
And so no one, and I literally mean no one, wants to be in this category.
And so there was a massive running for the exits.
I think Mike Johnson probably figured out within the space of maybe...
Hours or maybe even minutes that the support for this, which had been probably painfully cajoled by meeting one-on-one with Republicans.
Remember, Mike Johnson's scheme was to get a solid body of Democrats and a small number of Republicans.
That's where the majority for this bill ended.
And Johnson realized, no, this Republican support is completely melting away.
And of course, this cannot be passed with Democrats alone, not to mention the fact that if you have an overwhelming number of Democrats and one or two or just a handful of Republicans, think of what that makes Mike Johnson look.
He looks like a complete traitor, not to mention the fact that the Republicans will probably vote to depose him.
Which might, by the way, happen anyway in January, because I think Johnson has not come across looking very good here at all.
Elon Musk has proven himself to be pretty much as powerful as the entire Washington lobbying establishment combined.
And while the left is shrieking about this, oh, this one guy goes, you know, yeah, basically a guy who owns a car company is stopping the entire U.S. Congress.
Well, No.
It is worth noting that for the last couple of decades now, if not more, one figure, George Soros, has been actively intervening in our politics, has been toppling whole regimes.
I mean, he's been knocking out district attorneys over here, secretaries of state over there.
Giving enormous amounts of money to the left, to the non-profits, to the Democratic Party.
And all of this is like for democracy.
Oh no, he's helping to save democracy.
But now that Elon Musk, somebody who's actually a lot richer than George Soros, comes along and basically goes, I'll be the George Soros of the right.
I mean, I'm not putting words in Elon Musk's mouth.
This is what Elon Musk has himself said.
Okay, I guess I'll be the George Soros of the right.
Now we hear all the yelling and screaming about interfering in our politics and this guy is not really elected.
I think that what Elon is doing, and this is where the platform is bigger than Elon Musk, is he's giving people a chance to speak out.
And he is himself viewing even his own position as an echo of the people's voice.
So it is highly ironic, I will admit, that somebody who's not elected is somehow echoing the voice of the people through the Platform X, even more so than elected officials.
but the paradox disappears, the irony is removed when you realize that the elected officials have formed a sort of cabal against the American people.
The elected officials have a common interest in something that is different from the American people and what is that?
They have a common interest in re-electing themselves and thus they have a common interest in raising oodles of money to do that and they have all kinds of incentives to make side deals with each other to achieve that.
This is the system that we have to bring down.
And Elon Musk, I think, for no reason of self-interest, he has nothing to gain himself out of it, has committed himself to bringing it down.
And I say more power to him for that.
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I'm very happy, guys, to welcome to the podcast our guest Will Upton.
He's a political editor at The National Pulse, former Trump administration treasury official.
You can follow him on x at w, Will, Upton, or the website is just thenationalpulse.com.
Will, thanks for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you for having me.
Appreciate it, Dinesh.
So much going on in the news.
And let me begin with this massive boondoggle, the continuing resolution kind of crashing and burning.
And I mentioned in my monologue a few moments ago, I said, you know, it's quite remarkable because we never see this happen.
We have all the familiar signs.
They drop this on you at the last minute.
They do it in the Christmas season when everybody wants to go home.
They bootstrap it to one or two really attractive things.
Hurricane relief!
And so they want you to sign off on the whole thing, in many cases, but barely reading it.
And yet, even though people grumble and scream and shout, it always goes through.
Until now.
So let's have from you a reaction to what happened, but also let's do a little bit of a dissection of how it happened.
Yes, yeah.
So, you know, what we've seen here is sort of the derailment of what Senator Mike Lee calls the firm, and that's Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell and Hakeem Jeffries, basically your House and Senate Republican leadership and Democrat leadership.
And for the past few years, they've set it up so that government funding runs out right before Christmas so they can ram through a continuing resolution that they attach all of these other provisions and projects and spending to and use sort of the Christmas holiday and Congress going into its break to sort of force a quick vote and get it through before anybody knows what happens.
But what we've seen over the past few days is between President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, and then just rank and file members of the House, they finally have had enough and revolted openly against this process.
And it's really the first time, and you're correct, this is the first time we've seen this happen in a long time.
Typically, a continuing resolution decades ago might be at most nine pages long.
Usually you have a brief table of contents and then just a series of extensions of dates into the next year for federal appropriations, just to keep the government open a little bit longer.
In this case, this one was over 1500 pages long.
The actual continuing resolution language is only about nine pages.
It is a four page table of contents.
Which is absolutely astounding.
And then you've got the additional 1,500 pages are all sorts of federal programs, basically giving amnesty to Liz Cheney, preventing people from looking at her communications with the January 6th Committee, a pay raise for Congress.
Senator Ted Cruz managed to get his entire anti-deepfake bill into it.
The Take It Down Act, word for word.
I believe it's Title IX. And the entire bill just rammed right in there.
And you see that a lot.
It becomes kind of a Christmas tree.
And each one of these provisions are an ornament.
And these members will kind of scramble to get theirs included.
And it's usually the appropriators in a back room get together and they write these things.
And so the members they're friendly with, they can get their preferred provisions.
Projects or legislation that wouldn't pass otherwise thrown into this bill because it becomes then a must-pass bill.
But we've actually seen it again this time.
It's been derailed, and now we're back at square one.
Do you think that the...
The power of this liberated X platform, which now gives the ordinary citizen the ability to rail and rant and blast these congressmen.
But I think even more devastating than that, To expose the particularity of their schemes.
Because now you say, hey, we're funding bio labs.
We are funding gain-of-function research.
We are actually funding the group that is involved in identifying us as the spreaders of disinformation and that gets us kicked off social media.
Republicans are voting to give more money to these people.
What?
So what happens is that the congressman now has to defend Yes, absolutely.
I think that you're going to see because of the rise of X and sort of the way Musk has sort of taken the filters off.
You're going to see members become much more responsive to their constituents.
And I think this is part of a larger process that we're seeing with Congress.
First was the ouster of Kevin McCarthy, and then eventually settling on Mike Johnson as Speaker.
Mike Johnson is a weak Speaker.
We're not supposed to have a strong speaker like Tip O'Neill or Newt Gingrich or Speaker Cannon back in the 1910s.
The speaker's supposed to be relatively weak.
They're just sort of there to keep the house...
The actual powers is supposed to be with the head of the caucus, the majority leader, and then with the committee chairs, and ultimately the appropriators as well, who run the appropriations committee.
These are the guys who are actually supposed to be doing the day-to-day grunt work.
And so I think the next stage is to get folks and get constituents aware of how the House is actually supposed to function and that the ire really needs to be directed at these committee chairs and these appropriators who meet behind closed doors, exclude other members from the process.
And monopolize these spending bills to sort of both balloon the federal budget, you know, increase the deficit and pass all sorts of loony bin type stuff just because their buddy, you know, wants it or, you know, one of their donors wants it or a lobbyist wants it.
What is your reading on Mike Johnson?
And I say this because if this bill had passed, The vote would have been a solid phalanx of Democrats with a small number of Republicans that together would have constituted a majority.
Now, this has got to be at some level a deep embarrassment for a Republican speaker.
I'm basically getting the other team on board with a handful of guys on my team.
So in some ways, I'm representing the other team's interests even more than my own.
Assuming that Johnson is, as I take him to be, a fairly decent guy, do you think that he's motivated just by fear of the Washington establishment and of the media?
What's up with this guy?
I think it's one, he hasn't been, prior to becoming Speaker, he wasn't in leadership that long.
You know, he was sort of a member that had one foot, and the Conservative, with the Conservatives, one foot kind of in with the more moderate leadership, and served as sort of a bridge there.
I think it's less fear, it's more that he doesn't know how to quite navigate some of this.
I will give him credit, it appears that he's pulling this bill, and we're going back to square one.
So unlike Kevin McCarthy, he's not going to try to ram through a CR with, you know, as you illustrate it, All the Democrats and then a handful of Republicans, the committee chairs and the appropriators.
I mean, he could have done that.
He could have sat there and said, I don't care.
We're going to push this bill through, kick it over the Senate, where Schumer would have put it right on the floor and eventually found out a way to stop Rand Paul or somebody else from filibustering it.
And, you know, we would have had this terrible bill passed.
But instead, Johnson, you know, seeing the backlash, didn't do the McCarthy, didn't go the McCarthy route, and has pulled the bill.
Now we're looking at probably a clean CR. We'll see if President-elect Trump can get his debt limit increase attached to it, which is what he wants, because he doesn't want to have that fight happen and take up, you know, half of his first term.
Like, that would be...
I get people who are like, oh, we shouldn't increase the debt limit.
I also get Trump's complaint.
Hey, like, if we kick this, you know, further down the road...
This is going to become a huge fight and it's going to put a stop to everything I want to do because it's going to take up all the time.
So I think that's kind of the position where Mike is in.
I don't envy it at all.
It wouldn't be easy.
But again, he's a weak speaker.
But speakers of the House are supposed to be weak.
They're supposed to be sort of the figurehead put in place by the actual sort of leadership of the House, which is, again, the committee chairs, the caucus leadership, and the appropriators.
Well, let's talk about a couple of other interesting developments, both loosely in the legal domain.
The first one is, it seems like Big Fanny is out on her fanny, if I can put it that way.
She has been booted off the case by the appellate court.
Yes.
The local judge had said, if I recall, Nathan Wade, you're disqualified, but Fannie Willis, you can stay on.
The appellate court said, no, you can't.
And so, number one, what was the rationale for booting Fannie Willis out?
And number two, does that mean that this case is, as a practical matter, dead in the water?
Yeah, so on the first point, essentially, the appellate court stepped in and went further than the Fulton County Superior Judge, Scott McAfee.
The Georgia State Appellate Court determined that Willis' actions with Wade and her public statements to the media and to donors and fundraising basically jeopardized her ability to prosecute the case and tilted sort of the perceptions against the defendants in an unfair way.
And so they will not only is Fannie Willis disqualified, but her entire office is disqualified because they derive their prosecutorial authority from Fannie Willis.
So the entire Fulton DA's office cannot try this case.
The court acknowledges this makes it an orphaned case.
There's a state board of prosecutors, a state committee of prosecutors, that now will kind of convene to look at this.
And if one of them says, hey, I'll take it, the case will live on.
But other than maybe DeKalb County, and even then, I think it's...
Iffy.
I don't really see anybody in the state taking up this case.
So it just sort of withers at the vine and dies, and eventually either Judge McAfee or some other judge down the line will just say, hey, we're dismissing this, because nobody will try it.
And I think it's important to note that because very often when you think about these cases, you think about Trump, but there are a number of co-defendants in this case.
And so it is also important for them, right, if this case crashes and burns.
Yeah, you've got Mike Roman and others.
A ton of Trump administration officials were basically dragged in on this.
I believe there were originally 17 co-defendants.
I think we're down now to 12. Some people have pleaded out.
I'm sure they're going to go back and try to get some of those pleas changed, given where the case is at now.
But yeah...
This is going to be big for a lot of folks that even I served with in the administration that know who are now being prosecuted by this absolutely rogue, kind of nuts, left-wing DA. And this is, I think, a victory for justice.
This is a victory for kind of the rule of law.
This was an obvious attempt.
I think she sees herself as sort of a Stacey Abrams type that's going to be able to actually win a statewide race.
It was a point, and it was also something that, I'm sure you may see this, we've seen some indication of it, that she was sort of also encouraged to do this by either somebody in Jack Smith's office, Jack Smith, or somebody in the DOJ. Almost certainly kind of gave her a helpful nudge in the right direction on this, or what they think is the right direction.
Yeah, absolutely.
Let's close out by talking about Luigi Manzioni, because apparently this dude is now no longer going to be under the Alvin Bragg state prosecutorial apparatus, but rather Is going to be in federal court, tried on federal crimes.
Question becomes, is this a significant shift?
And I say this because there's been a rather disturbing atmosphere of lionizing this guy, elevating him.
I saw that he's gotten a bunch of money into his commissary account and he's already getting some fan mail and this sort of thing.
So there is a They give him the Bundy treatment.
Exactly.
He's appealing to a certain twisted constituency of people.
So it seems to me really important that not only justice be done, but an example made of this guy.
Is that going to happen, do you think?
Because is it an, are we better off to have this guy in federal court and why?
Yeah, I think so.
And I think that's the Fed's reasoning here, is that this has sort of become a bit of a circus, both with the Mancione fan club that has kind of erupted, the media coverage of it, and the fact that Alvin Bragg has just become sort of the brunt of I think
we'll still have a state prosecution.
What we'll see now is sort of it negotiated out who gets to go first on this.
And there's some indications it may be the feds.
Right before I came on, it looked like they may actually be diverting the prison transport from the federal court or from the state courthouse in Manhattan to the federal courthouse in Manhattan, which means he may get charged in federal court first.
We'll kind of see what happens over the next half hour or so if that's the case.
But, you know, it does look like the feds are kind of getting into the driver's seat here.
And it's also important because New York state abolished its death penalty in 2004.
On the federal side, the federal death penalty has been reinstated.
There is a federal death penalty.
And so in the federal murder case, Mangione will face the death penalty most likely.
I mean, this seems to me to be appropriate because the more we learn about this case, the more we see...
I mean, it'd be one thing, of course, inexcusable still, but let's just say this guy's family had somehow been devastated and he attributed it to UnitedHealthcare.
He's like, oh, my mom died or whatever.
They weren't even treated by UnitedHealthcare.
So this is a premeditated, it seems like ideologically motivated crime.
So it has, as far as I can see, no mitigating circumstances at all.
And that is basically, am I right, the definition of the criteria for seeking a death penalty?
Yeah, yeah.
You know, you could see a prosecutor using some discretion in a case, or exactly, if there was sort of a mitigating circumstance, whether it was his family, you know, or if he was just trying to, you know, mug the guy, and there was a struggle, and he shot and killed him.
But that's not what happened.
This was an execution.
He walked up behind him, he shot him in cold blood, he put several more rounds on him to make sure he was dead, and then calmly walked off.
Like, this was a cold-blooded, premeditated execution.
Okay.
And this is a textbook death.
This is the worst of the worst.
Guys, I've been talking to Will Upton, political editor of The National Pulse.
Website is thenationalpulse.com.
Follow him on x at wupton.
Hey, Will, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you for having me.
Appreciate it.
Continuing my discussion of The Big Lie and the broad theme here is the Association of fascism and Nazism with the political left.
And I'm talking about, today, the fascist synthesis.
A synthesis of what?
Well, a synthesis of Marxism and fascism.
And when we understand the synthesis, we'll see how fascism arises Out of Marxism as a modification of Marxism, different than anything Marx thought of, but very consistent with the spirit of Marxism.
Now, the core idea of Marxism is that the world is divided into two.
It's divided into exploiters, And the exploited.
It's divided into victims and victimizers.
So this is the key idea.
Now for Marx, the businessman, the capitalist, this is the victimizer.
And the working man, the laborer, this is the victim.
What fascism does is it starts to rethink.
It keeps the categories just the way they are.
Yes, there's a victimizer.
Yes, there's a victim.
But who is that really?
I mentioned yesterday that Mussolini in World War I discovered that national consciousness or nationalism, patriotism, Arises out of this natural feeling of devotion to one's country.
And Mussolini realized, we need to tap into that.
We need to corral that.
And we need to use it to achieve the Marxist goal.
And so Mussolini was a very smart guy.
And he was surrounded by a lot of other very smart guys.
All of them intellectuals.
They were Marxists.
And what these guys began to say is, by the way, some of the names here, Giuseppe Prezzolini, Angelo Olivetti, Arturo Labriola, Filippo Corredoni, Paolo Arano, Sergio Pananzio, very Italian, right?
This is an Italian, sounds like an Italian menu.
It's an Italian menu of Marxist intellectuals, buddies of Mussolini.
And all of them are thinking, How do we connect this nationalism thing to Marxism?
And then they had a kind of a brilliant idea.
And their idea was, how about if instead of thinking of the exploiters as being the business class and the exploited as being the workers, How about if we swap that around a little bit?
Italy, after all, is kind of a poor country.
At least it's one of the poor men of Europe.
Italy, Spain, Portugal, these are relative backwaters in Europe.
Not culturally, not historically, but financially.
Why?
Because Germany, France, England, these are the dominant economic powers in Europe, certainly in the early 20th century.
England is, in fact, the most dominant and dominates the world, at least through World War I. And really even right after when America begins to move into first place.
So Britain number one, France number two, Germany number three.
But that's one, two, three right there.
Italy is nowhere in the picture.
And in fact, many Italian workers in the early 20th century would go and work in the rich countries like France and Germany.
They would do menial jobs.
They would cut trees down.
They would dig holes for...
For tracks, railway tracks and so on.
And then they would try to bring money back to Italy.
So Italy was definitely the poor man on the European landscape.
And no surprise, many Italians viewed England, France and Germany as exploiters.
And so the idea that Mussolini gets, and a lot of the people around Mussolini, is they get this idea that we can redefine the conflict between rich and poor to be not between rich and poor individuals, but between rich and poor nations.
Therefore, we can speak of hegemonic, exploitative, victimizing nations.
And then we can speak of poor, So therefore, Mussolini gets the idea, I don't want the working people of Italy to be fighting against the business people of Italy.
We're all together in being exploited by the French and the English and the Germans.
And so we, the whole of Italy, all of us are the proletariat.
They, all of them, are the capitalist class.
And so this becomes a formula now for unifying Italy under one victim So you can see right here how Mussolini now begins to see himself against the rest of Europe until,
of course, the emergence of a similar fascist force in Germany, very much along the same lines, by the way, and using much of the same rhetoric.
Germany saw itself as the poor man compared to England and the United States.
Germany saw itself as the exploited nation vis-a-vis Britain and France.
Why?
Because Britain and France had colonies all over the world.
Britain had India.
Britain had parts of Africa, including part of South Africa.
The French had North Africa, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia.
And so you had this situation in which the English and the French Had tentacles that stretched all over the world, and Hitler goes, well, why not me?
How come Germany doesn't have an empire?
How come Germany doesn't control all these foreign territories?
And so Hitler gets the idea, well, why don't we make ourselves strong so we can take them?
We can get those kind of territories for ourselves.
And so here we are at the beginning of fascism, and we have this really remarkable redefinition of the Marxist categories, but now they apply to nations as a whole.
And so Mussolini now defines Italy as a proletarian country.
Now, that's the first move in creating the fascist synthesis.
It is using the Marxist framework, but redepositing some new categories into it.
It's no longer the individual, it is now the country itself.
Here's the second element of the fascist synthesis, and this is where we get, I would say, very close to modern progressivism, which is to the modern progressive left.
And that is that the fascists begin to say, yeah, we have a country, but kind of, well, who speaks for the country?
You have a country, but countries don't speak for themselves.
You have people in a country, but they don't have a unified voice.
So who represents the country?
And of course, the answer to that is the state.
The state becomes the executive branch or arm of the country.
And this is the importance of Giovanni Gentile, whom I've mentioned earlier.
He was the kind of apostle or advocate of the centralized state.
Because Giovanni basically says, Gentile basically says, look, he says, the nation is the state.
And the state is the nation.
Somebody has to be the rod that carries out the will of the people.
And who is that going to be if it's not the state?
And Mussolini, of course, loved all this because he goes, yeah, guess what?
This way, if I become the head of Italy...
I become the head of the state, which means I become the state, which means I am essentially the voice of the entire country.
And so you can see why the idea of totalitarianism, which is a total embrace of all aspects of life, all of it represented in the country as a whole, all of it represented in the state, and ultimately all of it represented in one man, This appealed greatly to Mussolini.
Now, Here's the point where fascism begins to resemble modern progressivism even more than Leninism did.
And here's why.
Because Leninism, as I mentioned yesterday or the day before, always had the doctrine, the Marxist doctrine, that the state would eventually disappear.
Now, as I mentioned, the state never disappeared.
It was very powerful under Lenin.
It was even more powerful under Stalin.
So in practice, you had a Soviet state.
But in theory, it was not supposed to be that way.
Or at least in theory, the Marxists always held, and Lenin himself held, that the state was going to, at some point, not be needed anymore.
But under fascism, it always is.
Fascism always held, we need a state.
And the state is, in fact, something that becomes the object of our highest allegiance.
Notice here that we're now moving almost into Obama territory, where we worship the state.
Everything is in the state.
The state becomes the voice of the people.
The state becomes the instrument of redistribution.
Mussolini believed that.
The state is the outgrowth of what the people really want.
If people aren't getting, quote, their fair share, it's up to the state to determine, not only to redistribute income, but to determine what the fair share is.
And you can see right here how fascists were ultimately about state-run capitalism.
They didn't have any antagonism to capitalism per se.
Why?
Because as I mentioned, Mussolini and the people around him said, you know, the real problem is not Italian business.
In fact, to be honest, Italian business is not that big.
It's not that powerful.
It couldn't exploit all the Italian workers even if it wanted to.
It's not a good thing, maybe.
But nevertheless, it is part of Italy.
The Italians who are really being exploited, a lot of them, are working abroad.
They're not being exploited by some massive Italian corporation.
They're being expanded by the international corporations that are based in places like Berlin and Paris and London.
That's the real enemy.
And so inside of Italy, We want the state to be numero uno, and we want the state to be in control of everything, which means the state has also got to control business.
So think about it.
Which is closer to modern American progressivism?
This Leninist idea that somehow the state will wither away?
No.
The progressives in America don't have that idea and never did.
They want and wanted the state to stay the way it is and become very powerful and dominate all the other institutions of society.
And so here we begin to see the way in which the fascist ideology and progressive left ideology or some even liberal ideology, at least liberal in the modern contemporary sense of the term, are becoming increasingly indistinguishable the one from the other.
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