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Dec. 23, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:05
ACHILLES HEEL Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep986
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Thank you.
Also talk about an Achilles heel of democracy, which is at the root of why our government seems chronically unable to reduce serious spending.
Josh Hammer, senior editor of Newsweek, joins me.
We're going to talk about what's really happening in Syria, what it means for Israel and the United States.
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.
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.
We are just a couple of days before Christmas and this is about the time when we look for Uplifting and heartwarming stories that make us feel good and put us into the Christmas spirit.
And what do we have instead?
Well, what we have instead is this very shocking episode of a woman being set on fire in the New York subway and just I mean, if you look at the video of it, which is all over social media, you can look at my feed and you'll see it.
You just have a person who is...
Engulfed in flames.
The only time I saw something even remotely similar was when that strange, creepy guy set himself on fire as an act of protest.
And that was disturbing to itself, but at least, you know what?
He did it to himself.
So he was trying to make some sort of an, I guess, ideological point.
But in this case, this poor woman, against her will, is burned.
And burned by an illegal migrant from Guatemala.
Now, the scene itself is Troubling enough.
You can see the woman engulfed in flames.
You can see the man fanning the flames.
Think of how strange and evil that is.
And then you can see on the side a policeman sort of sidled through all this and he looks at it as if he's looking at something rather curious.
But something that you would think would demand immediate action from his part, but he has that same kind of lazy shuffle as if he's maybe sizing it up or thinking about what to do.
It's not clear what he actually does, but what he doesn't do is jump right into the middle of it, stop the man from doing what he's doing, attempt to douse the flames or do anything like that.
He doesn't do any of that.
So you almost feel like you're in a certain type of twilight zone here.
This is Kathy Hochul's New York.
And I think what makes all of this really particularly bad is that this is not something that, you know, there are always very disturbing incidents that happen in the world.
And sometimes you wonder, like, what can be done about them?
And the answer is nothing because these are incidents that are kind of local.
Let's just say, for example, a man is going through a very troubling divorce.
In fact, there was a recent incident of something like this, shows up at a Christmas party dressed up as Santa and then massacres his ex-wife and his own kids.
Now that is sick, it's twisted, it's demented, but it's difficult to say that there's some sort of policy that is responsible for that because the explanation of that incident is within that local situation.
But not here.
This is the fruit of policies that bring illegal migrant criminals to our shores, feed them, subsidize them, house them.
By the way, this is a guy who had been deported under the Trump administration.
He came back, he slipped back into the country, and then the Biden administration released him into the country.
And he, in fact, was living in a New York migrant shelter, which is to say that you and I, at least indirectly, taxpayers are paying for this guy.
This is Biden and Harris's America.
By the way, this is the America that would continue unabated if Harris had been elected.
The media is doing its usual work to downplay and cover up the episode.
For example, CBS Evening News has a short account of it.
ABC and NBC don't report the incident at all, even though it is all over social media.
This, I think, is a corroboration of Elon Musk's observation that X is becoming the media because this is where you get news.
This is what people are talking about.
And it's almost like you now recognize that what we call mainstream media just gives you the news that they want you to see, that they want you to consume.
And then you see a bunch of print headlines that pretend like the woman kind of got...
Was engulfed in flames for no reason at all.
In other words, the headline makes no reference to anyone doing it.
Woman engulfed in flames.
As if to say that somehow, this is spontaneous combustion.
You've heard of that probably from your chemistry.
Spontaneous combustion.
But no.
Somebody did this.
And the whole point of the headline is to conceal the fact that it was done By a Guatemalan.
It was done by a migrant.
Now, believe me, if this was done by, like, some white guy, it would be white supremacist sets woman on fire, and that would be the headline.
So, this also becomes a very interesting case study.
By the way, I'm referring to the deceitful AP headline, but there were many others as well.
Now, let me pivot from that to just a brief comment about what has been happening with regard to the funding of the government, the government shutdown that is now averted.
What's going on here is the simple fact that our congressional leadership is proving that it does not have any real appetite to cut spending.
The best that they can do is to leave it the way it is, increase spending here and there and there, but the idea of substantially reducing the budget, no one really wants to do that.
Even Republicans don't want to do that as a group.
There are some Republicans, Thomas Massey being a notable example.
There are a few others.
But you can't pass laws in this country unless you have a majority, a majority in the House and the Senate.
And it looks like we are in a kind of democratic, a small-D democratic trap.
In which it is in the interests of politicians, Republican and Democrat, to continue current levels of spending because the way that you get elected is you offer things to groups.
We need to help this group over here and that group over there and a subsidy for the farmers and an economic benefit to the corporations and these lobbyists want this and we want to build a bridge over here to create jobs over there.
And this is a disease that is especially contagious.
When it comes to elections and swing districts, because those swing districts are going to determine the control of Congress.
So a great deal of money is spent on those swing races.
And when I say spent on the races, I don't mean spent on the campaigns.
I mean spent on making massive giveaways to your own political team, if you will, or to your own voters to get them to vote for you.
And so the net result of this is Is that we have a budget in which the government takes in approximately, loosely, $3.5 trillion in tax revenue and spends something like $5.5 to $6 trillion.
I mean, notice that there's a $2 billion gap there.
And if you want to know how we get to a $35 or now $36 trillion deficit, That's the answer right there.
You just spend dramatically more than you have.
And the problem that I see is that there is sort of no end in sight for this.
In other words, it's one thing to say, you know, as a family, you might say, hey, listen, we're going through hard times.
We need to borrow more money.
We need to go into debt.
But, of course, your intention is that the hard times is not going to be permanent and there are going to be other times in which you...
You store up and you save and you pay down your debt.
At least this is the way we all have to behave as individuals or families.
And it's really striking that our country doesn't behave that way.
And that's bad not only as an example, a bad example to citizens, but it's bad also because it puts the country kind of on the road to an economic crash or an economic precipice.
The precipice is not right in front of us, but it's not all that far away.
And it is avoidable, but it's only avoidable if we can somehow change this fundamental dynamic in which both parties, politicians on both sides of the aisle, are addicted to a level of spending that goes way beyond the amount of money that they take in in taxes.
So this is something that Trump and Doge are going to have to look at and are going to have to deal with, but they are up against the dynamic of trying to get results out of politicians that have a vested interest in spend, spend, spend.
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I'm seeing a very interesting strategy being played out by the Democrats on social media platforms, namely the strategy of trying to drive a wedge between Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
The Democrats appear to communicate.
I don't know if they're communicating directly by memos that they send out or if they somehow are more like a herd of wildebeest that all run in the same direction and therefore echo the same type of noises as they move.
But I'm seeing eerily similar posts on various social media platforms all saying, well, I guess we have to say that Elon Musk is now the real president or Trump is taking orders from President Musk.
And there are even some memes and cartoons where Trump is basically, you know, Elon Musk is sort of riding on the back of Trump.
All of this is coming out from the left and from the Democrats.
And it's coming out in such a cluster that you can tell that they think they're onto something really big here.
I think this is really the reasoning of the Democrats.
They're like, Donald Trump is all about himself.
He's all about Trump.
And Elon Musk is all about himself.
In fact, according to the Democrats, and here I think specifically of AOC and Elizabeth Warren, they think that Elon Musk is really out for the money.
So here's Elizabeth Warren.
We need to establish conflict of interest rules for Elon Musk, because after all, he is the head of all these companies, including Tesla and SpaceX.
So the idea is that he might be somehow double dealing to benefit himself through his influence in government.
And here's AOC, says of Elon Musk, quote, he's trying to further explode his net worth.
This is what it is about for him.
Now, on the face of it, this is, I think, incredible, which is to say unbelievable, which is to say it shouldn't be and cannot really be believed, because how can someone who has hundreds of billions of dollars, whether it is 240 billion, 301 billion, or let's say 420 billion, What possible difference does it make?
How is this going to change anything that Elon Musk does?
What is it that you can do with 301 billion that you can't do with 220 billion?
I think it is a failure of imagination on the part of AOC and others to realize that those are, in practical terms, pretty much the same amount of money.
The same amount of money in terms of what you can actually do with it.
Elon Musk is not motivated by that.
He is, I would say, beyond that.
And you only have to recognize what kind of revenue $200 billion produces annually to realize that once you reach that kind of level, once you become the richest man in the world, to say that you're motivated by money doesn't make any sense.
I think for Elon Musk, he's motivated by, he has a vision for humanity.
Some of it is a little out there.
Not all of it I can identify with.
The idea of human colonies on Mars and so on is a bit far-fetched for me, at least certainly far-fetched for me in the Immediate or foreseeable future.
Whether this is something that's possible 50 years or 100 years from now, I'm not going to say because I know that the world now is quite different from what it was 50 years ago.
And so there are things today that we can't easily envision that become a reality five decades from now.
But I do want to make a point, and in fact Trump makes a version of the same point, this campaign to somehow get Trump to become all nervous about Elon Musk's influence and get Trump to distance himself from Musk is, I think, nonsensical.
Trump is very much the man in charge here, Elon Musk and Vivek.
Quite honestly, they don't even have a cabinet agency that is a normal cabinet agency.
They're going to make a report of restrictions and getting rid of regulations.
But they don't get rid of regulations.
Who gets rid of regulations?
Trump does, via executive order.
They don't get rid of agencies.
Trump gets rid of agencies, again, via executive order.
So Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, their power is derivative.
It's ultimately up to Trump.
He is the leader of the executive branch and all power flows upward to Trump and then downward from Trump.
Trump himself joked about all this.
He was asked about the threat, so-called, from Elon Musk.
And Trump goes, hey, What are you even saying?
First of all, not only is Elon Musk not a threat to me, Trump suggests, he can't even succeed me.
Because why?
He isn't born in America.
He's South African by birth.
And so he can't be president.
So Trump is actually just kind of...
Backhandedly pushing that idea aside, I think the relationship of Trump and Elon Musk is actually very good.
If anyone is sort of excited to be around the other, it is Elon Musk who's excited to be around Trump.
More even than perhaps the other way around.
And the proof of this is really simple.
Is Trump showing up at the SpaceX headquarters and hanging around there all day?
No.
It's Elon Musk who's showing up at Mar-a-Lago and refusing to leave.
That tells me that Elon Musk is infatuated with Trump.
Trump, I think, is very amused by the whole thing and is actually, I think, quite intrigued by the genius of Elon Musk.
I mean, Elon Musk is a remarkable figure.
Who else can you think of who's created multiple, multi-billion dollar companies and runs them all still to this day?
That's Elon Musk.
And so the idea that Elon Musk is advising Trump, I think, is on the balance an extremely good thing.
And the left knows it.
They know that Elon Musk is an enhancement to Trump's image and reputation and power.
And so they're doing their best to try to ruin it.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome back to the podcast Josh Hammer, Senior Editor of Newsweek, where he also hosts the Josh Hammer Show podcast and syndicated radio show.
He also writes a weekly newsletter, The Josh Hammer Report.
You can follow him on x at josh underscore hammer.
The new book, Israel and Civilization, The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.
Josh, thanks for making the time.
I really appreciate it, as always.
I thought we would talk today about Syria because this is something that I don't think people understand very well.
Syria has been run for quite a long time now by the dictator Bashar Assad.
And Assad is now out of power.
He is, I believe, hiding somewhere in Russia where he's been given asylum.
But what's going on in Syria?
Is this something we need to worry about?
And what are the implications for us?
So Syria is an interesting situation.
On the one hand, Dinesh, it's very much a two things can be true at once or a multiple things can be true at once situation.
So I did write my column two weeks ago, my weekly creator syndicate column, which goes up at Newsweek and a bunch of other places.
I did try to explain how a lot of people I think are getting the Syria issue wrong because you have had a lot of people.
Some kind of, shall we say, Bush-era neoconservatives.
A lot of people who have been kind of triumphously just pounding their chest and saying, oh, we got our guy.
Liberty and freedom and tyranny in Syria is no more.
These are a lot of people that were supporting the so-called Arab Spring during the Obama presidency, apparently unaware of the fact that the so-called Arab Spring was actually just a mass region-wide Muslim Brotherhood uprising.
It was a fundamentally Islamist movement.
It was being promulgated by Qatar and Al Jazeera.
And it was being supported by Hamas and arrested by Taip Erdogan in Turkey, who was a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood and various other extremist Sunni Islamist organizations.
And as we know, Dinesh, from the book of Ecclesiastes, there's nothing new under the sun because we're kind of seeing an Arab Spring 2.0 situation here in the country of Syria.
So again, Bashar al-Assad, terrible person, horrible, horrible, horrible person.
His father was a dictator of Syria as well.
The Assad family ran Syria into the ground for...
Over half a century, I mean, from the 1970s onwards, actually.
Assad's personal death toll is probably roughly 600,000 people.
I mean, we're talking here about Stalin-esque mass graves.
I mean, he will go down in the history books as a world historical tyrant, and no one should bemoan his demise.
I want to be very, very clear about that.
However...
However, the folks who are coming into power are not necessarily a whole lot better.
To kind of get back to what I was just saying, talking about this Islamist movement here.
So the organization that is now in de facto control of Syria, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Western media typically refers to it by its English acronym, HTS. This is a U.S. State Department-recognized foreign terrorist organization.
So, you know, first of all, we should just stipulate that, just like Hamas or Hezbollah.
This is a terrorist organization, a jihadist network.
It is led by a man by the name of Al Jelani, who has been somewhat of a career peripatetic jihadist, we might call him, someone who has been affiliated at times with Al Qaeda, with ISIS. He's humorously playing the Western game, so to speak.
So he's kind of – he claims that he's renounced his sympathy for al-Qaeda, and now he's talking about how he wants Syria to be a diverse country.
It kind of sounds at some point these days kind of like a Harvard faculty lounge member, frankly, by talking about all this pablum out about how diversity is our strength and all that there.
You really have to be quite naive and foolish, I think, to take al-Julani at face value.
There's already lots of empirical and anecdotal evidence alike, tragically, that Christians are already being persecuted in Syria because fundamentally the folks now in charge are Islamists.
These are radical Islamists.
Assad was a brutal strong man.
He was a puppet of both Russia and Iran.
Those are the two countries that controlled the Assad regime.
But he was not an Islamist.
And look, I'm not saying that religious and ethnic minorities were treated well, far from it.
They had a high death toll there.
But, you know, it's not necessarily the case that what replaces it is automatically better.
It's also a huge victory for Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who is rapidly emerging, I think, as a mid- to long-term strategic threat.
To Israel, to America's Gulf allies, such as the Saudis, the Emiratis, Bahrainis there.
You know, if the Iranian regime, frankly, goes down in a second Trump term, which is possible.
I mean, the maximum pressure campaign really was turning the screws very much on Iran the first time around.
So if, God willing, that regime ultimately goes the way of the dodo bird, it's entirely possible that Turkey under Erdogan could actually emerge really as the next big threat in the region.
And, you know, he's just gotten a massive, massive victory here with this coup of Assad in Syria.
Josh, I think the lesson that you're highlighting here is that a lot of times in the world when you have a dictator who's in power and an insurgency against that dictator, the assumption in America and in the West is that those people must be on the side of democracy.
We saw that, for example, when Somoza was overthrown in Nicaragua a generation ago.
But no, the rival Sandinistas were communists.
They weren't Democrats in any sense, and they had no intention of having free elections when they came to power.
Now, when we look at the Muslim world, it seems pretty clear that the two types of regimes that we...
the two types of power structures in the Muslim world are the secular autocrats, The Shah of Iran was one of them.
For example, I suppose Saddam Hussein would fall into that category.
Assad in his own way, perhaps.
But that the main rival force to these autocrats are these radical Muslim jihadi types.
And even though there might be other people in the mix...
This is the strongest faction, so it seems always to take power.
There might have been a bunch of people who fought against the Shah, but guess what?
It wasn't the liberal intellectuals or the secular Iranians.
It was the Khomeini people who got the country in the end.
Are you saying something similar has happened in Syria?
Yeah, very much so.
So the Assad regime, Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez Assad, going back to the 1970s, they were Ba'athists.
So Ba'athism is an Arab ideology.
It basically is pan-Arab nationalism.
It is more secular.
It is less radically Islamist.
It goes back...
At least as far as the 1960s, the other great example—well, not great—the other horrific example, really, of Ba'athism would be Saddam Hussein.
So Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the Assad regimes, both Hafez and Bashar in Syria, that really is Ba'athism.
And they are autocratic.
They are murderous.
They do gas-throwing people.
These are horrible, horrible people.
Unfortunately, again, when it comes to the Muslim world more generally here, what's on the other side is not necessarily always a heck of a lot better there.
Because the other side oftentimes does consist of people like Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood or Erdogan in Turkey or HTS now in Syria, people that support Sharia law.
Now, you know, if you're talking about what is the best possible option or at least the least bad possible option for what a type of regime might look like in the broader Arab world— You probably can look to a non-Islamist monarchy of some sort.
So the current regime in Saudi Arabia is probably the closest to what that would look like under Mohammed bin Salman.
He is somewhat of a precocious, forward-thinking monarch there.
He is heavily renounced Muslim Brotherhood.
He's heavily renounced Al-Qaeda and various fundamentalists, Sunni jihadist sects there.
That was not always the case in Saudi Arabia.
It was definitely not the case 15, 20 years ago.
The majority of the 9-11 hijackers were, of course, Saudi nationals.
But I mean, we know...
That the perfect cannot be the enemy of the good, and that generally speaking, when it comes to the Middle East, you really should try to just hope for the least bad option.
But I guess the one thing that I will say here, I do think that it is overall, and I'm hedging a lot, but I think it's overall a net good that Assad is gone.
I'm not beating my chest in saying rah-rah freedom because I'm not an idiot.
But I mean, I do think that strategically speaking, in the mid to long term, It is probably a good thing that Russia, China, and Iran have lost their guy in Syria.
So recall that Iran was really kind of trafficking lots of weapons, materiel, and fighters across what was known as the Shiite Crescent, from Iran through Iraq, which is now basically an Iranian satrapy, through Syria, then ultimately into Hezbollah, which has now been decimated thanks to the Israeli strikes over the past few months.
So without Syria, the Shiite Crescent has taken a massive blow.
And it's a huge blow as well to Russia, which is now scrambling because Russia had a naval base there in Syria.
So now Russia is redeploying to Libya, which is, if anything, an even more unstable country.
So from an American geostrategic perspective, it's probably on net a good thing that Russia, Iran, and to an extent China have taken such a big blow here.
But that should not blind us as to who the people currently in charge in Damascus are.
It's a very bad situation.
It's a huge victory again for Erdogan in Turkey, which strikes me as a very dangerous mid to long term country.
Let's turn to the significance of all this from the point of view of Israel, which is, of course, right there.
We are viewing these events from the distant lens of the United States.
The Israelis are looking right over their shoulder.
Does this contribute to the kind of instability in the region that is a concern for Israel?
Or do you think it's a good thing on balance for Israel as well and for the same reason?
Well, so one thing about the Israeli-Syrian border, and I've stood on that border.
I mean, they very much do share a border, actually.
So it's worth noting that I think it was literally the week before Assad formally fled to Moscow.
The United Nations took a vote as to whether or not Israel should give back the Golan Heights, which they have controlled for about 45, 50 years.
The UN literally voted as to whether or not Israel should give back the Golan Heights to Syria.
And I think the entire world either voted that they should or they abstained other than like seven or eight countries, thank goodness, including the United States.
I mean, those people literally voted to give a very strategic part of high-altitude mountainous land to a terrorist regime.
So I just want to make that point because the timing of this vote at the UN right off the top was just utterly, utterly crazy there.
So, Dinesh, the Israeli mentality, as far as I understand it, when it comes to the region, is basically the following.
It is better to deal with the devil you know than to risk chaos.
Now, this is very different, I might add, than kind of the Bush era neoconservative mentality, which is generally kind of just toppling dictators trying to spread this westernized liberal conception of kind of Jeffersonian, Lockean, European enlightenment thinking into these Islamic countries where it's fundamentally incompatible.
That's not really how the Israeli mentality works.
They tend to be more comfortable when they're dealing with people, no matter how evil they may be or no matter how much they hate them.
Better to deal with the devil you know there.
Now, sometimes, to be clear, something so horrific happens that the devil that you know simply has to be done with.
So October 7th would be a good example of that.
So Israel essentially tolerated Hamas in Gaza for 16, 17 years.
They did not try to topple that regime until October 7th.
And we can debate as to whether or not that was good policy, but that was the policy is the point there.
So I personally find it very difficult to believe that Israel had anything to do with the toppling of the Assad regime in Syria because, again, that's just not how.
the Israeli thinking tends to go there.
This really seems like it was a Turkish Erdogan operation there.
The one thing that I will say is that as a result of this, it looks like Israel has acquired Mount Hermon, which is the second tallest mountain in the entire region.
It's a very tall mountain there straddling the Israeli-Syrian border.
Very, very, very strategic mountain.
I hope my Israeli friends are getting ready to go skiing, actually.
I'm not sure how many own ski equipment, but it's apparently very good skiing conditions there in the very high altitude.
But that is an important strategic victory, that single mountain for Israel.
But generally speaking, Israel's been engaged with bombing a lot of chemical weapons depots and envoys there.
They're basically just trying to make sure, now that Assad is gone, that these weapons don't get in the hands of ISIS there.
It's common sense policy.
It's the kind of thing that America should support as well there.
So I think Israel is trying to do what it has to do from its own perspective right now.
But again, there's a lot of unknowns about al-Jelani, about this current regime in Syria, and they're just as unknown right now to the Israelis, I think, as they are to the Americans.
You mentioned, Josh, the United Nations and Trump intends to dispatch Elise Stefanik to the UN. I think our hope, anyway, is that she will be something of the firebrand that Jean Kirkpatrick was in the Reagan days, where she at least spoke up boldly for the interests of the United States.
But it does seem to be Tragic that this institution, which was founded by the United States along with Great Britain and for a time did represent U.S. interests pretty well, now appears to be a complete cesspool.
Is there any point to the U.N. anymore?
Is there something that can be done about this organization, which after all does sit right in the middle of New York City?
What should we do with the U.N.? There's two schools of thoughts on this.
On the one hand, there are people that agree that the UN is evil, which it is, and then simultaneously say, but it's still worth it because the US sits as a permanent member on the Security Council.
We get to veto a lot of this nonsense there.
It's still better that we're underwriting roughly 20% to 25% of the budget because then we can direct how the money goes there.
I'm basically apologists for the status quo.
And the fact that we give so much money to it, I mean, we are bestowing it a lot of moral legitimacy in the eyes of the world.
So I ultimately come down, Dinesh, on the other side of the ledger that the ends do not justify the means and that the United States should in the mid to long term seek to extricate itself from this completely toxic bear hug relationship with the United Nations there.
You know, whatever it may or may not have been founded on, it's an evil organization.
You have countries like Iran on the International Women's Rights Commission.
What kind of clown body is this?
Why should our taxpayer dollars, why should our people be involved in any way whatsoever about this?
Personally speaking, I I would seek to use eminent domain or whatever kind of other legal authority you would have to do in order to get an international soil building off your soil.
I would personally prefer to be fully removed there from the East River in Manhattan.
That's very nice real estate.
You can build a nice condo.
You can build some missile defense, point it straight at Tehran or Beijing if you want to, if you want to make a symbolic statement.
But, you know, there's various things you can do there.
But I personally, Dinesh, do not think that the ends justify the means.
This is an evil body.
I think that Donald Trump should frankly treat it as such.
Yeah, I mean, I agree.
I think Trump should negotiate with one of the leaders of a relatively backward African country about moving the UN there.
And then let's see how excited these diplomats are from all over the world to, you know, living in Harare or someplace like that.
I think you'll find the appeal greatly different.
Guys, I've been talking to Josh Hammer, Senior Editor of Newsweek.
Follow him on x at Josh underscore Hammer and look for the book, Israel and Civilization, the Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.
Josh, as always, thanks for joining me.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you, Dinesh.
Chapter four of my book, The Big Lie, is called A Democratic Party Secret.
And what is this secret?
Well, we get a clue from a quotation from the historian Tim Snyder.
This is a Harvard historian.
His book is called Bloodlands.
And here's the quote.
"'As Hitler imagined the future, Germany would deal with the Slavs much as the North Americans had dealt with the Indians.' The Volga River in Russia, he once proclaimed, will be Germany's Mississippi.
Now, this seems like a bit of a strange quotation, but it'll become clear as we talk about Hitler and the big idea that Hitler gets.
From Andrew Jackson and from the Democratic Party and from the Democratic Party's history in America.
So we are here at a surprising point in the book where we're not looking at what the Democrats got from the Nazis.
We're looking at the opposite.
What did the Nazis learn from the Democrats?
Now, this is such a taboo subject that if I were to raise the question, what do you think the Nazis learned from the Democrats?
And you say this on a typical college campus, students will look at you as if you are out of your mind, because the idea that the Nazis got anything at all, were influenced in any way by the Democratic Party, past or present, would seem ludicrous.
There's certainly no No indication, no hint, no mention of this in any textbook.
No history professor brings it up.
You never see it on PBS or the History Channel or never hear about it on NPR. And yet, it is right there in the historical record.
And this quotation from Timothy Snyder does allude to it.
It says that Hitler was looking to examples for what he was about to do in Germany, examples from America.
So let's get into what this really means.
Hitler was in Landsberg prison in 1924 and this was for his failed attempted push or attempt to overthrow the government.
And sitting in Landsberg prison, Hitler has a remarkable idea.
What is this idea?
Hitler looks around the world and he sees that Germany has been humiliated under the terms of World War I, the Treaty of Versailles.
He also sees that Britain and France have been, at least for all of his lifetime really, major colonial powers with colonies all over the world.
And Hitler is trying to apply these thoughts to his own situation in Germany.
He has a problem in Germany that he knows about and he wants to deal with the problem of the Jews.
But at this early stage, Hitler does not seem to be thinking in terms of Holocaust or death chambers or any of that.
He's basically thinking about how do I... How do I stigmatize the Jews?
How do I make them second class citizens?
How do I kind of segregate or ghettoize the Jews?
How do I force them to live in segregated communities as second class citizens?
And also, how do I chase them away?
How do I get them out of Germany?
Now, this is not a case of...
By the way, some people on the left will be like, yeah, the Hitler is acting just like Trump.
You know, he's trying to get rid of the illegals.
No, the Jews are not illegals.
The Jews are citizens of Germany.
Many of them have been in Germany for...
Not just decades, centuries.
So, the issue is not one of deporting illegals, but rather evacuating German citizens of Jewish origin out of their own native country.
Native in the sense that they have been there for a long time and they are, in fact, full citizens.
Now, Hitler never came to America.
He was interested in America, but he never traveled here.
He didn't like America, and his reasons for not liking America are pretty interesting.
For one, unsurprisingly, he thought there was too much Jewish influence in America.
That's one reason.
But the other reason is really interesting.
He says, quoting Hitler now,"...America is a country where everything is built on the dollar." And so here you get a hint of the way in which National Socialism, Nazism, is anti-capitalist.
And in fact, Hitler identified the Jews with capitalism, Jewish bankers and so on.
So for Hitler, the two things he didn't like about America reduced to one thing.
He didn't like the Jews, he didn't like capitalism, and so he says America is represented by Jewish capitalism.
However, Hitler looks to American history.
And what he does like, the things that do appeal to him, is he likes segregation.
He likes slavery.
And he likes Indian removal.
So the pushing of the Indians further westward and the seizure of their land.
Hitler goes, that's a great idea right there.
So this was done, by the way, by the Jacksonian Democrats, by Andrew Jackson, but also by his successor, Martin Van Buren.
This continued through most of the 19th century.
Indian removal is part of the legacy of the Democratic Party.
Hitler said, I like that.
I like that aspect of American history.
As I mentioned, Hitler liked the idea.
Well, he had no objection to enslavement.
In fact, he sided with the Democratic South over the Republican North in the Civil War.
And as we'll see later, he came to admire the segregationist policies of the Democratic Party in the American South.
Now, Hitler, as I mentioned, knows that the British and the French have all these territories abroad, But Hitler says, you know, there's a downside to this.
There's a downside to colonialism.
And what's the downside?
Well, the downside is basically, yes, you get to rule.
And Hitler did admire that.
But he goes, you're ruling over a bunch of black and brown people.
Like, that's not exactly pleasant from Hitler's point of view.
So Hitler's idea is, it's good to have colonialism, but it'd be good to be ruling over a bunch of white people.
So how do we do that?
Well, Hitler's idea was really simple.
We essentially do to the Indians what the Democrats did in America, except we do it to the other white people in Europe.
So we focus on the Slavs, we focus on the Eastern Europeans, we focus on the Poles, and we run over these people and we enslave them, pretty much exactly the way that the Democrats did in America.
We later can segregate them if we need to, or we can do that to the Jews right here in Germany.
So Hitler's plan is called Lebensraum.
Lebensraum basically means living space.
And for Hitler, colonialism is a form of getting more living space for the Germans.
Now, Lebensraum is not exactly an idea that Hitler invented per se.
But what Hitler did was he said, let's do Lebensraum the way that the Democrats have done it in America.
So that's the Hitler innovation.
So there were other German writers who bemoaned the fact that Germany and France had bigger empires.
And they were like, yeah, we too, we Germans need living space.
But these writers weren't saying that Germany should now militarily equip itself and overrun, say, Austria or Czechoslovakia or Poland.
But this was Hitler's idea.
Hitler's idea was, let's look around the world and let's look at the way in America that the Democratic Party spearheaded this move to take the Indians and throw them off their land and drive them further west and then take their land He goes, let's do that.
That's our model.
So I'm pointing out here that Hitler is getting his idea of how to do things and his inspiration from the Democratic Party in America.
This is the party of Andrew Jackson.
I'm not really saying that Hitler wouldn't have invaded any other country if he wasn't inspired by the American example.
We don't know how the world would have turned out if Hitler knew nothing about America, never figured anything out, didn't draw his inspiration from people like Andrew Jackson or the South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun, who was the great defender and apostle of Of segregation and of slavery.
Not so much of segregation.
Actually, Calhoun died too early to see real segregation.
But of course, Calhoun was the defender of the so-called positive good school of slavery.
So the point here is that we are doing something I want to call a prehistory of Nazism.
And I say a prehistory because when you say Nazism, most people think World War II, the Holocaust.
And that is the way we see Nazism now because we're looking at Nazism through the rearview mirror.
What we're doing with our prehistory of Nazism is trying to forget that all those things are going to come later.
What we're trying to do is look at Nazism in the early stages.
Look at the inspiration of where did people like Mussolini and Hitler get their ideas?
Where were the borrowings back and forth across the Atlantic?
Part of what I'm going to show in this book is there's a lot of mutual Admiration societies and mutual borrowings going on between the progressive left and the Democratic Party in America and the fascists all over Europe and specifically the National Socialists or Nazis in Germany.
And all of this is a way of saying that when fascism and ultimately Nazism came to power, notice we're talking here about a period before they came to power, but when they came to power, right away you can see why the Democrats in America were like, whoa, we recognize those guys.
They're a lot like us!
And what I'm trying to show is that the reason For this familiarity, for this sense of those people are on our team, they're doing the same kind of things that we're trying to do here in America is because there was a lot of borrowing back and forth between the two sides long before the Democrats came to power in America through FDR and long before the fascists and the Nazis came to power in Italy and Germany respectively.
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