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Jan. 8, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
52:13
FACT CHECK THIS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep996
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Thank you.
Thank you.
Coming up, I'll examine the significance of Mark Zuckerberg's decision to roll back the censorship and get rid of the fact-checkers.
I want to consider some of Trump's unexpected recent statements about Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal.
And political commentator Oron McIntyre joins me.
We're going to talk about what is meant by the term woke right.
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I want to talk about Mark Zuckerberg's important announcement that he is going to jettison, get rid of the fact-checkers, and cut back on the censorship, and cut back on the censorship, open up political discussion, allow more...
Open exchange on the border, even on issues of gender, which I think he knows means for the most part transgender.
These topics in particular were heavily censored by the left-wing army of censors and so-called fact-checkers that Zuckerberg has employed over the past several years.
Nick Clegg, who is the chief censorship officer of Meta, Or Facebook has resigned.
Joel Kaplan, a conservative and a Republican who has been calling for pulling back on the censorship, has replaced him.
Dana White, clearly a Trumpster, has been added to the meta board of directors.
And wow, this is a big change, regardless of what you think of Zuckerberg.
This is a signal.
And you can see the importance of it if you just flash your mind back four years ago.
Think about it.
Four years ago today, Trump had been kicked off or restricted on Facebook, Twitter, Google, Spotify, Snapchat, Instagram, Reddit, Twitch, YouTube, TikTok.
Trump was essentially gone from social media, and I suppose part of this was the impetus for starting Truth Social Trump's, in a sense, own channel, his own platform.
And so we are in a new environment, an environment that could end up being very significant, because now what you have is, you have two major platforms now that are anti-censorship.
And one that remains pro-censorship.
So the one that remains pro-censorship, of course, is YouTube, run by Google.
And that is a nest of vipers.
But I think there's going to be very strong pressure on YouTube and Google.
To go the way of Facebook and X. By the way, remember that Zuckerberg was very candid that he's going to be following the model on X of community notes, which is you can offer a commentary and say, I want to put this in context.
Or even dispute something on a factual basis.
But that doesn't mean it gets taken down.
It just means readers get to see what the person posted and then they get to see what the community note says and make up their own mind.
So the market itself, not to mention the Trump administration, I think will exercise some leverage or weight.
On YouTube to follow suit, to reduce if not eliminate its censorship regime.
Now, all of this has many people, including Brian Stelter at CNN, very unhappy.
Here's Brian Stelter.
Mark Zuckerberg's MAGA makeover will reshape the entire internet.
I certainly hope so.
But this is what Stelter is worried about.
I'm going to read you a line which gives you an idea of his thinking.
He's quoting Zuckerberg.
Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more, Zuckerberg said, repeating a right-wing talking point used to undermine fact-checking.
So you can see for Stelter, Stelter is basically a spokesman for...
The low-IQ people in the media.
He's very low-IQ himself, so he fits right in with this group.
And something that we ought to know is that these fact-checkers are not, for the most part, academic researchers.
Who are they, really?
Answer?
They're journalists.
And they're journalists who sit very often at flailing...
Going bankrupt, loser media organizations, organizations that can't sustain themselves and would go under if not for the revenue that they get from, quote, fact-checking.
So really what's happened over the last several years is that traditional media outlets, left-wing media outlets, which were sinking under the ocean, figured out that they could run a scam.
And the scam was they bullied YouTube and Facebook into hiring A bunch of them.
And I'll tell you how many in a minute.
An army of fact-checkers.
And that basically meant lots of money and paychecks flowing from Facebook and YouTube to an army of journalists who otherwise might find that their own journalistic output is worth exactly zero dollars in the market.
It also gave these journalists the power of being...
Not gatekeepers directly, because you can't be a gatekeeper at like the Washington Post.
The only power you have is over your own newspaper.
But they realize that these digital moguls have power over entire platforms.
They can throw millions of people off and block them or silence them.
And so these people were able to exercise a very malevolent leverage this way.
And now they're all freaking out.
Here's an article in Wired.
Meta's fact-checking partners say they were...
I'm now quoting them, that funding means survival.
They're worried, like, where's my paycheck going to come from?
How am I going to pay my mortgage?
And this is something interesting.
Well, I have a solution for them, by the way.
There are lots of tyrannical and dictatorial regimes around the world.
There's China, there's North Korea, there's Cuba, Venezuela.
I guess it's too bad for them.
The old Soviet Union is out of business.
So go offer your services to these totalitarian regimes.
You already have the totalitarian mindset, and maybe you can find some employment over there.
Maybe you can get paid in Chinese yen or in Venezuelan, what is it, the Bolivar, even though the Bolivar is worth basically nothing.
But then you're worth nothing also, so it's kind of a good match.
Meta, it turns out, believe it or not, employed.
And I had to sort of read this number twice.
40,000 fact-checkers.
I repeat, Meta employed 40...
40,000 fact-checkers, 40,000 bums and losers were getting checks from Mark Zuckerberg to do this fact-checking.
No wonder this was being conducted on such a massive scale.
You basically have the population of a small town employed in this fact-checking enterprise.
Pushing back against the Zuckerberg announcement.
And I can kind of see where they're coming from.
They're basically saying, look, this guy is such an opportunist.
It's not that he's had some change of heart, really.
Frankly, if Kamala Harris had won the election, he would not be doing any of this.
He might even be doubling down on the censorship.
This is a way of saying that Zuckerberg is not really any kind of a leader.
He's sort of a follower.
He watches to see which way the wind is blowing.
And then he runs in that direction.
So he can be counted on not to do the right thing, but to do the convenient thing.
And a lot of conservatives have highlighted Zuckerberg's long litany of past offenses and crimes.
First of all, he banned any discussion of the lab leak theory regarding COVID. Second of all, he banned discussion about the efficacy of vaccines.
Third, he sought to influence the outcome of the 2020 election, not just through Facebook itself and through his censorship regime there, but also by pumping money.
He was willing to put close to half a billion dollars of his own money essentially to rig the 2020 election.
He had left-wing activists inside the election offices that administered these elections in places like Wisconsin.
Facebook was also controlling information to promote the Russia collusion hoax, the Ukraine impeachment hoax, the insurrection hoax.
It goes on and on and on.
I think what the conservatives are saying is that, look, okay, if Zuckerberg wants to change course, to turn the ship around, then he needs to do something more than just announce, guess what, I'm turning the ship around.
He needs to do some...
Some sincere apology.
Some sincere accounting for how things went wrong so badly.
After all, one of the points that the fact checkers have made, and I agree with them on this, is they're like, listen, we were hired by Facebook to do a job.
We basically were the censorship.
We're apparatchiks.
We were the kapos.
But obviously, who was the don?
Who was the one directing the whole effort, if not Zuckerberg?
Who's running Facebook?
The people at Facebook are the ones paying us.
So they set the priorities.
They decide what topics they want to censor.
We carry it out.
We are, if you will, good Nazis doing our jobs.
And so this is not to let the fact-checkers off the hook at all, but it is to say that they worked for a sort of corrupt regime headed by this guy.
Zuckerberg.
And so, I agree with this.
I think that Zuckerberg does need to do a little bit, certainly more of a mea culpa, certainly more of a...
Because there are people who lost their, not just their reach, but in some cases, their livelihoods.
These are people who had monetized places like Facebook and they were making a living doing commentary or doing podcasts or doing whatever it is that they do.
And for some of us, you know, we get a strike and we're able to just keep going because it's just one thing out of many things.
But for a lot of people, Facebook is the thing.
Just like on YouTube, there are people who make a living on YouTube.
And if YouTube does censorship, it affects those people.
So I welcome the change on the part of Zuckerberg.
I hope it signals something big in terms of a shift in the culture, and yet at the same time, one shouldn't be too quick to let the freaky robot named Mark Zuckerberg off the hook.
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I want to talk, perhaps somewhat lightly or whimsically, about all this talk that is coming from the Trump camp about annexing Canada and taking over the Panama Canal and buying Greenland.
Yesterday, I did my Q&A on locals and a number of people were like, Dinesh, Like, is this serious?
Is Trump really going to do any of this?
And with Trump, you have to be...
My initial instinct was to say Trump is being playful.
Trump is joking around.
Trump is trying to put leverage on some people.
He wants the Canadians to shut the border on the northern side.
Obviously, he's trying to have the same leverage with Mexico on the southern side.
You can't be too sure.
Now, let me start by talking about the Panama Canal, because the Panama Canal was an absolute disaster when Jimmy Carter gave it away to Canada.
The United States, by the way, built a canal, paid for it.
Reagan pointed all this out.
And Carter basically turned it over to Panama.
He gave away a hugely important asset.
Recently, I saw Caitlin Collins on CNN, and she goes, Giving away the Panama Canal was, quote, one of his biggest accomplishments as president.
And I'm thinking, what a way to think about it.
Well, see, this is the post-Obama left.
Whenever America suffers a big defeat, loses reputation, loses power, loses privilege, it is seen as wonderful.
It's seen as an accomplishment.
It's like something amazing that we did.
By hurting ourselves.
And that, I think, is the Caitlin Collins mentality.
From the left's point of view, diminishing America is always considered an achievement or an accomplishment.
Now, with regard to Canada, I think Trump is trying to renegotiate our dealings with Canada.
And by this I mean when Trudeau came to visit Trump, Trump apparently said to him, listen, you know, we're...
We're subsidizing Canada in all kinds of ways, including, by the way, in providing a kind of umbrella of defense to Canada.
It's costing us $200 billion a year.
And the way Trump puts it is, look, if you want the protection, you ought to be part of America.
If you're part of America, we protect you for the same reason that we protect Maine and we protect Idaho and we protect California.
But if you're another country that's...
Nothing to do with us.
You just happen to be to our north.
It's kind of like saying, you know what?
I'm going to buy a shotgun to protect my property, but guess what?
I'm going to agree to protect my neighbor's property, too.
No, you're not, because he's your neighbor.
So Trump is using, I think, a certain type of straightforward logic and saying, not so much that I'm going to make Canada join the United States, but if you want the protection...
Why don't you come under our umbrella?
And then we will have a single kind of cordon of protection.
And if you don't, then why are we paying the $200 billion a year?
Why don't you pay to defend yourself?
In effect, get your own shotgun.
So I think that's what's going on there.
I don't anticipate that Canada is going to join the United States anytime soon.
I think this is the push and pull that is going on between Trump and, of course, Trudeau is getting out of there.
And I'm going to talk about this tomorrow.
I have a good guest to discuss the future of Canada with the execrable Trudeau exiting the stage.
On Greenland, I really don't know what's going on.
I've seen some intimations from the Trump camp that it's not Trump so much himself, but others around Trump.
And apparently Don Jr. made a trip to Greenland to sort of check things out over there.
Now, everything I've seen from the authorities in Greenland is like, you know, we're not leaving Greenland.
We're not joining the United States.
So I think that this was really more of just an escapade and possibly even a little bit of a stunt.
But things could change if Greenland has real strategic value.
Now, I haven't seen an argument for why we need to own Greenland or how Greenland enhances the security of the United States.
Probably it's fair to say that Greenland is more important to the United States than, say, Afghanistan.
And look at the amount of time and money that was spent.
On, quote, democratizing Afghanistan.
So I think the good thing that we're seeing here is that we have an incoming president who thinks strategically.
This is what America first means.
It means, let's look at whether this is a good deal for us, whether or not you can make the deal happen, whether or not the terms ultimately work out.
Remains to be seen.
But I think what Trump is really signaling here is kind of everything is on the table.
He is open to increasing the size of the United States.
This doesn't mean, by the way, that any of these places are going to become states and don't worry about, like, left-wingers and Greenland voting for the Democratic Party.
I think that if there are any additions to the United States, they would come in as territories, a la Puerto Rico, so that they would have some status as being related to us, but they would not be states in the normal sense of the term.
But we are in a new era, and the possibilities are seemingly endless.
So we will see what happens with Canada, with the Panama Canal, and with Greenland.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome back to the podcast our friend Oren McIntyre.
He's a columnist, a lecturer, he's an author, and a political theorist.
He's the host of The Oren McIntyre Show, the podcast on The Blaze, and he lives with his wife and son in Florida.
Hey Oren, thanks for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
I've been talking on the podcast about this announcement by Mark Zuckerberg.
That he's going to get rid of the fact-checkers.
And apparently there's a rather large legion of them.
I had no idea there were so many of them.
Apparently they number in the thousands.
So he says he's doing that.
And also that he is going to roll back on the censorship, and he said specifically on issues dealing with the border and gender issues.
Now, I suppose at the first glance all of this is welcome news, but also at the same time we're all very suspicious given Mark Zuckerberg's track record.
What do you make of this latest announcement?
Is it a genuine change of heart?
What do you think we can expect?
I think a lot of people are right to be skeptical.
When you win a mandate like Trump did, people sit up and take notice.
And Mark Zuckerberg is somebody who wants to be on the right side of power.
He runs a massive company.
He doesn't want to be regulated.
He doesn't want to be on the wrong side of the people in charge.
So when the woke were in charge, when the left were in charge, it was clear that the Democrats were running everything.
Zuckerberg was out there being on their side, censoring the things that they wanted.
Censored even donating his own money to change the outcome of the election.
And ultimately creating a jobs program for a bunch of leftists through the fact-checking industry, as you just pointed out.
The left is really good at that.
Everything is actually a patronage network.
But now he sees the winds of change coming, and so he says, well, if the right is going to be in charge for a while, if it looks like Trump didn't just get across the finish line, but he really, truly did win a big election, and that seems to offer some kind of shift in the mentality.
Well, he wants to be on that side, too.
I doubt that Zuckerberg is a deeply ideological creature.
Ultimately, he wants to run his company, do it efficiently, and do it without the government getting involved as much as possible.
And so he's going to kind of bend whichever way is convenient for him and his company.
There are people who are ideologues up in kind of the Fortune 500. There surely are businessmen who are deeply bought into the leftist ideology.
But, you know, Zuckerberg, the joke is he's barely...
It's really human most of the time and I think you can kind of see that here.
I mean, I guess we get an insight here into a broader point about society, don't we?
Which is that when we saw all these businesses buying into DEI and woke culture, and we're tempted to think, wow, this is the product of the university system.
All these CEOs are coming out of Ivy League schools where they've been indoctrinated.
And as you say, that may be true in some cases, but most people are, A, And so they're not doing anything that is all that political in their view.
They're just trying to stay on the right side of the people who could do them a lot of harm.
And they also want to look cool so that when the political wind shifts...
I guess what we're learning is that you're going to have a bunch of opportunists who come over to our side, and maybe that's not an entirely bad thing.
In fact, that is actually one of the indices that your side is winning.
Yeah, they like you when you win.
That's really all there is to it.
A lot of Eastern Bloc countries in Europe went from being fascist to communist to liberal democracies, and in each iteration, the elites of those countries...
Really did believe somewhat in that ideology.
Ideology is something that people do change on a relatively regular basis.
It doesn't mean that they didn't have some level of sincere belief, but when the incentives change, when the winds of power change, when social consensus changes, you get what's called a preference cascade.
And I'm somebody who believes deeply in elite theory.
Once you see the change at the top happen, then you see it cascade down through the ranks and to the common people.
And what we saw was that slowly but surely, the average person was pretty fed up with what the left was doing.
Trump embodied that energy, and once he won that mandate, a lot of people at the top are saying, I
think, Oren, that...
What you say is quite right and runs counter to what a lot of conservatives believe.
Because I remember even years ago, I went to a talk by the renowned Christian Chuck Colson, who had worked in the Nixon administration.
And Chuck Colson was, the theme of his talk was basically, real change comes from the ground up.
And I remember just my mind rebelling throughout the talk and saying to myself, actually, no, it looks like change by and large comes from elites and then filters down or trickles down, if you will, to the society at large.
But the lesson I draw from that is that...
Is that our side needs elites as well.
In other words, the very fact that we now have a constellation of very powerful people from Elon Musk to all the billionaires in the Trump cabinet, powerful people in media, this is an elite to take on the elite on the other side.
And some people, there are some MAGA people who think you can do without that.
I think you believe, and I believe also, that you can't.
Yeah, the political theorist Valfredo Pareto said that change always comes through the ruling elite class.
And whenever you have men of ambition, like Elon Musk, who are limited by the current regime, or you have very bright people who are pushed out of any of these influential positions like we see through the DEI regime, what you get is built up as a counter-elite, a group of people who are outside.
They have elite skills.
They have elite resources.
But they are outside the ruling coalition because however it's constructed, they are excluded.
They can't be a part of what's going on.
And when you get enough talented people built up outside of the ruling class, the ruling class becomes weak and those counter-elites become stronger.
And I think what we saw is what Pareto would call a rotation of elites, where not all of them suddenly disappear, but there's a...
Fundamental shift in the balance of power inside the elite coalition.
Those that were in power are waning.
Those that were pushing the DEI regime are waning.
And those that want America to be able to achieve, people who want to go to Mars, who want to build things, they are the ones who are on the ascent.
And so we are starting to see guys like Elon Musk and David Sachs and others who were left more left wing see the opportunity through Trump to throw away some of the worst parts of what the left has been doing and put America back in a place where guys like that can achieve again.
And so I think that's why we're seeing a big move now.
Those elites are moving in and that's signaling to everybody else.
OK, there is a real movement here now.
It's not just a scraggly bunch of people fighting against power.
They have really backing.
And now this is something we want to be a part of.
As I think back over the last 50 years or so, it seems like we've seen almost a kind of alternation between the age of the bureaucrat and the age of the entrepreneur.
Because if we go back to the 1960s, you remember John F. Kennedy basically saying, in effect, if you're young, if you're idealistic, if you care, don't go into business.
Join the Peace Corps.
In other words, join the government.
This is the true avenue of American idealism.
And that defined the era of the 60s and 70s.
Reagan came along and basically said, no, you know, the bureaucrat is kind of a do-nothing guy.
Reagan made all kinds of jokes about these bureaucrats who sat at their desk all day with nothing to do.
And Reagan celebrates the entrepreneur.
And then we see in the 80s and 90s this massive technological boom that defines the Reagan era.
Then along comes Obama.
And he restores, if you will, the prestige of the bureaucracy.
Once again, we're back to sort of the idea that the government is the solution.
And it could well be that we are now seeing a second boost of the technological entrepreneurial age, but this time associated not so much with Reagan as with Trump.
It's interesting that with Trump, it didn't happen so much, I don't think, in 2016, even though we had a good economy under Trump.
The level of entrepreneurial energy that seems ready to burst out just seems to me right now of a completely different magnitude and dimension.
Do you agree?
Yeah, there's definitely kind of this...
Haggard moment that a lot of the businessmen, the entrepreneurs were going through throughout the Biden administration, the way that they had been constrained, the things that they wanted to do, the way that different social pressures had made them...
Choose people for their political or their ideological or their racial or sexual characteristics rather than for their ability.
And now they see an opportunity to free themselves from those shackles.
And you're right to see it as a cycle, right?
We get this burst of creativity.
Money is made.
Inventions are created.
And then we start to get the structures that are built around it.
As everything scales up, the complexity increases.
We get more and more managers, more and more bureaucrats.
And they start pulling different resources away.
And so it's really important to recognize that we are always going to see kind of that shift towards the bureaucracy after one of those big explosions because people want to pull those resources into their own structures, their own political networks, instead of allowing these people to continue to do what they're doing.
And like I said, they're very sick of it at this point.
They're ready to get back to work.
They're ready to go back to creating, growing, doing things that are important.
That's really what many of these people came to America to do or really see as the American spirit.
Oren, let's talk about a skirmish that you have gotten involved in recently, but I want to have you comment on it just to illuminate the underlying issues, which...
We all know about DEI. We all know about the phenomenon of the woke.
And we identify wokeism, if you will, with...
Political correctness with the left, with the attempt to kind of impose an ideology of identity politics.
But of late, we have seen this term sort of percolate up.
And to be honest, I can't say I followed it really closely, but it's the woke right.
And can you clarify what this is all about?
What is the issue here?
And what does the term woke right even mean?
Yeah, it's difficult to clarify because the people who use it don't even know.
Guys like James Lindsay and Constantine Kissin who have it regularly in kind of their rotation of what they're saying, when they've been asked what does it mean, they'll say, well, it's actually not a great term and it's not really precise.
So I can't really define it for them.
What I can say is that a lot of these guys are people from the left.
I'm sure you guys remember, you know, kind of the intellectual dark web and Barry Weiss's story about, you know, Sam Harris and Joe Rogan and all these guys who used to be on the left, but then they kind of didn't get the next update when it came to progressivism.
They were ready to redefine marriage, but not gender, you know, that kind of thing.
And they said this far, but no further.
And they kind of ended up on the right.
And so a lot of these guys, you know, some like Sam Harris, you know, went back to the left.
Some like Jordan Peterson became more right wing.
But a lot of them, like...
James Lindsay were basically still leftists, but they have a lot of the beliefs that they had beforehand, but they find themselves working with the right because they agree on free speech and not mutilating children.
And that's great.
I'm glad that they agree with those things.
But the problem was that we're never right-wing.
And so after we kind of got past those issues, like, okay, we all agree that we are for free speech, and now Elon's helping us get more free speech.
Okay, we're all against this child mutilation, so we should pass laws against that.
We agree with that.
Okay.
But then it turns out, you know, when, say, Christians want to be governed in a way that is in accordance with the Bible, they want their Christian faith to have an influence on the laws of their land and the things that their children are taught, all of a sudden a lot of these guys are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's a bunch of fascism, that's a bunch of, I didn't sign up for that.
They were only here for the free speech.
They were only here for maybe the gender issue.
But when it came to going back to actual conservative beliefs, Christian beliefs, a lot of these guys are atheists.
A lot of them were leftists for most of their life, and they're just not willing to go there.
So I think the clash you're seeing is really between kind of The new crop of neoconservatives, the people who got pushed out, the left left me, and they went too far, and I'm going to be conservative, and the people who were actually conservative, the people who actually had right-wing beliefs the entire time, and said, okay, no, I actually want to implement those when we're governing.
It's not just some theoretical thing that I was keeping in a corner.
So now that we're in power, we would like that to be something that we are doing.
And I think that's why you see this reaction, them calling people the woke right, because it's just, I think, a polemical term at the end of the day.
In just trying to think of what you just said, that there's a certain type of procedural classical liberalism that envisions a neutral state, and that envisions kind of, you know, you have economic freedom, you have freedom of speech, and these are kind of procedures, but they are open procedures.
They don't take sides.
They don't say that this speech is better than that speech.
They just say that speech should be permitted.
So freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, right to vote, economic liberalism.
But modern American conservatism includes that, but it's not restricted to that.
It includes a kind of positive vision of what a good society looks like.
In other words, it says something like, you know, when the founders talk about the pursuit of happiness and the American dream, they're not neutral about what that dream is.
If 350 million Americans all decided freely to become pornographers, the American founders wouldn't go, "What an amazing republic we've created!" Not at all!
Could it be that this is the breaking point, that the old leftists want this procedural liberalism, but the moment you say to them, this is our positive vision of a good society, they go, whoa, that's the woke right speaking.
Is that an accurate summary of what's going on?
I think that's exactly correct.
And the thing about this vision of classical liberalism is, as you're just pointing out, it never existed.
John Locke didn't believe that atheists should be allowed to hold office or influence public opinion.
The founders...
Had state churches in most of their states when the Constitution was written.
Our understanding of the neutral state today in modern America has very little resemblance with what the founders themselves believed or what the original philosophers who came up with classical liberalism believe.
What we're really seeing is relatively modern liberalism.
This idea that states could be entirely neutral, have no values, that institutions are completely free from bias.
And what that belief does is blinds us to abuses of the system.
So we just went through this pandemic lockdown.
Everyone believed that our medical institutions were liberal and neutral and unbiased.
And then it turns out, actually, no, guys like Fauci are deeply political.
They have deep beliefs that they want to foist upon you, and they will use their position from inside these neutral institutions to...
Force that view on you, just like we see with our universities, just like we see with so many of our government institutions.
And ultimately, the truth is every institution has a worldview.
Every institution has a belief system.
Everybody has a political theology at the end of the day, and that is going to inform the things that they do with power.
Recognizing that is what many people who use the term woke right, that's what they have a problem with.
You're noticing how power works and that power has an opinion.
It has a position.
It's not neutral and it never will be.
That is scary for a lot of people because that means we have to positively affirm a vision.
We have to actually have a positive vision for who we are and what we want to be.
There's a telos to our society.
We are moving towards it.
These are things that scare people who wanted to be in this live and let live society for the rest of their lives.
But history didn't stop in the 1990s.
We aren't going back to Bill Clinton liberalism.
That is just not what's going to happen.
When you sit there and let that happen, what you get is a woke takeover institutions because institutions are never neutral.
And if you treat them as if they are neutral, then another force will come in and ultimately inform the decisions that they make.
Yeah, great stuff.
Very interesting.
Guys, I've been talking to Oran McIntyre.
Follow him on X at Oran, A-U-R-O-N-M-A-C-I-N-T-Y-R-E. Oran, as always, thank you very much for joining me.
Great talking to you.
I'm drawing on my book, The Big Lie, which is now out in paperback.
We're talking about parallels between the left in America, The progressive left and the Democratic Party, on the one hand, and the emerging fascist and Nazi movements in Italy and Germany, respectively.
And I described last time how the Nazis patterned the Nuremberg Laws, which turned Jews into second-class citizens, on the racist codes of the Democratic South.
The Nuremberg Law was...
It was officially called the Law for the Protection of German Blood and the Reich Citizenship Law.
And it is well known that these laws, which were a kind of, some people have called them a dress rehearsal for the Holocaust, and it is not well known in this country, and it's certainly not taught.
And it's rarely promulgated in documentaries or movies or the media that the Nazis lifted this from the democratic policies of the American South.
Now, there's one very interesting modification the Nazis made, a modification so interesting it is virtually, well, it's almost humorous.
And that is that the Nazis, in trying to outlaw interracial marriage, and also...
To do segregation, you do have to answer the question, who is a Jew?
And so the Nazis were like, how do we do that?
What is the parallel for that?
What did the Democrats do, basically, in the United States?
And one of the Nazis who had studied in Arkansas explained that the Democrats have this policy under segregation that is called the one-drop rule.
Now, the one-drop rule did not exist under slavery.
There are a lot of people, in fact, there are even some slavery scholars who think that the one-drop rule was there under slavery and then was simply extended through segregation, but that is not true.
I document this, by the way, in an earlier book of mine called The End of Racism.
Under slavery, there was no one-drop rule.
The status of being a slave passed through the mother.
So, the simple fact of it is if your mom was a slave, you're a slave.
And that's why, by the way, some of these mulatto kids who were born on the plantation became slaves because they inherited their slave status through the mother.
Now, under segregation, it was different.
And the Democrats adopted a very harsh rule, which is essentially any discernible black ancestry makes you black.
It doesn't matter if you've got your one-eighth black or one-sixth black.
It doesn't matter.
If you sort of look blackish, you're black.
And that's where the one-drop rule comes in.
Obviously, it's not literal because there's no way of finding out if you have one drop.
But the one-drop rule is a way of symbolizing that any racial mixture or admixture qualifies you to be segregated basically with...
Now, the Nazis took this up.
And very interestingly, in their discussion, and we know about the discussion because records were kept of it, they felt this was too harsh.
They felt like you can't, you know, you have a guy who's got, let's just say, three white or non-Jewish grandparents.
And is one-fourth Jewish.
Are you going to make that guy a Jew just because he has some Jewish ancestry, even though, let's just say, for example, his family are practicing Christians?
Does that make any sense?
Well, the Nazis were like, we can't do that.
That's too extreme.
In other words, the Nazis found the racism of the Democratic Party too much, even for them.
And so, they decided to build their Nuremberg Laws on a much more limited principle.
You could call it the three-fourths principle.
In other words, in order to qualify as Jewish, you had to have three Jewish grandparents.
In other words, it wasn't even enough to be half-Jewish.
You had to be three-fourths Jewish or more, and anyone who was less than that could not be segregated under the Nuremberg Laws.
Now, there were some exceptions to that rule.
But in general, this was what the Nazis decided.
Now, I mentioned that a lot of what I've been talking about is described in a book by the Yale scholar.
His name is James Whitman.
And I want to emphasize the point that Whitman is always covering for the Democratic Party.
I want to read a few lines from his book, which is very tellingly called Hitler's American Model.
The book really should have been called Hitler's Democratic Model because Hitler was looking to the policies of the Democratic Party.
But James Whitman realized, listen, I can please my progressive colleagues and I won't get into any hot water.
Not to mention I won't embarrass myself since I too am a Democrat.
I'll just take the things that the Democratic Party did and blame them on America.
And he does this consistently throughout his book.
He says, for example, that American law remained a regular Nazi point of reference.
No, it wasn't American law because these laws were not...
There were no laws in Oregon or California or Chicago or Maine that the Nazis drew on at all.
They are drawing on laws from a particular part of America, the so-called Solid South, dominated by one political party, namely the Democratic Party.
Again, here's Whitman.
The Nazis, quote, repeatedly turned to the American example.
No, they didn't.
They repeatedly turn to the democratic example.
And finally, Whitman concludes, quote, American white supremacy provided, to our collective shame, some of the working materials for Nazism in the 1930s.
No, it wasn't American white supremacy.
It was the white supremacy of the progressive left and of the Democratic Party.
So what's really going on here is there's an attempt to cover up for the racism of the Democratic Party and of the left.
Not one time does Whitman talk about Democrats.
Never does he point a finger of blame at, quote, the progressives.
Not once does he mention the left.
And this, I think, is part of a strategy.
Let's remember, to repeat a point I've made on the podcast before.
Every segregation law in the South...
It was passed by Democratic legislatures.
Every such law was signed into power by a Democratic governor, enforced by Democratic sheriffs, Democratic city and state officials.
It was progressives who passed the racist immigration laws of 1924. The Ku Klux Klan was the military arm of the Democratic Party.
So when the Nazis look across the pond and they go, we like the Klan because it's enforcing white supremacy.
It's important to realize they like an arm of the Democratic Party.
And that's what these American scholars like Whitman are trying to hide.
And we see this attempt to hide also when people generically blame the South.
Because the South did this and the South did that.
But what they don't pay attention to is the fact that this regional divide of the Civil War between the North and the South...
Also had an ideological divide between the Northern Republican Party and the Southern Democratic Party.
Let's remember, for example, that the Republican Party really didn't have any constituency in the South.
Lincoln's name did not even appear on the ballot in most of the Southern states.
And so the Republican Party was, to that degree, a regional party.
The Democratic Party, of course, did exist in the North, but its real power was in the South.
So that's the point I'm trying to make here.
By the way, my former colleague at AEI, Josh Morawczyk, he's reviewing this book by James Whitman, Hitler's American Model.
And the point he makes is he tries to refute the book by saying, what's the big deal?
His argument is, he says, look, you know, the Nazis are going to be Nazis.
The Nazis hate Jews.
They're going to kill Jews.
So simply saying that they look to the American model is insignificant because, as Morawczyk puts it, and Josh is a real smart guy, I'm now quoting him, suppose for a moment the Nazis found no inspiration in American examples.
Would there have been no Nuremberg laws?
Had there been no American model, would one fewer Jew have died in Hitler's hand?
So here what...
What Morawczyk seems to be saying is that, you know, yeah, they might have looked at the American example, but it didn't really make a difference.
And I think this is wrong.
It made a difference.
Why?
Because obviously the Nazis didn't get their racial animus from the Democrats.
They already had it.
But what they did get...
They did get a formula for institutionalizing their anti-Semitism.
They got a formula, a ready-made recipe from the Democrats for how to do it.
They didn't know how to do it.
They might have done it differently, to answer Josh's question.
They wanted to create the world's first racist society, and then they found out that the Democrats already had in the American South, and so they went.
Great!
We're just going to pirate their example.
And that is, in fact, what they did.
So I think unwittingly what Josh Morawczyk is doing is he's covering up for the racism of the Democratic Party.
He's making it sound like it was no big deal at all.
He's letting the left off the hook.
And I think this is the problem with...
Some conservatives who try to just sort of minimize the impact of the volume of racism in America, they pursue what can be called the racism minimization strategy.
Oh, racism wasn't that bad.
So what if Hitler got some of it from here?
He was kind of a racist already.
And I think a much better approach...
Which is the approach I've taken, certainly not only in my books, but also in the films, like Death of a Nation, like Hillary's America, is that the racism was really bad, but it wasn't done by us.
It wasn't done by Republicans.
It wasn't done by conservatives.
It was implemented by progressives.
It was implemented by Democrats.
So, yes, it is shameful, but all the shame falls on them.
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