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Jan. 14, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
52:54
THE PARDON LIST Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1000
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Thank you.
Thank you.
This is the 1,000th episode of the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
I started this with Debbie being my primary organizer in the beginning of 2021, and we've been going at it.
I hope you've been enjoying it.
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I'm trying to broaden my audience.
Coming up today, I'll talk about Pete Hegseth before the Senate.
I'll talk about why Trump is riding high.
Jerry Perna, the aunt of the January 6th victim, Matt Perna, joins me.
We're going to talk about the fate of the January 6th committee and the issue of which convicted January 6th defendants should be pardoned.
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Things are getting going on the Senate approval of the Trump cabinet slate.
Up today, and I got a chance to watch some of it, the hearing with Pete Hegseth.
And, well, my take on it is that Hegseth is doing just fine.
I saw some exchanges with Elizabeth Warren, Maisie Hirono, and a couple of others, Kristen Gillibrand.
And Hexeth has a good sense of balance of repartee.
The vulnerability that the Democrats are going to try to exploit is he's had a somewhat tumultuous family life.
But guess what?
We're in an era, and this is not a good thing, where unfortunately this is relatively common.
And not only this, but it is relatively common among...
And if I may say so, it is even more common among Democrats than Republicans.
So if you want to get into domestic squabbles and divorce and infidelity, all right, well, let's scrutinize the marital histories of the senators who are questioning Pete Hegseth, and let's put them alongside Pete Hegseth to try to understand what kind of standard is being applied.
My own sense at this stage is that it is a reasonable chance that every single Trump nominee will get through.
I think the Republicans are coming together in a recognition that, first of all, these same Republicans gave a lot of latitude to Biden with his nominees.
And if you're going to be okay with Biden's Secretary of Defense, just a complete fool, Why wouldn't you be okay with Hegseth?
And similarly, if you're okay with a lot of the just deplorably bad guys that ran the Biden operation from Mayorkas to Merrick Garland, the absolutely goofy and unqualified Pete Buttigieg, mayor of Fort Bend, Indiana, these clowns have been running the show.
And applying that, admittedly low bar, the Trump nominees are just stand tall above them like Hercules.
Trump himself seems to be at a point of great strength.
And we have seen this in a number of things.
I saw it, Debbie and I saw it up close and personal with the Mike Johnson Confirmation or support his election as Speaker of the House because there were Republicans who didn't want to do it, who were holding out.
And basically, Trump got on the phone and said, hey, I kind of need Mike Johnson.
We're not going to get anybody else.
I realize you've got reservations, but sort of basically do it for me or do it because we are going to be calling the shots.
And I think that's really what's going on.
Trump is going to come in and say, this is the plan that we're pushing.
Mike Johnson will get behind it.
And the Republicans will get behind it, not even so much because of Mike Johnson as because of Trump.
And so if you want to know how do you hold a majority with one seat or just a couple of seats, the short answer is Trump has got to stay close to the phone.
And he needs to...
Call in on these wayward Republicans and say, basically, listen.
And this will bring them into line.
None of these Republicans wants to be primary.
None of them wants Trump campaigning against him.
So I think we normally, I say that we have a de jure or an official majority but not a real majority.
With Trump's active involvement, I think we do have a real majority, at least at the beginning of this new term, to get some really good things done.
You can also see the way in which corporate America, the big CEOs, and I'm seeing a number of them being interviewed now on places like CNBC. The financial networks is where you get to hear Jamie Dimon come in from Chase Bank, or you begin to hear these big-name CEOs.
Or also you see the digital moguls making their pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago from Jeff Bezos.
I don't know if Jeff Bezos went to Mar-a-Lago, but I know he's put up a million dollars for the inauguration ceremonies.
Mark Zuckerberg, of course, did undertake the pilgrimage.
And so there's a desire here to recognize, and Zuckerberg was very explicit about it, that The election told us something.
The election signals not just a political but a kind of cultural and corporate shift in the country.
And he, Mark Zuckerberg, wants to be part of it, which is another way of saying that Mark Zuckerberg is not a resistance guy.
He's a guy who wants to be on the winning team.
I guess he thought Biden was the winning team in 2020, and now he thinks that Trump is the winning team.
Look at the way that Trump has prevailed over the legal obstacles.
Who would have thought, just a few years ago, With all these legal vultures, think of each of these charges as a vulture circling overhead, just waiting to feast on your carcass.
And nevertheless, Trump has beaten them all.
He's scattered the vultures.
They've all gone away one by one.
What marks have they left on Trump?
Well, he's a convicted felon.
He's a convicted felon with...
Basically, no penalty, no punishment, no encumbrances, no probation officer, no community service, no fine, no nothing.
So the civil case hasn't gone away, but that's something that Trump can deal with, I think, effectively on appeal.
But here is Trump essentially riding high.
Another example of this, I think, is the way that Fetterman, John Fetterman, the senator from Pennsylvania, Seems to have become a little bit of a Trumpster himself.
First of all, he's been saying nice things about Trump.
Going back to when people asked him, you know, this is on Left Wing Networks about Pennsylvania.
And he goes, hey, listen, there are a lot of guys in my state who like Trump.
And it's not because they are fascists and it's not because they're extremists.
These are good guys.
They are reasonable.
They're thinking about the future of the country.
They love the country.
They think Trump is the best solution for the country.
It's important for him to have said that.
And then he's gone a lot further, and now he made a pilgrimage down to Mar-a-Lago to meet Trump.
I predict that Federman will be a pretty reliable supporter of Trump's cabinet nomination.
Not to say that Federman ceases to be a Democrat, but he is a wavered Democrat.
In fact, he's better than Sinema.
He's better than Manchin.
Those guys were wavering Democrats in a sense, but...
My view of Manchin is fundamentally this guy is a coward.
He's an invertebrate.
He's a weakling.
Fetterman is not a weakling.
When Fetterman speaks, and by the way, Fetterman has basically gotten his brain back.
It's interesting that as he gets his brain back, he's moving in a conservative direction.
Fetterman speaks like, this is how I see it.
Take it or leave it.
You never get this.
Fetterman doesn't give you the sense that he's crafting his words to appease Chuck Todd or some...
Host on CNN. Fetterman is confidently saying, this is what I think.
In fact, he even makes jokes about it.
People go, why are you going down to Mar-a-Lago?
He goes, well, I'm looking to see if I might be able to be named the Pope of Greenland.
So this is Fetterman basically giving the middle finger to these journalists who think they're trying to score a point on him.
Let me turn briefly to the fires in California and just make an observation about those.
It's just coming out that a number of the firefighting initiatives that were being undertaken by the L.A. Department of Water and Power were blocked for environmental reasons.
The L.A. Department of Water and Power in 2019 began a program of replacing 100-year-old power lines.
These are basically old wooden power lines that were made in the 1930s through the 1950s.
They were installed more than half a century ago.
And not only were these poles, wooden poles themselves, obviously susceptible to fire, but they were put in a manor that were close to each other.
And basically the LA Water and Power Department said, let's take these old...
Let's replace them with steel poles.
Let's widen the fire lane access lanes in the area.
Let's put fire-resistant power lines.
And all of this was to fight, quote, an elevated fire risk.
So they knew that there was an elevated fire risk.
They knew that they needed to do things to reduce the susceptibility of these fires spreading.
And then what happened was, well, there were some hikers who were walking through there and they noticed that there were apparently some plants.
These are called Brontons.
Milk Vetch.
M-I-L-K-V-E-T-C-H. I've never heard of these plants, but they're called Brontons Milk Vetch Plants.
And apparently they have some sort of federal protection because there's a limited number of these plants available in nature.
And so these hikers complained and the whole project was junked.
It was shelved.
It was stopped.
And the result of it was that they were able to save 200 Bronton Milk Vetch Plants.
And where are those Bronten milk vetch plants now?
Gone.
Torched.
Burned in the fires.
So the bitter irony is that the risk of fire was intensified by not undertaking preventive measures to save the Bronten milk vetch plants, plants that are now consumed in those very same fires.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome back to the podcast a friend.
She is Jerry Perna.
You probably know her.
She's the aunt of Matt Perna, who tragically took his life in the aftermath of January 6th.
I urge you to go to RememberingMattPerna.com and you can learn about Matt's story and about the family's ordeal.
You can follow Jerry, at Jerry, G-E-R-I-P-E-R-N-A, Perna.
Jerry, thanks for joining me.
I want to begin by asking how you're doing as we go into this new year, where I think many of us are feeling very optimistic about the way in which the country seems to have averted disaster, but you, on the other hand, have been through a major family catastrophe.
I read an article, I remember, years ago about how do family members recover when there has been this kind of tragedy, and the theme of the article was they...
They don't a lot of times.
They don't recover.
So I wanted to ask you, how are you doing and how is your effort to sort of channel some of this grief into a cause, which is the cause of January 6th?
How is that going?
Well, thank you for having me on, Dinesh.
It has been difficult.
It really has.
I guess with President Trump having been elected.
It does give us some shred of hope here that we can turn our country around, but at the same time, we have only four years to do it in, and we all know how quickly four years can pass.
I'm sitting here, you know, almost three years ago, my nephew hanged himself, and I don't have any peace with that, and I think I talked to you and Debbie Pryor that Matt's own father passed away this past July.
He was brokenhearted.
Dinesh, and he deteriorated after Matt's death, understandably so.
So our family has had two casualties from January 6th, and it just doesn't seem to get any easier.
So I channel my efforts into pushing for the Matthew Lawrence Burnett Act of 2024, and hopefully President Trump will put some support behind that and bring that to the floor.
Because our Republicans are still ignoring it.
Marjorie Taylor Greene has been a huge support for my efforts, and I appreciate her so much, but she's only one person.
It's been very hard.
It really has.
I struggle day to day.
Most of my efforts are the result of my anger.
Jerry, you were in our film Police State and you told a story, but I want to zoom into one aspect of it, which I think is people need to be very aware of.
And that is that in Matt's case, this is a kid who was hanging in there.
This is a kid who didn't do anything violent, didn't break anything, didn't touch anything, was in there for a few minutes.
And yet, at the last minute, the government, as a bludgeoning tactic, put a terrorism enhancement charge on his sentencing.
and this was the idea that he was going to be sentenced as a terrorist was the final blow that took Matt over the precipice, over the edge.
I want you to talk a little bit about the villainy of them doing that and about your phone call to the prosecutor and what he said when you called him.
Well, when Matt called me on the phone on that Monday to tell me about this, he was sobbing uncontrollably and I could barely understand him.
And I kept trying to offer him hope that, you know, that...
This wasn't going to go this way.
That his attorney was going to be able to put an end to this threat of this terrorism enhancement because it would have taken his sentence from 6 to 12 months to several years in prison.
And Matt had already prepared himself mentally for 6 to 12 months.
He had not prepared himself for 6 to 10 years.
And so that was just too much to bear for him.
And even the thought that...
He had to wait yet another month and a half before this would even be discussed.
He couldn't make it another month and a half.
He had already reached his limit.
So after he had died, it was about a month or so later, I looked through all of his paperwork that I had received from his attorney, and I saw the phone number of the prosecutor, who was in fact the one who was presenting this terrorism enhancement to his judge.
I called him up and left a message.
And about 15 minutes later, I received a phone call back from D.C. And they told me I was on a recorded line with several witnesses.
And the prosecutor picked up the phone and I asked him, I said, how could you do this?
Do you have any idea what your responsibility was in all of this?
And he basically said, many of us in the Department of Justice were very sorry that Matthew took his own life.
Again, placing the blame back on Matthew.
We're sorry that Matt decided to do that.
But if he could have just waited another month, I don't even think the enhancement would have stuck with his judge.
Dinesh, that cut me like a knife, because now the truth has come out.
It was an idle threat that caused my nephew to take his own life, and these people just throw these threats out there like nothing.
There are human lives that were affected by their actions, and I wanted this person to know that when he went to bed at night and every night for the rest of his life, that I hoped his last thought would be Matthew Perna and the role he played in his death.
And yet the sad truth appears to be, given the psychology that we've seen of Matthew Graves, And the whole prosecutorial establishment in D.C., I don't think realistically that that is how they look at it.
Do you?
No, I don't.
It seems like they have villainized, they've demonized the entire January 6th group and said these people were insurrectionists, they were trying to overthrow the government.
I mean, just...
I'd just like you to comment as someone who's had a close-up look at how preposterous this, I mean, was your nephew trying to overthrow the government?
Absolutely not.
Matthew went that day because he thought he was going to be there to celebrate, hence not certifying the election.
It was going to be historic.
It was going to be an historic moment.
But that is not what it ended up being.
And we all know that this was planned out very carefully by the Democrats and others.
It blew up in everybody's face.
And I don't know if they had this thought that Donald Trump was never going to become president again and this was all just going to continue and the truth would be swept under the carpet.
But that's not what is happening.
And my hope is that the truth comes out.
All of the truth comes out.
Right now there is all this talk about pardons and vice president-elect.
J.D. Vance made a statement the other day that definitely ruffled some feathers about not everyone would receive a pardon.
And I am in agreement with him on this.
And I have taken quite a bit of flack for my views because people think that I am totally on board with every last January 6th of receiving a pardon.
And I simply am not because there were provocateurs that day.
There were agitators and instigators who have been arrested for their actions.
And it was those actions, Dinesh, that brought out the term and the narrative of January 6th as it being an insurrection.
So the actions of some affected the lives of many.
And I don't believe they deserve a pardon.
Do I believe they should rot in jail for years and years?
No, I do not.
But I don't believe that everybody is to receive a pardon.
And I agree with J.D. Vance on that.
What would you say?
And I'm just raising this as something for you to respond to and think aloud about.
You could make an argument that said, look, there could be some people who did some bad things.
But that this January 6th prosecution has been corrupted from the beginning.
Leave aside the element of luring people into the Capitol by giving no indication that they need to leave.
No one with a bullhorn ever said, clear out this building right now.
This is a restricted area.
You can come on a tour, but you can't get in this way.
There was none of that.
Second of all...
You could argue that pretty much the basic civil liberties of all the defendants were violated.
Strong-armed tactics, which we've heard you talking about even in the case of Matt, that were really applied across the board.
And so the point here being that if you have the rights of defendants violated, it is part of our legal system that that kind of evidence becomes tainted, becomes corrupted.
And this would apply even to people who did bad things.
In other words, not that those people don't deserve to be prosecuted, but they were prosecuted by bad people in the wrong way.
And therefore, Well, I agree that there definitely was a complete and total overreach of power, and the justice system failed everybody.
But they are not above being investigated either.
I believe these judges and our DOJ should be investigated to the fullest, and I don't care how much it costs to do that.
Because, I mean, let's face it, there are a lot of people involved in this, but I just can't get behind anybody swinging a baseball bat at a police officer.
I can't condone that.
And for me to...
You have to understand where I'm coming from as far as Matt.
You know, Matt had this television in his house and it was his worst enemy because it was constantly on.
The news with January 6th was just constantly in his face every day.
And do you know what he would tell me, Dinesh, when footage was released of a January 6er behaving badly?
He would say, oh my gosh, Aunt Jerry, this is not helping my case at all.
What were these people doing?
That's how he felt.
And I don't think everybody could understand that standing in their shoes.
I watched him and I heard him, how he was just disheartened by some of the actions of people that took place that day.
But as I said, they don't deserve to sit in prison, but I just don't feel that they are worthy of the same pardon that somebody who just casually walked in, like, let's say, Tim Hale.
Tim Hale spent three years of his life in prison over the obstruction charge, which was eventually overturned by the Supreme Court.
Those are three years he's never going to get back.
He deserves a pardon.
Absolutely.
He walked through peacefully.
I think what you're saying, Jerry, which is right, is that, look, the way to handle the abuse of power is to prosecute the prosecutors.
In other words, hold the people accountable who abuse their power.
If you don't get to the root of it all, then why bother at all?
Because these same people are going to turn around and do it again to somebody else down the road.
You had a judge that was overseeing some of the January 6th cases.
I believe he was in his late 80s.
He fell asleep on the stand half the time.
They had to wake him up.
These are not people that should be judging the people that stand before them.
There needs to be some major overhaul in our Department of Justice.
January 6th needs to be investigated completely.
We'll be right back with Jerry Parna.
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I'd love to have you along for this great ride.
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I'm back with Jerry Perna, the aunt of Matthew Perna.
Follow her next, Jerry, G-E-R-I-P-E-R-N-A. And the website, RememberingMatt.com.
RememberingMattPerna.com.
Jerry, we've been talking a little bit about pardons and, of course, Biden is...
has been on a pardon binge, pardoning getting some guys out of Guantanamo, pardoning a bunch of crooks.
Apparently, it's, of course, pardoning his son, Hunter Biden, and interestingly, not just pardoning him for the gun charge, but for any actions taken going all the way back like a decade.
So all the crookery that Hunter Biden was part of, bag man for the Biden, all of that is now sort of off the table prosecutorially.
And evidently Biden isn't even like close to done because we understand that in the last days, the next few days coming up, we could see a kind of parade of pardons.
How does it make you feel when you witness this spectacle?
It infuriates me.
It just totally infuriates me.
This deal with Hunter, who's ever even heard of covering crimes that were never I mean, a pardon only takes place if you did something wrong, obviously, or you're accused of doing something wrong.
It's inexcusable.
I wish that President Trump was able to overturn that, but I don't think that's a possibility.
Now, we talked a little bit a few moments ago about the narrative of January 6th, and I think what was really disheartening, if we flash our minds back to four years ago, there was this juggernaut, this intense campaign on the part of Democrats and the media.
To make it seem like this was the worst event since the Civil War.
This was an attempt to subvert our whole constitutional system.
These people were basically a kind of domestic terrorist that no sympathy, no understanding should be extended to them at all.
And here we are four years later, and I would say that that narrative has been punctured and questioned, but it hasn't really been...
Totally capsized or overthrown.
And then I look out and I see that people like Liz Cheney, for example, or just today, overnight, Jack Smith, the special counsel or the former special counsel, I guess he's out of there now, released the volume one of his report basically saying, you know, repeating the same recycled nonsense.
Trump tried to overthrow the 2020 election.
January 6th is the smoking gun.
He tried to instigate a riot and an insurrection.
Where do you think we are in terms of the public understanding of all this?
And specifically, I know you've been really frustrated at the failure of Republicans to listen to you, to recognize the truth of January 6th.
Do you think we're making any headway with those guys?
They're doubling down on the lie, and it adds salt to the wounds.
A good majority of Americans are seeing through it now.
Thanks to social media, a good majority are seeing through January 6th and are agreeing that this was a setup.
But the Democrats are never, ever going to admit what it was all about.
They're never going to.
They will go to their graves lying as they lie about everything.
But the Republicans have not been very vocal either.
And I am disgusted with the lack of attention that the Republicans have paid.
It's almost as if they feel that once Donald Trump gets in, this is all going to be brushed under the rug and we're going to move on and fix the country and the mess that Joe Biden has left it in.
For me, it would just be a total tragedy to not address everything and to bring the truth out.
No matter who it affects, Republicans and Democrats alike.
Because I don't look at them as two different segments anymore.
They're all one and the same anymore.
And I really hope that the truth comes out and that the people accountable will be having to face the music.
It's their turn to face the music.
When you say one and the same, are you saying that there is a...
I mean, I assume you're not saying that the Republicans are so much putting out the lie, but are you saying that they are so fearful, they are so intimidated by the media that they don't want to be seen?
For example, you know, a congressman don't want it to come out.
Oh, I met with Jerry Perna and she told me all about January 6th.
They run away from the issue really in fear.
I have to say that has been the case over the last four years.
They have definitely been silent.
They have been very careful about their comments or their support for the J6ers.
It's almost as if it's the elephant in the room and they don't want to address it.
And I even had a meme one time I made.
I put it on Twitter.
J6 is the elephant in the room full of rhinos.
Very clever.
Yeah.
I know that once President Trump is in office and he addresses this publicly with January 6th, you're going to see the Republicans all of a sudden have a spine and start speaking out and echoing him.
But up until now, they've been silent for the most part.
I mean, it does seem heartening.
I mean, I have to say with Trump that in the beginning, even Trump was keeping his distance from January 6th.
And that might have been somewhat strategic.
Obviously, he was being implicated in it directly.
And there might have been some legal reasons why he was doing that.
But it seems very important that he move on this.
Really on day one or right about day one, right?
This is not a case where we want this to drag out.
We would like to see some action right up front.
Part of the so-called shock and awe that were being promised on Inauguration Day or the day after Inauguration Day.
Do you agree that this is something that needs to be hit right up front?
Because I think that if Trump strikes with one heavy blow...
The media is going to be a little bit frazzled.
There'll be so many things happening, they won't know whether to try to counterattack here or there because they will be getting blitzed on all fronts.
Oh, I think they are going to get blitzed on all fronts.
And, you know, President Trump has said we need to get the people out of jail who have been rotting in prison.
That was first and foremost.
He has also said that he will be examining pardons on a case-by-case basis after that.
But, I mean, you could definitely commute these sentences and get these people out of jail and then investigate these, you know, these overreaches of power that placed them there in the first place.
But I hope he does come out of them just, like, punching left and right.
I'm thinking in my mind that President Trump has a stack of executive orders just waiting for his signature, and he's going to get carpal tunneled by the time he gets finished.
Yeah.
And they're going to be furious.
I hear that they do have a presidential auto pen, which can do multiple signatures at one time.
And that may come in really handy at this time.
Jerry, let me close up.
And looking at what President Biden has been rolling out these last several weeks, it's only justified.
But I'm not saying that what...
I'm not saying two wrongs make a right either.
And that's another reason about as far as the pardon discussion goes.
Tit for tat isn't right either.
So that's why I think things should be done in an organized fashion.
Let me close out with this, Jerry.
The pardons is the first step.
The accountability is the second step.
I think the final step is when there is a true public understanding of what happened and what didn't happen in January 6th.
If we get to that point where the American people, by and large, see through all this, and the Democrats, I mean, there are some people, as you say, who will lie to the bitter end.
But nevertheless, if we're able to get the counter story out there effectively, do you think that that will bring you some closure on this tragic episode with your nephew?
Or do you think that this is something that will haunt you the rest of your life?
I think there are some aspects of all of this that could bring me some closure.
There are.
But at the same time, Dinesh, I will go to my grave grieving the loss of my nephew in the country that he loved so much and that I watched my brother deteriorate.
I mean, it wasn't just one family member here.
And many people don't know that, you know, my brother died.
And one of the things about my brother that I am looking into is when Matt was taught, when they were talking about sentencing Matt to the 6 to 12 months, Matt asked, is there a chance I could have house arrest so that I could take care of my dad?
My brother had Parkinson's disease.
Matt was his holistic provider.
Matt had everything on point with him.
He had a whole regimen of things that helped my brother keep a pretty independent lifestyle.
And Matt did not want that to go by the wayside if he was in jail.
And the probation officer who would hear such a request came back with a denial and said, Proof whatsoever that you are your father's caregiver or that he even needs one.
And here we are, less than two and a half years later, my brother died.
And he was no longer taking any of the supplements and the protocol that Matt had him on a daily regimen.
He stopped all of it after Matt died.
So I just feel like...
Two of our family members were taken by this Justice Department, and that's not something I can ever forget.
Guys, I've been talking to Jerry Perna, the aunt of Matt Perna.
You can follow our next at Jerry, G-E-R-I Perna, and the website, which I urge you to go to, rememberingmatperna.com.
Jerry, thank you very much.
Thank you, Dinesh.
I'm continuing my discussion of the Big Lie, and we are in the section where we're talking about Hitler's anti-Semitism, and I made the point yesterday that it derives from, in part, the idea that the Jew is the quintessential capitalist.
Now...
As Debbie said to me after the podcast, she goes, you're not saying that Hitler's homicidal fury against the Jews is all based upon that, right?
Because one can think that the Jew is a quintessential capitalist and doesn't follow that you've got to go out and kill six million of them.
And so I think that the fury of Hitler's anti-Semitism requires deeper explanation, in fact, taps into some cords of fundamental evil.
That are truly inexplicable, or at least inexplicable outside of some kind of theological framework.
But nevertheless, I was just saying that the idea of the Jew as a financier and a swindler was part of Hitler's pretext, part of his justification for the antisemitism.
Now, the question is, since I've been arguing that Hitler was on the left, The question is, is this a left-wing way to think?
Do people on the left, do people in the socialist Marxist camp, tend to see Jews as capitalists and hate them for it?
And the answer is yes.
In fact, very interestingly, we can turn for our exhibit A to none other than Karl Marx.
Now, Karl Marx was born a Jew.
He was, according to most accounts, Jewish in his cultural habits.
He was baptized as a Christian, although he didn't practice any kind of Christianity.
In fact, to be honest, he didn't practice any kind of Judaism either.
He was a professed atheist.
And so when we say Marx was a Jew or Marx was not a Jew, we're not talking about Marx's theological commitments.
In 1844, Karl Marx wrote an essay called On the Jewish Question.
And I just want to read four sentences or five sentences from that essay because it's very illuminating.
And for people who haven't studied Marx, kind of unexpected.
Here's Marx.
And I'll pause with each sentence and offer some commentary.
This is a very important passage.
Let us consider the actual worldly Jew.
Not the Sabbath Jew, but the everyday Jew.
Pause.
So here Marx is starting off by saying, all right, I want to talk about Jews as a group.
I'm not talking about the religious Jews.
I'm talking about the Jews.
Because there are lots of people who are Jews, and they think of themselves as Jews, and they are part of the Jewish community.
In fact, they maintain a certain kind of ethnic or tribal Jewishness, but they don't necessarily perform the Jewish rites.
They don't even necessarily take the Sabbath seriously.
They don't necessarily celebrate Jewish holy days, but nevertheless, they are Jews, as Marx is putting it, the actual worldly Jew.
He says, very telling.
Marx is saying that the clue to Judaism is not the Jewish faith.
And in fact, the Jewish...
Faith is a little bit of an oxymoron.
Judaism is not a faith in the sense that you can speak of the Christian faith.
Because in Christianity, the faith element is central.
Judaism, like Islam, is more of a code of practices, of laws.
And so what Marx is getting at is he's making the claim, and I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, I'm simply interpreting it.
He says the key to the Jew is not religious at all.
Well, what is it?
What is the secular basis of Judaism?
Practical need.
Self-interest.
What is the worldly religion of the Jew?
Huckstering.
What is his worldly good?
What is his worldly God?
Money.
This is Marx.
And you notice the close resonance to what Hitler said.
And what Fader said, the economist that Hitler was paying close attention to, and what the Nazis believed.
Here is Marx, and you see the proximity, the similarity, the common view of Judaism as a type of debased capitalism.
So, practical need, self-interest.
The Jew, in other words, is a low creature.
He's not...
Looking up at heaven, he's looking down at the ground.
Huckstering.
So it's not just that the Jew is a capitalist, he's a swindler.
Huckstering means you're an operator, you're a card shark, you're a trickster with money.
What is his worldly god?
Money.
So think of it.
If one thinks of anti-Semitic themes or tropes through the centuries, Here is someone born into Judaism, Karl Marx, echoing this antisemitism very clearly and agreeing with it and basically saying this is not just an incidental characteristic of Jews, this is their defining characteristic.
So, Marx continues, very well then, very well then.
Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical real Jewry.
So what Marx is saying is, okay, if the Jew is defined by swindling, huckstering money, then basically what we need to do is get away from all that, which means we have to abolish Judaism.
But he doesn't call it Judaism.
He calls it practical, real Jewry.
J-E-W-R-Y. Not Jewelry, but Jewry.
And what he's saying is, This Jewry or Jewishness is the problem.
This is what we have to eradicate.
So you can see right here how close Marx is.
If one is going to talk about eradication, elimination, emancipation, you're actually not very far away from Hitler's, well, let's get rid of all these people.
If they are the actual real-world embodiment...
Of crookery and swindling and capitalist deception?
Why do we want them in the world?
Why do we want them in Germany?
So, my point is, it is thoroughly natural for a leftist, a national socialist like Hitler to think this way.
Marx thought this way.
There's a common element here.
Now, let's think about what anti-Semitism offers to the anti-Semites.
Like, what is the benefit of it?
What do they get out of it?
Well, the first benefit is it offers an explanation for antisemites about why they themselves are not doing all that well.
In other words, the explanation is, yeah, the Jews are doing better than us, but that's because they're crooks.
Crooks advance in the world.
The world is very unjust.
Good people don't get ahead.
We work hard, but we don't get anywhere.
These people are swindlers and they get everything.
So antisemitism offers a kind of psychic...
Salve or consolation for one's own sense of inferiority.
Beyond that, anti-Semitism is also, this is unexpected, but it is a source of social equality and solidarity.
And how is that so?
A German writer I mentioned earlier, Gotts Eli, says this, the desire for social equality is at the heart of the German brand of anti-Semitism.
Why?
Because basically the argument here is this, that if you can isolate and demonize the Jews, you put all the other Germans on a kind of not only equal level with each other, But you elevate them above the Jews.
So in other words, every white Nordic German, even if completely uneducated, incompetent, lazy, do nothing, nevertheless, because they're white and Nordic and German, they are raised above the status of every Jew.
Why?
Because the Jew is lowered, is lowered by the accusation that Jewish achievement...
Jewish academic success, Jewish economic performance, all of this is fundamentally because the Jew is a bad guy.
And so, because the Jew is a bad guy, the rest of us, the non-Jews, are all morally superior to the Jews.
We're all equal to each other in being better than the Jew.
That's the point.
Anti-Semitism is, you could almost call it a white or Nordic type of socialism.
It is a socialism that really appeals to losers in the race of life.
And in this sense, and I'll pick up this theme tomorrow, we will see it closely mirrors the racism of the Democrats, of the Democratic Party in the United States.
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