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Jan. 23, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:50
FRESH START Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1006
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Thank you.
Thank you.
It is a return to an older 19th century American ideal.
I'm going to talk about the cabinet nominations and where they stand, focusing on Pete Hegseth and a last-ditch attempt by the left to try to, I think unsuccessfully, torpedo.
His nomination and author and commentator Larry Taunton is in Davos.
He's at the World Economic Forum.
He's going to report in from there and tell us what the globalist cabal is up to these days.
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There's just an awful lot going on with trauma.
A flurry of executive orders.
the percolating up of legislation that is going to be coming out of the Republican Congress, and the confirmation hearings and the confirmation decisions that are now advancing pretty rapidly in and the confirmation hearings and the confirmation decisions that are now advancing This is for Trump's cabinet appointees.
It's worth pulling back for a moment and trying to look at what is going on Before I get to that,
I want to make a comment about this Episcopal female bishop and her hectoring and sermonizing and really insulting, condescending.
The message to Trump and to J.D. Vance.
The oozing pomposity, the sense of moral superiority, all of this extremely offensive.
Trump was offended and lashed back out at her in a post that he did yesterday.
But it's an interesting question of how Trump found himself in this situation in the first place.
And here's the answer to that.
It's the way that the Democrats are always cooking up traps for our side.
And we have to be alert for these because it's very easy to fall into them.
Something that seems very benign, very neutral, very procedural, and you suddenly find yourself sitting there and without a place to go, you can't exactly get up and leave.
That creates an incident of its own.
and you give this absolutely worthless cleric a chance to bash you nonstop as long as she feels like it because she is giving, quote, the sermon.
Now, if the Trump people had known all this in advance, I don't think they would have gone for it.
They would have said, nah, we're not interested.
We'll just skip this event.
So how did it really come about?
Well, the answer has to do with Amy Klobuchar, and it has to do with the inaugural committee.
So they have an inaugural committee, which is in theory bipartisan and has got some Republicans and Democrats, but it's controlled by Amy Klobuchar.
She's the chair of it, and of course the staff is answerable really to her.
So what does she do?
She orchestrates the program in such a way that Trump is going to go to this church.
And again, I think the Trump people went along with this.
They thought, well, okay, this is the day.
We do this, we do that, we take the oath, and we go to the service.
Not realizing that this is a setup, that the Democrats are very crafty in the way they do these kinds of things.
All right, we know that this is an Episcopal church.
In fact, it's an historic church, the very church, by the way, that the BLM guys torched in early 2020, I guess, 2020-2021.
And at that time, the Episcopal bishop, this is the same one, by the way, She was like, I'm not going to blame BLM. I'm going to blame Trump.
So you kind of know what you're getting with this woman.
She is a creature of the far left.
And sure enough, the Democrats knew.
Klobuchar knew.
The Klobuchar team knew.
This is going to be very interesting because we're going to give one of our own a chance to flagellate Trump.
And that is pretty much what happened.
All right.
And let's turn to the big picture here on what Trump is up to.
The first thing to note about Trump is that Trump is a very different creature today than he was in 2021. Had Trump assumed office in a second term, beginning about this time of 2021, he would have been very embattled.
It would have been a disputed election.
Trump would be, I think, in many ways on the defensive.
But weirdly, by the fact that the Democrats have thrown everything that they can at him over the past four years, and he has survived, he is basically now in an absolute gangster zone.
I mean, this time I sometimes talk about the gangsterization of the Democratic Party, but here I mean it in a positive sense.
Trump is like Steve Jobs coming back to Apple.
This is after they fired him, after they threw him out, they humiliated him.
And then, of course, Apple itself was going down the tubes.
So Steve Jobs kind of came in as a conquering hero, and he proved to be exactly that.
Now, we see this flurry of actions by Trump.
Down goes DEI and the government.
No more infinite genders.
No more open borders.
We're going to talk about punishing Mexico and Canada if they don't close the border on their ends.
Maybe we'll take over Greenland.
Hey, give us back the Panama Canal.
We're out of the Paris Treaty.
We're getting out of the WHO. And we're going to start spiking DEI in the universities.
I'm going to talk a little bit more about that tomorrow.
And so where are we going with all this?
Clearly something big is happening, right?
This whole woke philosophy is just being body slammed.
And I think the wokesters are realizing, kind of to their dismay, that...
No one is rising to their defense.
I mean, they can shriek about it, but there's no broad support that is affirming them.
Even the media is backing off here.
And, you know, you always know that you're winning when the other side is always bringing up the exception.
Like, yeah, you pardoned the January 6th captives, but how come you didn't pardon these three?
How come you pardoned these three guys who fought with the cops?
Well, that's conceding that the pardons are legitimate, except allegedly in these three cases.
Or if you say something like, well, why are you getting rid of DEI? Because in this particular program, DEI has turned out to be quite effective.
Well, you're actually conceding that DEI as a whole is a complete dud.
And so Trump is really on the offensive here.
But there's an interesting post.
Which I want to comment on, on X this morning, or yesterday morning, which makes the point that this is not a back-to-the-50s movement.
I think for a lot of Americans, that would be great.
Let's go back to the 1950s.
Why?
Because we had single-earner families, we had low rates of illegitimacy, we had a prosperous economy, America was riding high, and this was like Pax Americana.
But if you listen more carefully to Trump, the Post argues, The post is the post on X, and I'm agreeing with this line of analysis, is that Trump is not trying to restore that kind of expansive Pax Americana in that sense.
Why?
Because what he's trying to do is...
Get the United States out of this idea that we are trying to manage the world, run the world.
True, we want to be the world's reserve currency for as long as we can hold our position.
I think Trump is very committed to that.
But this whole idea of exporting democracy, making everybody else do what we do, we're sort of going to educate the world's elites.
We're going to bring all the smart people here so they can stay in this country.
Every multinational should come and set up its base here.
All the NGOs are welcome.
They're welcome to establish their offices in New York City.
Trump is not into any of that.
Is not America in the 1950s, but you could almost say America in the 1850s.
Why?
Because in the 19th century, America was not trying to be the numero uno of the world.
It was actually acknowledged that there were a number of powerful entities in the world.
The United States is one of them.
Great Britain was a second.
France was a third.
But of course, there were other powers that were also emerging on the horizon.
And some that were old powers that were maybe declining, but still held on to considerable basis of...
So it was a multipolar world.
And I don't think Trump has any problem with having a multipolar world, although he does want the United States to be a strong force in that world, but a strong force not so much looking outward and trying to manage the whole scenario, the whole scene, but rather a strong force that is strong internally, that is looking out for its own people, that is paying attention.
It's paying attention to jobs.
It's paying attention to prosperity in local communities.
This is the America that Trump is going for.
And it's summed up pretty well here in the following way.
History is running in reverse.
What does that mean?
That starting with FDR, the United States has built up, and this is mirrored in other countries, the kind of the Leviathan state, the huge...
Almost collectivist way of looking at the government.
And Trump's view is we need to wind that down.
We need to wind it down in the United States by shrinking the power of government, shrinking the reach of government.
But we're also in some ways going to modify America's relationship with the world.
This, I think, is what Trump is going for the second time around.
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I'd like to do an update on Trump's cabinet nominations, tell you where things are, what is likely to happen, who's coming up next, and so on.
So I'm going to focus really on the prominent ones.
So far we've heard from Rubio, who got 99 votes.
I mean, Rubio is in, he's confirmed, he is basically on the job.
It probably helped that Rubio is a fellow senator.
Nobody really wanted to vote against him.
I'm not even sure who the one vote was, but probably someone who just didn't show up to vote.
Rubio got everybody's vote.
We have seen Pam Bondi, who I thought did an excellent job and I don't think will have any real trouble.
Apparently, the...
The Pam Bondi final vote hasn't taken place, but it should occur shortly.
I think I would say the same for Besant, who is up for Treasury Secretary.
This guy is very eloquent and just flummoxed all the people who tried to get him from the podium, the Democrats who were trying to, you know, it's always a little bit of a test of who's the smarter guy up there.
And the Democrats get a chance to prepare.
They have staff who come up with questions for them and so on.
But you just couldn't stump Besant because his knowledge is so deep and his rhetorical style is so effective that I think this is another guy who's going to sail through.
Tulsi Gabbard's upcoming hearings seem to have been held up.
And I'm hoping that John Thune doesn't put up with any kind of unreasonable delays here.
It's one thing to complete a security check or this or that, but Democrats are going to try to block, I think, Tulsi Gabbard.
They're going to do their best to block Cash Mattel, even though I don't think they will be successful.
And they're going to try to block RFK Jr. And again, I don't think they will be successful, but they're going to try.
But let's remember that Republicans make the rules.
So, by and large, John Thune is an establishment guy.
He tends to go with the, let's do it this way because we've done it this way before.
He's big on the norms of the Senate.
And all of that is fine to a point.
At some point, it is worth remembering that you're the guy who makes those rules.
It reminds me of the scene in, I guess it's in Chariots of Fire, where they're having a meeting, and the old curmudgeonly guy goes, well, this is a matter for the committee.
And then another guy points out, he goes, well, we are the committee.
In other words, we make the rules.
So this kind of procedural...
You know, dilly-dallying or sitting on your hands is not a good way to go, particularly because there's a lot of stuff that needs to be done.
Trump is doing a lot unilaterally through the executive orders, but there's also a lot of legislative action that needs to occur.
And action on the budget, action on perhaps a Senator Luman's idea of a crypto and a Bitcoin strategic reserve.
There are many other ideas that are being developed.
Consolidating some of the executive orders into legislation.
This is partly what Brandon Gill wants to do.
Brandon's idea is, listen, when you pass an executive order, it's somewhat vulnerable because the other guy comes in four years later and they undo all your executive orders and so it becomes a little bit of a back and forth.
But on the other hand, if something is a law...
And remember, to make it a law, you need all three, well, I won't say all three branches of government, two branches of government.
You need the legislature and you need the executive.
So both houses of Congress have to pass it.
The president has to sign it.
And so if we can get some laws passed now, because we do have all three branches of government, even though a couple of the House and the Senate are somewhat narrow.
But nevertheless, if you get it through, the Democrats won't find it that easy to undo it because they will need to have all three branches of government to be able to do that.
Now, I want to talk about Pete Hegseth because Pete's vote is likely to come up today.
It's not a guarantee, but it could come up as soon as today.
And I'm hearing the following.
That there could be a couple of Republicans, maybe as much as three, who vote against Pete Hegseth.
And if that happens, the reports are, and I'm not here claiming any kind of clairvoyance, I'm just going based on what's being reported, that the three no's could be, could be, Murkowski, no surprise, Collins, no big surprise, but here's a bit of a surprise, McConnell.
So normally, Pete...
If Pete lost three votes, it would be a 50-50.
He'd have to bring in J.D. Vance to break the tie.
But here's the wild card, and the wild card is one John Fetterman.
The senator from Pennsylvania, the guy who's sort of pivoting more and more to the right, at least Debbie and I think.
We don't think it's entirely out of the question.
He might even jump out of the Democratic ship or get off the back of the Democratic donkey and become an independent, maybe even a Republican.
But in any event, I think that there is a 50-50 chance or better.
That Fetterman will vote for Hegseth.
And if that happens, he won't need J.D. Vance to show up.
Now, the media is making a last-ditch attempt to sink Hegseth.
And over the last couple of days, they fished out some relative, I think a sister-in-law, a left-wing sister-in-law, to make some new allegations about Pete abusing his wife.
And I saw these headlines, you know, relative asserts that Hegseth abused his wife, Hegseth denies the allegation.
And you have to read inside the article to realize it isn't just Hegseth who denies the allegation, the wife denies the allegation.
So in other words, imagine putting a headline, relative says man abused his wife, wife says that never happened.
Poof!
The article evaporates.
It becomes non-news, fake news, garbage.
So in order to sustain the article and act like there's some, you know, there's something there, what you do is you remove from the headline the key fact that the woman who was supposedly the target of the abuse, Hegseth's wife, says this is absolutely untrue.
None of this even happened.
And in fact, she says, I'm going to hire a lawyer to look into this, to look into who's making these false allegations.
So this to me is a non-story.
It's a desperate effort on the part of the media, the media left, to kick up some dust right before the vote.
It's not going to work.
We've been through this kind of Kavanaugh routine.
We're on to it.
This is part of the problem with the left these days.
They keep regurgitating their usual lines that worked in the past, right?
Elon Musk did the Nazi salute.
Everybody now is like, get out of here, you bums.
And that's a whole different attitude from, no, no, no, no, no, we're not Nazis.
Let us prove to you that we're not Nazis.
No, we don't have to prove anything to you.
The context of what happened makes it abundantly clear.
We know that you're editing these videos.
You're removing the part where Elon Musk puts his hand on his heart.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
Guys, I think you're really going to enjoy this.
I'm welcoming back to the podcast my friend Larry Taunton.
And this is becoming a little bit of an annual tradition here on this podcast.
cast.
Larry is, well, Larry is hard to describe.
He's a little of many things.
He's an author.
He's a commentator.
He's a columnist.
He's sort of a raconteur.
And as we'll find out, he's also a sleuth reporter who has an ability to sneak his way into things, in this case, the World Economic Forum.
And the World Economic Forum, Economic Forum is this kind of globalist annual meeting.
I spoke at it myself many years ago, the early 2000s, I believe.
And it's gotten worse and worse and worse.
But Larry is there now.
And so we're connecting with Larry.
He's in his hotel room in Davos.
You can follow Larry, by the way, at Larry Taunton, T-A-U-N-T-O-N. Larry, welcome.
Thanks for joining me from Davos.
And let me begin.
I want to talk about so many things, the things going on there.
Trump's addressed to the Davos people this morning, today.
But before we do, let me ask you, how do you pull off this feat?
How do you make your way into Davos?
And why are you there?
Yeah, well, you know, one of the things that I try to do in my work, Dinesh, which I think you'd be familiar with, is that I want to work at both ends of the ideological spectrum.
So on the one hand, you know, going to places like Davos or D.C. or Paris or London, where the policymakers are, Brussels, and listening to them, moving among them to understand the way that they think.
Watching how those ideas, once they're floated, how they're affecting people downstream from those ideas.
So that might take me, for instance, to the third world.
And see, most of these people, the elitists who come to Davos, they're very insulated from their own ideas.
And just by way of example, just by way of example, Ursula von der Leyen, who is the European Commission president, Now, she comes to, she's one of the featured speakers.
She's on the board of trustees for the World Economic Forum.
And she's here to lecture us all on our carbon footprint.
Now, when she arrived, she got out of the Nash an Audi A8. And if people don't know what that is, this is the European version, which is a 12-cylinder, 585 horsepower.
Beast.
Now, I frankly would love to own one, but I wouldn't go around lecturing people on their carbon footprint.
But you see, they don't even see that as hypocritical.
They see themselves as exempt from their own policy.
So anyway, that's why I do that as for how I get in.
Dinesh, I just walk into every building like I own it.
And because there's so many billionaires here.
The people who are standing at the door are usually young women with a clipboard.
They're not entirely sure I don't own it.
So the result is that I'm seldom stopped.
And I go in and I find myself talking to prime ministers and royalty and former presidents of countries.
It's quite interesting.
I don't know, Larry.
I mean, I think that with that very nicely trimmed mustache and beard, you could pass yourself off as some sort of decadent European royalty.
So what you need to do is cultivate a title.
I would recommend something like Count.
And then it's got to be a really obscure country that no one has entirely heard of, but nobody wants to admit that they don't know that such a country exists.
Just come up with a really clever name.
And then you need a little bit of an entourage.
You need a couple of sycophants around you who are treating you like a prince.
Step aside, Your Highness, count this way, and so on.
And I'm pretty sure you wouldn't just be there.
You probably would be put suddenly...
Honestly, Dinesh, you know, you're much better known than I am, but you need to come and we'll put a fake beard on you or something.
And the two of us will just go from one meeting to the next.
It'll be a riot.
You know, really, when you get down to it, you know, all kidding aside, these are people who are possessed of a colossal arrogance.
And the result of that is, I mean, one of the reasons, I mean, for instance, Rebel News, and there are other people who are here, Bannon's War Room, they have some people here.
They're here very openly as members of the press and they have their camera crews and that sort of thing.
And that's valuable.
They get something that I don't get.
But one of the things that I get that they don't get...
Is that I just pretend to be in...
You see, they refer to themselves as WEFers, World Economic Forum, the WEF and their WEFers.
And because I just move among them like I'm one of them, the result is they speak very openly.
And because they're arrogant, they never ask you questions about yourself.
They just never do.
And they can't resist telling you why they're so important and why they're...
So I meet some fascinating people, and I get a real under-the-hood look at what the World Economic Forum really is.
This morning, Trump, he's not there in person, but he delivers a kind of virtual address.
And I noticed that Trump did not hold back.
I mean, he slams the idea of diversity and affirms the idea of merit.
He talks about climate change, quote, nonsense.
He says there's basically there are only men and women in the world and there's no third gender.
He goes on to say that he talks about the confidence of the United States.
He talks about importing huge amounts of foreign investment here to create jobs in this country.
I mean, the way I think about it, Trump is articulating in an unabashed way the exact opposite of what the mainstream of the World Economic Forum believes.
And for years, these people have operated with the idea that theirs is the only way to think.
It is the reigning way to think.
And it probably was.
It has been for the last several years.
But now there is a kind of new challenger, if you will, on the horizon.
So my question is...
Moving among these guys, listening to Trump, what's going on in their heads?
One word, Dinesh.
Panic.
There's panic.
Every other year that I've been to the WEF, they just brim, they exude an unbridled confidence and nothing but disdain for populism.
Nothing but disdain for democracy, for ordinary people around the world.
I mean, it's why I refer to the WEF, the World Economic Forum, as the HOA from hell.
I mean, that is really what it is.
It's a global HOA. They're busybodies who want to tell everybody else what to do.
And the way I put it is...
As your average conservative, their mindset is to get up in the morning and grab a cup of coffee and think about their day.
The average leftist, the average weffer, gets up in the morning, grabs a cup of coffee, and thinks about your day, too.
You know, that's just the way that they think.
But this year, there's genuine panic.
And I want to say this about Trump's address.
Javier Malay, you know, his address yesterday...
Trump was bare-knuckled.
It was angry.
He let the WEF have it, and particularly on the sexually perverse agenda.
Trump today, I thought, was about an hour ago.
It wasn't that long ago that he gave his address.
He was quite presidential, actually.
He was firm in stating America's position.
He wasn't in the least apologetic, but he treated all the questioners with great respect.
He spoke of his desire to be there and that next year he hopes to be there and see a lot of friends and this kind of thing.
But at the same time, he made it very clear in presidential terms.
I'm not a globalist.
And see, this is the reason why, Dinesh, I think there's real panic.
It isn't just simply that Donald Trump isn't a globalist.
He's an anti-globalist.
He is a wrecking ball to the globalist agenda.
And I don't know if I sent you this.
I think maybe I did.
But in one of the presentations, you have a panel of individuals who are speaking, and one of them from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
He said, look, what we have seen here in Donald Trump, and I'm close to quoting him, maybe not word for word, but I'm pretty close.
He said, what we have seen from him has never been done in the history of politics, and that is a resurrection of someone who is politically dead.
And we have to realize that our agenda is in serious trouble.
And so I think that's what's happening.
Yeah, I think in that very same panel, and I did get this from you, there's another guy who weighs in and makes, I think, an equally striking observation.
Namely, he says, listen, we're all talking about how Trump won, how he won.
But we also need to pay attention to the fact that we lost.
And it's interesting at the World Economic Forum that you could use a term like we, because what he's really saying is that Those of us in the room are kind of of one mind.
My mind flashes back to last year, Larry, and there was a very smarmy woman whose name I don't remember.
But what she said, she was speaking on the podium, and she said, you know, here we are, and we trust each other.
We come from all these different countries, and we trust each other.
But none of us are trusted by the people of our own countries.
So the trust gap is not among us.
We trust each other.
In other words, we're all part of a cabal.
But in our own countries, there is a populist and popular suspicion of what we represent and what we're trying to do.
And I think the significance of Trump is...
That before Trump, you had the distrust, but you did not have a real alternative.
But now what Trump is doing, and you can see that he's doing this in the US, but he's doing it globally too, is he's assembling a counter-elite to challenge their elites.
They are elites in a way.
They've got, you know, the kind of titles of the people who show up there, titans of business, titans of government, of media.
But there's a rival global right that is represented, I think, by people like Millay.
Georgia Maloney, perhaps, is in that camp.
Maybe Farage.
Many others that you and I could think of.
Maybe Bolsonaro in Brazil.
And then, of course, Trump.
I don't know if Modi in India belongs in that group.
Do you see the...
I mean, I'm not expecting this global right to be represented at the World Economic Forum, but are they aware that something like this is going on?
Oh, I think they are.
And you're very astute, Dinesh.
I mean, what we have seen in recent years since, I think since 2020, is let's just take South America, for example.
We saw, you know, Chile, the most stable democracy in South America.
Fall to Marxist.
Of course, Venezuela had already gone in that direction.
Colombia, Brazil, Honduras, Peru, all in very shady kind of terms.
And we saw massive populist uprisings in all these places.
With Trump coming back, in America, globalists do know is the keystone.
To their entire agenda.
If it falls, then, you know, other globalists, excuse me, anti-globalist movements are going to fall with it.
Other populist movements.
But there are real cracks on the other side.
I mean, for instance, of the G7, none of the heads of state of the G7 were there except the outgoing, you know, president of a chancellor of Germany.
That's it.
You know, and in past they have been there.
They're not this time.
Now, Davos is trying to put a nice spin on it all and give the impression that they're just as significant and as important as they have ever been.
But I think you can feel, I'd come back to that word, I think you can feel panic.
I think you can feel defeat.
Very, very interesting.
Guys, I've been talking to Larry Taunton.
Follow him on x at Larry Taunton.
Larry, where do we go from here?
Is the right step here to put pressure on the World Economic Forum, for example, to have more conservative representation, which may be one way that they try to co-opt some of these new forces that are...
Now unavoidable, they can no longer go along with the idea that, hey, we're in charge, we don't have to listen to anyone else.
All the ideas that they presented as self-evidently right, like we got to censor disinformation and misinformation, it seems that there's a countercurrent against all that now.
So does the World Economic Forum adapt by trying to somehow...
Go back to being a debating society and incorporate these, let's call them right-wing elements?
Or do they hunker down, double down, think that they're facing a mortal enemy, and in which case they become more and more irrelevant over the years?
Where do you see this going?
You know, that's a great question, Dinesh, because I was thinking today that when...
When Trump was elected in 2016, I didn't feel this.
I mean, you know, MAGA was certainly, you know, energized and there was a populist movement at the same time you had Brexit, you know, going on.
But there was still kind of this feeling that globally things were still, you know, pushing headlong in a leftward direction.
I feel very different this time.
I feel that the left is on the run all over the world.
And so I think Davos, I think they want to remain relevant.
And I think it's kind of what you're seeing.
I read today, for instance, of CNN. I'm sure you saw this.
There's a big makeover that's going on there, and they're going to be letting go a lot of their employees.
I think Davos has to do that and to incorporate some dissenting voices if they're to remain relevant.
And I think they want to remain relevant.
And I should say this.
Davos, at its heart...
It's godless.
It's, you know, even neo-pagan.
You know, I was telling you when we were, you know, in a break, you know, a little bit of the kind of the earth worship kind of stuff that goes on there.
But there's also a very strong capitalist element.
I mean, there are vendors there just to sell stuff.
They are there to sell things to governments.
And you better believe that a lot of them were not there.
They are now in D.C. Some of them were going to the inauguration.
They're now wanting to kiss up to Trump.
So I think we're seeing a shift.
That's very telling.
I always say that you know you're winning when all the opportunists are coming over to your side, and we see that happening.
There are some people here in America, they're saying, oh, I can't believe that Jeff Bezos is going over to Mar-a-Lago.
No, that's a very telling sign.
Or even Zuckerberg.
These are guys who recognize the wind has shifted, and they are shifting along with it.
Larry, it's always fun to talk to you, and I know you're busy over there, so thank you for making the time.
Guys, Larry Taunton, author, columnist, cultural commentator.
Follow him on x at Larry Taunton.
Larry, when you're back in town, when you're back in the country, let's do it again.
Thank you, brother.
I appreciate it.
I'm in a section of The Big Lie, my book that is now out in paperback, and the chapter is called Disposable People.
I began yesterday with a kind of introduction to the chapter, and now we're going to see the fairly deep and elaborate connection between the progressives, not so much the Democrats, because We're now talking about an ideological movement in America called progressivism.
I'll say a word in a moment about what that is.
And the Nazis, and this is in the areas of so-called euthanasia, basically killing people you don't want to be alive, and also forced segregation.
I'm sorry, not forced segregation, forced sterilization.
That's what I mean to say.
And one might expect that I'm going to lay out an argument for the Nazis did this, the Nazis did that, and the progressives were like, wow, that sounds pretty cool.
Maybe we should be doing the same thing.
But in reality, I'm going to show the opposite.
It was the progressives who did this and the progressives who did that.
They were the inventors, the divisors, the concoctors of the schemes that I'm about to describe.
And the Nazis were like, wow, the progressives have come up with this great stuff.
We need to grab it and in fact run ahead of them.
And then the progressives notice that the Nazis are getting ahead of them and they go, whoa, the Nazis are beating us at our own game and the Nazis are more progressive than we are.
So this is the chapter.
Of sordid history that I'm about to outline.
And you'll notice it's a chapter that appears nowhere in, well, pretty much any other book.
Because the books are written largely by liberals, by people who are progressive in today's lexicon.
And sanitizing the role, the connection between the progressives and the Nazis, the kind of mutual admiration society.
This is part of what today's progressives do, and they've done it very successfully so that for someone like me, I mean, I'm now in my early 60s, and it was not until my late 50s that I discovered these things.
And when I first discovered them, I'm so stupefied that I say to myself, it's got to be wrong.
I've got to be reading some eccentric sources that maybe aren't corroborated.
I need to go to the original documents.
So I go to the original documents and I go, whoa, this is in fact true.
And so we're dealing here with a major...
A brainwashing operation carried out by the left very successfully to the point that pretty much most intellectual conservatives, certainly of my generation, were taken in by this.
And also earlier generations.
I say that because I've been steeped in conservative literature really since my late teens.
And of course, if conservatives were writing about all this stuff, I would certainly have known it.
Yesterday, I talked about the dress rehearsal for the Holocaust.
I talked about how the Nazis were killing mental defectives, physical defectives, practicing forced sterilization.
They had created the early, not only early concentration camps, which are work camps, but early death camps.
And now, the question becomes, where did the Nazis get all these ideas from?
Did the Nazis come up with them?
Or did the Nazis learn them from someone?
And I'm going to answer the Nazis did not come up with them.
They learned these ideas from American progressives.
Not Democrats, but progressives.
So now it's worth taking a moment and asking what is the difference between the Democrats and the progressives.
Now, the Democrats, that's the name of a party.
And it's a party that started in the 1820s, really begun in a sense by Andrew Jackson.
And the Democrats have had different elements within the party.
An ideological movement that developed in the early 20th century.
Well, it has its roots in the 19th century progressivism of Europe.
But it was imported into America, really, in the early 20th century.
And progressivism was a doctrine of the administrative state.
Think about it.
We're living today with the administrative state, all these agencies.
Think of who these agencies are accountable.
Like, who is the food and drug agency accountable to?
It's not really accountable to Congress.
Congress doesn't really follow the contours of what the FDA is doing.
It's accountable, in a sense, to nobody.
It is a branch of the government that is theoretically under the executive division, but it's not even really directly answerable.
In theory, it's answerable to the president.
But in reality, these agencies are runaway groups.
They make their own, quote, laws.
They enforce them the same as any other laws.
This is the administrative state.
This is a creation of progressivism.
But progressivism was about a lot more than just centralized government, ruled by experts, the administrative state.
It did all those things, but it did all those things to achieve certain types of goals.
And here we're going to talk about what those goals are.
So the progressives wanted to undermine capitalism.
They wanted to replace it with state-run capitalism.
You'll see later how Nazism pretty much was state-run capitalism or an alliance between government and business with government as the senior partner.
Now, it's worth noting that there were some Republicans who were progressive in the early I would say a good example of it is Theodore Roosevelt.
He's probably the most famous.
progressive Republican.
Teddy Roosevelt wasn't all that progressive when he was the president.
He was president for two terms.
But after he finished his second term, he became politically very ambitious for a third term.
There was no easy path to do that because Taft was the leader of the Republican Party.
And so Teddy Roosevelt decided to, in a sense, run on a third-party ticket.
He called it the Bull Moose ticket, or at least colloquially the Bull Moose ticket.
And so that was a progressive platform.
Woodrow Wilson, who was running also in that race, it was a three-man race in 1912, was also a progressive.
And I think this is the key point.
Teddy Roosevelt was kind of a soft progressive and Woodrow Wilson a hard progressive.
And what's the difference between the two?
Well, we can see the difference if we think about something like sterilization laws.
Roosevelt would say things like, yes, society is based on survival of the fittest.
Progress means eliminating the unfit.
This was a kind of social Darwinism, very popular at the time.
And it was connected with the progressive movement.
But Teddy Roosevelt was also a family guy.
He was a religious guy.
And so his social Darwinism existed somewhat uncomfortably with this personal...
So if you went to Teddy Roosevelt and said something like, why don't we forcibly sterilize all the kind of losers of American society?
He would have been horrified.
This would run completely counter to Teddy's idea, which was really a be fruitful and multiply idea.
But Woodrow Wilson, on the other hand, would have been far more sympathetic to something like this.
And as we will see, the progressives were pushing exactly these kinds of schemes.
In what I'm about to say, or I'm going to say a little bit today and then more tomorrow, I'm going to be speaking not of progressives in general, but left-wing progressives, these kinds of hard progressives of the Woodrow Wilson stripe.
Now, the progressives were ahead of the Nazis in sterilization, for sterilization schemes.
And they showed the Nazis how to implement those programs.
The Nazis, for their part, acknowledged the pioneering role of the American left in educating them into these life-preventing, which is sterilization, but also killing schemes.
The so-called euthanasia schemes also came out of the progressive left.
And progressives, when they realized that the Nazis were going ahead of them, And putting more expansive versions of their own programs into effect, they became super excited and they declared that the Germans were the frontiers of social advancement.
In other words, progress was defined as getting rid of the bad people and preserving only the best people.
You can kind of see how Hitler's philosophy of racial supremacy comes out of this kind of soil.
It takes on very specific...
It's a very specific path within this soil because it essentially is a philosophy of Nordic superiority.
It targets Jews.
But nevertheless, it comes out of this idea that there are better people and there are worse people, and we've got to basically kick the worse people off the face of the earth.
This whole connection, as I mentioned, has been swept under the rug.
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