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Jan. 24, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
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CRACKDOWN Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1007
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Thank you.
Thank you.
the comprehensive scope of Trump's border crackdown.
I also want to reveal how Trump intends to change the culture of universities and the workplace by ending DEI and affirmative action.
And Ryan McMakin of the Mises Institute joins me.
We're going to talk about the issue of birthright citizenship.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
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No issue is more fundamental in the recent election than fixing the border.
This is an issue that Trump was serious about in 2016, but he is approaching The issue with a comprehensive determination that even makes 2016 look mild.
In some ways, you can understand that.
In 2016, Trump had a simpler task, and that is there were people coming across the border, but even under Obama, there were quite a few deportations.
And so the border problem was real, and it was serious.
But you didn't have the 10-plus million people.
Now, Trump thinks it's far more.
It's more like 20 million people.
But whether it's 10 or whether it's 20, we're talking about gargantuan numbers.
I mean, the country as a whole has 330 million people.
So 10 million people makes a huge difference.
And so in early 2025, Trump is...
Kind of going at this from many different angles.
And Trump's man to do it seems to be the right man for the job, Tom Homan.
Why?
He's done it before.
He has a lot of experience.
And he's not reluctant to go there.
And here's what I mean by this.
Homan was on CNN, and he was being peppered with this idea.
You're going to go after some of the criminal aliens, aren't you?
And he goes, yeah, we are.
But he makes it clear that it's not limited to criminal aliens.
Let's remember, everybody who comes in as an illegal is a lawbreaker.
They're all criminals.
I've heard it said as almost a chant on the progressive left, you know, an illegal alien is not a criminal.
Actually, yes, an illegal alien is a criminal.
You could say that there are children who come across the border who aren't criminals because they don't really have a will of their own and these things are being brought by their parents.
But okay, you're not a criminal.
You're the children of criminals.
So that's Homan's approach.
And I just saw him, I think yesterday it was on Fox News, and somebody asked him, like, hey, listen, what do you have to do to get a visit from ICE? And the answer is very simply, be in the country illegally.
That's it.
You're illegal.
There's every right for you to be deported.
Now, of course, Tom Holman, I think, is pretty clear that he has certain priorities.
They're going to deport the worst people first, the criminals first, the gang members first.
But the point is, no one gets to say, hey, I'm not a gang member.
I'm not in Trendi or Agua.
And, you know, I haven't killed anybody.
So even though I'm illegal, I should be able to stay.
No, you don't have a right to stay.
You may not be the ones removed first.
But Homan also made an interesting point that I think is a very nice gotcha on these so-called sanctuary cities.
Because some of these mayors...
Have said, I'm not going to allow you to come into our city.
We're a sanctuary city.
You're not going to be able to get past me.
I'm going to be standing in the gate and so on.
And this is an area where the U.S. Justice Department has already put out a statement basically saying that if you're a mayor or some kind of official of any of these sanctuary cities, prepare to be arrested.
You're not going to be able to obstruct this operation.
And in fact, Holman goes further and he goes, listen, we're going to be kind of focused on these sanctuary cities because here's the point.
If you're hiding these criminal aliens, let's say you're hiding them in some hideaway with like a hundred other people.
He goes, we're going to be deporting all the hundred.
You could see actually on CNN, there was a big expression of surprise on their face.
They're like, you're not just going to come in and get the criminal alien?
He goes, no.
All the rest of them are lawbreakers too.
So the point being that if...
If these democratic cities kind of round up these illegals to hide them, that actually becomes a sort of opportunity for ICE and for Tom Holman to go in there, kind of grab them all at once, and then send them back over.
Now, they've been talking about flying these people back to their home countries.
I don't even see why it's necessary to do that.
This is where I may be even more hardcore than Tom Holman, because my view is, listen, how did they get here?
Did they fly here?
No, they walked.
Okay, they need to walk back.
So take them to the border, put them over the fence on the other side, and give them a big sayonara.
Maybe give them a map.
And let them go the way they came.
Well, yeah, but Dinesh, I don't know.
It's very treacherous to make your way back through Mexico to Honduras or wherever you came from.
Well, didn't you make that journey already?
Didn't they let you get through?
Didn't they give you a pass?
Well, you're going to have to ask them to give you the same pass to make your way in the reverse direction.
Now, it is a measure of how freaked out the left is that they're putting out the most preposterous types of defenses for these illegals.
Here's an article in the New York Times.
I have it right in front of me.
Undocumented women ask, will my unborn child be a citizen?
Listen to this, honey.
Title in the New York Times.
Undocumented women ask, will my unborn child be a citizen?
Suddenly, the New York Times has discovered the personhood of the unborn.
Suddenly, the unborn have rights.
Will my unborn child, notice that they even use the word child, be a citizen.
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
In fact, following the New York Times' ideology, it should be, undocumented women ask, Will this extension of my own body, will this clump of cells be a citizen?
Well, that answers itself.
You're not a citizen, so obviously this extension of you is not a citizen either.
So this shows how shameless the New York Times is, and it also shows in some ways that they know in every other context that an unborn child is in fact a child.
Now, Bill Milligan of Fox News went along with ICE in Boston to detain some violent illegals.
One of them is this criminal from Haiti.
And it's very interesting what he says.
He says, I'm not going back to Haiti.
So he's yelling out as he's being apprehended.
He goes, so you feel me?
Yo, Biden, forever, bro.
Thank Obama for everything that he did for me, bro.
So...
Here you have a very telling admission on the part of the illegals.
They know.
And I suppose this is part of their own self-defense.
They're like, hey, listen, yeah, we came here of our own accord, but guess what?
Obama invited us.
Biden invited us.
And there is an element of truth, of course, in all this.
So, in other words, the law-breaking was facilitated on this side as well.
You have democratic lawmakers who, in a sense, said, please come.
Open invitation.
We're not going to be enforcing our own laws.
This is a little bit bad because really it shows that although you have these people and they are at fault, the fault is also partly with the Democrats who created this scheme for them.
In this case, by the way, we're talking about a gang member with 17 criminal convictions.
And so I think it's not exactly to the benefit of the Democrats that he goes, hey, I'm calling out to my friend Biden, I'm calling out to my friend Obama, because it is a way of acknowledging that Biden and Obama are in league with these gangsters.
Here's another headline from the New York Times.
How labeling cartels terrorists could hurt the U.S. economy.
Again, think of the...
Think of the mentality that thinks that this is a winning argument.
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One of President Trump's executive orders that I haven't focused on, although I've mentioned it, is the executive order on DEI. And there is an executive order, but there are also various...
Statements coming out of the departments and agencies that pertain to DEI. The bottom line of it is, no more DEI in the federal government.
Nothing could be more unequivocal.
Nothing could be more clear.
And even more than that, Trump has ordered all federal DEI employees to be put on leave no later than Wednesday, this past Wednesday, at 5 p.m.
Eastern Time.
They are out of there.
Now, he hasn't said that they shouldn't be paid, but his point is stop the DEI activity in the government as of right now.
Now, not a surprise, some of the agencies are trying to conceal their DEI operations by reshuffling and renaming them.
This has been going on in the FBI. Somebody on X posted a very good example of the ATF. Here's the ATF. They had Lisa T. Boykin.
I see a picture of her in front of me.
Chief Diversity Officer.
And you now look at her resume, or you look at her title.
Lisa T. Boykin, Senior Executive, Office of the Director.
Clearly what's going on is the woman is the same.
Her duties, as far as we know, are the same.
She just has a different title.
So the Trump people, this is really how you fight bureaucracy.
You have to go inside these agencies, expose all these sleights of hand that are going on, and there are probably hundreds, maybe even thousands of these examples.
You find all these people, you expose the duplicity, and you remove them.
You not only remove the woman, who is the DEI offender, if you will, but you remove her boss, because that's the person who made the sly decision, hey, listen.
Come in here.
What about if we just change your title?
Hopefully the idiots in the Trump transition team and the new incoming Trump administration won't figure this one out.
Yeah, I think we're on it.
I think we are going to figure it out.
But an example of how Trump is serious about all this is something that I did not expect him to do, but it's absolutely fantastic that he has done it.
And that is he has repudiated an executive order signed by Lyndon Johnson going all the way back to 1965. This is an executive order called 11246. Now, this will probably mean nothing to you or to many people, but it's a notorious executive order.
I discuss it at some length in my book, The End of Racism.
Other people who write about this have discussed it.
This is what got affirmative action started.
Basically, the executive order itself reads in a fairly benign way.
It talks about Federal contracts taking, quote, affirmative action to promote the full realization of equal opportunity.
And right there, you see the absolute contradiction between these two terms, affirmative action and equal opportunity.
They're presented as if they're the same thing.
One is designed to achieve the other.
But affirmative action in practice rapidly becomes racial preferences.
And this happened kind of slowly.
So at the beginning, it was you have two guys who are roughly equally qualified.
All All right, we give the nod to the minority or we give the nod to the woman.
Initially, affirmative action, of course, began with race and then gender was kind of appended or added to the list.
And so in the beginning, it was measuring people of roughly comparable credentials or comparable capabilities.
But pretty soon that was thrown out the window, partly because a couple of the minority groups, notably blacks, were Not performing well enough that their numbers would increase substantially.
And so realizing this, universities, corporations basically decide, all right, let's dump this idea of, quote, equally qualified.
Let's just establish a two-track or a multi-track system.
We'll set goals for all the different ethnic groups.
And in a sense, when you're competing to get into a university, say Rice University in Houston, or you're trying to get a job or a federal contract, Basically, what happens is you're only competing against members of your own race.
Harvard, in the recent Supreme Court case, submitted data basically talking about what is the chance of getting into Harvard, for example, if you are in the top academic decile, the top 10%.
What is the chance that you'll be admitted to Harvard if you're in the top 10%?
And let me give you an answer here.
Basically, if you're white, You have a 15% chance of being accepted.
And that's if you're in the top 10%.
If you're Asian American, 12.7%.
So whites have an advantage, slight advantage, but an advantage over Asians.
If you're African American, you have a 56% chance of being taken.
In other words...
You have a better than even chance of being accepted.
For Hispanics, 31%.
For all applicants, the average is 14%.
And then as you go down, you notice that those percentages persist.
Let me give you an example.
If you are basically in the sixth academic decile, kind of toward the middle, you have almost no chance if you're white or Asian.
Your chances are basically under 5% for whites and 2.5% for Asians.
But if you're black, You have a 30%, a 29.7% chance of being accepted.
So what this really shows you is that affirmative action in practice means egregious racial preferences.
And so what Trump is doing here, and think about this, you've had this executive order.
When I first began to write about affirmative action in the Reagan era, Reagan could have canceled this executive order, but he didn't.
George Bush, George H.W. Bush could have cancelled it when he was elected in 1988, and he didn't.
George W. Bush could have cancelled it during any of his two terms, but he didn't do it.
Trump didn't even do it in his first term.
So all of this is kind of an indication of the fact that Trump is willing to chop down the tree, not just by knocking off a branch here and a branch there.
Think of a DEI. It is an outgrowth.
It is the branches of a tree that was planted going right back to this executive order.
Now, some people say, in fact, Debbie mentioned to me, she's like, well, didn't Richard Nixon, wasn't he the one that implemented the first affirmative action program?
Well, the answer is technically yes.
The first practical program adopted was the Philadelphia Plan under Nixon.
Nixon, remember, was elected in 1968. He came in after Lyndon Johnson.
So Lyndon Johnson's executive order, the one I mentioned, was the first articulation and executive approval of an affirmative action scheme that was later...
It became ultimately a bipartisan scheme.
Republicans were more reluctant implementers, but they were implementers all the same.
And Democrats continue to push the envelope on all this until racial preferences have suffused not only our academic sector, but really the whole society.
So Trump is taking an axe to something that has grown.
In a very profuse way in our institutional culture.
But I'm delighted to see that he's going to the very beginning of it.
He is chopping off ultimately the root, as I mentioned, and I'm hoping that with that, slowly, but ultimately the whole tree will begin to shake and perhaps in the end even to fall.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast a new guest, Ryan McMakin.
He is Executive Director of the Mises Institute, the website mises.org.
I'm named, of course, after the great Ludwig Juan Mises.
Ryan McMakin, he's a former economist for the state of Colorado.
He's written a couple of books, Breaking Away the Case...
of secession, radical decentralization, and smaller polities.
Also a book called Commie Cowboys, The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.
He's co-host of the Radio Rothbard podcast and the Loot and Lobby podcast.
He's appeared on Fox News, Fox Business, featured in a bunch of publications.
You can follow him on X at Ryan McMaken, M-C-M-A-K-E-N. And we're going to talk about the issue of birthright.
Ryan, welcome.
Thank you for joining me.
I must confess, this is not an issue that I have studied myself.
And I know that Trump has issued an executive order basically saying, hey, no more birthright citizenship.
And I've seen that a bunch of states have immediately jumped into action and said, we're going to be filing lawsuits about this.
We're going to be contesting this.
I've seen a couple of prominent Democrats say, wait a minute, it says in the Constitution that if you're born here, you can be a U.S. citizen.
I'm counting on you to educate us a little bit about all this.
So talk about birthright citizenship.
Have we had this since the very beginning?
Or is this some innovation that has made its way into the American understanding of the Constitution more recently?
Well, this is an issue that's not just relevant to the United States, of course, is that lots of countries debate this issue should they have birthright citizenship.
And what that usually just means is your citizenship is contingent upon the location of your birth.
And this is different from what most of the world outside of Latin America does, which is basing citizenship on who your parents are, what their citizenship is, what their family background is.
And the reason that the Americas have tended to lean toward, and this is the case in the United States, is lean toward birthright citizenship.
Either unconditional or conditional, is because historically there's been a big labor shortage in the Americas, a relatively unpopulated region of the world, and that's part of the reason why the Americas also imported so many slaves during that period, as well as there was just an ongoing labor shortage.
Latin America had a similar issue going on.
So to this day, both North and South America still have laws that tend toward birthright citizenship.
Now, of course, what's being argued for the United States by people who want it is that the United States has unrestricted birthright citizenship.
Lots of countries have restrictions on this.
You have to have at least one parent who is a citizen, or you need to have lived here for a certain period of time, that sort of thing, or obtained a certain age.
There are lots of restrictions you can put on it.
What people who want birthright citizenship in this country, what they want when they say birthright citizenship is you're born within the physical boundaries of the United States, you have full unrestricted citizenship, really no exceptions.
And they want to apply that to someone who arrives illegally, someone who arrives illegally.
It just doesn't matter.
And the only exception they really accept is that maybe you're the children of foreign diplomats who are actively working for a foreign government.
But they will tell you it's not even debatable.
They will tell you that the 14th Amendment, as written in the late 1860s, simply states that anyone subject to the laws of the United States and born here is a citizen.
This is a lot more debatable than those people would have you believe.
However, historically in the United States, there wasn't, of course, outright birthright citizenship because you could be denied citizenship based on your race in some states in the U.S., of course, because of the issue of slavery.
And so generally the narrative is that, and I think this part of it is correct, is that the 14th Amendment was introduced.
To make it clear that they were overturning the old Dred Scott decision, which said that, right, if you were a slave or descended from slaves, you could not have citizenship.
Okay, so they're introducing new legislation that says, yes, in the form of an amendment, you were born here, you cannot be denied citizenship.
However, that second phrase is pretty important where it says where you are subject to the jurisdiction.
And so there's been a lot of debate over that over the years.
What does that mean exactly?
And we can look back to then some Supreme Court decisions as to what that phrase means exactly.
And the number one exception usually given to that is...
Wait, we have a big exception of people born within the boundaries of the United States who were not granted citizenship by the 14th Amendment, and everybody accepts this, and that was residents of tribal lands, that is, Native Americans, people who lived in places we now call Indian reservations.
However, nobody denied that those places were, in the broad sense, subject to the laws of the United States, right?
Even though there was...
These sort of nods and claims that the tribal lands had sovereignty of some sort.
Everybody knew they didn't have real sovereignty and that Congress governed the laws and ultimately had control over those tribal lands.
And so the courts recognized early on in the 1880s that, yes, the 14th Amendment says that people who are subject to the United States are citizens.
However...
There were millions of people who were not subject to that, who were born, in fact, within the United States.
And the reasoning given was that, oh, these people have some sort of allegiance or a connection to a foreign sovereign state.
And in that case, they were saying, oh, they have this allegiance to their tribal government, and so they're not primarily, in terms of naturalization and state allegiance, they're not Americans in that sense.
So therefore, they're not automatically citizens.
And then there were other debates within the legal framework as well, saying that, yes, if you were, and some of the early commentators on the amendment said this, was that, quite frankly, if you were a citizen of another state and you considered yourself to be really allegiance if you were a citizen of another state and you considered yourself to be really allegiance to some sort of foreign sovereign or foreign state, that you were not so uh
In these areas, they're looking and they're saying, hey, foreign nationals may not be eligible for citizenship under the 14th Amendment.
So there was a recognition that there were definitely limits there.
These limits pertain in a small way to these children of diplomats, but also larger to people residing within the United States who had a connection to some government other than the United States.
And that's, I think, a lot of the debate today is...
Okay, if you've entered the U.S. legally and you have no legal status in the United States, you're clearly a foreign national.
The question is then, can you get citizenship from that way, even though your only legal relationship is in fact to a foreign state?
Now, I would argue, you could even argue that the 14th Amendment, in the way it's written, could be used to limit citizenship even to legal residents if they are still foreign nationals.
But that's a slightly different matter of debate.
But that's really the core of the debate today is, does the 14th Amendment really apply to everybody?
Or are there limitations based on whether you're a foreign national or have some allegiance to a foreign government?
And that is a real debate and goes back, I think, one of the most comprehensive discussions on this was a 1985 book called Citizenship Without Consent.
And that was written by two Yale scholars named Shuck and Smith.
And you can look it up.
Shuck and Smith's Citizenship Without Consent.
Now, these scholars have even clarified that they are not in favor of denying citizenship to illegal aliens.
They just think that a coherent and honest reading of the Constitution tells us, an honest reading of that 14th Amendment, tells us that, yes, Congress...
Really is able to define who is eligible for citizenship under the 14th Amendment.
So these people weren't backing into that reading based on, right, we want more.
More alien residents, any sort of thing.
They're just going off on what they saw as an honest reading of that amendment and admitting that, yeah, Congress can define who is eligible.
And that book still affects the debate today.
And so we simply cannot, we shouldn't listen to these people at the Washington Post and such who are handing down these arguments saying, hey, the text means what the text says.
Well, that, of course, isn't true of any legal text.
There's significant debate over this, and there has been for quite a long time.
Ryan, let me ask it slightly differently, because it looks to me like if you're saying that Congress would need to pass a law, the Senate would need to go along with it, Trump would need to sign it.
That's going to be a difficult road, particularly with an issue as fraught as this one.
I don't see the existence of any majority there that could sort of pull that off.
However, my question is this.
Under Biden, We have fairly clear, well-articulated laws, and the Biden people basically said, yeah, we're aware of those laws, but guess what?
We have enforcement and interpretive latitude.
If we want to let people into the country, we can create porous systems to enable that to happen.
And so in a sense, we're flouting the laws, but since it's up to us to decide, it's kind of like the cop who goes, I don't have to catch every speeder on the highway.
I'll just kind of catch the ones I come across, and I'll enforce the law in that way.
I'm using prosecutorial and sort of enforcement discretion.
My question is, Do you think that Trump might be able to get away with that?
By saying, in effect, listen, this issue may not be totally sorted out.
There might be some ambiguity in the Constitution in precisely the way that you describe.
But it's my job as head of the executive to enforce these laws.
We're interpreting them this way, which is not an unreasonable interpretation of the law.
And we're going to carry it out.
You think the Supreme Court might go along with that?
Yeah, I am not an expert on that aspect of things.
That's really the downside of really what we've degenerated to, which is basically rule by executive order, where you get one guy in, Biden issues a bunch of executive orders, which are pushing the limits of legality, and then the next guy comes in and goes to the other side, trying to undo the previous guy, and there's no real congressional debate or anything like that.
It's hard for me to predict what the Supreme Court will say in response to that.
Now, it does seem that this will force the Supreme Court to address the issue in some respect.
Although I would suggest that even if the Supreme Court comes down with a decision on this, Congress could still intervene to define certain phrases within the law.
They could define things like, what does it mean to be under the jurisdiction of the United States?
Other legal phrases that have been important is, what does it mean to be domiciled within the United States?
This is a key historical phrase when we're talking about citizenship as well, and Congress hasn't done a lot with that.
Regardless of where the Supreme Court comes down, Congress should have to do this.
So I don't know.
Where the Supreme Court will come down on this, because a lot of it really depends on just what is your preferred reading of these past rulings from the court.
And of course, we know, right, the court has been wrong about things in the past, right?
They were wrong about Roe v.
Wade.
They were wrong about the internment of Japanese back in the 1940s.
And then those things get overturned, just depending on what a reading is.
So yeah, I can't predict how this will go in the Supreme Court.
I think it's good.
That the executive order is raising the issue of the fact that this really is a debatable issue.
And claiming that the law is just so self-evident, I think, has really caused people to take a harder look out of it and admit that nothing is really as self-evident as you might think.
I mean, no surprise to me a judge has just come out and, you know, basically put the order on hold.
But I think you know and I know that this happens all the time.
It's kind of round one of a legal battle.
This happened with Trump with Remain in Mexico.
Judges held it up.
I think Trump may even have lost it.
But as it makes its way through the system, ultimately the high court goes, yeah, this is actually something that is within the authority of the government.
So I think what I'm getting from you is that even though you know how the left works, they're going to find some progressive jurisdiction.
They're going to contest this order.
They're probably going to win at the first stage.
They might even win at the second stage.
But you're saying that the final outcome remains to be seen.
Yeah, I mean, in the realm of politics, there aren't these deeply principled, honest readings of what the legal history of any particular law is, right?
They want a legal interpretation that suits modern politics.
And that's the way it works.
I would say that political realities are going to continue to push things in favor of restrictions of birthright citizenship.
And we see this worldwide.
We see...
The decline and the end of unrestricted birthright citizenship in Europe.
The last country to have it in Europe was Ireland, and it ended that in 2004. And there are no unrestricted birthright citizenship countries left in Europe.
Why is that?
Because Europe as a net in-migration region, as they've extended the welfare state to more and more migrants, and as numbers have increased in many ways, it's just become more of an issue.
And so political realities push these countries in that direction.
And there have been empirical studies of what determines birthright citizenship in various countries, and it's clear that as volume of migration increases...
And as there are more and more benefits to citizenship, that is in terms of welfare states and being able to gain greater economic benefit that way, that makes immigration more high stakes.
And so it's important to note, actually, that naturalization is a separate issue, really, from immigration, right?
You could have high immigration but low naturalization, that is.
And this happens in some countries where they have a large number of foreign workers in the country.
But citizenship is rarely handed out to new arrivals.
And when you do have a very open immigration policy, that makes naturalization more high stakes, or rather vice versa as well.
Because if everyone arriving then is able to obtain citizenship after only a few years, that...
It presents real costs on the existing citizenry.
It provides real benefits to incoming immigrants and not much downside.
To the incoming immigrants as well, especially if they're not required to give up citizenship in a foreign country where dual citizenship is allowed.
There is certainly an interplay between naturalization and immigration, but if you had a country that was far more restrictive on naturalization and was handing out citizenship much less frequently, that would make immigration a lower-stakes game.
Because the people who live here already wouldn't be facing, essentially, for lack of a better term, a dilution of their vote to millions of people as they come in and obtain the vote.
And you're not granting political participation and access to the welfare state.
To new arrivals if you were restricting naturalization more.
So the situation with immigration is very much affected.
How people view immigration and immigrants is very much affected by how easy it is to get citizenship.
I mean, it seems there's also kind of an element of obviousology here, if I can put it that way, right?
I mean, somebody comes to the United States from India or from China, and let's say they're here on a work visa, but they're not citizens.
They have a kid here.
Whoops, the kid becomes a citizen automatically by virtue of being here, or even a worst case where someone comes as an illegal.
They're pregnant at the time.
They stay here for a certain duration.
Boom, they have a kid.
The kid becomes a citizen.
I mean, there's something inherent.
We're currently preposterous about this.
There's no rationale why this should be so.
And so regardless of how this all came about historically, I think it seems to me that most Americans faced with these kinds of cases are going to say, That really doesn't make any sense.
And the question is whether that commonsensical interpretation will make its way into the understanding of the law.
Guys, I've been talking to Ryan McMakin.
He's executive director of the Mises Institute.
We're trying to untangle this thorny issue of birthright citizenship.
Follow him on x at Ryan McMakin.
Ryan, thank you for joining me and helping to illuminate this issue.
Thank you.
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It's DINESHDINESH. I'm going to show how American initiatives that were launched by progressives in this country in the early part of the 20th century inspired the Nazis,
caused them to kind of copycat these schemes, but not only copycat them, but escalate them to a whole new level to the enthusiastic recognition and praise of the American progressives themselves.
I'm going to begin with a quote by the historian Angela Franks.
America led the way in legalizing and promoting coerced eugenic sterilizations.
What's she talking about?
Well, progressives had a big success in 1907 in this country.
Indiana passes a law requiring sterilization.
This is not voluntary sterilization.
You have to be sterilized if you are what?
Quote, a confirmed criminal, idiot, imbecile, or rapist.
Over the next 30 years, 26 other states passed similar laws.
In the early 1930s, when the Nazis came to power, American states were sterilizing 2,000 to 4,000 people a year.
And in all, adding it up, 65,000 people were sterilized against their will as a consequence of progressive eugenic legislation in the United States.
So this is the first prong.
Namely, forced sterilization.
Started in America.
Now we go to the second one.
Around the same time, progressives persuaded states around the country to pass marriage restriction laws, which prohibited whites and blacks from intermarrying.
These were often called anti-miscegenation laws.
And it wasn't just black and white.
We sometimes think of these laws as prohibiting whites and blacks from intermarrying.
That was part of it.
But it discouraged all minorities, Native Americans, Hispanics, everybody.
From marrying whites.
The idea here was to keep the fit and unfit of the Darwinian stock separate.
And of course, that was accompanied by various schemes to reduce the number of the so-called unfit.
So that's number two, marriage restrictions.
The third...
Immigration restrictions.
And the point is, there's nothing wrong with immigration restrictions by itself.
Every country has a right to determine who comes in and who becomes a member of a community.
But what we're talking about is immigration policies that are anchored or based on race.
In fact, based upon doctrines of racial superiority.
In 1924, progressives won a big victory with the passage of the Immigration Act.
It curtails immigration by preferring Northern Europeans, or so-called Nordics, and discriminating against immigrants from Asia, Africa, South America.
But not only that, also from South and Central Europe.
So it's interesting now, progressives will say, well, you know, Trump is cracking down on immigration.
He's a racist.
But the crackdown in immigration going on now has no racial component.
Basically, the idea is all illegals.
Need to stay away.
Don't come at all.
And if you're here, we're going to try to send you back.
And it doesn't matter if you crossed the border and came originally from South America, or whether you came from China, or whether you came from India.
It doesn't matter where you came from or what the color of your skin is.
You need to go home.
So there is a kind of colorblind approach being applied now, but that was not the case in the immigration law of 1924. The centerpiece of progressive enterprise in America was definitely eugenics.
All the other things, the intermarriage, the immigration, came out of the eugenic philosophy.
So it's worth spending a moment of time thinking about what eugenics is.
So eugenics is a project that is aimed at improving the racial stock, the genetic pool of the human race.
And you want to do this through genetic selection.
In a way, it's an effort to apply Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest to human beings.
The guy who started all this was actually a relative of Darwin, a cousin of Charles Darwin, Francis Galton.
But Galton's idea of eugenics went far beyond survival of the fittest.
Let's think about it.
In Darwin's idea, you have a competition in nature between the less fit and the more fit or the fit and the unfit.
And through a kind of Darwinian struggle, the fit survive and the unfit don't survive.
And so the fit have more offspring and you get a certain kind of natural selection going on here.
But think about it.
When you're talking about eugenics, you're not saying, hey, listen, why don't we let, in human society, people compete, compete for jobs and so on, and some people will win and other people will lose, and we'll let sort of nature take its course.
No.
The eugenic approach was let us bring in human engineering to identify the fit and the unfit and preserve the former and get rid of the latter.
So I want to emphasize that this is not just an idea of let the Darwinian principle apply to human society.
It is let us use human planning, human orchestration, human engineering to create this result.
Now, in America, there was really a plethora of progressive organizations all connected with eugenics.
I'm going to name a few of them.
The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor in Long Island.
The National Conference on Race Betterment.
The American Breeders Association.
I mean, think of how striking these titles are.
Leading eugenicists were Charles Davenport.
He is the founder of the Eugenics Record Office.
Harry Laughlin.
First superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office, Leon Whitney, executive secretary of the American Eugenics Society, Madison Grant, president of the New York Zoological Society, also a trustee of the American Museum of Natural History, Paul Popino, editor of the Journal of Heredity, Eugene Gosney, director of the Human Betterment Foundation, and the progressive philanthropist Clarence Gamble.
The reason I give you all these titles, I want to show that these people were not...
They were not in the margins.
They were running important institutions, journals, associations of American society.
They were, if you will, the respectable people.
So here is Laughlin.
He's perhaps the most influential eugenicist in America.
He develops a scheme for mass sterilization.
And again, we're not talking about mass sterilization of like 30 people or 300 people.
He thinks that 10% of the U.S. population should be sterilized.
So he wanted to sterilize at that time, the population was less, 11 million people.
And he said, listen, we can compensate for that.
We're going to lose some people, but why don't we encourage fecundity or having more kids among the more gifted people?
Now, this scheme wasn't really carried out, but the point is it was proposed, it was advanced, it was discussed.
And as we'll see later, these kinds of schemes were lifted and picked up by the Nazis.
Progressive educators and health officials, according to this scheme, would start classifying people.
Mostly the uneducated people, the lower class people, of course the majority of them black, Hispanic or American Indian, but of course a lot of whites as well.
These people would be considered unfit or imbeciles.
And then you call the police and these women should be imprisoned or segregated from the population.
The idea was that they shouldn't be able to contaminate other people.
And in some cases, the women were held pretty much indefinitely.
The idea was to prevent them from breeding and having the kind of kids that we don't want in society.
Now, here's where the kind of sneaky scheme creeps in, which is that the progressives would...
Grab these women, segregate them, take them away from their families, and then come up to them and say, listen, you want to go back to society.
You want to be part of the normal human society.
Here's the way you do that.
You agree to be sterilized.
So we didn't really have...
For sterilization, or we kind of did.
Why?
Because the women were pressured into agreeing to be sterilized as the only way for them to be removed from these segregated quarters and returned to society.
So many women went along with this, and then the progressives could say, hey, listen, we're not forcing anybody.
These people are choosing to be sterilized.
Now, in addition, progressives come up with the idea of euthanasia.
This is an alternative to incarceration and forced sterilization.
And again, you may think, wait a minute, your solution is to actually kill people off?
Yeah, the progressives thought that would be an excellent idea.
The leading advocate for killing off the undesirables was the California geneticist Paul Popino.
He wrote a book, Applied Eugenics, and I'm now quoting him.
When it comes to the congenitally feeble-minded or the habitually criminal, quote, is execution.
And execution means just what you think it is, killing people off.
And Papano proposes, quote, lethal chambers to carry out these executions.
So he doesn't use the term gas chambers.
But he talks about lethal chambers, another word for killing chambers.
You can see here how the ingredients of what later would be called Nazism, concentration camps, death camps, gas chambers, the embryonic roots of all that are occurring right here.
This is long before the Nazis are coming to power.
We're talking about 1905, 1906, 1910. The Nazis don't come to power until 1933. Now, Papano's suggestion was controversial.
The progressives realized this is a bit too much.
We can't create these lethal chambers and start killing off people.
So they didn't really do that.
But guess what?
People in Germany noticed these ideas.
How did they notice these ideas?
Because the American progressive eugenicists and the Nazi progressive eugenicists would go to the same conventions.
There were international conventions of eugenics.
These were held all over Europe, sometimes in the United States.
So all these people knew each other.
And they would read each other's papers.
They would comment back and forth.
And so the Nazis were like, great idea!
Let's take this one up.
And so the point I'm trying to make is an American idea finds a...
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