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Jan. 31, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:35
TRUMP AND REAGAN Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1012
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Thank you.
Bernie Goldman, he's executive producer of a new film called Valiant One, is going to join me.
We're going to talk about this military thriller.
That is based upon the virtues of survival and bravery.
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Hit the follow button.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
It's been quite a week and Debbie and I are not doing today our usual Friday roundup, but I'm going to do a little bit of my own roundup.
I want to talk about some of the events that have gone unmentioned this week, but then I want to address a broader topic, and that is to look at the early days of this Trump administration and also compare it to the early days of Reagan.
Similarities, but also the differences between Trump and Reagan.
It's a way of reflecting on these sort of signposts of our life, of my life certainly.
Reagan I encountered first as a teenager, and then in my 20s working for him.
Trump, of course, more recently and in a number of ways over the last several years.
But it's also a way of thinking about leadership.
And about situational leadership.
And I say that because leadership is always calibrated to a given situation.
George Washington, for example, was a very effective leader.
But he was a very effective leader because he, certainly in the American Revolution, used a type of warfare that was very well suited to In some ways,
George Washington used the same strategy that the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese used against America in the 1960s and 70s.
Washington realized that in a straight-out battle, he would lose.
And in fact, if the British had truly brought the full force of their government to bear on the struggle, the American Revolution would have been killed in the cradle.
So Washington's job was to harass the British and torment them enough that they didn't want any part of this.
They were like annoyed.
They were irritated.
Give it up.
Let it go.
It's not important to us.
This is the way you defeat an empire that is trying to maintain its control from far away.
And this is all worth remembering when we think about Reagan and about Trump.
They're very different people, but I think also their success is based upon the idea that they're facing a very different situation.
In fact, a very different America.
So I'm going to swing back to all that, but let me begin with a couple of other things that have happened this week that I've meant to comment on but haven't been able to.
Here's a post by Hakeem Jeffries.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion are American values.
Never surrender.
This is a typical Hakeem Jeffries.
I'm not sure, by the way, if he writes these posts, but he probably approves them.
And he's a pretty smart guy.
He is somebody who knows how to hold the Democrats together, and he is pretty savvy at trying to score points.
So here he is.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion are American values.
And we're so conditioned to nod our heads when we see things like this that it never quite occurs to us to go, wait, is this really true?
Are there any founding documents that mention any of these things?
Can you think of diversity, equity, inclusion in the Declaration of Independence?
Are these words present in the Constitution?
Do you find them in the Publius papers?
No.
They simply don't exist.
Nobody thought in the founding that diversity was even a value.
In fact, the opposite.
By and large, the emphasis in the Federalist Papers, of which I'm more familiar, is on the homogeneity of the American people.
They're very similar to each other.
They come from a common stock.
And by the way, this is not simply something that the founders talk about, but this is something Tocqueville notices.
He comes to America and he notices that there are important differences.
And he notices that there are differences in climate.
He notices that the North is somewhat different from the South.
He attributes this to the institution of slavery.
But nevertheless, he says Americans are kind of characterized by common attachments, common values.
They are truly one people.
He has a section on American women.
You never get the impression that somehow these women are radically different from one part of the country to another.
No, in fact, the difference is between the American women on the one hand and Tocqueville's observation of European women on the other.
Think of Abraham Lincoln.
Can you think of a single Lincoln speech which talks about diversity?
No.
Equity?
I don't even think Lincoln knew that word.
Inclusion?
Preposterous.
Right away we see that Hakeem Jeffries here is blowing smoke, as they say.
These are not American values.
If anything, they are progressive values that have been kind of conjured up in recent years and are now being sort of presented as if they are the bedrock of American democracy, which they are manifestly not.
And I want to turn to something that involves Elon Musk.
He gave a speech.
In Europe, and he was giving a speech, I believe, on behalf of the right-wing party in Germany.
Now, the right-wing party in Germany is castigated all over Europe as being a sort of far-right party, somehow extremist.
There are even implications that it might be linked in a vague way with the Nazi party.
Leave aside the fact that the Nazi Party was not on the right.
It was actually on the left.
It's the National Socialist Party.
But nevertheless, there is an aroma of extremism attached to the German right-wing party.
And for what?
What is the German right-wing party doing that earns itself these epithets, not only in Germany, but all over Europe?
And you get a sense for how odious what Elon Musk is about to say.
If you watch the video of him saying it, I'm really going to focus on the content of his remarks, but if you watch the video, there's a woman sitting right next to him, and she jumps out of her seat and moves her seat like three feet away from Elon Musk, as if to say, I cannot even be seen sitting next to this guy.
He's polluting me by what he's saying.
And so let's look at what he's saying.
Basically, he's saying, I think there's value to a culture.
We don't want Japan to disappear.
We don't want Italy as a culture to disappear.
We don't want France as a culture to disappear.
I think we have to maintain the reasonable cultural identity of various communities, or they simply will not be those countries.
He goes on to say, Italy is the people of Italy.
The buildings are there, but really, what is Italy?
Italy is the Italians.
And so this is an affirmation of the integrity.
In fact, interestingly enough, here is Elon Musk himself giving a defense of true diversity.
So true diversity is a way of saying, listen, the world is a big place and it's got lots of interesting pockets of people.
You've got the Chinese over there, the Japanese over here, the Indians.
And all these people have developed over many, many years, if not centuries.
They have their own cuisine.
They have their own language.
They have their own culture.
And why would we want to annihilate these cultures?
You know, you and I may not want to live in Japan.
We may not like Japanese food.
Actually, I don't mind Japanese food at all.
But nevertheless, you may say it's too crowded.
I don't like Japanese culture.
Those people are...
I don't like their personality.
But the point is, they do.
And so...
Don't the Japanese have a certain, if you will, right to say, hey, this is our country.
This is who we are as a people.
And while we're going to let some people in from the outside who may want to come here, visit here, live here, maybe even become Japanese citizens, it's our job to decide who those people are and how many we're going to allow.
And protecting the integrity of our society is something that would seem on the face of it legitimate.
But somehow when it comes to Germany, If it's because of the Nazis and the Holocaust, the Germans have been battered for decades into this idea that you people are evil, Germany is evil, German history is evil, you don't have any right to exist.
And part of the desecration that we see happening in European society and to some degree in American society is based upon this browbeating of people, particularly Western people, particularly white people.
As if to say that whiteness is evil.
You people are evil.
Your history is evil.
It is an uninterrupted series of crimes committed against other people.
This is what Elon Musk is pushing back against, and I think he's quite right to do it.
All right.
Let me come back to the topic of Trump and Reagan.
The difference, I think, between Trump and Reagan can be kind of put this way.
Reagan comes in as president in 1980 with the unshakable confidence that American civilization is intact.
It has been despoiled by bad policies on the part of Jimmy Carter, who I think Reagan saw as a complete buffoon.
Reagan believed that there were many bad things that had happened in America going back to the Great Society.
Now, not the New Deal.
Reagan was never against the New Deal and, in fact, said, I'm for the New Deal, but against the Great Society.
Reagan, of course, had come up as a Democrat.
This is, by the way, a difference with Trump.
Some people think that Trump was a Democrat.
This is not true.
Trump, in fact...
Is a Republican, and he has been a Republican from his early business days.
Now, he did give money to both parties, and I think his reasoning was that if I'm operating as a real estate guy in New York, I've got to sort of play along with the establishment.
I need permits, I need permissions, and so in order to do that, I need to work with whatever political structure is in place in New York, and as you know, the...
The powers that be in New York have oscillated from Democrat to Republican.
We think of New York as a Democratic state, but no.
You've had Giuliani.
You have had Republican powers that be in New York as well as Democrats.
But with Reagan, you got the sense that the country fundamentally was okay.
Things were in their place.
The institutions of our society were generally sound.
What needed to be done is that you needed to root out these democratic bad policies, policies of appeasement of the Soviet Union, policies of confiscatory taxes, high degree of regulation.
But once you did those things, Reagan believed that...
Simply affirming American patriotism, simply celebrating the entrepreneur, giving, if you will, a great speech, would mobilize the American people, would kindle, if you will, that American virtue in them, and that America would be back.
So even though Reagan's slogan and Trump's slogan, Make America Great Again, very similar, my point is that the conditions weren't similar.
There was a threat, but the threat was coming mainly from the outside.
It was the evil empire was abroad.
You might have a nincompoop who had preceded Reagan in the form of Jimmy Carter, but I don't think that Reagan would have said, in fact, I don't even think that Reagan thought that Carter was evil.
Rather, he thought Carter was a fool.
And Carter was indeed a fool, although I think that there are, and there was a malevolent strain in Carter that Reagan, maybe because of his geniality, his optimism, overlooked.
Nevertheless, with Reagan, the bad guys could be found in places like Moscow or in Romania, in Bucharest, Ceausescu.
These were...
Foreign villains.
The other thing about Reagan was that he was a guy who was very much at ease with himself and not somebody who attached a great deal of importance to taking credit.
You'd never hear Reagan say something like, who was the greatest president?
Because for Reagan, if you thought he was the greatest, that would be great.
Even if you didn't think so, Reagan's view was, I'm here to kind of get a job done.
I have unshakable convictions that I've developed over many, many years, and I'm going to do my best to put those into practice.
And if you don't like what I believe, you can vote me out, but I'm going to do my best to convince you.
And this is a real difference with Trump.
Trump is very self-aware.
The other thing about Trump, a difference with Reagan that I think is worth noting, is that Reagan operates by what I would call internal affirmation and Trump by external affirmation.
This is a key difference, and in fact, it's a key difference even historically, because if you look at ancient times, you have warriors like Achilles who, when they talk about imperishable fame, what they mean is what other people will say about them.
Fame is important because I need to be affirmed by the words of others.
They need to remember me.
They need to say I'm the greatest.
There's no such thing for Achilles of saying something like this.
Achilles would never say, well, you people don't think I'm the greatest.
Agamemnon doesn't think I'm the greatest.
But guess what?
I know inside my heart that I am truly the greatest.
And so what the rest of you say doesn't really matter to me.
What I'm saying is that this is sort of Reagan's way of thinking.
Reagan's way of thinking is internal affirmation.
It is sort of a job well done.
This is not to say that the internal guy doesn't seek any kind of external recognition.
In fact, sometimes for the internal guy, the external voice could even be God.
You know, well done thou.
Faithful servant.
Something like that.
But notice that God's message isn't received audibly.
God doesn't jump in front of you and say this in a manner that you can hear.
It's a feeling that you have inside of you.
Hey, Reagan, you did a good job.
You can step aside from the scene.
You did what you set out to do.
For Trump, Trump is, I think, maybe partly the way that he's come up through the real estate industry and then through popular culture.
It's all based upon external measures of success.
I built half of the New York skyline.
I have the tallest building in New York.
And this is not a matter of subjective opinion.
It's not like you think it's the tallest, but you think it's not the tallest, but in my heart I know it's the tallest.
No.
Either it's the tallest building or it isn't.
Either The Apprentice has the highest ratings of any TV show or it doesn't.
And that is the way Trump operates.
Debbie and I were kind of chuckling to ourselves that for Trump, what was the most important fact about the 2024 election?
Now, you might say he won.
We don't think so.
You might say, well, not only did he win the swing states, he won all of them.
What is the probability that Trump could have won every single swing state, not just the swing states of like Arizona or Georgia?
But he broke down the blue wall.
If you had asked me, I would say that is the spectacular accomplishment of the 2020 election, to obliterate the blue wall and take not most, but all of the swing states.
But Debbie and I don't think it's that one either.
So, for Trump, we think that the big one is the popular vote.
Why?
Because the popular vote is the same thing.
As having the tallest building in New York.
The popular vote is the same thing as having the highest rated show on television.
It is an external, objective validation of Trump's comeback.
Not just of his election a second time, but his election in the aftermath of unremitting lawfare.
All the efforts to go after Trump, the two impeachments, the nonstop media attack on every platform, pretty much every second of every day, to come back against all that and win the popular vote.
And this, by the way, at a time when it's been a long time since Republicans won the popular vote.
And who would have thought that Trump could do it?
I mean, if you went on one of these betting sites...
I would certainly not have put money on it.
I don't think you would have either, because the odds against that would seem too great.
I mean, it's good enough, we'll take the election, but winning the popular vote is something else.
And I think that's why, for Trump, that is really important.
And being a cultural figure.
Now, Reagan was also a cultural figure, but not of the same magnitude as Trump.
Reagan was known from his Hollywood days.
But Reagan was not Humphrey Bogart, and he wasn't Richard Burton.
He was, you can say, a sort of second-tier Hollywood guy.
He had some notable films, but he wasn't an actor of sort of surpassing recognition.
Not everybody in the country knew Reagan that way, although most people in the country obviously knew Reagan.
By the time Reagan was running for president.
Remember, he had been also governor of California for two terms.
So he was a well-known national figure.
I think what we're seeing here with Trump is something that's quite different.
Comparable in some ways to the end of the Cold War.
But this, of course, has to do with a revamping, a remaking of the pegs of American institutions and American culture.
First of all, It seems like all the institutions of our society are now up for grabs.
We're questioning everything.
We're taking nothing for granted.
We don't trust the banks, and we don't trust the FBI, and we don't trust the health authorities.
And so there's going to be...
This is not to say that we can live in mistrust all of our lives.
We're going to...
We're going to try to recreate institutions that can be trusted.
And so this is a massive task that the new administration is going to not do by itself, but is going to lead.
But the other thing is, I think we are going into a post-progressive era.
And what I mean by that is that we've been living through a progressive era since the 1960s.
The progressive era is the era that set...
The terms of the debate.
And when you set the terms of the debate, it doesn't matter if your party is in power.
You're still controlling the discourse because the other side is talking about the stuff that you think is important.
So if you think what is important is civil rights, the other side is going to be talking about civil rights.
If you think what is important is feminism and women's autonomy, the other side is going to be talking about that.
If you think what is important is everybody has a right to health care, Then that's going to be setting the agenda for the other side as well.
And so this is where the left has sort of had us up against the wall.
It's their agenda.
It's their vocabulary.
And we are always explaining, no.
The policies that we have in mind are not an infringement of human rights.
No, we too believe in the autonomy of women.
And no, we aren't going to be hurting the environment.
In fact, fossil fuels can be good for the environment in certain ways.
These are all concessions that the other side is setting the terms of the debate.
And so the progressive era has continued.
It continued in many ways through Reagan.
Why?
Because even under Reagan, the cultural debate was dictated, particularly at the higher levels of the culture in the academic world, in the world of NPR and the media.
The media was very left-wing under Reagan, and it remained left-wing under Reagan.
Now, the media that Trump inherited was more left-wing, was more viciously against Trump.
But I would argue, and Trump is not the only factor here, there's technology, there are other factors coming into play.
But Trump actually has the opportunity here to kind of break the monopoly of the media, to break the back of censorship, to transform the way in which the pharmaceutical establishment, the food industry, To transform the way in which normal, everyday business is done in this country.
And I don't just mean business in the sense of entrepreneurship or companies.
I'm talking about the way things are done in the country in terms of education, in healthcare, and in many other areas.
So Trump has the opportunity, he really didn't in 2016, to have this kind of widespread transformation.
People have spoken in the past about the era of Lincoln, which followed the Civil War.
Lincoln, of course, was assassinated right after the Civil War, but a Lincoln era did dominate for the next 30 years.
The FDR era and the Reagan era, because Reagan's era began, in a sense, in 1980. I don't think it ended until 2008, when Obama was elected.
So far, it has been hard to speak, except in a very kind of casual way about a Trump era.
I think if Trump had been a one-term president, he would still be consequential, but it wouldn't be a Trump era.
In fact, arguably, it would be more of an Obama era, because Obama would be 2008, 2012, interrupted by Trump in 2016, and then Obama resumes control in 2020 with Biden as his puppet.
And so Obama would be the towering figure of the age.
But now, with Trump having repudiated Obama twice, he stopped Obama in his tracks in 2016, and now he stopped the Obama guy, Biden, and of course the other stooge, Harris, in her tracks in 2024. We might be seeing what history will look back and proclaim to be not the Obama era.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
Hey guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast Bernie Goldman.
He's executive producer of a film that I've been talking about on the podcast.
It's called Valiant One.
It's a thriller, it's a military thriller, and it opens today, January 31st.
By the way, you can follow the film on X. It's Valiant One, O-N-E, Valiant One Movie.
And the website is valiant1movie.com.
Bernie Goldman is a, well, looking at these credits, I'm just blown away.
He's an executive at both Disney and Village Roadshow.
His movies include Ocean's Eleven, The Matrix, Space Cowboys, Miss Congeniality.
He's also a producer of Zack Snyder's great film, The Battle of Thermopylae, which is 300, a film that broke all kinds of box office records.
And Bernie Goldman is executive producer for this new film, Valiant One.
Bernie, thanks for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
It seems like this is a film that is based upon courage and an attempt to really bring the idea of the military thriller to the forefront.
At a time when we've been seeing all kinds of movies and maybe some people thought that we needed these thrillers, we don't see that often these days.
Is it your sense that America is ready for this kind of a film now?
Well, you know I don't think there has been many military movies.
In recent memory, which is one of the reasons we wanted to make this movie, is, you know, to celebrate the courage of American soldiers.
You know, what does it take to put yourself in the position to defend your country, to defend your fellow soldiers?
What does that feel like?
The terror of that, but also the bravery.
You know, the Americans' ability to stand up for the man next to them, no matter who they are, just because they're another American fighting for freedom.
You know, one thing I've noticed is that there are, when typically we've seen films over the last 25 years and they have these foreign villains, they never focus on...
What I like about this film is it takes a closed society,
a tyrannical society, North Korea, and it It locates that as the scene for the plot.
Say a little bit about what this film is about, and what is the conflict described in this movie?
This movie is about a group of soldiers that are non-combat soldiers.
So there's a whole group of soldiers that are in the Army or the Navy or the Marines, and they don't really and never will experience combat.
It takes a great deal of management to run the armed forces.
And so they're off on a routine mission.
They're trying to repair a broken mechanical system in the DMZ, which is the border that exists between free South Korea and the dictatorship in North Korea.
Unfortunately, their helicopter gets into bad weather conditions.
It's blown into North Korea, crashes.
And because we cannot go into North Korea to rescue those soldiers, they must make their own way out.
So it's the story of their heroism, their bravery in escaping that regime.
It sounds terrific.
I mean, it just sounds wonderful.
We just got a screener for the movie.
Debbie and I are excited to watch it.
We'll probably get a chance to watch it this weekend.
But the film opens today.
Talk about who you envision as being the primary audience for this film.
Is this a film that appeals widely to all Americans?
Is it aimed at patriotic, conservative, Trump-loving Americans?
What do you foresee as the target audience for this film?
Well, I would certainly hope that everyone will see the movie.
I think we all have a great debt to the people that serve our country.
And this film, you know, certainly goes out of its way to present them as heroic.
You know, it really represents younger people.
The stars of the movie are Chase Stokes, who's made famous by this television show called Outer Banks, and Lana Condor, who's made famous by this series of films on Netflix called All the Boys I've Loved Before.
So it will appeal to young people, you know, because of those two stars.
Appeal to more middle-aged and older people, like myself, who just like thrillers and like war movies.
Interestingly, when we tested the movie, the movie tested best with women because there's great emotion in the movie.
It's an exciting movie.
It's a fun movie.
I do think it represents great emotional relationship and great stakes.
If you're a fan of suspense movies, hopefully you'll turn out and see it.
And if you want to see more movies that celebrate soldiers, hopefully you'll turn out and see it as well.
It seems like this is a genre of filmmaking.
If I think back to films like Braveheart, for example, films that celebrate courage, that celebrate valor, that celebrate...
The idea of the individual against great odds facing some kind of a tyrannical regime.
This would seem to be like a natural winning formula for a plot.
And yet it seems, again, that these plots are not all that common.
In fact, very often when these themes are treated in Hollywood movies, at least over the last couple of decades, they're treated ironically.
So in other words, the bad guy ends up being, you know, the American colonel because he was the guy who was sort of ultimately giving all the orders for, you know, for bad things to happen.
But it looks like what you're doing here in this plot is straightforwardly setting forward an adventure, a challenge.
And then allowing, if you will, the human virtue of courage to play itself out and letting the audience identify with the people who are in that condition and following it as they make their way, hopefully, to survival.
Yeah, I think that's very, you know, what you've said is very astute on so many different levels.
You know, I think there have been a dearth of movies made to celebrate.
The American Soldier recently.
You know, it seems that Hollywood has moved away from this subject matter.
That, you know, they're not celebrating ordinary Americans the way that we used to in Hollywood.
And, you know, hopefully this movie gets back to that.
You know, it really approaches it.
Unfortunately, the people that fight wars are young people.
And, you know, it's a tragic part of war.
And luckily, we've avoided war.
But there's certainly been a great deal of conflict where American soldiers have been put in harm's way.
This is based on true events.
And, you know, hopefully people will turn out to see this movie and Hollywood will get back to making more movies that do celebrate our armed services and honor them the way they should be honored.
The other thing I've got to say, just from the trailer and from the little I've seen that I like about the film, is that It does seem that there have been some kind of hyper-patriotic films over the last, well, few decades, but they tend to be so over-the-top that they're kind of unbelievable.
I mean, a classic example, of course, would be something like Rambo, where you've got this guy, you know, and single-handedly he's killing hundreds if not thousands of people.
You know, hundreds of people are shooting at him, but no bullet ever gets even close to him.
So there's an element of it.
It's kind of like...
Cartoonish, it's ridiculous, it's fun, but it's so over the top that you can't imagine that this could actually ever happen this way.
What I like about this and what makes me really looking forward to watching this film is it looks to me like this is a film about real people sort of in a situation that is believable, fighting their way in a dangerous setup to try to save their lives.
And that's something that we can all identify with.
That's exactly right.
And, you know, that was really what we wanted going into the movie, was a story of a group of underdogs, people that are not used to going to war, and to really show, you know, what that experience is like.
Because it's terrifying.
You know, to put your life on the line for the country is terrifying.
To have people shooting at you that don't know you and have no reason to want to take your life, it's a terrifying experience.
And, you know, to be thrust into that situation where you not only have to survive, but, you know, in this case, the character played by Chase Stokes is elevated by the helicopter crash.
He's a pretty lowly ranked soldier.
And some of the more experienced soldiers that are there to defend him are killed in the helicopter crash.
And he's thrust into a position of leadership where he's now responsible for leading this group of people.
Out of North Korea.
And he has no experience in combat.
He has no experience in leadership.
And we see him grow over the course of the movie and really have to defend all of these disparate voices, people he wouldn't necessarily be friends with in his life experience, nor would he be a colleague with.
But because they're on his team, because they're Americans, he has to put them before himself and eventually to be...
You know, stand up and step into the shoes of heroism.
Guys, check out the film.
Go to the website valiant1movie.com.
You can watch the trailer.
You can also follow the film on X at Valiant One Movie.
I've been talking to Bernie Goldman, executive producer of the film.
Bernie, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you.
Great to meet you.
Having skipped a couple of days, I want to pick up on The Big Lie.
This is a section in the middle of the book, and it's called Hitler's American Example.
I want to show in this section that Hitler himself was directly aware of what was happening in America on the part of both the progressive left and the Democratic Party, and Hitler was patterning his own thoughts, ideas, and even policies on things that were going on In the United States.
Here's a line from the historian Richard Weickart.
This is from his book, From Darwin to Hitler.
He says that Hitler drew upon a bountiful fund of social Darwinist thought to construct his own racist philosophy.
This social Darwinism was part of American progressivism.
The social Darwinist movement was bigger than progressivism.
But it incorporated strong progressive themes, and Hitler was very well aware of this.
Hitler himself became a social Darwinist, partly in his reading period when he was locked up in Landsberg prison, and he saw nations engage in this kind of Darwinian struggle for survival.
Now, while he was in prison, Hitler commented that in America, progressives had passed these race-based immigration laws, giving preferential treatment based on race.
And it wasn't just that these were laws that favored whites over non-whites.
That was true.
But even among whites, there were racial categories.
So the Northern Europeans, the so-called Nordics, were preferred over the Southern Europeans.
These immigration laws of the 1920s Restricted immigration from Central Europe, from some of the Mediterranean countries.
Why?
Because they were sort of more olive-skinned, more brown-skinned, if you will.
And Hitler knew about all this.
And he was like, yeah, this is the model.
He's like, basically, this is a model that proclaims the Nordics, i.e.
the Germans and the Scandinavians, to be, you know, top dog.
And obviously, this is something that appealed to Hitler.
Now, quoting Hitler, this is from Mein Kampf.
The Germanic inhabitant of the American continent, who has remained racially pure and unmixed, rose to be master of the continent.
He will remain master as long as he does not fall victim to a defilement of the blood.
And of course, one way to avoid this defilement, according to Hitler, is, hey, look what the Americans are doing.
They are preventing In Mein Kampf, Hitler is now continuing.
He basically goes on to say that the American laws are a model for Germany to follow.
He goes, Which is peculiar to the Volkish state concept.
So the Volk is the people, the nation.
And what Hitler is saying is we have this philosophy of the Volk.
The German nation is one nation.
Well, the Americans don't talk in that language.
They don't use the same script, so to speak.
But hey, says Hitler, they're kind of coming around to our way of thinking.
They have the same concept, even if they don't use the same.
Then Hitler goes on to praise American eugenics.
Basically, he doesn't name Margaret Sanger, but he's praising the people around Margaret Sanger.
And he says, And then he goes on to say, This is very interesting because Hitler...
We often think of him as like, yeah, kill off the inferior.
But here is Hitler using the language of compassion.
He goes, hey, listen, you know, trying to prevent these inferior people from breeding is we're doing them a favor.
It's going to be good for them.
So one of the hallmarks of progressivism and of the left is to always portray policies, even the most cruel policies, as somehow humane.
This is, you know, abortion is just health care.
It is providing access.
So there is a kind of attempt here by Hitler to use that same kind of mollifying rhetoric.
I'm doing something that's good for mankind.
Hitler then also, in his other writings and statements, he praises specific people in the United States.
He was especially taken with the writings of a guy named Leon Whitney, who was the head of the American Eugenics Society.
He liked a book written by a guy named Madison Grant, who was an associate of Margaret Sanger.
And on one occasion, Whitney visits Grant.
So these are two Sanger-type eugenics people in the United States.
Whitney visits Grant, and Grant was at the time the chairman of a eugenic immigration committee.
Whitney comes and he says, hey, Grant, listen, take a look at this.
And he shows Grant a letter from Hitler requesting a copy of Whitney's own book called The Case for Sterilization.
So Whitney is very excited.
He's like, look at this.
Hitler wants my book.
And what does Grant do?
You may think that Grant was going to be kind of impressed, and he actually was.
But what Grant does is he whips out his own letter from Hitler, which praises Grant for his book called The Passing of the Great Race.
And in the letter, Hitler calls Grant's book his, quote, Bible.
So what this really shows is that you've got these progressive leftists in the United States.
Not only are they promoting eugenics, Not only are they aware that the Germans and the Nazis have their own eugenics program, not only do they think that the Nazi program should be adopted and accepted in the United States, they're fans of Hitler.
They're genuinely pumped.
They're excited that Hitler is familiar with their work.
They're showing each other Hitler letters.
And this was the mood.
Now, notice that all of this, as I've said before, You won't hear a word of this in your history class.
You won't see any mention of it in the History Channel.
Why?
Because none of it happened?
No, here it is.
I'm describing them with actual quotations.
I'm giving you citations.
Of course, the big lie is plenty of footnotes that document and reference where I get my sources.
But all of this is hidden.
It is swept under the rug.
It is...
Kept out of sight, so to speak.
It's in a brown paper wrapper, so to speak.
Shortly after the Nazis implement their sterilization and euthanasia programs, the American eugenicist Paul Popper praises Hitler, and he says, quote, he has based his hopes for biological regeneration solidly on the application of biological principles of human society.
So, what the Americans like to do here, the progressives, They act like they're simply implementing the precepts of science.
Think of it.
Because they're grounding their work on Darwin.
They feel like this is the most cutting-edge biology.
We are...
So progressive for them doesn't just mean politically progressive.
It does mean that.
But it also means progressive in the sense of we are on the latest frontier of science.
It's like follow the science.
You know, we've heard this phrase in our own time.
This is basically what these guys are going for.
Here's Harry Laughlin and Charles Davenport in their publication called Eugenic News.
They're referring to the Nazi program.
Quote, It represents a milestone which marks the control by the most advanced nations of the world of a major aspect of controlling human reproduction.
So, think about it.
Open praise for the Nazi program.
It is the latest science and it is showing us how we can do things.
The historian Stefan Kuhl says that these progressive eugenicists, quote, understood Nazi policies as the direct realization of their scientific goals and political demands.
So one reason these guys are so excited is that they were putting out in America all kinds of proposals.
Sterilization.
And segregation.
But not all their proposals were being carried out.
Remember that this guy, Paul Papano, whom I mentioned a moment ago, he had recommended lethal chambers to kill people off.
Obviously, America didn't do that.
America didn't have gas chambers.
But he loved the idea.
So what was happening is that these American eugenicists look and see that the Nazis are taking them seriously.
The Nazis are implementing these ideas.
And so the Americans become really excited because they see the fact that another nation, not any nation, but an advanced industrial nation like Germany.
Germany, which, by the way, was the leader of philosophical thought, a leader of culture in some ways in the 19th century, leading into the 20th century.
Think about all the great German musicians of the 19th century, the great German philosophers from Hegel to Schopenhauer to Nietzsche.
So the Germans sort of had this high reputation.
And the progressives in the 20th century, in the early 20th century, are very impressed by what Germany is not only saying, but it is doing.
A final example of progressive enthusiasm for Hitler's sterilization program involves a guy named Charles Goethe.
He's founder of the Eugenics Society of Northern California.
He comes back from a 1934 fact-finding trip to Germany.
Hitler, by the way, let's remember, has just been in power for a year.
And he writes a congratulatory letter to his fellow progressive, a guy named Eugene Gosney, who was head of the San Diego-based Human Betterment Foundation.
I'm now quoting from the letter.
Letter written by one American progressive to another, referencing Hitler.
Here is what this guy Goethe says to his friend.
Quote, In other words,
Hitler...
And the people around Hitler love what we're doing.
And this is so exciting that I want you to not only know about this, but cherish this idea to the end of your days.
This is precisely the way in which progressives in the United States celebrated the Nazi sterilization program, Hitler's enthusiasm for the program.
And you see the mutual traffic here going back and forth between the left and the Democratic Party over here.
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