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Feb. 6, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:43
NATION OF SETTLERS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1016
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Thank you.
Thank you.
Coming up, I'm going to talk about Elon Musk's Doge and the big thing that it is revealing to all of us.
Also going to talk about the FBI on the run and Trump's new executive order protecting women's sports.
Jeremy Karl of the Claremont Institute joins me.
He's going to talk about the parable of the Good Samaritan and the distinction between immigrants and settlers.
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I begin with a quote from Jen Psaki.
What is happening right now, she says on MSNBC, is a hostile takeover of the U.S. government.
What an interesting statement because of what it implies or suggests.
Who is...
Doing this hostile takeover.
Apparently Trump.
In conjunction with his cabinet, in conjunction with Elon Musk.
So in other words, the democratically elected leader of the country is accused of doing a, quote, hostile takeover.
Why should it be hostile?
Evidently because there are entrenched interests who don't care.
That there has been an election.
They see themselves as part of the permanent bureaucracy.
They don't understand why they should be disrupted in any way, let alone displaced.
And so for them, from their point of view, this is what Jen Psaki is echoing, it's hostile.
And they see themselves as the natural ordained elite that runs the country no matter who is in power.
They're obviously joined at the hip to the Democrats, and they view Republicans as a kind of alien or hostile force.
So that's the meaning of what Jen Psaki, without really quite intending to, that's what she's giving away.
And one of the genius ideas of the Trump administration, and part of, I want to highlight this, is the novelty of Trump's way of thinking.
They're not necessarily all Trump's ideas any more than...
What Reagan put out was entirely Reagan's ideas.
Reaganism came to embody a philosophy.
There were lots of smart people pumping ideas in.
And part of the ingenuity of Reagan was to see, I want this, I want this, I want this, I want that.
I think the same thing is going on with Trump.
Just a kind of fertile creativity surrounds him.
And he is picking and choosing the ideas he wants to run with.
One of them, by the way, is this really amazing idea of a buyout.
Kind of amazed that no one thought of this really before, at least thought of it with enough seriousness to consider implementing it, telling basically every government worker.
And by the way, this extends not just to the Department of Housing or HHS. It even extends to the CIA. There's a buyout for the whole CIA. And one thing you can be sure of because the CIA is so full of incompetence is they didn't see it coming, right?
These guys are supposed to be worthy intelligence people.
We really anticipate every possible move.
We play war games.
We know what they might try to do to the country or to us.
Whoops.
Buy out.
Now, this idea of buying out government workers to me is somewhat comic because the term government worker itself is somewhat comic because as we all know, government people don't do any work.
They don't do any real work.
What do government workers do?
How do we justify not calling their very name government workers some kind of an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms?
Well, government workers, I guess, attend meetings.
That's one thing they do.
They take long lunches.
They run out the door at 5 p.m.
They write bureaucratic memos to each other.
But if you actually...
Install some surveillance inside a government building.
You realize that most of them in the day, they're watching podcasts, they're on Reddit, they're checking their Facebook, they're probably paying their bills.
They're not really working.
So this is kind of funny here because these workers are being offered eight months of pay to quit.
So they're basically being offered these buyouts to, quote, stop working, but of course they're not working in the first place.
So that's the irony of it.
I don't think most of these workers, apparently 40,000 have said yes, but that's not a big number, right?
Because the federal government employs about 2.5 million people.
And I don't know by raising the terms if you could get more, but see, these government workers, as I say, being paid to do nothing.
Or to do close to nothing.
And so it's a cushy operation, right?
In fact, they get really indignant if someone talks about them quitting because they feel like they have tenure, sort of like a professor.
And a lot of them make $80,000, $90,000, $100,000, $120,000.
There are government workers who are better paid than the President of the United States.
Unbelievably.
By the way, Fauci was one of them, but he's not the only one.
They get great healthcare.
They get benefits.
It's like a job for life.
They sound important.
Some of them have access to private cars.
So there's really nothing like this that doesn't exist in the private sector.
What's really been exposed by Elon Musk and Doge recently is the way in which this whole government operation is a mafia.
It is a...
It is ultimately all about the money.
Remember, the mafia is all about the money, right?
It's a criminal enterprise, but it's not for the joy of going around and beating people up.
Ultimately, it's about the cash.
And that's why one of the best-remembered lines from The Godfather is, you know, it's strictly business.
It's strictly business.
Same for these guys.
They're like a mafia, and it is strictly, strictly business.
What we're beginning to see when you dive into what Elon Musk and Doge are exposing is the complexity of this operation.
Because what you have is USAID doesn't give money straight to politicians.
It doesn't slip money into your pocket.
What does it do?
It doesn't even give money directly to left-wing groups.
You won't find like a straight payment to some left-wing organization, some transgender organization in America or in Afghanistan for that matter.
No.
They'll give the money to some other group, like the Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening.
It's, you know, CEPPS. And then CEPPS will give it to another NGO, which has another long, complicated name.
And all these NGOs have very vague names, Strengthening Democracy and Promoting Understanding and Mutual Aid.
And so the money moves from here to there.
It's kind of like the money moving into Biden's personal accounts.
Same thing.
It wouldn't go straight from some Moscow oligarch.
It'd go from Moscow oligarch, it goes to some entity, to an LLC set up by Hunter Biden in which he has partners.
And only at the very end of this line does Joe Biden get his cut 10% for the big guy.
Now the left is shrieking and saying USAID is less than 1% of the budget.
Ah, interesting.
So if this much fraud and waste and abuse and self-dealing and money laundering, if all of this is occurring with 1% of the budget, Think of what's going on with the other 99%.
In other words, Doge is only like scratching the surface.
It's only touching the tip of the iceberg.
And then on and on we go with all these hysterical warnings.
One of them that, you know, I don't know who sends out the memos, but suddenly all the Democratic politicians are saying the same thing.
One of the things that they're saying now is that Elon Musk may get access to your social security number.
When I heard this, I thought to myself, hmm, this sounds bad, but really?
Doesn't the government already have my social security number?
And what's Elon Musk really going to do with it?
Let's consider some possibilities.
He could pass himself off as me.
He could collect my benefits when I retire.
He could take out a loan using my social security number.
Really?
The point is, all of this is so stupid.
It's so stupid because...
Our private data is hacked all the time on the part of the government.
It's been abused by the government.
It's used to hunt down January 6 protesters and suddenly we're worried about Elon Musk, who's the man with the least interest in anybody's social security number.
If anybody has no motive to want to pull a ripoff scheme, it's this guy.
Meanwhile, these government bureaucrats have been ripping us off left and right.
And the beneficiaries are so interesting because it isn't just the traditional left-wing groups.
It's left-wing Christian groups, so-called progressive evangelical groups.
A lot of the groups have been warning us about the ugly head of Christian nationalism is rearing its ugly head.
Well, it turns out some of those guys are on the government payroll.
They're being paid to say this stuff.
Now, they don't reveal the payments.
They're a little bit like Judas, right?
The money is under the table.
By the way, it's a lot more than 30 pieces of silver.
And yet, they issue these pompous, sort of morally indignant warnings.
And these are the guys who are actually taking money.
And taking money from the government.
In other words, they're making us pay them.
To attack our values and to attack our beliefs.
And this has been going on and now it's exposed.
I'm not sure if the left can like unexpose it, put the genie back in the bottle.
My guess is that they can't do it.
But this is actually why they are so apoplectic.
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The FBI is, well, on the run, and it is a fun thing to watch.
I mean, think of the irony.
Here is Charlie Savage in the New York Times.
FBI agents ask court to bar Trump team from disclosing their names.
Wow.
The FBI agents, and by the way, guess how many there were.
How many agents would you predict were involved?
In the January 6th operation?
100?
200?
Maybe 500 at the out?
No.
5,000.
5,000 FBI agents.
So think of all the other work that went unattended, neglected, ignored.
We're not going to worry about terrorism, child trafficking.
Not important.
Not important.
January 6th, very important.
And now these same guys.
Emil Bove, the acting FBI deputy director, I guess it is, sent out a demand that all the FBI agents who were involved in January 6 need to fill out a form, say who they were.
What their cases are, what they did.
And Emil Boeby has been very clear.
He's like, this is not some kind of a retribution campaign.
If you were an FBI agent, you were given a task, you carried out your task, you did your job, you're fine.
We're looking at people who abuse their power.
We're looking for people who use their discretionary authority to go around or against the law.
And these FBI people are panicking now, and they have run to a judge to hide their names.
We'll tell you what we did, but we're not going to tell you our names.
And so I'm sure they're trying to find a left-wing judge to protect them.
And these are the same people, by the way, who outed these January 6th people, put their faces on a website, hunted them down mercilessly.
So now they have become the hunted.
But it's not even proportionate, because these guys are simply being asked a few basic questions to justify and explain what it is that they did, by the way, on the job, receiving government salaries, taxpayer-funded, and they are evidently very reluctant to do it.
I would like to see these guys be fully held accountable to the law.
I'm sure that you would find a lot of bad apples here.
Maybe not all the 5,000, maybe 3,000.
By the way, it's not just the people at the top.
This is not a simple case of...
Four guys gave all the instructions.
No.
There was a culture of abuse.
Kind of like you sometimes see with a police force.
There's a culture of abuse that percolates all the way down.
So it's thugs with badges all the way.
In fact, the good apples become the rarity.
The guys who are doing their jobs.
And let's think about it.
Even the good apples aren't all that good because none of them spoke up and said, hey, what's going on here is an abuse of power.
They looked the other way.
They pretended it wasn't going on.
They might have said, I don't want to be a part of it.
But collectively, they were a part of it.
So these people need to be held to account.
And quite honestly, I... I'm in favor of something resembling Nuremberg trials for these guys, these thugs with badges.
The Nuremberg trials, as you know, were for a lot of the, quote, good Nazis after World War II. And let's remember, by the way, the defense of the Nuremberg defendants is the same as the defense of these FBI guys.
Quote, I was just following orders.
It was seen as a rationalization and as a bogus defense on the part of the so-called good Nazis.
And it's a bogus defense for the FBI because, again, you're not supposed to just follow orders that contravene the law.
If you know that this goes against what the FBI stands for and against the oath that you took to the Constitution, then you should object.
You should complain.
You should become a whistleblower if you have to.
Tell the media if you need to.
You should certainly raise a stink about it, and many of these people didn't.
The other thing I want to mention is this terrific executive order just signed by Trump outlawing transgenderism, basically, in our public institutions, notably women's sports.
But this will extend to things like locker rooms and so on.
This is going to be held to be a violation of Title IX and institutions that do it, academic institutions.
We're talking about institutions, by the way, that take federal money.
If you don't take federal money, then you're not covered by these executive orders.
You're not accountable in that sense to the federal government.
But we live at a time, and our institutions, many of them, most of them, do take federal money.
And so they are going to have to comply.
And, you know, it's worth noting here that a lot of the people on our side who have raised these issues, who have fought for them, who have brought them to the forefront, deserve credit.
And I can just think of a couple of names here.
The two athletes who are most prominent are Riley Gaines and Paula Scanlon.
I'm looking at a post by Clay Travis here, who says, This would not have happened, and I think that's true.
Somebody else, by the way, who I think has had a big impact on this debate is the author J.K. Rowling, who has been...
I shouldn't say merciless, because merciless sounds like a bad word, but I mean it in a good way, who has been unrelenting, who has been firm, even though many of her own fans have shrieked and said, I wish I never read those Harry Potter novels.
You were the heroine of my childhood, and now you've come out against the trans people, and so on.
And J.K. Rowling is not backing down at all.
She's not giving in to the craziness.
And this is really what needs to be highlighted.
This whole thing is downright crazy.
You know, if your kid, male or female, came to you and said, you know, I identify as a pirate.
I mean, are you going to amputate your kid's leg?
And put out his eye and put an eye patch on there so he looks the part or so he can feel authentically himself.
No, you wouldn't do that because doing that is insane.
And so why would you consider this type of insane response when your boy identifies as a girl?
What is the real difference here?
It's in their heads.
Kids are highly, by the way, imaginative and imaginary.
They live in imaginary worlds a lot of the time.
And therefore, they identify with all kinds of, not only people, but things and non-existent creatures like unicorns and dragons.
And all of this is part of growing up.
And you grow out of it at some point.
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You're a leftist.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H, Dinesh.
Guys, I'm really pleased to welcome to the podcast Jeremy Karl.
He is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute.
He works on a range of issues, multiculturalism, nationalism, immigration.
He's a former deputy assistant secretary of the interior, also a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
Follow him on x at Real Jeremy Carl, C-A-R-L. The website is claremont.org.
Jeremy, welcome.
Thank you for joining me.
You are the author of a recent article in The American Mind.
It's called A Nation of Settlers.
And I want to begin by having you talk about the article.
But let me frame it kind of this way.
We keep hearing in this country slogans that have a grain of truth to them, but they're not really true.
I mean, one common one that I hear a lot is things like, well, the slaves built America.
Well...
To a degree, that's true.
The slaves built the plantation economy of the South, but of course that was wrecked and leveled to the ground at the end of the Civil War, so it is only in a highly partial way that you could make this kind of a statement.
But another one, and this is the one you really take on in this article, we are a nation of immigrants.
It's immigrants who built America.
So take that one away and react to it.
By drawing on your article, what's wrong with the statement that we are a, quote, nation of immigrants?
Sure.
Thanks, Dinesh.
And it's a pleasure to be on.
I think the real problem with it is that if you actually understand the history of it, that that particular phrase, first of all, has its origins in a democratic political campaign for the 1960 presidency that John F. Kennedy had.
And I talk a little bit about that.
In my article, but I think more fundamentally why it's wrong is because simply not only is that phraseology relatively new, the conception of America as a nation of immigrants is both new and Not accurate, because I argue sort of before we were kind of a nation of settlers or pioneers, whatever you want to call it.
I mean, certainly from the first time in the early 17th century that you had Europeans arriving on America's shores, they weren't here to join an existing society.
And this is really the key point.
They were settling and creating a new society.
Now, of course, there was a society here.
But those were separate and distinct from what we were being built up.
And I kind of walk through this in great detail in the article, but it's really only until almost 300 years of European settlement have happened in 1890, and the U.S. Census Bureau declares the frontier closed, that we become anything like a nation of immigrants.
These are all, I think, very fundamental ideas.
I want to slow them down so we can look at them a little more closely.
I think the first thing you're saying is this.
There's an existing society or societies, which is to say these Native American tribes.
Now, the clear definition of an immigrant is someone who emigrates to a society.
And at least is expected to assimilate or become part of that society.
And I think perhaps the most striking line of your article to me is you go, hey, the Puritans didn't come here to assimilate to Native American society, did they?
No.
They came here to make a, you know, in the famous phrase, a city on a hill to create their own original society, if you will.
And that's what settlers do, don't they?
Settlers carve a new path, they create a new system, and then later immigrants come to become part of that club, if you will.
That's absolutely right.
And I think what we see is we see exactly that settlement pattern that I've been talking about.
And then sort of starting in the mid-19th century and even into the early 20th century, we aren't what I call a nation of immigrants.
We're a nation with immigrants.
So we do have at that point...
A settled society that people are joining.
Now, there's still some expansion still going on.
I mean, where I live in Montana, you've still got some pretty empty places.
But you do, of course, have people immigrating to that society and immigrants making contributions.
But you still have new settlement occurring on the American frontier up until the very end of the 19th century.
Yeah, and isn't it true also, this is something I don't think you dwell on in the article, although you might allude to it, is the fact that At one point, there was so much open space in America, this is before the kind of closing of the frontier, where, by and large, there was no distinction between the legal and the illegal, because America had space, it wanted to attract people.
By and large, if you could find your way here, you were fine.
But that's no longer the case.
Now we have a system of rules.
We have a distinction between a process of legal immigration.
I suppose in some way, I'm not even sure when people use phrases like undocumented immigrant, it's not just the undocumented that is the wrong word.
The whole phrase is wrong, right?
Because someone who's illegal is not an immigrant.
No, absolutely.
I mean, that's why the actual phrase is illegal alien.
And this is not, I mean, it's just sort of like when retarded has now become a bad word, but originally it was a euphemism, right?
Illegal alien has just been the legal term of art.
Because it is describing a bad thing, as it acquired a bad connotation over time, now we say things, or I don't say them, but the left says them, like undocumented immigrant and all these things.
But you're absolutely right in that it's really a misnomer on...
On both parts, not just the undocumented part.
Yeah, I mean, undocumented immigrant is a very retarded term to bring it all together.
Well, let's talk about you.
You said something earlier that I think is very interesting, which is that the whole nation of immigrants...
Mumbo-jumbo, if you will, started with John F. Kennedy.
Explain that more.
What were the Kennedy people trying to accomplish?
How were they deploying that rhetoric?
Because it's helpful for us to understand to what use it is being paid now.
Right.
So it has a particular history growing out of Jewish and Catholic immigrants.
And again, I'm oversimplifying, or descendants of immigrants.
But at a basic level, this is what was going on in the mid-20th century.
And President Kennedy, in particular, felt this very acutely because he was from the upper crust, what was called the Laced Curtain Irish.
His father was very, very wealthy established.
He'd served as the ambassador to the UK on his mother's side, also very distinguished.
They were never going to be Boston Brahmins.
They were never going to be in that top white Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite that ruled New England.
He felt that as a slight, very acutely.
And so in his mind, he was very sensitive to this.
And as he was looking also...
To become president, he looked and said, well, where are my swing votes that are going to win this election for me?
And he looked at a lot of Catholic ethnics, particularly in the Midwest, and he said, you know, I can really reach out to them through this.
And at the same time, you had a lot of Jewish immigrants and their descendants who were also looking.
And I kind of say, you know, this is not all nefarious.
They're trying to be part of America's story, which is better than the alternative that we often get.
Somewhere now, but you had a lot of Jewish members of Kennedy's staff who were very influential in both putting together his book, A Nation of Immigrants, which he put on the campaign trail, and also just sort of generally pushing this as an issue.
And so you sort of had that combination along with a few key upper-crust white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who pushed on this issue at a key time, and that's kind of where we get the rhetoric from.
Jeremy, let's talk about something that goes a little beyond your article, but it's been a theme, at least in Christian precincts on social media, and that is this idea that the progressive Christians have been pushing.
Now, these progressive Christians have got to be viewed with a little suspicion.
It's turning out that a lot of them were on the take from the federal government via AID, USAID. But nevertheless, just looking at the merits of what they've been talking about, they've been saying, well, listen, We've got to recognize from the parable of the Good Samaritan that we have to treat the stranger,
the outsider, the alien, if you will, as indistinguishable from the members of our own society, the members of our own family, perhaps even our own children, and that this is, in fact, the unalterable teaching of the Bible.
Now, this I'm highly suspicious of, and so I wondered if I'd like to get your take and then react to it about what you think the true message of this parable is, and what are the duties that we owe the outsider vis-a-vis those that we would call, quote, our own?
Sure.
And I've been following a little bit of this debate myself, and J.D. Vance even talked about this from a Catholic perspective.
And in fact, the notion that you sort of build out your circles of affection, starting with your family and then going out, is actually a very old...
Christian precept that goes back to Augustine, that goes back to Aquinas, you know, and, you know, the left, if they want to, the smarter ones, what we say, ah, well, you know, they just smuggled in Greek philosophy.
But, I mean, I'd say two things.
I mean, one is, A, this has just been a part of how the church has understood itself from its earliest days and from some of the most...
Important church fathers.
Secondly, this is just a natural ordering of affections.
Again, it's not saying that we, from a Good Samaritan perspective, that we should ignore the person who, by the way, of course, if they're on the side of the road, this is the other key thing, without getting too theological, they're in front of you.
That's a very key thing, right?
It's not somebody off in Timbuktu who I should have a theoretical concern for.
The good thing that the Good Samaritan does is he's reacting to that person who is right in front of them.
So that's another kind of key distinction that I would make.
But I think as usual with the left, they're kind of grabbing.
Kind of disordered view of Christianity to attempt to use as a cudgel in most cases without even really believing in it themselves.
Well, I think that's very telling, isn't it?
None of them actually live that way, right?
In other words, if you look at the way that they actually live, you find that they have their own kids and not some Nepalese kid living in their house.
They put their salary towards feeding their own children, not somebody else's children.
They give sex education to their own children, not to their neighbor's kids.
And if you look at their wills, I'm sure you find their own family members in the will and not some other guy.
So, they're following the J.D. Vance prescription and not their own.
I think that what the Samaritan story is getting at, and I'd like to see if you agree with this, there was kind of a proverb that I learned growing up in India, which is that the tears of strangers are only water.
And the premise, the idea here was, you know, we look after ourselves, we look after our own family, we look after our own tribe, but if somebody shows up from another tribe, another country, you know, it's not that we're not sympathetic to them, but it's not our problem.
It's their problem.
And I think Christianity modifies this by saying that, yes, you know what?
You do have some obligations even to those who are not related to you in the sense that they are part of the human brotherhood, right?
They are also children of God.
But that is not the same thing as saying that you don't owe special duties or special obligations or special responsibilities to your own family and your own community.
What do you think?
Yeah, absolutely.
And I saw, I'm in the Presbyterian Church in America, PCA, and I saw something, I believe it was from a pastor in the PCA online that said, you know, Christianity commands me to love my wife, and it also commands me to love my neighbor's wife.
But if I'm loving them in the same way, I've got my affections in a very disordered fashion, right?
But sort of in a more extreme way, of course, I mean, I think one of the great breakthroughs of Christianity is to say, yes, you know, even That person far away, particularly if they're a Christian, but not exclusively.
They do have some claim on our affection, some claim in our interest.
But I think if you're really living a proper Christian life, if you're just thinking about what it takes to really do that just for your own family and friends and really to kind of be there and be supportive and be that, that's almost so overwhelming that...
The amount I truly am going to have left in most cases for things that are outside that circle, if I'm really doing that first part right in the way that a Christian should, it's going to be much more limited, just realistically.
I mean, even the Mother Teresas of the world realized that you're going to have to give up a lot in order to undertake this kind of mission, right?
You have to become a nun.
You cannot have family obligations.
You have to dedicate yourself single-mindedly to this sort of kind of philanthropic project, if you will.
Now, no one on the left does any of this.
I mean, if you look at the little pundits of Christianity today and so on, you know, they couldn't be further from Mother Teresa.
I think that they're using it as a cudgel, if you will, against conservatives, against Christian conservatives.
I think we seem to be in agreement on that.
Guys, I've been talking to Jeremy Karl about his important article in The American Mind.
By the way, the website is AmericanMind.org.
Jeremy's at the Claremont Institute, claremont.org.
Follow him on xatrealjeremycarl.
Jeremy, great stuff.
Thank you for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks, James.
It's a pleasure.
We are in a section of the big lie called American Führers.
The Führers in question are Woodrow Wilson and FDR. FDR, I think it's probably fair to say, is the guy who brought fascism or a version of fascism, American fascism, to this country.
He was, in that sense, our Il Duce or our Fuhrer.
And this is a bit of a shocking claim because I know that there are, well, generations of people who revere FDR, think, oh, this was a guy who fireside chats and he...
It led us to victory in World War II and all of this, which is part of the left's propaganda about FDR. And look, I mean, some people will continue to believe it.
I'm not even going to fight the propaganda so much as just show you a side of FDR that's undeniable.
So you'd have to say, maybe you say he was a great guy, but yes, he was kind of a fascist too.
Or he was a great guy, but he did admire Mussolini.
Or he was a great guy, but he...
It did adopt some of Hitler's policies and vice versa.
So you can take that line if you want.
Let's go into it.
This section is called, It Did Happen Here, meaning fascism.
There was the idea, it can happen here.
Hey, fascism might come to this country.
In fact, it's been the left that has been sounding this kind of shrill cry, all based upon the fantasy that fascism is on the right.
But let's take a closer look.
Now, in the early 1930s, a woman named Ann McCormick returned to the United States.
She was a writer for the New York Times, and she said she noticed something very interesting about the atmosphere in America.
She was at the inauguration of FDR in early 1933, and she writes that the inauguration of FDR is, quote, Strangely reminiscent of Rome in the first weeks after the March of the Blackshirts.
So Anne McCormick, the New York Times writer, is saying that FDR is a bit like Mussolini.
The kind of strong arm, the Blackshirts marching through Rome, this festive atmosphere that she noticed she was covering Rome for the New York Times.
And by the way, she loved Mussolini.
She was a kind of admirer of Mussolini, and so she's complimenting FDR on producing the same kind of fascist excitement in the United States.
She's also ideologically aligned with Mussolini, and she's praising FDR for having a New Deal that sounds a lot like Italian fascism.
She sees, quote, a nation moving in a kind of trance.
A cult-like quality, if you will, to FDR. And she likes it.
She saw exactly the same thing in Italy.
She also likes the idea of dictatorship.
Which, let's again remember, took on a bad odor later after World War II. Hitler was a dictator.
Mussolini was a dictator.
But dictatorship was considered positive because dictators got things done.
Here's McCormick, quote, America today literally asks for orders.
Nobody is much disturbed by the idea of dictatorship.
So, one of the ways we get a window into history is we look at what people said at the time.
Because that way we capture the mood, the vibe, the zeitgeist.
Now, around the same time, people compared FDR to Hitler.
And let's remember, Hitler too rose to power through the democratic process.
He wasn't directly elected, but his party was the largest party in Germany.
And so, the praise of Hitler, of Mussolini, of FDR, was based on the idea that these leaders somehow embody the will of the people.
And they also get things done with an efficiency that you wouldn't otherwise expect in the normal give and take of constitutional democracy.
Now, this kind of rhetoric, identifying the leader with the spirit or soul of the nation, this was common in Germany.
Rudolf Hess used to say, Hitler is Germany and Germany is Hitler.
In Italy, people would say, Italy is Mussolini.
And interestingly, people started saying this about FDR. America is FDR and FDR is America.
So you get these kinds of themes in the Saturday Evening Post, Reader's Digest, Fortune magazine.
So the popular and middle-brow sort of press...
Is all saying the same things in Germany, in Italy, and in the United States.
Now, just to get an idea of how the kind of Nazi spirit was not only acceptable, but even fashionable in certain parts of the United States, notably in the Democratic left, within the precincts of the Democratic Party.
Let's look at a specific example in some detail.
In 1934, Harvard President James Conant hosted a tea at his house for a guy named Ernst Hans Stegel.
This guy was the head of the Nazi Press Bureau under Joseph Goebbels, reporting, of course, to Hitler.
Hans Stegel was a close friend of Hitler.
He frequently dined at Hitler's house.
Hitler liked to have Hans Stegel play piano renditions.
And Hitler spoke quite affectionately about this guy and his family.
And Hans Tegel's son, a guy named Egon, would apparently refer to Hitler as, quote, Uncle Dolph.
Uncle Dolph.
Now, this seems all so surreal and crazy because of our image of Hitler.
But this was not the image of Hitler.
This is what I want to stress prior to 1939, before World War II. Hitler was seen as kind of a nice guy.
And we see the example here that this guy, this German guy, obviously a cultured, educated guy, and here he is at Harvard.
Well, what's he doing at Harvard?
Well, during Hitler's rise to power, Hans Stegel financed the publication of Mein Kampf, as well as the purchase of the Nazi newspaper called the Volkischer Bierbachter.
And when a Boston rabbi protested against Hans Stegel being at Harvard, the Harvard Crimson laughed him off and basically said, hey, why are you objecting?
This guy is a Harvard alumnus.
In other words, he is a Harvard alumnus who has become a high-ranking official in the Nazi party, and this reflects well on Harvard University.
Giving him an honorary degree, says the Harvard Crimson, is, quote, appropriate to his high position.
Germany is a great nation.
They have a great leader.
This guy represents our great leader.
Sure, he needs to get an honorary degree.
And there's more along this line.
The same year, prominent Harvard faculty administrators and student leaders visited a Nazi warship.
It was called the Karlsruhe.
It docked in Boston Harbor, flying the swastika flags.
And the Harvard delegation went to a gala reception.
The warship captain praised Hitler.
And Harvard in 1936 sent an academic delegation to celebrate the anniversary of Heidelberg University.
Some British universities had boycotted this because it was highly politicized over there, and the whole atmosphere was very pro-Nazi.
In fact, attending this Harvard ceremony that the Harvard people went to were the Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg, propaganda minister Goebbels, and SS chief Heinrich Himmler.
Now, once again, and I have made this point a couple of times, how much of this do you already know?
How much of this do even highly educated Americans know?
Answer, none of it.
None of it.
And you have to always ask why.
Because, Pierre...
The Big Lie actually originally published several years ago, I don't know, 2000, maybe 17 or 18. None of these facts have been questioned.
There are legions of fact checkers out there.
None of them have said, oh, Dinesh, this didn't happen.
Harvard didn't give an honorary degree to this guy.
Yes, they did.
So all of this is just cemented into the record.
It is the record that has been sanitized.
It's the record that has been put into brown paper wrappers or put away on the shelf.
But sometimes, even if you try to hide things, they kind of break out.
Now, here's a catchy song from Cole Porter.
You've probably heard it.
Debbie probably knows it.
Debbie has an amazing encyclopedic kind of memory for music.
But the song is called You're the Top.
And here are the original lyrics of that song.
You're the top.
You're the great Houdini.
You're the top.
You're Mussolini.
This is from the actual Cole Porter song.
Now, later.
When the leftist sanitization project went into effect, they realized, whoops, this is going to reveal that Cole Porter, reflecting the mood of the country and the left and the Democratic Party and FDR, thought Mussolini is really cool.
He's on top.
He's like a Houdini.
So we got to change the song.
We got to rewrite the words to hide the fact.
So this is what you could call cultural revisionism.
And so sure enough, you're the top.
The song is available right now.
You can probably get it on iTunes.
You listen to it.
You're not going to hear the name Mussolini.
They cleaned it up.
All right.
They cleaned it up because they didn't want to let the cat out of the bag.
And so in that sense, the Cole Porter song, I'm not saying Cole Porter has anything to do with this per se, but...
It becomes party to the big lie, right?
His original lyrics, along with all the articles of Anne McCormick, the Harvard-Hitler connection, all of these are by themselves little details, but the value of these details is the larger picture that they illuminate, which is that in the precincts of the Democratic Party, in the precincts of the kind of liberal institutions, of which I'm using Harvard as a kind of classic example, Fascism is cool.
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