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Feb. 12, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
48:56
LAWFARE 2.0 Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1020
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Thank you.
Thank you.
Coming up, rogue judges.
I'll expose the new type of lawfare the Democrats are deploying against Trump.
Judges blocking legitimate executive actions.
I'll explore how they can be stopped.
I've got a really good guest, Gerard Fillity, of the Lawfare Project to talk about this.
I also want to outline how the New York Times serves not as a real newspaper doing journalism, but a kind of shaper of the narrative for the left and for the Democratic Party.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble or YouTube or on X, Or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
I don't know if you saw Elon Musk with his son named X in the Oval Office with Trump taking questions from the media.
For me, the highlight of it had...
to do with something that I tweeted out myself that Elon Musk shared on Twitter.
My tweet was something like this.
We have seen so many examples of government officials or bureaucrats, sometimes elected officials, who make $200,000 a year but then are very wealthy.
They have a net worth of 17 million, 27 million, 33 million dollars, sometimes more.
And I said that Doge and Elon Musk are giving us a window into how this occurs.
How these people have created a very elaborate, labyrinthine racket.
In which money flows out of the government from the taxpayer, and then it flows right back into their pockets or to their benefit or into their re-election campaigns or into their bank accounts.
So in some ways, I guess what I'm saying is that, remember what we talked about for months involving the Biden family?
Biden is kind of a mafia boss.
Money flows from foreign entities to...
An LLC set up by Hunter Biden and flows to another LLC and to another LLC, and then it somehow circles into the Biden's private bank accounts.
The same thing is happening here, but it's not just Biden.
It's with not everybody, but lots of people in the government.
And the process here involves not so much LLCs, but NGOs, non-governmental organizations.
And by the way, even the term NGO is a misnomer.
Think about it.
You have an NGO, a non-governmental organization, fueled with government money.
Well, what makes you non-governmental if the government's bankrolling you?
And in fact, these NGOs are screaming, we may have to shut down.
Well, you're an NGO. You're a non-governmental organization.
Now you're saying that if the government didn't fund you, you'll have to shut down.
What does that tell you?
You're not non-governmental after all.
So here's Elon Musk in the Oval Office.
I hear him saying to Trump, we are now going to investigate how these people who make, you know, $100,000, $150,000, $200,000 have a net worth of tens of millions of dollars.
So this is kind of why I'm telling Debbie, this is kind of why we do what we do.
We like to put this stuff out there and see it picked up, disseminated, amplified.
So the point here is, it is really gratifying to see that the power is the be.
We can't find out these answers, and we can't do anything about it.
It's up to the various agencies of government, DOJ, but I would also say the DOJ, because we need to have prosecutions once we figure out who these crooks are and how much they have ripped us off.
Now, I mentioned yesterday, That $59 million had been dispatched by the US government after Trump's executive order to fund illegals at luxury hotels in New York.
And the bureaucrats who did that have been identified.
They've been removed.
But the good news that I just saw just a few minutes ago...
Is that the DOJ has clawed the 59 million back.
And if you remember yesterday, I said that's what they need to do.
It's not enough to just fire these guys as if like, oh, 59 million, it's gone.
No, get it back.
Then fire these people and then prosecute them.
So the third part is still awaiting.
It's kind of an interesting test for Pam Bondi because if you have orders countermanded, laws broken, People need to face consequences and they need to be made examples of.
The big picture of what's going on here is that the Doge is threatening to put the whole addictive government spending program that stretches across the entire bureaucracy into a kind of a detox.
And what you're seeing is the addict thrashing and yelling and screaming.
You can see the thief, in a way, responding with outrage to the idea that he is now going to be audited and that he may in fact be caught.
Solzhenitsyn once said something about the Soviet bureaucracy.
He said, we know that they are stealing from us.
They know that they are stealing from us.
They even know that we know that they are stealing from us.
And they are still stealing.
This is an excellent summary of what is going on in the U.S. government today.
And the weapon that the left is using to protect this thievery system is lawfare, a new type of lawfare.
We know about the old type of lawfare.
We witnessed it.
It was, by and large, lawfare.
That sought to criminalize political differences, go after Trump and Trumpsters, and put them in jail, lock them up.
This is a different kind of lawfare, but it's lawfare nonetheless.
It is used judges, left-wing judges, judges very often with conflicts of interest, compromised judges.
To give you one example that I have right here, you've got a prominent judge, Engelmeyer.
And this is a guy weighing in on the funding of NGOs, non-governmental organizations.
And guess what?
His wife, Emily Mandestam, works for an NGO that is swimming in USAID cash.
Another judge has a daughter involved in this NGO racket.
So these are people who...
Now, you would think they would recuse themselves, but no, they act as if they are, in some senses, serenely above any question, and they are doing the lawfare on behalf of the Democrats.
Although the left keeps talking about the word coup, this is a sort of a judicial coup, or at least an attempted coup, against preventing Trump and the executive branch From doing what the executive branch is, in fact, empowered to do.
So federal funding cutoff, which the executive branch can do, blocked.
Offering a buyout to federal employees, blocked.
Access to the Treasury's so-called vital data system, blocked.
NIH grant cuts, blocked.
In fact, removing public health websites that are all about gender ideology and the trans issue, blocked.
Put those websites back up, orders a judge.
Now, is this all bad news for Trump?
Many of the MAGA people are freaking out, but I think that in the big scheme of things, this may actually turn out to be a benefit.
It's true that some of the MAGA people, here's Emerald Robinson, for example, are going to fairly extreme recommendations.
Let me quote.
What happens if the Trump White House ignores these Obama judges?
How are the judges going to enforce their fake rulings?
They can't.
Criminal referrals go to A.G. Bondi at DOJ, and then DOJ will, quote, decline to prosecute, game over.
This is a possibility.
I'm sure the Trump people have thought about this.
What if we just ignore these people?
But it is the case, quite apart from the left's shrieking, it is the case that we do have three branches of government, and it is the judge's job to scrutinize these measures to make sure that A, they are consistent with the Constitution, and B, consistent with statutory law.
The problem that we have is that you have judges, partisan judges, that are abusing the process to take perfectly legitimate actions and proclaim them, well, not out of bounds.
The judges have not said yet that this is illegal or unconstitutional.
They're just saying, we need time to figure it out.
And I think what's really happening here is, first of all, politically, the American people can see That all this abuse is occurring, all this waste, all this fraud, all this stuff that shouldn't be happening.
And if we didn't have X as a platform to amplify and broadcast it, then we'd only have the mainstream media for the most part.
We'd have small conservative outlets, but we'd mainly have the mainstream media.
And the mainstream media isn't covering all the stuff that Doge is putting out there.
So we would be in a position where we would think, oh yeah, Trump is contravening the law.
We wouldn't be able to see what's really going on.
And what's really going on is the mafia operation inside the government is putting up its paid stooges in the media.
Like, don't cover all this stuff.
Why would you want to cover all the embezzling that we're doing?
You're part of it.
We're paying you.
Remember that the USAID was funding 5,000 journalistic outlets.
They're funding the BBC. They're funding Politico.
They're funding the New York Times.
I'll talk in the next segment about the way in which this funding is done.
But the point I want to make is that I think that this fight is a good one to have.
Because it is good for the American people to see the thrashing around of this thieving class as it tries to protect its prerogatives.
In the end, I think Trump is going to come out victorious here.
Why?
Because look...
There's no way the Supreme Court is going to put up with this nonsense.
There's no way the Supreme Court is not going to allow the elected president to have his own policies.
There's no way the Supreme Court is going to say, you know, the previous president did it this way, you want to do it a different way, so we're going to force you to comply with the way he did it.
This is not only insanity, this would in fact create a constitutional crisis.
I do not think that this is something that the Chief Justice Roberts wants to go down this road.
There might be some things further down the road in which the Supreme Court acts to block something that Trump has done.
They don't want to die on this mountain.
They don't want this fight because the things that Trump is doing, maybe he's doing them more rapidly, maybe he's doing them more efficaciously, These are within the prerogative of the executive.
So unless they contravene laws passed by Congress or unless they contravene the Constitution in some clear way...
It's none of the business of the Supreme Court.
So I think that's how it's going to come out.
It is annoying in the interim, the interregnum.
The time between now and then is frustrating because we want to see swift and decisive action.
Quite honestly, I think one way Trump can respond to when an executive order is blocked, issue three more.
Three more executive orders so that these judges realize you're going to get three for one.
Block one.
Three more come down the pike.
And this is a way of showing that two can play at this game.
And you're doing it in a way that is consistent with the law and consistent with the Constitution.
So this is my recommendation for how our side should fight back.
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Have you seen the news from economists forecasting a depression?
Not a recession.
A depression by the year 2030. Very scary.
We are in a bit of a perfect storm.
Social Security and Medicare have hit a breaking point.
The largest generation hitting retirement and a smaller workforce, which means a smaller tax base.
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Text my name, Dinesh, to the number 989898. I mentioned in the last segment how the government has been bankrolling journalists, and this is very disturbing because the whole idea of a free press is a press that is not beholden to the government.
Now, the way that the government is funding these journalists is very sly.
They're pretending merely to buy subscriptions, but these are not normal subscriptions, because if you buy a subscription, it's going to be, what, $59, $79 for a year.
But the government is often paying thousands of dollars per subscription, and they're buying thousands of subscriptions.
So millions of dollars are flowing to the New York Times, to Politico, and so on.
So what these news outlets have figured out is they can create kind of a special premium subscriber status.
Then get their own allies in the government.
Remember, all this is happening under Biden and Harris.
Hey, listen, wink, wink.
We have a $7,000 subscription.
Oh, okay, we'll take 800 of those for this department and 1,000 for this department.
It's all a way of sending money.
I don't know if under the table is the right word, to these outlets.
And these outlets in return essentially agree to be propagandistic outlets, which of course we know they largely are.
But here's an interesting thread I want to briefly tell you about by a guy named John Conrad about how the New York Times performs a kind of special function inside of this ecosystem.
He says the New York Times primary function is not journalism.
It's narrative coordination.
He says, you notice, for example, that people suddenly throughout the media, throughout the left, the Democratic Party, they're all saying the same thing.
Like right now, they're all saying this is a constitutional crisis.
Hundreds of people recite the same chant.
What he's saying is that the New York Times coordinates the chant.
They decide what the chant should be.
He says their job is not to report the news or even react to news.
What they do is they cull different kind of narrative possibilities.
And working in coordination with Democratic and left-wing activists, they settle on a narrative.
And the narrative could be something like, you gotta take the vaccine, or it's a constitutional crisis.
They pick, they flag what should be the kind of predominant slogan or phrase, and then they build their articles around that.
They're then picked up by other outlets that then essentially simply repeat.
They amplify, they magnify, they regurgitate, they recycle, and...
Once the tone is set, John Conrad says, basically, stick to the narrative.
If somebody goes off the reservation, some journalist at the Sacramento Bee or the Boston Globe decides to take a different tack, the whole job of the herd is to come down on that guy and kind of push him into line or push her into line.
And if necessary, absolutely flagellate the guy, excommunicate him, throw him off the bus.
So journalists kind of know that they're being watched.
They know that this kind of narrative policing that is occurring at the highest level by the New York Times, but is then carried out by little gangsters in the media all the way through the system, smear campaigns, if you will, directed not at conservatives.
Conservatives are allowed to, they're outside this ecosystem, but they're aimed at independent-minded journalists who are, because you sometimes might wonder, why are there so many Well, the answer is there is a system of enforcement in place that makes sure that the prevailing narrative prevails and that people who run against this narrative are suitably punished.
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Guys, I'm really delighted to welcome back to the podcast Gerard Felitti.
He's a senior counsel at The Lawfare Project.
I had him on the podcast before.
He did a great job.
Follow him on x at Gerard Felitti, F-I-L-I-T-T-I. The website is thelawfareproject.org.
He has degrees from NYU, the University of London, University of Michigan Law School.
And he has had a very distinguished career.
He's also a scholar of the Middle East and Central Asia.
But Gerard, I invited you back on because I want to talk about these judges.
And it started out, there was one, there was two, but now it appears that there is a small army of judges that are being sort of recruited by the left to block Trump initiatives.
The judges appear to be moving in a fairly detailed way, which is things like, put this back up on your website, and no, you can't do this, and you can't freeze this kind of funding, and you can't fire these people, and you cannot offer buyouts to federal employees.
And so I thought I would begin by just asking you...
You know, presumably these judges aren't just deranged.
They aren't just left-wing activists who say, let's just stop Trump any which way.
They need some kind of legal pretext, some kind of legal rationale for these TROs, temporary restraining orders, or for these blockages that they are announcing.
So can you help us understand?
From the point of view of these judges, what is the basis for them taking these steps?
Well, first of all, thank you for having me back.
You're always phenomenal to be on with, and I love your show.
It's great to be on.
These judges, they don't necessarily come out of nowhere when it comes to how they analyze the law.
The biggest thing here is Trump is doing things in a way that no one else has done before.
He's come in, and in a spate of two weeks, he's issued executive orders, and those executive orders trickled down to the agencies that have to implement them.
Those agencies have issued rules or they've issued policies that we've seen, whether it's at DHS, whether it's ICE involving immigration, whether it's the Department of Justice.
All these agencies are now implementing Trump's executive orders.
And the way that this has happened so quickly leaves judges wondering if procedures were followed.
Because remember, we're used to agencies, government agencies, taking a long time to operate.
We're not used to having decisions come down so quickly or changes happen so quickly.
So judges are looking at what's being challenged and they're saying, well, what really controls here is the Administrative Procedure Act.
There's a way that government agencies are supposed to operate.
and they're not sure whether all the procedures have been followed and because they're unsure, and again, they're unsure because this has never been done before, they're placing holds on Trump's policies.
They're asking for more information.
They haven't yet ruled that everything is illegal or unconstitutional or improper, but they're looking for more information.
That's basically where we are in the vast majority of the legal challenges that have been brought to date.
So, I think what you're saying is that The judges are saying that there is a kind of an established way of doing things governed by this APA, or Administrative Procedures Act.
And the judges are saying that we need more time to figure out whether or not this act is being violated.
And in the meantime, we don't want any of these government employees, for example, to suffer hardship.
And we don't want these programs and the program beneficiaries.
So we're just going to hit the pause button, right?
Is that pretty much what you're saying?
You've nailed it on the head.
That's exactly it.
They haven't ruled that anything is improper, but they want time to evaluate whether the way that these agencies are carrying out Trump's executive orders is proper, that the procedures are being followed.
And in some cases, I think that challenges will actually succeed, and most of them, they probably will not.
But this is a matter for the courts to get more information at this stage, and that's precisely what's happening.
And described this way, it does seem to be part of the normal flow of government.
In other words, it is customary.
This happened even under Biden.
It has happened, obviously, under previous presidents.
You take an action.
The one that comes to mind is Biden, for example, forgiving student loans.
This is then challenged.
Does he really have the authority to do this?
Or to what degree can he forgive these student loans?
The court issues are ruling.
You can then appeal if you want to.
So is it the case right now?
Because I know that some of the MAGA people are freaking out.
You know, we need to impeach these judges or we need to threaten to pack the court.
Of course, the Supreme Court hasn't weighed in here.
In fact, by and large, appellate courts haven't weighed in either.
Is there no alternative to just sort of running the clock?
Dealing with these judges, if you don't agree with their ruling, appeal it, and if they don't agree with that, appeal it.
But it does seem like the net effect of that is to slow down the operations of the Trump juggernaut by weeks, if not months.
It does, and the irony here is that if proper, well, let's not say proper, let's say if the normal procedure is followed, because there's nothing improper about these rules in most cases.
If the normal procedures were followed, you'd have a publication about a proposed rulemaking.
You'd have 90 days or so for comment from the public.
You'd take into account these comments and still decide what you want to decide and make up these policies as you want them.
So that would have taken time anyway.
And the irony is perhaps that would have taken less time than these lawsuits.
But it's worth pointing out that even if the government, even if Trump had followed those protocols, he still would have been sued.
In some ways, it's hard because there is a concerted lawfare effort on the part of the far left to challenge anything that Donald Trump wants to do using any means necessary.
That's why we see a lot of these lawsuits and a lot of these lawsuits are without merit.
The Supreme Court has said on more than one occasion that the executive, meaning Trump, can decide on firing employees and even agency heads.
So when you see cases like this, you know that they're being put out there just to cause delay.
Other cases, there is a reasonable inquiry as to whether procedures were properly followed.
But that doesn't mean that the left is still not challenging things without basis.
They just don't like what Trump is doing.
So they'll use any tool to put interventionist works.
Right.
So this seems to me, I mean, on the one hand, on the one extreme, I would take something like the birthright citizenship question, which is extremely controversial.
And I would have to say that a straightforward reading of the Constitution here does...
Not seem to favor Trump in terms of the birthright citizenship, much as I think that as a policy matter, it's kind of absurd just to say if someone is geographically born on the land of the United States, they automatically become a citizen.
That is, in fact, what the Constitution appears to say.
But to me, there's a big difference between, say, that one and other actions by Trump that seem squarely within the executive branch.
And yet they are being put on hold.
And my question is whether there might be some...
Restrictions placed on these federal judges.
I mean, you have about 600 of these judges.
You have them in liberal states.
Obviously, the Democrats go shopping for a judge that is kind of in their camp.
That judge then decides not only to put a hold, let's say, on the effect of Trump's action, say, in Rhode Island, but across the entire country.
So a single judge, unelected, can block...
A Trump action for a fairly long period of time and basically go, you know, I'm going to scratch my head and set dates and hearings and you file a response and then you file a response to that response.
Isn't there a way for maybe the Supreme Court to step in and go, listen, there is a merit to this process, but it is also being used here to delay Well,
the first thing to point out is that this does cut both ways.
When Biden was president, there were plenty of challenges that more conservative-leaning groups used in courts in Texas and other jurisdictions that were more friendly towards their causes or positions.
Precisely to block implementation of policy agendas that the vast majority of Americans probably disagreed with.
So really, it does cut both ways.
Today, we might not be benefiting from it because we're seeing delays in actions we want implemented.
Another administration in the future, we might be thankful for this.
Now, I think there may be fixes to this.
There may be a way to have an expedited review process built in.
That's something that Congress can work out.
That's something that maybe the Supreme Court on its own can do as controlling the federal judiciary.
But an expedited review process might streamline things and take them to the Supreme Court quicker because ultimately what we're talking about is the very functioning of government.
Regardless of what private citizen brings a lawsuit, It really is a matter of the House, Congress, the Senate, and the Executive.
So ultimately, it will be something that should be resolved more quickly, more speedily by the Supreme Court.
If you have a law that pushes review of some of these cases to the Supreme Court quicker, that might help, but ultimately you still have to wind your way through the system.
I mean, that I think is really where I'm trying to go, because I appreciate what you're saying about the fact that we have a system of checks and balances.
In some ways, the founders themselves...
Wanted to slow things down.
They created enough of separation of powers, people looking over each other's shoulders, judicial review to oversee, make sure that legislation is compatible with the Constitution.
But on the other hand, I look at some of this egregious stuff where, let's take a concrete example.
A judge basically says, That I have been approached by a bunch of doctors who claim that if you don't have this extreme transgender ideology, I can't function and perform medicine.
Now, this is on the face of it absurd, because these same doctors were practicing for years, if not decades, before this ideology was introduced.
So, what seems to be going on here is a collaboration between these groups that file a lawsuit.
These doctors come forward and make a preposterous claim.
The judge goes, oh, I gotta worry about these doctors practicing medicine.
There could be irreparable harm if I let this go on without further scrutiny.
And so...
Again, the judge seems to be in no position to be making these decisions, and yet this is going on right in front of us, and the net effect of it is to, at the very least, interrupt, if not block, what seem to be these vitally important doge investigations, the exposure of fraud and abuse.
All the stuff that's coming out is just so embarrassing for the swamp.
And they're using a new kind of lawfare.
I mean, they use the one type of lawfare, the criminal lawfare, if you will, to go after Trump.
This appears to be a lawfare of a different kind.
Are you optimistic that the Trump people are aware of this?
They kind of know how to deal with it.
Maybe they even expected it.
And they will prevail in the end.
Well, I will say that the more egregious example to me is actually in Doge, where the government was sued over the issue of who can access Treasury Department records, whether it was a presidential appointee or a career civil service person.
At the end of the day, if you're signing confidentiality provisions and you have security clearance, it shouldn't matter whether you're appointed, anointed, or born to that position.
But lawsuits like that are absolutely a waste of time.
And what can we do about that from that perspective?
Look, Donald Trump knows that this is what's happening, that lawfare has been waged against him in his first administration, too.
Remember when he had a ban on people from certain countries?
That was ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court, but not before it spent years in litigation.
So Donald Trump...
Trump knows that lawfare is being waged, and he has a legal team prepared to do that.
That's why he put in Pam Bondi as Attorney General, because she has a lot of experience not just as a litigator, but also managing the vast multitude of cases that are now going to take place that she needs to be involved in.
That's why Donald Trump has a robust legal team in his office.
So we know that this is coming.
And I think that in a lot of these cases, ultimately, when we get to the Supreme Court, Trump will prevail.
What about a wild man solution, which I'm just going to throw out for your reaction?
It essentially is based upon Andrew Jackson's famous or infamous statement, the judge has made his decision, now let's see if he can enforce it.
I think what Andrew Jackson is getting at is, I'm going to ignore this decision and let's see what happens.
So presumably if Trump decides, and Trump is not going in this direction, Trump has actually said, I'm going to conform to what these judges are doing.
But I'm going to appeal and challenge what they're doing.
But what if Trump were to say, you know what?
These judges are making these decisions.
Let's pretend that they don't exist.
I'm just going to keep going ahead.
What are they going to do?
Refer me for criminal prosecution?
To whom?
That referral will go to Pam Bondi.
She receives the letter.
She tosses it into the trash.
And that's the end of that.
I mean, this would be a case of, I would have to say, fighting lawfare with lawfare of our own.
My instinct is that although in general I think we sometimes have to do to the other side what they're doing to us, in this case this makes me uncomfortable.
Does it make you uncomfortable and do you think it is a bad way to go?
It makes me absolutely uncomfortable, and I think it's a bad way to go for one reason, because we have a precedent, we have that separation of powers, but you don't want to create a precedent where presidents routinely ignore court orders.
Imagine that it's not Donald Trump that's president.
Imagine that it's Kamala Harris, or imagine that it's AOC, or Rashida Clay.
It can't be, but I'm just using that as an example.
Do you feel comfortable with that president ignoring an order from a court or from even the Supreme Court?
I don't think any of us do.
So at the end of the day, We have to remember that it cuts both ways.
As much as we may hate the Administrative Procedures Act right now for the impediments that it's causing, let's not forget why it was created in the first place.
FDR created a government bureaucracy like we'd never seen, and it's only grown since then.
The APA was put in place as a check on all this new bureaucracy that Roosevelt created.
So back then, we loved it.
It was necessary.
Now, not so much.
Things change.
But if you just ignore the law or ignore precedent, you're risking future generations.
Very interesting, guys.
Fascinating conversation right here with Gerard Filitti.
He's Senior Counsel at The Lawfare Project.
Follow my next at Gerard, G-E-R-A-R-D-F-I-L-I-T-T-I. The website is thelawfareproject.org.
Gerard, as always, enlightening discussion, and thank you very much for joining me.
Great discussion and great topics.
Thank you.
I'm beginning a section of The Big Lie that is somewhat ironically called With Compliments from Hitler.
Now, the significance of this section is the following.
I've been focusing in the last section about ways in which the American left, both inside and outside the FDR administration, what they thought.
of the fascists and the Nazis.
And here we turn the tables, we switch the camera around, and we ask what did the fascists and Nazis think about them?
So we're going to look at it from the fascist point of view and from the Nazi point of view.
And we begin with Mussolini and then we'll go to Hitler.
Here's Mussolini reviewing a book by FDR. The book is called Looking Forward.
Mussolini loves it.
He says that the book is boldly interventionist in the field of economics, meaning the state is boldly intervening in capitalism, interfering in the private sector.
And he says FDR's policies are, quote, reminiscent of fascism.
He recognizes them.
And he says that Mussolini is doing the same thing that he is trying to do in Italy.
We think of Mussolini as a disciple of Hitler, but that actually isn't quite accurate in two separate regards.
First of all, Mussolini came before Hitler.
He was a towering figure on the world stage when Hitler was just coming up.
Remember, Mussolini was in power in the 20s.
Hitler didn't even come to power in Germany until 1933. It was actually Hitler who looked up to Mussolini and not the other way around, at least in the beginning.
Second, Mussolini admired somebody much more than Hitler.
And that was, yes, you are right, FDR. FDR was Mussolini's real hero.
And I'm quoting Mussolini right here.
FDR, Roosevelt had the strength and the will to do what ought to be done.
And Mussolini's praising Roosevelt here for kind of being a strong man.
For being decisive, for overriding people that he doesn't agree with, for not paying attention to, if you will, checks and balances.
Now let's go to Germany and look at what the Nazi press is saying about FDR. Here's something that is noticed by the left-wing legal scholar James Whitman.
He says that he has encountered, quote, the strange fact.
A strange fact that the Nazis frequently praised Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal government in the early 1930s.
Now, I've got to give you a bit of a big lie alert here because this fact is not strange.
Fascism, communism, Nazism, socialism, progressivism are all on the same track.
They're all moving in the same direction.
They're sister ideology.
So it's not strange.
Whitman, the legal scholar, is making it seem strange because he wants to act like Nazism is on the right.
Why would the right-wing Nazis somehow find something to praise in the New Deal?
As we're seeing, they had every reason to praise the New Deal, which was fascist in a certain way of its own.
So Whitman is trying to hide the ideological affinities between the American left and the Nazis.
But the fascists didn't try to hide these affinities.
In fact, you would find FDR, for example, would get a massive spread in the Berlin Illustrated magazine, which was one of the magazines favorable to the Nazis.
And in that magazine, underneath FDR's photo, they would talk about, quote, the fascist New Deal.
And they meant this as a compliment.
On May 11, 1933, the Nazi newspaper Volkischer Beobachter has an article, Roosevelt's dictatorial recovery measures, but they're using the term dictatorial here as a compliment, meaning Roosevelt is taking decisive action.
He's giving dictation to people who need to follow what he's doing.
And we can see this if we continue to read the article.
Roosevelt, quote, is...
Carrying out experiments that are bold.
We, too, fear only the possibility that they might fail.
We, too, as German national socialists are looking toward America.
The Nazis are saying, this is one of us.
This guy, FDR, is one of us.
We want him to succeed because the success of fascism in America and our own success are somewhat connected.
Hitler himself was interviewed by the New York Times, and he said, I have sympathy for Mr. Roosevelt because he marches straight toward his objectives over Congress, lobbies, and bureaucracy.
FDR overrides the normal machinery of government.
So Hitler, like Mussolini, is viewing FDR as a fellow dictator.
And Hitler told FDR's German ambassador, this is a guy named William Dodd, he says, One of the things I noticed about FDR is that his philosophy is based upon the idea that the common good overrides the individual good.
And this is what Hitler says.
This is also the quintessence of the German state philosophy, which finds expression in the slogan, the public good transcends the interest of the individual.
And even as late as 1938, this is the year...
Before Hitler invades Poland, by this time, Dodd is no longer the ambassador.
He's replaced by a guy named Hugh Wilson.
And Hugh Wilson reports to FDR that he has a big fan in Germany, and this fan is none other than Adolf Hitler.
I'm quoting, Which were similar to the problems that he faced when he assumed office.
Now, when we hear this rhetoric, we might wonder, like, what are we talking about?
Like, what is it that the Nazis were excited about?
And we think about, well, it can't be like Social Security because a program like that was very small in the 1930s.
Well, what the fascists and the Nazis were referring to is a program of the New Deal that was later struck down.
It's called the National Recovery Act.
So a couple of words about that.
This act was, you could almost say, straight-out fascism.
It certainly was moving the United States dramatically against the free market.
And let's look at what it did.
It empowers the federal government to bring together coalitions of labor and management in every single industry.
So think of that happening now.
You have these coalitions drawn from unions, drawn from management in every industry.
What do they do?
They sit down together and they set production targets, wage targets, price targets, even minimum and maximum hours.
So here is the government getting actively involved in brokering a managed economy.
And this is the essence of fascism, isn't it?
The government isn't taking over the private sector completely.
That would be straight-out socialism.
But it is creating this fascist synthesis in which the government says, all right, well, why don't we get together in the computer industry?
Let's decide how many computers should be made next year.
We won't decide by ourselves.
We'll let the unions and management and us all have a roundtable discussion and decide we'll produce 4,000 computers or 4,000 chips or 4 million chips next year.
So there's no free market if this kind of thing is going on throughout the economy.
Moreover, all these agreements have to go through the government.
They have to be reviewed by a government-run industrial advisory board.
And who is that board answerable to?
FDR. So the configuration of the American economy, at least according to the National Recovery Act, very similar to the fascist economy in Italy and the Nazi economy in Germany.
In fact, Rexford Tugwell, whom I've mentioned before, one of FDR's brain trust, this guy goes that the NRA is designed to, quote, eliminate the anarchy of the competitive system.
Another way of saying get rid of free enterprise and the market as a system of setting prices.
Now, when the National Recovery Act and the New Deal policies were being advanced, a lot of people in America recognized that this was a fascist program and they were proud of it.
They were excited by it.
So here's the progressive writer Roger Shaw writing in the North American Review.
He says the NRA, NRA meaning National Recovery Act, was, quote, plainly an American adaptation of the Italian corporate state.
The corporate state was Mussolini's term for fascism.
One of the Marxist writers, the NRA is doing the job that European fascism set out to accomplish.
Here's FDR's own interior secretary, a guy named Harold Dickies, quote, what we are doing in this country are some of the same things that are being done in Russia.
And even some of the same things that are being done under Hitler in Germany.
Mussolini himself, upon hearing about the NRA, becomes extremely enthusiastic and compares FDR to himself.
In fact, he says, Behold the dictator.
And let's remember again that for people like Mussolini, dictator is not a bad word.
He means behold the great leader.
Behold the strong man.
Behold the guy in America who's, well, just like me.
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