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Feb. 18, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
59:10
DC FUMIGATION Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1023
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Thank you.
Thank you.
Coming up, I'll reveal how Washington, D.C. home listings show the positive effects of cleaning out the cockroaches from the federal government.
Trump made a controversial statement, and a lot of people say, well, he's a dictator, we told you.
And I will tell you why what Trump said is completely defensible and also an analysis of what's going on in Europe.
J.D. Vance and his speech before the Munich Security Conference.
All of that coming up.
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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.
It's really great to be back.
I realized yesterday was a holiday, President's Day, so no podcast yesterday.
And in fact, Debbie and I were on a very long plane ride from Sydney, Australia, right back to Texas.
Fortunately, a non-stop flight, so even though it's perhaps the longest flight you can take, previously we've done flights to Israel and flights to India even, and those are long, but somehow the flight to Sydney over the Pacific, And over the Pacific Ocean is in a class by itself.
So we had a four-day trip to Australia.
We were actually not in Sydney.
We were up on the, it's called the Sunshine Coast.
And we were there for a series of business meetings, which really went great.
I'm going to...
Hold back on going into all of this until I have something more specific to announce about it.
But we had really good meetings and launching an important project that I'm looking forward to telling you more about.
We also got to see some very cool animals in Australia.
In fact, we had When we went last year to Australia, we didn't really get any chance to see Australia.
And the reason was because we were on this speaking tour with Tucker Carlson.
And we started up in the north in what the Australians call Cairns, even though it's spelled Cairns.
And then, anyway, Cairns to Brisbane and Brisbane to Adelaide and Adelaide to Perth and Perth to Sydney.
The tour finally ended up in Melbourne, or Melbourne, as they say.
And so because we were bopping around, we didn't get to see very much.
We did go to a kind of a crocodile exhibit, which was cool.
But this time we did spend half a day at a very remarkable kind of open park.
With all kinds of Australian birds and animals, we got to feed kangaroos, believe it or not.
And we also got to see the koala bears up close and even pet them, which is kind of remarkable.
An insanely condensed trip, but one that was necessary and productive and opens up some really cool new possibilities, which I'm going to tell you more about later.
Glad to be back.
The Doge operation is in full swing, and that's what I want to focus on here.
I'm going to call this opening segment Panic Among the Cockroaches.
And there are cockroaches galore in the federal government.
You only have to scratch an agency, USAID, the cockroaches come out.
Then you move over to the Social Security Administration.
The cockroaches are running everywhere.
I saw that Trump fired the head of the Social Security Administration because she was trying to block Elon Musk and his team from gaining access.
Next step, FEMA. The Emergency Management Agency.
And this is really a rampage that needs to go on throughout the federal government.
I was quite amused this morning to see Kevin O'Leary on CNN. And you could see the stupefied and really stupid faces of the CNN panel.
As Kevin O'Leary basically told them, I don't think that this cutting is going far enough.
You need to cut deeper.
And they were like, what?
What?
One of them even idiotically blurted out, what about the nuclear codes?
Well, if there are people who are managing the nuclear codes, it's probably like three guys.
So yeah, I think we can afford to retain those three guys.
But Kevin O'Leary was not in the mood to listen to any kind of nonsense.
So he goes, yeah, cut there too.
Because this is the kind of...
Juvenile and jejune type of response you get from a media that doesn't even know what's going on and is just in a habitual defense of big government mode.
In other words, it's running its usual ideological formation, almost like one of these...
Defensive tackles in a football game where they're trying to prevent Elon Musk and his team, his rushing team, from getting past them.
This rushing team is made up of a bunch of youngsters.
And apparently, well, according to Trump, it started out with a small group of them and they've now multiplied.
Apparently, there's over 100 of them now.
And I'm hearing and seeing from the left, well, these are children.
These are people who don't really know what they're doing.
These are people who are incapable of managing or supervising or even investigating adults.
Well, first of all, it is worth knowing that both in the entrepreneurial and in the technology space, you have a lot of young people.
Who do remarkable things?
In fact, most of the remarkable technological achievements of our society are done by young people.
Here are a couple of examples.
Michael Dell, when he started Dell Computer, was the ripe old age of 19. Steve Jobs founded Apple at the equally impressive age of 19. Mark Zuckerberg was barely 20 when he started with Facebook.
Bill Gates was 19 when he started Microsoft in, I believe, 1982. The same is true, Snapchat.
So you've got brilliant young innovators, entrepreneurs, even academics at a young age, if not 19, then early 20s.
And let's remember that this was also true of the American founders, or at least a number of them.
And Hamilton, for example, was not even 20 when he was right alongside George Washington, being part and helping to shape the course of the American Revolution.
So this Doge squad, and I don't mind calling it a hit squad, it needs to be a hit squad, is doing its work.
And if you want to measure its effect, I direct you to a very interesting Thread posted by a group that normally surveys real estate.
It is a group that put out the following kind of alert.
Since Doge began discussing mass layoffs, the median home price in Washington, D.C. has fallen by $139,000.
Now, it should be noted that Washington, D.C. is very expensive.
It is not uncommon to have homes at $500,000, $750,000, $1 million, even $2 million.
But still, $139,000 drop in a couple of months is a big deal.
That is pretty unusual.
Not only that, but according to the Kobesi letter, quote, in 30 days, nearly 4,000 homes have been listed for sale in and around Washington, D.C. Now, normally, you might say, well, what is this?
What's the connection?
But the connection is actually quite obvious and extremely delightful, which is that as these lazy, callous, overpaid, non-working bureaucrats are ousted, and with a lot more ousting to come, these people have realized that the sort of the jig is up, the racket that they've been running.
And this racket is not a simple case of working for the government, doing nothing, and getting overpaid.
That would be actually bad enough.
That would be bad enough to be funding for years, if not decades, these parasites.
But these parasites have, these cockroaches, so to speak, have created cockroach cities, cockroach networks.
And these networks have created very complex ways of funneling money.
Around the place and right back into their own pockets.
And so you might have a guy, he's working in one agency, doing nothing, and making $174,000.
And his wife is working in another agency, doing nothing, and making another $174,000.
And because the two of them are in influential positions, they've got relatives, a son-in-law, a brother-in-law, a cousin, who have started NGOs, non-governmental organizations.
And these guys are using their influence to funnel government money to their own relatives and some of it obviously circles right back to them.
And so this is how...
You have people who are supposedly public servants.
I'm serving the public.
They're not serving the public.
What they are doing is lining their pockets.
They're looting the treasury.
They're ripping off the taxpayer.
And as a result, they're living in $1 million and $2 million and in some places $3 million homes.
And now they're like, oh no, people are waking up.
The auditors are here.
This game is now imperiled and we might want to skip town.
We can't continue in this manner.
We may no longer be able to make our $7,500 mortgage payments per month.
And so we may have to downsize or maybe even get out of here before the cops show up at our house.
Some more data on these home prices.
As of November 2024, the median home.
And I think you know what the median home means.
The median home is not the average price of a home.
If you have 10 homes, the average is you add up the price of the 10 homes, divide by 10. That's the mean.
That's the average.
The median is if you listed the prices of the 10 homes.
What is the price of the home that sits right in the middle of that distribution?
Well, that median home in Washington, D.C. was worth $699,000.
Now it's worth about $550,000.
So that's about a 20% drop.
And of course, what's causing the drop?
Well, it's the laws of supply and demand.
So there are a lot of people willing to sell.
They're putting their homes on the market.
The demand, of course, remains the same.
When the supply increases of any product and the demand is the same or roughly the same, the price is going to fall.
And that's the point.
You have thousands of homes that are now listed for sale.
And this is actually not normal because D.C. is generally a very coveted market.
By and large, the supply of homes in D.C., again, according to the Kobesi newsletter, The supply of homes in the winter is typically quite low.
And all of this has clearly accelerated and exploded after Doge moves in.
Not just by the way the expose of all the fraud and all the waste and all the excess, but also the idea of...
Trump's idea of a massive employee buyout.
And apparently there's an expectation that some 5% to 10% of the entire federal workforce might take up the offer, which would be great.
I actually hope it would be much higher.
My goal has always been to cut the federal workforce in half.
So it'd be wonderful if like 50% of federal workers exited the scene.
I think this can be done, by the way, with no loss of government efficiency.
Frankly, there's very little government efficiency now.
Hard to see how things could get much worse.
but apparently some 65,000 or so federal workers out of about Well, 2.3 or so million have accepted this offer.
That number is expected to go up.
I hope it goes up a whole lot.
So what this really shows you is that there is a spreading dismay, a spreading panic.
In Washington, D.C., I haven't really seen something like this, well, quite honestly, ever.
Not even under Reagan, not in the early days of Reagan, was there a clean-out of this magnitude.
It suggests...
Well, it doesn't suggest necessarily that Trump is different from Reagan in this regard because I think that the problems of federal bureaucracy, which were bad enough in 1980, have now reached just absolutely disastrous proportions.
The infestation of the cockroaches has become truly unbearable.
And the toll, the cost to the American taxpayer, the amount of destruction that these termites have done to the, let's call it the House of America, is absolutely horrible.
So it's time for a major termite cleanup.
And the termites are fighting back in whatever way they can.
And their allies in the media are trying to convince us that termites are really very good for the house.
The house can't survive without termites.
Termites, in fact, have been protecting the house all this time.
And the very fact that we have a house standing at all is due to the termites.
Yes, we hear you, but we cannot help but disagree.
And so the real estate crash of Washington, D.C. is something that is an indication of how well things are going in the early weeks of the new Trump administration.
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I want to discuss something that Trump posted on social media a couple of days ago that has generated a good deal of consternation.
And some howling and screaming and I told you so from the left.
But interestingly, a very quiet response, which is to say a non-response from the right.
And it's the non-response I want to focus on because it suggests that sometimes Trump will say things.
And conservatives and Republicans alike are like, well, we can't really defend that, so we're going to pretend he didn't say it.
And that is one way to deal with Trump, the idea that somehow Trump goes off the deep end and can't be defended, but we should just recognize that this is just part of his temperament.
He flies off the handle.
But I don't think that that is what is going on here.
And this is why I want to depart from the usual Republican practice here and analyze and in fact defend what Trump is saying, even though it seems on first glance to be indefensible.
So let's start with Trump.
He who saves his country does not violate any law.
What a statement!
Trump appears to be saying that he is in some way above the law and that someone who is saving the country should be above the law.
Now, as it turns out, this quotation is from Napoleon.
Trump doesn't put it in quote marks.
He doesn't attribute it to Napoleon.
But Napoleon is supposed to have said something.
Very much like this.
But of course, that doesn't really solve the issue because Napoleon himself was an emperor.
Napoleon was what we would in modern language call a dictator.
Napoleon wasn't elected in any sort of constitutional or democratic process.
And so Trump here appears to be sharing, promulgating a Napoleonic dictum that It is interesting to ask why Trump would even do this.
Why would he post something like this?
He, I don't think, is doing it casually or whimsically.
It's not like he just gets up and goes, oh, this is an interesting Napoleon quote.
Let me just put it out there without attribution.
Because, of course, when you post something without attribution, it's attributed to you.
If I posted a quote, let's just say, from someone else, And didn't say it was from them.
It would be taken reasonably that I'm saying it.
And so you have a number of people on the Democratic side, some elected, some people like Bill Kristol and others.
Look, we told you, see, Trump is a despot.
Trump thinks he's above the law.
And this is really why we were trying to prosecute him before, not because he was a political opponent or he was a conservative or because he's MAGA, but because this is a lawless guy who thinks that laws somehow don't apply to him.
Now, I want to argue that if you pay attention to what Trump is saying here, just analyze the statement itself.
It will be quite clear that the statement is an expression of the most basic common sense, which is a common sense that we can test for ourselves, and Democrats can test for themselves.
I think that upon reflection, this is a statement that Lincoln would have agreed with, Washington would have agreed with, and we can test the logic by asking this question.
I'm going to pose it this way.
If the survival of the country was at stake, Which law would you not violate?
And I posed, let me know.
And then I carefully read the feed to see if anyone could think of a law that they would not violate, even if the survival of the country was at stake.
One guy, actually, perhaps this is the best answer I got, was, well, I would never violate the First and Second Amendment, even if the survival of the country was at stake.
But this to me makes absolutely no sense for this reason.
If the survival of the country is at stake, and you are willing to jeopardize that survival in order to protect the First and Second Amendment, you are a fool.
Why?
Because if the country goes down, then there's no country.
And if there's no country, there's no constitution.
And if there's no constitution, there's no Bill of Rights.
And if there's no Bill of Rights, There is no First Amendment or Second Amendment or Fourth Amendment or Fourteenth Amendment or any of the other amendments that we consider to be this kind of basic charter of our enumerated liberties.
None of it.
All of it goes down with the ship.
And this is a point that Lincoln himself made in a very specific context which I now want to turn to.
And this is the...
Suspension of habeas corpus, which Lincoln did at the very beginning of the Civil War.
Habeas corpus is one of those absolute basic rights, the right to essentially due process, the right to not be imprisoned without trial.
The habeas corpus stands for those basic due process liberties, and yet Lincoln suspended it, suspended habeas corpus.
Moreover, Lincoln suspended it when the Constitution Pretty clearly says that it's not the president's job to do that.
It is possible to suspend habeas corpus in a national emergency, but that has to be done by Congress.
Congress is given the power to do that.
And yet, Lincoln does it, and he does it unilaterally.
Now, Lincoln, in defending himself, said that Congress could have done it, and should have done it, and would have done it.
But couldn't do it because the eruption of the Civil War and the power of the Confederacy right around Washington, D.C. Let's remember, Washington, D.C. is right next door to Virginia, which was the most powerful state in the Confederacy and fully had the ability to encircle Washington, D.C. And in fact, Congress was not able to meet as a result.
And so Lincoln's point is, how can Congress do it?
it, there is an emergency, but Congress itself is not able to meet.
Therefore, I am taking this action on behalf of Congress, and I will look to Congress to ratify it when Congress does meet, which Congress later did meet and did ratify Lincoln's decision.
But nevertheless, Nevertheless, so Lincoln argued that his action was constitutional by the very fact that the conditions that were necessary for Congress to make the initial decision were not present.
And therefore, he had to, in a sense, act in their stead until they could, in fact, meet.
But then Lincoln goes on to say something even more interesting.
And that is, Lincoln says, in effect, this, and I'm paraphrasing rather than quoting from him because I'm just doing it off the top of my head.
Lincoln says, but...
If I am not authorized to do it, if I acted unconstitutionally, let me ask you this question.
Would you rather that the ship of state go down to the bottom of the sea, taking with it all our rights?
Do you want me, in the name of protecting this one right, habeas corpus, to put not only all our rights, but the survival of the union, of the state itself, in jeopardy?
Lincoln doesn't really answer the question directly, but the presumed answer is, of course not.
Don't be out of your mind.
Recognize that when you have a constitution, when you have a Bill of Rights, you need a union, you need a country, you need a state in order to put all those things into practice.
You can't have separation of powers and checks and balances and all the different mechanisms of government that are described and laid out in the blueprint of the Constitution.
All of that is meaningless if the entire government itself is subverted by a group of people that don't want to operate by those arrangements at all.
The point here is that basic survival is always the highest law.
It's higher even than the Constitution.
This, by the way, applies not only to a Constitution, but it's the same moral principle that applies in our own lives.
Let's take, for example, the simple principle and, in fact, commandment, thou shalt not kill.
Now, strictly speaking, it means thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not kill an innocent person, but I want to argue that even killing an innocent person is justified if your own survival is at stake.
If a mother's life is in danger, then you can, in fact, end a pregnancy.
And that self-defense, if you will, doesn't make that either a moral or a legal crime.
Similarly, if I'm walking on the street, And I look up, there's a skyscraper, and let's say a man has fallen out of his balcony and he's plummeting to the ground, and he's about to land on me.
Let's even say further that if he lands on me, his life will be spared, but I will die.
I'm perfectly justified in jumping out of the way, protecting my own survival, and letting the other guy crash into the pavement.
Why?
Because my survival is at stake, and I am entitled to look out for that first.
And the same principle applies to countries as applies to individuals in the situations, admittedly, the imaginary situations that I've outlined for you.
And so the point I want to make is that Trump is actually stating the truth of the matter.
Even a Democratic president in Trump's situation or in a similar extreme situation would invoke the same principle.
And if they wouldn't say it, if they wouldn't quote Napoleon, they would...
And therefore, I think we see with Trump a kind of remarkable ability to say things that make even Republicans, and even conservatives, I'm not talking about rhinos, I'm talking about the most conservative Republican.
I haven't seen a single Republican senator, a single conservative commentator come to Trump's defense on this statement, except me.
And the reason is...
People are generally afraid of things like this.
And so the reason I'm doing a segment on it, the reason I'm even sort of rubbing it in your face a little bit and pushing it out on social media, is for the reason that one is afraid of it.
For the reason that one tends to think, oh, this is where Trump may have gone too far.
I'm not denying in principle that Trump can go too far, and I don't have any hesitancy in saying that I have no hesitancy in disagreeing with Trump when the occasion calls for it.
But in this case, I think Trump is simply stating the simple truth of the matter.
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I want to talk about a great crack-up, a great breakup, a potential divorce between the United States and its traditional allies in Europe.
The crack-up, the divorce, focuses on two separate issues, and I'm going to say a word about each.
The first one is the idea that there is a defense pact, NATO, a common line of defense between the United States and Europe.
And this is something that goes back to the alliance between America, And Great Britain in World War II. But of course, in that war, the Germans and the Italians were on the other side.
So it was after the Second World War, with the formation of NATO and during the Cold War, that this kind of united front developed between the United States and Europe.
And now there is no Cold War.
At least not of the same type.
The Soviet Union is gone.
We have in its place Russia, the same people, but of course a different society based upon different interests and different principles than the old Soviet Union.
And so you may ask, what is the point of having this NATO? A good question, and a question actually not sufficiently scrutinized.
In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, even though I think it probably should have been.
And now there is this issue of Ukraine.
Russia and Ukraine are disputing territory.
Russia invades Ukraine.
Russia claims that the parts of Ukraine that it claims for itself are part of Russia, that the people who live in those areas are Russian.
They are native Russians.
They've got cousins and ancestors who are Russian and live, in fact, in other parts of Russia.
All of this is pushed to the side with the simple claim that Russia invaded Ukraine and the West and NATO, so America and its European allies need to scurry to the defense of Ukraine.
But Trump doesn't see it that way.
He sees it as a battle between Putin and Zelensky, between Russia and Ukraine, that needs to be and can be worked out.
And the Trump team is in Saudi Arabia and will be negotiating with a Russian team to try to sort out.
This conflict and bring it to an end.
The imperative to end it is at the forefront here.
And Europe is acting like this is a terrible affront.
And there's, of course, Zelensky in the middle of it, in fact, recently speaking at the Munich Security Conference and telling the Europeans that they're next.
If they don't rush to the defense of Ukraine, in fact, he says if you have to do it without the United States, you, the Europeans, have got to do it.
Support me, continue the war, and because if you don't, then Russia will have its eyes on you next.
Now, first of all, this is a highly debatable proposition.
There's no question that Putin would like to have as much power as possible.
But, of course, the relationship of Russia to Ukraine is completely different from the relationship of Russia to, say, Norway or Germany or France.
And the evidence for Putin having his eyes on those countries or even having any appetite for let alone ability to take those countries is highly open to.
Doubt and question.
But Zelensky here is doing something that you'd expect him to do.
Tie his fate to all of Europe.
And the Europeans could go for it.
But look, the Europeans spend almost nothing on their own defense.
They spend very little, relatively speaking.
They rely on the United States to spend the bulk.
And in fact, the European welfare state is only possible.
They can only spend so much on themselves because they don't spend on their own defense.
And yet, if they believed what Zelensky is saying, that they are under threat, that they are facing the same kind of siege that, say, Ukraine is, then the Europeans should be spending more, in fact, a lot more, on their own defense.
And I think Trump's point is, go ahead.
Zelensky is inviting you to do something that you should do.
And if you think you can protect yourselves without the United States, that would be actually fantastic.
Because the Europeans always talk about our mutual obligations and our mutual commitments as if to say that if America was invaded, they would be rushing to help us.
This is, of course, a complete fantasy.
Because the simple truth of the matter is Europe...
Has no ability to come to our rescue at all.
So it's a one-way protection arrangement.
We protect them.
They don't protect us.
We spend on their defense.
They don't spend on their own defense.
And it's not even clear what we get out of it.
What is the United States?
How is the United States benefiting from this?
I think this is really what Trump is pressing.
And not only that, one could press the topic even further, and I'm going to, in subsequent days and weeks, to ask this question.
When we think about the strategic landscape of the world, why would we want to push Russia into the arms of China?
That's the big question I see going on here, which is, remember Nixon's famous visit to China?
This is now a whole generation ago.
Nixon's idea was to pull China away from Russia.
But Nixon had the right idea.
Nixon's idea was, we don't want Russia and China to be in bed with each other.
That would make our lives much more dangerous.
They are both powerful nations.
Bring at least one over to our side, not because we like them.
But because we can deal with them, and we can deal with them in a manner that undermines what we see as our greatest threat.
And from Nixon's point of view, the greater threat was the Soviet Union, and that's why it made sense for us to try to make a pact with China.
I would argue, and at least I think a good argument can be made, that the opposite is now true.
The real threat, the big threat, the threat over the next not just year or five years or ten years, but maybe 25 years.
We should be doing what we can to woo Russia away from China.
And so, all of this is a way of saying that for us to not only take the Ukraine's side, but to be...
Essentially, the proxy fighters of a war with Russia is going to have no effect other than to make the Russians turn to the Chinese, as in fact Putin has done.
Now, as if all of this wasn't enough, J.D. Vance is in Munich.
And he gives the Europeans a speech of the kind that they will never forget.
A speech that makes them extremely uncomfortable for the simple reason that...
Now, J.D. Vance doesn't go into a discussion of Ukraine.
He doesn't discuss American strategy.
He doesn't invoke...
He doesn't even raise the question of whether we are better off being on this side or that side of the conflict.
None of that.
He simply says that you Europeans are counting on the American protective umbrella.
But not only do you not spend enough on your own defense, but more seriously, you are going after the very democratic practices, the very civil liberties, the very defining hallmarks of a free society that you claim to be protecting.
You say you're for democracy, and yet you're not above canceling elections in countries when you think that they may come out the wrong way.
You say you're for democracy and the procedures around democracy and for civil liberties, but you censor free speech in the name of so-called hate speech.
You're willing to shut down speech.
You define things you don't like as misinformation or disinformation.
This is exactly really what the tyrannical societies of the 20th century did, from the fascists to the Soviets to the Nazis.
Tyrannical societies have always said that people who go against them or against the state are engaging in misinformation and that the truth is only on one side and that they have every right to have government censors determine what the truth is.
And so J.D. Vance made the point, you keep talking about protecting democracy and democratic values, but you don't live them.
He gives a number of examples of this.
And he closes out by making the point, and this I think is the punchline of the speech, which I want to read, because I think it's actually quite powerful, and that is, I believe deeply that there is no security if you're afraid of the voices, the opinions of the conscience that guides your own people.
Europe faces many challenges, but the crisis the continent faces right now.
The crisis I believe we face together is one of our own making.
And here's the line I want to focus on.
If you're running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you, nor for that matter is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump.
What is Vance doing here?
Nothing more than affirming the core principle that governments, democratic governments, Gain their legitimacy from their own people.
And when governments act in fear of their own people and try to shut them up, shut them down, in some cases lock them up, deny them a political representation, try to silence them and prevent them from saying what they want to say, this is an effort to protect democracy by undermining democracy.
So it was kind of a...
Remarkable sight to look at the panic-stricken, dismayed faces of these European leaders as they received, or not very willingly, this message from J.D. Vance.
Later, one of the German officials even kind of broke down.
He was almost in tears.
I mean, it was just a pathetic spectacle.
It's not something that actually made you feel sympathetic, but it made you feel really contemptuous.
Sometimes very similar to when you watch someone, you know, a mass murder or a serial killer break down and it's like, I'm sorry for myself.
They're not really sorry.
They're sorry that they got caught.
They're sorry that they find themselves in a situation where they're being held accountable.
That's how I interpreted this pathetic scene of this German official, you know, grown man reduced to blubbering.
And I think what's happening here is that on the foreign policy front, as on the domestic front, the Trump administration is going where previous administrations have feared to tread.
Continuing with my book, The Big Lie, I've been focusing on FDR and the ways in which...
Not only FDR admired Mussolini and sought to emulate him, copy him in certain ways, but we've seen that FDR had policies like the National Recovery Act,
which were modeled on Italian fascism and were recognized even on the Italian side to be fascist in their formulation and execution.
I want to focus today on the connection between FDR and racism.
Now, this is important because racism was, of course, a key element of Nazism.
Nazism was encoded In the Nazi case, of course, the bigotry was directed at Jews.
In FDR's case, and in the American case, by and large, we're dealing with racism against blacks.
Now, interestingly, the racism is a similarity between FDR and Hitler, not so much a similarity between FDR and Mussolini, because, as I've mentioned before, Italian fascism was not really...
So the connection here is, the parallel here is between the New Deal and its leader, FDR, and Nazi racism.
But in what sense was FDR really a racist?
It seems hard to believe a little bit because, think about it, FDR was a New Yorker.
He would seem to be somebody who was not from the South, didn't directly have connections with segregation, was not descended from ancestors who were slaves.
And yet, and yet, let's look at a couple of high points that are very revealing.
Number one, FDR appoints Hugo Black, a prominent Ku Klux Klansman, to the Supreme Court.
It might seem like, well, maybe Hugo Black was somehow an amazing, distinguished jurist.
Actually, he wasn't.
When FDR named him, he had been a municipal court judge.
He was a very low guy on the judicial totem pole, but he was an enthusiastic New Deal supporter.
He had enthusiastically endorsed FDR's court packing plan.
And Hugo Black was also an active Klan member.
He had spoken at Klan rallies.
He had led Klan marches throughout his native Alabama.
And FDR, when the scandal broke, FDR said, well, I don't really know a whole lot about Hugo Black's Klan connections, but Hugo Black himself denied this.
In his memoir, here's what Hugo Black writes, quote, "...President Roosevelt told me there was no reason for my worrying about having been a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
He said some of his best friends and supporters were strong members of that organization." He never in any way, by word or attitude, indicated any doubt about my having been in the Klan, nor did he indicate any criticism of me for having been a member of that organization.
And I think this is a case where I believe Hugo Black.
FDR obviously knew.
How did he know?
Hugo Black points out, I listed my client membership on my resume.
It was in the documents that were presented to the government when they considered me for the Supreme Court.
So that is, I think, a very telling strike against FDR. Number two, FDR supported racist Democrats in Congress.
In their efforts to block or thwart anti-lynching laws.
Now, who can disagree?
Who can deny that anti-lynching laws are good things?
Lynching is a form of extra-judicial or vigilante justice.
You suspect somebody of murder or you suspect somebody of, in some cases, not doing a whole lot or perhaps even organizing people to vote.
You round this poor guy up, sometimes in front of his family.
You string him up on a tree or you set him on fire.
Lynching is one of the most horrific practices of American life.
One would think that on this FDR would surely be for anti-lynching laws, but no.
The racists in the Democratic Party, these are mainly racists in the South, tell FDR, if you promote anti-lynching laws, we will not support the New Deal.
And FDR kind of weighs it and he decides the New Deal is more important than saving the lives of these hapless black guys.
And so FDR... Not only that, I will use my presidential muscle to convince Northern Democrats and progressives to back their Southern counterparts in keeping these bills from coming to a floor vote.
And so this is one of the most disgraceful legacies of the FDR presidency.
No surprise, it goes virtually unmentioned in progressive FDR. And then third, FDR makes a deal with racist Democrats to cut blacks out of New Deal programs.
How does he do this?
He can't do it explicitly.
He can't say no blacks need apply.
So what he does is he exempts certain fields from Social Security benefits and unemployment benefits.
What are those fields?
Number one, agricultural labor.
And number two, domestic service.
What are the two occupations that most blacks took up after the Civil War in the early part of the 20th century, in the first few decades of the 20th century?
Number one, agricultural labor, and number two, domestic service.
And so FDR decides, let's basically...
It wasn't until 1954 when Republicans got a hold of both houses of Congress and the presidency, Eisenhower, that they changed this rule or this law, and they eliminated the exclusions that denied black Social Security.
FDR also allowed segregation to continue in certain places in the federal government, including segregation in the military.
There were people who pushed for desegregation of the military.
FDR refused.
later that was accomplished under FDR's successor, Truman.
So all of this is, I think, a damning indictment of FDR.
FDR, in this sense, is showing his fascist or, perhaps more accurately, national socialist colors.
And yet, in April 1938, FDR warned America of a rising tide of fascism.
What?
FDR goes, the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself.
That, in essence, is...
Fascism, ownership of the government by an individual group or other controlling private power.
Now, I submit, first of all, that this definition of fascism is a complete lie.
Let me ask you this question.
Let's look at Italy.
What private power controlled the government?
What private organizations controlled Mussolini?
None.
It was not private powers that controlled the government.
It's the government that controlled the private sector.
That's the essential meaning of fascism.
Notice that FDR is inverting that definition.
He's acting like fascism means private control of the state.
In fact, fascism means the state control of the private sector.
Similarly, you could apply the same standard to Nazism.
If you look at the Nazi authorities, if you look at Hitler, ask yourself, what private company in Germany controlled the Nazi regime?
None.
All the private companies were under the thumb.
Under the jackboot of the Nazi state.
The government was telling the private sector what to do and not the other way around.
So you can see right here that the big lie is being promoted by the Democrats.
It's being promoted by a very guy, FDR, who is himself fascist in so many respects that I have been trying to outline for you here.
And yet he's presenting himself as an anti-fascist.
He's the original Antifa guy because he's using fascist techniques, he has a fascist ideology, and yet he's posing now as someone who is resolutely opposed to fascism.
Of course, he's gone unmentioned as FDR's enthusiasm for Mussolini or any of that.
So this is a form of, I would call it tricksterism.
In which Democrats have specialized ever since the days of FDR. And I'll conclude with a more recent scholar, Ira Katznelson, who recognizes that today some of these unsavory associations of FDR are coming out.
And he has to run cover for them.
And so he, in a recent book, he talks about the fact that FDR had these Here he's referring to the blocking of the anti-lynching laws.
And yet...
In the end, this scholar, this left-wing scholar says that FDR should be supported.
We should not be too harsh on FDR. Why?
Because these fascist or dictatorial elements of FDR, quote, were necessary.
Quote, with it, the New Deal became possible.
So in other words, the suppression of liberty...
The callousness, the brutality, all of this was a price worth paying for the result.
And ironically, I must say, this is itself a fascist point of view.
Because if you think about what fascism really is, it is everything must be subordinated in the end to the state.
In the end, what matters is the outcome.
And the process is unimportant.
If you have to suppress academic freedom, well, you have to do that.
If you have to control and curtail the private sector, then you have to do that.
If you have to kill some Jews, well, then you have to do that.
Because in the end, the state is everything and everything must be inside the state.
And this is really what Ira Katznelson is saying.
He's saying, listen, the state embarked on this great crusade called the New Deal.
And even though our American system has checks and balances, individual rights, a bill of rights, equal protection of the laws, due process of law, it was actually worth stampeding over all of these things in order to achieve the doctrine of Mussolini, everything in the state, nothing above the state, nothing outside the state.
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