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Aug. 4, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
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FUDGING THE NUMBERS Dinesh D'Souza Podcast Ep1139
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Coming up, I'll reveal why Trump was right to fire the woman responsible for the latest jobs numbers.
I'll draw on the work of a Polish commentator to show why Europe has become a pale shadow of its former self.
And Scott Walter, president of Capital Research Center, joins me.
We're going to talk about his new book, Exposing the Dark Money Group called Arabella Advisors.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The defunding of PBS and NPR is hitting many people on the left pretty hard.
They had been warning that this would be terrible.
People in rural areas wouldn't get the news, as if people in rural areas are all sitting around waiting for PBS to come on or NPR to come on.
As far as I can tell, the real audience for NPR is African cab drivers in Washington, D.C. and Northern Virginia.
But here's Will Stansel, left-wing pundit on X. And he says that you don't have to be a fan of things like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and so on.
He goes, it's terrible that these things are being closed.
And when somebody goes, Are you really a fan of the corporation for public broadcasting?
Are you a regular listener and viewer?
He goes, It's fun to tear the stuff out of the walls to break things, but you tear enough stuff out of the walls, the house will fall down.
Wisermen than you built those things and you're destroying them for cheap, idiotic thrills.
Now, it's actually really fun and funny to hear a bomb-throwing leftist, a self-styled revolutionary, talk like this.
Why?
Because they're talking like a real fuddy duddy.
Suddenly, the bomb-throwing leftist has revealed himself to be a stuffy old man.
I've never met this Will Stansel guy or seen a picture of him, but I can now envision him as a kind of graying guy with like a toothbrush, mustache, and umbrella.
He looks sort of like a probably like a Republican from the 19th century.
You know, and it's sort of interesting how the left now says things like, Well, you know, don't take down that fence because you don't know why your great-grandfather built it in the first place.
Again, this is the kind of rhetoric you normally expect from reactionaries, from right-wingers.
But here we are seeing the left now turn reactionary and say, basically, you didn't build PBS and see these institutions, so don't be so hasty to take them down.
Of course, the core of the matter.
I saw David Brooks recently making the point that he goes, I don't think it can cross Donald Trump's mind that there are neutral arbiters who are objective and not politicized.
So, this gets to what I want to talk about in this opening segment because our side is going about cutting back and defunding not just NPR, not just PBS, but also recently, Trump fired this woman who was in charge of the Bureau for Labor Statistics.
We are scaling back on institutions like the CDC.
And of course, the point of view of David Brooks is that these institutions are neutral.
Now, by the way, that's the problem, isn't it?
It's not that neutrality is the problem.
The problem is that there are people posing as neutral who aren't neutral.
The media poses as neutral.
Are they neutral?
No.
Harvard poses as neutral.
Is it neutral?
No.
The foundations and nonprofits pose as neutral.
Are they neutral?
No.
Was the CDC neutral under COVID?
No.
Was the FBI neutral?
But how about the CIA?
Were they neutral when they evaluated Russia collusion?
No.
So, point to make here is that these so-called neutral arbiters have all demonstrated that they are not neutral at all.
Neutrality is the mask that they wear to protect themselves and to put themselves beyond criticism and beyond accountability.
So, what's happening is not that we reject neutrality.
We're just learning to look behind the mask.
And let's talk a little bit about the firing of this woman from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
So, this is the Bureau of Labor Statistics is part of the Labor Department.
They put out data on the economy.
And the basic theme is that this data is number crunching.
It's accurate.
Here is Jerome Powell.
Good data helps not just the Fed, it helps the government.
It helps the private sector.
The U.S. has been a leader in that for 100 years, and we really need to continue that.
So, the woman managing this was a woman named Dr. Meckentarfer, And she has been now given the boot.
Now, the left and the media are screaming that this is very bad because data will no longer be neutral.
The new people taking over from her will, well, let's see what they're going to do, according to the New York Times.
The New York Times says the following: That is not to say political interference would be impossible.
So they're warning about the kind of political interference that you could get from the newly appointed regime at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Here's the Times.
Government statistics rely on hundreds of methodological decisions, many of them judgment calls with no obviously correct answer.
A sufficiently sophisticated agency head might, over time, be able to nudge the data in a politically advantageous direction.
Now, here's the New York Times saying, listen, there's no such thing as pure objectivity.
Yes, number is our objective, but how you read the numbers, the kind of economic models that you create, the data that's fed into the computer, that is a matter of discretion or choice.
And so, says the New York Times, somebody on the right, a Trump MAGA economist, could in fact rig the numbers, could in fact slant the data, could in fact spin it in a way that is beneficial to one side or the other.
And my point is: boom, voila, this is exactly what has been going on all along.
This is exactly what Dr. McIntoffer is doing.
This is how the existing regime at the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been operating.
And Trump has even provided proof of that.
He said, Look, the Bureau of Labor Statistics put out all these rosy statistics under the Biden administration, which then had to be revised.
So they show massive job growth, all of which is politically advantageous to the Democrats.
And then later, when it doesn't really matter or after the election, they go, oops, we overstated it.
No, employment numbers weren't that high.
They were actually much lower.
Now, the point is, who got it wrong?
And why did you get it wrong in a direction that benefits your side?
Let's remember, these are Democratic appointees who are making these decisions.
And then when you do the correction, it's kind of like, again, it's like the New York Times running a correction after everything is already over.
They do the Hunter Biden, for example, laptop thing.
Oh, the intelligence officials, it's Russian disinformation.
After the election, oh, well, it's not Russian disinformation.
So you do what you can to help your side get over the finish line.
And then, of course, you calmly and generally to a much smaller audience, you make your correction.
So the point here is that the Democrats have, in fact, been bending the data.
And they, while they were running the government, they had their own people producing this data.
So if we could trust the objectivity of it then, well, then there's no reason we can't trust the objectivity when during a Trump administration, we have our people looking at the numbers and our people putting out the statistics and our people putting out the facts.
My friend Kevin Hassett, my old actually colleague at AEI, he's now head of the National Economic Council.
He was on NBC, CNBC, actually.
And he was making the point I'm making in a slightly different way.
He says, quote, if I'm running the BLS, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and I have the biggest revision outside of COVID in 50 years, we're talking here about the biggest revision of the numbers.
I said X, now I'm saying why.
Then it's incumbent on me to explain why in a very transparent way to show how the numbers add up and what you're doing to address it.
So basically what Kevin Hassett is saying here is that if a mathematician goes wrong and doesn't go wrong by slightly underestimating, let's say the distance from the earth to the sun, which happens to be eight light minutes, and let's say the mathematician comes in at 7.5, okay, you made an approximation, you were slightly off, you revise it to the correct amount, but let's say it's eight light minutes and you claim it's one light minute, and then you've got to issue a correction.
What Kevin Hassett is saying is, how are you so far off?
You're supposed to be a mathematician.
How did you blow it and not just blow it in the sense of a mere accident, blow it in a way that is politically helpful to your team, namely the left, namely the Democrats, namely the Biden administration.
And then later, when it makes less of a difference, you make the adjustment, you make the correction.
This is suspicious behavior, to put it mildly.
And so there's a breakdown of trust on the part of Trump with, by the way, one of his own cabinet agencies.
Once again, let's be clear that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is inside of the labor department and the labor department answers to the president who happens to be one Donald J. Trump.
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What is the problem with Europe?
What's going on with Europe?
We see images from time to time that suggest a civilization in decay.
We'll read about plummeting birth rates.
We will see whole towns in Germany and England that seem to have been taken over by the radical Muslims.
You see garish scenes of massive protests for Gaza.
And it looks like Europe has totally lost its moorings.
And yet, if you listen to the European leaders, they exude an air of confidence, of sophistication.
Whatever you think of Macron in France, he seems to be kind of a cool cat, a young guy, well-dressed, speaks well.
And Kier Starmer with his kind of authoritative British accent, and the German guy with his bespectacled German thick voice, all of them posing together, taking their obligatory curtsies and bows, surrounded, if you will, by the architecture of old Europe.
And they assure us that everything is going well.
Now, there's a Polish commentator named Daniel Foubert.
I think that's how you say his last name.
He appears to me to be a French background, but he lives in Poland.
He's a Polish guy.
And he has a critique of Europe that I think is worth sharing.
And I'm going to summarize it in my own words while reading some of his lines.
So his argument is this, and that is that Europe has become a kind of open-air museum of the past.
It has all the great cathedrals.
It has magnificent castles.
It has Big Ben.
It has the Eiffel Tower and the Palace of Versailles.
It has all that.
In that sense, America or other countries have very little to compete with the grandeur of Europe.
At the same time, the Europeans appear to be very progressive.
They're into recycling and they're into climate change and they're always talking about managing the future and they're always talking about coming to terms with the new global world that we live in and making sure that this globalization advances apace.
They're always talking about new forms of technology.
But according to Daniel Foubert, it is an illusion.
Why?
Number one, he says, they preserve the buildings but erase the meaning.
They protect the monuments but mock the faith that built them.
He says, cathedrals are kept for acoustics.
Castles have become venues of wedding photos.
Traditions are paraded like costumes stripped of conviction.
And every time something from the past stirs, people talk about reviving religious belief or they talk about the Latin Mass or they talk about restoring the manners or the dignity of the past or they talk about the fact that Europe and these European nations once considered themselves nations.
As soon as you do that, the European leaders say, this is dangerous.
This needs to be stopped.
This needs to be blocked.
And so there is a kind of embalming of the past.
The past exists and it's there to see.
And you've got a lot of brown and black and foreign tourists taking photos.
But says Daniel Fubert, this is like Muslims selling trinkets at the foot of the pyramids.
The pyramids are gone.
The civilization behind it is gone.
It's now nothing more than an opportunity to take a selfie.
Second, Fubert says, the European claim to the future is utterly bogus.
They use these futuristic slogans, but they have absolutely no meaning or no coherent meaning.
Let's take the slogan, diversity.
Now, Europe has always been very diverse, but it was very diverse because all the European countries were different from each other.
The diversity came out of nationality.
And so let's describe this diversity.
It's going to sound a little stereotypical, but the reason these stereotypes developed is because they're largely accurate.
And so with the French, you get French flamboyance.
You get French, the French language, you get French culture.
But with the British, you get a more pragmatic, a more scientific, a civilization that produces people like Isaac Newton, the stiff upper lip, a stoic sense of endurance.
And what do you get from the Germans?
With the Germans, you get organization, you get discipline, you get military power.
From the Poles, you get religion, dogmatism, stubbornness, and unwillingness to yield, a willingness to defend the frontier.
From the Italians, you get whimsicality, a kind of love of life, a kind of open air, affection for good food and romance and courtship.
And so the Spanish bring a combination of Catholic devotion and at the same time, great cultural richness and creativity, the creativity that built the great Spanish civilization of the 16th and early 17th centuries.
So this is diversity.
And all of it coming together produces a very powerful, rich, forward-looking continent.
But that diversity is now diminished.
It's gone.
And says Daniel Fubert, it's replaced by something that can never take its place.
It's replaced by these slogans of like sustainability.
So this is how he puts it.
Europe has no border, no army, no God, no industry.
But don't worry, your garbage is being recycled.
He goes, that's the priority.
Not offense, not birth rates, not energy independence, but sorting plastic.
The culture, the continent that once built cathedrals and empires is now building recycling bins.
And so what Foubert says is this is decline, but it's decline with a kind of sanitary label.
It is like, listen, you know, We can no longer control the seas, but you know what?
We can control our carbon footprint.
We can't afford our kids, but we subsidize wind turbines.
We can't produce anything, but gay, we got a really good ESG score.
So this is the pathos.
And the word pathos comes out of the word pathetic.
This is what Europe has become.
And then he looks at the children of Europe.
And he goes, these Europeans, he goes, they provided everything.
except formation of their children.
They gave comfort, screens, trips, space, but he goes, but no boundaries, no instruction, no gravity.
They outsource discipline to schools, morality to cartoons, meaning to the internet.
He goes, these parents worked hard, but for what?
For children who despise their history, resent their privileges, dismantle the very world they inherited.
So the buildings are standing, but in a way, what he's saying is the chain of custody, the chain of transmission, our obligation to raise our children in our values, that cord has been broken.
And then he makes a final point that I think is really worth considering.
And he says, a lot of times when we think of decline, we think of something that goes down, down, down, and then there's nothing there.
And he says, but that is never the case.
It's not that there's nothing there.
Somebody else takes over.
Here we go.
If you don't like the culture of your ancestors, don't expect to live in a world without culture.
You will live surrounded by the culture of others, of their ancestors, of their civilizations, which have nothing to do with you, and you will be nothing.
You will be culturally dominated.
A foreign culture will be imposed on you.
You will be treated as inferior.
He goes, that's the rule.
Abandoning your culture doesn't free you.
It opens the door to occupation.
And I think this is a very profound point.
The point being that there is no such thing as a vacuum.
When the Inca civilization fell, it was replaced by the Spanish.
When the Europeans conquered Africa, they dominated the Africans and left their own imprint.
And it's not always the case that the society is conquered by military force.
Sometimes, for example, the stronger force that conquers another culture is itself conquered by that culture.
So a good example of this would be the Romans.
They conquer the Greeks, and then they submit to Greece.
They start speaking Greek.
They begin to worship the Greek gods and the Greek idols.
They begin to write in Greek.
Notice, by the way, that the New Testament, although written under the Roman Empire, is written in Greek.
And so we come back to Faubert's point, which is: your streets will bear their names.
Your language will submit to theirs.
Soon you will not belong in your own land, in your own culture.
What you couldn't defend, not because you didn't have the means to defend it, but because you didn't want to defend it, becomes no longer yours.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome my old friend Scott Walter to the podcast.
Scott and I go way back to my days at the American Enterprise Institute.
This is in the early 1990s.
So we've been friends for, well, 25, 30 years now.
And Scott has remained in DC.
He's kind of moved up the ranks.
He is now the president of Capital Research Center.
But prior to that, he served in the George W. Bush administration.
He was special assistant to the president for domestic policy.
He's also been vice president of the philanthropy roundtable.
He's testified many times, including recently before Congress, on the whole issue of these nonprofits and so-called dark money.
His book, which is just out in paperback, this is what we're going to focus on today.
It's called Arabella, Arabella, the Dark Money Network of Leftist Billionaires Secretly Transforming America.
The website of Capital Research, by the way, just capitalresearch.org.
Hey, Scott, good to see you.
Glad to have you on the podcast again.
The Trump administration, as you know, has been doing, making some efforts in trying to defund the left, particularly the left that is cashing in on the government.
So you have USAID, you have the recent defunding of NPR and PBS.
There's an effort to scale back the bureaucracy and the Department of Education.
How do you think Trump is doing so far in the effort to defund the bureaucracy of the left?
Well, it's wonderful to see because, as you know, this was attempted during the Reagan administration and defunding the left was a buzzword of supposedly monstrousness.
But of course, almost no defunding happened.
In the first Trump administration, there was a good deal of talk of this, but again, not that much progress.
They've made a whole lot more progress this time, but there's a long way to go.
And of course, lots of the folks whose funding has been cut off are now suing the administration, demanding it be turned back on.
Scott, you have done such valuable work in looking at these nonprofits.
I interviewed you, you might remember, in 2000 Mules about rivers of money flowing into the issue of elections and how to sort of manipulate the results of elections.
You now have a new book that focuses on a somewhat mystical entity called the Arabella Network.
Now, most people, if they've heard about it, haven't heard a lot about it.
What do we need to know about this Arabella network?
What is it?
Well, I think the simplest way to understand it is to think of a pyramid.
At the top of the pyramid, you have Arabella Advisors.
That's a for-profit consulting firm, Beltway Bandit, we call them, right?
It creates and operates everything below it in the pyramid.
Now, in the middle of the pyramid, you have half a dozen nonprofits of different legal types.
That's where the money goes in.
That's where a Zuckerberg, a Gates, a Soros, a Ford Foundation, they write checks to those nonprofits that then get operated by Arabella Advisors.
At the base of the pyramid is what your viewers see.
That's the hundreds and hundreds of these fake groups with names like Keep Iowa Healthy, Secure Michigan Elections, Floridians for a Fair Shake, yada yada.
They want Americans to think, oh, these are some neighbors of mine here in the state, and they're upset about something that's, you know, some wrong being done, when in fact, it's just a doofus at a desk in D.C. who's created a website and bought some Facebook ads.
Wow.
I'm getting the picture now, Scott.
So I think what you're saying is that Arabella Network is an effort to create not democracy, but a sort of masquerade of democracy, right?
Because going back to Tocqueville's idea of democracy, you have local agitation and New England town meetings and people clamoring for this or clamoring for that.
And Tocqueville saw this as a very healthy sign of citizens participating in government.
And of course, it is a healthy sign if they are in fact citizens and if in fact you do have these local sort of revolts.
But you're saying that it's also possible to manufacture them.
And Arabella Network is in the business of creating fake agitation, fake revolts.
But of course, the fake revolt has the same effect as the real one.
If the media amplifies it, if people believe it, people think, oh my gosh, people are really upset about this or upset about that.
Now, let me ask you this.
It sounds like the money is coming from these billionaires, these leftist billionaires.
What is their incentive for pumping money into these organizations?
Well, you really hit them right on the head with your Tocqueville reference because, yes, the traditional America is decentralized, right?
Neighborhoods, towns, states have real powers.
But of course, every single policy, by some strange coincidence, that Arabella has ever pushed would centralize more power in Washington.
Now, that answers the question of why do the billionaires want this?
And by the way, it's not just billionaires, like people like Pierre Omed Yar or Soros or Gates.
It's also the billionaires with the same last name, Foundation, right?
The Ford Foundation loves this too, and MacArthur and on and on.
So the point is: if you centralize power in Washington and take it away from ordinary Americans, it's a lot easier for the billionaires to manipulate the machinery in Washington, which the rest of us never even see or don't fully understand or just don't have the time to be monitoring.
That explains why the billionaires love Arabella.
And isn't it also true, Scott, that it gives the billionaires a mask or a shield of anonymity, right?
If Bill Gates has his own foundation, he could do some of this directly.
But I think what you're suggesting or implying is that if Bill Gates did it, attention would focus on Bill Gates.
Maybe people would start protesting outside one of his palatial homes, but by giving it to a nonprofit, which is then steered by a seemingly independent group of people, then Bill Gates gets to sit back and give Solomonic interviews as if he's not actively involved in any of this.
But of course, he's still seeing the results of his donation.
He's still getting what he's buying.
No, that's exactly right.
You know, the billionaires write the checks to those Arabella-run nonprofits, but remember, there's about a half dozen of those, and then there are hundreds of projects.
You have no idea when you see a project by, you know, Arabella's new venture fund.
Well, who of the many people pouring money into the new venture fund was supporting that project?
You'll never know.
Scott, you mentioned a rather peculiar setup for this pyramid.
You've got the for-profit organization at the very top and the nonprofits underneath it.
What is the legality of that?
And I say that because presumably a nonprofit has rules of transparency, tax deductibility.
So how is it possible for for-profit entities to, in a sense, maneuver or manipulate this ensemble of nonprofits to its own end?
Well, you know, it is not in theory illegal because the legal understanding, right, the legal fiction here is, well, there's a nonprofit and it hired this place to help it.
Now, you know, most nonprofits are going to hire people that, like, I have a website and I have a nonprofit.
We have to hire somebody to host the website, right?
So nonprofits are going to have vendors and all that.
But you're right, it's quite unusual.
And by the way, it also is one of the original Arabella lies.
When they first applied for their very first nonprofit with the IRS to be recognized as a charity, it said, well, for one year, we expect to be using Arabella Advisors LLC for-profit, you know, to help us get launched, but just for a year.
Well, that year was 2005.
Wow.
Scott, what is the right counter to all this from the right?
I mean, one of the things that you're doing is you expose, you bring public attention to what these guys are doing.
And capital research more generally has done this in so many different areas.
You also, in a way, export your knowledge and expertise to the Congress.
You've appeared before congressional committees.
I think you were in front of Brandon Gill's committee recently with our committees.
Two of his committees.
Okay, awesome.
But should the right, Scott, be imitating this model?
Should we be Trying to, what is the, what is the answer to this, it seems somewhat nefarious manipulation of the democratic process.
Well, I would say both and, which is to say the conservatives should both be using the model when it makes sense for them, because as I said, it's in theory, it's a legal thing.
But then the other thing, though, is the most important thing is exactly what you're doing, which is exposing this.
Because here's the thing: it's a Wizard of Oz operation.
Now, when Dorothy first sees the wizard, big, scary, very powerful influence on her, right?
But when the dog pulls the curtain back and you see it's just some guy at a microphone, not so powerful anymore.
So the illusion only works as long as it's an illusion.
And both for American citizens and for lawmakers, right?
You have legislators terrified when they're attacked by some Arabella fake group.
But once everybody knows it's a fake group, well, that's not so much to be scared of.
Scott, talk more generally about where we've come in our politics over these last 25, really few decades that we've known each other.
It seems, as you say, in the Reagan years, there was an awareness that you had this state within a state.
And when people talk about the deep state, they often think about hidden entities that are within the bowels of the government.
But I think one of the things that Capital Research, your organization, exposes, is that there are hidden entities that aren't necessarily within the government at all.
They hide inside of academia or the media or these, or the intermediate sector, somewhere between the private sector and the government, the so-called non-profit sector.
Is the nonprofit sector itself part of this deep state or at least an ally of the deep state?
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And in fact, I'll give you a great Arabella example.
There's a little tiny thing called Governing for Impact, which is one of their fake groups.
And they even, for a long time, for years, they kept their website set up so that you couldn't even find it in a web search.
You'd have to know the precise URL to type in, and then you could get to it, right?
And now, they created it two years before Biden took office.
And all it did was work with Harvard law types to do legal strategy to reverse all of the regulatory reforms of the first Trump administration, right?
All kinds of things, environmental, Title IX about boys and girls' sports, whatnot.
Now, so they were working with the future and then the existing, once Biden took office, all his people to do all this regulatory work.
And then the second that Trump won his second term, what did they do but instantly pivot to creating the legal strategy for all the lawsuits that are going against the Trump administration now, whether it's nonprofits saying, hey, you can't dare take my funding away or stop my funding, or whether it's a state or city saying, you know, you can't put ICE here, you know, on and on.
The entire assault against the whole Trump administration, all the lawsuits, which are now in the hundreds, you know, the basic strategies hatched by this little entity, all Soros funded for its initial years in Arabella.
I mean, this is very interesting, Scott, and significant because I think when many people think about these federal judges, these district judges that are running interception against Trump, we think that the judges are somehow moving on their own.
But I think what you're saying is that, no, there have to be plaintiffs who bring a case and say, hey, you've got to get ICE out of California.
Or that say, hey, you cannot defund Planned Parenthood.
Or hey, you can't do this, so you can't do that.
And that operation is coordinated.
Now, that operation presumably is going to go out and do a little bit of judge shopping to make sure we get a Clinton judge over here, a Biden judge over there, an Obama judge over here.
So the judges come into play, but to put it somewhat differently, the judges are not the quarterbacks.
They're the receivers, aren't they?
That's not a bad metaphor.
And yes, it's a very complicated machinery, right, that's working together to produce those results.
Guys, I've been talking to my buddy Scott Walter, president of Capital Research Center, the book Arabella, the Dark Money Network of Leftist Billionaires Secretly Transforming America, now out in paperback.
By the way, you can follow Capital Research on X at Capital Research, the website capitalresearch.org.
Scott, as always, a great pleasure, and thank you for joining me.
Thanks for letting me be here.
I'm discussing my book, Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
And we're now in the second part of the book.
In fact, we're kind of approaching the windup of the book.
We're going to finish this chapter and the wall came tumbling down.
Then I have a chapter that looks at the personality, the character, who Reagan was as a man.
And that's going to be a kind of portrait in leadership and an attempt to look at Reagan very clearly for strengths and weaknesses.
I'm also going to draw out the analogy between Reagan and Trump.
And then, of course, I have the summation, which will also tie things into the present.
Now, if you were to ask people on the left or even on the right, let's focus on the right for a minute.
How did the Cold War come to an end?
Who ended the Cold War?
Their answer typically would be: well, on the left, it's likely to be Gorbachev.
On the right, it's likely to be, well, Reagan and Gorbachev together, with Gorbachev, of course, being the arm of the scissors that was on the Soviet side, and Reagan being the other arm of the scissors that was on the Western or the American side.
And this has now become something of the conventional wisdom that Reagan and Gorbachev were certainly both necessary.
It wouldn't have happened without the other.
But it took both of them to do it together.
I want to focus on a slightly different question, which I think gets to the heart of the matter.
How did we get Gorbachev in the first place?
To frame this question a little differently, let's look at the Soviet leadership going all the way back to the beginning.
You start off with Lenin, and then you have Stalin.
Stalin and Lenin are very similar.
Stalin is responsible for more butchery than Lenin, but that's not because Lenin was a better man.
It's just that Stalin had, in a way, well, first of all, he had a much longer term in office.
Second of all, he had different occasions, the relocation of the kulaks, World War II.
So Stalin had more opportunities in a wider landscape or theater to carry out his homicidal operations.
And then we continue on beyond Stalin, Khrushchev, who repudiated Stalin for tactical reasons, but of course he never repudiated Lenin.
He certainly didn't repudiate communism.
And then beyond Brezhnev, we had Andropov, we had Chernenko.
And so this is the train of Soviet dictators, all of them not only similar ideologically, but they even looked the same.
They wore the same kind of coats.
They wore the same kind of stuffy expressions.
And you could almost swap out the one for the other, and it wouldn't make a whole lot of difference.
And then you have Gorbachev, clearly a different looking guy, a different talking guy, and a guy with a different animating spirit.
So the first question you have to ask, and very few people think of asking this, is what made the Soviets change their course?
What made them pick a very different horse?
How did they even end up with a guy like Gorbachev who knew that a guy like that could make his way through the Politburo system?
So the argument I want to make is that the Soviets realized that what they were doing wasn't working, that their system was failing, and that they had to.
They had no choice but to go in a different direction.
Now, when I say that the Soviets realized that their system was failing, I do not mean that their infant mortality rates were high, their life expectancy was low compared with the rest of the industrialized world, their stores were empty.
All of these things were true for 70 years.
So the Soviet ruling class, the so-called nomenklatura, lived very well themselves.
They didn't care if the stores were empty or not.
They had reasonably good doctors to look after them.
So there's nothing new here.
No reason to change course.
But the Soviets had a way of dealing with these domestic problems, and that is to project their power abroad.
And this strategy was paying rich dividends.
I mentioned during the Carter administration alone how a number of countries topped off with Afghanistan fell into the Soviet orbit.
And the Soviet goal was to use international power, international prestige, and possibly even concessions that were somehow wrung out of international negotiations with the West to substitute for the domestic problems inside the Soviet Union.
Now, here comes Reagan.
And it's very clear that when Reagan came in, the Soviets were worried, but they were not too worried because other presidents had talked tough.
And so they thought, well, Reagan says these things, but what's he actually going to do?
And then Reagan deploys the Pershing and cruise missiles.
And the Soviets go, wow.
He didn't just say he was going to do it.
He did it.
It demonstrated the unity and resolve of the Western alliance.
Reagan was able to hold these wayward Western countries together.
Number two, Reagan deploys the Reagan doctrine.
Suddenly, the Soviets have to fight everywhere that they are in power in the third world.
They have to fight in Afghanistan.
They have to fight in Angola.
They have to fight in Nicaragua.
And their advances are stopped.
No new country falls into the Soviet orbit, and they lose Grenada.
So suddenly the trajectory, even though modestly, is in the opposite direction.
And in Afghanistan with the Soviets, this was a little bit of a powerful affirmation of Soviet prestige, but Afghanistan was getting out of hand.
It was becoming what Gorbachev would later call a bleeding wound.
And so we see here with the missiles, with the Reagan doctrine, and then on top of that, with the Strategic Defense Initiative, the Soviets are now invited into a very expensive arms race in space, one that they can't afford and one that they do not believe that they're going to win.
And so, I'm quoting in the book the Sovietologist Richard Pipes.
He goes, the momentum of the Cold War had dramatically shifted.
And if this seems like a kind of neoconservative or right-wing American point of view, much later, many Soviet officials would say the same thing.
They would say that we were starting to lose ground.
I'm talking about officials like Andrei Gromyko, Anatoly Dubrinin.
And so the Soviets recognized internally that the tide had turned.
And so when Chernenko died in 1985, let's remember, Reagan came in in 1981.
For the first four years, he was dealing with the old Soviet Union under first Andropov and then Chernenko.
And when Chernenko died, the Soviets go, okay, time to change course.
And so we get to the key point I've been trying to make here, and that is that it's Reagan, in other words, who seems to have been largely responsible for neutralizing the Soviet strategy of the 1970s and creating the loss of nerve that caused the Soviets to seek a new approach.
When we think about the famous initiatives of Gorbachev, they were called glasnost, which means kind of openness, and then perestroika, which is reorganization or restructuring.
The point I want to make is that Gorbachev did create those initiatives, but they were in response to circumstances that he didn't create, circumstances that were to a much larger degree shaped by the effectiveness of Reagan policies.
And that's why, again, later, Ilya, this is Ilya Zaslavsky.
He was in the Soviet Congress of People's Deputies.
He gave a rather startling statement later where he said the true originator of both Glasnost and Perestroika was not Gorbachev, but was in fact Ronald Reagan.
Now, the reason it's difficult to clearly understand the Cold War, not only at the time, but even now, is because we have been subject, as by the way, we're subject in other areas too, to historical revisionism.
And this revisionism began with Gorbachev himself.
I've discussed in my earlier work how there's been revisionism about, for example, fascism, how fascism, which used to be seen for a long time, both by its defenders and critics, as a left-wing phenomenon, It was somehow moved very slyly, very subtly, but very effectively into the right-wing camp.
Suddenly, fascism was described, as it still is by many people, as a right-wing phenomenon.
This is called changing the tablets, or it's called using your power to rewrite history to your benefit.
And something like this occurs also with the Cold War.
Gorbachev, the moment the Soviet Union collapsed, Gorbachev declared, I did it.
I'm the true architect of all this.
I deserve the credit.
And of course, the Western media was only too happy to give it to him.
And the only way to give it to him is to make it seem like Gorbachev was always a progressive.
He was a Democrat.
He was a liberal in the classic and perhaps even in the modern sense.
And so he farsightedly took the Soviet Union in a more enlightened direction.
We will see when I pick this theme up tomorrow that nothing could be further from the truth.
None of this was Gorbachev's intention.
In fact, the very opposite.
And so, what we want to do is plumb beneath the revisionism and try to uncover the true story of how the Cold War really ended and also why, who brought it about.
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