Dinesh D'Souza and Larry Sanger dissect the alleged left's terror network, arguing that the SPLC funds extremists to manufacture white supremacy narratives while Wikipedia, since 2005, has abandoned neutrality to propagate anti-Trump propaganda. Sanger details how anonymous editors systematically erase inconvenient truths about Obama and proposes a conservative "Wiki Project Intellectual Diversity" to counter this bias. The conversation expands to Elon Musk's robotics vision, warning that high costs could let wealthy entities monopolize resources, before addressing the $39 trillion national debt and framing the Israel-Palestine conflict as a biblical prophecy revival. Ultimately, the episode suggests systemic cultural and digital manipulation threatens American stability. [Automatically generated summary]
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Ideological Murders Against White America00:15:13
The Democratic Left, like political Islam, has become a domestic terrorist network.
These two groups, now closely allied, both pursue their own type of jihad against opponents.
And notice they are the same opponents.
Their target is white Christian America.
In the forefront of this jihad is the lone wolf maniac, creating the illusion that this is an isolated problem.
But behind the lone wolf is a wolf.
Pack carefully organizing and creating the conditions for intimidation, viewpoint suppression, assassination, and ultimately large scale mayhem to produce a massive social transformation.
For the left, this transformation is what Obama once called the remaking of America.
That's the goal.
Domestic terrorism, like Islamic jihad, is the means to the goal.
We should not miss the forest for the trees.
In focusing on an isolated incident, we sometimes lose.
The larger picture.
We need a more wide-angled lens, which I will try to provide here.
I want to expose the left's domestic terror operation, or at least a part of that operation, by zooming in on two recent incidents.
First, the alleged assassin Cole Allen, who sought to break his way into the White House correspondence dinner by his own admission to kill Trump and senior officials of his administration.
He even confesses he had no intention to target the guests, the media personalities there.
Most of whom he probably viewed as allies, and many of whom were probably instrumental in shaping the assassin's own worldview.
Second, I'll dive into the revelations arising out of the indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the SPLC, on charges of bank fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering.
At first glance, the two incidents, the shooter and the SPLC, seem unconnected, but I'm going to connect them to show how the left's domestic terror network.
Terror networks, as it turns out, don't arise spontaneously.
They take vision, planning, funding, and wide coordination to achieve their objectives.
Let's start with what happened on Saturday night.
In effect, a third assassination attempt directed at Donald Trump.
Butler, that was Thomas Crooks.
Mar a Lago, that was Ryan Ruth.
Now, this.
No previous president has faced so many attempts.
Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Reagan all faced just one.
One.
These attempts are part of a perverse assassination culture that has developed in the United States.
Think of the grisly assassination of Charlie Kirk or the assassination of the CEO of United Healthcare.
In those cases, the attempts succeeded.
By the way, notice how we subconsciously adopt the assassin's own point of view.
If the guy ends up dead, it's a success.
If he lives, it's a failure, merely a quote, attempted assassination.
Reacting instinctively to what I saw on the video that Trump released, I posted on social media.
I'm struck by how dumb this would be assassin is running like a fool past the metal detectors.
Now, that's the natural first reaction.
What a lunatic!
Well, I suppose he is a lunatic, but a lunatic of a special type.
I'm quite sure this Cole Allen fellow is not a genuine lunatic.
We don't have to be psychologists to figure out he's not crazy in the clinical sense.
Does he go around insisting he's Napoleon?
Does he spend three years of his life counting the hairs on his head one by one?
Is he known to take a dump on the carpet in his living room?
No, he's not crazy in that way.
He's in a special class of crazy, which in some respects is not crazy at all.
Compare Cole Allen to his comrades in the assassination community the guy who killed Charlie Kirk, or the guy who shot the CEO of United Healthcare, or even to cast a wider net the man who shot those two young staffers from the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., or the Islamic conspirators who carried out the 9 11 attacks.
These are ideologically motivated murders carried out by rebels with a cause.
Cole Allen is a mechanical engineer with a master's degree in computer science.
He went to Caltech.
He's a video game developer.
He's also a Democrat who made a small donation, $25, to Kamala Harris in 2024.
He marched in a No Kings protest.
So this guy is on the left.
But lots of people fit this general profile.
This is a recognizable constituency for the Democrats.
Cole Allen is a normal and perhaps even typical member of that group.
Cole Allen is also a teacher.
He was Teacher of the Month in December 2024.
He's an educator.
So, he's in the knowledge business.
He's also tasked with forming the minds of young people.
He knows what it means to persuade, to convert, even to propagandize.
I think we're right to view his actions on Saturday through that lens.
Even through his violent actions that evening, Cole Allen was sending a message.
Now, Cole Allen left behind a manifesto that shows he knew exactly what he was doing.
He knew he'd end up captured or dead.
He was willing to take the risk to have a chance.
Of taking out the President of the United States and his top lieutenants.
On X, I see that Jesus Enrique Rojas said this guy had an actual death wish.
Nah, I don't think so.
Cole Allen is more accurately described as a soldier of the left and the Democratic Party.
Soldiers, after all, take similar risks of capture, of death, in order to achieve a higher objective.
We are dealing here with fanatics, not lunatics.
The Russian writer Dostoevsky, who had a lot of experience with such people in pre revolutionary Russia, Wrote about them in novels like The Possessed and Crime and Punishment.
Dostoevsky's point is that the revolutionary murder is often a rational act, carried out, oddly enough, from pure hearted motives.
The murderer, the terrorist, is captive to an ideology, and the ideology offers a sort of moral redemption.
This is the pure hearted part.
He's convinced, he's convinced himself that he's a genuinely good guy.
Like Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, he's willing to do things and take risks that others could only.
Talk about.
Now, in his manifesto, Cole Allen spoke of his, quote, righteous duty to target the Trump administration.
He wrote, I'm no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.
Now, never mind that Trump is not a pedophile, a rapist, or a traitor.
Allen was convinced he was all three.
For him, assassination was a moral duty.
He didn't want to go there, but he didn't see any other course.
He was forced to make the attempt by his own sincerely held.
Convictions.
These convictions, this higher goal, gives the killer the confidence that what he's doing is righteous, that the ends justify the means.
This is the essence of revolutionary ideology.
The goal is always so lofty, so worthwhile, so irresistible that mere laws or conventions or the norms of decent behavior don't apply.
Nothing is more important than achieving the political objective.
What are the objectives, the goals of the would be killer or terrorist?
The goal is not terror per se.
That's why the terror label is.
Terror describes the means, not the end.
And the end, according to Dostoevsky, is twofold.
First, the murder is a purifying act to remove a tyrant or collaborator from the scene.
Second, its purpose is to raise consciousness among other would be revolutionaries and also among the public at large to create the conditions for broader revolutionary sentiment and action and to hasten the coming of the revolution.
I wonder if these are the two motives that inspired Cole Allen to make a reservation at the Washington Hilton, to assemble his long gun on the scene, and to attempt what surely would have been.
A mass casualty event, including a presidential assassination, had he not been stopped.
But let's go beyond Cole Allen himself to ask a broader question.
How do we get people like Cole Allen?
How do we get people like Ryan Ruth, who waited on the Mar Lago golf course to take a shot at Trump, or Tyler Robinson, the fellow charged with assassinating Charlie Kirk, whose trial is coming up soon, or Luigi Mangione, the alleged perpetrator of the United Healthcare shooting?
Such people don't just arise out of the ground, they're not born, but made.
Who makes them?
My answer is the Democratic Party makes them.
They are the creation of the political left.
Again, I return to the analogy with political Islam.
Who makes violent jihadis?
Islam does.
Networks like the Muslim Brotherhood do.
The Muslim Brotherhood may be an ostensibly educational organization, even a charitable organization in some respects, but part of its product is ideological indoctrination.
And that indoctrination produces killers who act on behalf of the vision supplied by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Brotherhood.
And so it is with the Democrats.
And their version of the Muslim Brotherhood, or one chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood, is the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Admittedly, the Democrats have a wider network that includes lots of other organizations and institutions.
One could name the Anti Defamation League, the ADL, the Human Rights Campaign, the Soros Network, Wikipedia, NPR, and mainstream media organizations, legal groups, and a constellation of NGOs, non governmental organizations.
But the SPLC sits right in the center of this.
Massive beehive of organizations feeding them and being fed by them.
It's no exaggeration to say the SPLC is the brain or perhaps the heart of the terror network of the Democratic left.
The SPLC is responsible for creating the narrative that motivates the left and the Democrats, and in the process creates people like Luigi Mangione, Tyler Robinson, Ryan Ruth, and Cole Allen.
Let's turn to the indictment brought against the SPLC by the grand jury.
According to the charges, The SPLC was caught red handed funding a whole arsenal of racist, white supremacist, and neo Nazi groups.
They funded the Ku Klux Klan.
Indeed, they were the largest single funder of that organization.
They funded the National Alliance, a white supremacist neo Nazi organization.
Both the Klan and the National Alliance would be largely defunct were it not for SPLC funding.
The SPLC is now being defended by the entire left and the Democratic Party establishment.
And basically, the message is.
The SPLC was not funding racism or white supremacy.
It was paying infiltrators to burrow into those organizations for the purpose of exposing them.
First of all, this kind of infiltration is done by government agencies with prosecutorial power, not by a private nonprofit.
Second, the infiltrator is typically an outside man, like an undercover cop.
But the SPLC wasn't giving money to outside infiltrators or even to members who agreed to become informants.
Rather, it was paying The top guys in the white supremacist and neo Nazi organizations to carry on with their projects.
The SBLC specifically gave money for these guys to organize their events, like the infamous Charlottesville Unite the Right rally in Virginia in 2017.
Quite likely, the Charlottesville rally would not have happened or would be much smaller were it not for hundreds of thousands of dollars in SBLC cash.
The indictment also documents the way in which the SBLC hid the money it gave to these groups by creating various front organizations and pass through bank accounts again.
This shows the SPLC wanted to conceal its operation from outside scrutiny.
The SPLC knew it would be damaging to its reputation and to its donor base if people knew it was funding the very hate, the very extremism it claimed to oppose.
So, why did the SPLC do it?
The conventional explanation on the right is the SPLC was running a highly sophisticated fundraising operation.
The SPLC raises money by constantly claiming that racism, bigotry, neo Nazism, and white supremacy are on the rise.
What if they're not on the rise?
Then the SPLC has to make it seem they are on the rise, and what better way than to secretly fund the racist groups, get them to speak up, act up, cause trouble, and then the SPLC can point to all this and say, See, we told you so.
Open up your wallet to save America from the rising tide of white supremacy.
Yeah, this is true as far as it goes.
The SPLC made a very profitable business out of its under the table subsidies to the Klan and the neo Nazis.
This might explain why brown and black people at the SPLC were.
Good with giving money to people who want to demean, segregate, and even kill them.
They really weren't afraid of those people.
They were willing to cynically use them to boost their group's revenues and their own paychecks.
But this can't be the whole story.
Surely those black and brown officials of the SPLC were able to convince themselves that they were part of some larger, grander project.
Surely they said to each other, This might seem sleazy, but it's helping us to vindicate a larger purpose.
Surely they viewed their complicity in promoting white supremacy as the means.
To some finer, nobler end.
But what is that noble end?
Moreover, the fundraising story does not explain the usefulness of the SPLC to the Democratic Party and to the left.
Why would the leading figures of the left rush to defend the SPLC to keep its fundraising going?
But why?
How is that fundraising, how is the organization in general, vital to the national project of the Democratic left?
Here we have to go beyond narrow and local explanations.
The broader picture is that the SPLC is in the business of.
Narrative creation.
Its real mission is not to fight racism.
It's not even to fight racists.
It's to fight the mainstream of the Republican Party, of MAGA, of the right, by making it appear to be racist.
The SPLC has no intention to take down real Nazis or white supremacists.
Its real task is to highlight and accentuate those people, promote them, and then to make it seem like this is the mainstream of the MAGA movement and the Republican Party.
The SPLC doesn't demonize or dehumanize.
It would hardly take an organization with hundreds of millions of dollars to do that.
SPLC's Mission to Portray Trump as Racist00:03:49
No, the SPLC seeks to demonize and dehumanize Trump and Charlie Kirk and me and rank and file MAGA supporters.
We are the real target.
Proof?
It's right there in the SPLC archive.
It's right there in their Hate Watch newsletter.
I look at what the SPLC puts out and I find that Trump is regularly attacked and portrayed as a racist.
I find I am regularly attacked as a hatemonger and conspiracy theorist.
Charlie Kirk is regularly attacked.
As a bigot.
Just last year, the SPLC accused Charlie of promoting, quote, an authoritarian, patriarchal, Christian social order rooted in white supremacy.
Then the SPLC designations are amplified in the media, constellations of the Democratic left, which include public TV, public radio, innumerable media outlets, and Wikipedia.
Just go to Wikipedia's page.
It's called The Racial Views of Donald Trump.
You'll see multiple citations from the SPLC, all aimed at portraying Trump as a racist, a bigot, a white supremacist, and a fascist.
Now, this seems crazy.
Trump, whatever his flaws, is not a bigot.
He's the furthest thing from a white supremacist.
He actually likes blacks.
Charlie Kirk could be confrontational at times, but he wasn't a racist.
My work, my films, have shown how the Democratic Party invented racial terrorism, segregation, and white supremacy to keep blacks down, to keep them servile and dependent.
In other words, my message is sympathetic to blacks and unsympathetic to those who have exploited them.
Now, the SPLC knows all this.
Its mission is not to expose actual bigots.
The point is to make non bigots look like bigots.
The SPLC carries out its work of demonization and dehumanization through various media groups and also through organizations like Wikipedia.
In today's show, I have a revealing conversation with Larry Sanger, who's a co founder of Wikipedia.
In that conversation, we look at specific Wikipedia depictions of, among others, me.
Wikipedia, as it turns out, is a smear machine.
It functions very much like the SPLC, and it frequently cites the SPLC to portray Trump, Charlie Kirk, me.
Others as extremists, racist bigots, and some people that the world would be a lot better off without.
So here's where the SPLC's mission connects with the mission of the would be Trump assassins and also with the mission of those who kill, maim, or seek to harm other figures on the right.
The SPLC lays the groundwork, it creates the narrative.
Then groups like Wikipedia, the New York Times, NBC News, and innumerable media outlets promulgate that narrative.
The left and the Democrats then Use that narrative to push for censoring these racist and extremist points of view, racist and extremist, according to the SPLC.
The same narrative is used to deprive its villains of jobs, of loans, of mortgages, of credit card use, and of social respectability.
Basically, the SPLC is creating the framework to ruin people's lives and, in some cases, even to have them injured or killed.
The SPLC and its constellation of enabling networks all surely realize there are plenty of fanatics on the left who have become fanatics.
Precisely by consuming SPLC and Wikipedia and the New York Times and Democratic Party propaganda.
Some of these people then sign up for No Kings protests.
Others join groups like BLM and Antifa, and some subset of those otherwise ordinary people, like Cole Allen, are turned into ideological soldiers and ideologically motivated killers.
It happens the same way in Islam, where organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood successfully convert ordinary Muslims into murderers and terrorists.
Crypto IRA Risks and Lifetime Penalties00:03:15
Where will it end?
I'm not entirely sure, but here is one possibility.
It might end the way the French Revolution did, in a regime of terror that consumes the very leaders of the revolution.
Initially, Robespierre thought the guillotine was well suited to the aristocrats of the Ancien regime.
Ultimately, he found out he too was to be guillotined.
What began as a bloodthirsty campaign against the leaders of the right ended up in a regime of terror that also consumed the leaders of the left.
Will that also happen here?
Will the left and the Democrats themselves realize what they are unleashing on our society?
Even the media figures who have done so much to sanctify violence against the right must have realized at Saturday's White House correspondence dinner that they too could conceivably have been its victims.
Will the left and the Democrats recoil at some point and stop it?
Or will they only rue their actions too late when the monster they have created devours even them in the end?
And that's the way I see it.
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Larry Sanger is, along with Jimmy Wales, the co founder of Wikipedia, the controversial but also highly influential site that so many people turn to to get at least initial information about just about everything, a kind of online encyclopedia.
And Larry is an information technology guy.
He is a high tech guy, but he's also has a deep interest in history and philosophy.
We're here to talk about Wikipedia, but also some of these other issues.
Larry, welcome and thank you for joining me.
I got to confess, I have a kind of maybe passionate hatred of Wikipedia.
I somewhat identify with Elon Musk, where he said, I believe, to Jimmy Wales that he would give him a billion dollars if he would change the name to Dickapedia.
Now, that was not in fact done, even though a billion dollars is a lot of money.
Your own feeling about Wikipedia.
You've become a public critic of Wikipedia, but you're also the co founder.
So you must view it with a certain type of ambivalence.
Is that a correct description of your current relationship to Wikipedia?
That's a very good brief description.
Basically, for a couple of decades, I was mostly a critic.
But recently, just last year, I became convinced that I have maybe a special obligation to actually try to reform it.
If it is even conceivable that it could be reformed.
I think it is.
It's possible.
And there's some things about Wikipedia that are worth rescuing.
The problem that I see right now is that Wikipedia isn't going anywhere.
You can excoriate it all you like, and it's still there the next day.
Being one of the institutions that the left has marched through, right?
Why don't we try doing the same in reverse?
That's the proposition that I've been working from basically for the last six months or so.
So it seems to me what you're saying is that, and I suppose one could apply this logic to the media, to the universities.
There's been a kind of leftist march through these institutions, and there's always a question of are these.
Can they be reformed from within, or do we have to create alternative institutions that compete?
And I think you were suggesting a moment ago that you're looking at alternatives.
Maybe a.
Now, Elon Musk, of course, has Grokopedia, and Grok is, in fact, I use it quite a bit.
It's a very useful tool.
Do you think that Grokopedia could, in fact, be a real alternative to Wikipedia, or what else do you have in mind?
Well, a couple of different things.
Elon Musk actually announced plans for Grokopedia the day after I launched my nine theses on Wikipedia.
So I can't prove anything, but I have a feeling that he had the plans sort of simmering in the background.
He said, okay, with this new attempt at criticism of reform, we need to actually get on the stick and make a more viable AI based.
Alternative.
I actually think Wikipedia does have reason to be worried about Gracopedia, mostly because Elon Musk has the ability to basically include a lot of primary sources that are now basically forbidden on Wikipedia, which means potentially a much longer tail of articles than Wikipedia now has.
Wikipedia has become deletionist.
Which means that they like to get rid of things that are not up to their ideas about what is important.
So, Grokopedia is, without getting into the details, something that they need to keep their eye on.
But the other is all of the other encyclopedias taken as a whole.
I call this the encyclosphere.
And one of the things that my nonprofit has done in the last five years or so is to.
Collect over 60 encyclopedias, free encyclopedias, and put the content in an open content form, which means that they can be shared in the same way that Wikipedia can, but all in a bundle, as it were.
So that project is called the Encyclosphere, kind of like the Blogosphere did for blogs.
This would be the same with respect to encyclopedias.
It doesn't have to be organized as a blogosphere.
I actually think, though, that there are other competitors.
And essentially, we just need to get the resources and the people behind them.
A good example of something that is in the encyclosphere is Justopedia.
So, this was started by a person who is now a friend of mine.
She wasn't at first, but she is now.
And she's a disaffected ex Wikipedian, knows Wikipedia and how it works very well, and said basically this needs to be done better.
So I didn't have anything to do with Justopedia as such, but I was there when it started and I gave her advice.
And I think it's got legs.
So it's actually going somewhere.
Let me ask you, when did Wikipedia really go off the rails?
I say this because it's pretty clear that one of your well, you named it Wikipedia, as I understand it.
And not only that, but you had a rather clear vision of a sort of neutral platform that wouldn't take ideological or philosophical sides, that would provide, I suppose, information and resources for people to think for themselves.
All of this appears to have gone off the rails at some point.
If you had to sort of trace the point at which maybe it happened over time, but when did you get the feeling that, hey, my baby or the institution I co-parented has lost its way?
I actually think that it made a gradual decline from practically the beginning, from 2002.
It was started in 2001 until, say, 2002.
2022, when it sort of reached its nadir, maybe it's even declining even now.
I don't know.
But there are two points in that overall decline where it got significantly worse, where I actually noticed significant new problems that hadn't been there before.
The first was in 2005, when for the first time Wikipedia was saying in its own voice that.
Global warming was a fact, and that it was caused by human beings and pollution.
So, and that was something new.
And I was actually a little shocked because before that, the neutrality policy had been strong enough to actually require that people not actually say that in Wikipedia's own voice, but attribute it to the scientists who make such claims.
And in the years that followed that, as I like to say, Wikipedia.
Took on the sort of tone and the position of the BBC or the New York Times, something like that.
So, standard establishment center left kind of thing.
And then, what really made it go off the rails, I think, was when the mainstream media, which it takes a lot of its cues from, began to.
Imitate Fox News and MSNBC and state its views in a sort of commentary format.
And even outright claim that Donald Trump has lied.
And when in the past, such claims would again be attributed to their owners, Democrats or whoever.
So, Wikipedia started doing the same thing, essentially, in the same way that the mainstream media around the first election of Trump and Brexit, when they became radicalized, I would say, Wikipedia did as well.
It took its cues, as I say, from the mainstream media.
Now, I think, Larry, a key difference here that is probably worth stressing is that.
You know, if the New York Times publishes something, everybody knows that's the New York Times speaking.
In other words, now the Times, of course, has maintained over many years this distinction between the news page and the editorial page, and we know that that distinction has become greatly eroded.
But nevertheless, it has a big label, New York Times.
It's the New York Times speaking.
Now, I would say the illusion of Wikipedia was, or at least its public presentation, we're not doing that.
We're an open source.
People are essentially submitting things.
These things are then sort of presented in a format where people can look at them, look at their sources, make up their own mind.
But isn't it in fact true that Wikipedia has a kind of clearinghouse of editors who play the same role, I suppose, as the New York Times, as the BBC?
And they go, well, we're going to go with this fact and not that fact.
We're going to leave this in and not that one.
We're going to use this subhead or category and not that one.
So, there is a process of selectivity in Wikipedia, but it's maybe camouflaged because people think, hey, I'm just looking at an encyclopedia.
No one's actually making these decisions and telling me what to think and how to think.
Yeah, it's doubly camouflaged.
So, first of all, you're absolutely right that when people look at Wikipedia, they think this is an encyclopedia, therefore I can take what it says on trust.
Jimmy Wheels recently wrote a book about.
How trust is important in society and cites Wikipedia as an example, which to my way of thinking is actually ironic, right?
Because I know how the sausage is made.
But here's the thing if you actually go and look at the talk pages, so the pages that are assigned to each page on Wikipedia where decisions are made, it's like a discussion forum about the article.
Like it's just a bunch of random anonymous, you know, nerds debating about minutiae of subjects, and there isn't any central coordination.
How could there be?
And so, what you're suggesting, they would say, is just ridiculous because it implies a level of central coordination.
But here's the thing.
It is easy to see if you know the players.
In other words, if you actually get on Wikipedia, you play the game enough, you get to know the main accounts, the ones who are basically making the decisions.
And there are certain circumstances where a decision has to be made, and then someone will essentially just take it on themselves.
You can see how these people rather openly are allied with each other.
And together, they definitely, I mean, they'll even announce on their user pages, as they're called, their profiles, that they are socialists, for example.
A lot of people do.
And it's very clear also to my mind, and this is another aspect of it that we don't need to go into unless you want to.
I think it would be a mistake on the part of big corporations, governments, intelligence agencies, if they didn't have their fingers in the pie, precisely because people sort of respect and trust Wikipedia.
It doesn't cost very much money to pay off editors on Wikipedia.
And of course, the people on Wikipedia, they're They're anonymous.
85% of the most powerful accounts, as I did this tally last summer, and that was the number.
So, 85% of the most officially powerful accounts on Wikipedia are anonymous.
Anonymous Editors Paid by George Soros00:15:33
We don't know who they are.
So, they could be paid.
I'm not accusing anyone in particular, but they could be paid under the table by any number of entities and be.
Lobbying behind the scenes.
For all we know, they actually have, you know, boardroom meetings in which the marching orders are given.
I'm not saying that that's the case.
I don't even strongly suspect that that's the case, but that's not off the table.
That's what I'm trying to say.
You know, to me, Larry, as someone who has been watching the process of politics, but also the formation of facts, you can say, in culture and history.
I'm interested in the process of sort of how something becomes a fact.
And I don't mean, you know, what year you were born or me, but something more broad.
So, for example, take something like the idea that fascism is a phenomenon of the right, not the left.
That's presented as a fact.
I'm pretty sure you'll find it as a fact in Wikipedia.
But how did it get to be a fact, right?
So, this is kind of my theory of knowledge, if you will.
And that is that at some time, let's just flash back to, let's say, the late 40s or 50s, in the aftermath of fascism becoming discredited, you know, just had World War II, you start having some progressive historians, and one of them writes a book making the startling claim I mean, startling from the point of view of what people said before that that fascism is right wing.
Even though the fascists saw themselves as socialists, Nevertheless, it's not left wing, it's right wing.
And then what happens is this academic is cited by eight of his friends who all declare this is the most amazing book that's ever been published.
Everybody needs to read it.
This is in an article, a review in the New York Review of Books.
And then pretty soon it's on NPR.
And then Michael Moore comes along and makes a documentary in which fascism is right wing.
And so what happens is that the ordinary guy, you know, is getting the same information from seven different sources.
Now it's not really seven sources, it's the same bullet.
Ricocheting off the wall, right?
But the ordinary guy goes, Well, you know, my professor said something about it, and I was in Barnes and Noble, I saw a book about it, and then I was on watching TV, and it was on the History Channel.
And therefore, you know, since this has come to me from so many different directions, and I don't have the time to go check it out myself and read the original documents what did the Mussolini, was he a Marxist, what was the Nazi platform?
Since I can't do any of that, I'm going to sort of take it as settled.
From multiple different sources, that fascism is right wing.
And I think what you're describing in miniature is kind of the same thing, according internally at Wikipedia.
Yeah.
Yes, I think you're on to something.
I mean, we can quibble about how actually fascism arose.
You know, Jonah Goldberg wrote a well known book about that very question.
And it's liberal fascism.
It's very good.
But without getting into those details, your general point is clearly right.
Generally speaking, you can describe a lot of broad facts in history, philosophy, any theoretical discipline as being part of a thought world, right?
And the thought world is defined by important articles and academic articles and books.
And when a certain point of view becomes fashionable, then it is repeated in many different sources and takes on a kind of factualized quality, which doesn't necessarily bear any relationship to what.
A pure reason might require what the objectively ascertainable truth might be.
It's just a reflection of what traditions or the latest fashions or trends take to be the case.
So, yeah, somebody to change the example, like your reputation, you know, you started out, I remember, because I think your very first book.
On my shelves somewhere here.
And you were this young maverick who's taken very seriously.
But then you just kept being inconvenient to the left, and you were successively repainted.
Yes, there is, and to get back to the point, Wikipedia plays an important role now, today, in this process.
Wikipedia.
Is essentially the summary of what is contained in, as they call them in Wikipedia, the secondary sources.
So, not the primary sources, not your books, for example, or not the original documents written by Hitler and Mussolini and so forth, which make it very clear they're socialists or national socialists, they said.
So, no, those are not the things that you're supposed to cite on Wikipedia.
You're just supposed to cite.
The secondary sources.
In other words, everything that has been written about those.
And then that actually gives a sense of what is legitimate and can be trusted.
If it's just one person writing a book, then it can't really be trusted, is the idea.
But if there are a bunch of other people writing about that book, then it begins to look credible.
That's the theory of Wikipedia's policy on reliable sources, as they call it.
Just for fun, we're going to apply this thesis that you just advanced by looking at several examples from Wikipedia.
I'm going to start actually with myself because it's a beautiful illustration of your point.
First of all, I will say that just for fun, I read my description on Wikipedia carefully, and then I read Michael Moore's description because people sometimes compare me to Michael Moore.
He's a filmmaker on the left, I'm a filmmaker on the right.
And the Michael Moore one is pretty glowing.
You get the idea, this guy's very serious, reputable, won a lot of awards.
There's a throwaway line where some people say that his films are propaganda, but Wikipedia never goes into how they might be propaganda.
And so, for example, in one of Michael Moore's films, he's making a film about healthcare.
And he goes down to Cuba and he's talking about how great the healthcare system is over there.
Now, he doesn't go to a normal hospital where Cubans get healthcare, he goes to one of these elite hospitals.
That's created for the Cuban Communist Party and foreign visitors to Cuba.
And he shows, oh my gosh, these procedures are almost free.
And so he gives you the idea that this is what Cubans are getting.
It's blatant propaganda, but there's no mention of any of this in Wikipedia.
It's just kind of left out of the story.
And of course, you can give numerous such examples.
But I want now to turn to Wikipedia's description of me.
Right up the front, it says, I'm a, first of all, it says, I'm a conspiracy theorist.
Now, I thought to myself, yes, in 2000 Mules, I actually do talk about the fact that there's a kind of organized, or at least organized at the local level, plot to steal the 2020 election.
We all know that there have been legitimate conspiracies, like the Russia collusion hoax was in fact a conspiracy.
There was a White House meeting about it.
There were COVID conspiracies where people collaborated.
We now have the behind the scenes talk with Francis Collins and others.
We got a spike.
This guy, we got to ruin that guy, we got to discredit this guy.
So, all of this is now known.
But I thought to myself, I can't think of, apart from 2,000 meals, I can't think of any other, quote, conspiracy theories that I've advanced.
And yet, none of them are actually named.
And as you said, they never cite an example from any book saying, this is an example of Dinesh promoting an actual conspiracy.
Now, I will say this they do say, I'm going to quote here Dinesh D'Souza has promoted several conspiracy theories, such as the false claim that Obama was not born in the United States.
Now, Larry, you have to take my word for this.
I have never, ever said that.
And so I look at the footnote, and the footnote is some article from The Hill and some other article from The Week.
So apparently, somebody else falsely claimed that I said that, even though I never did.
So there's clear false information, but it's got the kind of authoritative footnote.
So the naive reader thinks, well, he must have said it.
There's some footnotes here.
And then it goes on to say, D'Souza has also.
The conspiracy theory that the Clintons had murdered people.
I have never said that either.
But again, there are a couple of bogus footnotes to lead you to believe I did say that.
D'Souza has also promoted false claims about businessman and philanthropist George Soros, including that Soros collaborated with the Nazis as a youth and that he has sponsored Antifa, a left wing fascist movement.
Now, both those things are true.
Number one, The Soros organizations have given money.
Now, they don't give it straight to Antifa, but they give it to nonprofits who give it to nonprofits who give it to Antifa.
And then, second of all, George Soros, he talks about this in his Steve Croft interview with 60 Minutes.
He goes, When I was 14 years old, I was kind of attached to this guy, this Hungarian business guy who was kind of looking after me.
And the two of us went from Jewish neighborhood to Jewish neighborhood, confiscating the property of Jews.
And turning it over to the Nazi affiliated regime.
Now, again, you could say, well, Soros was 14.
You know, how much blame can you attach to a teenager for being part of all this?
But it's not that I made it up out of whole cloth.
So, again, what's going on here is a highly skewed, tendentious, one sided type of polemic, but it's masquerading as, quote, an encyclopedia.
Right.
There are a lot of examples like that.
And yours strike me as ones that could be successfully litigated on the talk page.
The problem is, and by talk page here, I mean the discussion page about the Dinesh D'Souza article.
So I think it would require a lot of hard work.
Because they'll just circle the wagons and say, Well, cite your sources.
You'll have to actually have to try to prove a negative in some cases.
And if you simply pull out their source and say, This doesn't say what you say it says, then you actually might be able to make some headway.
But it would be a A lot of work and they will not do that work for you.
In other words, I actually think those are deliberate lies, very, very likely.
But I mean, so they knew they were misrepresenting the facts.
But Larry, I mean, isn't the burden on them?
I mean, they're saying that I'm saying this.
So I'm like, show me where, right?
Sometimes I argue with Grok like this because what will happen is that one of the AI sites will say something.
And of course, they're relying also on public sources, but you can push back.
You can say, hey, Grok, listen, you're claiming that I said that Obama was born in Nairobi.
Where do I actually say that?
Cite a primary source.
Please.
And then Grok will come back and basically confess we can't find it in any of your archive of any of your written materials.
It is, however, you know, so Salon articles said that.
And so that's where we got it.
Okay, we agree.
So Grok is actually reasonable.
You can actually conduct a debate with Grok.
And what you're saying is it's much harder to do with Wikipedia because it's almost like the.
And it's because Grok is willing to use primary sources and Wikipedia.
Is not.
In other words, if it says in a secondary source that you said such and such, then as far as they're concerned, that's a fact and it doesn't matter what you have written.
Right, right.
I mean, it's crazy, but that's their stance.
So it's really systemic.
It's a big problem.
I turned over to, because of the reference I made a moment ago to George Soros, I'm just pulling up the George Soros entry on Wikipedia and I just want to read you a line here.
On one occasion, rather than leave the 14 year old alone, the official took Soros with him while completing an inventory of a Jewish family's confiscated estate.
So there's a real attempt here to kind of minimize.
The older guy is going to do the confiscation.
He just didn't want to leave the 14 year old alone.
Now, by the way, Soros says none of this.
Soros actually says he routinely accompanied the guy on these confiscation journeys.
Soros later wrote that 1944, this is the year when he's confiscating the property, had been, quote, the happiest year of his life.
Very eerie thing to say.
In fact, Soros goes on to say something like he learned a lot from the Nazis, and one of them is the importance of good timing, which he has then applied to markets.
So when you listen to George Soros, he sounds like this amoral monster, but not in Wikipedia.
I'm going to just finish up with Wikipedia.
And Soros later wrote that, quote, 1944 had been.
The happiest year of his life.
And then Wikipedia adds this for it had given him the opportunity to witness his father's heroism.
Behind the Scenes Collusion on Wikipedia00:07:10
This is not even mentioned in the Steve Croft interview.
It has nothing to do with why he said it was the happiest year of his life.
But Wikipedia puts it in there.
So we all think, oh, wow, this is a loyal kid who admires his dad.
So this kind of stuff goes on and on and on.
I see it in the Obama entry, for example.
I've written two books on Obama.
So I'm very familiar with Obama's background.
His background is like beautifully edited by Wikipedia.
So all the inconvenient aspects of it are omitted.
And Obama is just so, for example, Obama's an attorney, he's a constitutional law expert.
Now, the truth of it is, Obama has never published a scholarly article, not just on constitutional law, but on any subject, whatever, in any academic journal in his life.
So, the idea that he is a constitutional authority and a constitutional law expert is extremely problematic.
But nevertheless, here it is in Wikipedia, and probably most people take it for granted.
So, you know, you have this site that is dense with seemingly factual information.
And part of what I'm trying to bring out, I think you agree, is that there is a highly selective and polemical project going on.
So, Wikipedia, in other words, should be read skeptically, to put it mildly.
And I think you are right that it really needs alternatives because if you're getting your truth from Wikipedia, even as a Starting point, it's going to put a lot of people completely on the wrong road.
I think that's right.
I mean, if you, Dinesh D'Souza, were to go on the talk page and were to raise all of these questions, given your level of knowledge and your ability to actually cite the relevant sources, you or a Confederate, somebody who knows as much as you do, you actually might be able to make some headway.
So, this is something that I've been trying to tell people for the last six or nine months.
It's actually important that we realize that Wikipedia can be changed.
It's hard to change because the left is very dominant in Wikipedia, which explains why there are all of these problems of the sort that you raise.
But they are.
Constrained by their own rules, and their own rules demand that they pay attention to citations that you can bring to bear.
And especially if you've got more than one person, if it's just one person making noise, then that person can probably be shut down regardless of what he says.
But if you've got several people, if you've got like a group of people converging, then it can, you can make a difference.
I mean, it's almost like.
Yeah, you're saying something really, I think, very practical here, Larry, which is that, you know, I think the reason they get away with this stuff is, you know, Elon Musk is really busy.
I'm really busy.
You are.
We've got projects all day.
So we can't possibly sit down and spend, you know, four hours a day, let's say, composing these critiques of Wikipedia.
But it could well be that there is room for some sort of a WikiCheck.
And by that, I mean a little consortium of people, maybe on the conservative side.
Who pull up hundreds of these Wikipedia entrees, particularly of prominent figures and prominent ideas, and just essentially become a barrage of factual questioning of Wikipedia.
And you're saying that that, that's not maybe going to transform Wikipedia or make Wikipedia convert, but it's, you're saying it could actually break through and get Wikipedia to make some fixes.
I, I think the number of people who are actively at work on Wikipedia is smaller than you might expect.
Um, you, What they say in their own propaganda about themselves is that they've got millions and millions of contributors.
And that's true if you count as a contributor somebody who has made an edit at some point.
How about you have made an edit on Wikipedia at some point?
So they would count you as a Wikipedian then or as a Wikipedia editor.
But you're not, really.
The number of people who are editing Wikipedia as basically.
Part time or more is in the hundreds, low thousands at most.
All right.
So if there were a groundswell of conservatives, libertarians, Hindus, there's all kinds of disaffected people who are badly treated by Wikipedia.
So I actually am working on developing a project which I'm going to call Wiki Project Intellectual Diversity on Wikipedia itself.
Okay, so they have on Wikipedia these things called wiki projects.
And so the idea is there's nothing wrong with organizing people on Wikipedia to deal with the systemic problems of Wikipedia's policies that enable one point of view to dominate over all others.
And that's essentially what Wikipedia's policies now do.
They actually have closed off the exits.
So your idea that There be behind the scenes collusion to edit Wikipedia.
Now, there's nothing illegal about that exactly.
But if it were discovered by Wikipedia and they were able to associate participant names with Wikipedia accounts, those accounts would be immediately gone because of a rule against what's called canvassing.
So, canvassing isn't like drumming up votes, although it can mean that.
It's broader.
It's just like, Any off wiki organization to pushing people to vote or to make edits in a certain way.
So, and it's very clear, by the way, that at least it's clear to me that a lot of the people who are responsible for the shocking absurdities that you have listed in these articles, that those people have been colluding off wiki.
They have their own back channels, right?
Robots for Corporations That Can Afford Them00:07:40
But they make it hard.
They're very good at it, I think, and they make it very hard to discover.
So do with that as you will.
Larry, let's close out on a kind of a little more, maybe grandiose note.
Elon Musk recently talked about the enormous changes for the good that are around the corner.
A kind of mass abundance of a kind where robots are building homes and robots are building other robots that build homes and home prices, which are now $700,000, might come down to a fraction of that, and that people will start enjoying the type of abundance that they could maybe not have envisioned even just a few years ago.
I think of this as, in some ways, he's announcing the end of, I'll call it the end.
The Adamic or Adam project, because of course, God says to Adam, you know, now you got to go out into the world, and by the sweat of your brow, you need to make bread.
And I think we've been sort of at it now for thousands and thousands of years.
And in a sense, Elon Musk is saying that that age, that Adamic project, might be coming to an end.
I just thought we'd perhaps close out with asking you to reflect and comment on this astounding.
Assertion by Elon, who has proven very visionary in so many areas.
Well, it's really remarkable.
And I noticed when he said it, you know, economists have things to say about this sort of thing.
You know, if there is an incredible amount of abundance, then indeed the price does come down.
But then there's still competition in other areas.
So then some things, other things become more expensive.
My worry doesn't actually concern the ultimate consequences, but what would have to be the case in order for Elon's vision to occur at all.
In other words, if indeed there are robots that are going out and doing all our farming for us, well, what does that mean?
Does that mean that all the farmers are going to be able to?
Afford robots, or are the farms going to be seized?
Surely not that.
Okay, then they're going to be purchased, I suppose, by corporations that can afford the robots.
Or is the notion that the robots are always going to be cheap enough that anyone can afford one?
There are a lot of questions like this that need to be thought through.
And I don't know what the answers are.
I mean, for me, the big question here is all right, let's suppose that it is possible.
I don't even know that this is true, but let's suppose that it's possible that there will be robots that are smart and tough enough to day in, day out, serve as farmers.
Let's just suppose that's true.
Then how much does it cost to build one?
And at what point will it be the case that robots are talented enough to build other robots?
Because, after all, it's one thing to be a farmer and it's another thing to build a robot.
And presumably, the latter is harder.
So I think the jury is out as to whether it's even possible.
And if it is possible, Then it might turn out to be the case that the technology, this robot technology, will only ever be affordable by super rich corporations and governments.
And if that's the case, then they would then be able to outcompete all the human beings.
And then that's what they say, right?
They'd be cheaper than all the human beings, but only governments and corporations would be able to afford them.
All right.
Well, if that's the case, then, then.
In order for me to be able to eat, I wouldn't be able to sustain myself by my own labor because there would always be a cheaper robot to do it.
Okay, if that's really true, then basically I'm at the mercy of the giant corporations and governments.
And this then becomes an assertion that essentially the most wealthy among us will be in charge of.
Whether we can eat or not, which is a kind of power they've never really had before, except at the edge of a sword.
So it's interesting.
Yeah, very well.
I think that's a very necessary and kind of sobering commentary on all of this.
Larry Sanger, I've really enjoyed this and I want to thank you very much.
Thank you, Dinesh, for having me.
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Israel Conflict Revived from Ancient Bible00:00:17
Is the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians the revival of an ancient conflict recorded in the Bible?
The nation of Israel is a resurrected nation.
What if there was going to be a resurrection of another people, an enemy people of Israel?