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Jan. 14, 2022 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:07:41
A White Man’s History of Howard Zinn
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Hey guys, welcome to Left, White, and Right.
I am Gregory Hood.
I'm here with Chris Roberts, and today we are going into, I would say, the establishment's top historian, the late Howard Zinn.
Now, I know people are already probably infuriated with that, but I mean, wouldn't you agree that if, like, the system had a court historian at this point, it's Howard Zinn?
Unquestionably, unquestionably.
I know a lot of you have been requesting that we do a podcast on Zin, really since we first started doing this podcast, and Greg and I have actually avoided covering him because we both find him so irritating.
Of all of the leftists that we've covered so far, I think Zin is the one that Greg and I appreciate the least.
I mean, we do think he's worth talking about because he's so influential, but unlike Chomsky or Hedges, I don't think we have any kind of inverted way of appreciating it.
Do you, Greg?
No, I mean, I actually, and I want this to go far and wide.
I want all the watchdog groups to hear this.
I want everyone to hear this more than any other single person, more than any other single book.
Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States radicalized me and made me a right winger because I read that book and it made me more pro-American.
Because everything that he said, it was just screaming through me, you know, friend-enemy distinction.
And this guy clearly had no, never identified as an American, never wanted to be here.
From the minute he crawled ashore, everything he wanted to do was just tear down this country.
And so reading that book, I just thought to myself, whatever this guy is for, this is what I'm against.
And whatever he's against, this is what I'm for.
And having read a fair bit of him in the years since, including his god-awful plays, which we'll get into in a second, and I apologize in advance for inflicting this on you, I actually think it's valuable.
I think it's almost a kind of test, like give a right-winger the people's history of the United States and then say, okay, well, what do you think about your beliefs at the end of this?
And at least in my experience, most people are actually strengthened in their beliefs.
Because a lot of conservatives, I mean, if you want to critique People's History of the United States.
And we'll back up a sec.
I mean, Howard Zinn, born in New York City, son of immigrants who came from, I believe, the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Typical New York City leftist.
Eastern Europe at any rate.
Yeah, I mean, typical New York City leftist socialist upbringing.
I mean, he's a cliche.
Yeah, and not really all that different from Marcuse, only I think he's even less sophisticated than Marcuse, which is saying something.
Well, no, Marcuse did grow up in another place.
Zinn was actually all American, like American by birth.
He was not an immigrant.
And I do think that that's actually really important.
Yeah.
Well, he says in his play about Emma Goldman, who clearly he just lionizes.
Emma Goldman's father, who's portrayed as sort of the authoritarian personality writ large.
Say who Emma Goldman is, come on now.
Well, Emma Goldman was one of the anarchists, one of the leading anarchists of The early 20th century and it's kind of a favorite for contemporary leftists because there was never a leftist, an actual leftist project that she truly agreed with.
So she was involved in all this movement.
Basically never actually was a part of any of these left-wing regimes that ended up doing horrible things.
Right.
Right.
It goes to the Soviet Union and oh, this isn't actually what I wanted.
And it's, well.
This is sort of kind of a model, I think, of a lot of leftists where they strive for the impossible.
And because they set up these projects at the cost of however many lives and property destruction and disruption of the entire social order and everything else.
And then when it collapses, this is all the conservatives said it was going to do altogether.
They say, well, I bear no responsibility for this because actually I have some weird critique about how this isn't actually socialism or something.
This was kind of the hero of Zen, and he wrote a play about her, which we'll get into in a bit, which I think is much more revealing of his thought than People's History of the United States.
People's History of the United States is presented to you as sort of a radical book that your teachers don't want you to read.
But of course, as we know from the endless parade of teachers bragging on TikTok about how they're trying to indoctrinate their students into all this radical leftist stuff, I mean, I think if you've read this book, even odds that you probably read it in school.
This isn't the book that teachers don't want you to read.
This is the textbook.
Yeah, my story with encountering this book, I had heard of it at some point in adolescence, but what happened to me was my senior year of high school, I went to a charter school, so we had a lot of independent projects instead of classes, and I did an independent project on Francis Fukuyama and his book, The End of History and the Last Man, and his theory that the end mark of human history was Democratic capitalism and we've you and I of course did a podcast on Fukuyama and that thesis months ago at this point if you all want to go back and dig into that but as a 17 18 year old I was really really fascinated by Fukuyama's theory so I read that book and I read a bunch of books related to it books critiquing it etc etc etc and my teacher who served as an advisor on that project
There's a very jaded left-wing Gen X-er, and she really, really did not like that I found Fukuyama so interesting, because he's a Republican associated with the George W. Bush administration.
And she insisted that I read Howard Zinn's The People's History of the United States, because to her, the fact that all of these bad things in American history had happened would sort of disprove Fukuyama's
thesis that all of humanity is headed towards an American-style or a European-style
democracy. Now this is, of course, absurd, because Fukuyama at no point has ever argued that
every democracy is perfect and no democracy ever has skeletons in its closet or anything like
that.
This is really resistant to this assignment.
I used to argue with this teacher, like, listen, this book just isn't related to what I'm studying in this independent project.
This is just not sufficiently related to my own thesis.
You know, it's like, Fukuyama doesn't deny that there were Indians here hundreds of years ago, or Fukuyama doesn't deny that there was slavery or any of these things, and my teacher was just furious that I was uninterested in this book, and I remember she told me that not reading A People's History might cost me one letter for my ultimate grading of this project.
You know, as in, if I would have gotten an A, I would go down to a B, or from a B to a C. I remember telling her that that was fine.
I didn't really care that reading this book wasn't worth an extra letter.
But, you know, and again, this teacher very much thought of herself as this radical, stirring things up from the inside, but she had all of the power In this situation, she was the one saying, you know, read this book or else.
It was, you know, I had zero power in it.
And again, it was fascinating that she was so obsessed with this book.
She found it so essential that she couldn't really see how unrelated it was to what I was studying.
And I, yeah, I didn't finish it, but then you can counter Zen everywhere.
I mean, they assign chapters and selections from Zen at basically every level of education.
There's a young adult version of the people's history of the United States that can be taught at a junior high and even like a late elementary school level.
In a way, it kind of paved the way for the 1619 Project or whatever else, all the other movements where they try to deconstruct the popular image of American history.
But this was already done.
And even in his book, even in The People's History, he sort of humble brags about how when they had the Bicentennial in 1976, that there were a lot of movements basically denigrating the United States, saying it was a bad thing that it was established.
We dispossessed the Indians, we did this, we did that, and he was saying, well this is what's going to lead to a greater movement for liberation.
Now again, this was decades ago when he said this, and people like him... Yeah, the first edition of this book was published in 1980.
Yeah, and people like him have been in charge for longer than we've been alive.
That's right.
And they've had all of the power.
The more power they get, the worse, the worst things get from their own perspective.
And yet all they can think of to do is keep blaming it on the remnants of whatever the historic American nation exists and whatever traditional culture exists.
And I think that, I mean, I would assign a people's history to where I in charge, but to me, it just shows How politics really does ultimately boil down to identity politics, and it doesn't show what he thinks it's showing, which is this idea of class.
Because, again and again in the book, he essentially sounds like a nationalist when he's talking about any group other than whites and American whites.
I mean, it's blood and soil nationalism all the way for the Indians.
Yes.
Yeah, Howard Zinn is something of a Cherokee nationalist, despite the fact that they practiced race-based slavery.
Well, that's fine, because I mean, again, it's it's a question of us and them.
And that's when you cut through all the leftist nonsense about, oh, it's class and it's capitalism and everything else.
I mean, eventually you find when you scratch all that away, you find a militant right winger whose nationalism and patriotism.
Is just directed at something that has nothing to do with the United States and has nothing to do with whites.
The People's History, I think, is important because it perfectly illustrates this idea of punching from the top while pretending you're a rebel.
I think, what is that terrible movie, Good Will Hunting, where the character says, like, oh, if you read, like, a People's History of the United States, it'll blow your mind, or something like that.
Like, it's the 60s.
Yeah, that movie caused sales of the book to skyrocket.
That was a really big moment for it, actually.
Which tells you all you need to know in some ways, because if it was actually a dangerous book, you wouldn't have some celebrity preaching it.
Right, in a Hollywood movie.
Right.
Incidentally, Matt Damon is out there preaching the virtues of whatever cryptocurrency thing right now.
And essentially, to me, there's no difference.
I mean, it's just, this is the fad, this is the thing that you show that you're on the right side of history, that you're with What the people in charge claim to be is the intellectual milieu that you need to be surrounded by and people's history of the United States.
is the foundation for all the different little studies groups that would grow up later.
I mean, Marcuse obviously was far more important, but Zinn took it to the next step, and from here you start getting the things like, oh, we're going to have gender studies, we're going to have women's studies, we're going to have... What Marcuse is to theory and criticism, Zinn is to history.
There's sort of this hydra of influencing the academy, and I mean, not just higher education, but basic education as well.
Yeah, this is what your kids are probably reading in elementary school, some version of this.
I mean, as you point out, they even have young adult versions of it.
And there are all these people's histories of the world, and people's histories of this, and people's histories of that.
I mean, you could find a people's history for whatever region you want now, and it all follows the same script.
But again, you already know what it's going to say.
You already know every thought they've ever had.
I mean, if you read one, you've read them all, and there are a lot of movement conservative critiques of people's history.
Where they'll point out that Zin made this or that factual error.
There are some vanishingly few actual historians who care about being right about the facts will say, well, he says this when it didn't actually happen, or he exaggerates that, but that's not really what's important because.
Zinn, and I think he was self-aware enough to know this, he's presenting a narrative.
He's presenting a useful narrative.
It's a narrative that a lot of people want to believe.
And I think that the reason conservatives are so ill-equipped to deal with this pretty crude attack is that American conservatives have internalized the myths of the founding where they say, The United States of America is justified because we ultimately led to mass democracy.
We ultimately led to egalitarianism.
We ultimately led to what should be a race blind country that is judged purely by individualism and the American dream.
And by doing that.
You're essentially saying, well, there's no such thing as class inequality.
There's no such thing as power politics.
There's no such thing as race consciousness among the founders.
There's no such thing as race consciousness among the vast majority of Americans up until very recently, or in terms of how we define ourselves as white country.
And so that just opens the door for somebody to come in and point out, well, here's a time when America didn't act in a way consistent with egalitarianism. Here's a way, here's
a time when America didn't act in a way that's consistent with anti-racism, to which people like us
can say, well, yeah, that's because those are stupid ideas, which nobody really believed in, except
people who were trying to be intentionally subversive. And two, again, once you boil it down, they don't
believe in it either. They just become right-wingers for their side. But American conservatives,
they're like the last liberals.
I mean, they really do want to die on this hill of America is the great liberal experiment.
And they will die on that hill.
I mean, this is why they say things like Martin Luther King would be on our side today, or he'd be voting Republican, or he'd be voting for Donald Trump or whatever else, even though we know that's not true.
It's because they've blocked themselves off to this forbidden knowledge about What Americans actually thought about race and what, how America, how Americans actually thought about democracy and equality.
The founding fathers were not fans.
And when you're not willing to deal with what actually happens, even imperfect histories like Howard Zinn's come in and essentially take over the entire space.
Because the only thing you get offered in return are these myths about Essentially Martin Luther King in a colonial hat leading the fight against the British and that's what America's always been I mean, that's what conservatives think will have you believe and that's just not true and that opens the door for Zen and everybody like Yeah, it's well put I mean so much of conservatism inks American history has this corn ball ish sort of syrupy sweet the flavor to it of
You know, we've done the best we can at every stage, and that must be true because look how well we're doing now, which is ultimately not terribly satisfying.
It also begs the question of, okay, well, if there were so many missteps in the past, what makes you so certain that what we have now isn't a misstep of some kind, right?
Right.
It's always defensive.
That being said, the conservatives do have a point with the sort of overall critique of Xin's book of
compared to what, I mean you were bringing up earlier how now there can be a people's history of, you know,
any country or region or group of people so long as they're not white.
And that's largely because, you know, there's no other nation that doesn't, you know,
that didn't have territorial conflicts, that didn't have, you know, class domination.
I mean, these are human universal things.
I mean, even even slavery is found or was found basically everywhere at some point.
You know, there isn't there isn't this perfect left wing country out there.
I mean, what we were talking about On our episode about Herbert Marcuse, I kept saying, you know, Marcuse never outlines this utopia, right?
He never talks about what exactly this perfect society where nobody has regressive or commercial identities is, and it's because it's unimaginable.
You can't really, you could never really put your finger on it because it's all just so abstract.
Well, in the case of Zinn, there's something somewhat similar where he is so focused on you know, Indians and slavery and all of these bad things,
that it would be impossible to find a country that would sort of live up to Zen standards. It
would be impossible to find any country at any time in human history that Zen couldn't
critique on all of these same grounds of like, oh, there were people in power and they, you know,
they used force to stay in power.
It's like, well, welcome, welcome to human existence.
And again, you know, there are somewhat conservative cheap shots of like, oh, well, the Indians practiced slavery, or, well, you know, America never did anything bad as Stalin's, you know, gulags or anything like that.
But, you know, it is, it is true.
And it is interesting that Zin, and people like Zin, in a lot of ways get away with so much because Americans really know very little about other countries.
Yeah.
You know, most Americans have no idea that, you know, when we brought slaves from Africa, all of those African empires were enslaving one another.
That's where we got the slaves from.
Yeah, I think there's this belief that whites or England or anything like that, you know, they don't know about the brutality of Genghis Khan or the Chinese Civil War in ancient times or any of these things.
So all these things are just equally barbaric, or they're equally not barbaric, depending on, you know, what you want to define as barbaric.
But all these things are just totally universal, which is why Zin never wrote a book about a great country that he liked very much.
I mean, it just, nothing would pass muster.
Well, there would be the, you know, there's Goldman, of course.
Well, but we already said on this podcast, right, she's not tainted.
And one of the reasons Zin likes her is because she's not tainted by having supported anything that actually held on to power.
Right.
It's like saying that they're communists.
That's why Trotsky is so lionized, right?
And the Paris Commune, which lasted, I believe, 36 or 37 days, right?
The less successful a left-wing thing is, the more the left fetishizes it, because all of their successful projects—maybe not all, but an enormous number of their successful projects—then led to gulags, or genocide, or famine, or what have you.
Yeah, or the anarchists take over in Catalonia or something like that, which of course end up getting put down by Marxists, not right-wingers.
Before Franco marched in, the communists did a number on him first.
Yeah, and they only lasted a few weeks, a few months.
months. Yeah. So what was, I mean, Zin, when we talk about him as an establishment figure,
one of the things that we have to confront is, well, how do you, how do you avoid this trap
that the conservative movement has fallen into?
I mean, even with Donald Trump, we saw again at the tail end of the administration, when he's just kind of grasping and doing stuff, they had that 1776 commission.
That's right.
Which was going to be the big counter.
And of course, what you get was this incoherent mess.
of American identity is defined by Martin Luther King, but also Robert E. Lee, but also George Washington, but also this guy or that guy.
And the fatal flaw is that America was founded explicitly, not just as a white country, but as an Anglo country.
There was a national core when even someone like Lincoln said, our fathers brought forth on this continent, he's speaking in a literal sense.
He's saying that these, we are a people who are tied to this land that goes and we go back for generations and generations and other people may come in, but the core you had to assimilate to was that Anglo-American core identity.
But after successive waves of immigration, And after the complete loss of certainly white racial consciousness, which interestingly enough, they say is like a benefit of whiteness now, although clearly it hasn't, or less powerful now that that's gone.
What you're left with is America as simply a landmass with different peoples contending over it, trying to take control of the system for power.
That's probably the norm of human history in any given location.
But if you're trying to say that there's still an American nation, and that all these different peoples somehow fit into it seamlessly, and that we're all red, white, and blue, and that we can all have the same heroes, and we can all have the same heritage, we can all have the same culture, that's just a lie.
And you can try to smash it together as best you want.
You can use the 1776 Commission, you can ban critical race theory, you can do whatever you're going to do.
But at the end of the day, history is what it is.
And if you're not going to talk about it, Zin gets the monopoly on what we get to talk about.
The counter, of course, is to say that America is not just some stupid egalitarian experiment.
And that if you're going to fall into the, as the radical organizer Saul Alinsky famously advised, you always want to make the enemy live up to their own rules.
Howard Zinn is doing that by saying, oh, look, America claims to be a democracy.
It claims to be this, that and the other.
But look at how they treated this group.
Look at how they treated that group.
The way to get out of that trap is if they say, well, you're not living up to these rules.
You rip up the rule book and you say these rules are stupid.
And furthermore, we never accepted them.
These are just that this is your story of how America was created.
But the people who actually created America didn't believe in any of this stuff.
All you have to do is look at the writing of the founders themselves.
I mean, American Renaissance website, just what the founders really thought about race.
I mean, I think if you just read that, that's an inoculation against 90 percent of the radical stuff that's going to be thrown your way, because all of it is premised upon you believing that America was built on racial equality and democracy.
And if you can, if we can prove to you that we're being hypocrites, then the American project itself is totally discredited.
Well, if you just say, well, that's not true, and that's not what the founders believed, and that's not what the people who built this country believed, and Manifest Destiny was a good thing, and the fact that we won these wars was a good thing, and that we conquered this continent is something to be proud of.
As long as you just throw off that guilt, and as long as you just throw off these ideas that you say you have to accept, You're essentially invincible.
Because then Howard Zinn comes along and starts saying, oh, look at what happened.
America won this war.
Isn't this terrible?
And then it's just, well, why is this subversive even talking to us?
You're not part of this.
Get out of here.
I mean, like, there's no reason.
Like, I understand that you don't like the country and you want to discredit it and that you think it's bad that we triumphed.
But everything that you're saying is just reinforcing the fact that what we did was good.
And the only mistake we made was not going farther, because if we actually were truer to what our real principles were, we would have never had to deal with this guy in the first place.
Yeah.
I mean, he's another, I mean, I know he was born in New York City, but his family, again, is another powerful example of why immigration is generally bad.
Yeah.
Well, I'd say they're two kind of related Threads, when I think about Zin, I mean, Zin is taught at every level of education to reinforce this idea that A, everything whites have ever done has been bad,
And B, that nothing bad ever happens to whites, unless they're at the absolute bottom of the economic pile.
Maybe the poorest of poor whites can have bad things happen to them.
Then you're not white anymore, then you're a worker.
Right, that's right.
And workers are oppressed.
But the idea, it's this duality with Zen, right?
Whites are always on top, and since they're always on top, they're always doing bad things.
And on a historical level, this involves, I mean, especially when you're talking about early America and the frontier and the expansion westward, this involves, to make Zen's argument, it sort of presupposes A certain conspiracy of almost as though whites on the East Coast or whites in Europe kind of had some sort of council meeting where they decided, oh, we're going to go, we're going to push West and we're just going to slaughter everybody we encounter and the handful of people we don't slaughter, we're just going to put on these reservations.
But that obviously wasn't what happened.
People didn't really know what, you know, What was out west?
I mean, that was part of the incentive to push west was to find out who and what was there, you know, in terms of resources and population.
I mean, that's why in the United States, the Midwest is called the Midwest, even though it's in the direct middle of the country, east to west.
It's because, you know, as we were pushing west, we were just, you know, we just didn't really have the geography really clear in our heads.
And especially for the vanguard of the pioneers who pushed West, basically from Andrew Jackson's time onward, these were really poor people.
The first people to push West were not the wealthiest, it was not the military, and it was not some cable of whites who wanted to just decapitate Cherokees or something.
These are people, these are hardscrabble people who went out and built, you know, log cabins on their own to try and set up their own farms without knowing really what was out there.
And it was in that context they suddenly discovered, oh, we're on territory claimed by this other race, this tribe of Indians that we don't know anything about.
And the brutality that they face, of course, Xin doesn't get into at all in this book, but I mean, those territorial wars, many of which weren't really wars because it was just done to the first white farmer, the first white settler, the first white pioneer, were brutal.
I mean, the amount of, you know, torture and rape that happened to whites who, again, weren't part of this big conspiracy to do anything.
They were just Pioneers this is just what you did back then and then we're just immediately faced torture and slaughter, you know And then there were these retaliate retaliatory movements against hostile Indian tribes, you know, all of this happened piece by piece and oftentimes is the US government and the US military had to just be Dragged out west because it was only the pioneers that wanted the help I mean the officials didn't actually really want to get involved in these protracted conflicts and
But this idea that there was just this big sort of sweep west that was all coordinated and that was genocidal from the get-go and everybody wrote in their diaries the whole plan was genocide was really just not the case.
I mean, these were explorers just kind of bumbling west hoping to get, you know, a house and a farm.
They really just didn't know what was going on.
I mean, it can be difficult to imagine being in that position, because there's nothing very akin to it today.
The pioneer spirit has been all but lost.
But I think that perspective is really essential, and when you hear people just sort of blithely comment like, oh, we genocided the Indians, it really does not take into appreciation the fact that one white family would set up Yeah, and there also was no united Indian opposition.
know, in the morning they would get scalped, you know, then, you know, the people that they had
left, you know, however many miles east would go, you know, try looking for them, seeing what
happened, see what had happened and strike back. I mean, these were very tit-for-tat conflicts. It's
just happens that whites won. Yeah. And there also was no united Indian opposition. One of the
things that you notice when you actually get into, and this is Xin's fault as a historian, because
if you want to know what actually happened in the West, you're not going to get Howard's end.
You're just going to get narrative from Zinn.
But if you actually read the real history of what happened with the West, it's more complicated story than either the 7076 project or whatever, or Howard Zinn will tell you, which is that these different groups often saw these small groups of whites as new players in their little geopolitical game.
And so you would have various alliances between Indians and white settlers and white settlers from different countries, including the Spanish, the British, the French.
There was not as much racial solidarity as you might expect.
There were certainly some, but you would definitely have cases where the British and one tribe would unite against the Americans and another tribe.
Neither Just as whites, unfortunately, have no problem fighting wars against other whites, Indians had no problem fighting wars against other Indians, and it's only in retrospect that we get this narrative of these people being defeated by this monolithic racial advance, when in practice, as you say, it was not as coordinated as people like to pretend, and the people in power
Are also the ones who are against it.
And this goes back to colonial days.
I mean, one of the biggest reasons that the American revolution even happened was because the British tried to hold the colonists to the Appalachian mountains and said, here's this line.
I think it was the proclamation of 1763.
Here's this line that you can't go past because we don't want to spare the expense of having the British army fight the Indians just so you guys can go settle.
Right.
Same thing with even after... Which Zin does get into that, actually.
Yeah, but of course then it's Americans become the bad guys and somehow, like, the British become... Yeah, the British Empire with the good guy.
Well, that's it.
This is the thing.
When you start talking about the realities of power, The people, the basis of any real quote-unquote right-wing movement, any nationalist movement, any populist movement, it tends to be small property holders and the people who want to become small property holders.
These are the types of people who are pioneers and these are the people who in the Soviet Union would be the kulaks.
These are the people who The Bolsheviks and their ideological descendants, whatever you, in whatever form they take now, these are the people they always come for first.
And we saw that even over the last year, last two years, I should say.
It's not Citibank or JPMorgan that's threatened by, say, Black Lives Matter.
In fact, they donate to these things.
But if you've got a small business downtown, or if you're running something in the suburbs, All of a sudden you have people calling in to the people you do business with telling them to cut ties Like those are the people who are the most vulnerable Those are the people who have the most to gain from a national state that is willing to defend their interests and those are the people that people like Howard Zinn hate the most because You can say whatever you want about the elite, but the fact is the elite is
teaches this guy and has taught this guy for decades.
And they've taught people like him for decades more, and it's only intensifying.
In fact, the more we talk about this stuff, the more we talk about the quote-unquote real history of America, the more angry people get and the more resentful people get.
It doesn't heal historic wounds the way they disingenuously claim it will.
It just makes people angrier at each other and makes the country more divided.
Which, again, they know this.
Joe Biden.
Howard, we were talking about this last week, I think, but Howard Zinn is another one of those supposed radicals who got to give a talk at Google, arguably the most powerful corporation in human history.
They had no issue about having him, you know, give a little talk to their top employees.
It's something I love about your point that Zinn is essentially a right-wing nationalist for everybody except whites.
Obviously, I've never spoken, I never spoke to Zinn directly, but When I talk about what I just talked about, about how pioneers were just sort of bumblingly pushing west and, you know, suddenly encountered, you know, brutal violence, lots of leftists will actually just immediately say like, oh yeah, it's okay that the Indians did that, you know, it was their turf and, you know, those stupid pioneers shouldn't have stepped, shouldn't have stepped, you know, on their territory.
How quickly immigration restriction becomes okay.
Right, yeah, to which I always respond and then it's like, okay, so then You know, when Tunisians show up in France, are Frenchmen just allowed to immediately scalp them?
You know, is that kosher?
Like, is that alright?
Which, of course, the answer is no.
Because, again, it's not... What's... You've got a great saying on this.
It's never what, it's always who.
Yeah.
All politics is who, not what.
Right.
The Indians get to do that, but the French don't.
It's the friend-enemy distinction.
You saw this on Twitter a while back.
There was somebody who said, blood and soil, but make it woke.
And it had this tribal map of Which India tribes historically own this land.
And now, of course, in Canada and some of the wackier parts of the United States, they'll say, before a meeting or something, they'll say, we need to take a moment to acknowledge that we're on whatever land, and this is stolen land, and blah, blah, blah.
Now, of course, they themselves are never going to give back their land.
Because if you actually believe that, the thing to do is to give your house away.
They'll never do that.
They'll give your house away, though.
Like, you're the one who has to pay.
I mean, Zinn would have been the most perfect man to start a return-to-Europe movement in the United States and Canada.
I mean, he was a celebrity historian.
His most famous book starts with Columbus.
I mean, he more than anybody else turned Columbus into a villain.
I mean, he really should have dedicated the last 30 years of his life to being the white Marcus Garvey and saying, all of us need to return.
Of course, everybody would follow us.
For some reason, that never seems to have occurred to him.
Maybe he was just too busy giving talks at Google.
Yeah, the faux radicalism is just something that you have to call it out every time.
You can't just limit yourself to the conservative critique of, oh, these guys are hypocrites.
No, this is how the system functions.
Howard Zinn is a court historian.
That is what he is.
He's been subsidized by the elite.
He's a product of the elite.
There's nothing that he says that will get you in trouble in any single circle of power.
Whereas if somebody had so much forwarded an email with FBI crime statistics that they pulled from Jared Taylor, like Google would be a smoking ruin within 10 minutes.
So let's not talk about radicalism, who's radical and who's not.
Which brings me, and I was avoiding it just because it's so bad, it's so bad that, it's not one of these things that, oh it's so bad that it's good, it's just bad.
And you just kind of have, it's the same thing when you're reading Marcuse, where you just sort of have this creeping horror as you're reading along, when you realize that this is a genuinely stupid man.
That there's no inner secret, that there's not even the Leo Strauss, like, oh, maybe there's a hidden meaning behind this, or maybe I need to study it more and figure out what's really going on.
No, it really is just a bumper sticker of a brain.
And I'm going to, and I beg your forgiveness in advance, I'm going to read from something called Three Plays, the political theater of Howard Zinn.
This is from a play called Emma.
Her friend, Emma Goldman, yes.
Her friend here tries to murder Henry Clay Frick, doing this as like kind of anarchist propaganda of the deed.
He gets sentenced to 22 years.
Emma, standing in the shadows as if watching the scene from 500 miles away, cries out in anguish, Sasha!
Like this, this overwrought type thing.
And you go back and you say, but you just tried to murder someone.
You don't, you don't get to complain.
And he didn't even do it too.
You don't get to try to murder someone and then complain when that person gets sent to jail.
You don't get to say that the system is this oppressive, violent thing.
And then when you try to murder one of its leading figures, it strikes back against you.
And yet the whole book, for the whole play, I mean, it's mostly her arguing with other anarchists, none of whom were good enough for her, of course, complaining about the federal government.
And then the play ends with her speaking out against World War I, which ironically now would probably mark you as like a far right radical, which would get you deplatformed.
And then federal agents come in.
And then the play ends.
Voice your megaphone.
Clear the hall by order of the United States government.
No one leave the stage.
Stay where you are.
Vito, these are all just random anarchists.
Vito turns toward the voice and gives it the arm.
Then he takes Emma's hand on one side, Saucer's hand on the other.
Anna takes Saucer's hand.
The four face the audience as the lights go down.
So here you are.
You're these plucky little anarchists.
They're standing up to the government.
They're standing up to federal agents.
All they want to do is just preach this radical creed that advocates the violent overthrow of the government.
Why are they being persecuted?
Well, you read this and then you look at today's headlines, where the Department of Justice has now created a special domestic terrorism unit, which is going to pursue groups that are fueled by quote-unquote racial animus, although it interestingly also says that it will pursue groups that are quote anti-authority.
So we'll see if any of our progressive friends have any dealings with this new DOJ unit.
Somehow I doubt it.
We'll have to wait and see.
Yeah.
The entire media has been in a constant state of hysteria ever since the January 6th farce, saying that this is an insurrection, that this is as bad as the Civil War, it's worse than 9-11.
This is the worst thing that ever happened.
It's deadly.
They never tell you who it's deadly to.
Ashley Babbitt.
Worse than 9-11.
I mean, it is worse.
It is worse than 9-11 in the sense that you have federal officials just gunning down American citizens.
I mean, that's that's worse than 9-11.
Certainly not worse in terms of the death toll and the human cost.
Yeah.
But I suppose it's worse.
I mean, unless you have believed certain theories about 9-11, it's certainly worse in the sense that the government showed its willingness to gun people down.
Unlike Emma's good friends here who just got like a little slap on the wrist.
I don't know.
One citizen getting guns down, though, is still not as bad as 3,000 people.
Oh, no, no, no.
It's not actually worse than 9-11, but I'm saying that in terms of the government, if we're not going to devolve into conspiracy theories or whatever else.
Which we're not, for the record.
Right, right.
The government, at worst, failed to protect the United States on September 11th,
whereas with January 6th, you arguably had the government unleashing violence
against its own citizens, which is different.
The problem with this is that the media has been saying, if anything, the government didn't go hard enough,
that federal law enforcement needs more powers to persecute these people,
that these people should be tried for insurrection, that these people should be sent to prison
for the rest of their lives.
We have these cases where people who are getting some like trespassing get lectured by the judge and given outrageous sentences and everything else.
Then you pivot back to this, where you have an anarchist movement that was killing people, that was sending bombs, that was trying to do stuff.
This is behavior that has lionized in this play.
That's lionized in his history, that this is a good thing, that this is a justified thing.
It was an immigrant anarchist who killed President McKinley back in the day.
That was kind of the golden age of anarchist terrorism.
Yeah, propaganda indeed, right.
And they always say the first Red Scare after World War I, as if it was just something entirely made up.
Well, you just had the Bolshevik Revolution, and you had people talking about spreading revolution worldwide.
Like, they weren't just making this up.
But here.
You you get the narrative you get the image really of your standing up against authority that you're you're confronting the corrupt capitalist establishment.
But even as the time he was writing this he was the establishment.
And the exact same people who might get their hearts stirred by this soaring drama, this soaring melodrama, are the same people who are shrieking and screaming because some confused boomers walked through Statuary Hall making sure to stay within the velvet ropes.
And these are the same people who are saying with a straight face that it was worse than 9-11.
I remember 9-11.
I mean, North Jersey was a war zone when I came back.
The idea of comparing this protest because it disrespected the bureaucrats' place of work for a few hours, comparing that to the death of 3,000 people, it's not that it's, oh, it's obscene or, oh, they're overstating it or whatever else.
I mean, they really do have a moral framework that is fundamentally different from ours.
I mean, 9-11 and the people who died, I think, really meant nothing to them.
Whereas the idea of a political challenge emerging from the right that they couldn't fully control, that scared them, and that really is more horrifying to them.
They are more terrified by domestic right-wingers than Islamic terrorism.
That's certainly true.
That's actually the case in Hillary Clinton's new thriller novel, where I believe domestic right-wingers and Muslim extremists abroad collaborate to take down the American government.
Imagine the type of person who says, like, I just bought a novel from Hillary Clinton.
Yeah.
I mean, really imagine it, because I'm having a hard time.
I imagine you'd do it for the money.
It's got to be good work if you can get it.
I don't think we're going to get that call.
No, I mean the type of person who would buy it, like, go to a bookstore and be like, I've been looking forward to it.
Oh, I misheard you.
OK, yeah.
Yeah, that's it.
Yeah, I can't imagine that.
But my point here is that the anarchist used to violence.
The assassination attempts, the bombings, the idea of a violent overthrow of the entire system.
This is something that is celebrated.
This is something that is identified with.
This is something that you are told to feel sympathy for.
It's very hand-handed, which I suppose we should be grateful for because they haven't made a movie about it that way.
Although maybe they will, I think.
Most people are gradually losing even the ability to have a sense of irony about some of these political things.
But at the same time they celebrate this, they tell you that domestic terrorism, by which they mean a NASCAR car with the slogan Let's Go Brandon, is the greatest threat of all time.
And I think Zinn is important because he really captures that Schizophrenic attitude of the American left where they they are really leftist generally where they have to be in the opposition They psychologically can't handle the idea that they are in charge More broadly you can't if they start talking about race or something else and you say well look You guys have been chart been in charge of these policies for what 60 years at minimum total control
I mean, even last week when we were talking about Confederacy of Dunces, there were even signs in that book that the tide was turning, and that ordinary small businessmen had to be afraid of civil rights groups and things like that.
But yet, it's never their fault.
And no matter how many regimes they establish, no matter how many people are killed, no matter What historical inaccuracies they say, they never have to take responsibility for any of them.
They just keep going on to the next thing.
And if you're on the right, you have to reject the premise from the very beginning.
You're just going to keep getting owned by these people over and over and over again.
You can't accept the premise that, look, America was meant to be this colorblind place of mass democracy, and we haven't lived up to our founding dream.
It wasn't our founding dream.
And all you have to do is read the Founders to understand that.
Yeah, I mean, you don't even really necessarily need to read the Founders.
The fact that the Founders didn't try from the get-go to create some kind of egalitarian left-wing paradise is evidence that that's not what they wanted, because they really, you know... I mean, there's a lot of poison inherent in the American founding.
I mean, I did write Waking Up from the American Dream, after all, but The rhetoric that they said during the revolution and then what they actually did and other things that they said really counteract that.
I mean, let's not forget that in the Declaration of Independence itself, one of the crimes that is laid, and this is one of the things that wasn't edited out, one of the crimes laid against King George III is having incited the quote, merciless Indian savages against American settlers, which there was some truth to.
I mean, again, the British policy was to keep Americans contained and dependent on Britain on the coast.
But this raises questions.
OK, well, what what did the capitalists or then equivalent of the capitalists and the merchants and the established powers see as their true interests?
It was not a republic of settlers spreading from coast to coast.
It was not small property holders.
It was not Thomas Jefferson's Empire of Liberty.
That's not what the capitalists wanted.
And if we look at things today, we say, oh, exploiting labor and bringing in foreigners and everything else.
Well, what's the closest equivalent of that today?
It's these people who run slaughterhouses and agricultural concerns and everything else who bring in cheap, illegal labor and who scream and whine and beg.
That they should be allowed to bring these people in that they shouldn't have to pay them much and that the American people should have to pay the cost of their health care and education and crime and infrastructure and everything else.
And at the end of the day, the Chamber of Commerce is on the same side.
As all the left wing and communist movements on the issues that matter.
So if you're trying to build a history around the premise that capitalism is the problem and the established powers have always been pushing racism and nationalism and everything else.
All you have to do is you don't even need to look at looking at history health, but just looking at our own time.
All of the forces that Zen would call the bad guys in terms of the people who actually have the power are on his side and always have been.
Yeah, something I wish had been done to, you know, just about every leftist intellectual before Obama became president was to ask, you know, to ask them, will America ever have a black president?
Because until it happened, I know in their heart of hearts, every last one of them would have said, oh, absolutely never.
America is way too diabolically racist for this to have ever transpired.
I once asked a college professor of mine what she thought of America's Indian vice president.
And she was so wrapped up in her own ideology that she misheard me and she told me America will never have an Indian vice president because all we do is bad things to them.
And I had to tell her about Herbert Hoover's vice president.
She was really quite blown away.
She's not aware of Charles Curtis, despite fawning over Indians and their plight and their status and all of these things.
Yeah, that's one of the things about sometimes, I remember Discussing and this is actually a pretty common critique.
I think of white advocates where we'll be saying something and then we'll bemoan the state of our people now and express frustration about like, oh, why don't people wake up quote unquote and do X Y or Z and people could say well.
Why do you believe in this people if this people doesn't want to be saved?
I mean, why are you trying to fight to save people who seem content with their own extinction or seem content to move to a different stage of history where they'll no longer be the ones in charge?
But you can point to a lot of groups in American history with groups who weren't the majority where certain individuals said, you know what, I'm going to shift with the times.
I'm going to assimilate myself to this American system.
You can think of this in terms of certain conservative blacks.
You can think of this in terms of a number of American Indians.
Some of the tribes never fought against the United States, never fought against the United States military.
They were always allied or at best neutral or at worst neutral.
And how does the left treat those people?
They're race traitors.
They didn't side for their own people.
They're the worst kind of scum.
They're scabs.
They were supporting their oppressors, as we've learned over the last two years, where you'll have these Trump rallies where people come out who are not all white.
There's a whole literature now on how white supremacy, you don't have to be white to be a white supremacist.
That's right.
You can internalize white supremacy.
And in fact, there are quite a few very amusing videos of white people lecturing, like, black police officers, for example, about white supremacy.
Yeah.
And how they're upholding white supremacy.
I highly recommend it.
You can see the black cop just thinking to himself, like, I am not getting paid enough to listen to this lunatic.
But of course, this person, to say these things, to speak in this way, you're only one of two things.
You're either lumped in proletariat, have absolutely nothing to lose, but In that case, you probably don't even know those arguments, and you're just there for the crime, essentially.
Or you're the over-educated product of the elite class, of the managerial elite.
And you're claiming rebellion, but you're the one whose hands are on the levers.
If there's one thing that I want people to take away from Howard Zinn, and it's not even so much that, okay, read the people's history.
Yeah, I mean, Knowledge is good, right?
As Steve Saylor always says, quoting Animal House.
Yes, it's worth readings in.
You might learn something.
I would encourage you, obviously, to go a bit farther.
I think a lot of the conservative critiques of it, like a patriot's history of the United States, fall flat.
As you said, there's kind of this cornball, syrupy sweet, we're all in this together type thing that doesn't really fit with what actual history is.
There We should obviously internalize this idea of never apologizing.
You referenced the savagery of Genghis Khan.
Well, in Mongolia, there's this giant statue of Genghis Khan.
I encourage you to look it up.
And it's like made out of silver or something.
It's pretty awesome.
I'm not going to lie.
Instead of changing Mount Rushmore, like we should build an equivalent of that, only it's like George Washington pointing toward the West with like a giant flaming sword or something like that.
Like, that would be cool.
I support that.
Yeah, I mean, that's the kind of thing that we should be doing if we were a real country.
But the idea of Zin, and this is why I think his fiction is actually worth reading, even though it's a slog, even though it's melodrama, even though it's basically agitprop, or they just kind of beat you over the head with it, and you're going to find it hard to relate to any of these people.
It's important to understand the progressive mind this idea that.
We are in rebellion we are incapable of holding authority even though.
We hold the authority and are willing to use it to the point of locking up our political enemies controlling what.
You here controlling what we think people should say controlling who has access to financial services controlling who gets to be online and everything else.
And when the same people tell you that January 6th was worse than 9-11, or when they compare it to the Civil War, you can't just brush it off and say, oh, well, these people are crazy.
You have to get into that mind and say, well, why, why would they say this?
How, how can I understand the mindset of this?
And the mindset of it is essentially that every kind of rebellion that doesn't come from their own ranks, Terrifies them because it's something authentic and I think that Progressives in this country for more than a century have been Leading both sides of every political movement where they are the establishment, but they're also the opposition to the establishment and we always just end up getting dragged in the same direction and
And conservatives all too often, they just keep defending yesterday's left, rather than pushing forward a positive vision for like where we want to take the country.
And also, what is the country?
I mean, are we something more than just a landmass populated by random groups of people?
I mean, if you go to CPAC and ask people that, I mean, they're not going to really understand it.
They're just going to say, well, no, if you believe in the American idea, which is Capitalism and freedom and democracy or something like that, then you're an American.
And if that's the case, then why should we bother with immigration enforcement?
Why should we bother with assimilation?
Why should we bother with anything at all?
For the record, I do disagree with you.
I cannot bring myself to recommend that anybody read Howard Zinn, either of People's History of the United States... Well, you probably already read it in school, so...
Nor do I recommend reading the conservative replies.
No, I don't recommend reading the conservative replies.
I don't think any of it is worth really anybody's time.
I mean, unless you're... I don't know.
Yeah, I can't actually think of it.
Did you have to read it in school?
Yeah, yeah.
I'd read chunks of it.
I mean, you talked about the one thing, but did you have to read it in, like, more than one class?
Oh yeah, yeah.
I mean, it's like, um, it's like To Kill a Mockingbird, you know?
It was assigned every other year in one form or another.
I mean, it was, you know, the whole book was never, well, the whole book to me, you know, you read chapters of it in different history classes and geography classes and stuff like that.
But I, you know, if you want to learn about, like, if you want to learn about history, find the oldest history books you can.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
If you want to learn about Andrew Jackson and his age, I would specifically recommend Robert Romini Um, but as far as learning all of those things that, you know, the sort of key dynamics of the left that you just talked about, I mean, I think you can absorb those lessons and come to kind of grasp that mentality from reading leftist thinkers who have considerably more interesting things to say than Zinn does, such as Noam Chomsky and maybe to a lesser extent
Chris Hedges, basically any of the other lefties we've covered on our podcast.
Even Marcuse at least has something, at least he grappled with the idea of what it is to be human, even if you're left kind of disappointed in the end with what he came up with.
At least he confronted these ideas as opposed to Zen writing plays about like, how dare they try to punish somebody who tried to murder someone?
Yeah, the plays are dumb and the history is just polemical and one-sided and anti-white and propagandistic.
I just don't For our younger listeners, it's like, yeah, sorry kids, but you're gonna get assigned this no matter what.
You get assigned it over and over and over again.
I remember sitting in school where I was getting assigned lies my teacher told me, you know, by my teacher, and you're just sitting there reading this, like, pounding your head against the desk, and it's just, you know, you're having to read these excerpts, and you're going through these sort of cultural revolution like confessions, racial guilt and everything else.
And you're just sitting in the back, bored out of your mind and thinking to yourself,
like if I just ripped my own head off in class, would anybody notice?
Like anything could be better than having to sit through this.
But that's, I think that's really the biggest takeaway is that so many of these so-called rebel historians
and so many of these rebel organizers, Saul Alinsky chief among them,
we'll have to get into him at some point, but I'm reading a biography of him now
called, Let Them Call Me Rebel.
And it's like rebel against what?
Your whole life is conning millionaires to give you money to screw up middle class neighborhoods.
What are you rebelling against?
I mean, if you actually had a rebellion, if you actually had a meaningful rebellion, even in a Marxist sense of the term, where you are displacing the class that controls the means of production and that controls the cultural mechanisms of power, all of these people would be out on the street.
All of these so-called radicals would have nothing to say.
And frankly, the people who align With people like us would be probably the ones in charge because we're the ones who have been cast out of all these things when you actually break down of who is the working class and who are the people who control the cultural mechanisms of power who does control the commanding heights of the economy.
I promise you it's not the far right.
And I also promise you that this idea of race was not cooked up by a bunch of capitalists who sat in a room one day saying, how can we trick the working class into dividing against itself?
Yes.
Yeah, that was one of the most fantastical of all of them.
In actuality, what powerful financial groups do is try to bring in as many outsiders as
possible for cheap labor, and we have it in writing that they try to promote diversity
within companies because they know it makes it harder to unionize.
You look at a lot of the strikes, even strikes led by outright communists in countries around the world, including, of course, South Africa.
But if you look at what happened in Australia and some of the movements here, all of them were very heavily racially motivated.
Because they understood that bringing in these foreigners was just an attempt to destroy their own pay and destroy what benefits they had won through outrageous sacrifice.
But anti-racism is really the most powerful weapon the enemies of labor have.
And that's a contradiction that, I mean, Zinn had to notice.
I mean, he kind of mentions it.
Time and again in people's history, but he always has to blame it on like, oh, well, it was propaganda from the capitalists.
It was propaganda from the top.
No, well, Ignitov, or I forget how to pronounce his name, but the guy who founded Race Trader Magazine and wrote that book, How the Irish Became White, he did eventually notice that anti-racism was used, you know, to damage like labor rights.
And he, Right.
anti, you know, relatively anti-union kind of by the end of his life, because he just found that
the unions, you know, ended up being kind of based in and promoted a sense of ethnic identity,
which he was very much opposed to. Right. Ultimately, I mean, you notice that the only
unions that really they get behind now are the unions of public employees, except police, of
of course.
Right, that's right. Yeah, because We're essentially, who are you collectively bargaining against?
You're bargaining against the public.
I'm not sure that should even be allowed.
That's a podcast for another time, I think.
Right.
When we talk about Howard Zinn, we talk about the faux opposition of the left and this idea that they are incapable of admitting that they wield authority.
I can't.
I know I've said it before, but I want to say it again, and I want to bring this home to every single one of you.
You always, always, always have to hit them with that.
That is their biggest vulnerability.
That is something they don't know how to respond to.
When you have guys who are working for the most powerful newspapers in the country, when you have guys working for intelligence agencies, when you have guys working for some of the most powerful corporations in the country, when you see where these people are getting donations and grants from, you have to say you are a tool of the ruling class.
That is what you are doing.
The receipts are all here.
There's no conspiracy.
It's right there.
They promote it themselves.
And When you look at a character like Howard Zinn, you have to regard him as a court historian.
In effect, the court historian who, in many ways, paved the way for everything that we're facing now.
If you want to know why they're teaching critical race theory to first graders, if you want to know why teachers are on TikTok bragging about how they're indoctrinated kids, if you want to know why we're dealing with the embarrassment that American higher education has become, look to Howard Zinn.
And look to this powerful self-deceit where the people who are in a position of trust and authority, who are deliberately destroying young minds and deliberately destroying patriotism and what I would consider to be positive values, think they're rebelling, even though they're in a position of power and trust.
And as far as what makes somebody who could be a good white advocate, I think it's somebody who can read a people's history of the United States, come out the other end and say, now I love my country more than ever.
So.
All right.
Well, I think that's actually like a beautiful note to end on.
So I think we should leave it there, but we'll see you all next week.
I appreciate it, guys.
Yes.
Thank you so much.
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