Ep. 752 dissects Jeffrey Epstein’s autopsy conspiracy theories while exposing William Barr’s purge of Sidney Blumenthal over prison protocol failures, then pivots to "uptown problems"—how modern debates like border security and anti-Semitism thrive in prosperity but lack historical context, citing George Washington’s slavery as a flawed progressive judgment. It contrasts Sean Hannity’s defense of American unity with Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib’s BDS ties to MIFTA, framing left-wing anti-Israel rhetoric as anti-Semitic dog whistles. Howard Zinn’s A People’s History is debunked by Mary Graybar, who exposes his communist past, plagiarism, and distortions—like equating U.S. camps to Nazi atrocities—while conservatives argue his legacy fuels woke tribalism over American exceptionalism. The episode concludes that progressivism now rejects the very ideals conservatism upholds. [Automatically generated summary]
More news continues to break in the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the multi-millionaire alleged to have supplied underage girls to some of the most powerful former presidents named Bill in the country.
New York medical examiner Barbara Sampson released her autopsy report declaring that Epstein committed suicide by wrapping his hands around his own throat and slamming his face into the floor of his cell repeatedly until he stopped struggling with himself.
Looney, internet conspiracy theorist, noted Sampson kept jiggling her eyebrows as she spoke, and many conjecture she was sending a message in Morse code saying, quote, I'm lying.
Epstein was murdered.
They're holding my family hostage.
Someone please call the police, unquote.
The Emmy's office issued a statement saying the conspiracy theory was absurd, and Ms. Sampson just happens to have eyebrows that twitched in Morse code.
Attorney General William Barr, meanwhile, fired Sidney Blumenthal, the man temporarily in charge of the prison where Epstein killed himself.
Blumenthal protested he did nothing wrong when he took Epstein off Suicide Watch, sent all the prison video cameras out for repairs, gave the prison guards the day off for a late Cinco de Mayo celebration, and told Epstein's fellow prisoners if they said one word to anyone, they'd think Epstein got off easy.
The disgruntled Blumenthal says he'll retire now to his private island in the Caribbean, which he bought with money left over from the fund for Haitian Hurricane Relief, which was a gift from a friend.
The United Kingdom's Prince Andrew, who was caught on video inside Epstein's mansion, released a statement saying, quote, I find it abhorrent that Epstein and his friends were enjoying the tender flesh of exquisitely young girls to their heart's delight until they could barely see through the fog of pure pleasure, and I'm appalled that anyone would suggest I was a part of those glorious, glorious days, unquote.
Officials say the facts will continue to pile up until the truth is completely buried.
Virtues as Luxuries00:02:58
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty-zing.
It's a wonderful day, hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing!
Oh, hurrah, hooray!
Oh, hooray, hurrah!
You know, when I was more active in the movie business, I had this friend with whom I worked on several projects.
And whenever we'd hit a snag or get in a fight with a studio, my friend would shrug and say, it's an uptown problem.
What he meant was, whether we won or lost, whether we got our movie made or crashed and burned, we were still having a good time and making a lot of money doing something many people would kill to be able to do.
Almost every issue facing America today is an uptown problem.
Our border is under siege because people want to live here because it's so great.
Our politicians want to rob and divvy up the spoils because there's so much spoils to divvy up.
We have entanglements overseas because we have the means and power to handle those entanglements while others don't.
Even the social questions that arise are questions that only arise when your basic needs have been taken care of.
In a non-technological tribe struggling for survival, gender roles and sexual morality aren't elective.
They're essential.
Babies are precious.
Women have to bear them and take care of them.
Men have to protect the women while they do that.
Virginity gives men a reason to protect the women and children because it's proof of fatherhood.
If no one else had her, the kid must be yours.
Homosexuality, which some say doesn't even exist in primitive societies, is a dangerous waste of human resources, and so on.
Likewise, it's probably not an accident that the universal human practice of slavery was rolled back at the same time the Industrial Revolution rolled in and more slave work could be done by machines.
It's probably not an accident that people began to feel a tender concern for indigenous peoples only after their homes were secure from aboriginal attacks.
None of this is a judgment on what's actually right or wrong.
It's only to say that some virtues, like being anti-slavery, may be luxuries.
They're good ideas we can now afford to have because those who came before us created a world in which we could afford to have them.
And other virtues may only be luxuries and not virtues at all.
Gender roles and sexual morality, for instance, may be good ideas whether they're survival necessities or not.
But in any case, and in every case, once we begin to understand that our problems are uptown problems, we also understand that we live in time and we live in a specific time.
We weren't just planted in this prosperity.
It was created for us before we got here.
We should look backward with gratitude to the people who made this country and move forward with humility because you never know what luxurious new idea might bring your rich, fat, happy civilization tumbling down around your ears.
At which point, survival will become an issue once again and luxurious virtues will become luxuries we can't afford.
Ring Com: Stay Connected00:02:24
We'll talk about that more in a sec.
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The mailbag.
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Values In This Moment00:14:41
Then you can ask me anything you want about religion, about your personal life, about politics.
And all my answers are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life on occasion for the better.
But you want to get your questions in now because tomorrow is the live, backstage live.
So I won't have a show tomorrow.
I will have my mailbag show on Thursday, but I'll only have time to curate the letters today.
So if you've got them in now, I'll be able to pick out your letter and answer your questions on Thursday.
So, you know, the reason I bring up the question of luxurious values is because so much of our conversation goes on as if we just kind of, we just dropped here and all our values kind of rain down on us like out of the air.
And we just kind of know these things.
Bill Maher once said, it's common sense.
Morality is common sense.
If it's common sense, people would have thought of it before.
You know, a lot of our values are values in this moment.
It doesn't mean they're not good values, and it doesn't mean they are good values.
It simply means they're values created in the moment.
And that's why, you know, we don't, this is why we don't cover up murals of George Washington, like I did, I think, was in San Francisco, because there were pictures of slaves and all this stuff.
Because we understand George Washington lived in his time.
And instead of saying, oh, he was bad because he held slaves, what we should say is a man that good, a man that virtuous, if a man that good and that virtuous held slaves, then what would we have done?
We would have been even worse because we are not as good.
We're not as virtuous as George Washington.
Not one of us really is.
So, I mean, that's why we understand ourselves as living in time.
And when we get a little breathing space, sometimes we can have values that our forebears couldn't have.
They just couldn't have it.
They couldn't afford it.
You know, you're standing out there on the frontier and Indians are attacking.
You can't sit around and say, ah, the Native Americans, what a wonderful group of people.
You just have to kill them to protect your family.
That's what you have to do.
And so we can sit here and pass judgment on them, but we don't because we are safe.
We're living in our safe places.
We're surrounded by police.
We're surrounded by army.
We can afford to have these tender feelings about all this, but we have to remember that those tender feelings exist in time.
We all exist in time.
And the issue of racism itself, the issue of racism itself, is in fact, it's in a way, it's a value we invented.
The idea that racism is bad is a value that grows out of our philosophy, out of the West's philosophy, out of Christianity, but it takes thousands of years before it becomes an issue.
Look, in the old days, people, you know, a lot of Indian tribes, for instance, just called themselves the people.
We're just the people, right?
Because everybody else is less than the people.
The phrase barbarian comes from what it sounded like to the Greeks to hear foreigners talk.
Bar, bar, bar.
It sounds like they're stuttering.
I think it originates in Sanskrit, but wherever it comes from, it is basically mockery of those people over there who don't know how to speak a civilized language like Greek.
So they're barbarians.
They go, bar, bar, bar.
So, you know, this is the thing.
We talk about things like, oh, we're in a fight.
You know, these primitive people are nationalists.
Oh, these evil Trump supporters are nationalists.
Whereas we good people are globalists.
We want everything to be.
But those are all things that are created in time, right?
Nationalism itself, you start with tribalism.
You start with your tribe and you defend your tribe.
And nobody ever said, you know, we're just going to let that other tribe that wants to come and take our food and take our women.
We'll just let them come in and do that because that's the kind of great old people we are.
We're just that kind of great people.
Nobody thinks about that.
Why do people become nationalists?
People become nationalists because of transportation and communication gets big enough where you can start to communicate with a place that's defined geographically, like the island of Great Britain, right?
You can start to communicate with all those people.
Now you have a nation because it's all the tribes that are living under the aegis of maybe this one conquering king.
And that's how nationalism comes to be.
Well, where does globalism come from?
The same thing.
Globalism is only created once you know where the globe is, first of all, once you know what's on the globe, and once you can communicate in an instant from one place to another.
So we are a global civilization.
It's not a question of whether we're going to be a global civilization.
We already are.
It's a question of what that global civilization is going to look like.
And when you have a nation, right, your nation is defined by geographical boundaries, by how far you can communicate, by how much of a territory one king can rule, all right, until something happens.
Guess what that is?
It's the creation of the United States.
And then that's when you have the issue of racism.
I'll get back to that in just a moment, but let's first talk about Lightstream.
I know we all do this.
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So the idea of racism only becomes an issue when you create a country that is defined by something new.
It's not defined by territory.
It's not defined by the area that you can communicate with.
It is defined by an idea.
Yes, it is held upon a certain piece of land, and that land is ultimately defined by how much of it is under our control and by natural borders and natural coastlines and all that stuff.
But who becomes part of that country is who ascribes to the ideas under which the country is founded.
And that's when racism becomes an issue because suddenly you and the Irish guy next to you or the Italian guy next to you or the black guy next to you, suddenly you are countrymen.
You are not just people of basically the same race, basically the same kind, living on an island or living in a nation based on the people who conquered that place.
You are there ascribing to an idea together.
And that's when racism becomes a problem.
It is essentially, essentially an uptown problem like everything else.
And that's why, this is why I think conservatism is progressive, whereas progressivism is regressive.
Conservatism is basically saying these values, these values that shaped our country, that shaped our world, should be kept in place because they are the values that created the idea of racism.
Racism was not a problem anywhere else.
Nobody ever sat around.
I mean, in Rome, they had a little bit of this because Rome was a multi-ethnic empire, but it was a multi-ethnic empire.
Nobody denied that it was run by the Romans in Rome.
And as the people surrounding Rome wanted more and more rights, they had all kinds of tremendous fights about that.
But still, Rome was a multi-ethnic empire.
We are a multi-ethnic nation.
That is an entirely new idea.
And that's when racism becomes a problem.
When you've got to say, oh, this guy next to me is my countryman.
When we go to war, he and I are going to be in a foxhole together.
So therefore, we are brothers in arms and brothers in a nation.
And that makes racism a problem.
Because if you don't like the guy because he's Italian or Irish or Jewish or black, then it's a problem.
And that's why conservatism, we are trying to conserve ideas that create this idea that makes racism a problem, where the left is going to progress right back to the past.
They want to progress right back to the past.
And that's why you see what's happening now is this upsurge, this upsurge of racism on the left.
We talked yesterday about Heather McDonald's great piece in the Wall Street Journal.
It's still available.
Wall Street Journal is behind a paywall because they want to get paid for their work, which I know what a concept.
But Heather McDonald wrote a great piece saying it's not Donald Trump who brings up race all the time.
It's the left interpreting what he says as racist.
But the left is constantly talking about whiteness and blackness and identity and all these different things that are a problem.
And now it's all coming home to Roost.
It's all becoming visible in their anti-Semitism problem.
You know, it's really interesting.
They had this thing in Portland over the weekend where Antifa and the fascists who call themselves anti-fascists and the Proud Boys who seem to have a little bit of a democracy problem themselves were fighting each other, right?
They're out there.
They're going to have demonstrations and counter-demonstrations.
And Antifa is just an absolutely miserable, violent leftist organization.
And Proud Boys seem to be instigating violence too in the name of white supremacy.
So Sean Hannity goes on TV, right?
And Sean Hannity says a pox on both your houses, a plague on both your houses.
This is not the way this goes.
We're one country, even though Sean is a deep, deep partisan, pro-Trump partisan, he is saying the people I argue with, I'm arguing with, right?
We're not enemies.
We're opponents in this fight.
We're not hitting each other over the head with clubs.
Here's just a taste of what Sean said.
But what matters here is we can have a thorough, complete, passionate, open discussion of ideas and ideals.
We don't need fists and baseball bats and mace.
This show will always condemn hatred on any side.
White supremacy, bigotry, you have no place in this society.
None whatsoever.
People chanting, what do we want, dead cops?
When do we want them now?
You are radicals and you're hurting our country.
And you're putting the men and women that protect and serve us at risk.
If you're an Antifa extremist, the same goes to you.
What do they have in common?
They're all tied to sick, ugly, twisted, evil ideologies.
We've got to remain one United States.
This is a country of God's greatest gift to man, created equal.
God's natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
That's a gift for all of us, all American citizens.
Sadly, we don't always see these values defended on the left.
In fact, look at today.
Two anti-Semitic members of Congress have been given a free pass from the media mob and the Democratic Party.
Imagine if it was Trump, though.
That's right.
He's absolutely right.
He's talking about Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.
Now remember, this is evil Sean Hannity on the evil right, right?
The white supremacists.
He's coming out and saying, no, no, that's not what this is about.
It's about the ideas that bind us all together.
And by the way, while the New York Times is going El Paso, El Paso, El Paso, El Paso, because that's where a white supremacist shot people, only Hannity has been covering Chicago, where the left's policies have created an inner city that is as violent as any place in America.
Sean is covering that.
He's got people going out there.
So while we're saying this, he's absolutely right.
Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, these two virulently anti-Semitic Muslim women in Congress, they're claiming that they were denied entry into Israel, which is a half-truth.
They were denied, they were allowed to go into Israel with a congressional delegation, a bipartisan Republican and Democrat congressional delegation.
They went and staggered times.
I can't remember if it was the Republicans first, and then they overlapped with the Democrats.
And then so they were both there together, and then the Democrats stayed, or maybe it was the other way around, but it was a bipartisan trip.
They went over.
They were perfectly allowed to go with them.
They were banned when they wanted to go, sponsored by a virulent anti-Semitic group, MIFTA, which has sent out blood libels, which is the most primitive form of anti-Semitism.
They supported terrorism.
They did all these things.
And so now, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar stage a press conference that is one lie after another.
We're going to start with Ilhan Omar.
I have to tell you this.
Ilhan Omer is kind of an attractive lady and she has a very lovely smile.
And every time I see, she smiles when she's saying the ugliest things, the ugliest things come out of her mouth and she's got that smile on her face.
Every time I see her, I think of this line from Hamlet.
I quoted, I printed it out here because I always misquote things, but it's, oh, most pernicious woman, Hamlet says, oh, most pernicious woman, oh villain, villain, smiling, damned villain.
My tables meet it as I set it down that one may smile and smile and be a villain.
Every time I see Ilhan Omar, I think one may smile and smile and be a villain because she keeps flashing that smile while she says the most hateful, hateful things.
So here she is talking about our ally, Israel, our pals, Israel, and the only democracy in the region.
And when she says this, in case you're listening just and not watching, when she calls them the only democracy in the region, she uses scare quotes as if somehow that's not true, although I'd like her to show why it's not true.
We give Israel more than $3 million in aid every year.
This is predicated on there being an important ally in the region and the only democracy in the Middle East.
But denying visit to duly elected members of Congress is not consistent with being an ally.
And denying millions of people freedom of movement or expression or self-determination is not consistent with being a democracy.
We must be asking, as Israel's ally, the Netanyahu government stop the expansion of settlements on Palestinian land and ensure full rights for Palestinians if we are to give them aid.
So they're not an ally.
They're not a democracy.
That's only just, those are scare quotes.
And we must demand, you know, one of the reasons she has time to do this is because Congress doesn't do anything anymore.
They don't actually pass any laws.
Believing in BDS00:15:36
So she just has time to get in front of cameras and make a big fuss over the fact that she was not allowed to go.
This anti-Semitic woman was not allowed to go with this anti-Semitic group into a country full of Jews for some reason.
God knows why they wouldn't let her in.
But they didn't want her to go in doing the BDS stuff, which would be incredibly destructive to Israel.
So she says this long thing about that they're not really a democracy.
They're not really an ally.
And my question is, who is?
Who in the Middle East is giving Muslims more rights than Israel?
The Muslims within Israel, the Muslim citizens of Israel, have more rights than they do in any Muslim country.
Period.
That's it.
They have more rights in Israel than they have in any Muslim country.
So who's she comparing them with?
And why?
Why is it Israel that's the problem?
You know, this country, that country is so tiny.
It is so small.
If you've ever been there, you can literally walk the width of it.
Let's see, what would it take?
It would take five hours, I think.
That's what it would take to walk.
I'm doing that calculation.
My head takes me 20 minutes to walk a mile.
It's something like 15 miles across.
So that would be, yeah, five hours to get across the entire country.
And they're being shelled.
They've been invaded.
All this stuff is happening.
But all that history doesn't matter because she hates Jews.
That's why.
That's why.
And she smiles and smiles and she is a villain.
And then there is Rashida Tlaib, who's just a loon and just uses emotion and the tearing up.
And she puts on a big parade.
She went over.
She wanted to go over and they wouldn't let her go over with this anti-Semitic organization.
So she said, well, please let me go over and visit my elderly grandmother because she's 90 and I'll never see her again and this is my only chance.
And they said, oh, all right, as long as you don't do any of this BDS stuff, you can go over and visit your grandmother.
She said, no, I don't want to do it.
Forget it.
If I can't do my BDS stuff, I ain't going.
And this is her comment.
As a young girl visiting Palestine to see my grandparents and extended family, I watched as my mother had to go through dehumanizing checkpoints.
Oh, she was a United States citizen and proud American.
I was there when my city was in a terrible car accident.
And my cousins and I cried so she could have access to the best hospitals, which were in Jerusalem.
I remember shaking with fear when checkpoints appeared in the small village of Bet Urul Foca.
Tanks and guns everywhere.
I remember visiting East Jerusalem with my then husband and him escorted off the bus, although he was a United States citizen, just so security forces could harass him.
All I can do as my city's granddaughter, as the granddaughter of a woman who lives in Occupy Terror J, is to elevate her voice by exposing the truth the only way I know how.
Yeah, well, when she starts to do that, we'll let you know.
Meanwhile, it's all nonsense.
I mean, the reason you can't get into Jerusalem to get to the hospitals is because the Palestinians have sent suicide bombers through ambulances.
They've sent them in ambulances to blow people up.
The reason there's no hospitals where they are is because the Palestinian authorities spend the money they get, immense amounts of money in international aid, and they spend it on missiles to basically lob at Israel.
And where are all these checkpoints?
Why is there this wall?
That wall that works so well to keep terrorism out of Israel was built to keep terrorists out of Israel.
So all of this is this imaginary world that they're living in, this fake world that they're living in, and selling to us because they're anti-Semites, because they hate Jews.
And where are the Democrats?
Where's the Sean Hannity of the Democrats condemning this?
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All they're doing is supporting this idea that somehow a congresswoman from a country that gets aid from us has been denied entrance.
They weren't denied entrance.
They were denied entrance under a situation that would have been deeply, deeply harmful to Israel, which by the way, they never said they wanted to visit Israel.
They said they wanted to visit Palestine.
Palestine in and of itself, denying the existence of this country.
So where is the left?
You know, Bill Maher, and I guess maybe he's the guy to compare to Hannity in this case.
I'm sure I would blow the top of his head off.
I've always had respect for Bill Maher.
He's always stood up for free speech.
He stood up for diverse opinions.
He stood up for the diversity of opinion, even though he's on the left and I disagree with him about a lot of what he said, but I've always had respect for him.
And he said this about the system of thought that leads, that has led the left into anti-Semitism.
Here it is.
BDS is a bullshit purity test by people who want to appear woke but actually slept through history class.
It's true.
Thank you.
It's predicated on this notion, I think it's very shallow thinking, that the Jews are in Israel mostly white and the Palestinians are browner, so they must be innocent and correct and the Jews must be wrong.
As if the occupation came right out of the blue, that this completely peaceful people found themselves occupied.
Forget about the infitatas and the suicide bombings and the rockets and how many wars.
And let me read.
Omar Barghudi is one of the co-founders of the movement.
His quote, no Palestinian, rational Palestinian, not a sellout Palestinian, will ever accept a Jewish state in Palestine.
So that's where that comes from, this movement.
Someone who doesn't even want a Jewish state at all.
Somehow this side never gets presented in the American media.
It's very odd.
He's saying that it's a shallow form of thinking, but it's actually a regressive form of thinking.
He's absolutely right.
It's the brownness of the Palestinians and the fact that Israel has beaten them in wars, so it makes Israel look like the spearhead of Western civilization, which it is.
So it's the Western civilization against the poor little minorities.
All of this is a regressive way of thinking.
It's the old way of thinking.
It's the way of thinking that came before the Constitution, before the Declaration, before the invention of America, which was the invention of racism as a bad thing.
Because racism only becomes a bad thing when you redefine the nation as a series of ideas.
Conservatism is the progressive idea.
Progressivism is going back to before, before America was formed.
It is not such a good thing.
Believe me, you won't like it there.
All right.
Interestingly, we have a guest coming on named Mary Graybar who has written this book called Debunking Howard Zinn.
And so much of this, so much of this thinking is taught to people through Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States, because Howard Zinn is the guy who sells this idea, this idea that somehow you have to tell the story of America as a story of the oppressed people.
And he says, you know, I'm going to tell the story from the position of the slaves and from the position of the Indians.
And look, all those people have stories, and of course, they should be told.
They are part of the story of America.
But the question is, the question is, why is it?
Why is Howard Zinn in a position to think about those stories?
And of course, as I always, I always, whenever I go and talk to college students, I always tell them, you know, I can do this to anybody.
I can tell anybody's story like that.
I can tell anybody's story.
And I'll pick out some poor guy in the audience and I'll say, let me tell your life story, but I'm going to start with your porn surges.
Because we all do bad things.
We all do squirrely things.
We all have immoral moments.
We all have immoral practices.
We all participate in the immorality of our day as people who believe in abortion and participate in that immorality of our day and sometimes don't even know.
They actually don't even know that it's a bad thing.
And so it's easy, it's easy to tell those stories.
You know, I want to just go back and talk about the people on the left defending this idea, defending the idea of anti-Semitism because there's some kind of special goodness, as Mar was saying, there's some kind of special goodness to the Palestinians.
Rich Lowry, on CNN, they led an actual conservative on CNN.
Rich Lowry got into it with Peter Beinart of the Atlantic, and Beinart just lost his stuff.
just lost it and started screaming as Lowry said to him, how can you support this organization MIFTA, which has done and the fact that these congresswomen have retweeted anti-Semitic cartoons?
How can you support all that?
Why aren't you, why isn't that the same thing as all these accusations about white supremacy?
Why is it Donald Trump is guilty of white supremacy because somebody else did something, but these congresswomen are not guilty of anti-Semitism when they actually hooked on to an anti-Semitic group.
There are many Palestinians who believe that Palestinians have the right to use violence because of the daily violent oppression they feel.
I disagree with them.
I believe in only nonviolent protests.
But the point is, every time any Palestinian leader or any Palestinian organization tries to expose what happens, this is exactly what happens.
People try to discredit them because they don't want to talk about the real issue.
The real issue is an absolutely indefensible denial of basic human rights.
What's that to do with supporting terrorism?
I mean, no one has any problem with harshly criticizing Israel.
That's fine.
But you don't support blowing up innocent people.
That's just a bottom line.
No, something we all have.
The purpose behind focusing on this is to try to distract attention from the reality on the ground, which is funded by American people.
Our tax dollars blow up the homes of people who cannot get permits to build because they're non-citizens under military.
The spear standard for a white nationalist organization is not a son racist thing.
I support some terrorism.
With all due respect, that's okay.
You have not entered there and seen this on the ground.
I know Hanana Shrawi.
She is not even close to a white nationalist.
She is someone seeking social freedom.
So why does the organization publish things supporting terrorism?
See, like I said, the right, even the most evil of right-wingers, that evil Sean Hannity, are against this form of bigotry.
Why?
Because they ascribe to American values.
The left has lost its way, and anti-Semitism is always the devil's flagpole.
It always tells you when people have lost their way, and these people have.
We've got a great guest coming up.
As I was saying, Mary Graybar, but we got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come to dailywire.com, subscribe, and get your mailbag questions in now because we'll be answering them on Thursday, but I got to curate them today.
So get your questions in today.
Mary Graybar is a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, the founder of the Dissident Professor Education Project.
She taught at the college level for 20 years, most recently at Emory University, excellent university.
She is the author of Debunking Howard Zinn, Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation Against America.
Mary, are you there?
I am here, yes.
Hi.
Hi, how are you doing?
Thank you.
Thank you for coming on.
Oh, you're welcome.
Can you explain how powerful this guy Zinn is?
I mean, explain the effects that he has had.
Oh, it reverberates throughout education, throughout our culture.
I've been following this guy for about 10 years now, and I see every year that his influence is increasing.
His book, A People's History of the United States, has become accepted in classrooms, especially in high school advanced placement courses.
There are passages quoted in other textbooks and history books for children.
There's the Zinn Education Project.
You can download materials.
One city council member took her oath of office on a people's history.
There are songs written for him.
Dance, dances choreographed in his honor.
Movies, rock bands, songs.
It's anti-fud, Black Lives Matter.
He's everywhere.
So his basic idea is that we're the bad guys.
Is that fair to say?
Yes.
Yeah.
Oh, absolutely.
The United States is just rotten to the core and it needs to be overthrown.
That's the message.
Well, then let's, before we look at his message, who was he?
I mean, what was his life about?
Well, Howard Zinn died in 2010.
He was born in 1922 in New York, grew up in Brooklyn.
So when he was a teenager in the 1930s, that was sort of the epicenter of the American communist movement.
He got involved in the communist movement, was a member of the Communist Party from about 1946 to 53, card-carrying member.
I have that on pretty good authority.
So we can, we're almost, you know, 100% certain of that.
And, you know, gave up his party membership formally in order to infiltrate the institutions.
And he became a college professor, taught at Spelman College until 1963, and then was fired and then landed on his feet at Boston University, where he gave John Silber a lot of grief until he retired in 1988, and then went on to make movies, give lectures, go around the world, give courses here and there.
Pretty much a life of luxury, what a lot of professors hope for.
But a communist underneath.
Oh, yes.
So in the book, I know that he says, I'm going to tell the history from the point of view of the victims.
Now, that's an ideological point of view, and you can say that point of view is wrong.
Plagiarism and Misrepresentation00:06:08
But is he factually wrong?
Are the facts in the people's history incorrect?
Yes, and that's the reason I wrote the book, because a lot of people have fumed and complained about it because it's anti-American.
And what I've done is I've looked at his sources, saw where he plagiarized, saw where he twisted people's words around to mean the opposite, where he left out critical material in an ellipses, just outright lied.
So I've gone back through the sources and I've also checked out other reputable history books, not only by conservative historians, but also some liberal ones.
And if you look at just about any reputable history, you will see that the points that Howard Zinn makes are just wrong.
They're factually wrong.
Well, how does he get around?
We're talking to Mary Graybar, the author of Debunking Howard Zinn, exposing the fake history that turned a generation against America.
What does he do with incredible American successes like just off the top of my head, like winning World War II?
How does he underplay those?
Oh, well, we were just like the Nazis, according to him.
Yeah, no.
Wait, how does he get there?
Well, there's a good portion of my book devoted to what he says about the Japanese American relocation camps.
And what he does is he leaves out critical information.
I mean, this was just, it was like a mystery hunt.
You know, you're looking for some treasure.
He claims that no one knew about these relocation camps until 1945, after the end of the war, because of an article in Harper's Magazine.
Well, you know, I went and looked up some old Harper's magazines in 1942.
There was an article about, you know, the first one and, you know, that it was definitely not a concentration camp.
But, you know, and described life there, that they were clean, the food was pretty good, and so forth.
So, you know, while a lot of conservatives did not approve of FDR's order at that time, by no stretch of the imagination, can you say that those were anywhere close to concentration camps?
So he uses things like that, twists the facts around to make this analogy between the American government and Nazi Germany.
What does he do?
How does he get away?
Most American communists, the vast number of American communists, finally gave up on communism when they saw what Stalin was doing, when they saw the Soviet Union collapse.
How does he get around that?
I mean, what does he say about the Soviet Union that makes us as bad as they are?
Well, he kind of thinks the way these Antifa people think.
They think that, and this is the way he thought.
He said, you know, a top-down bureaucracy or government is bad.
But he was proposing this egalitarian government, real communism, he called them local communist communities.
So it just hasn't been tried, you know, the right way.
You know, Stalin may have done some, he did some bad things.
He's a leader with flaws.
But we're going to get it right.
And, you know, Ho Chi Minh, of course, was great.
He was the real Thomas Jefferson.
But there is, but he puts out this sort of fantasy that if we just got rid of all government, especially, you know, a government like ours and an economic system based on capitalism, that we're going to get it right.
We're going to have this sort of, you know, grassroots communism, and everything's just going to be really, you know, just grand.
And people will, there's a passage I quote where he says, you know, people will won't have to work as much.
They'll have more time for leisure.
There'll be plenty.
There'll be no poor people, you know, et cetera.
It's going to be great.
Yeah.
Do you have any hope of rolling this back, this incredible influence that this essentially pernicious book has had on people?
Is there any chance of fighting back, of rolling that back?
Well, that's what my book is for.
I wanted to give a tool to people.
There have been efforts.
There was a legislator in Arkansas who tried to introduce a bill.
It went nowhere.
He just wanted to keep the book out of public schools.
But what I've done is I've looked at Zinn's major points and sort of provided a rebuttal.
And I've also pointed to other sources.
So what a lot of defenders of Zinn and Zinn himself said was that, well, you just disagree because you disagree with my politics.
You're a right-winger.
Well, no, it's the facts.
And I lay it out.
These are the real facts.
This is what this conservative historian says.
This is what this liberal historian says.
This is where he plagiarizes.
And he plagiarizes not from a history book, but from a book, a screed written by a socialist anti-Vietnam War activist for high school students.
And that forms the opening pages of his book, the most famous ones where Columbus lands in the New World and is greeted by the Arawaks, if you've read those pages.
So this is a systematic way to go through the points he makes point by point and say, this is where he lies.
Where Else Do You Go?00:02:16
This is where he misrepresents and plagiarizes.
Mary Graybar, author of Debunking Howard Zinn, Exposing the Fake History that Turned a Generation Against America.
Mary, thank you for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Oh, you're welcome.
It was a pleasure.
You know, we had a little trouble getting Mary on the line, so we've gone a little long, so I'm going to have to stop there.
But please let me remind you one more time.
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