Ep 23 | Arthur Herman | The Glenn Beck Podcast

You are one of my favorite historians.

This is like a dream come true, to say with you.

At your service.

It is great.

You have written so much, and

I want to hit on a lot of these.

The idea of the decline in Western history, Joseph McCarthy, how the Scots invented the modern world,

the rule to rule the waves, how the British Navy shaped.

I've got questions on that one.

Gandhi, Churchill, I am fascinated by those two.

One of my favorite books of all time is Freedom's Forge that you wrote: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II.

The Cave and the Light, Douglas MacArthur, and 1917, Lennon Bies.

I know you do.

I know you do.

And

my feeling is, as an historian, you can't afford to despise your figures.

What you're trying to do is get inside their minds and figure out why they did what they did and what the consequence of what they did.

Was it a good thing or was it ultimately a bad thing?

And I think we have to say about Wilson, ultimately, it was a lot of bad things.

A lot of bad things.

Do you think he was a really

bad guy?

The way he

loved the Klan Klan and all of that stuff.

That was part of the times, I think, and also part of his background.

It was there are many things to dislike about Wilson, and a lot of his thinking on things like race is very, very different from the way we think now.

Not so different from the way a lot of people did at the time, of course, particularly if you came from Virginia, rural Virginia, as he did.

But the thing that's so fascinating about Wilson

is that he was a man so utterly convinced of his rightness,

of a level of self-righteousness that would allow him, in his own mind, to lie to people.

Yeah.

That would allow him, you know, the meeting, you know, the ends justify any means.

Yeah.

That's very much part of Wilson's practice.

Very much.

Very much.

And I guess what I don't like about him and some of the people that surrounded him and the progressive

era that he really kind of pushed forward

is that arrogance.

And we're seeing it today.

We're seeing it.

Oh, I think so.

I think it permeates.

It's always permeated the progressive mind and the progressive movement in this country

and in Europe, but in this country particularly because it's able to latch onto that kind of Protestant evangelical zeal that lies at the basis of so much of American culture, good and bad.

But when it's linked to political movements, boy, watch out!

Yeah.

Because it can cause so much pain and suffering, all for a higher cause and all for a higher motive.

Aaron Powell, so would you?

Because

people don't

realize that social justice started out as a Catholic thing in the 1800s and it was a good thing.

And then it has morphed and morphed and morphed and it became more and more about politics and

the government's power to create justice, social justice, even things out.

I think.

You go ahead.

Yeah, no, I think it took on a Marxist machine and now it's become virtually the equivalent.

The Marxist social and historical analysis, which is really at the bottom very, very simplistic, now underlies so much of what the left does

that I think if you go to Marx, you go to Lenin, you understand so much more about the American left today

than you would by reading any of the classic figures of American progressivism like Herbert Crowley

or Bellamy or Edward Bellamy, any other figures who were Wilson's contemporaries and Wilson's admirers.

But Marx is the name of the game today.

And that's been, that's part of what drives the extremism that you get on the left.

And it's also, I think, what makes

the life of the mind in places like universities and colleges now really so,

what's the word I'm looking for?

So stagnant,

so lacking in

any kind of intellectual vitality.

At the same time, of course, in which they're shutting down dissent, shutting down any view which in any way deviates from what they consider to be the party line.

You mentioned,

you know, when

social justice is connected to, you know, the Protestant,

you know, viewpoint or evangelical.

The left has its own religion now.

I mean, it is getting to the point to where science doesn't matter.

Nothing matters.

It is a religion.

And

if you dare to question,

it is almost

it's heresy.

And to and to cross,

when a system of beliefs becomes an orthodoxy, it signals two things.

One is dissent is not to be tolerated,

or even the hint of dissent.

I mean, that's really where we are now.

It's not even if you don't dissent, but you don't

stand up enough.

Right, or you don't hit the exact points when discussing issues such as race, issues such as class, issues such as gender,

you can be cast out.

But

what it also does is that at the same time it becomes, as I say,

this fierce enforcer of that orthodoxy, what it also is, Glenn, is a sign of vulnerability.

Orthodoxies,

the whole nature of orthodoxies is that they're rigid.

They can't adjust to change.

They can't deal with reality.

Reality has to be seen through a lens, which is defined by the ideology or by the system of religious beliefs.

And the hardening of that system into an orthodoxy is a sign that it knows it's in trouble.

And this is where we are today.

We're with

a left which is intellectually bankrupt.

I would argue too, morally bankrupt.

but which has seized the means by which to enforce its standards and its creed so that being a conservative, being a conservative commentator,

having a different view of these kinds of issues becomes a form of social death.

I mean, that's really what's happening.

I know people who worked in the Obama administration and say they are no longer welcome in the circles of the left.

Aaron Ross Powell, nothing surprised me.

Right?

Revolutions devour their own children.

Yeah.

And this is exactly what we're seeing with the left today.

Wilson and Lenin, for sure.

Since Marx plays a big role now, let's go to Lenin and show me how that

plays out here.

Well, in the case of Lenin, what you have is

someone for whom Marx was less of a way to understand the world and more as a way to understand power.

Lenin, in the end, was only concerned about one thing, and that is getting power and holding on to it.

He isn't the one who sort of said power comes from the barrel of a gun, but that basically underlies everything that he believed and understood about the politics of his own day, how it was that the czarist government was able to control the masses and

dominate that empire, and that was the power that he wanted in order to reshape it.

Aaron Trevor Brandon, didn't he say right around the time of the revolution, no, no, no, we're not communist.

We're...

I think he used social democrats, didn't he?

Or something along those lines?

He used to say that.

Well, social democrats, yeah, social democrats at that time were, of course, mainstream Marxists.

Right.

And in a country like Russia,

being a social democrat, you were bound to endorse some form of revolution because it was very unlikely that you were going to wait long enough for a conscious working class to come into existence to create the kind of revolution that Marxists were anticipating in countries like Germany and

Great Britain and France and the other leading industrial nations.

So

you were bound to endorse some sort of revolution.

In Lenin's case, the revolution that he saw was one that would be driven not by a,

certainly not by the masses and not by the workers, but would be driven by a tiny revolutionary elite.

who understood how to seize events, to topple the old order, and then to use it to impose a new order run by them.

And from his standpoint, the whole question of sort of waiting for the right occasion, waiting for the right opportunity in terms of what was happening in society itself, waiting for that moment when industrialization, which was, as I explained in the book, was already well underway in Russia.

Russia was on its way.

We would call today, we would think about it as basically an

emerging economy and where it was headed.

But the event that he seizes on as the moment to seize power is when Russia makes the terrible mistake of entering World War I

and fighting a war which is way beyond its capacity to sustain or to deal with the consequences

when defeat comes on the battlefield.

If you read Fabian Socialists in England and all throughout Europe,

they know the pain that's going to happen with World War I.

They know it.

They're looking at it like Lenin did.

This is a good opportunity to redraw the draw the map and

to bring in a new world order.

Do

for instance, with Lenin and Stalin, Mao,

do they at any point

stop and say

this doesn't work?

That's a really great question.

Is there even a moment of self-reflection?

Reflection, just a moment.

Or do they just not care?

I think that they don't particularly care.

I think that's exactly right.

And I think also, too, what, again,

as I was going to say with regard to Lenin and Marx, what Marx does is justify a way to seize power and to hold it.

And once you have power, power is itself self-justifying.

Right.

There are no moral principles.

There are no ethical standards to appeal outside the realm of power and the realm of politics.

And once you've located yourself in that space, and all the men that you just described did, and we can throw Hitler into the mix too if we want to, and Himmler and the other key figures who organized that particular totalitarian dictatorship, then you're in.

I mean, then there's never a moment of doubt.

You know exactly what you need to do, and that is to consolidate power and to hang on to it, and that every move you make is a means by which you extend it and grow it.

Probably the only one of that mix who had any kind of lingering self-doubts was probably Mussolini, actually.

I'm not written about

it.

Franco's in a totally different, totally different camp.

But Mussolini, he is, after all, the founder of fascism

as a political doctrine and even as a working ideology for running a state,

in this case, his own, Italy.

And yet, at the same time, when you look at Mussolini, you look at him, he's a man, I think, who is ultimately really plagued by self-doubts and a deep sense of shame about the country that he runs.

You know, his son-in-law became foreign minister, Count Ciano, and you read Conciano's diaries, which are fascinating reading.

Glenn, you really got to pick them up and look at them.

But one of the scenes in which he, in the book in the 1930s, is where a delegation of peasants have come from, I can't remember where it was, from Sardinia or from Piedmont, and they've come to see Mussolini, and just before they go have you know, the, the, the, the meeting and his office and so on, they relieve themselves underneath the sterile going up that.

And Mussolini finds out, and he's so, this is such, destroys his day, destroys his week.

Here I am trying to make this country a modern, you know, efficient state and government and a new model, a new order that's going to emerge from it.

And then they do this.

And then I'm still dealing with this sort of peasant, this peasant material left over.

So behavior like that makes Mussolini ashamed.

Behavior like that, you're shot if you're in, if by Stalin or by Lenin or by Mao in those circumstances.

But Mussolini,

there was still an element of conscience left for him that for those other dictator figures

it had all been it had all been wiped away.

There's this thing in America that

we just don't want to look at Russia.

You know, it's the Soviets.

We, you know, FDR, there's not a communist

that I've met that I don't like, I think is one of his phrases, something along the line.

I know a lot of great communists.

I think that's what he said.

We all know

you say fascist, you immediately think of Hitler, and you immediately think of the death camps, and that's really bad.

It's a direct association one to the other.

Correct.

Mao,

Stalin killed many more than Hitler.

I mean, it's not a contest, but it's just as bad an evil, if not worse.

And yet we don't have that.

Where is that?

Where's that breakdown?

Well, you know, I did this book, Biography of Joseph McCarthy, and I explored a lot of those issues there.

The very important issues you're just raising.

Why is it now from our modern lens and we think about

really evil societies and evil dictators, why is it that Hitler is always front and center in those discussions?

Stalin a little bit, Stalin more so than it used to be.

You know, when I went to the University of Minnesota, there was a professor in the physics department who actually had a

portrait of Stalin on his wall, and the kids sort of chuckled about it.

I think now that would be more difficult to get away with.

I think there would be more fuss that would be made about that, but certainly not the fuss that would be created if you had a picture of Hitler or

had

an SS banner in your office.

Of course.

You would be in

serious water if you tried something along those lines.

And I think there's two things.

One is, of course, that the writing of history

has tended to be dominated by the left.

And

it's the left's view of that.

Books like Howard Zinn's,

for example, his history of the United States.

Look at the numbers, how much of that book is used as the standard textbook in high school?

That's nuts.

It's a very bad thing.

Gary Nash is another one, too.

They're very smart.

They have targeted schools and textbooks as a means by which to spread that propaganda, which it really is.

I have

a one-sided, lopsided view of history.

I have a first edition of Zinn signed and inscribed by him to somebody.

I don't remember who it's inscribed to.

And it talks about...

Kenil Sung, perhaps.

Yeah.

It talks about how, you know, we've held for a long time.

We just have to

keep on pushing through.

And

all of us who are on this side will understand that these kinds of books will change the world.

That's right.

And it's the old

German student student leader, Rudy Dutschke, right, who coined the phrase the long march through the institutions.

And he was talking about it in the early 70s, and they've succeeded.

It's been an impressive enterprise, the means by which they have seized key institutions in this country and made them purveyors of, and now enforcers of, a leftist orthodoxy.

Aaron Powell, it's amazing because

people will say

Americans don't have long vision.

I think the left does.

The left has a much longer vision.

I mean, this has been something in the works since the turn of the century, last century.

Yep, I think that that's true.

And

they know how to use allies and dupes.

The useful idiots, right?

They know how to do that.

And American progressives became part of that team of useful idiots, the people who were recruited by

the NKVD and by Soviet espionage and by the Communist Party USA to become tools by which to infiltrate the federal government in the 1930s.

Men like Alger Hiss, for example, Harry Dexter White.

But there's another ingredient, I think, also, and that is, and this is something that I know you're very interested in, and that is, is that

what is able to make that leap from Hitler fascism to the death camps?

Yes.

Visual images.

Images of Buchenwald and Dachau, which, by the way, were not actually the worst of what was happening.

You know, what was happening at places like Auschwitz and places like Treblinka, the Holocaust was played out.

Dachau and Buchenwald, although they shifted later to becoming part of the death factories of the Nazi regime,

that was sort of collateral damage, really, by comparison to where the final solution was really headed, which was East, not in Germany.

But

set that aside, the point is that

we have visual images of this, film of it,

being able to watch again and again to be played and to be linked in people's minds to what's happening.

The visual images for the Great Leap Forward,

not very much.

For the Great Famine in Ukraine, a few photographs of people lying dead in the streets, not much else than that.

You talk about the Holodomor.

No one knows what it is.

No one's ever heard of it.

No, they don't.

And again, the household names, right?

Auschwitz, Treblinka,

Buchenwald, Dachau,

but the camps, the Gulag camps?

I don't know the name of any of them.

They're not very well known.

Kolyma,

for example, which was the great gold mine at which thousands and thousands of people died working that for Stalin.

The White Sea Canal, this pointless effort to cut thousands of miles of a canal

to connect the White Sea

to the Baltic, I think it was.

In any case, the point is that these were as much death factories as anything that Auschwitz and Birkenau

were

involved.

But we don't have, and we live in a visual age now, Glenn.

The

written word is being replaced and has been replaced by the visual image as the key carrier for cultural transmission today.

And it's one of the things that you and I and all of us who are engaged in is how do we get our country back, how do we get our heritage back, need to really think about.

And that is it's through the visual image, through the icon,

that we now

have to carry on that fight.

That's not to say I love my written words.

I'm very proud of that work, but it has to be,

the key transmitter is.

Yes, I talk about this all the time.

In fact, I was just on tour recently and I showed a picture of Proud Boys fighting Antifa in the street.

And I asked the audience, tell me who the good guys and the bad guys are.

Can't tell.

They all look alike.

They're all moving the same way.

They're all throwing punches.

You can't tell.

Then I show them a picture of Martin Luther King and groups without King in it walking through with the police and the dogs dogs and the batons.

Tell me who the good guys and the bad guys are.

You know immediately.

You know immediately.

And

the

struggle that's happening here in America is that both sides are not understanding that it's visual first.

It's visual first.

And if you blow it on the visuals, if you are beaten and you are not defending yourself, what's left of the Judeo-Christian value in the society will say, you are the oppressed, and that is the oppressor.

And without those images, you don't.

It remains too abstract for most people.

You know, this has happened in history before.

I mean, the advance of Christianity in the fourth and fifth century was driven by...

Christianity's ability to monopolize and to seize control of visual images.

And that's going to continue all the way through the Middle Ages.

You go to a Gothic cathedral, right?

The statuary, the stained glass windows, the mosaics on the floor, all of this were the means by which Christianity was able to convey its message to the masses when the written word had become more and more marginal to the way in which culture

and cultural messages were both transmitted and reinforced.

So I think this is a shift that we can say has happened before and it can swing back again.

It did in European history with the Reformation.

The written word and the book came back as a powerful tool of Christianity and Christian thought.

But we have to now think about our strategies going forward and come to realize that

it's in the realm of the visual, the realm of the icon, that this battle has to be joined.

You have that with triumph of will.

No, of course.

You know, you have that.

But you also have exactly what I was talking about with the Jews.

The Jews did not not fight back.

So you have all these pictures of the Jews peacefully being rounded up.

And you would know better than I do.

This is my guess.

I have been trying to figure out

Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

He said in...

Amazing man.

Amazing.

And he said, you know, I got to talk to Gandhi.

He has the answer.

I got to talk to Gandhi.

Well, my guess is...

that what Dietrich Bonhoeffer was doing, even if he would have been able to lead the march, wouldn't have worked because the people of Germany had already gone over the cliff away from those Judeo-Christian values.

And Gandhi was playing to England, not to England.

He was playing to England.

That's a marvelous point.

Very profound insight.

And yes, if Dietrich Bonhoeffer had tried to conduct the equivalent of the march on Selma, we can just imagine what carnage would have resulted from that.

And if you would have had the West covering it, it may have worked.

It may have worked.

It may have worked.

But

it was much too late.

It was far too late

for that kind of change to take place.

And, you know, this happened.

You have, for example, in the Netherlands, you had days of solidarity

in which Dutch citizens would put on, for example, yellow stars or even interfere with the efforts to round up Dutch Jews.

And what happened?

Well, the Nazis came down and rounded up everybody and has shot them all.

But at least they kind of kept their soul.

I mean, mean, if you look at that, it's not the same story as the Germans.

The Dutch, in the end, still, they did a lot.

And I'm finding out in the new book that I'm working on that the Danes did a lot.

The Norwegians did a lot.

Raul Wallenberg, he had company.

He had company in his efforts to protect Jews in a very, very dangerous situation,

which was in Nazi-occupied Budapest.

So

there were efforts underway.

But when you have the apparatus of the total police state at your behest, as they do in China, as

Vladimir Putin does in Russia,

there's all kinds of ways in which you can deal with dissent in ways that no one knows about and no one is able to confront and no one dares confront

when it's aimed at them.

Let me stop with Wallenberg for a second.

Six years ago, Christmas, my wife came to me and she gave me a present.

She handed it to me and then she took it back and she said, I can't give this to you on Christmas.

And I said, what?

And I said, no, I want to open it.

And she said,

I know you.

You're going to spend all day crying.

So if you promise, you won't cry.

And I said, of course I won't.

I opened it and I cried all day.

It was one of the last

letters.

the passports that Raoul Wallenberg gave to the Jewish people.

Oh, how precious.

Oh my gosh, it's unbelievable.

And I went over to Sweden and I was talking to one of the main historians of Wallenberg.

She was surprised an American and even heard of him.

I'm kidding.

And I talked to her and

the way I understand the story, maybe you can shed some light on this,

we asked him to go.

The Americans came to him and said, hey, we need you to go over there.

We need you to help out.

We need you to get some information.

yada, yada.

He then became so

committed to it.

The guy was a giant.

That's my impression, too.

He was, in effect, an intelligence agent first.

Right.

And then a humanitarian.

Yeah.

And then

a humanitarian second when he saw what was actually taking place.

And then we don't even ask for him when he goes to the Soviets?

How does America, I mean, that's just one of the greatest,

this is the atmosphere of the immediate post-war period.

I mean,

think of the British, right?

And all of the

Baltic and

Russian

citizens who had fled Soviet tyranny who were handed over to Stalin for disposal by the British because you didn't want to cross an ally.

You didn't want to get mixed up with this.

It seems sad and it seems brutal to say so, but in those, 46, 47, 48, there were lots of issues that were being dealt with, big issues.

And the question of

a figure like Raul Wallenberg

slipping through the cracks, it's not surprising.

It's tragic.

But you know what, Glenn?

This is one of the things I think it's important always to emphasize.

How much of history reveals to us

not the fact that some are

inescapably good and some are simply insuperably bad, but how much of what happens in the world is really involves a tragedy of human beings who find themselves in circumstances in which they are forced to act according to their either their social role or their cultural assumptions or their religious beliefs or even a sense of, you know what, this sounds like I have to do this because I have a feeling this will lead to the consequences that we all want.

And you make the wrong decision.

You make blunders.

One of my favorite sayings in history is it's always difficult for us to remember that events that are in the past were once in the future.

And that the people who initiated those actions and who made those crucial decisions, and think about the long list, I don't have to walk through them,

all the time never knew what the outcome would be and simply had to make a guess or a judgment based on their own experience and their own context.

And there are

humanity.

There are no humanity.

We don't like to look at the worst case scenario.

It goes against everything in us as an animal.

And it rests upon our self-confidence or lack of confidence that we make those decisions.

And sometimes I think it's important.

It's one of my main beefs with the way in which the left has twisted and distorted how we look at history, like for example the Civil War, is we don't see it through that lens of individuals making decisions which have tragic consequences, sometimes for the right reasons, sometimes for the wrong, but sometimes for reasons which were understandable at the time.

And that being able to understand that and understand our own humanity through history, this is one of the missions that I've set for myself from the very first book I wrote.

And it's one which I think I hope that readers and those who appreciate my books also understand.

It's an exploration of the nature of humanity, of human nature, through our actions in the past.

And the more you can illuminate what it is that makes us as human beings by understanding what has been done in the past, what's possible and what's not, that's, I think, a key enterprise for an historian.

Whereas right now, I think a lot of history is driven by the idea of either assigning blame or absolving blame.

Yeah.

I think that most people that we look at as heroes,

it's important to see that they didn't know how it would work out.

That's right.

And

that's exactly my point.

Right.

And they, you know, my son said to me, I have all these artifacts and pictures and the Raul Wallenberg, you know, stuff on my walls in my office.

And

we were having a conversation about courage.

And I said, do you know why I I have them?

All these people.

He said, Yeah, because they were all heroes.

I said, Yeah, well, they were, but that's not why I have them.

And he said, Because they weren't afraid.

And I said, No, I think the exact opposite is true.

I think each

you know, courage is not the absence of fear.

It is the, oh, well, it's right to do anyway, come what may.

I think these people were terrified, but they did it anyway.

Do we all have that

in us, Or are there just a few of us that have it in us?

Because I have no idea if crap hits the fan.

I don't know who I'll be.

I hope I will be some, you know, one of these guys,

but I don't know.

What is that when you're looking at the great men of history?

What is that?

That's a very profound that transcends history really.

You've brought us into the realm of philosophy, I think, and how we understand and how we evaluate human behavior

within the purviews of

our ability to make judgments based on what we know, what we draw upon from our experience, from our perception of the world around us, and how we make right decisions versus wrong decisions.

That's an issue that I think haunts all of us, isn't it?

I mean, what would you do?

What would I do if I were a German in 1935?

What would I do if I were a Russian in 1917, 1918?

You know, would I join the whites?

Would I join the Reds?

Who would I be fighting?

Because if you

look at the record of human carnage during the Russian Civil War, it's pretty bad on both sides.

What would I do

if I'm living in Virginia in 1860?

All those decisions are going to be made.

I would like to think I would make the decisions that would make me look really good, right,

in 2018.

What's the likelihood of that happening?

Almost none.

Well, I think on that particular case, I think we know there are more slaves today,

today,

than there were in the entire 400-year of the Western slave trade combined.

Combined.

And nobody wants to talk about it.

No, nobody's going to talk about that.

We're not doing it.

And no one's going to talk about the other aspects of the slave trade either, the way in which it was run

and

profited the Arab world for hundreds of years before the Western Europeans could be done.

And it's never stopped.

And it's never stopped.

And so we're no different.

People are saying that.

The

one thing that

the Arabs did, which has helped to sort of eliminate, obliterate the traces of the human carnage they left was they castrated all their slaves.

So you don't have the problem of large numbers of offspring as you do in the Western hemisphere.

That keeps it, again, come back to the visual, right?

That keeps that,

that's a history which has been obliterated visually, whereas the history of slavery in the Western Hemisphere, in both North and South America, lives there to look at.

Let me just stop on some people here while we're in this territory.

Sure.

FDR, in your book, Freedom's Forge.

You know,

you don't say anything surprising to me about FDR.

In writing a book where you're spending time with these people as much as you can, what do you walk away with on FDR?

I would say in general, with the books that I've written, and it's a fair number of biographies.

You mentioned the Gandhi and Churchill.

I'll tell you the story about the Pulitzer Prize finalist and how I found out about that at some point, too.

But the McCarthy book, the Douglas MacArthur biography, and then the characters who really dominate the stage in Freedom's Forge.

The view that I took when I came into the book was usually different from when I came out.

And this was the case with FDR.

You know, people have urged me to write a biography of FDR.

Lay it out there.

Talk about all the kinds of really awful things that he did, both domestically, but also in foreign policy.

Look at the record at Yalta, for example, of

his gullibility and cunning in dealing with Stalin.

And really, if Churchill would have been, if we would have flipped those two.

We would flipped those two,

and Roosevelt wasn't there.

So when I came to this book, I was sort of thinking about Roosevelt in

that kind of light.

But what I found out in working on this book was I came out with more of a positive view in this sense, and that is that everything, for those of you who don't know the book, he calls up when it becomes clear the United States is going to get involved in World War II, it's going to happen.

This is in the May of 1940 when France is falling apart, Britain is isolated, the war is going to come to America within two years.

His military advisors tell him, we've got to gear up for war.

We've got nothing to fight a modern war with.

What are we going to do?

How are we going to arm ourselves?

He calls the CEO of General Motors, Big Bill Knudsen, and says, come to Washington, help me get it.

Oh, he's a fantastic character.

He's a guy that had been targeted by FDR

as a guy who's a bad capitalist, who's just money-grubbing.

And his family, when he gets the call from FDR, says, you're crazy to just...

You're not going.

You're crazy to sign up with this guy.

Why would you do that?

And he goes,

it's because I'm an American.

My president called me, and I have to go.

And yet, everything that Bill Knudsen represented was the exact opposite of what Roosevelt believed and thought about.

I mean, you

talk about sort of someone who stands for everything that you're against.

But FDR, as I explained in the book, understood that if America was going to gear up to fight this kind of modern warfare, to have the equipment and resources that it would need for a war on this scale.

And we're just talking about Europe now, not

the war in the Pacific wasn't even on the horizon, just to fight the war in Europe, a war in Europe.

He realized it can't be done by government fiat.

This has to be a bottoms-up effort led by the businesses that I'm going to need, and Knudsen's my tool in which to do that.

So FDR liked Mussolini's policies generally.

Hitler said he's one of us, FDR, he's one of us.

He did believe in, you know, the big state, et cetera.

But the thing that's different about fascism, as I understand it, is it

directs companies.

We all have to do this, but then it lets those companies do it.

So is this a, was this a crap I was wrong about the capitalist system and we have to have these guys in?

Or was this kind of in his head kind of a, well, this still works because the government is really kind of in charge and it's kind of this new modern.

I think there's a certain amount of truth to that and i think also too he realized there were limits to what government could really do

and you know roosevelt would always say to people i don't know why they're beating me up about uh about the the new deal uh destroying capitalism hell i'm saving capitalism now george bush said the same thing i think it i think roosevelt's case and probably in george bush's too i think I think too, I think Roosevelt did actually believe that.

In the end, what separates Roosevelt out from the other figures you mention,

in my view, is his base, including Wilson,

is his basic humanity.

He, in the end, is still a human being.

Except for the Japanese.

Well, in the Japanese thing, again,

I mean, we have to look at the historical context.

And the context was that

it wasn't Bill Knudsen, but it was others who told him we are going to have huge problems if we're going to have

plants doing wartime production on the West Coast if we have a large Japanese population there who may be able to spy in it, who may be

able to do it.

It's going to create all kinds of problems for us later on.

You had the whole issue of

the prejudice against Japanese Americans that was part of West Coast politics, including Democratic politics at the time.

I think in Roosevelt's case, this was one in which

the end justifies the means.

The Pentagon, though, said, don't do it.

Don't do it.

Don't do it.

We've gone out.

J.

Edgar Hoover said, we've got them all.

We've rounded up

all the spies here.

You don't have to go to this length.

No, the one person who emerges is a real hero in all that.

And by the way, I'm not excusing Roosevelt.

So he's saying

this is what was in his thinking.

The one person who emerges is a real hero, that is Bob Taft.

The one person in the Senate, the one person in Congress who said, this is wrong, and I'm going to vote no.

And everybody else was shocked and horrified at the decision that

he had made.

Just as they would all be horrified when

he said these Nuremberg trials,

there's no basis for this in international law.

You're making it up as you go along.

These trials shouldn't take place.

Likewise, his support for Israel.

which again flew in people's, what?

You want to send arms to Israel?

I'm telling you right now, I think, Glenn, one of the most interesting movies that you could make right now would be A Life of Bob Taft.

Never heard of him.

Robert Taft, senator from Ohio.

He was Mr.

Republican.

In fact, that was his name.

He was known as Mr.

Republican.

Ran for president a couple of times.

May have been able to beat out Dwight Eisenhower in the 1952 election, as a matter of fact.

But Eisenhower working behind the scenes and his team were able to thwart him.

He was well known as being an isolationist during the 1930s.

He was an opponent of NATO.

So, what are we doing getting ourselves involved in this North Atlantic treaty organization?

What's this going to involve?

What's it going to involve us in?

And he's a dedicated anti-communist.

He is a dedicated foe of the New Deal.

He's a strong and staunch supporter of civil rights in the South.

He is the one who even mounts a campaign to expel Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi from the Senate because of his demagogic racist speeches here.

He's an extraordinary man.

Robert Taft.

Okay.

Look him up.

Look him up.

I will.

I will.

Let's kind of stop here for

in the kind of the 1950s and talk a little bit about

McCarthy.

Sure.

McCarthy, you know Edwin Black's book, Blacklisted by History.

So I read that and I read the first couple of chapters.

And as I was reading it, I thought, this is going to change everything I think I know about McCarthy.

And

I didn't know if I was prepared for it.

And I wanted to call and make sure.

I wanted to call Edwin and make sure that he wasn't out of his mind crazy.

What was your conclusion?

I think he's buttoned up.

I think he's buttoned up on the Holocaust for sure.

He's quirky.

He is quirky.

But I read that.

I have not read yours, and I wish I would have before this.

But I walked away from that thinking, okay,

McCarthy is not this evil dude.

He's just a bad mess.

He's a mess of a guy.

He really is.

And

made some stupid mistakes and claims, and

he was just a mess.

But there is

this

group in the State Department, et cetera, et cetera,

whether he knew it or not.

He was just a bad messenger, but he was not the guy that we learned about in history.

Yeah, he was a bad messenger who came to distort the message

as his influence grew and his self-importance.

Right.

He just became, yeah, it's all about me.

And yet, again, in the point of view from the context of the time, what's interesting, if you look at the trajectory, and I talk about this in the book, of his popularity and his support in the country,

and really the springboard to all of this was the revelations about Alger Hiss.

The man who really stands out as, I think, the hero of the anti-communist movement and revealing what was really happening.

It's not Joe McCarthy, but it was actually Richard Nixon.

And his single-minded pursuit of that case of saying, no, Whitaker Chambers, the guy is a physical mess, that's true.

And Alger Hiss is this handsome, Gregory Peck-looking, you know, wasp male model with impeccable credentials and

visual.

Visual.

That's right, exactly.

And letters of recommendation, you know, resume that is just outstanding.

He's a Soviet spy.

Whitaker Chambers telling the truth about who he is and

who he was working for and what he was doing to this country

through his espionage efforts at the behest of the Soviets.

As a result of that, and when you look at McCarthy's career, as he begins to sort of say, who is this political party that allowed someone like Aldrich

to rise to

important posts, influential posts in the corridors of power, not simply

at the

Yalta conference, but in line to be the next Secretary of State, for God's sake.

How did this happen?

How are the Democrats so soft on this threat, this totalitarian threat to the free world?

When he preached that message,

McCarthy's popularity soared.

His influence grew.

He became really a leader of his political party because the American people's heard of it, looked at the record and said, yeah, the Democrats have a lot to answer for.

What turned around for McCarthy, what turned his career in a downward trajectory was when he began making the same accusation at Republicans and began to say that Dwight Eisenhower, Ike,

had been soft on communism and allowed confumist

infiltration in the U.S.

Army, in the Defense Department,

and that he was really

as soft on communism as Truman and his cohorts had been in the Democratic Party.

And the American people sort of said, forget it.

I don't believe this.

Everybody puts the, you know, the assigns Edward R.

Murrow in this great heroic role of exposing McCarthy and turning around America from seeing McCarthy as the great crusader for anti-communism and seeing him as a demagogue instead.

McCarthy's popularity had fallen off long before that.

And Murrow was simply riding

on a train which was already headed out of the station and had left McCarthy behind.

That was his crucial mistake.

That was his crucial error.

And it sprang from the same elements that we see in other figures who rise to a level of a position of feeling as if they can do no wrong, that they understand the world and that their judgments are the ones that really will determine the future here.

And everybody, either it's my way or the highway, right?

That hubris.

McCarthy had it.

Wilson had it.

And these are the things that make their stories both tragic, but also so predictable.

You know,

we hear about the

industrial, the military-industrial complex, and it's become this conspiracy thing.

It's become almost a joke.

But if you really go back and listen to what Eisenhower said in that speech, It is so prophetic, and I'm trying to put myself into his shoes as a guy who

he was Mr.

Pentagon.

I mean, he was the war machine.

And the courage that that must have taken to come out against his own

set of people, you know, never, you know, you don't cross the blue.

Yeah, you don't cross the blue line.

He did.

He crossed the green line.

You did.

You know, I've spent a lot of time analyzing that speech and looking at it

because it is, as you were suggesting, it is a slightly sort of jarring phrase to come from a person whose life was spent in the U.S.

Army, commander-in-chief, the person who really

built the.

He didn't establish the Defense Department, but who gave it this sort of central role in terms of the development of the key technologies in air and

aerospace,

in nuclear power, in nuclear weapons.

This is all springs out of the Eisenhower, out of the Eisenhower administration, what they call the new look, the new look for the military, was all rested on a new technological base, which was inevitably an industrial base for America at the time.

And what you see is

what were Eisenhower's overriding concerns?

One was the question of debt,

that this was going to be a growth in terms of America's ability to spend itself into oblivion trying to maintain this technological edge and the costs that would go with it.

His fear that out of this would emerge a kind of garrison state, that American military figures would

now suddenly take on a dominant role in American politics because of the ways in which the American economy was geared around their needs and their requirements.

And then I think also there was another fear that he had, which was

that the purely military

objectives that any soldier would understand when looking at the world or looking at a situation in which, should America go to war or not, that these decisions would be dictated by industrialists, by civilians who had a, if you like, a financial stake, financial stake in going to war,

kind of the merchants of death sort of stereotype about people who are involved in armaments industry.

And I think you have to say, in the final analysis, that all of those concerns on the part of

Eisenhower were never really realized.

Military men did not emerge as sort of key figures in politics.

I mean, after MacArthur,

you know, they occasionally pop up.

But they're always

contained in the right way.

They're contained in the right way.

Civilian leadership has not been lost.

So we've hardly become a garrison state.

From the point of view of going to war for the sake of industrialists, if you look at the wars that we've been involved in from Vietnam on, it's not the industrialists who push for it or even the military guys.

It's the civilians who have these grandiose ideal ideas about saving the world from itself.

Very Wilsonian causes opposed to that.

And then from the point of view of cost,

how could Eisenhower have ever guessed that the costs for the Defense Department's budget would be totally dwarfed by the costs for the American welfare state?

And that that is in the end what is going to

consume us

as a debtor nation, not

the cost for more planes or more missiles or even for even for more

soldiers and

service personnel.

What do you think of,

I'm trying to remember his name, he wrote Tragedy and Hope in what, 1962,

Harvard.

He's the guy who came out.

He was with Eisenhower.

He was with Kennedy.

And then he went low for a while after this book came out.

And then he was with Nixon and maybe with Carter.

But

he wrote that the great tragedy of the world

was these last two wars.

And now we have something even worse

on the horizon.

And so the hope is that we have tied our economies together and we've made it mutually assured destruction.

So if we fire these missiles, or even if we fire, even if we fight an all-out global war, we'll all collapse the financial situation.

I've always thought he was

gosh, that's really comforting notion, isn't it?

Yeah, I know.

In the book,

it's about 800 pages.

And in the book, there's only one reference, and nobody seems to recognize this because what he said has happened.

Whether it happened the way he said or not, I don't know, but it did happen.

And he says the only problem with this is if there's ever an unflagged group of people

that

do not care about the nation states and do not care about finance, industry, banking, if they're living

some nomad-ish kind of culture.

It's almost as if he's talking about ISIS.

It is, it is.

And yet, in some ways, you know, the ISIS phenomenon, I have to say, I think has turned out to be rather more transitory than a lot of us had worried about.

In the shadow of 9-11, I think there was a feeling that the war with Islamic terrorism was going to go on and get worse.

And I think what we've seen is that it has been more,

what shall I say?

It has had more to do with the transitions that were taking place in the Middle East than it did with a head-on confrontation between Islam and the West.

Now, that's not to rule out the importance in a philosophical sense.

or even we can say theological sense of that confrontation, but in terms of how it affects events on the the ground and the developments of movements, that much of what was happening here had to do with

the internal dynamics of these Middle Eastern countries and societies, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, of course, but also Iran.

A lot of the work that I'm doing now, Glenn, at

Hudson Institute has really been focused on the issue of advanced technologies and the ways in which they are going to be changing and altering how how we think about national security and economic security.

And one of the questions I always get asked about this book, Freedom's Forge, is: could we do it again?

Could this happen again?

And you know, funny you should say that because right after I published that book, my answer was, yes, we can.

We just have to harness all of the advanced technologies that we see emerging in

Silicon Valley.

Yeah.

And it will happen.

What I've come to realize, working now in Washington for the last five years and working on this problem, these issues, is we face an enormous challenge.

I don't say we can't do it, but the biggest challenge we face towards getting us into this shape to fight a protracted war to sustain our military and technological edge over our adversaries, particularly China,

isn't financial.

It isn't technological.

We still lead in all of these areas.

It's cultural.

You know, I was invited to attend a symposium at the National Defense University, which was about the book, and to talk about, because they were working on a project, what would happen?

How would America be able to ramp up its military for a protracted conflict with a near-peer

competitor, Reed China, in 2040?

And so I spelled out for them what would be different from where we were in 1940 to 2040.

It was a good discussion, but the main thing that I stressed was the biggest difference is cultural.

When Bill Knudsen goes out to the leading industrialists and business executives and technology and engineers and says, America needs you to work to build the planes and the ships and

the equipment that we're going to need to fight a modern war, they say, you bet, Bill, I'm right there for my country.

We're not going to get that kind of response, not right now.

And it precisely goes back to what you were talking about, those stereotypes about what it is to become part of the military-industrial complex.

And companies like Google and all across Silicon Valley, there's this fear and concern that if you join forces with America in terms of protecting national security, that you are basically working for the evil empire.

But they don't see that.

That underlies a lot of what's happening there with those 20s and 30s-somethings.

I agree.

Here's the problem.

They don't see that with working with China.

Exactly.

I think that's one of the big problems.

And that's the real problem here: they see us as an evil force

where

they don't see that way.

Well, what they see is they see a globalist agenda.

And they see China as part of the globe and America's part of the globe.

And that we're all involved

in a marvelous convergence

of humanity's goals.

That, again, part of the whole globalist agenda that underlies it is this belief that we have more in common than we do in in difference.

And in a rather sort of physical or physiological and psychological way, that's true.

I tend to agree with that.

Human nature is the same everywhere you go.

But it completely ignores all of the other factors that make us all different rather than the same.

It ignores culture.

It ignores social dynamics and social evolution that makes a society like the United States different from a Denmark or from a Saudi Arabia.

These aren't just cultural differences.

It's where we are as societies and

how we think about confronting the problems and issues that we deal with.

The globalist agenda sort of says 80% of what humanity's experience has been in the present and in the past, we just set aside as irrelevant.

We're just going to focus on that 20% where we see that commonality.

After all, right, every time I pop on a plane flying from Los Angeles to Bali, right, I'm able to go there.

I mix with other people who think like I do, who are in the same, you know,

software engineers like I am, right?

Or

I fly to Thailand, or I fly to Sri Lanka.

The world looks very small from the business class seat

on an airliner as you're moving from place to place doing business or engaged in charitable work of one kind or another, or working on environmental kinds of issues.

It's bound bound to reinforce that globalist bias.

But down on the ground, down where the rest of us are, 80% of the human experience runs in a very different direction, which is there's lots that divide us around the world.

There's lots that unites us

in a nation-state, in a community.

And the globalist agenda tends to ignore what unites us as well as what divides us.

You know, I try to explain to members of the media, tried to do this privately, and they just do, there's no interest.

You know, if you look at Europe, they don't have the American system of left and right.

Their system is communist-fascist.

You know, that's the left and right.

It's not the American right here.

The American right is as close to anarchy as you can possibly get without it grabbing you.

Right.

So it's different.

But when they look at what's happening in Europe and they interpret,

they interpret people as being racist.

There are racists.

There are racists.

Probably a bigger racist movement over there by far than over here.

I would say that's currently true, yeah.

Correct.

But it's because they have no place to go.

But what feeds it every time?

All those issues have been channeled into the fringe.

Yes.

Into marginalized political groups.

And that's where they've popped up.

Yes, because the media and the ruling elite will not listen to the people on the ground who are very different than the people in the front of the plane, who their communities are being disrupted.

They're being told, I can't fly my flag because I'm a racist.

Their children are being raped or whatever.

That's right.

They're just being accosted in the street.

Right.

And because

the media won't admit it because of political correctness and because the government won't admit it, the first person on the scene, usually a fringe group that says, I can solve your problem, they go to because I may not agree with anything they're saying except this one thing, and they see the problem.

But I'm desperate enough to turn to someone who can offer an answer.

has repeated itself over and over and over again.

And I think we're kind of moving in that direction, too, as we become more and more PC-driven in terms of a media and in terms of government and in terms of leading institutions.

I think we're going to be able to do that.

Where even to raise the issue, to even raise the issue of whether men and women are built differently in terms of their response to questions of science and math gets you ejected

without even a moment to explain what you were thinking or to justify or what you were or even present the arguments to be true or false or not, but you're simply even to raise the issue kicks you out.

That's kind of where we're going right now.

What do you think about this analysis

as a historian?

And I know you have to put yourself in the future to look back, so I get it.

But

that's why Donald Trump won.

It's not his border policy.

It's not anything else.

What it is, is his willingness to say things that everyone says you're not supposed to say, and then he never backs off it.

Backs off?

He doubles down.

Yeah, yeah.

And

that's the beginning of that.

I'm tired of being told I'm a racist.

I'm tired of all these things.

And the people that I know that support Donald Trump, they'll all say, I wish he would get off of Twitter.

I wish he would stop saying some stupid stuff.

But it is that sense that enough Americans have had enough of this political correctness.

Yeah.

And the Twitter feed, it's his bully pulpit.

Yeah.

And it is, I think, very strategic.

I think it's aimed in order to force the mainstream media to deal with issues they don't want to deal with.

For example, with the Christine

Ford case, you know, he was able to bring that out in a rather sort of, I suppose, not in the way in which you would think a politician would bring it out.

The fact that her story really had

no substantive basis.

And the media was forced to cover it because he had made it, in case not in the Twitter, but at one of his rallies.

This is one of the things that I think Trump has done.

It's been a two-edged sword, because I think it's alienated many, and we've seen that in the midterms.

We've seen the ill effect of that approach to using your bully pulpit.

I think CNN could, you say the same thing about CNN.

The way they're using it is isolating and polarizing and strengthening their core.

Donald Trump's strength.

And I think there's a lot of us in the middle going, I don't want to talk to either of you.

Guys, knock it off.

You're like acting like seven-year-old kids.

Stop it.

Well, I understand Trump's position more than I do CNN's, to tell you the truth.

And what I find with CNN, what I find with CNN is a level of hypocrisy

with regard to where they are on these kinds of issues and the way in which they deal with.

Some wise person said once, there is no such thing as a double standard.

It's only a single hidden standard.

And those who play that that game, I think,

get

earned the title of hypocrisy.

I don't think anyone would ever accuse Donald Trump of being a hypocrite in that standpoint.

He says what he thinks and puts it out there, and there are millions and millions of Americans who agree with it and who, as you just pointed out, have been so fed up with the hypocrisy and the cant that's come from the other side that they're willing to tolerate the uncouthness of this president because because they see a larger, they see him pushing a larger truth that needs to be put out there and hasn't been.

Wow,

so much.

How much time do we have left?

Do you know?

It's two o'clock right now.

At what time do we start?

We've gone one hour.

Okay, good.

We got another night, yes.

Let me finish up World War I, World War II, and then I'll...

You want to do the Franco-Prussian War?

I'm happy to talk about it.

I know, I know, I know.

I started when I was a kid, my interest in history really sprang from ancient history.

You know, when other kids were going out playing baseball and stuff, I was reading Herodotus and Livy and Caesar's commentaries.

My parents have, you know, some of my first drawings that I ever did just about the time I was learning to write.

The first drawings were like the Battle of Pharsalis.

Oh my gosh.

I know, I know.

But my other great fascination was civil war.

And so the earliest drawings are, you know, Roman legionaries, you know, bashing each other on the plains of plains of Pharsalis, but, or Hannibal's elephants, but the other ones are of soldiers in blue, soldiers in gray.

And so history was something which it's like

it's built in.

Ancient history, medieval history is what I did as an undergraduate.

I thought I was going to become a medievalist was was my plan here.

So what I'm saying to you, Glenn, is that if you want to go and explore fundamental issues having to do with the late Roman Empire, I'm your guy.

And I can't wait to take you up to one of our vaults.

We have a lot of museum pieces.

Oh, I can't wait.

I have Mary Lincoln's funeral dress.

We have a lot of stuff from the Civil War that I think you'll just see.

That's the other thing I like about you.

You're a collector, and I'm a collector.

My stuff is political memorabilia and particularly campaign buttons.

And I've been doing that since I was a kid.

I think I still had the very first button I got was for the 1964 campaign.

It was a Johnson button.

And all the other kids were telling me that

that would come clear that if Goldwater were elected, that we'd all have school on Saturdays.

That was the level of sort of campaign propaganda.

I don't know if it's really improved very much this last year,

but that was part of it.

You know

what interests me in the political, political america.

I was just thinking about this and talking to my wife about it like a week ago.

I was looking at my collection, which is pretty extensive at this point.

I'd love to see it.

The

range of candidates and stuff.

And what I've noticed is that over the years, over the decades I've been doing it, I've gravitated towards the losers in presidential campaigns.

When I was a kid, I read a really interesting book by a guy by the name of Irving Stone.

You remember Irving Stone?

He did Agony in the Ecstasy, The Life of Michelangelo.

He did one on Van Gogh.

They were both made into movies.

But he did a book called They Also Ran, which was about defeated presidential candidates that ran out.

The book was written in 1949, so he only got as far as Tom Dewey.

But my Dewey collection is quite extensive.

My Truman collection, I have a handful.

I have a big Richard Nixon collection, but it's really focused on the 1960 campaign, the year he lost.

There's something to me that's fascinating about, and this goes back to human nature and the issue of

human beings making decisions for which there are often tragic consequences.

These were the stories of men, and they are predominantly men after all, who ran for the nation's highest office, who were nominated in many cases by their presidential,

by their party

in the convention, who had every reason to believe that they would wake up in the morning and be president.

And they lost.

And

some of them tried again.

I mean, the man who's always fascinating to me is William Jennings Bryan.

How can you do that?

How can you run three times for president

and lose each time, but keep coming back and keep thinking

you can make it work out?

How do others think that somehow the third is going to be a charm?

Hillary Clinton.

Hillary Clinton, exactly.

Well, she's too, you know what?

She's too close.

She's too close to events for me to become a collector in those areas.

But the losers and presidential candidates, there's something interesting, to my mind, distinct and special about them and the way in which the winners,

the Trumans and the Eisenhowers, Eisenhower, nice collection.

It hangs in my office right now, but it doesn't draw me the way an Adlai Stevenson does.

I have a campaign button that I bet you don't have.

Let's hear it.

And it was

for, in the Truman era, and it was for Israel.

and it's Truman.

I want to say it's Heim Solomon, but it's not the

Pai Inweitzman?

Yeah.

They made very few, but it's the two of them on a button together to campaign for Israel.

Oh, that's really

tremendous.

That's tremendous.

I was at the Jewish Leadership Conference in New York the weekend last,

and

one of the things that they were talking about was

the role of Jews and Jewish Americans in presidential campaigns.

And on the cover of one of the brochures was

a picture of a button,

a dual portrait of William Jengs Bryan and his running mate, Adlai Stevenson III, right?

The first Adlai Stevenson, and so on, and all of the lettering in Hebrew.

Oh, wow.

I said, oh, I got to have that button.

I need to get that button.

But I don't know how that's going to happen.

But you were going to say something.

Yeah, so let me take you.

I just want to kind of hit these quickly.

Sure.

Okay.

You wrote, To Rule the Waves, How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World.

Just one question.

I believe that a case could be made that had we not sunk the British Navy and been so

arrogant under Wilson, that perhaps we wouldn't have had all the problems that we had with World War II.

Well, you know, I have an op-ed which is coming out on Monday

on Wilson's responsibility with the way in which World War I ended

that set the stage for World War II,

which I think you'll find very fascinating, and I think that will

raise a lot of the issues you just raised here.

The real problem, the real problem that I think, one of the points I was trying to make in that book

was that

the British were the first empire in history

which conceived of their use of power,

military power in the case of the Navy, as a

means by which to create a global community on which freedom and prosperity would

persevere.

And it's that role that we inherited.

after World War II, the passing of the torch, the transition of power from the British Empire, the Pax Britannica to the Pax Americana.

And it was, I think you have to say that there was a lot of good that came as a result of that.

But just as with the rise of

Britain's empire, as it became a

expanded to become a colonial empire, not a mercantile empire, right, protecting the seas and keeping the lanes of commerce open and free for the use of all merchants, not just British merchants, merchants of all nations.

That was the great mission that emerged in the 19th century for the British Navy.

But as

they emerged as a colonial power with possessions in Africa, possessions in Asia,

with its

concessions in China, the character of that empire changed.

The character, I think, also of Britain changed in ways that were not good.

and that ultimately led to the downfall of that empire.

And one of the things that I think we have to worry about when when we think about what comes after the Pax Americana is how we preserve those aspects of the idealism of what American power can do without being absorbed into the temptations that American power brings to us.

And unfortunately, we've seen that played out in time and time again.

And we keep making the same mistakes.

We keep making the same mistakes.

Sorry.

Churchill.

I love, I love Churchill.

But as I read about Churchill from the Asian perspective,

not a good guy.

Screwed up, racist, screwed up, not

you make all kinds of excuses, but not a good guy from that perspective.

Gandhi.

Everybody loves Gandhi.

He's great.

Unless you go to South Africa, he's a racist and a racistly bad.

Which can I spell that all out?

Right.

His problem was his fight in South Africa, and where he really creates the whole

ideology of civil disobedience and develops the tools by which it will work in India later on when he goes there,

was all about getting,

it was not breaking down the color line, it was getting the Indians on the right side, namely on the right side.

Which you say that to people, and they're like, no, that's not true.

That can't possibly be Gandhi, but it is true.

But it is.

So,

real quick,

the left,

well, everybody loves Gandhi, but because they don't know the other side of him,

The left hates Churchill.

The right loves Churchill.

And the left will say, well, Churchill is bad.

Look what he did.

Yada, yada.

No, no, no.

They're both the same kind of people.

They're all of us.

They're both good and bad.

And that's exactly right.

And that was one of the things that I think emerged from the course of that book, was how very different these two men were, how they saw the world very differently.

And yet, under the skin,

what made them do what they do and what made them great men sprang from the same roots.

Incredible courage, indomitable will,

at times enormous blindness,

again, belief in the rightness of their decision and following it through to the end.

And in Gandhi's case, at the end of his life, it

cost maybe a million and a half lives.

in the partition of India, which I describe in, I think,

it's a harrowing story, what takes place.

Again, often forgotten when we think about not just Gandhi but the whole history of that subcontinent why the relationships between Pakistan and India are so

tenuous is so tenuous and and well went to the brink of nuclear war yeah

if you don't understand partition you won't understand what happens in that part of the world in that subcontinent and yet at the end I think when I started that book I was thinking in my own way Gandhi is going to come out as the big villain Churchill as the big hero.

And yet, the more I worked on it, the more the two converged.

And a lot of my Churchill-admiring friends, like Andrew Roberts, for example, still haven't forgiven me for that.

Because, of course, they do want to see Churchill as being very distinct

and see Gandhi as someone who was, in the end, a political opportunist and a manipulator, and more than his share of hypocrisy, which I acknowledge.

But

I don't think if you

look at the man himself, look at what he had to deal with and the forces

and his skill in being able to bring Great Britain.

And you're right, you said this earlier.

His audience was Great Britain.

It wasn't

even India, and it wasn't the Soviet Union or the Nazis or anyone like that who could have snuffed that movement out in the mirror.

When you look at the skill in which he was able to do that and to transform himself, this unlikely figure, physically,

linguistically, all the things counts against him, and yet he would emerge

as a world icon.

It's an extraordinary story.

You wrote a book I just started reading last night, and I'm so bummed.

I'm going to have to have you back.

The idea of the decline of the West.

Right.

And this stress on the idea that it's not a book about the decline of the West.

It's about those who have prophesied it and have been wrong again and again and again, and explaining why.

So understanding why they were wrong, but also, most importantly, understand what the impact of that loss of faith in our Western heritage has cost us over the course of the last, well, really the last century and a half.

So you've listened to me before, watched me before, right?

You certainly have.

I mean, I'm a pretty gloomy guy.

Oh, I don't get that impression at all.

I'm anxious to get that.

I don't get that at all.

I get very much

a person who is both depressed and hopeful.

I love you.

I'm an optimistic catastrophe.

Do you know how I first found you?

No.

I first found you.

I was in, I can tell you exactly where it was.

I was in the Borders bookstore in Richmond, Virginia.

Remember Borders?

And I was going around.

I was signing copies of, I don't remember what it was.

It may have been,

I don't remember which book it was.

And there it was, your book was sitting on a table, and it was a book by Glenn Beck.

And there was this picture.

And it was, I had heard something about you having a radio show.

And I was like, who is this guy, this Glenn Beck?

This sort of pasty-faced character

with a plain vanilla name.

I mean, come on.

And he said, what is this?

He's trying to be the next Rush Limbaugh or something.

And then I heard you for the first time on the radio.

And I said, this is a guy who exists in a totally different plane from Rush.

Rush Limbaugh is, and the key to his success, he knows who he is.

He knows what he thinks.

He knows what he believes.

And it's been

part of his upbringing.

And he must have had a most extraordinary family, don't you think?

The bond that existed with his father, his grandfather, his brothers, it's just,

it's amazing.

But he's a man who knows his mind, who knows what's important and what's not, and speaks on that.

You're a searcher like me.

You have more questions than you do answers.

And the more answers I get, the more questions I have.

And that's what I appreciate about you and what you've done right up ever since I started listening to you

and up to this moment.

I realize that's who you are.

Do you ever get frustrated?

You're like,

how is nobody interested in asking these questions?

I was in a theater last week.

And it was the Carnegie Theater in Pittsburgh, Carnegie Homestead, I think.

And I was down in the basement with the old coal burners before the audience got there.

And I was literally down on my hands and knees

looking, reading who made the seats in the theater.

I'm fascinated by everything.

And

most people are not.

They're just not.

No, I think so.

I mean, I'm a relentlessly curious person.

This is why I've written a number of books in a range of topics that I have.

And I won't walk you through it, but every book has sort of led to the next one.

It's out of writing one book, there's a problem that has developed, and I said, no one else has worked on this, but I need to know the answer myself.

So the way in which I deal with it is I write a book on it.

That's the easiest path for me to get some answers with it.

And you're a searcher for truth.

And I, in my own way, I've tried to do that in the historical field.

And now

that I'm working at the Hudson Institute, working in Washington, D.C., which I've been doing for the last five years, I'm now beginning to sort of pursue that the same endeavor, but now not so much through writing a books, although I'm still writing books, but rather through

policy, through analyzing why we're doing what we're doing in policy ways and going to Capitol Hill and organizing conferences and hitting up commissions to deal with these real problems and finding ways to try and and get a handle on them and to understand how we can get some answers to the questions we both have about all of these things.

How do we get beyond the military-industrial complex stereotypes?

How are we going to stay ahead of China in the competition for the high-tech supremacy in these areas that, whether you're talking about quantum computers or artificial intelligence,

autonomous systems,

unmanned vehicles, both undersea and in the air?

Glenn, how are we going to get Americans interested in science and engineering in ways that we can win that contest and win that?

Do you see that this week they just did a contest?

They're recruiting all of their brightest children for their AI projects.

It should be a moonshot for us, and we're not making it.

And we're not doing it.

We're not doing it.

We need a sputt moment.

And if we wait for a sputnik moment, it's going to be too late.

Too late.

And this is one of the big issues that I'm addressing now: how do we get American students involved

at the K-12 level?

Because right now, Glenn, right now, look at our colleges and universities.

All of our major science and engineering programs, the majors, the graduate students,

the numbers of Americans there are shockingly low.

Computer science, computer science.

Of every 10 students who's a computer science graduate student or a major, of the 10, two are Americans.

I don't think anyone has captured, you know, when I was a kid, I grew up around the space program.

Yeah.

So I had all the little toys that were space program.

And that was Walt Disney.

Nobody.

Nobody

has captured the imagination.

I go out and I talk about AI and what's just over the horizon, just even the 5G network and how 5G is.

We have a conference coming up next week on 5G

and it's going to change everything and nobody knows it.

I'll sit and I can talk to an audience for an hour and I'm telling you you can hear a pin drop.

People are starving for it.

They don't know it.

And all you have to do is explain because it is both terrifying.

If you look at the moral machine of MIT, both terrifying and

exhilarating.

The opportunities are endless.

Endless.

Endless.

Unlike

anything anyone has ever dreamt.

And we face a competitor in the case of China who does not fear the risks involved.

They don't worry about that for a minute.

Right.

All they see

is the opportunities and the means by which

the comparison I draw, and it goes back to Rule of the Waves.

It's like the British and the Germans before World War I and the race for naval supremacy, in which the Germans decided that they needed to pour all of their industrial resources, all of their technical skill into building a battle fleet that would give them maritime supremacy.

And the British, who took that supremacy for granted, suddenly woke up one day and said,

oh my God, if we don't act, it's over.

We need to step up.

We're at that point.

We're at the point now where, and just as the German military

five years?

Well, I would say this.

I would say that with 5G, in fact, the timeline may even be shorter.

China is in the process of getting countries around the world

to

sign Memoranda of Understanding to allow the test of Chinese-built equipment for 5G.

Oh, my gosh.

And

they've got 45 countries signed up now, including many of our closest allies, by the way, Glent.

Why, we make the stuff.

We make it better than anybody else.

But we're dithering over the question of, well, what kind of standards should we set?

Oh, my God.

Who is it going to pay for?

Because it's enormously expensive.

The fiber optic networks on which it depends will cost billions of dollars.

And so while we dither,

they're moving.

The Chinese are moving.

Oh, my gosh.

And likewise with high-tech STEM and with education, the children, right?

The children are being recruited in grade school level to go into these areas, artificial intelligence, quantum.

China's a command economy.

They can say to a kid, you are going to study computer engineering and you are going to go to MIT and learn everything you can from your professors and download every file you can get back.

And you're going to come back here and you're going to work for the People's Liberation Army so that we can apply what you've learned there

to boosting our military edge here.

We don't have that kind of thing.

Thank God.

What we have to do is incentivize.

And it's developing incentivization to get America where we were

at the time of the space race, to get people, minorities, women, this is their moment.

When you look at quantum physics, quantum technology, it's the coming thing.

It's going to dominate the 21st century.

Why not draw kids into what's going to give them the future?

for the rest of the century here.

The moments are here.

It's all here waiting for us right now.

All we have to do is be aware of it and start moving on to incentivize it.

And then

this will happen again, Glenn.

I am totally convinced.

I have to have you.

I have to have you back because

I've got another hour and a half of topics with you.

Let me

do it.

Let me leave you with this one question.

Please.

You're a historian

2075.

Look at today

in America.

How does that book start with you?

Wow, that's very interesting.

Where would this story start?

In what?

You're going to have to be a little bit more into politics in terms of American society.

The American Experiment.

The American Experiment.

I love that.

Where has that happened?

I would say I would see two inflection points.

One would be 1968,

which is when our politics took a really bad turn with the assassinations, the radicalization of American campuses, radicalization of a major American party, the Democratic Party.

I would also point

where I think the American experiment also

nearly ran aground and received scrapes on its hull that we're still suffering from and still trying to plug the holes was the Clinton presidency.

I think that though, and you remember what that was like, the Clinton impeachment, the whole Monica Lewinsky, all at the time was

an all-consuming soap opera.

That's what we're going through now.

But this is where it started.

This is where where the polarization of American politics and the shift from what the media was able to do

with regard to absolving Bill Clinton from real crimes,

real crimes, not serious crimes, they weren't physical crimes, but they were real crimes

of getting, of what's the term I'm looking for, for inducing people to commit perjury, for lying to a federal judge, contempt of court.

This was the kinds of things which seriously damaged the fabric of the American presidency, the most important institution at the time

in our polity.

I would talk about the Trump presidency.

I would talk about Barack Obama, of course.

But I think in the end, and here I may surprise you, I think in the end, the theme of the book from

2075 is:

how did we go from being being as low as we were at that point to being as high as we are today?

I hope you're right.

Neither of us will be around to see unless.

Oh, I intend to

be there.

You better be there too.

I'm counting on it.

If Ray Kurzweil is right, we will be.

Thank you so much.

Thanks, Glenn.

What a pleasure.

Cheers.

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