Darryl Cooper: The True History of the Jonestown Cult, WWII, and How Winston Churchill Ruined Europe

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Here's the episode.

Speaker 3 And so sometimes I think to myself, you know, why are current events so unclear to so many people? And I always go back to the question of history.

Speaker 3 You can't really understand what's happening right now unless you understand what has happened before. You certainly can't plan a coherent future unless you understand.

Speaker 3 And then I think, well, why do people know so much, so little about history? Probably because it's not taught. And then to the extent that it is taught in, say, airport bookstores,

Speaker 3 you know, our popular historians are people like John Meacham and Michael Beschloss and Doris Kearns-Goodwin and Ann Applebaum, you know, not only sort of the dumbest people in the country, I would say.

Speaker 3 I know most of them, but also completely dishonest political actors.

Speaker 3 And so I think I just want to, I can tell that you hate compliments, but I just want to say I think you are the most important popular historian working in the United States today.

Speaker 3 You work in a different medium on Substack X podcasts,

Speaker 3 but. I'm a fan of yours because of the way you treat history, which is with relentless curiosity and honesty.

Speaker 3 And I'm sure you have all kinds of political beliefs or religious beliefs or whatever, but I feel like you get to what you think is true based on really intense research.

Speaker 3 So I just, for those people who aren't familiar with who you are,

Speaker 3 I want people to know who you are. And I want you to be widely recognized as the most important historian in the United States because I think that you are.

Speaker 3 So that's my last compliment for our time together. I know it was excruciating.

Speaker 3 Tell us some of the stories, we call them stories, but historical events that you have taken a really close look at recently.

Speaker 4 So I decided to start with an easy one. I did a 26-hour series on the early history of Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Speaker 4 Whether that was naive or hubris, it turned out pretty well. Yes.
You know, and the reason it turned out well, I think, and I've had time to really think about it over the years. I started it in 2015.

Speaker 4 Took me a few years to complete.

Speaker 4 But I've received hundreds of emails from Israelis, from

Speaker 4 Jews around the world who are, you know, boosters of Israel, as well as Palestinians and people around the Middle East and people who are critical of Israel, who all of them on all sides have kind of told me that it opened up, at least opened up their perspective to the way the other side saw the world, which is what I was going for, you know.

Speaker 3 In all of my series, something that I didn't really say, I think that the series that you did on the formation of Israel, I think is regarded by honest people as the most honest, most non-aligned look.

Speaker 3 No axes were being ground, maybe ever done. Can you just tell people who aren't familiar that what did it take to produce that? You said it took a few years, but what did you do in preparation for it?

Speaker 4 Well, you know, it's funny, actually, because

Speaker 4 when I first started it, I didn't really know what went into making a podcast like that, right?

Speaker 4 So I had this experience where I started working on it after I had read maybe like six books because I only, the series only goes up to 1948.

Speaker 4 I did some follow-up work on the more modern period, but this is up to the foundation of the state of Israel and the lead up to that, right? That's the, I only covered that part.

Speaker 4 And so I didn't know if this was going to be a one-episode thing, a two-episode thing. I start working on it after I've read about six books on that pre-1948 period.

Speaker 4 And I'm working on it for maybe, you know, quite a while. taking my time because I was working for the Department of Defense at the time.
So it was, you know, a side gig or wasn't even a gig.

Speaker 4 I didn't make any money from it. But

Speaker 4 and after a while, when I started to approach the end of that episode, this is months and months and months later.

Speaker 4 By now, I've read 20 books, 30 books about that pre-1948 period and a lot of the tangential topics and issues that

Speaker 4 help better help you better understand it. And I went back and I started going over.

Speaker 4 what I'd created for that first episode and it was so embarrassingly terrible where you look at it and you're like, this is not even that phrase, not even wrong. It's like, this is not even,

Speaker 4 it was a nightmare to read. And you realize, and I realized something at that point.
I was like, I've read, I started this, I'd read six books on this topic.

Speaker 4 Six books is a lot, you know, on a single historical topic. There's countless topics that I've read a book or two on.

Speaker 4 And if you give me like an energy drink and let me go, I'll start pontificating for hours about it, you know?

Speaker 3 Oh, I know the feeling.

Speaker 4 I read a book on the Federal Reserve once.

Speaker 4 And so eventually i got to the point i counted them all up one time people keep asking me to put together a list i can't put together a complete one because i just didn't keep as good a track as i should but i read over 80 whole books um parts of another 100 at least um and about

Speaker 4 when i counted them up i i

Speaker 4 could remember about like 12 1300

Speaker 4 academic papers and journal. I read everything I could find.

Speaker 3 So only people in prison read 80 books. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Well, or people who work for the Department of Defense and their job entails spending eight to 10 months a year going overseas by yourself, often with nothing to do in a country that nobody speaks your language.

Speaker 4 So,

Speaker 4 you know, I would, I would go over to work with one of our foreign allies usually on the weapon systems that I specialized in. We'd go over there and we'd work during the day.

Speaker 4 Most of the Ministry of Defense people, it doesn't matter what country you go to, you can go to Israel, you can go to Norway, you can go to Japan, Korea.

Speaker 4 All they want to talk about is American gun culture. It's there.

Speaker 3 Is that an interest of yours?

Speaker 3 Are you knowledgeable on that topic?

Speaker 4 I wouldn't say I'm necessarily like technically knowledgeable, like my gun nut friends are. But yeah, in terms of, you know, I'm a hunter and a gun owner, educated gun owner, you know.

Speaker 4 But I have friends who are real gun nuts that are

Speaker 3 totally fair, right? It's all specs.

Speaker 4 And I say that with all affection when, you know, it's, um,

Speaker 4 And so, you know, I would go overseas and spend my day, workday, working with them, training them, helping them with, you know, whatever was broken or needed upgrading, whatever we were doing over there.

Speaker 4 And sometimes I would spend, like I said, eight to 10 months a year overseas. I would be doing this by myself most of the time.

Speaker 4 And so after the workday was done, it's just me in my hotel with nothing really to do. And, you know, I grew when I was growing up, I

Speaker 4 counted these up one time and it was between kindergarten and 12th grade. I went to like 35 different schools.
Like I was changing schools sometimes every few months.

Speaker 3 Not a good sign, sorry.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Well, you know,

Speaker 4 one of the good habits I picked up from it was reading because it gave, you know, books were what gave me a sense of continuity from environment to environment to environment, right?

Speaker 4 I'm in the middle of a book and I move to another school and I have to adjust to that, but I'm still reading this book and it sort of patches me over. And that became sort of

Speaker 4 the background reality of my life as, you know, I sort of moved around in this unpredictable way, like for most of my early years.

Speaker 4 I'd still have this thread that was coherent that I was following, you know, consistently. And so it definitely helped with a sense of stability like that.

Speaker 4 And it implanted this idea that, you know, like I take refuge in books. Yes.
It's, you know, they, they,

Speaker 4 if I'm anxious, a lot of people, if they're anxious, they can't sit down and read a book because they can't sit still. Books make, they make my anxiety go away, right? It's what they do for me.

Speaker 4 And so, you know, I'm just a nerd is what I'm saying, basically, right? I'm a nerd. And I had a lot of time to read books.

Speaker 4 And once I started really getting obsessed with the podcast, you know, it got to the point where I was waking up three hours early so that I could read and write and work on the podcast.

Speaker 4 If I was in a meeting and we were waiting for the next speaker to come in, I was working on the podcast. Lunch, I was working on the podcast.
Evening, I was working on the podcast.

Speaker 4 And I mean, became like a real obsession, partly, partly because,

Speaker 4 I mean, left to my own devices, I would read books and talk to people about them.

Speaker 4 That's, you know, if I had a trillion dollars and nothing to do with myself, I would want a whole library and a bunch of interesting people to talk to about these books.

Speaker 4 That's what I'd do anyway, right?

Speaker 4 And so it was never really work.

Speaker 4 But yeah, that's the way you do it, you know, people

Speaker 4 who

Speaker 4 want to do, there's a lot of people I know who started doing history history podcasts or other, maybe not history, but

Speaker 4 not sort of conversational, just

Speaker 4 back and forth discussion podcasts where they do research and they want to make a presentation, right?

Speaker 4 And a lot of these guys who started back when I started, you know, 2015, 2016, and, you know, my success up to this point has been kind of unique in the space.

Speaker 4 Not everybody wants to listen to a seven-hour podcast on Jim Jones. And by the way, that's only the fifth out of seven episodes on the topic, right? So that's not for everybody.

Speaker 4 And, you know, they, they ask me sometimes, like, how do I, how could I do this as well as you do it? And other people who are like aspiring podcasters have asked me that.

Speaker 4 And like you said, I don't like compliments.

Speaker 4 And so I get shy when people ask me things like that, but I tell them, and you're going to object to this because you're a nice fellow and everything, but like, I'm not that smart.

Speaker 4 I'm not that, it's nothing like that. I work on this.

Speaker 4 You have to like, if you want to do something like this, you have to be willing to get up a little early, to use your lunch hour, to, you got to spend time in books. You got to read and read.

Speaker 4 And then when you think you've read enough, you got to read some more. And because there's just, there's so much out there.

Speaker 4 Like I said, that experience after I had read six books on just the pre-1948 period of, you know, the Zionist, Israeli-Palestinian conflict story, and I knew nothing, Tucker. I knew nothing.

Speaker 4 Like embarrassingly nothing. Worse than nothing.
Because like, at least before I read the book. It was the illusion of knowledge.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 4 At least before I had read the books, I would just be repeating to you whatever I had heard, you know, Benjamin Netanyahu say or somebody, whatever, somebody like on TV.

Speaker 4 I at least would have just been repeating that.

Speaker 3 This was worse.

Speaker 4 This was like the full midwit kind of meme in, you know, in production where, uh, where you know enough to really embarrass yourself.

Speaker 4 And I'm glad that I sort of recognized that at the time and I went back and like scrapped the whole thing, didn't start it for another year after that, probably, because I just realized that, you know, I got to get deeper into this.

Speaker 4 And as I've moved through different topics over the years, because I don't do an Israel-Palestine podcast, I do a history podcast and I choose topics based on

Speaker 4 what I want to read about, you know, that's all it is. Like usually while I'm working on one

Speaker 4 something,

Speaker 4 as I'm sort of getting into the second half, finishing it up, I can see the finish line on the thing I'm working on now.

Speaker 4 It'll get harder and harder to discipline myself to stay on that topic because there's something that's pulling me away.

Speaker 3 I know the feeling.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And so it's like a feeling of relief where like I finish it and now I can, I already know the next topic because it just emerged kind of naturally.
And I move on to that.

Speaker 4 And sometimes they're very, very different. I've done, like I said, a, you know, 32 hour series on the Jonestown cult, which turned into, you say, how do you do 32 hours on that?

Speaker 4 I told the story of, you know, the people's temple. 32 hours.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 Well, the reason for that, and I didn't know this going in, I never know exactly how this is going to unfold when I'm going in, unless it's like sometimes I'll do a single episode and I kind of know the story.

Speaker 4 But when I start a long series, it's going to take me a year and a half to put out every episode. I don't necessarily know how it's going to turn out.

Speaker 4 And, you know, when you look at something like the Jonestown cult, and for people who don't know,

Speaker 4 you know, 1978, everybody's heard the phrase, don't drink the Kool-Aid, right? And that's what people know about Jonestown, basically, is that Christianity sometimes goes off the rails.

Speaker 4 Don't drink the Kool-Aid. 1,000 people,

Speaker 4 you know, 900, I think 16 people committed mass suicide in the jungles of Guyana. Right.
At the direction of this preacher, Jim Jones. That's the most people know about it.

Speaker 4 When you open any book about it, even mainstream books about it, which, you know, again, most people don't get to that point. This won't be in any of the documentaries for the most part that you see.

Speaker 4 We open to like page one or two of any book about it. And the first thing you see is that 75% of the people that died out there were African Americans.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Black women from Oakland.

Speaker 4 From Oakland. But if they were over 40 or 50 years old, there weren't really any black people in Oakland until the Second World War.

Speaker 4 So these were migrants who had come from the South as part of the Great Migration. Right.

Speaker 4 And you'd think like if 75% of the people that died out there were Mexican immigrants, first generation Mexican,

Speaker 4 that wouldn't be a part of the story. That would be like the story.
Like what is going on here, right? Not just how did this religious cult get out of control. And like,

Speaker 4 you really need to understand that. I never knew that.
I always knew about Jonestown on the surface level, but I saw that. I'm like, I have to understand this better.
And so,

Speaker 4 you know, it drew me like deep into the history of African-American life in America post post-slavery and really, really deep into the Great Migration and the forces that drove it and the experiences that African Americans encountered when they got to the cities, the north and west, when they left the rural south.

Speaker 4 And,

Speaker 4 you know, when you, I get emotional when I think about the Jonestown story. I worked on that for a long time.
I read literally every single book or thing that's been written about it.

Speaker 4 And there's a lot of

Speaker 3 documentation. I think it was UCSB had an interview service.

Speaker 4 I mean, there's just a lot out there. Well, not only that, the FBI seized a thousand hours of tapes from Jonestown after the suicide, and they're all available online.

Speaker 4 I've listened to all of it and most of it twice. Like for months, I had this guy's sermons in my head.

Speaker 4 I had their like backroom midnight meetings where they're all going through struggle sessions, screaming at each other, beating each other up, all of their recordings of these late night torchlight sessions that they would have out in Guyana in the jungle.

Speaker 4 You know, if you watch most documentaries about Jonestown, it's all about the craziness. of the last year, which is when they were all actually in Jonestown, in Guyana.

Speaker 4 These people have been together together for 20 years. You know, he started his first church in the 1950s.
And this is a guy,

Speaker 4 Jim Jones, who,

Speaker 4 you know, in 1953 in Indianapolis, which was a KKK stronghold at the time, you know,

Speaker 4 because the second KKK was not really a southern anti-black movement. It was more of a Midwest and northern urban anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish movement.
And so Indianapolis was one of the strongholds.

Speaker 4 And he lived, that's where he lived at the time. He's like a 23-year-old guy.
He was born 39, maybe.

Speaker 4 He's 24 years old, starting his first little Methodist church in this storefront with folding chairs, you know. And he and his congregation are going out and boycotting stores in 1953.

Speaker 4 Years before anybody heard of a bus boycott or anything like that, you know, with Martin Luther King, he's going out there and doing that, getting death threats from KKK leaders, getting death threats from the American Nazi Party, trying to integrate these businesses, right?

Speaker 4 And so this is a true believer, like when it comes to this.

Speaker 4 His family, he adopted the first African, he was the first white family to adopt an African-American child in the history of the state of Indiana. And this was back in the 50s.

Speaker 4 And he was, you know, if Jim Jones had been hit by a bus in 1962,

Speaker 4 they moved out to the Bay Area in 1965.

Speaker 4 He would be remembered today as one of the early pioneers of the American civil rights movement and like revered for it. He really would be, right? And so I started to read about this stuff.

Speaker 4 And I realized that there was this theme that was starting to emerge in all of my podcasts for the most part, in the Israel-Palestine one and this one, which is, here's this guy who really is an idealist.

Speaker 4 And I'm not saying he didn't have pathologies, you know, that were already inherent in there, although I'm very suspicious of accounts when, you know, whenever I'm reading a book about, and all of the

Speaker 4 Jim Jones biographies are like this, and you have to learn how to like read past it.

Speaker 4 But you're reading a book about Stalin, and the author went and found and interviewed somebody who was in sixth grade with him or something.

Speaker 4 And they're like, you know, he got tripped on the playground one time and stood up and said, I'll get revenge on all of you one day.

Speaker 4 And that's when I knew I'm, I just, I'm very suspicious of all those stories, you know? And so you have this guy who's a true idealist.

Speaker 4 And he could be, you know, whether or not his, his, his politics were correct or whether his, you know, was misguided. That's a separate question.
He was an idealist.

Speaker 4 Like he really believed these things. He really did treat people in a way that in 1953 in America was uncommon, you know, and

Speaker 4 so you have this idealist, just like with the in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the beginning, you read all the early accounts of the early Zionists, and it's all about, it's just, it's soaring rhetoric about returning to the Holy Land and there's people who have really grand idealistic visions of what it's going to be like when they get down there.

Speaker 4 And then people run into the rocks of reality and how we respond to that pressure,

Speaker 4 you know, really defines

Speaker 4 the destiny of a movement and the people in it. And

Speaker 4 there are always going to be people and sometimes entire movements

Speaker 4 that the pressure ends up turning them off the road completely and into a ravine. That's kind of what happens.

Speaker 4 So, if you look at like the Jonestown story, the reason it turned into a 32-hour series is, like I said, they started in the 1950s doing

Speaker 4 stuff that you would recognize as just early civil rights stuff, you know, boycotting a local business to get them to integrate right around the time, a few years before, but like that Martin Luther King was going to start that kind of thing.

Speaker 4 And then, so you have Greensboro, you have these things. And

Speaker 4 their trajectory as an organization, the People's Temple, I realized, I mean, they that trajectory from about 53 to 1978, when everything came to an end, that 25-year trajectory follows almost to the month.

Speaker 4 I mean, it is uncanny, like how perfectly it follows. It makes perfect sense because of how plugged into it they were.

Speaker 4 It follows the trajectory of the civil rights and protest movement in America through its rise,

Speaker 4 its peak. its radicalization, and then its decline in the late 60s and then into the 70s into insanity and death.
I mean, and it is,

Speaker 4 I mean, it's almost a month.

Speaker 4 You can tell the story of Jonestown and give a month-by-month account of that process, of those protest movements being radicalized and turning to violence and insanity in the 60s and 70s.

Speaker 4 And so it became a vehicle for that. And that's what

Speaker 4 really the story is about. It's about that period of American history.
from the mid-50s up until about 1980.

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Speaker 4 The number of

Speaker 3 well-known Democratic politicians who were patrons of the People's Temple is quite amazing.

Speaker 4 Willie Brown was one of them.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah. But sure, I mean, every mayor of San Francisco.

Speaker 4 I have specific contempt for all of those people

Speaker 4 just because,

Speaker 4 you know, it wasn't just that when Jim Jones was a power broker in San Francisco, that they would go give a speech at the church because they were trying to bring out votes or something.

Speaker 4 You know, you had Angela Davis, you had Huey Newton, you had a lot of these other people who

Speaker 4 when these people were in Jonestown. And I mean, you got to remember, a lot of the, first of all, 300 of those thousand or so people were kids.
Another 300 to 400 were people over like 60 years old.

Speaker 4 Okay.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 you can, I mean, that's who's out there. Two-thirds, fully two-thirds of the people who committed suicide out there were kids or senior citizens, right?

Speaker 4 And as they're approaching this point of just maximum paranoia, maximum group psychosis down there, you know, and you listen to the recordings that they've, that they left for us, and they're just getting increasingly deranged.

Speaker 4 They're certain that the CIA is going to come and kidnap their children and put them through brainwashing. This is not just Jim Jones and his charisma telling these people this.

Speaker 4 These people understood themselves as a revolutionary movement, and they were true believers. Like they were true believers, these people.

Speaker 4 A lot of people like to say that at the end, it was basically murder. These people were forced to do this.
These people were for, at least for the vast majority of them, were not forced to do it.

Speaker 4 They believed in what they were doing. And they, they.

Speaker 4 Jim Jones, by that point, was almost like a figurehead of the movement, to be honest with you. He was just sort of the titular leader, but the movement,

Speaker 4 the organization was running itself. And you had a bunch of true believers who were out there trying to start the revolution and start a new society in the jungle.

Speaker 4 And in the last few months, when they're approaching just maximum psychosis and paranoia, you've got...

Speaker 4 like Angela Davis, Huey Newton, Harvey Milk, like a lot of the, I think you might, you know, he got killed shortly after, who are literally calling into Jonestown and being put on the speaker for everybody to listen, saying, we know that like, you know, the government is after you and we just want you to know that we have your back and, you know, there's just the whole world is coming after you, but we're there for you.

Speaker 4 We're on your side. This is a bunch of people who are like approaching a crisis point of paranoia and psychosis that's going to lead to their mass death within a few months.

Speaker 4 And that's what these people are doing, calling in, just feeding into it. And, you know, it makes me sick because you have people.

Speaker 4 And I know this wasn't maybe supposed to be just a Jonestown thing, but this topic, again, like it's, it affected me a lot, right? Like, there's this one woman.

Speaker 4 She was the lead singer of the Jonestown band.

Speaker 4 And the night before they all committed suicide, Leo Ryan, the congressman, was there and his entourage was there. And they put on a performance and there's a video.

Speaker 3 She did Jackie Spear. Yeah.
He became a member of Congress yourself.

Speaker 4 Yep. And there's a video of.

Speaker 4 that night, you know, it was

Speaker 4 in they show a musical performance. And this woman, who's the lead singer and band conductor is up there.
And she's this, you know, this African-American woman, beautiful, great voice, up there, like

Speaker 4 really confidently commanding the stage and really in her element, right?

Speaker 4 Well, her backstory was back in Indianapolis,

Speaker 4 Jim Jones, when his family had lived there, knew her when she was a little girl, just a little bit, like her mom came to the church sometimes, something like that.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 after Jim Jones and his people left,

Speaker 4 you know, she got abandoned by her mother. She ended up

Speaker 4 being

Speaker 4 pimped out by her drug dealer boyfriend when she was 15, 16 years old. And she's living her life on the streets, being beat up by this guy who's forcing her to go out and

Speaker 4 prostitute for him, you know, and that's her life. And now she's about 20.
She's committed suicide three or four times at this point. And now she's 20.

Speaker 4 And the Jonestown people make a trip back to Indianapolis because they would go around the country in their buses and, you know, speak at churches and hold events and stuff. And so they go back there.

Speaker 4 And she just kind of knew who the Jones family was. She said they treated her with kindness and her mother with kindness when she was a little girl.

Speaker 4 And she's in the depth of suicidal depression, drug addiction, you know, just she's close to the end, right?

Speaker 4 And,

Speaker 4 man, even in the podcast when I was recording, it makes me emotional because they got out there.

Speaker 4 She went there to the event when the Jonestown people came in because she just remembered that like these people had been kind to her 15 years ago, you know, when she was a little girl.

Speaker 4 So she came out to see and Jim Jones sees her and immediately recognizes her and starts talking to her, just, you know, friendly, everything.

Speaker 4 The people like start talking to her and she starts telling them kind of about how her life's gone since that time. And he said, oh, well, great.

Speaker 4 Like, or he said, not great, but he said, oh, well, come with us. Hop on the bus.
Let's go. Like, we've got houses.
We got a whole community out here.

Speaker 4 Like, you know, we can find a job for you until you do something. Whatever.
Yeah. Come on out.
And so she did, she did. And she went out there and they cleaned her up.
They got her off drugs.

Speaker 4 They took this broken, destroyed, abused woman

Speaker 4 and put her in an environment where it

Speaker 4 And again, you have to understand that even this psychotic movement, you know, the way it turned out, this part was genuine they put her into an environment where uh she felt like she belonged and it really was the people cared about her and she cared about the people there you know and so she ends up being the band leader she's like a super talented magician uh musician and she's writing the songs she's leading the the practices for the band she's the lead singer and everything and uh

Speaker 4 this you know and she died out there with all the rest of them you know with all the rest of those old people and kids and everybody else. She

Speaker 4 committed suicide with everybody else. The night after you see that video where Ryan says that it's amazing that you watched that video.

Speaker 3 I mean, I don't think I'd want to see something like that.

Speaker 4 I had to. Yeah, well, of course.
You know, I had to.

Speaker 4 I have a rule, and I've broken this rule once, and

Speaker 4 it's probably an episode I'm just like least proud of, maybe, although it's a lot of people's favorite episode.

Speaker 4 Like, I have a rule that I don't start a podcast until I feel like I can at least understand where everybody in this story is coming from.

Speaker 4 I didn't start the Israel-Palestine podcast until I felt like I could see how the Zionists saw things, how the Arabs saw things, how the British saw things, and how their behavior toward each other made sense to them in the context of their own world.

Speaker 4 And I did the same thing with Jonestown, which was a challenge because I mean,

Speaker 4 talking about a, you know, a psychotic cult leader who

Speaker 4 dragged his people to their deaths, you know, in the jungle, their meaningless deaths.

Speaker 4 There were literally people, Tucker, who, I mean, hundreds of people, parents who were injecting cyanide into their babies' mouths and watching them froth and twitch until they were sure they were dead.

Speaker 4 And then they could take the suicide drink themselves because they had done that. This is almost a thousand people.
It was one woman who.

Speaker 4 uh was in the capitol she wasn't she was at their office in the capitol she wasn't out at the um at the actual compound And when she got the call, like, it's time we're doing it.

Speaker 4 She slashed her kids' throats and then stabbed herself in the heart. I mean, this is,

Speaker 4 and yet

Speaker 4 these people loved each other. These people actually did believe like in

Speaker 4 equality. They believed in like human brotherhood and all these things.
And she slashed her kids' throats. And you, if you're going to tell a story like that,

Speaker 4 you can't do what all of the biographies of Jim Jones do. You You know, they'll all talk about like these weird things about him as a kid and something where it was all there at the beginning.

Speaker 4 And it was just the gradual ungradual flowering and unfolding of this psychosis that had always been in there. And all these other people just got sucked into it.
It's just, it's total nonsense.

Speaker 4 You really have to understand how people could get to a place like that from where they were. You know, everybody.

Speaker 4 Doesn't matter who you're talking about, Uday Hussein.

Speaker 4 There was a time, and I always try to keep this in mind because,

Speaker 4 I mean, it's like it's one of the governing thoughts as I go through any of these stories. Uday Hussein, Joseph Stalin, I don't care who you're talking about.

Speaker 4 There was a time where that was a little three-year-old kid.

Speaker 3 That's right.

Speaker 4 And they weren't evil. They weren't

Speaker 4 who they became. And so

Speaker 4 how did they become what they ended up being?

Speaker 3 You know, so I think you're approaching this, which is why I am so impressed by what you do and want more people to experience it.

Speaker 3 You're approaching this from the most honest possible perspective and allowing readers, viewers, listeners to come to their conclusions with the maximum amount of information.

Speaker 3 What you're not doing is using history as a weapon, a cudgel,

Speaker 3 or as a kind of propaganda tool to make policy. So in that, you almost stand alone, I would say, right now.

Speaker 3 I'm really interested in the project that you're working on now. I'm a little bit baffled by it.
So I'm just going to answer my own question. So you are working on

Speaker 4 World War II,

Speaker 3 which has to be, even more than the Kennedy assassination, the most

Speaker 3 written about event in human history. I can't think of one that has occasioned more books.
So

Speaker 3 why World War II?

Speaker 4 Well, you know, I was giving a talk to

Speaker 4 a graduate history class at the University of Vienna a while back online,

Speaker 4 giving them a talk. And

Speaker 4 one of the things that I said to them, and I was curious how this was going to go over in Austria, but it seemed to go over all right, is I told them over the next few decades, like, look, anytime you have a historical event, for us in the United States, it's the civil rights movement, it's World War II, and to a certain degree, it's still the civil war.

Speaker 4 Everything in between and before those things, you can do whatever you want.

Speaker 4 doesn't matter you think that the russians were to blame for world war one and not the germans you think that it was all british conspiracy you can do whatever you want it's fine because that's not part of the founding mythology of the order that we're all living in at this time right those other things are and whenever you have a historical event that is mythologized And when I say that, I don't mean myth like that's a myth, that's a lie.

Speaker 4 That's not what I mean. I mean that it's, it's a formative part of how we all understand the world we're in, or at least officially, like the official world, like that, the structures we live in.

Speaker 4 The structures we live in, it's the justification for a lot of those structures, right? Whenever you have those things, you're going to have taboos.

Speaker 4 You're going to have certain ways that certain topics have to be talked about that are going to guarantee that

Speaker 4 that topic is just profoundly misunderstood.

Speaker 4 And I told the students at the University of Vienna, I said, over the next couple of decades, like we're going to get to a point where the interwar period and the Second World War are far enough away that people can actually start taking a more honest look at everything that went on.

Speaker 4 And it is going to be the most fruitful place that any aspiring historian can dive into because we've spent the last 70 years, I mean, in Europe's case, like literally throwing people in jail for looking into the wrong corners, right?

Speaker 4 So there's so, and even

Speaker 3 particularly in Austria, I think.

Speaker 4 Right, right. And so even in the United States.

Speaker 3 It was an invaded country. So I'm not exactly sure why it's so important.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Well, I mean, it's a big topic.
But I mean, even the United States, where,

Speaker 4 where you're not going to go to jail necessarily for doing that, you might have your life ruined and lose your job.

Speaker 3 You might absolutely go to jail in this country.

Speaker 4 Nowadays, you might, yeah.

Speaker 4 But, you know,

Speaker 4 you could write a book. You could take any angle on it you want.
You're not going to ever get a job or have a publisher want to publish it or anything, but you could do it.

Speaker 4 You can go out on the street corner and stand on a box and say whatever it is you think.

Speaker 4 But even

Speaker 4 still,

Speaker 4 you know, that event is really,

Speaker 4 it's such a core part of the state religion that there are emotional triggers built into people since childhood that almost prevent them

Speaker 4 from

Speaker 4 taking an approach that would that would that might lead them uh to information or to conclusions that are not part of the state religion's version of of that event you know and and again you're going to find that i'm sure the peloponnesian wars were like that for the you know ancient greeks

Speaker 4 right.

Speaker 3 Well, by the way, the American Revolution, which is now totally irrelevant to modern America, unfortunately, was like that. The life of Lincoln was like that.
Lincoln was an very complicated guy.

Speaker 3 It's not an endorsement of slavery. Well, speaking for myself, I think slavery is disgusting.
It's the worst thing.

Speaker 3 What you're saying is absolutely right. It's not just the Second

Speaker 3 World War that is sort of uniquely censored or protected. the mythology around it.
It's every event that's central to a nation's understanding of itself, and then that changes over time.

Speaker 3 So do you think that we are far enough away, 80 years from that war, where you can try to take as an objective a look as you can

Speaker 3 and that will be allowed?

Speaker 4 No, I don't.

Speaker 4 I think we've got a little ways to go on that, but I hope I can kind of start to break the ice a little bit, you know, because

Speaker 4 Like here's the problem with doing something like that.

Speaker 4 And this is something I'm very aware of as I research it and start to work on the project, is that when

Speaker 4 you have a mythologized historical event that is told, that is, I mean, again, you go to a lot of places in Europe, it's a legal requirement.

Speaker 4 Over here, it's not quite that, but it almost might as well be where that this event is going to be described from a certain perspective. You're going to approach it a certain way.

Speaker 4 There are just certain things you're not allowed to question. You have to.

Speaker 3 Literally, it's a crime to ask questions.

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 4 That whenever that's the case, when you try to add any type of balance to that account, when you try to tell the story in a way that brings other approaches and other perspectives into it, it's going to look like you're trying to justify those other things.

Speaker 4 That's just how it's going to seem to people who are very locked into this side.

Speaker 4 And so if you start talking about the interwar period and how Weimar, the Weimar culture, you know, after the First World War, led to something like the rise of the National Socialists and why the people who embraced that movement did embrace it in a way that's not just, you know, was because they were, you know, you had this country, Germany, a sophisticated cultural,

Speaker 4 you know, superpower that was fine. And then they all turned into demons for a few years and now they're fine again.
Like that's sort of the official story.

Speaker 4 And I think deep down we all know that makes no sense. Everything has a cause.
You know, again, to go back, like Uday Hussein got to be Uday Hussein from that three-year-old little kid.

Speaker 4 Jim Jones got to be Jim Jones from being that guy who was just an earnest local Indianapolis civil rights activist.

Speaker 4 They all got to be those people that led to the chaos that they eventually invited into the world and onto themselves and their people through their experiences in the world and through a series of decisions, decision points that at the time,

Speaker 4 if you can. bring yourself to step into the shoes of those people, and it's not a comfortable thing to do.
I mean,

Speaker 4 I literally listened to probably 2,000 hours of Jim Jones's sermons and him screaming at his people and just going insane to the point where I was dreaming about this guy for months, I would have my headphones in as I was working, listening to Jim Jones.

Speaker 4 And it's really hard. Yeah, I know.

Speaker 3 Are you the only guy in the office doing that?

Speaker 4 I think I'm probably the only person in the world that's done that.

Speaker 4 And so, like, and I got to the point where I felt like I knew this guy. I like I could notice from tape to tape, I would hear changes in his tone of voice.

Speaker 4 And I knew whether he was high on amphetamines that day or if he had taken his barbituits already and now he's, you could just, I felt like I knew this guy.

Speaker 4 And their tapes, by the way, they're not all from like one year. They're from like 15, 20 years, right? So you can, you can watch this process of

Speaker 4 a descent into madness as it's happening. And,

Speaker 4 you know, to get to a point where you can bring yourself to step into the shoes of any other human being and understand that as much as

Speaker 4 you know, as much as it makes you uncomfortable, it is just a human being. And at the very, very like base level, their motivations are the same as yours, their needs are the same as yours,

Speaker 4 but that we're a very, we're a multivariate species that can go a lot of different directions, right?

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 to be able to do that and force yourself to do it is the key.

Speaker 4 And so, when you do something like that with, I mean, again, like a historical event like World War II, where, I mean, the one rule is that you shall not do that.

Speaker 4 You shall not look at this topic and try to understand how the Germans saw the world. Like how

Speaker 4 the whole thing from the First World War on up to the very end of the war, how these people might have genuinely felt like they were the ones under attack, that they were the ones being victimized by their neighbors and by all these, by the allied powers.

Speaker 4 You know, and you can,

Speaker 4 you can handle that with a sentence. You know, you can wave it off and say, well, you know, they're justifying themselves or they're rationalizing their evil or whatever you want to say.

Speaker 4 But again, that's, it's, I think we're getting to the point where that's very unsatisfying for people.

Speaker 3 Most of us, well, actually all of us go through our daily lives using all sorts of, quote, free technology without paying attention to why it's quote free. Who's paying for this and how?

Speaker 3 Think about it for a minute. Think about your free email account, the free messenger system used to chat with your friends, the free weather app or game app you open up and never think about.

Speaker 3 It's all free.

Speaker 4 But is it? No, it's not free.

Speaker 3 These companies aren't developing expensive products and just giving them to you because they love you. They're doing it because their programs take all your information.

Speaker 3 They hoover up your data, private personal data, and sell it to data brokers. and the government.

Speaker 3 And all of those people who are not your friends are very interested in manipulating you and your personal political and financial decisions. It's scary as hell.

Speaker 3 And it's happening out in the open without anybody saying anything about it. This is a huge problem.
And we've been talking about this problem to our friend, Eric Prince, for years.

Speaker 3 Someone needs to fix this. And he and his partners have.
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Speaker 3 It's

Speaker 3 more than unsatisfying.

Speaker 4 I mean, it's childish and shallow, of course. Hold on.
Let me, sorry to interrupt, but that's true. But every society has founding myths.

Speaker 3 100%.

Speaker 4 And you need them. You know, like, I don't think that we're necessarily better off now that people are

Speaker 4 now that people are

Speaker 4 able to just freely tear down a statue of George Washington because he was a slave owner, right?

Speaker 4 And so like, there are sacred symbols and national myths that any group of people are going to need to hold themselves together.

Speaker 3 And there's also peril in knowing the truth about things.

Speaker 3 I mean, if when we finally find out how President Kennedy was murdered in 1963, we finally find out what all these weird lights in the sky are at night, we really get to the truth of that.

Speaker 4 Will we be better off or not?

Speaker 3 I mean, those, you know, those are fair questions. I don't know the answer.

Speaker 3 But, but let me just say what I completely agree with you.

Speaker 3 Particularly, any unifying myth, you know, is important. important

Speaker 3 i'm just highly distressed by the uses to which the myths about world war ii have been put in the context of modern foreign policy particularly the war in ukraine and but but not just the war in ukraine so many others you know churchill's the good guy neville chamberlain's the bad guy you know it's just it's too uh pat it's obviously quite banal, but it also has justified like the killing of millions of people since the end of the Second World War.

Speaker 3 And so I do think it's fair to ask like what, what really was going on. So why not, for example,

Speaker 3 and I'm American, I'm not English, so I don't have any weird motive in asking this, but how would you assess Winston Churchill?

Speaker 4 I got in trouble with my podcast partner, Jocko Willink, one time, because he's a New England Dutchman who's his family.

Speaker 4 It's near and dear to they're Dutch, but very near and dear to their heart that Winston Churchill is a hero, right?

Speaker 3 Well, everyone, Everyone thinks that.

Speaker 4 He really thinks that. And I told him that I think, and maybe I'm being a little hyperbolic, maybe,

Speaker 4 but I told him, maybe trying to provoke him a little bit, that I thought Churchill was the chief villain of the Second World War. Now, he didn't kill the most people.

Speaker 4 He didn't commit the most atrocities. But I believe, and I don't really think, I think when you really get into it and tell the story

Speaker 4 right and don't leave anything out, you see that he was primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did, becoming something other than an invasion of Poland or

Speaker 4 just, I mean, at every step of the way, like people are very often, I find, surprised to learn. There's a two-step process.

Speaker 3 Well, why don't you just make the case, make the case for that? Okay. So you've made your statement.
A lot of people are thinking, well, wait a second.

Speaker 3 You said Churchill, my childhood hero, the guy with the cigar. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Well, and the next thought that comes into their head is that, oh, you're saying Churchill was the chief villain, therefore his enemies, you know, Adolf Hitler and so forth, were

Speaker 3 the protagonists, right?

Speaker 4 They're the good guys if you think he's a villain. That's not the case.
That's not what I'm saying. You know, Germany, look, they put themselves into

Speaker 4 a position, and Adolf Hitler is chiefly responsible for this, but his whole regime is responsible for it, that when they went into the East in 1941,

Speaker 4 they launched a war where they were completely unprepared. to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners and so forth that they were going to have to handle.

Speaker 4 They went in with no plan for that. And they just threw these people into camps and millions of people ended up dead there.
You know, you have

Speaker 4 like letters as early as July, August, 1941 from commandants of these makeshift camps that they're setting up for these millions of people who are surrendering or people they're rounding up.

Speaker 4 And they're so it's two months after, a month or two after Barbarossa was launched. And they're writing back to the high command in Berlin saying, we can't feed these people.

Speaker 4 We don't have the food to feed these people. And one of them actually says, rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn't it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now?

Speaker 4 And so this is like two months into the invasion, right? And like my view on this,

Speaker 4 you know, I argue with my Zionist

Speaker 4 interlocutors about this all the time with regard to the current war in Gaza. Look, man, like

Speaker 4 maybe you, as the, you know, the Germans, you felt like you had to invade to the east.

Speaker 4 Maybe you thought that Stalin was such a threat, or that if he launched a surprise attack and seized the oil fields in Romania, that you would now not have the fuel to actually respond, and you'd be crippled, and all of Europe would be under threat.

Speaker 4 And whatever it was, whatever it was, like maybe you thought you had to do that.

Speaker 4 But at the end of the day, you launched that war with no plan to care for the millions and millions of civilians and prisoners of war that were going to come under your control.

Speaker 4 And millions of people died because of that, right? And you can look at it and say, like,

Speaker 4 you know, there,

Speaker 4 well, yeah. So get back to your like, your main question about Churchill.
You know, if you go to 1939,

Speaker 4 when the Germans and the Soviet Union invade Poland,

Speaker 4 as soon as that war is wrapped up on the German side, Hitler starts firing off peace proposals to Britain and France because they had already declared war.

Speaker 4 He didn't expect them to declare war, actually. There's

Speaker 4 a famous scene where he kind of throws a fit when he finds out that they actually did, that they did do that. And so he doesn't want to fight France.
He doesn't want to fight Britain.

Speaker 4 He feels that's going to weaken Europe when we've got this huge threat to the east, the communist threat over there.

Speaker 4 And he starts firing off peace proposals. He says, let's not do this.
We can't do this. And of course,

Speaker 4 a year goes by, 1940 comes around and they're still at war. And so he launches his invasion to the west, takes over France, takes over Western and Northern Europe.
Once that's done, the British have

Speaker 4 escaped at Dunkirk. There's no British force left on the continent.
There's no opposing force left on the continent. In other words, the war is over and the Germans won.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 by what point?

Speaker 4 Fall of 1940, right? So there's just, there's literally no opposing force on the continent.

Speaker 4 And throughout that summer, Adolf Hitler is firing off radio broadcasts, giving speeches, literally sending planes over to drop leaflets over London and other British cities, trying to get the message to these people that Germany does not want to fight you.

Speaker 4 Like, we don't want to fight you, offering peace proposals that, you know, said,

Speaker 4 you keep all your overseas colonies. We don't want any of that.
We want Britain to be strong. The world needs Britain to be strong, you know, especially as we face this communist threat and so forth.

Speaker 4 Like this, this is what's going on. And I think that if there were people in Britain who,

Speaker 4 well, if they hadn't put it this way, if they hadn't been so successful at delegitimizing the peace approach by demonizing Neville Chamberlain and so forth and holding him responsible for the invasion of Poland,

Speaker 4 that people would have been, they would have understood, like, we don't need another.

Speaker 4 a repeat of the First World War, you know, we don't, which is not what ended up happening, but that's what everybody thought was going to happen.

Speaker 4 And so Churchill, I mean, you have a guy once Churchill wanted a war. He wanted to fight Germany.

Speaker 4 And the reason that I, I don't begrudge him that, you know, people can, national leaders, you can fight whoever you want.

Speaker 4 If, you know, if you feel like your long-term, the long-term interests of the British Empire are threatened by the rise of a powerful continental power like Germany and you need to check that.

Speaker 4 Those are great power games and you play them the way you feel like you need to play them. That's fine.

Speaker 4 The reason I resent Churchill so much for it is that he kept this war going when he had no way, he had no way to go back and fight this war. All he had were bombers.

Speaker 4 He was literally by 1940 sending firebomb fleets, sending bomber fleets to go firebomb the Black Forest just to burn down sections of the Black Forest. Just

Speaker 4 rank terrorism, you know, going through and starting to, you know, what eventually became just the carpet bombing, the saturation bombing of civilian neighborhoods, you know, to kill is the purpose of which was to kill as many civilians as possible.

Speaker 4 And all the men were out in the field. All the fighting-aged men were out in the field.
And so this is old people, it's women and children. And they knew that.

Speaker 4 And they were wiping these places out as gigantic-scaled terrorist attacks, the greatest, you know, scale of terrorist attacks you've ever seen in world history.

Speaker 3 Why would he do that?

Speaker 4 Because it was the only means that they had to continue fighting at the time. You know, they didn't have the ability to re-invade Europe.
And so he needed to keep this war going until he accomplished

Speaker 4 what he, what he hoped to accomplish. We know now there's actually a really great series of books.
It's one of the best. I recommend it to everybody, but it's really expensive now.

Speaker 4 And it's six long volumes called History of British Special Operations in the Second World War.

Speaker 4 And one of the books gets into the level of just the extent of media operations, propaganda operations, everything that they were running in the United States to eventually drag us into that war.

Speaker 4 And that was his whole plan. His whole plan was

Speaker 4 we don't have a way to fight this war ourselves. This war is over.
We need either the Soviet Union or the United States to do it for us.

Speaker 4 And that was the plan and kept the war going long enough for that plan to come to fruition. And to me, that's just, it's a craven,

Speaker 4 ugly way to fight a war.

Speaker 3 And what was the motive?

Speaker 4 Well, you know, Churchill's got a long and complicated history. I mean, he's a, you know, he's somebody who.

Speaker 3 That was the wryest smile I think I've ever seen.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Well, look,

Speaker 4 I think on one level, there was a sense that Churchill was sort of humiliated by his performance in the First World War as the head of the Admiralty, and he was out in the cold for a long time.

Speaker 4 Mean Glipoli. Yeah.

Speaker 4 And which, you know, was that was his operation. Yeah.
You know, and so he.

Speaker 4 was rightly held responsible for that and seen as responsible for one of the great disasters that the British suffered during that war. And so I think part of it was probably kind of personal.

Speaker 4 You know, he wanted redemption. He wanted to go out there and like prove that he's the warlord, that they can go out there and fight this big war.

Speaker 4 Probably. I think part of it, like I read about Churchill and he strikes me as a psychopath,

Speaker 4 but he's also a sort of, I mean, he was a drunk. He was very childish in strange ways.

Speaker 4 People would talk about how as an adult, like at, you know, as prime minister, they'd find him in his room and he's he's like playing with action figures like war toys and army men and stuff and would get mad when people would interrupt him, you know, when he was doing this.

Speaker 4 This is a strange, strange fellow, you know. There's all those things.

Speaker 4 But then you get into, you know,

Speaker 4 why was Winston Churchill such a such a

Speaker 4 dedicated booster of Zionism from early on in his life, right? And there's ideological reasons.

Speaker 4 One, you know, like in 1920, he wrote a kind of infamous now article called called Zionism versus Bolshevism. And he basically makes the case that,

Speaker 4 which was true to a large extent, that

Speaker 4 all of Eastern Europe, the Pale of Settlement, which is where the vast majority of Jews lived, other than the United States, which is where a lot of them had traveled to,

Speaker 4 that

Speaker 4 that area had become so engulfed by a revolutionary spirit, that all the young Ashkenazi Jews who were over there were getting swept up into it. It was the 60s here on steroids, right?

Speaker 4 And in a much more serious and ended up being destructive way. And this is 1920, so this is shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution.

Speaker 4 Basically, the point of his paper is he says these people who are over there,

Speaker 4 they're all going one direction or the other. They're going to be Bolsheviks.
They're going to be Zionists. We want them to be Zionists, you know, and so we need to support this.

Speaker 4 And so that was early on. There was an ideological component of it.

Speaker 4 But then as time goes on, you know, you read stories about Churchill going bankrupt and and needing money, getting bailed out by people who shared his interests,

Speaker 4 you know, in terms of Zionism, but also his hostility, just,

Speaker 4 you know, I think his hostility to Germany, put it this way, I think his hostility to Germany was real.

Speaker 4 I don't think that he necessarily had to be bribed to have that feeling.

Speaker 4 But, you know, I think he was, to an extent, put in place by people, the financiers, by a media complex that wanted to make sure that he was the guy who, you know,

Speaker 4 who was who was representing Britain in that conflict for a reason. And

Speaker 4 Churchill's a,

Speaker 4 again, it's so hard because like, you know, especially in a short interview like this, where

Speaker 4 you have this guy

Speaker 4 who,

Speaker 4 I mean, he's a, he's an Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Martin Luther King, like type figure in the, in the sort of Western consciousness, right? Yes.

Speaker 4 And so people have so many assumptions and built-in triggers like when it comes to this guy, that it's hard to talk about him because you're always thinking about the triggers that you're setting off and your listeners.

Speaker 4 And I don't say that in a way of like, I don't want to offend anybody. No, no, I understand.
It's that it's, you know, you know that things are going to be misunderstood.

Speaker 4 And so this is why I do 30-hour podcasts.

Speaker 3 Well, it's just, it's interesting because I, you know, as a follower of your work, I don't see you as hostiles to the West.

Speaker 3 I see you actually as a product of the West and as a defender really of the West or its values.

Speaker 3 You know, in your approach, in your open-mindedness, rigor, you know, belief in accuracy and honesty. I mean, those are Western notions.

Speaker 3 And yet Churchill has been positioned and has been really is accepted as like the defender of the West over the last hundred years.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And so maybe that's, and I wonder why that is. I don't, I mean, people can certainly take issue with any factual claims you're making.

Speaker 3 I assume they're all right, they're consistent with what I think I know to be true.

Speaker 3 But why do you think Churchill has been presented in a way, in the way that he has?

Speaker 4 Yeah, well, it has to do with what you said earlier, right?

Speaker 4 Neville Chamberlain versus Churchill has been the binary model that has served as the chief rhetorical device for every conflict we've wanted to get into since then. Yes.

Speaker 4 You know, the entire Cold War and then even after the Cold War in the global war on terror is if you appease them, you're Neville Chamberlain.

Speaker 4 Hitler's the, rather, Churchill's the one who saw all along where this was headed and was trying to warn people, this, you know, Cassandra.

Speaker 4 And finally, because nobody listened to him, the war ended up breaking out and we were forced to like go stamp out this threat.

Speaker 4 And now it's a much bigger threat than it ever would have been if we just would have listened.

Speaker 3 If we had strangled it in its crib.

Speaker 4 And it's justified every conflict,

Speaker 4 you know, really since the Second World War. Everybody's the new Hitler, right? It's, it's, um, and so that it's a, it's very valuable in that sense.
But then also,

Speaker 4 you know, it really did become

Speaker 4 the

Speaker 4 founding myth of the, of the global order that we're all living in now, right? Like, because when you think about, like, if you go back to,

Speaker 4 think about like, um, in Machiavelli's The Prince, right? And he, he starts that book out kind of talking about why he's writing this book.

Speaker 4 And one of the things that he says in there is, you know, Italy is a bunch of broken up little principalities and city-states and stuff.

Speaker 4 And he's looking over to the west and the north and seeing countries like Spain, countries like France and England, who like, these are, these are countries that are now starting to operate on a totally different scale.

Speaker 4 like on a national something.

Speaker 4 And we have got to get it, get it, get our act together and start learning how to act on that, on that level as well. And so that's why I'm writing this book.

Speaker 4 It's an instruction manual and like a call to action kind of.

Speaker 4 Well,

Speaker 4 as that goes on and the nation state starts to put itself together in the modern era,

Speaker 4 you know, you

Speaker 4 get to World War I and you think about what the nation state is, right?

Speaker 4 Like history to a large extent, like sort of global event style history is governed to a great degree by the military technology that's prevalent at a given time, right?

Speaker 4 So I don't think it's an accident, for example, that

Speaker 4 the ancient Greeks had like an equal, a feeling of like citizen equality that was unprecedented in the world at the time. And they had their chief combat system was the phalanx unit

Speaker 4 that required every man to stand by his, you know, his fellow citizen as a unit. And

Speaker 4 that's what their position in the world depended on people people being able to do that. I don't think that's a mistake, right? I don't think it's a mistake when you look at other societies where

Speaker 4 charioteers, you know, really expensive branch chariots, or

Speaker 4 when you get to like

Speaker 4 the high middle ages where the heavy horse cavalry is just totally dominant on the battlefield.

Speaker 4 So only the people who can afford that kind of a weapon system, they're the ones who are going to rule. And the people who don't like it, they really don't have any means to

Speaker 4 sort of express

Speaker 4 their own political will. And so as a nation state starts to get put together,

Speaker 4 you start to have military conflicts and just military buildups on a scale that nobody's ever heard of before.

Speaker 4 I mean, you're talking, you get to the First World War, I mean, millions and millions of men.

Speaker 4 And if you want to operate on that level, if you want to operate on the level of great game global politics, you got to be able to put an army of several million men in the field, you know?

Speaker 4 And it's why countries who tried their hand at imperialism, like the Dutch and the Belgians, eventually they were just like, you know, we're not doing it. And it's because they saw that.

Speaker 4 And so, you know, when you look at the First World War and the Second World War, but really the First World War is like the apotheosis of the nation state in a lot of ways, where you have, you know, if you, if you think back to like an old king.

Speaker 4 in the early modern period or even, no, forget about that. Look at like Louis XIV,

Speaker 4 the sun king, right? powerful as any monarch in europe like for hundreds of years

Speaker 4 his actual ability to reach into the local affairs of some village and tell people how to act or what to think pretty limited very limited like we we think you know because of movies and tv that a monarch is sitting on his throne and he just orders this and it happens like god's saying let there be light or something head him yes yeah and that's just they didn't have that kind of reach you know they had influence and they had but they had like any modern

Speaker 4 individual politician, they had to work through existing structures and systems to get their will actually carried out.

Speaker 4 And that meant making compromises and they just didn't have the resources to like, you know, technological resources, but also just human and financial resources to get down to the granular level of control that would become common when with the rise of the nation state.

Speaker 4 And so you get up to the point where, you know, when the nations face off in World War I, and you have countries that,

Speaker 4 I mean, when you look at the

Speaker 4 level of efficient mobilization toward a single cause, you know, fighting the war,

Speaker 4 how the economy, how the government, everybody was on the same page. And, you know, they were fighting this war as whole societies.

Speaker 4 Like they figured out a way that they could do what Louis XIV could never dream of. They could mobilize their whole society for war.

Speaker 4 And that was what you had to do if you wanted to compete on the level of Germany and France and so forth.

Speaker 4 And so what somebody like Churchill during the First World War, and probably actually the Second World War as well, most people, I think, players in the Second World War, what they thought they were doing was that this was a war between nation states.

Speaker 4 like World War I and so on and so forth. And it was not that.

Speaker 4 And we found out afterwards that it was not that, that there were two great military land empires, multi-ethnic, multiracial, multicultural military land empires, the Soviet Union and the United States,

Speaker 4 that, and when I say empire, obviously, like we don't think of the U.S. pre-World War II in that way very much, but you know, we didn't start out with a whole continent under our control, right?

Speaker 4 We started out as 13 colonies and we grew through

Speaker 4 a confrontation with and a centuries-long race war against the natives, right? I mean, that's really, that was the formative experience of America in its early history.

Speaker 4 And so it's an empire in a way, you know, not the way we normally, like the, it's not like the British Empire, but I think you can call it that.

Speaker 4 And, you know, these two countries, that thing that Machiavelli was noticing when he's looking over at Spain and France, you actually had like Germany, for example.

Speaker 4 There's this idea that the only reason that they did Molotov-Ribbentrop was because, you know, Hitler needed needed to buy time so he could eventually invade the Soviet Union later or something like that.

Speaker 4 Not exactly true. I mean, obviously he was talking about the eventual conflict with the Soviet Union very early in his career.
That was there.

Speaker 4 But by the time you get up to like 1939, his views are starting to become more complicated on it, where he's starting to see the United States as the chief, the real chief threat to not just to Germany, but to Europe, because he saw himself as the sort of European defender, messiah guy, right?

Speaker 4 So, and he looks over at Joseph Stalin and says, you know, a lot of his people kind of thought this way, that this is not an international communist movement anymore.

Speaker 4 Like Trotsky's been banished from the country, and his followers are all dead. You know, they were killed during the purges of the late 30s.
These people are all are all gone.

Speaker 4 Those are all of the people

Speaker 4 who, you know, from the very beginning after the First World War, they saw Russia as the fountainhead of world revolution.

Speaker 4 And Stalin, he never quite gave that up, you know, just like the United States, he saw it as

Speaker 4 his duty to build up ideologically aligned allies and so forth.

Speaker 4 But if you really look at what happened and a lot of the Germans saw it this way, you know, Stalin, what he did was kind of turn the Soviet Union into like a national socialist nation state, really.

Speaker 4 You know, he kind of brought back the Russian Empire and now it's called communists and stuff. But there's no goal to just set off global revolution.

Speaker 4 And then once that happens, the the chips will fall where they may.

Speaker 3 They kept inside the Kremlin, they kept all the paintings of St. George, the patron saint of Russia, all the crosses.

Speaker 3 The whole Stalin period, they're there.

Speaker 4 And I have, don't, I mean, I have nothing good to say about Stalin.

Speaker 3 I don't either, but I don't think it's been misadvertised a little bit.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 And when I, earlier, when I said that there's one episode that I have done where I feel like I didn't do my duty to force myself to understand the perspective of the perpetrators, it was the one that I did about the Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe after the Second World War and what they did in Germany and other places, and specifically Romania, which is, as far as I can tell, like so far, after 30 years of reading history books, is pretty much the worst thing that ever happened.

Speaker 4 These prison experiments that they ran in Petaschi and other places in Romania after the Second World War are

Speaker 4 not family listening, if you really want to.

Speaker 3 The Soviets did.

Speaker 4 Yeah, the Soviet advisors were there. It was carried out technically by the Securitate and the Romanians themselves.

Speaker 4 But, you know, this was a

Speaker 4 program being run from Moscow, right?

Speaker 4 And it's whatever you're thinking it is out there, whoever's listening or watching this, it's a thousand times worse. And I wouldn't recommend going and listening to my episode, The Anti-Humans,

Speaker 4 unless you're prepared for that. So I'll just leave it at that.
But I'll say like in that one, like, I just couldn't, I couldn't bring myself to put my, I couldn't put myself in the shoes of

Speaker 4 the people who were doing those things. And I didn't really try.
And it comes across much more polemical than any of my other work.

Speaker 4 And a lot of people love it because it does, you know, expose a lot of the crimes that happened during that period and stuff. But I think

Speaker 3 it's hard sometimes. I'll tell you one thing as a

Speaker 3 I'm not a Stalin expert. I don't speak Russian, but I have read about Stalin my whole life.
And one thing that I was very surprised to learn that it came out right after the

Speaker 3 everything collapsed in 91, and a British historian,

Speaker 3 a Russian speaker, got access to a lot of the Stalin archives, the personal archives. And I was amazed to read in

Speaker 3 this book, Court of the Red Tsar, amazing book. That is a great book.
It is a great book.

Speaker 3 But the thing that it overturned, I mean, I'm older than you, so maybe you always knew this, but growing up, we didn't.

Speaker 3 Everyone thought Stalin was this bloodless technocrat, not a true believer at all. That was Lenin, certainly Trotsky seemed like a true believer.

Speaker 3 Zinoviev, Kamenev, you know, all the guys around him might have been, but he was not. And you learn in reading this, so he was actually a devout, like religious level communist,

Speaker 3 which either makes him more repulsive or less, depending. I don't, I don't, you, I could see it from either side, but it's definitely not what we thought he was.
And what I loved about that was

Speaker 3 your view of something. It's a small thing, I guess, for most people.
It was a big thing for me to learn that.

Speaker 3 But your whole kind of accepted view of something can turn out to be utterly false. Like a lot of history is just completely fake.

Speaker 3 And so when you see someone who's diving in face first with like courage and honesty, you just have to applaud. That's why I'm just applaud.
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Speaker 3 They were there there at the Butler Township assassination attempt, for example, and got footage that no one has ever seen before. And it's amazing.

Speaker 3 Become a member at tuckercarlson.com to see this series, Art of the Surge.

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Speaker 3 Where are you, by the way, in this process?

Speaker 4 Well, I'm currently working on a series. I'm about,

Speaker 4 I'm probably going to do two more episodes on it on the history of the American labor movement.

Speaker 4 It's not a narrative history of the entire labor movement. I pick certain episodes.
I talk about the Battle of Blair Mountain in one episode.

Speaker 4 Do one on the Haymarket Affair. And

Speaker 4 really, it's about the industrial wars of the late 18th century from Pittsburgh to Chicago and everything.

Speaker 4 I did one on

Speaker 4 this 1968 teachers' union strike in New York City that's kind of famous now, Ocean Hill-Brownsville.

Speaker 4 And that was one that a lot of my research for the Jonestown podcast about the great migration of African Americans out of the South came in really handy.

Speaker 4 Because really what it's about is

Speaker 4 it was a conflict in the New York's political system that centered around a school in Brooklyn at a time when, you know, 75% of the teachers in New York City were Jewish.

Speaker 4 And, you know, New York is, it's such an interesting city for the, you know, for the, for the fact that, you know, it's obviously this, this multi-ethnic, multi-cultural city that over the years just, you know, is where everybody washed up for the most part on our shores.

Speaker 4 And from the Irish migrations to the Jewish Jewish and Italian migrations and everybody that came after that,

Speaker 4 there was conflict and people had to figure out and eventually come to a settlement of like, how are we going to live here together and all feel like we are being represented and so forth.

Speaker 4 And so you had this city where, again, like today, this sounds almost,

Speaker 4 it sounds like a different world in some ways where, you know, the teachers were pretty much all Jews.

Speaker 4 The transit workers, pretty much all Irish. The cops were mostly Irish.
The firemen were mostly Irish. Most of the construction trade, the dock workers, things like that, they were all Italians.

Speaker 4 And everybody kind of, it wasn't something like that's what they gravitated to.

Speaker 3 Sanitation to Italian.

Speaker 4 Sanitation, yeah. But that was their economic territory.
And they had certain neighborhoods that were theirs. And people kind of knew that it's not like a

Speaker 4 you know, a Jew couldn't move into an Italian neighborhood or vice versa or something.

Speaker 4 But everybody knew that this was an Italian neighborhood and it was going to stay that way. And they had all kind of come to this settlement in a natural way.

Speaker 4 Like it just, there was an emergent order that came came over the years.

Speaker 4 And when,

Speaker 4 and again, there was conflict at every stage of that.

Speaker 4 After the 1924 immigration law that essentially cut off European immigration and generally

Speaker 4 Europe, immigration in general, the cheap source of labor that industry turned to were African Americans from the South.

Speaker 4 And so you saw over the course of about 40 or 50 years, about six or seven million African Americans move out of the rural South to the northern and western cities.

Speaker 4 And it turned out when they got up there that they had a lot of the same problems that they had had previously,

Speaker 4 but for, you know, various reasons.

Speaker 4 I think personally, the fact that we were in the post-second world war period and we were in the middle of a cold war,

Speaker 4 that

Speaker 4 the process of integrating these people into the system as one of several,

Speaker 4 you know, because this was a great dream. If you read,

Speaker 4 what's the book?

Speaker 4 Nathan Glazer and it's Beyond the Melting Pot, you know, that he wrote. And

Speaker 4 they, in the, I think they wrote that in 1971. And what they predicted in that book was Moynihan and Glazer, that's what it was.

Speaker 4 And they predicted in that book that, yeah, there's a lot of problems right now integrating the African-American and Puerto Rican populations into the, into the city.

Speaker 4 But what we're going to do, like eventually, this has always happened, it's happened in the past. Eventually, it's not going to be black and white like it seems right now.

Speaker 4 It's going to be Italian and Jewish and Puerto Rican and black.

Speaker 4 And so they're going to take their place as one of the ethnicities, like in the sort of urban political structure and social structure we have here.

Speaker 4 And when they look back on it, and I think it was maybe a 2012 edition, they sort of recognized that that was obviously a

Speaker 4 prediction that

Speaker 4 did not come true.

Speaker 4 They, you know, they sort of get into that. And so, um,

Speaker 4 but this, the teacher strike

Speaker 3 of 1968

Speaker 3 was like, first of all, it was, at least in my reading of it, one of the pretty rare expressions of mass and open anti-Semitism.

Speaker 3 There's been anti-Semitism, of course, but like for real in American history. And it doesn't seem to be remembered for some reason.

Speaker 4 No, it's remembered or misremembered like right alongside the Crown Heights riot and

Speaker 4 things like that.

Speaker 4 Because, you know, it's one of those things. Look, I lived for a long time in Los Angeles, right?

Speaker 4 Um, used to live in South LA when those were all black neighborhoods down there.

Speaker 4 And you people think back to the Rodney King riots or when they were watching the fresh Prince of Bel Air or something, and he would go visit his friends down in Compton, and those were the black neighborhoods down there.

Speaker 4 Those are not black neighborhoods, oh, I know, those are all Latino neighborhoods, and that transition was not accomplished peacefully.

Speaker 4 You know, there were, and there are, there are good studies and write-ups about this: um, hundreds and and hundreds of random murders of black people by Mexican gangs, fire bombings of apartment buildings to drive these people out.

Speaker 4 Right. And now you look at something.

Speaker 4 That's kind of, you know, if you look at all the big cities in California, even like up in Oakland and stuff, they're all losing their black population.

Speaker 4 And the great migration out of the south to these cities is actually in reverse right now. And a lot, like net African Americans are moving back to the south.

Speaker 3 And they're into the Indian Empire or just like away from the coast. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Yeah.
Well, that's right. That's what happens.
Like a lot of the, but it's a step-by-step process, right?

Speaker 4 They get priced out of Oakland and San Francisco and they move to Stockton and Sacramento and then those places go up too and they end up moving, you know, further inland.

Speaker 4 And that's a process that's been going on for a long time.

Speaker 4 But like when you look at what happened in Los Angeles, I mean, again, you're talking about hundreds and hundreds of random murders, fire bombings, just not of other gang members or something.

Speaker 4 I'm not talking about drive-bys of other gang members. I'm talking about just a random black guy.

Speaker 3 Race killings. Yeah, race killings.
Killing people because of the color of their skin.

Speaker 4 And if those people had been, you know, who were doing that were wearing white hoods, they would have called the U.S. Marines in and for good reason, you know.

Speaker 4 But it's one of those things that nobody wants to talk about because it doesn't fit neatly into one of our easy political.

Speaker 3 That's what bothers me about the recording of history. I mean, I think it, what happens matters, reality matters.

Speaker 3 And if you find that sort of everything that happens, not just 80 years ago in Dresden, but things that are happening in like LA County 20 years ago, if they just disappear,

Speaker 3 you know, in some cases you can even find them on Google. Like that's a level of manipulation that's like, that's just mind control.

Speaker 4 That's, that's really scary.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I think the propagandists throughout the 20th century, ever since the sort of the rise of mass media, have really understood that that's exactly what it is, you know, especially once it goes on for a generation or two and kids are raised up

Speaker 4 and this is what they're being taught because

Speaker 4 it forms for them

Speaker 4 their,

Speaker 4 not just their view of the world, but their view of themselves.

Speaker 4 Like our identities as individuals and our identities that we attach ourselves to collectively are all a result of the stories we tell ourselves and that we hear as we're growing up.

Speaker 4 And so if you change those stories, all of those things change as well.

Speaker 3 Okay, so that's a perfect segue to something I'm just itching to talk to you about, itching to get your view on.

Speaker 3 And that leads us back to Churchill. So Churchill is this great hero, defender of the West, savior of the West, the toughest man in world history, the only reason we're not speaking German.

Speaker 3 And he won the Second World War. Like, that's what, ask anybody, that's just a fact.

Speaker 3 And yet, if I go to his country, like regularly,

Speaker 3 and it's, you know, it doesn't really even exist. in any recognized way.
It's totally degraded. I try not to go there because it's so depressing.
It's just so sad. It's so broken.

Speaker 3 It's not the country of victors. It's the, it's a defeated, completely defeated country that's subsequently been invaded.

Speaker 3 And so like, how did that happen? How did, where I go to Japan and it's full of self-respect and order and cleanliness and like, it doesn't look like it lost. It's like, what is that?

Speaker 4 Well, I think we ran a, we ran an experiment that tells us pretty well what that is.

Speaker 4 And we didn't know we were running the experiment at the time, but you had the iron curtain set up and all the countries behind it that were not

Speaker 4 exposed to incessant American world order Western propaganda for 70 years,

Speaker 4 they all, they don't have these same problems.

Speaker 4 You go to Hungary, even a place like Poland, which obviously the leadership class of any of these countries is, you know, you always have to be suspicious of them because, you know, they

Speaker 3 even Romania, which as you said, suffered more than most countries.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And so, but those countries, like they don't mind, and again, the tipty-top leadership class might be one thing.

Speaker 4 You know, somebody went to the London School of Economics or something, but like taking NATO money.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 4 The people have no problem saying, no, this is a country. This is Hungary.
This is a country for Hungarians. This is a Christian country.
This is our country. They don't have a problem saying that.

Speaker 4 That is not something that anybody west of the Iron Curtain, for the most part, is comfortable.

Speaker 4 It's loosening up a little bit, thank God. But, you know, the question is whether it's loosening up too late.
You go to a place like

Speaker 4 Britain, go to a place like Germany. I mean, there's no country on planet Earth that has been subjected to

Speaker 4 a more pervasive and destructive psychological warfare campaign than Germany over the course of the Cold War.

Speaker 4 I mean, these people have very, it just, I mean, they're, you, you really hope that it's not the case, but you wonder if

Speaker 4 if there's even the material that would be necessary to construct a psychological defense of their nation and their people.

Speaker 4 And the lesson that we took from World War II, and again, this wouldn't have been the lesson that any of our soldiers who stormed the beaches in Normandy would have taken or anything like that, but

Speaker 4 the official kind of court history lesson is that when Europeans start thinking in terms of group, they're very dangerous. And that process needs to be subverted.

Speaker 4 It needs to be eventually eliminated, like the possibility for that to happen again.

Speaker 3 But just Europeans, not Asians or Africans?

Speaker 4 Well,

Speaker 4 I, you know, I think, well, there's a lot of elements to that. I mean, part of it is,

Speaker 4 part of it is the, the

Speaker 4 people that were victimized during the Second World War were not victimized by Africans. You know, people were,

Speaker 4 obviously, Chinese people were victimized by the Japanese, but that's a it's a different, you know, China's, China's got a very powerful immune system that kind of preserves them as

Speaker 4 a culture.

Speaker 3 So does Japan.

Speaker 4 And so does Japan. And so that's, you know, there's a little bit different.

Speaker 3 But from a Western perspective, I think it's fair to say, our leaders make the case implicitly, that it's really only when Europeans have a sense of themselves as Europeans that the world is in peril, but everyone else is fine to do that.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, you know, that's they don't see those other people as a threat, you know, either because the people who formulate these narratives don't live in those places or they don't have historical experience with those people.

Speaker 4 And so they don't see them as the same kind of threat.

Speaker 3 So Germany is because

Speaker 3 totally self-hating place. It's a husk.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 It's depressing as hell, though also wonderful in a way, but it's going away. But they lost, at least you could say they lost two world wars in a row.

Speaker 3 Britain won two world wars in a row. And if anything, it's more degraded than Germany.

Speaker 3 So like, just to take it back to the first thing i said and i'll shut up and let you answer but if churchill is a hero

Speaker 3 how come there are british girls begging for drugs on the street of london and the place is you know it's just they're

Speaker 4 london is not majority english now like what well the people who formulated the version of history that considers churchill a hero uh they like london the way it is now you know and but that's not victory that's like the worst kind of defeat is it not i mean i'm just confused if you're an English person who cares about England, then yeah, absolutely it is.

Speaker 4 I mean, it's, it's forget about victory and defeat. It's the worst thing that can happen.
You know, if you look at what's going on over lately in

Speaker 4 England, where you're having riots, you're having these, you know, sort of budding violent confrontations between nationalists and the police and so forth, which,

Speaker 4 you know, I think our natural,

Speaker 4 we like order, right? Yeah. Like Europeans, we like order and we see things like that, and we have a natural aversion to disorder, to street violence.
Yes, for sure.

Speaker 4 We might be, you know, war might be necessary, but disorderly mob violence, things like that, like immediately make us kind of take a step back.

Speaker 4 Cause most of our experience with those things is really bad. And at the end of the day, like it is an unleashing of evil spirits, no matter what the cause or the reason is.

Speaker 4 And yet, when I look over there at what the British people, some of them are trying to do,

Speaker 4 I

Speaker 4 kind of refuse to judge them for

Speaker 4 whatever, for doing whatever it is that they feel they have to do as their homeland, their ancient homeland is being taken from them. Because that is not something that can be walked back.

Speaker 4 That is permanent. That is something that ends your existence as a people.
Like, unless you're going to be like the Jews and, you know, go off into exile and sort of manage to maintain yourself.

Speaker 4 And even the Jews, they understood that they needed a little spot somewhere on earth that was their special place to develop their culture and to work things work out their history among themselves as a community of people and the english people are having that taken from them you know the the irish people ireland is on track to be minority irish by like 2070 and you say well okay hang on like a they never colonized anybody b they were colonized and like got the really nasty end of that a lot of the time, you know, suffered a lot.

Speaker 4 They fought for hundreds of years against brutal British attempts to try to bring them into the British fold and squash that uniqueness, you know, that they had out there.

Speaker 4 The British couldn't do it, and the British for a while there could do damn near anything. Yeah.
Okay.

Speaker 3 And they spent a lot of time trying to oppress Ireland a lot.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And it was a, I mean, not only that, it was a, it was a chief priority for a lot of them.

Speaker 3 Yeah, bring it to heal you.

Speaker 4 And, you know, we have a, we have a, a bit of a

Speaker 4 skewed view of the British Empire just because, and there are a lot of things that are glorious and wonderful about the British Empire, but the United States, like, we don't quite understand like the way the, you know, how bad it was to fall on the wrong side of the empire because they really treated us with kid gloves during the revolution.

Speaker 4 You know, we had half a parliament that were on our own. That's what they did to the Boers.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
That's what, you know, they could have done to us.

Speaker 3 They created the concentration camp.

Speaker 4 Yes. Yeah.
And they ran a lot of them during World War II, actually. That's another thing that's actually pretty awful is

Speaker 4 as soon as the war broke out, Churchill had all of the German and Italian nationals in Great Britain all rounded up and thrown into concentration camps where they would stay to the end of the war.

Speaker 4 This is 1939. And a huge number of those people were Jewish refugees who had come over from Germany to England.
They were just rounded up and thrown in camps for six years.

Speaker 3 And he also had the opposition party thrown in prison for the duration. Oswald Mosley and his wife right after giving birth, you know, spent the duration.
People died.

Speaker 3 That doesn't look like democracy to me.

Speaker 4 Are you saying that Zelensky is not running a democracy?

Speaker 3 I'm saying if you don't have elections and you're throwing priests in jail, if you're murdering people who disagree with you, as he has. You know, you call whatever.

Speaker 3 That's like basically a pretty constant form of government throughout history. It's fine.
I mean, it's like less barbaric than most forms of government actually through history. It's not democracy.

Speaker 3 So please don't lecture me anymore about that.

Speaker 4 Well, I mean, we've seen this in the United States even, obviously, a much smaller scale crisis, although maybe not, maybe it is an existential crisis for the people who are making the decisions, but ever since 2016,

Speaker 4 where democracy is great. We love democracy, but that's for normal times.
It's not for World War II.

Speaker 4 It's not for when we've got insurrections going on. And then sometimes...

Speaker 4 you know you've got to take extraordinary measures that may not be democratic but it's to preserve democracy it's always the excuse right? It's the excuse of everybody's excuse. Exactly.

Speaker 3 But can I just, so

Speaker 3 what's happened to the UK and Ireland is not accidental.

Speaker 3 Is there any evidence that the people of those countries whose ancestors have lived there for thousands of years or the indigenous peoples of those countries, that they wanted this? They wanted to be.

Speaker 4 I mean, certainly not the majority of the people who lived there, right? Obviously.

Speaker 4 like you can go to any western country the most just you know degraded cucked country you can possibly find in the west and the majority of people there don't want any of that happening to them this is something that has a class element to it it has uh as these countries have become more multi-ethnic and multicultural it has uh ethnic you know elements to it's like there's a lot of things that create a sort of a class of people, and it's a class of people who have most of the influence and power who actually do want these things because they don't identify with the people who are against it on the ground.

Speaker 4 And this is something that if you see in the United States, you know, we've seen in the United States and the West in general that was budding already.

Speaker 4 I mean, I would say personally, it goes all the way back to the foundation, but like definitely you see in like the 1960s, if you think of somebody like John Lindsay, right?

Speaker 4 John Lindsey was the mayor of New York for a while and he was sort of the quintessential. He didn't grow up like super rich old money owners.

Speaker 3 He was the last wasp mayor of Prince.

Speaker 4 But he was like,

Speaker 4 he was like that.

Speaker 4 He was the the wasp right he was the guy who limousine liberal the term was invented for right so yeah yeah and if you look at the way he conceived of himself and the way that he uh in his class the people who supported him the eastern establishment types and people like him um where they sort of drew their own sense of self-worth and their collective identity was first

Speaker 4 we're better than those white people in the south who are protesting martin luther king and so forth we're better than them or the parents in in South Boston who don't want busing for their own children.

Speaker 4 But then, right. So after the civil rights movement kind of came to a conclusion in 1965 and the Great Migration was starting to create a lot of conflict in the northern cities like New York,

Speaker 4 that idea, the southerners are always, they're always there as a foil for northern and western elite identity construction.

Speaker 4 But it shifted to these ethnic groups that lived in the cities, the Jews, which sounds strange today that like a, you know, a

Speaker 4 wasp mayor who's publicly obsessed with social justice would be against the Jews in a, you know, in a, in a conflict, but he was at the time.

Speaker 4 And it was because, you know, all these people, the Irish and the Italians, these people who think that like that's their neighborhood because it's been their neighborhood for 100 years now. And,

Speaker 4 you know, it's a, everybody in the neighborhood goes to a parish church that they've gone to, their grandparents went to.

Speaker 4 They have internal social structures and dispute arbitration structures and all of these sort of organic institutions that grew up from ground level that gave them an ability to self-govern in a way that made it so they really like were not as dependent on the state bureaucracy to do these things for them, right?

Speaker 4 They could do a lot for themselves. And

Speaker 4 these are the people who were resisting the movement of African Americans into their communities.

Speaker 4 When people look back, for example, like when Martin Luther King went up to Chicago in 1966 and there was the Marquette Park riot,

Speaker 4 to this day, like you can go, you have to go into a pretty deep, serious history book about that period to get the fact that everybody sees that as a bunch of white people who came out to protest, a bunch of black people moving or, you know, trying to open up their neighborhood.

Speaker 4 But that wasn't a bunch of white people. Those were Lithuanian people.
That was a Lithuanian neighborhood that had been a Lithuanian neighborhood for some time.

Speaker 4 These were a bunch of people who had come over here as refugees and had set up a little community for themselves that they didn't want changed. You know, when

Speaker 4 that's a Latino community with a bunch of

Speaker 4 white art students moving into it and gentrifying it in Brooklyn or Los Angeles.

Speaker 4 you know, people don't have a problem saying that they have a right to, you know, to maintain this community that they've built for themselves. And I actually kind of agree with that.
Like I do.

Speaker 4 When I see gentrification happening, it's like, you know, I'm sympathetic at the very least.

Speaker 3 Very sympathetic. Yes.
The crime thing makes me, look, I'm against, I'm against crime.

Speaker 3 I'm against hurting people, you know, strangers, but the idea that people of all backgrounds, races, everybody, every human being has a right to like have a cohesive.

Speaker 3 social network around him and live the way he basically wants to without bothering others and shouldn't be subject to, you know, abstract social planning that takes no account of human beings.

Speaker 3 Like, yes.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yes. I'm on this.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 You know, there's this very interesting.

Speaker 4 Well, actually, you know what? That'll take me off on a whole other tangent. I want to stick on the topic you were talking about.
And you bring up like what's happening in England and Ireland. And

Speaker 4 I think it's hard for a lot of Americans to really understand

Speaker 4 the tragedy of what's happening over there for the simple reason that

Speaker 4 And I'm not trying to trivialize our struggles with similar issues here in the United States. I just say that they're different.

Speaker 4 That in the United States, we've essentially had unending demographic turmoil from the very beginning.

Speaker 4 We fought our revolution and within a generation,

Speaker 4 most of the major cities on the East Coast were all majority Irish.

Speaker 4 And this was at a time when English and Irish, Wasp and Irish was like, you know, these were foreign peoples to each other, you know, Catholic and Protestant.

Speaker 3 That was still unresolved when I was small. There you go.
Even, I mean, it went on a a while.

Speaker 4 And so within a generation, you know, of the revolution, most of the cities on the East Coast are majority Irish, or at least huge chunks of them are super majority Irish, even if the whole city is not quite.

Speaker 4 Not to mention there's a lot of Germans, although they assimilated to the WASP majority pretty well, pretty quickly.

Speaker 4 But then within a generation of that, just as the Irish are kind of starting to move out of the slums a little bit and become

Speaker 4 middle-class kind of members of the society, you start getting a ton of Italians, a ton of Jews, a ton of all the southern and eastern Europeans who start coming in.

Speaker 4 And you see a repeat of the same process, a lot of the same problems. The institutions all start to break down.
The schools break down. The infrastructure breaks down.

Speaker 4 And they blame the people coming in.

Speaker 3 Actually, you've got a lot of violence and revolutionary.

Speaker 4 You get a lot of violence, organized crime, revolutionary movements, all those things. I mean, people forget that, you know, a lot of the lynching victims in the late 1800s, early 1900s were Italians.

Speaker 4 There's a famous one in New Orleans, but there are a lot of famous ones. And so that happens.
And then we cut off foreign immigration in 1924.

Speaker 4 But then we start the great migration of African Americans out of the South. You have the Okie migration out west from the Dust Bowl.

Speaker 4 You have the big hillbilly migrations out of Appalachia up to Detroit and Chicago, those places. And

Speaker 4 so we're just used to

Speaker 4 the fact that we're always renegotiating our identity here.

Speaker 4 We were this

Speaker 4 former British colonies that just fought for our independence, but now we've got to figure out how to construct a collective identity that includes all these Irish people that came in.

Speaker 4 And like one of the ways that we've done that traditionally has been through war.

Speaker 4 You know, the fact that there were so many Irishmen who came into the country and fought on the side of the Union in the Civil War, if you look at like,

Speaker 4 I mean, World War II to a great, I mean, if you think about the city of Vicksburg, which didn't didn't celebrate the 4th of July after it was conquered during the Civil War, like stopped celebrating the 4th of July.

Speaker 4 And I remember I was watching

Speaker 4 the

Speaker 4 Ken Burns documentary about the Civil War. He mentioned this and he said, and

Speaker 4 they didn't celebrate the 4th of July again for like X number of years. And it's not off the top of my head because I don't remember exactly what year they were.

Speaker 4 It was 63, Vicksburg. Anyway,

Speaker 4 he said for X number of years. And I thought about it for a second.
I was like, oh, that was July 4th, 1944. That was a month after D-Day.

Speaker 4 And that's what got this place that was extremely bitter over all this, you know, to raise the flag and celebrate the 4th of July again. So we've used warfare.

Speaker 3 That's 80 years. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 And we've used warfare for that purpose. And that's not an uncommon thing, but it's one of the means that we've done to unify our people.
And as,

Speaker 4 you know, wave after wave of, at the time, very foreign people,

Speaker 4 it's hard to explain to people today how foreign an Eastern European Jew was to a Wasp or an Irishman or a German-American in New York in

Speaker 4 1880. I mean,

Speaker 4 these people might as well have been coming out of the Congo, you know, and in some ways, even more foreign than that, because all of us, like, we're kind of, even if we've never met anybody from the Congo, just through mass media and everything, we've kind of got a more cosmopolitan view of the world.

Speaker 4 So we're not. It's sort of familiar in a strange way.
These are people who are coming from all over the world. And we've all, I I mean, if you think about like the 1798 Naturalization Act, right?

Speaker 4 You see a lot of like white identitarian types who point to that because it says all people, all white people of good character can come into the United States and become citizens.

Speaker 4 And they say, see, 1798, like they're already thinking in terms of race and America is a white country, excuse me, and so forth.

Speaker 4 And I say, you're not understanding the historical context of of that of that law.

Speaker 4 That's not to prevent you from bringing in like half of the African subcontinent or, you know, the Arab population of the Middle East or whatever.

Speaker 4 That was inconceivable to these guys in 1798 that anybody would ever do that or that that could happen. That was not the point of it.

Speaker 4 And if you really look at the law and you place it in the context of its time, the context of Europe at the time, remember again, Catholics and Protestants, like the different peoples across Europe, they've got two world wars still ahead of them.

Speaker 4 They've got a Napoleonic war still ahead of them. They're going to be butchering each other for the next couple centuries, right?

Speaker 4 And we said, think about how just a revolutionary level of inclusivity this is to say, all you Europeans, anybody, if you live in Europe and you're Protestant, you're English, you're Irish, you're Catholic, you're Jewish, whatever, you come over here.

Speaker 4 And when you come over here, you will be accorded the full rights and privileges of a citizen, the same as the richest guy in this country. That is a revolutionary.

Speaker 4 I mean, nobody had ever heard of anything like that. It was was unbelievably just open and inclusive.
And the reason that they said that they limited it to

Speaker 4 free white people was they didn't want, you know, some southern state including their

Speaker 4 slaves as citizens, but not really including them and kind of gaming the federal system, getting representation because they decide to say, oh, all of our Native American population are their citizens now, but not really allowing them, you know, in.

Speaker 4 And so that's what they were trying to prevent.

Speaker 4 Like the idea of bringing bringing in just, you know, an overwhelming number of people from what became the third world was obviously the farthest thing from their minds because they couldn't conceive that anybody would do something like that.

Speaker 4 And so, but that's the point is that this, even from the very beginning, there was a recognition that we need to be a radically open country if for no other reason than the fact that we've got a gigantic continent that we've got to go settle and build up, right?

Speaker 4 Because if we don't do it, then these European powers are circling like vultures and they're going to do it. And so we have to get out there and build this place up.

Speaker 4 And so, you know, that required a level of openness that has transformed the world in a lot of ways.

Speaker 3 So it's just interesting to hear you say that the point at the time of

Speaker 3 mass immigration was to build the place up. Clearly, the point of it now is to tear the place down.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And isn't that interesting how, you know, it's like

Speaker 4 I think the psychologist Carl Jung said something like inequality and excess becomes its opposite. Yes.
And exactly right. And it definitely has, you know, that applies to inclusivity or openness.

Speaker 4 Anyway, I was saying that like, you know, in the United States, because of that experience experience

Speaker 4 of just constant demographic turmoil, as soon as the Great Migration petered out in like 60, like literally the early 60s, we passed the Hard Seller Immigration Act and opened up the floodgates to the third world.

Speaker 4 And that's the world that we're in now, right?

Speaker 4 So it has just been an unending wave after wave after wave of your neighbors, the people you have to negotiate politically and a social collective identity with are changing all the time.

Speaker 4 And that's just sort of, it's built into the American understanding of themselves and how societies work and all of that.

Speaker 4 Like, I would say that there's only maybe the only time the United States, like

Speaker 4 really,

Speaker 4 at least maybe like you could say right after the revolution, but like the period, like from 1941, you know, right around that era, that time up to maybe

Speaker 4 the mid-50s when the Great Migration started to drive all of the European ethnics out of the cities, into the suburbs and stuff. Like there was that period where we almost pulled it off.

Speaker 4 We almost pulled pulled off

Speaker 4 constructing a solid and sustainable national identity that, you know, obviously the fly in the ointment ended up being that there was 10% of the population who weren't really included in that, the African-American population.

Speaker 4 And that became the sort of,

Speaker 4 you know, the wedge that allowed people to pry apart that project in the 1960s.

Speaker 3 And thank you for acknowledging that was the point of the exercise.

Speaker 4 Right. And

Speaker 4 which, you know, again, not to diminish,

Speaker 4 you know, especially after going through,

Speaker 4 you know, the Jonestown series and spending so much time reading about the history of African Americans in the country.

Speaker 4 And I grew up around in African American neighborhoods mostly and around different places.

Speaker 4 I'm more sympathetic than most people who are as far right on a lot of... political issues as I am to the plight of people who live in the ghetto.

Speaker 3 I couldn't agree more. No, but that's kind of the point that I'm making.

Speaker 3 If the point of the civil rights movement was to uplift black people, which I would be completely for, then Selma, Alabama would be a great place.

Speaker 3 And so would Jackson, Mississippi, and so would Little Rock, Arkansas, and all the kind of holy sites of that period. And in fact, they're all far worse than they were in 1960.

Speaker 3 So like, what was the point of that? Clearly, if the point of BLM was to help black people, again, I could kind of be for that. But

Speaker 4 I mean, the point of it, so there's, there's two elements, there's two answers to that question, really, right?

Speaker 4 One is there are people out there who absolutely saw it as um a wedge issue to spark revolution in one sense or another you know disintegration of the country you saw this in the 1960s tom wolf's written about it but a lot of people have written about how

Speaker 4 you know you remember back in 2008 how when uh Obama started to rise to prominence and a lot of the older Republicans were throwing out he's a community organizer he's a community none of the younger people that just didn't land with younger people at all because they had no frame of reference for the 60s and 70s and stuff they didn't know what that meant that you literally had these vast government programs who were just handing out money to revolutionary organizations the people who were going out and planning and organizing riots at city hall oh a hundred percent like that happened in new york like a group who was not like they got some funding through three different kind of you know degrees of separation from some government program they were literally just

Speaker 4 basically an agency of the New York City government. They were literally just fully funded.
Their leaders were appointed.

Speaker 3 Well, they were paying for all the street gangs.

Speaker 4 And these people, yeah, that too. And this group went and held a protest at

Speaker 4 City Hall, invaded City Hall, trashed the place and everything. And this is a government-funded organization.
So that's what people had in mind.

Speaker 4 And it didn't land with the younger people I noticed back then.

Speaker 4 So you have those people. You know, you have the people who

Speaker 4 at Columbia in the 1960s who wrote all the papers that led New York and then other places to,

Speaker 4 you know, to embrace busing at schools and to embrace

Speaker 4 expansion of the welfare

Speaker 4 programs.

Speaker 4 And they were very open about, I mean, it's really crazy how these two professors at Columbia who were sort of the like the expansion of welfare in New York under James Lindsay was kind of their brainchild.

Speaker 4 They wrote the paper and the articles about it and everything. And they were brought in as consultants once the decision was made.

Speaker 4 They're literally writing in their papers, if anybody at City Hall had cared to read them, they weren't saying this is going to make poor people less poor.

Speaker 4 In fact, they directly say what this is going to do is it's going to increase tension between the

Speaker 4 lower classes and the middle class.

Speaker 4 It's going to drive a wedge because there's going to be like an unavoidable racial angle to this because it's going to be transferring resources from the European ethnic groups in the city over to African Americans and Puerto Ricans.

Speaker 4 And this is all good because this is going to start to create that tension that we need.

Speaker 4 It even says. They said that out loud? Yes.

Speaker 4 They were, they wrote about it in, in a, um, I can't remember which magazine it was at this point, but it was, it was like the Atlantic or something. It was like that prominent magazine.

Speaker 4 And it was like a summary of their academic findings, right? And these are the guys who,

Speaker 4 they were the impetus for the expansion of the welfare programs in New York. They were brought into City Hall to like explain how to implement it and stuff.
They even say that

Speaker 4 A positive benefit of this is it's going to make all of these people more dependent on the government. You know, it's it's going to make them where they're.

Speaker 4 So, I mean, you have that angle of it, right? You have that side of things in those people who do, they know what they're doing and they want to tear this down.

Speaker 4 I think that in a lot of ways, they're the drivers of a lot of it.

Speaker 4 But a lot of people are the one, you know, the ones being led, a lot of them, it's just a lot of white people who use it to feel good about themselves.

Speaker 3 Oh, there's no, oh, I know.

Speaker 4 And they don't have, know them all.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 4 They're able to insulate themselves from the consequences of their decisions in a way that, you know, and this is, again, to take it international again, you go over to Europe.

Speaker 4 It's kind of what's gone on is, you know, if you're the leader of Hungary,

Speaker 4 like Victor Orban right now, like you're the leader of Hungary. If you're the leader of like

Speaker 4 Germany, if you're the leader of Great Britain,

Speaker 4 yeah, like you're, you're, we're still at the point where like you still, not in England, we're not, but like where you still have to be German to like get elected.

Speaker 4 You know, we can't like take it so far yet that we've detached it completely from like some illusion of the fact that this is a nation state that's self-governing.

Speaker 4 But really, this is an international superclass, you know, that they identify much more laterally with people of their own class across borders than they do with the people in their own country.

Speaker 4 And,

Speaker 4 you know, that mentality is what makes it possible for them to do the things.

Speaker 4 that they're doing to the people that they have power over.

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Speaker 3 So what at this point, you describe what's happening to Europe as the worst thing, not just the UK, but maybe especially the UK, but also Germany, Spain, Ireland, as you noticed, really everything west of Central Europe of Hungary

Speaker 3 is increasingly not European. So what does that trend continue or stop or what happens?

Speaker 4 Wow.

Speaker 4 I mean, that's going to be up to the Europeans.

Speaker 4 I don't

Speaker 4 I say this with

Speaker 4 not

Speaker 4 without pride at all, but I think that

Speaker 4 I think that as long as the United States remains the dominant power in the world and the dominant power in European geopolitics and a lot of places like Germany is still a significant factor in their domestic politics.

Speaker 4 I think that we are a very negative influence on that front.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting to watch a ghoul like Ann Applebaum become literally hysterical, like shaking with rage in the way that people with no self-control do when Victor Orban says stuff like, well, you know, I just don't want to admit like a million non-Hungarians into my country.

Speaker 3 And they go, they go crazy. Yeah.

Speaker 4 I mean, you look at how they respond to somebody like Orban and like they would color revolution that dude in a second if they thought they could get away with it.

Speaker 3 If they didn't get with Orban well, he's hardly like a right-wing crazy. He's like very moderate and kind of like liberal in an 80s way.

Speaker 4 That's probably the only reason they don't try is they know that like his chief opposition is far to the right of him. So that's probably why they don't do it.

Speaker 3 But well, he's like the least extreme world leader I've ever met. Yeah.

Speaker 4 It's funny. It's like, it's, I get a similar sense from Mr.
Putin in Russia where, you know, he's a hard man. You don't drag Russia out of its state in the 1990s without being a hard man.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 it's probably hoping for a little too much that whoever follows him up, you know, if we were to do something that would end his rule, that whatever would come next would be beneficial to us.

Speaker 3 Okay, so Trump, Orban, and Putin,

Speaker 3 I can say, this is my perception of all three of them, is that none of them is particularly ideological.

Speaker 3 All three are pretty sincere nationalists, not like crazed ideological nationalists, but just sort of want to do the best for their country.

Speaker 3 None of them is like a religious nut, and none of them is like especially right-wing.

Speaker 3 They're all in, you know, in the 1984, 5-6 context, they would be sort of moderate, maybe conservative Democrats, liberal Republicans. Like they're not, they're not at all what people claim they are.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Well, I mean.

Speaker 4 You know,

Speaker 4 the post-World War II order is really defined by the fact that after Nuremberg,

Speaker 4 it really became effectively illegal in the West to be genuinely right-wing. Like the things we call right-wing, I mean, it's all flavors of liberalism, basically, right?

Speaker 4 And like, if you go back and read pre-war conservatives, pre-war right-wing writers, in Europe, like literally in a lot of places, it became illegal to be that way, right?

Speaker 4 And here, again, it's not quite illegal, but we have control mechanisms

Speaker 3 that are almost as US government's had a lot of people to prison over the years for their political use, a lot.

Speaker 4 That's true. And

Speaker 4 that's like a defining aspect of the post-war European order, right? And as long as that order remains in place and remains a dominant factor, it's going to be very hard for them to escape this cycle.

Speaker 4 And I want to be clear, too, when I say like that it's the worst thing that can happen.

Speaker 4 I don't mean that, well, now you have to live next to these people who don't look like you or who, you know, speak differently. It has nothing to do with that.
I get it. You know,

Speaker 4 you're talking about a people.

Speaker 4 And again, this is why I spent so much time on why it's harder for Americans to kind of really understand this. It's because of our historical experience with just demographic turnover.

Speaker 4 We kind of have this idea, even though we're being pushed to our limits right now, you know, and you're really starting to see that because of the

Speaker 4 ideological forces

Speaker 4 and the cultural forces that are making it much, much harder to swallow and digest

Speaker 4 the current crop of new immigrants since 1965, much harder to assimilate for various reasons.

Speaker 4 So we're approaching our limit here, but still, we still have this kind of idea in America that, you know, yeah, these things are going to happen and then we'll figure it out and renegotiate and kind of America will, yeah, we'll be different, but, you know, in another generation or two,

Speaker 4 more change will be happening. And that's just, you know, the dynamic of the United States.

Speaker 4 And so we always have this sort of feeling that in terms of our collective identity, like we'll figure it out. You go to a place like

Speaker 4 any European nation where

Speaker 4 this is a people's ancient homeland. And there's actually such thing as

Speaker 4 an Englishman. There's such thing as that.
Like there's an American is something that, again, the definition of it changes with every generation. And it's always been that way.

Speaker 4 The definition of an Englishman has never changed and it never will change. And those people, the English people.

Speaker 3 Not for over a thousand years, not since 1066.

Speaker 4 Right. And so, and those people

Speaker 4 are going, they're in the process right now of forever losing the only spot of land that they have on this earth that is dedicated to the flowering and the preservation of the English people.

Speaker 4 Like the only, and it's a tiny little spot.

Speaker 3 It's true for the Dutch. It's true for the Spanish.
It's true for the Germans. It's true for the Belgians.
It's true for every Western European nation.

Speaker 3 So why not have a Nuremberg trial for the people who did that? I don't understand. I mean, that's such a crime.

Speaker 4 Well, we have to win first. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Oh, but I just think it's important to say out loud that that's a crime. It's against

Speaker 3 hundreds of millions of people.

Speaker 4 If you go back to, again, to bring up like Louis XIV or any powerful monarch, they never would have dared imagine that they could do that to their people without getting their head cut off.

Speaker 4 They wouldn't have dared imagine that they could just replace their people with, you know, people from a different continent, different religion, different languages, just to overwhelm them, to make their own people a minority in that country for whatever reason, ideological, economic, whatever it was.

Speaker 4 They they just,

Speaker 4 they wouldn't imagine that they had

Speaker 4 the right, the power, the ability to do that.

Speaker 4 You know, and I said something to you yesterday when we were having dinner that I would probably feel somewhat differently about this if it was a situation where, you know, over the last eight generations of English people, of British people, that they had just sort of like gradually brought people in from around the world and over the course of 200 years or 300 years, they had just transformed the demography of their island into something unrecognizable.

Speaker 4 Because you could look at that and say, well, you know, I don't necessarily think that's the best idea for them or, you know, I don't like the changes that are being made.

Speaker 4 But hey, the English people, they made this decision over the course of two years.

Speaker 3 Exactly. It's like their food.

Speaker 3 I won't eat their food. It's disgusting, but they like it and that's okay.

Speaker 4 But this

Speaker 4 one generation decided that they had no responsibility to any of the people who came before them and they have no responsibility to any of the people who are coming after them.

Speaker 4 They are going to permanently, radically, irreparably transform their society in ways that they know hurt the majority of the population.

Speaker 4 They've immunized themselves from, you know, at present, but that they know are not welcome and are harmful to the majority of the people that they rule over.

Speaker 4 And one generation of people decided that they had the right to do that.

Speaker 3 And it's the post-war generation. It's the generation born in 1946, between 1946 and 1964.
That's who did did that.

Speaker 3 So it's hard to escape the obvious conclusion, and I suspect this is part of what's driving your current project, that that war didn't just redraw borders,

Speaker 3 but it changed the world in ways that are still unfolding and that whose profound nature we're only now beginning to appreciate.

Speaker 4 Is that right? Sure.

Speaker 4 I'm a big fan of the writer René Girard, right? He talks about, he's got this whole big theory about the origin of human religion and sacrificial ritual and stuff.

Speaker 4 But putting aside like his broader speculations about the origin of religion, one of the things he talks about is if you look through the myths of every society you can pretty much think of throughout history, if you look at like the national origin stories of any nation or people that you can think of, it is almost without exception, and it may be without exception, that there's blood at the beginning of that story.

Speaker 4 There's in its frame, because it's a sacred story, it's framed as sacrificial blood, right? And now sometimes like he'll give examples of that is true.

Speaker 4 He'll give examples of sometimes, you know, there's a like his basic theory, right, is that when a society finds itself in a time of tremendous turmoil and it may be

Speaker 4 just

Speaker 4 disunion, you know, or like people can feel like we've like we have right now since like 2015 or however long it's been, there's just this tension where people kind of in moderate people, regular people that you that aren't typically political, right and left for that matter, everybody kind of has this feeling that this can't just keep going the way it's going.

Speaker 4 Like, you know, we're approaching some sort of a point where decisions are going to have to be made, confrontations are going to have to occur, and a decision is going to have to be made because there's just too much ambivalent energy pulling us in every direction.

Speaker 4 People feel it in their daily lives. And, you know,

Speaker 4 and so that starts to happen to a society. And

Speaker 4 he points to to

Speaker 4 all these examples throughout history and ancient mythology, right? Where he'll talk about how there's some problem that was, you know, a plague is plaguing Thebes and,

Speaker 4 you know, whatever example you want to give. And they find the scapegoat person for this and, you know, Jonah being thrown overboard into the sea, you know, to calm the storm.
And what do you know?

Speaker 4 We found the culprit. We found the perpetrator, the one who had like brought this curse upon the city because of his own private sin or whatever it was.
And we got rid of that person.

Speaker 4 And now everything is actually better. And now the plague went away and the storm stopped and something.

Speaker 4 And so what Gerard says is, and this is a very interesting insight, I think, is he says, what these all are, these are post hoc apologias for what these people did.

Speaker 4 You know, they're looking back and saying that

Speaker 4 You know, this person who we murdered,

Speaker 4 that A, we had to do that, but then there's another little weird dynamic where that person sort of becomes deified because at the end of the day, they did have the power to restore order and peace to the society, to make the plague go away.

Speaker 4 And there's also a sort of ambivalent feeling because somewhere in there, they do know that they murdered, you know, murdered this person as a scapegoat. And

Speaker 4 so he gives an example, by the way, of like, obviously he talks about the Christian story, the crucifixion.

Speaker 4 And he says, you have a time like where this is like a, you know, Jerusalem was full of revolutionary ferment. There were, you know, there were, there were rebel leaders and riots.

Speaker 4 There were messiahs cropping up saying that they were going to lead a resistance against the Romans. It was a very, very, very tense time.

Speaker 4 And the community, the Jewish community in Jerusalem was able to sort of go through this process of uniting.

Speaker 4 around the need to eliminate this victim who at least at present is like responsible and emblematic of all of the insanity, the mounting insanity that's sort sort of engulfing us all right now.

Speaker 4 And the difference, though, and why Christianity is what it is, like you think about the idea that we have the cross as our symbol, which is so strange to people who are not Christians.

Speaker 4 You know, it's like

Speaker 4 for people today, you would have to think about like for the, for the, for the visceral sort of way that somebody in the Roman world would have witnessed that, would have seen that, it would be like your religious symbol was like a corpse hanging from a noose.

Speaker 4 Exactly.

Speaker 3 Or a meat hook.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Right.
And so like, that's what they would have seen that's kind of crazy when you think about it like wow what is going on there like your your god came down and he was murdered and

Speaker 4 tortured put up on a cross and that's like your sacred symbol of him you're not trying to forget that part of the story or sort of pretend that didn't happen that is the story very strange right and it's because This process that every myth, Gerard says, was based on throughout history, that you see apologized for and rationalized in every one of these myths.

Speaker 4 There were people who were following Jesus who refused to go along. And they said, no, no, no, no, no, he was innocent and you murdered him.
And they refused to back down from that.

Speaker 4 And you look like in the book of Acts, when Stephen gets martyred, they freak out and stone him, not when he is making doctrinal points. It's when he gets the point as you murdered him.

Speaker 4 He accuses them of murder and they stone him for it. And you had these people who were willing to die for that.
You know, they were willing to stand with the victim

Speaker 4 of

Speaker 4 this mob attack, of this scapegoat attack and die with him if necessary. Because to a Christian, like that's what martyrdom means.
It's different than like what a Muslim means by it usually, right?

Speaker 4 You can go to war and die in war and you're a martyr in the Muslim world, which is fine. Like they have their way of looking at things.

Speaker 4 But to a Christian, it doesn't mean you're dying for an idea, dying for Christ. It means you're willing to die with Christ.

Speaker 4 If you see a mob picking up stones and surrounding an innocent victim, you're not going to slink away. You're not going to pick up stone.

Speaker 4 And if you do, then

Speaker 4 you're making an irreparable, sort of irrevocable choice at that point. You are going to stand with that person against the mob, even if it means that you die with him.
That's what it means.

Speaker 4 And if everybody does that, then you have a transformed society and the kingdom of God is here. And so as a counterexample,

Speaker 4 Girard uses a holy man, first century, late first century, early second century, called Apollonius of of Tyana.

Speaker 4 And he was a pagan holy man who they constructed a biography for him that is essentially the same as Jesus. Virgin birth, born in a manger,

Speaker 4 12 disciples,

Speaker 4 eventually died and like was brought back to life.

Speaker 4 And like, so it's like, it's, it's, it's a, it's a clear like ideological refutation of this growing Christian myth that's starting to take over the pagan world.

Speaker 4 And one of his most famous miracles that he performed was there was a plague that was engulfing the city of Ephesus. And

Speaker 4 nobody knows what to do. And so they call up Apollonius of Tyana.
You got to help us with this plague. And so he goes up there and he says, okay, I'll help you, but you have to agree ahead of time.

Speaker 4 You do exactly what I tell you to do. They say, okay, great.
Just help us. And so he leads the community to this town square.
And there's this old beggar who is

Speaker 4 you know, raggedy clothes, filthy, no teeth. He's just a, you know, a destitute, broken, like old beggar.
And he tells the people around, he says, now pick up stones, kill that man.

Speaker 4 And at first they're like,

Speaker 4 I don't know about this little word. And he's like, you want a plague to continue or not? Kill that man.
And so one stone flies. And as soon as one flies, two fly and then the whole thing.

Speaker 4 And so they cover him, they stone him to death. And he's covered with like a cairn of stones, essentially.

Speaker 4 And as they're stoning him, His eyes flash red and he bares his teeth and they realize it's a demon. And so they finish him off.
And at the end, they clear away the stones.

Speaker 4 And what they find is this giant frothing at the mouth, like dog demon thing. And then the plague goes away.

Speaker 4 And what Gerard says, or he doesn't put it this way, because it's a little too provocative for him, but I'll put it this way.

Speaker 4 What you're reading there is the story of the crucifixion as it would have been written from the perspective of the Pharisees. That's what that is.

Speaker 4 You know, of course, he was, because like, here's the crazy thing, is it's not, they're not imagining that after after they kill that guy that everything's getting better it does get better because all of these people who were ready to just tear each other apart yesterday once they all came together around

Speaker 4 that guy that's the guy who's responsible for all this and we all came together to commit this crime against him We're all in this together in a way that we weren't before.

Speaker 3 Right. There's catharsis and then unity.
Yes.

Speaker 4 And so it actually does work in a very perverse way. And that is the, now, of course, it doesn't last.
And eventually you have to to go through that cycle.

Speaker 3 Well, that's why human sacrifice continues.

Speaker 4 That's, that's what Gerard says.

Speaker 3 Have an abortion, be happy, right?

Speaker 4 And that Christianity is the answer to all that. And it's why that, you know, you can look and show similarities between, you know, Isis, Horus, Osiris, and all these various things.
Yeah, sure.

Speaker 4 Like there's structural similarities in other myths to certain aspects of the story, whatever. But at a fundamental level, they are.

Speaker 4 they are not just different. They are radically opposed.
They are 180 degrees deposed.

Speaker 3 Right. And it's also possible that it's not just a function of human psychology, but that there's also

Speaker 3 an element from the outside acting upon people. There is this, maybe you are appeasing the gods or the demons, actually, for a short time.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, that's a you know, most people come to me for history stuff, so I don't usually dive into that, but occasionally I do.

Speaker 4 And my more tolerant uh um subscribers they you know they say they enjoy it, so

Speaker 3 but yeah, that's so when can just to

Speaker 3 tie a bow in the World War II project, um,

Speaker 3 for I, the reason I keep focusing on this is because probably the same reason you're doing it, I think it's like it's central to the society we live in, the myths upon which it's built.

Speaker 3 I think it's also the cause of like the destruction of Western civilization and these lies. And so I just very much look forward to, to your honesty on this question.
When does this come out?

Speaker 4 I think I'll probably be ready to to put out the first episode in maybe

Speaker 4 six months or so. Because I've got another big, long episode I'm doing on the history of the labor movement wars, where it's a great story about

Speaker 4 basically a big war that took place between the mafia and the American Communist Party over control of the Hollywood unions. It's a fascinating story, a lot of larger-than-live characters and stuff.

Speaker 4 So I'll finish that up and then I'll start wrapping up my research and start moving on to that.

Speaker 4 Can I say real quick too, because I did the thing, you know, your interview with Mr. Putin, I think probably prepared you for interviewing me because we both do the same thing.

Speaker 4 Like you ask me something about World War II and pretty soon I'm talking about Apollonius of Tyon. Right.
You're going to tell you about the Rus.

Speaker 4 And so

Speaker 4 I can't help myself. That's, you know, you either love it or hate it.
That's what I do in my podcast too.

Speaker 4 But, you know, I think that World War II is a founding myth in that Girardian sense for us.

Speaker 4 If you think about like just the strategic bombing campaigns, the ethnic cleansing of the Germans after the war, what the Soviets did to East Germany after the war, just everything that happened that we did to

Speaker 4 win that conflict. I mean, these are things that.

Speaker 3 Or even the things that, or maybe especially the things we did after we win. Right, right.

Speaker 4 And so we do those things.

Speaker 3 Nuremberg, the farce of Nuremberg, and the whole thing.

Speaker 4 Well, and that's just it. I think that Nuremberg like is that sacrificial ritual.
And I might mean that literally, but I'm not married to it.

Speaker 4 If people don't want to take it literally, they don't have to, but,

Speaker 4 you know, but I probably do. And I think it was that sacrificial ritual that was the founding event of the current global order.
It brought us all back together.

Speaker 4 It told us who the bad guys were, why they are

Speaker 4 in a binary sense, different from and opposed to us, which makes us the good guys. And now we can all, again, you know,

Speaker 4 Vicksburg celebrated the 4th of July.

Speaker 3 But I do think there's something else going on because, look,

Speaker 3 I think a lot of what we hear about World War II is a lie. I've agreed with everything on the basis of much less knowledge than you have, but all of your conclusions are consistent with mine.

Speaker 3 But I'm totally happy to say the Nazis were bad.

Speaker 4 I think they were.

Speaker 3 I'm totally happy to say the United States was the

Speaker 3 most virtuous player among the three.

Speaker 4 But you're not talking about a historical event. You're talking about a myth.

Speaker 4 Go tell a Muslim that, yes, Muhammad is a great guy. He did a lot of great things, but.

Speaker 4 And then see the reaction, everything comes after, but.

Speaker 3 Right. No, you're totally right.
I just can't get over the fact that the West wins

Speaker 3 and is completely destroyed in less than a century.

Speaker 4 Well,

Speaker 4 the West was conquered.

Speaker 4 The West was conquered by the United States and the Soviet Union.

Speaker 3 Okay, but I'm including the United States in the West. Right.
Somehow, the United States and Western Europe won. That's the conventional understanding.

Speaker 3 And both have now looked like they lost a world war. So like, what the hell is that? Like, there's something very, very heavy.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I I mean, it's all the things that we have been talking about and probably some things that, you know, we only talk about privately, but

Speaker 4 we can see the results of it. I mean, so that's, that's it.
So that's the thing.

Speaker 4 The real question is if they were trying to achieve that destruction that you're talking about, if they, if they were trying, they couldn't have done it more directly or more effectively, you know?

Speaker 4 And so there are trends and forces. There are things that drive people, you know,

Speaker 4 like incentives that drive people that they're not aware of. There's a lot of things going on.

Speaker 4 But if they had been doing it intentionally, there are a lot of incentives that drive people that are not aware of.

Speaker 3 Boy, that is so true. And worth, well, in your business, I think it's really important to remember that.

Speaker 3 But for all of us, it's important to remember we're not quite sure what drives us or other people sometimes.

Speaker 4 That's the value of history in a lot of ways is we have the benefit of hindsight. And, you know, one of the things that

Speaker 4 You find I found this again on pretty much every single topic that I've covered, even the labor movement, like ones that I'm doing now, where I'm like, especially back in the old days, you know, before it became big labor, like I'm a fierce partisan of the labor movement back in the late 18 early 19th century.

Speaker 3 I totally agree.

Speaker 4 And so I expected going into it, like, this is just going to be like a big, you know, screw the bosses, like, you know, pro-union, pro-everything kind of, and I am still pro-union, pro-everything on, on that side.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 it's made me be able to see where the bosses were coming from and what they thought they were looking at.

Speaker 4 And if you take that, any historical topic, any historical topic, if you allow yourself to be open about it, you know, I

Speaker 4 have gotten an email. I got an email back in 2017,

Speaker 4 2018,

Speaker 4 from an active duty Israeli soldier who was serving actively in the West Bank, who told me that he heard my Israel-Palestine series and that it opened up his, you know, his

Speaker 4 understanding of how things did look to the other side and how the history was understood from the other side, and that it affected the way he interacted with people on a daily basis, Palestinians on a daily basis at his checkpoints and things like that.

Speaker 4 And it's because if you, and all praise to that guy, you know, good for him, because that's a tough thing to do, you know, especially when you're enmeshed in it like he is.

Speaker 4 But if you allow yourself to be open and look at almost anything honestly, what you find is you, you end up with at least a certain amount of sympathy or understanding for almost everybody involved.

Speaker 3 And totally. And that's the only perspective

Speaker 3 from which you can see the truth.

Speaker 3 I mean, I used to say to reporters who worked for me, as I'd be assigning stories, would say, you know, you don't get to write a story about your girlfriend or your mom because you're blinded by love, but you're also not allowed to write a story about someone who you hate, like, because hate is irrational, you know, strong dislike, disagreement, disapproval, all allowed, encouraged, in fact.

Speaker 3 But hate blinds you. And if you don't see the person as a person,

Speaker 3 you're not going to write about him accurately. Like people are fellow human beings, however evil they are, right?

Speaker 4 And you see this with like in good novelists versus mediocre novelists, right? Like you think of somebody like

Speaker 4 a great writer, like good prose writer, like Jonathan Franzen, right? He's got this one book. What book was it? I can't remember the title of it, but it's.

Speaker 4 It's this sort of like urban rural book where the New York City, you know, cosmopolitan guy goes back to visit his family for Christmas in the country. And

Speaker 4 Francis is a great writer. Okay.
You can develop characters. If this, the character that's from New York, richly developed.
He deeply understands that man.

Speaker 4 And you can tell by the way he writes it, nothing but caricatures and stereotypes for his family members.

Speaker 4 And it's because he just can't step into their shoes and understand them.

Speaker 3 And they're like screaming racist epithets instead of smoking math or something like that.

Speaker 4 It was just hokey and like, you know, kind of a, like just a Hallmark card version of what you would expect those people to be like.

Speaker 4 It just was not, anybody who's been around people like that or who's been people like that would just, I mean, you literally laugh at it. And this is a great writer.

Speaker 4 But if you can't put yourself into the shoes of the people you're writing about, at least to the point where you can humanize them, you don't have to say like, oh, I could see if I was Stalin, I would have done that too.

Speaker 4 That's not what it's about.

Speaker 4 It's, can you at least like, can you get yourself to a place where you can see how a person in that position at that time was seeing the world and the factors that they were taking into account when they were making their decisions.

Speaker 4 And now you have people out there who are Jeffrey Dahmer. I'm not talking about people like that.

Speaker 4 You know, those people who are pathologically broken, psychotic, you know, you think of a world leader like Idi Amin and even Mao to a certain degree, who I consider like much less like Stalin than he is like somebody like Idi Amin.

Speaker 4 In other words, just like a childlike psychotic, you know, like a true psychotic.

Speaker 3 Who enjoyed killing?

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 And I mean, so you have those people. And I'm not saying you should figure out how to identify with those people.

Speaker 4 Those people are operating on a different program than you are that you're not going to be able to step into and understand.

Speaker 4 But most people are not. Even the people, even the monsters in the world, the people you think are not.

Speaker 4 You know, there are people who zigged when you would have zagged and over the course of a whole lifetime of making, you know, different decisions ended up in a radically different place.

Speaker 4 You know, there are brothers and sisters, siblings who one of them ends up a drug addict and a porn star, and the other one is an engineer and a family man or something.

Speaker 4 Like they grew up in the same household. That happens, but they respond to the things that confront them in life in different ways.

Speaker 4 And those things start to add up and eventually gain a momentum of their own. And pretty soon, unless you,

Speaker 4 you know, unless you,

Speaker 4 it's very easy to get caught up in that and let that rule you. And that's what happens.

Speaker 4 in most, you know, most historical events, because most historical events are about groups. You know, they're prominent individuals, but ultimately they're about groups of people.

Speaker 4 And so, you know, the averages tend to tend to win out over time.

Speaker 3 So last thing,

Speaker 3 for people whose appetites have been whetted to

Speaker 3 experience what, you know, the history that you produce, where can people find this series, your labor series, your Israel-Palestine series?

Speaker 3 You know, how can they hear this?

Speaker 4 Sure. So my main podcast is the Martyr Maid podcast.

Speaker 4 How are we spelling Martyr Maid?

Speaker 4 M-A-R-T-Y-R-M-A-D-E. I think when

Speaker 4 Joe Rogan and Dave Smith were talking about the, or no, it was when Josh Barnett was on there, my buddy Josh, they were talking about it, and Rogan had never heard of it at the time.

Speaker 4 And he called me his name's Marty R. Made.

Speaker 4 But yeah, Martyr Made, Martyr like Allahu Akbar, made, like Made in America.

Speaker 4 And those are my long-form history podcasts.

Speaker 3 And they're found where?

Speaker 4 iTunes, Spotify, wherever you want to look for them. They also, they appear on my sub stack as well.

Speaker 4 The Substack is where I do a ton of subscribers-only content.

Speaker 4 Once you get done with the countless hours of long-form history podcasts, there are 50, 60, maybe 70 more podcast episodes behind the paywall on Substack, along with

Speaker 4 thousands of pages of essay series and things like that, where I kind of get deeper into subtopics and just tangential topics that I would like to talk about in my main podcast, but just can't quite fit them in and keep the narrative on true.

Speaker 3 Your main podcast has no advertising? No.

Speaker 3 So total revenue to you for years of work is right around zero in that range?

Speaker 4 For the podcast itself, yeah. The podcast itself, I just think that's amazing.

Speaker 3 We're at dinner last night. I'm like, hmm, you're talking about, took me five years to do this.

Speaker 3 I said, you know, how do you, I'm sorry to be vulgar and like a capitalist about it, but like, how, you know, how do you pay your mortgage? What do you make on that podcast? Like, nothing.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Well, the podcast is an advertisement, right? People listen to them, they like them, and then they find out that I have a subscriber.

Speaker 3 On TV, we do a tease. It's about 30 seconds long.
There you go. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Mine are seven hours long.

Speaker 3 So you're Substack also Martyrmaid.

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 4 And that's subscribe.martyrmaid.com. And it has to be that because if you go martyrmaid.substack.com, Elon kills it on the X algorithm.
So

Speaker 4 subscribe.martyrmaid.com. I do another podcast with my friend Jocko Willink, who's a retired Navy SEAL commander.
A lot of people have heard of. We do one called The Unraveling.
And

Speaker 3 how often?

Speaker 4 Well, lately, not as often as we should. We've been having trouble making our schedules meet up, but we've got 40-some episodes out at this point where we talk about more current historical topics.

Speaker 4 Sometimes we get into politics. Like our last one was on deinstitutionalization and the kind of the fallout and the homeless crisis that's partially resulted from that.

Speaker 4 So we get into all those things. You get to hear

Speaker 4 like a hardened warrior like Jocko comment on mental health crisis, for example. So it's a lot of fun.

Speaker 3 Darrell Cooper, Martyr Maid. Thank you.
Thank you for this conversation and for your addition to the sum total of knowledge. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 4 It's always fun. Thanks.

Speaker 3 Thanks for listening to Tucker Carlson Show. If you enjoyed it, you can go to tuckercarlson.com to see everything that we have made, the complete library, tuckercarlson.com.