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

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00:01:00.000 Welcome to the Tucker Carlson Show.

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00:01:25.660 Here's the episode.

00:01:26.500 And so sometimes I think to myself, you know,

00:01:29.880 why are current events so unclear to so many people?

00:01:33.800 And I always go back to the question of history.

00:01:36.780 You can't really understand what's happening right now unless you understand what has happened before.

00:01:40.780 You certainly can't plan a coherent future unless you understand.

00:01:44.160 And then I think, well, why do people know so much, so little about history?

00:01:47.140 Probably because it's not taught.

00:01:49.160 And then to the extent that it is taught in, say, airport bookstores,

00:01:52.960 you know, our popular historians are people like John Meacham and Michael Beschloss

00:01:57.060 and Doris Kearns Goodwin and Anne Applebaum, you know, 0.96

00:02:01.040 not only sort of the dumbest people in the country, I would say, I know most of them, 0.99

00:02:05.260 but also completely dishonest political actors. 0.99

00:02:07.600 And so I think I just want to, I can tell that you hate compliments,

00:02:11.160 but I just want to say I think you are the most important popular historian

00:02:14.340 and working in the United States today, you work in a different medium on Substack X podcasts.

00:02:21.680 But I'm a fan of yours because of the way you treat history,

00:02:25.300 which is with relentless curiosity and honesty.

00:02:29.220 And I'm sure you have all kinds of political beliefs or religious beliefs or whatever,

00:02:33.060 but I feel like you get to what you think is true based on really intense research.

00:02:38.260 So I just, for those people who aren't familiar with who you are,

00:02:41.940 I want people to know who you are, and I want you to be widely recognized

00:02:47.560 as the most important historian in the United States because I think that you are.

00:02:51.080 So that's my last compliment for our time together.

00:02:53.620 I know it was excruciating.

00:02:56.160 Tell us some of the stories, we call them stories,

00:02:59.340 but historical events that you have taken a really close look at recently.

00:03:03.180 So I decided to start with an easy one.

00:03:06.700 I did a 26-hour series on the early history of Zionism

00:03:10.100 and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

00:03:13.140 Whether that was naivety or hubris, it turned out pretty well.

00:03:17.480 Yes.

00:03:17.780 You know, and the reason it turned out well, I think,

00:03:20.540 and I've had time to really think about it over the years.

00:03:23.860 I started it in 2015, took me a few years to complete.

00:03:26.540 But I've received hundreds of emails from Israelis,

00:03:31.440 from Jews around the world who are, you know, boosters of Israel,

00:03:36.980 as well as Palestinians and people around the Middle East

00:03:40.260 and people who are critical of Israel who,

00:03:42.560 all of them on all sides have kind of told me that it opened up,

00:03:45.500 at least opened up their perspective to the way the other side saw the world,

00:03:49.900 which is what I was going for, you know.

00:03:52.900 In all of my series, something that I didn't really—

00:03:55.720 I think that the series that you did on the formation of Israel,

00:03:59.260 I think, is regarded by honest people as the most honest,

00:04:02.140 most non-aligned look.

00:04:04.840 No axes were being ground, maybe ever done.

00:04:07.600 Can you just tell people who aren't familiar that,

00:04:10.160 what did it take to produce that?

00:04:11.840 You said it took a few years, but what did you do in preparation for it?

00:04:15.300 Well, you know, it's funny, actually, because when I first started it,

00:04:20.380 I didn't really know what went into making a podcast like that, right?

00:04:23.380 And so I had this experience where I started working on it after I—

00:04:27.760 I'd read maybe like six books, because I only—

00:04:29.960 the series only goes up to 1948.

00:04:31.600 I did some follow-up work on the more modern period,

00:04:33.480 but this is up to the foundation of the state of Israel

00:04:35.660 and the lead-up to that, right?

00:04:37.380 That's the—I only covered that part.

00:04:39.480 And so I didn't know if this was going to be a one-episode thing,

00:04:42.080 a two-episode thing.

00:04:42.900 I start working on it after I've read about six books on that pre-1948 period.

00:04:48.740 And I'm working on it for maybe, you know, quite a while,

00:04:52.040 taking my time, because I was working for the Department of Defense at the time,

00:04:55.000 so it was, you know, a side gig.

00:04:56.940 And it wasn't even a gig.

00:04:58.140 I didn't make any money from it.

00:04:59.340 But—and after a while, when I started to approach the end of that episode,

00:05:04.240 this is months and months and months later,

00:05:05.840 by now I've read 20 books, 30 books about that pre-1948 period

00:05:11.780 and a lot of the tangential topics and issues that help better—

00:05:16.600 help you better understand it.

00:05:18.060 And I went back and I started going over what I'd created for that first episode,

00:05:23.280 and it was so embarrassingly terrible.

00:05:26.980 Where you look at it and you're like,

00:05:28.780 this is not even—that phrase, not even wrong.

00:05:31.440 It's like, this is not even—it was a nightmare to read.

00:05:35.840 And you realize—and I realized something at that point.

00:05:38.220 I was like, I've read—I started this, I'd read six books on this topic.

00:05:41.960 Six books is a lot, you know, on a single historical topic.

00:05:46.120 There's countless topics that I've read a book or two on,

00:05:49.480 and if you give me, like, an energy drink and let me go,

00:05:51.960 I'll start pontificating for hours about it, you know?

00:05:55.040 Oh, I know the feeling!

00:05:56.900 I read a book on the Federal Reserve once.

00:05:59.080 And so eventually, I got to the point—I counted them all up one time.

00:06:02.680 People keep asking me to put together a list.

00:06:04.420 I can't put together a complete one because I just didn't keep as good a track as I should.

00:06:08.960 But I read over 80 whole books, parts of another hundred at least.

00:06:14.780 And about—when I counted them up, I could remember about, like, 12, 1300 academic papers and journal.

00:06:24.340 I read everything I could find.

00:06:25.660 So only people in prison read 80 books.

00:06:27.840 Yeah. Well, or people who work for the Department of Defense,

00:06:30.980 and their job entails spending eight to ten months a year going overseas by yourself,

00:06:37.060 often with nothing to do in a country that nobody speaks your language.

00:06:40.320 So, you know, I would go over to work with one of our foreign allies,

00:06:46.040 usually on the weapon systems that I specialized in.

00:06:49.200 We'd go over there and we'd work during the day.

00:06:51.860 Most of the Ministry of Defense people, it doesn't matter what country you go to,

00:06:56.220 you can go to Israel, you can go to Norway, you can go to Japan, Korea.

00:07:00.600 All they want to talk about is American gun culture.

00:07:03.380 I've noticed.

00:07:04.580 Is that in interest of yours?

00:07:07.640 Mm-hmm.

00:07:08.080 Is that—are you knowledgeable on that topic?

00:07:10.580 I wouldn't say I'm necessarily, like, technically knowledgeable, like my gun nut friends are.

00:07:15.440 But, yeah, in terms of, you know, I'm a hunter and gun owner, educated gun owner, you know.

00:07:22.940 But I have friends who are real gun nuts that I refer to.

00:07:25.560 That's totally fair.

00:07:26.280 Yeah.

00:07:26.480 Right. It's all specs and head specs.

00:07:27.480 And I say that with all affection when, you know, it's—

00:07:30.280 and so, you know, I would go overseas and spend my day, work day, working with them,

00:07:36.140 training them, helping them with, you know, whatever was broken or needed,

00:07:39.300 upgrading, whatever we were doing over there.

00:07:41.560 And sometimes I would spend, like I said, eight to ten months a year overseas,

00:07:44.240 I would be doing this by myself most of the time.

00:07:47.480 And so after the work day was done, it's just me and my hotel with nothing really to do.

00:07:53.140 And, you know, I grew—when I was growing up, I counted these up one time,

00:07:58.380 and it was between kindergarten and 12th grade, I went to, like, 35 different schools.

00:08:02.600 Like, I was changing schools sometimes every few months.

00:08:05.180 Not a good sign. Sorry.

00:08:06.320 Yeah. Well, you know, one of the good habits I picked up from it was reading because it gave—

00:08:12.420 you know, books were what gave me a sense of continuity from environment to environment to environment, right?

00:08:18.080 I'm in the middle of a book and I moved to another school and I have to adjust to that,

00:08:22.060 but I'm still reading this book and it sort of patches me over.

00:08:24.680 And that became sort of the background reality of my life as, you know,

00:08:30.180 I sort of moved around in this unpredictable way, like, for most of my early years.

00:08:35.340 I still have this thread that was coherent that I was following, you know, consistently.

00:08:40.580 And so it definitely helped with a sense of stability like that.

00:08:44.160 And it implanted this idea that, you know, like, I take refuge in books.

00:08:48.200 It's, you know, they—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.

00:08:56.560 Books make—they make my anxiety go away, right?

00:08:59.780 It's what they do for me.

00:09:01.260 And so, you know, I'm just a nerd is what I'm saying, basically, right?

00:09:05.060 I'm a nerd.

00:09:05.840 And I had a lot of time to read books.

00:09:08.080 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.

00:09:19.180 If I was in a meeting and we were waiting for the next speaker to come in, I was working on the podcast.

00:09:27.040 Lunch, I was working on the podcast.

00:09:28.720 Evening, I was working on the podcast.

00:09:30.100 And, I mean, became like a real obsession, partly because, I mean, left to my own devices, I would read books and talk to people about them.

00:09:39.420 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.

00:09:46.880 That's what I'd do anyway, right?

00:09:48.900 And so, it was never really work.

00:09:52.400 But, yeah, that's—I mean, the way you do it, you know, people who want to do—

00:09:58.320 There's a lot of people I know who started doing history podcasts or other—maybe not history, but not sort of conversational, just back-and-forth discussion podcasts where they do research and they want to make a presentation, right?

00:10:12.280 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.

00:10:22.860 Not everybody wants to listen to a seven-hour podcast on Jim Jones.

00:10:26.520 And, by the way, that's only the fifth out of seven episodes on the topic, right?

00:10:30.440 So, that's not for everybody.

00:10:32.660 And, you know, they ask me sometimes, like, how do I—how could I do this as well as you do it?

00:10:39.220 And other people who are, like, aspiring podcasters have asked me that.

00:10:42.380 And like you said, I don't like compliments, and so I get shy when people ask me things like that.

00:10:45.920 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.

00:10:52.020 I'm not that—it's nothing like that.

00:10:53.780 I work on this.

00:10:55.840 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've got to spend time in books.

00:11:05.520 You've got to read and read, and then when you think you've read enough, you've got to read some more.

00:11:09.240 And because there's just—there's so much out there.

00:11:12.360 Like I said, I had experience after I had read six books on just the pre-1948 period of, you know, the Zionist-Israeli-Palestinian conflict story.

00:11:20.900 And I knew nothing, Tucker.

00:11:22.680 I knew nothing.

00:11:24.040 Like, embarrassingly nothing.

00:11:25.640 Worse than nothing.

00:11:26.720 Because, like, at least before I read the books—

00:11:28.300 It was the illusion of knowledge.

00:11:29.440 Yeah, 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.

00:11:41.620 I at least would have just been repeating that.

00:11:43.580 But this was worse.

00:11:45.580 This was like the full midwit kind of meme, you know, in production where you know enough to really embarrass yourself.

00:11:54.240 And I'm glad that I sort of recognized that at the time.

00:11:56.960 And I went back and, like, scrapped the whole thing.

00:11:59.280 Didn't start it for another year after that, probably, because I just realized that, you know, I've got to get deeper into this.

00:12:05.460 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 what I want to read about.

00:12:19.600 You know, that's all it is.

00:12:20.600 Like, usually while I'm working on one, something, 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.

00:12:30.260 It'll get harder and harder to discipline myself to stay on that topic, because there's something that's pulling me away.

00:12:36.500 I know the feeling.

00:12:37.400 Yeah.

00:12:37.700 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.

00:12:44.660 And I move on to that.

00:12:45.300 And sometimes they're very, very different.

00:12:46.540 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?

00:12:56.620 I told the story of, you know, the People's Temple.

00:12:59.240 Two hours.

00:13:00.500 Yeah.

00:13:00.820 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.

00:13:06.020 Unless it's like, sometimes I'll do a single episode, and I kind of know the story.

00:13:09.260 But when I start a long series, it's going to take me a year and a half to put out every episode.

00:13:13.380 I don't necessarily know how it's going to turn out.

00:13:16.280 And, you know, when you look at something like the Jonestown cult, and for people who don't know, in 1978, everybody's heard the phrase, don't drink the Kool-Aid, right?

00:13:25.840 And that's what people know about Jonestown, basically, is that Christianity sometimes goes off the rails, don't drink the Kool-Aid, thousand people, you know, 916 people committed mass suicide in the jungles of Guyana, right?

00:13:41.280 At the direction of this preacher, Jim Jones.

00:13:44.500 That's what most people know about it.

00:13:46.860 When you open any book about it, even mainstream books about it, which, you know, again, most people don't get to that point.

00:13:51.920 This won't be in any of the documentaries, for the most part, that you see.

00:13:55.620 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.

00:14:04.040 Yeah.

00:14:04.580 Black women from Oakland.

00:14:05.580 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.

00:14:14.820 So these were migrants who had come from the South as part of the Great Migration, right?

00:14:19.600 And you'd think like if 75% of the people that died out there were Mexican immigrants, first generation Mexican, that wouldn't be a part of the story.

00:14:28.940 That would be like the story.

00:14:30.320 Like what is going on here, right?

00:14:31.760 Not just how did this religious cult get out of control and like, like you really need to understand that.

00:14:37.880 I never knew that.

00:14:38.580 I always knew about Jonestown on the surface level, but I saw that.

00:14:42.020 I'm like, I have to understand this better.

00:14:43.340 And so, you know, it drew me like deep into the history of African American life in America, 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.

00:15:03.380 And, you know, I get emotional when I think about the Jonestown story.

00:15:09.780 I worked on that for a long time.

00:15:11.400 I read literally every single book or thing that's been written about it.

00:15:15.900 There's a lot of documents.

00:15:18.880 I think it was UCSB had an interview series.

00:15:21.480 I mean, there's just a lot out there.

00:15:22.720 Well, not only that, the FBI sees a thousand hours of tapes from Jonestown after the suicide, and they're all available online.

00:15:29.120 I've listened to all of it and most of it twice, like for months now.

00:15:33.380 I had this guy's sermons in my head.

00:15:35.700 I had their like backroom midnight meetings where they're all going through struggle sessions, screaming at each other, beating each other up.

00:15:42.960 All of their recordings of these late night torchlight sessions that they would have out in Guyana in the jungle.

00:15:50.420 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.

00:15:59.400 These people have been together for 20 years.

00:16:01.280 You know, he started his first church in the 1950s.

00:16:03.940 And this is a guy, Jim Jones, who, you know, in 1953 in Indianapolis, which was a KKK stronghold at the time, you know, because the second KKK was not really a Southern anti-black movement.

00:16:18.920 It was more of a Midwest and Northern urban anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish movement.

00:16:24.500 And so Indianapolis was one of the strongholds.

00:16:27.080 And he lived, that's where he lived at the time.

00:16:29.280 He's like a 23-year-old guy.

00:16:31.700 He was born in 39, maybe.

00:16:33.680 He's 24 years old, starting his first little Methodist church in this storefront with folding chairs, you know.

00:16:39.700 And he and his congregation are going out and boycotting stores in 1953, years before anybody heard of a bus boycott or anything like that, you know, with Martin Luther King.

00:16:50.680 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?

00:16:57.760 And so this is a true believer, like, when it comes to 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.

00:17:09.220 And this was back in the 50s.

00:17:11.260 And he was, you know, if Jim Jones had been hit by a bus in 1962, they moved out to, they moved out to the Bay Area in 1965.

00:17:20.840 He would be remembered today as one of the early pioneers of the American Civil Rights Movement and, like, revered for it.

00:17:27.980 He really would be, right?

00:17:29.560 And so I started to read about this stuff.

00:17:32.800 And I realized that there was this theme that was starting to emerge in all of my podcasts for the most part.

00:17:38.940 And the Israel-Palestine one and this one, which is here's this guy who really is an idealist.

00:17:44.340 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 Jim Jones biographies are like this, and you have to learn how to, like, read past it.

00:17:59.060 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.

00:18:07.880 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.

00:18:13.820 And that's when I knew I'm, I just, I'm very suspicious of all those stories, you know.

00:18:19.980 And so, you have this guy who's a true idealist, and he could be, you know, whether or not his politics were correct or whether his, you know, was misguided, that's a separate question.

00:18:30.760 He was an idealist.

00:18:31.760 Like, he really believed these things.

00:18:33.780 He really did treat people in a way that in 1953 in America was uncommon, you know.

00:18:39.400 And 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.

00:18:51.500 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.

00:19:03.280 And then people run into the rocks of reality, and how we respond to that pressure, you know, really defines the destiny of a movement and the people in it.

00:19:16.760 And there are always, there are always going to be people, and sometimes entire movements, that the pressure ends up, you know, turning them off the road completely, you know, and into a ravine.

00:19:29.480 That's kind of what happens.

00:19:30.320 And 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 stuff that you would recognize as just early civil rights stuff.

00:19:44.040 You know, boycotting a local business to get them to integrate.

00:19:46.820 Right around the time, a few years before, but like that Martin Luther King was going to start that kind of thing.

00:19:50.960 And then, so you have Greensboro, you have these things.

00:19:52.720 And 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.

00:20:10.080 I mean, it is uncanny, like, how perfectly it follows.

00:20:13.240 It makes perfect sense because of how plugged into it they were.

00:20:15.900 It follows the trajectory of the civil rights and protest movement in America through its rise, its peak, its radicalization, and then its decline in the late 60s and then into the 70s into insanity and death.

00:20:30.980 I mean, and it is, I mean, it's almost a month, 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.

00:20:46.920 And so it became a vehicle for that.

00:20:48.420 And that's what, that's what really the story is about.

00:20:50.540 It's about that period of American history from the mid-50s up until about 1980.

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00:22:31.720 The number of true well-known Democratic politicians who were patrons of the People's Temple is quite amazing.

00:22:52.920 Willie Brown was one of them.

00:22:54.300 Oh, yeah.

00:22:54.620 But sure, I mean, every mayor of San Francisco.

00:22:56.680 Look, I have specific contempt for all of those people just because, 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.

00:23:14.020 You know, you had Angela Davis, you had Huey Newton, you had a lot of these other people who, when these people were in Jonestown, and I mean, you got to remember, a lot of the, first of all, 300 of those 1,000 or so people were kids.

00:23:29.180 Another 300 to 400 were people over like 60 years old.

00:23:33.000 Okay, so, you can, I mean, that's who's out there.

00:23:37.980 Two-thirds, fully two-thirds of the people who committed suicide out there were kids or senior citizens, right?

00:23:43.300 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 left for us, and they're just getting increasingly deranged.

00:23:56.800 They're certain that the CIA is going to come and kidnap their children and put them through brainwashing.

00:24:02.300 And this is not just Jim Jones and his charisma telling these people this.

00:24:05.920 These people understood themselves as a revolutionary movement, and they were true believers.

00:24:10.260 Like, they were true believers, these people.

00:24:13.540 A lot of people like to say that at the end, it was basically murder.

00:24:16.320 These people were forced to do this.

00:24:17.860 These people were, at least for the vast majority of them, were not forced to do it.

00:24:21.860 They believed in what they were doing.

00:24:23.080 And they, Jim Jones by that point was almost like a figurehead of the movement, to be honest with you.

00:24:29.760 He was just sort of the titular leader, but the movement, the organization was running itself.

00:24:35.000 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.

00:24:40.340 And in the last few months, when they're approaching just maximum psychosis and paranoia, you've got, like, Angela Davis, Huey Newton, Harvey Milk, like, a lot of the, I think he might have, he got killed shortly after.

00:24:56.120 Who are literally calling in to Jonestown and being put on the speaker for everybody to listen, saying, we know that, like, you know, the government is after you.

00:25:05.320 And we just want you to know that we have your back.

00:25:07.940 And, you know, there's just, the whole world is coming after you, but we're there for you.

00:25:11.720 We're on your side.

00:25:13.400 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.

00:25:20.380 And that's what these people are doing, calling in, just feeding into it.

00:25:24.300 And, you know, it makes me sick because you have people, 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?

00:25:35.220 Like, there's this one woman. 0.96

00:25:37.200 She was the lead singer of the Jonestown band.

00:25:40.960 And the night before they all committed suicide, Leo Ryan, the congressman, was there.

00:25:45.660 And his entourage was there.

00:25:46.980 And they put on a performance.

00:25:48.380 And there's a video.

00:25:48.900 And his aide, Jackie Speier.

00:25:49.940 Who became a member of Congress herself. 0.57

00:25:52.080 Yep.

00:25:52.500 And there's a video of that night.

00:25:56.280 You know, it was, and they show a musical performance.

00:25:59.640 And this woman, who's the lead singer and band conductor, is up there.

00:26:04.120 And she's this, you know, this African-American woman, beautiful, great voice, up there, like, really, like, confidently commanding the stage and, like, really in her element, right?

00:26:14.640 Well, her backstory was, back in Indianapolis, Jim Jones, when his family had lived there, knew her when she was a little girl, just a little bit.

00:26:24.100 Like, her mom came to the church sometimes, something like that.

00:26:26.720 And after Jim Jones and his people left, you know, she got abandoned by her mother.

00:26:34.940 She ended up being pimped out by her drug dealer boyfriend when she was 15, 16 years old.

00:26:44.620 And she's living her life on the streets, being beat up by this guy who's forcing her to go out and prostitute for him, you know.

00:26:53.020 And that's her life.

00:26:54.320 And now she's about 20.

00:26:55.380 She's committed suicide three or four times at this point.

00:26:57.600 And now she's 20, 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.

00:27:06.920 And so they go back there.

00:27:08.860 And she just kind of knew who the Jones family was.

00:27:12.120 She said they treated her with kindness and her mother with kindness when she was a little girl.

00:27:15.580 And she's in the depth of suicidal depression, drug addiction, you know, just close to the end, right?

00:27:23.540 And, man, even in the podcast when I was recording, it makes me emotional because they got out there.

00:27:32.600 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.

00:27:41.500 So she came out to see.

00:27:43.540 And Jim Jones sees her and immediately recognizes her and starts talking to her, just, you know, friendly, everything.

00:27:50.680 The people, like, start talking to her, and she starts telling them kind of about how her life's gone since that time.

00:27:57.800 And he said, oh, well, great.

00:28:00.100 Or he said, not great, but he said, oh, well, come with us.

00:28:03.520 Hop on the bus.

00:28:04.080 Let's go.

00:28:04.660 Like, we've got houses.

00:28:05.520 We've got a whole community out here.

00:28:06.860 Like, you know, we can find a job for you until you do something.

00:28:10.880 Whatever.

00:28:11.260 Yeah, come on out. 0.60

00:28:11.980 And so she did.

00:28:13.000 And she went out there, and they cleaned her up.

00:28:16.200 They got her off drugs. 1.00

00:28:17.460 They took this broken, destroyed, abused woman and put her in an environment where it, and again, you have to understand that even this psychotic movement, you know, the way it turned out, this part was genuine.

00:28:32.040 They put her into an environment where she felt like she belonged.

00:28:37.020 And it really was the people cared about her, and she cared about the people there, you know.

00:28:41.960 And so she ends up being the band leader.

00:28:43.820 She's, like, a super talented musician, and she's writing the songs.

00:28:49.320 She's leading the practices for the band.

00:28:51.920 She's the lead singer and everything, and, 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. 1.00

00:29:02.760 She committed suicide with everybody else.

00:29:05.740 The night after you see that video where Ryan's out there.

00:29:08.700 It's amazing that you watch that video.

00:29:11.420 I mean, I don't think I'd want to see something like that.

00:29:14.540 I had to.

00:29:15.560 Yeah, well, of course.

00:29:16.180 No, I had to.

00:29:17.700 Like, I have a rule, and I've broken this rule once, and it's probably an episode I'm just, like, least proud of, maybe.

00:29:24.920 Although it's a lot of people's favorite episode.

00:29:26.900 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.

00:29:37.160 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.

00:29:52.900 And I did the same thing with Jonestown, which was a challenge, because, I mean, talking about a, you know, a psychotic cult leader who dragged his people to their deaths, you know, in the jungle, their meaningless deaths.

00:30:06.280 There were literally people, Tucker, who, I mean, hundreds of people, parents who were injecting cyanide into their baby's mouths and watching them froth and twitch until they were sure they were dead, and then they could take the suicide drink themselves because they had done that.

00:30:21.580 This is almost a thousand people.

00:30:24.040 It was one woman who was in the Capitol.

00:30:26.720 She wasn't, she was at their office in the Capitol.

00:30:28.620 She wasn't out at the, at the actual compound. 0.97

00:30:31.460 And when she got the call, like, it's time, we're doing it, she slashed her kids' throats and then stabbed herself in the heart. 0.99

00:30:37.120 I mean, this is, and yet, these people loved each other.

00:30:45.040 These people actually did believe, like, in equality.

00:30:50.180 They believed in, like, human brotherhood and all these things, and she slashed her kids' throats. 1.00

00:30:55.640 And you, if you're going to tell a story like that, you can't do what all of the biographies of Jim Jones do.

00:31:01.540 You know, they all talk about, like, these weird things about him as a kid and something where it was all there at the beginning, and it was just the gradual, you know, the gradual flowering and unfolding of this psychosis that had always been in there.

00:31:14.400 And all these other people just got sucked into it.

00:31:17.300 It's just, it's total nonsense.

00:31:19.400 You really have to understand how people could get to a place like that from where they were.

00:31:24.280 You know, everybody, doesn't matter who you're talking about, Uday Hussein.

00:31:28.860 There was a time, and I always try to keep this in mind because, I mean, it's like, it's one of the governing thoughts as I go through any of these stories.

00:31:39.640 Uday Hussein, Joseph Stalin, I don't care who you're talking about.

00:31:42.660 There was a time where that was a little three-year-old kid.

00:31:45.440 That's right.

00:31:45.860 And they weren't evil.

00:31:48.160 They weren't who they became.

00:31:51.700 And so, how did they become what they ended up being, you know?

00:31:56.400 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.

00:32:04.480 So, 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.

00:32:16.620 What you're not doing is using history as a weapon, a cudgel, or as a kind of propaganda tool to make policy.

00:32:27.420 So, in that, you almost stand alone, I would say, right now.

00:32:31.380 Well, I'm really interested in the project that you're working on now.

00:32:35.860 I'm a little bit baffled by it.

00:32:37.140 So, I'm just going to answer my own question.

00:32:38.680 So, you were working on World War II, which has to be, even more than the Kennedy assassination, the most written about event in human history.

00:32:48.800 I can't think of one that has occasioned more books.

00:32:51.460 So, why World War II?

00:32:53.640 Well, you know, I was giving a talk to a graduate history class at the University of Vienna a while back online, giving them a talk.

00:33:07.460 And 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,

00:33:20.340 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.

00:33:28.580 Everything in between and before those things, you can do whatever you want.

00:33:31.800 It doesn't matter.

00:33:32.280 You think that the Russians were to blame for World War I and not the Germans. 0.71

00:33:36.260 You think it was all British conspiracy.

00:33:37.880 You can do whatever you want.

00:33:38.660 It's fine.

00:33:39.140 Because that's not part of the founding mythology of the order that we're all living in at this time, right?

00:33:46.160 Those other things are.

00:33:47.500 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.

00:33:56.440 That's not what I mean.

00:33:57.020 I mean that it's a formative part of how we all understand the world we're in, or at least officially, like the official world.

00:34:03.940 Yeah, the structures we live in.

00:34:04.880 The structures we live in.

00:34:06.000 It's the justification for a lot of those structures, right?

00:34:09.140 Whenever you have those things, you're going to have taboos.

00:34:13.920 You're going to have certain ways that certain topics have to be talked about that are going to guarantee that that topic is just profoundly misunderstood.

00:34:24.560 And I told the students at the University of Vienna, I said, over the next couple 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.

00:34:39.080 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?

00:34:51.680 So there's so – and even –

00:34:53.600 Particularly in Austria.

00:34:55.080 Right, right.

00:34:55.760 And so even in the United States –

00:34:56.840 Which was an invaded country, so I'm not exactly sure why it's so important.

00:35:00.900 Yeah.

00:35:01.600 Well, I mean –

00:35:02.160 It's a big topic.

00:35:03.680 But, I mean, even in the United States where you're not going to go to jail necessarily for doing that.

00:35:10.700 You might have your life ruined and lose your job.

00:35:12.620 You might absolutely go to jail in this country.

00:35:14.400 Nowadays, you might, yeah.

00:35:16.380 But, you know, you could write a book.

00:35:19.160 You could take any angle on it you want.

00:35:20.760 You're not going to ever get a job or have a publisher want to publish or anything, but you could do it.

00:35:24.980 You can go out on the street corner and stand on a box and say whatever it is you think.

00:35:28.740 But even still, you know, that event is really – it's such a core part of the state religion that there are emotional triggers built into people since childhood that almost prevent them.

00:35:44.160 From taking an approach that would – that might lead them to information or to conclusions that are not part of the state religion's version of that event, you know?

00:35:55.340 And, again, you're going to find that – I'm sure the Peloponnesian Wars were like that for the ancient Greeks.

00:36:01.120 Well, that's absolutely right.

00:36:01.840 Well, by the way, the American Revolution, which is now totally irrelevant to modern America, unfortunately, was like that.

00:36:08.320 The life of Lincoln was like that.

00:36:09.640 Lincoln was a very complicated guy.

00:36:12.080 It's not an endorsement of slavery. 0.94

00:36:14.160 Well, speaking for myself, I think slavery is disgusting. 0.95

00:36:16.140 It's the worst thing.

00:36:17.560 What you're saying is absolutely right.

00:36:19.300 It's not just the Second World War that is sort of uniquely censored or protected.

00:36:26.300 The mythology around it, it's every event that's central to a nation's understanding of itself, and then that changes over time.

00:36:32.240 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, and that will be allowed?

00:36:43.780 No, I don't.

00:36:45.280 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, like, here's the problem with doing something like that.

00:36:57.040 But, and this is something I'm very aware of as I research it and start to work on the project, is that when 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.

00:37:12.160 Over here, it's not quite that, but it almost might as well be, that this event is going to be described from a certain perspective, you're going to approach it a certain way, there are just certain things you're not allowed to question, you have to—

00:37:24.820 Literally, it's a crime to ask questions, yes.

00:37:26.740 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.

00:37:41.860 That's just how it's going to seem to people who are very locked into this side.

00:37:45.940 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, you know, superpower that was fond of it.

00:38:11.860 And then they all turned into demons for a few years and now they're fine again.

00:38:15.540 Like, that's sort of the official story.

00:38:17.100 And I think deep down we all know that makes no sense.

00:38:20.140 Everything has a cause.

00:38:21.500 You know, again, to go back, like Uday Hussein got to be Uday Hussein from that three-year-old little kid.

00:38:26.820 Jim Jones got to be Jim Jones from being that guy who was just an earnest local Indianapolis civil rights activist.

00:38:35.460 They all got to be those people that led to the chaos that they eventually invited into the world.

00:38:41.480 And onto themselves and their people through their experiences in the world and through a series of decisions, decision points that at the time, if you can bring yourself to step into the shoes of those people, and it's not a comfortable thing to do.

00:38:59.840 I mean, I literally listened to probably 2,000 hours of Jim Jones' sermons and him screaming at his people and just going insane to the point where I was dreaming about this guy.

00:39:09.940 For months, I would have my headphones in as I was working, listening to Jim Jones.

00:39:14.100 And it's really hard.

00:39:15.440 Yeah, I know.

00:39:15.880 Were you the only guy in the office doing that?

00:39:17.500 I think I'm probably the only person in the world that's done that.

00:39:19.720 And so, like, and I got to the point where I felt like I knew this guy.

00:39:26.220 I could notice from tape to tape, I would hear changes in his tone of voice.

00:39:32.240 And I knew whether he was high on amphetamines that day or if he had taken his barbiturates already.

00:39:38.200 And now he's, you could just, I felt like I knew this guy.

00:39:41.760 And their tapes, by the way, they're not all from like one year.

00:39:44.320 They're from like 15, 20 years, right?

00:39:46.720 So, you can watch this process of a descent into madness as it's happening.

00:39:54.720 And, 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, you know, as much as it makes you uncomfortable, it is just a human being.

00:40:06.920 And at the very, very, like, base level, their motivations are the same as yours.

00:40:11.420 Their needs are the same as yours.

00:40:13.780 But that we're a very, we're a multivariate species that can go a lot of different directions, right?

00:40:19.660 And to be able to do that and force yourself to do it is the key.

00:40:23.620 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.

00:40:32.360 You shall not look at this topic and try to understand how the Germans saw the world.

00:40:38.040 Like how 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.

00:40:50.560 That they were the ones being victimized by their neighbors and by all these, by the allied powers.

00:40:56.800 You know, and you can, 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.

00:41:08.120 But again, that's, it's, I think we're getting to the point where that's very unsatisfying for people.

00:41:13.520 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.

00:41:22.620 Who's paying for this and how?

00:41:25.020 Think about it for a minute.

00:41:26.120 Think about your free email account, the free messenger system used to chat with your friends, the free other weather app or game app you open up and never think about.

00:41:36.000 It's all free.

00:41:37.500 But is it?

00:41:38.520 No, it's not free.

00:41:41.020 These companies aren't developing expensive products and just giving them to you because they love you.

00:41:46.800 They're doing it because their programs take all your information.

00:41:49.520 They hoover up your data, private, personal data, and sell it to data brokers and the government.

00:41:57.020 And all of those people who are not your friends are very interested in manipulating you and your personal political and financial decisions.

00:42:04.940 It's scary as hell.

00:42:06.440 And it's happening out in the open without anybody saying anything about it.

00:42:09.500 This is a huge problem.

00:42:11.900 And we've been talking about this problem to our friend Eric Prince for years.

00:42:15.640 Someone needs to fix this.

00:42:17.240 And he and his partners have.

00:42:18.820 And now we're partners with them.

00:42:20.260 And their company is called Unplugged.

00:42:22.500 It's not a software company.

00:42:23.920 It's a hardware company.

00:42:25.520 They actually make a phone.

00:42:27.520 The phone is called Unplugged.

00:42:29.120 And it's more than that.

00:42:30.900 The purpose of the phone is to protect you from having your life stolen, your data stolen.

00:42:38.720 It's designed from a privacy-first perspective.

00:42:42.640 It's got an operating system that they made.

00:42:44.660 It's called Messenger and other apps that help you take charge of your personal data and prevent it from getting passed around to data brokers and government agencies that will use it to manipulate you.

00:42:54.980 Unplugged Skim is to its customers.

00:42:56.640 They will promise you, and they mean it, that your data are not being sold or monetized or shared with anyone from basics like its custom Libertas operating system, which they wrote, which is designed from the very first day to keep your personal data on your device.

00:43:11.860 It also has, believe it or not, a true on-off switch that shuts off the power.

00:43:16.920 It actually disconnects your battery and ensures that your microphone and your camera are turned off completely when you want them to be.

00:43:24.460 So they're not spying on you and, say, your bedroom, which your iPhone is.

00:43:28.400 That's a fact.

00:43:30.040 So it is a great way, one of the few ways, to actually protect yourself from big tech and big government, to reclaim your personal privacy.

00:43:37.800 Without privacy, there is no freedom.

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00:43:45.240 So go to unplugged.com slash Tucker to get yours today.

00:43:49.700 Highly recommended.

00:43:54.460 It's more than unsatisfying.

00:44:08.060 I mean, it's childish and shallow, of course.

00:44:11.480 Hold on.

00:44:11.920 Let me, sorry to interrupt, but that's true.

00:44:14.100 But every society has founding myths.

00:44:16.760 100%.

00:44:17.240 And you need them, you know, like, I don't think that we're necessarily better off now that people are, now that people are able to just freely tear down a statue of George Washington because he was a slave owner, right? 0.85

00:44:32.280 I agree.

00:44:32.500 And so, like, there are sacred symbols and national myths that any group of people are going to need to hold themselves together.

00:44:40.140 And there's also peril in knowing the truth about things.

00:44:43.060 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.

00:44:50.760 When we really get to the truth of that, will we be better off or not?

00:44:54.440 I mean, you know, those are fair questions.

00:44:56.680 I don't know the answer.

00:44:57.360 But let me just say what I completely agree with you, particularly any unifying myth, you know, is important.

00:45:08.020 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.

00:45:21.280 But not just the war in Ukraine, so many others, you know.

00:45:24.400 Churchill's the good guy.

00:45:25.540 Neville Chamberlain's the bad guy.

00:45:28.480 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.

00:45:38.120 And so, I do think it's fair to ask, like, what, what really was going on?

00:45:41.980 So, for example, 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?

00:45:51.000 Uh, I got in trouble with my podcast partner, Jaco Willink, one time, because he's a New England Dutchman who's, his family, it's near and dear to, they're Dutch, but very near and dear to their heart that Winston Churchill is a hero, right?

00:46:06.580 Well, everyone loves Churchill.

00:46:07.620 He thinks that, he really thinks that.

00:46:09.360 And I told him that I think, and maybe I'm being a little, little hyperbolic, maybe, 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.

00:46:20.100 Now, he didn't kill the most people, he didn't, uh, 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 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.

00:46:40.420 Or, 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.

00:46:49.060 Why don't you just make the case, make the case for that.

00:46:51.160 Okay, so you've made your statement, a lot of people are thinking, well, wait a second, you said Churchill, my childhood hero, the guy with the cigar.

00:46:58.140 Yeah.

00:46:58.780 Well, and the next thought that comes into their head, he's saying, is that, oh, you're saying Churchill was the chief villain, therefore his enemies, you know, Adolf Hitler and so forth, were.

00:47:08.160 Stalin. 0.56

00:47:08.580 The protagonists, right?

00:47:09.640 Yeah.

00:47:09.760 That they're the good guys, if you think he's a villain, that's not the case, that's not what I'm saying.

00:47:12.800 You know, Germany, look, they put themselves into 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, 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. 0.87

00:47:41.340 They went in with no plan for that, and they just threw these people into camps, and millions of people ended up dead there.

00:47:47.960 You know, you have, you have, 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 were surrendering or people they're rounding up, and they're, so it's two months after, a month or two after Barbarosha was launched.

00:48:06.100 And they're writing back to the high command in Berlin saying, we can't feed these people.

00:48:11.540 We don't have the food to feed these people.

00:48:14.320 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?

00:48:22.820 And so, this is, like, two months into the invasion, right?

00:48:26.680 And, like, my view on this, you know, I argue with my Zionist interlocutors about this all the time with regard to the current war in Gaza.

00:48:35.340 Look, man, like, maybe you, as the, you know, the Germans, you felt like you had to invade to the east.

00:48:43.020 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.

00:48:54.920 And whatever it was, whatever it was, that, like, maybe you thought you had to do that, 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.

00:49:08.300 And millions of people died because of that, right?

00:49:11.460 And you can look at it and say, like, you know, there, well, yeah.

00:49:17.560 So, you know, get back to your, like, your main question about Churchill.

00:49:21.380 You know, if you go to 1939, when the Germans and the Soviet Union invade Poland, as soon as that war's wrapped up on the German side, Hitler starts firing off peace proposals to Britain and France because they had already declared war.

00:49:37.940 He was, he didn't expect them to declare war, actually.

00:49:40.160 Like, there's, you know, a famous scene where he kind of throws a fit when he finds out that they actually did, that they did do that.

00:49:46.880 And so he doesn't want to fight France.

00:49:48.900 He doesn't want to fight Britain.

00:49:50.000 He feels that's going to weaken Europe when we've got this huge threat to the east, the communist threat over there.

00:49:56.620 And he starts firing off peace proposals.

00:49:59.120 He says, let's not do this.

00:50:00.160 Like, we can't do this.

00:50:01.800 And, of course, you know, year goes by, 1940 comes around and they're still at war.

00:50:06.380 And so he launches his invasion to the west, takes over France, takes over Western and Northern Europe.

00:50:11.320 Once that's done, and the British have, you know, escaped at Dunkirk, there's no British force left on the continent.

00:50:19.660 There's no opposing force left on the continent.

00:50:23.580 In other words, the war is over and the Germans won. 0.77

00:50:27.320 Okay.

00:50:28.040 But by, but what, by what point?

00:50:31.040 Uh, fall of 1940, right?

00:50:33.440 So there's just, there's literally no opposing force on the, on the continent.

00:50:38.320 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.

00:50:52.800 Like, we don't want to fight you, offering peace proposals that, you know, said, you keep all your overseas colonies.

00:50:59.900 We don't want any of that.

00:51:00.820 We want Britain to be strong.

00:51:02.240 The world needs Britain to be strong, you know, especially as we face this communist threat and so forth.

00:51:06.560 Like, this is what's going on.

00:51:08.260 And I think that if there were people in Britain who, uh, well, if they hadn't put it this way, if they hadn't been so successful at delegitimizing, uh, the peace approach by demonizing Neville Chamberlain and so forth and holding him responsible for the invasion of Poland, um, that people would have been, they would have understood, like, we don't need another, a repeat of the first world war.

00:51:32.520 You know, we don't, which is not what ended up happening, but that's what everybody thought was going to happen.

00:51:37.420 And so Churchill, I mean, you have a guy who wants, Churchill wanted a war.

00:51:41.800 He wanted to fight Germany. 0.96

00:51:44.140 Uh, and the reason that I, I don't begrudge him that, you know, people can, national leaders, you can fight whoever you want.

00:51:50.220 If, you know, if you feel like your long-term, uh, 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, that those are great power games.

00:52:01.320 And you play them the way you feel like you need to play them.

00:52:03.420 That's fine.

00:52:04.140 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.

00:52:13.220 All he had were bombers.

00:52:14.220 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.

00:52:23.360 Just, just rank terrorism, you know, going through and, uh, starting to, you know, what eventually became just a carpet bombing, saturation bombing of civilian neighborhoods, you know, to kill is, the purpose of which was to kill as many civilians as possible.

00:52:37.220 And all the men were out in the field, all the fighting-age men were out in the field.

00:52:40.840 And so, this is old people, it's women and children, and they knew that, 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.

00:52:53.620 Why would he do that?

00:52:54.660 Because it was the only means that they had to continue fighting at the time, you know, they didn't have, uh, the ability to reinvade Europe.

00:53:02.300 And so, he needed to keep this war going until he accomplished what is, you know, what he, what he hoped to accomplish.

00:53:08.180 We know now, there's actually a really great series of books.

00:53:10.640 It's, it's one of the best, uh, I recommend it to everybody, but it's really expensive now.

00:53:14.900 And, um, it's six long volumes called History of British Special Operations in the Second World War.

00:53:19.720 And one of the books gets into the level of, uh, just the extent of media operations, propaganda operations, everything that they were running in the United States to eventually drag us into that war.

00:53:33.880 And that was his whole plan.

00:53:35.440 His whole plan was, we don't, we don't have a way to fight this war ourselves.

00:53:39.680 This war is over.

00:53:40.740 We need either the Soviet Union or the United States to do it for us. 0.95

00:53:44.480 And that was the plan.

00:53:45.460 And it kept the war going long enough for that plan to come to fruition.

00:53:48.900 And to me, that's just, it's a craven, uh, ugly way to, to fight a war.

00:53:54.340 And, um.

00:53:54.640 What was the motive?

00:53:58.880 Um, well, you know, Churchill's got a long, complicated history.

00:54:02.640 I mean, he's a, you know, he's somebody who.

00:54:04.860 That, that was the ryest smile I think I've ever seen.

00:54:08.440 Yeah.

00:54:08.760 Um, um, well, look, I think on one level, there was a sense that Churchill was sort of humiliated by his performance in the First World War.

00:54:20.460 Yeah.

00:54:20.600 As the head of the admiralty.

00:54:21.900 And he was out in the cold for a long time.

00:54:23.960 I mean, glippily.

00:54:24.820 Yeah.

00:54:25.560 And, which, you know, was, that was his operation.

00:54:28.740 Yeah.

00:54:28.920 I mean, you know, and so he was rightly held responsible for that and seen as responsible for one of the great disasters that the British suffered during that war.

00:54:37.060 And so I think part of it was probably kind of personal.

00:54:39.760 You know, he wanted redemption.

00:54:41.360 He wanted to go out there and, like, prove that he's the, the warlord, that, that they can go out there and, and fight this big war.

00:54:48.240 Um, probably.

00:54:49.240 I think part of it, I, like, I read about Churchill and he strikes me as a psychopath.

00:54:55.000 Um, but he's also a sort of, I mean, he was a drunk. 0.66

00:54:58.460 He was very childish in strange ways.

00:55:00.820 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, like, playing with action figures like war toys and army men and stuff.

00:55:10.580 And would get mad when people would, uh, would interrupt him, you know, when he was doing that.

00:55:14.640 So this is a strange, strange fellow, you know.

00:55:17.380 There's all those things.

00:55:18.500 Um, but then you get into, uh, you know, why was, why was Winston Churchill such a, such a dedicated booster of Zionism from early on in his life, right?

00:55:30.180 And there's ideological reasons.

00:55:32.460 Uh, one, you know, like in 1920, he wrote a kind of infamous now article called Zionism versus Bolshevism.

00:55:38.760 Um, and he basically, uh, makes the case that, which was, which was true to a large extent, that all of Eastern Europe, the Pala Settlement, which is where the vast majority of Jews lived other than the United States, which is where a lot of them had, had traveled to.

00:55:54.600 Um, that, that area had been, had become so engulfed by a revolutionary spirit that all the, the young Ashkenazi Jews who were over there were getting swept up into it.

00:56:06.500 It was the 60s here on steroids, right?

00:56:09.600 And in a much more serious, uh, and ended up being destructive way.

00:56:12.700 And this is 1920.

00:56:13.600 So this is shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution.

00:56:15.440 Basically, the point of his paper is he says these people who are over there, they're all going one direction or the other.

00:56:22.760 They're going to be Bolsheviks. 0.97

00:56:24.600 They're going to be Zionists. 1.00

00:56:25.900 We want them to be Zionists, you know. 1.00

00:56:27.540 And so we need to support this.

00:56:28.760 And so that was early on.

00:56:29.620 There was an ideological component of it.

00:56:31.980 But then as time goes on, you know, you read stories about Churchill going bankrupt and needing money, getting bailed out by people who shared his interests, uh, you know, in, in terms of Zionism, but also, uh, his hostility just, just, you know.

00:56:49.300 I think his hostility to, put it this way, I think his hostility to Germany was real. 0.99

00:56:53.120 Um, I don't think that he necessarily had to be bribed to have that feeling.

00:56:59.900 Um, but, you know, I think he was, to an extent, put in place by, by people, the financiers, by a media complex that wanted to make sure that he was the guy who, you know, uh, who was, who was representing Britain in that conflict for, for the, for a reason.

00:57:19.040 And, um, you know, Churchill's a, uh, again, it's so hard because like, you know, and especially in a short interview like this where, uh, you have this guy who, 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.

00:57:43.160 Oh, yes.

00:57:44.500 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, uh, the triggers that you're setting off and your listeners.

00:57:55.680 And I don't say that in a way of like, oh, I don't want to offend anybody or whatever.

00:57:59.200 It's that I, it's, you know, you know that things are going to be misunderstood.

00:58:03.240 And so this is why I do 30 hour podcasts.

00:58:05.840 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.

00:58:12.020 I see you actually as a product of the West and as a defender really of the West or its values.

00:58:17.360 Um, you know, in your approach and your open-mindedness, rigor, you know, belief in accuracy and honesty, I mean, those are Western notions.

00:58:25.760 Uh, and yet Churchill has been positioned and has been really is accepted as like the defender of the West over the last hundred years.

00:58:36.660 Yeah.

00:58:37.180 And so maybe that's, and I, and I wonder why that is.

00:58:39.820 I don't, I mean, people can certainly take issue with any factual claims you're making.

00:58:44.880 I assume they're already consistent with what I think I know to be true.

00:58:48.260 Um, but why do you think Churchill has been presented in a way, in the way that he has?

00:58:56.480 Yeah.

00:58:56.640 Well, it's, it has to do with what you said earlier, right?

00:58:59.420 Uh, Neville Chamberlain versus Churchill has been the binary model that has served as the, the chief rhetorical device for every conflict we've wanted to get into since then.

00:59:11.420 Yes.

00:59:11.660 You know, the entire Cold War and then even after the Cold War and the Global War on Terror is, if you appease them, you're Neville Chamberlain.

00:59:19.200 Hitler's the, uh, rather Churchill's the one who saw all along where this was headed and was trying to warn people, this, you know, Cassandra. 0.55

00:59:27.680 And finally, because nobody listened to him, the war ended up breaking out and we were forced to like go stamp out this threat.

00:59:36.840 And now it's a much bigger threat than it ever would have been if we just would have listened to him.

00:59:40.260 If we had strangled it in its crib.

00:59:42.140 And it's justified every conflict, uh, you know, really since the Second World War.

00:59:47.540 Everybody's the new Hitler, right? 0.99

00:59:48.860 It's, it's, um, and so that it's a, it's very valuable in that sense.

00:59:52.780 But then also, you know, it really did become the, the, the founding myth of the, of the global order that we're all living in now.

01:00:01.780 Right.

01:00:02.140 Like, cause when you think about, like, if you go back to, think about like, um, in Machiavelli's The Prince, right?

01:00:08.640 And he, he starts that book out kind of talking about why he's writing this book.

01:00:12.900 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.

01:00:19.200 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.

01:00:30.200 Like on a national.

01:00:31.560 Yeah, as nation states, yeah.

01:00:32.880 Um, and we have, have got to get it, get it, get our act together and start learning how to act on that, on that level as well.

01:00:40.180 And so that's why I'm writing this book.

01:00:41.660 It's an instruction manual and like a call to action kind of.

01:00:45.160 Well, as that goes on and the nation state starts to put itself together in the, in the modern era, you know, you, you get to World War I and you think about what the nation state is, right?

01:00:57.480 Like history and to a large extent global, like sort of global event style history is governed to, to, to a great degree by the military technology that's prevalent at a given time.

01:01:08.100 Right.

01:01:08.500 So like, I don't think it's a, it's an accident, for example, that, um, the, the ancient Greeks had like an equal, a feeling of like citizen equality, um, that was unprecedented at the world at the time.

01:01:21.380 And they had the, their chief combat system was the phalanx unit, uh, that required every man to stand by his, you know, his fellow citizen as a unit.

01:01:31.780 And they, that's what their, uh, position in the world depended on people being able to do that.

01:01:38.040 I don't think that's a mistake, right?

01:01:39.280 And I don't think it's a mistake when you look at other societies where, uh, charioteers, you know, really expensive branch chariots.

01:01:46.080 Or, uh, when, when you get to like, um, uh, the, the high middle ages where the heavy horse cavalry is just totally dominant on the battlefield, but the, you know, so only the people who can afford that kind of a weapon system, they're the ones who are going to rule.

01:01:59.920 And the people who don't like it, they really don't have any means to, to, uh, you know, sort of express, um, their, their, their, their, their own, uh, political will.

01:02:08.680 And so as the nation state starts to get put together, you start to have, you start to have military, uh, conflicts and just military buildups on a scale that nobody's ever heard of before.

01:02:20.240 I mean, you're talking, you get to the first world war, I mean, millions and millions of men.

01:02:24.680 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?

01:02:35.020 And that's, it's why countries who tried their hand at, uh, at imperialism, like the Dutch and the Belgians, eventually they were just like, you know, we're not doing it.

01:02:45.100 And, um, it was because they saw that.

01:02:47.360 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 in the early modern period or even, no, forget about that.

01:03:03.520 Look at like Louis the 14th, the sun king, right?

01:03:07.300 Powerful as any monarch in Europe, like for hundreds of years, his actual ability to reach into the local affairs of some village and tell people how to act or what to think.

01:03:19.620 Pretty limited.

01:03:20.480 Very limited.

01:03:21.480 Like we, we think, you know, because of movies and TV that a, a monarch is sitting on his throne and he just orders this and it happens.

01:03:28.900 Like God saying, let there be light or something. 0.99

01:03:31.240 Behead him. 0.99

01:03:31.820 Yeah. 1.00

01:03:31.960 Yeah.

01:03:32.260 And it's just, they didn't have that kind of reach, you know, they had influence and they, but they had like, like any modern, uh, individual politician.

01:03:40.540 They had to work through existing structures and systems to get their will, uh, actually carried out.

01:03:45.520 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.

01:04:02.420 And so you get up to the point where, you know, when, when, when the nations face off in world war one and you have countries that, I mean, when you look at the, the, the, the level of efficient mobilization toward a single cause, uh, you know, fighting the war, how the economy, how the government, everybody was on the same page.

01:04:27.580 And, you know, they were fighting this war as whole societies.

01:04:30.860 Like they, they figured out a way that they could do what Louis the 14th could never dream of.

01:04:35.800 They could mobilize their whole society for war.

01:04:39.520 And that was what you had to do if you wanted to compete on the level of Germany and France and so forth.

01:04:46.340 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,

01:04:56.920 what they thought they were doing was that this was a war between nation states like world war one and so on and so forth.

01:05:04.120 And it was not that we found out afterwards that it was not that, that there were two, uh, great military land empires, multi-ethnic, multi-racial, uh, multicultural military land empires, the Soviet union, the United States, uh, that, and when I say empire, obviously like we don't think of the U S pre world war two in that way very much.

01:05:25.060 But, you know, we didn't start out with a whole continent under our control, right?

01:05:29.420 We started out as 13 colonies and, and we, we grew through, uh, a confrontation with, and, uh, centuries long race war against the natives, right?

01:05:40.280 I mean, that's, that's really, there was a formative experience of, of, of America and, and, in its early history.

01:05:45.920 And so that'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.

01:05:53.140 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.

01:06:02.140 There's this idea that the only reason that they did Molotov-Ribbentrop was because, you know, Hitler needed to buy time so he could eventually invade the Soviet union later or something like that.

01:06:11.080 Um, not exactly true.

01:06:13.640 I mean, that, obviously he was talking about the eventual conflict with the Soviet union very early in his career that was there.

01:06:19.620 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.

01:06:31.080 Because he saw himself as the sort of European defender of Messiah guy, right?

01:06:36.280 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.

01:06:46.920 Like, Trotsky's been banished from the country and his followers are all dead.

01:06:51.800 You know, they were killed during the purges of the late 30s.

01:06:54.640 These people are all, are all gone.

01:06:56.880 Those are all of the people who, you know, from the very beginning after the First World War, they saw Russia as the fountainhead of world revolution.

01:07:07.060 And Stalin, he never quite gave that up, you know, just like the United States. 0.50

01:07:11.040 He saw it as his, as his duty to build up ideologically aligned allies and so forth.

01:07:17.500 But if you really look at what happened in the, the, 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.

01:07:28.300 You know, he kind of brought back the Russian empire and now it's called communist and stuff, but there's no goal to just set off global revolution.

01:07:35.680 And then once that happens, the chips will follow where, fall where they may.

01:07:38.880 They kept inside the Kremlin, they kept all the paintings of St. George, the patron saint of Russia, all the crosses, they, the whole Stalin period, they're there.

01:07:47.500 And I have, you know, don't, I mean, I have nothing good to say about Stalin.

01:07:50.780 I don't either, but I don't, I don't think it's been misadvertised a little bit.

01:07:53.980 Yeah, yeah.

01:07:54.920 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.

01:08:03.460 Um, 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, and specifically Romania, which is, as far as I can tell, like so far after, you know, 30 years of reading history books is pretty much the worst thing that ever happened.

01:08:20.820 And, um, these, these prison experiments that they ran in Petesti and other places in Romania after the Second World War are, uh, that's not family listening.

01:08:31.460 If you really want to.

01:08:32.140 The Soviets did. 0.97

01:08:33.500 Yeah, the Soviet, Soviet advisors were there.

01:08:35.460 It was carried out technically by the Securitate and the, and the Romanians themselves.

01:08:38.940 But, um, but, you know, this was a, it was a program being run from Moscow, right?

01:08:44.600 And it's, whatever you're thinking it is out there, whoever's listening or watching this, it's a thousand times worse.

01:08:50.900 And I wouldn't recommend going and listening to my episode, The Anti-Humans, uh, unless, unless you're prepared for that.

01:08:57.460 So I'll just leave it at that.

01:08:58.840 But I'll say that, like, in that one, like, I just couldn't, I couldn't bring myself to put, I couldn't put myself in the shoes of, uh, of the people who were doing those things.

01:09:09.020 And I didn't really try.

01:09:10.700 And it comes across much more polemical than any of my other work.

01:09:13.860 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.

01:09:18.500 But I think.

01:09:19.180 I think it's hard sometimes.

01:09:20.740 I'll tell you one thing as a, I'm not a Stalin expert.

01:09:24.140 I don't speak Russian, but I have read about Stalin my whole life.

01:09:26.260 And one thing that I was very surprised to learn that it came out right after the, um, everything collapsed in 91.

01:09:34.020 And a British historian, um, a Russian speaker got access to a lot of the Stalin archives, the personal archives.

01:09:42.820 And I was amazed to read in this book, Court of the Red Czar.

01:09:48.420 Amazing book.

01:09:49.460 That is a great book.

01:09:50.200 It is a great book.

01:09:51.040 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.

01:09:56.360 Everyone thought Stalin was this bloodless technocrat, not a true believer at all.

01:10:00.840 That was Lenin, was certainly Trotsky, seemed like a true believer.

01:10:04.600 Zinoviev, Kamenev, you know, all the guys around him might have been, but he was not.

01:10:09.400 And you learn in reading this, so he was actually a devout, like religious level communist.

01:10:14.580 Which either makes him more repulsive or less, depending, I don't, I don't, I could see it from either side, but it's definitely not what we thought he was.

01:10:23.740 And what I loved about that was, your view of something, it's a small thing, I guess, for most people, it was a big thing for me to learn that.

01:10:31.220 But your whole kind of accepted view of something can turn out to be utterly false.

01:10:36.460 Like a lot of history is just completely fake.

01:10:39.700 And so when you see someone who's diving in face first with like courage and honesty, you just have to applaud.

01:10:45.780 That's why I'm just applaud.

01:10:46.480 I can't wait to find out what you conclude.

01:10:50.480 We want to announce something big that we've been working on for months now.

01:10:53.980 It's a documentary series called Art of the Surge.

01:10:57.080 It's all behind the scene footage shot by an embedded team that has never before seen footage of what it's actually like to run for president.

01:11:05.560 If you're Donald Trump, they were there at the Butler Township assassination attempt, for example, and got footage that no one has ever seen before.

01:11:12.680 And it's amazing.

01:11:13.740 Become a member at TuckerCarlson.com to see this series.

01:11:18.720 Art of the Surge.

01:11:20.480 Where are you, by the way, in this process?

01:11:36.520 Well, I'm currently working on a series.

01:11:39.220 I'm about, I'm probably going to do two more episodes on it, on the history of the American labor movement.

01:11:44.080 It's not a narrative history of the entire labor movement.

01:11:46.900 I pick certain episodes.

01:11:48.640 I talk about the Battle of Blair Mountain in one episode.

01:11:51.580 Do one on the Haymarket Affair.

01:11:53.920 And really, it's about the industrial wars of, like, the late 18th century from, you know, Pittsburgh to Chicago and everything.

01:12:00.480 I did one on this 1968 teacher's union strike in New York City that's kind of famous now.

01:12:08.900 The famous one.

01:12:09.360 Ocean Hill, Brownsville.

01:12:10.720 And, you know, 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.

01:12:18.260 Because really what it's about is, you know, it was a conflict in 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.

01:12:35.540 And, you know, New York is, it's such an interesting city for the, you know, for the fact that, you know, it's obviously 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.

01:12:51.220 And from the Irish migrations to the Jewish and Italian migrations and everybody that came after that, there was conflict.

01:12:59.180 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.

01:13:06.400 And so you had this city where, again, like today this sounds almost, it sounds like a different world in some ways where, you know, the teachers were pretty much all Jews. 0.60

01:13:18.000 The transit workers pretty much all Irish.

01:13:20.240 The cops were mostly Irish.

01:13:21.940 The firemen were mostly Irish.

01:13:23.560 Most of the construction trade, the dock workers, things like that, they were all Italians.

01:13:28.140 And everybody kind of, it wasn't something like that's what they gravitated to.

01:13:31.460 Sanitation too.

01:13:32.920 Sanitation, yeah.

01:13:33.920 But that was their economic territory.

01:13:36.300 And they had certain neighborhoods that were theirs.

01:13:38.860 And people kind of knew that it's not like a, you know, a Jew couldn't move into an Italian neighborhood or vice versa or something.

01:13:45.700 But everybody knew that this was an Italian neighborhood and it was going to stay that way. 0.97

01:13:49.240 And they had all kind of come to this settlement in a natural way.

01:13:52.080 Like it just, it was an emergent order that came over the years.

01:13:55.180 And when, and again, there was conflict at every stage of that.

01:14:01.460 After the 1924 immigration law that essentially cut off European immigration and generally, immigration in general, the cheap source of labor that industry turned to were African Americans from the South.

01:14:15.680 And so you saw over the course of about 40 or 50 years, about six or 7 million African Americans move out of the rural South to the Northern and Western cities.

01:14:26.080 And it turned out when they got up there that they had a lot of the same problems that they had had previously.

01:14:31.980 But for, you know, 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, that, you know, the process of integrating these people into the system as one of several, you know, because this was a great dream.

01:14:54.720 And if you read, what's the, what's the book, Nathan Glazer and it's Beyond the Melting Pot, you know, that he wrote.

01:15:02.320 And they, in the, I think they wrote that in 1971.

01:15:06.500 And what they predicted in that book was Moynihan and Glazer.

01:15:09.460 That's what it was.

01:15:10.040 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.

01:15:16.920 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.

01:15:25.520 It's going to be Italian and Jewish and Puerto Rican and black.

01:15:29.040 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.

01:15:35.540 And when they look back on it in the, I think it was maybe a 2012 edition, they sort of recognized that that was obviously a, you know, a prediction that, that did not come true.

01:15:48.160 They, you know, they, they sort of, they, they get into that.

01:15:50.800 And so.

01:15:52.780 But this, the teacher strike.

01:15:56.320 Oh, right.

01:15:57.020 This, this, sorry.

01:15:58.260 Of 1968, what 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, there's been anti-Semitism, of course, but, but, but like for real in American history.

01:16:14.080 And it doesn't seem to be remembered for some reason.

01:16:16.580 No, it's, it's remembered or misremembered, like right alongside the Crown Heights, right?

01:16:21.260 Yeah.

01:16:21.660 Well, yeah.

01:16:22.040 Things like that.

01:16:23.040 Because, you know, it's one of those things, look, I, I lived for a long time in Los Angeles, right?

01:16:27.780 Right.

01:16:28.260 Um, used to live in South LA when those were all black neighborhoods down there. 1.00

01:16:32.660 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.

01:16:43.000 Those are not black neighborhoods.

01:16:44.220 Oh, I know.

01:16:44.860 Those are all Latino neighborhoods and that transition was not accomplished peacefully. 1.00

01:16:48.900 You know, there were, and there are, there are good studies and write-ups about this.

01:16:53.000 Um, hundreds and hundreds of random murders of black people by, uh, Mexican gangs, fire bombings of apartment buildings, um, to drive these people out, right? 0.63

01:17:05.200 Now you, you look at something. 0.99

01:17:06.420 Drive them east.

01:17:07.060 That's kind of, you know, if you look at all the big cities in California, even, uh, like up in Oakland and stuff, they're all losing their black population.

01:17:15.080 And the great migration out of the South to these cities is actually in reverse right now.

01:17:18.920 And a lot, like net African-Americans are moving back to the South.

01:17:22.160 And, uh, you're into the Indian Empire or just like away from the coast.

01:17:26.900 Yeah.

01:17:27.480 Yeah.

01:17:27.760 Well, that's right.

01:17:28.740 That's what happens.

01:17:29.220 Like a lot of the, it's a step-by-step process, right?

01:17:31.660 They get priced out of Oakland and San Francisco and they move to Stockton and Sacramento.

01:17:35.040 Exactly.

01:17:35.400 And then those places go up too and they end up moving, you know, further inland.

01:17:39.540 And that's a process that's been going on for a long time.

01:17:41.720 But like, you look at what happened in, in Los Angeles.

01:17:44.960 I mean, again, you're talking about hundreds and hundreds of random murders, fire bombings, just not of other gang members or something.

01:17:51.000 I'm not talking about drive-bys of other gang members.

01:17:53.060 I'm talking about just a random black guy. 0.98

01:17:56.060 Race killings. 1.00

01:17:56.680 Yeah, race killings. 0.99

01:17:57.260 Killing people because of the color of their skin. 0.99

01:17:58.480 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. 0.84

01:18:04.000 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 categories.

01:18:11.400 So that's what bothers me about the recording of history.

01:18:13.740 I mean, I think it, what happens matters, reality matters.

01:18:17.220 And if you find that sort of everything that happens, not just 80 years ago in Dresden, but things that are happening in like L.A. County 20 years ago, if they just disappear, you know, in some cases you can't even find them on Google.

01:18:32.160 Like, that's a level of manipulation that's like, that's just mind control.

01:18:36.240 That's, that's really scary.

01:18:38.200 Yeah, I think the propagandists throughout the 20th century, uh, ever since the, 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.

01:18:50.120 And kids are raised up, uh, and this is what they're being taught because it, it, it, it, it, it, it forms for them, uh, their, their, not just their view of the world, but their view of themselves.

01:19:04.000 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.

01:19:13.220 And so if you change those stories, all of those things change as well.

01:19:17.400 Okay, so that's a perfect segue to something that I'm just itching to talk to you about, itching to get your view on.

01:19:22.360 And that leads us back to Churchill.

01:19:23.800 So Churchill's this great hero, defender of the West, savior of the West, the toughest man in the, in world history, the only reason we're not speaking German. 0.57

01:19:34.580 And he won the second world war.

01:19:37.160 Like that's what, ask anybody, that's just a fact.

01:19:39.400 And yet if I go to his country, like regularly, and it's, you know, it doesn't really even exist in any recognized, well, it's totally degraded.

01:19:50.960 I try not to go there because it's so depressing.

01:19:53.220 It's just so sad.

01:19:53.800 It's so broken.

01:19:54.480 It's not the country of victors.

01:19:56.740 It's the, it's a defeated, completely defeated country that's subsequently been invaded.

01:20:00.860 Um, and so how, like, how did that happen?

01:20:04.900 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.

01:20:12.020 It's like, what is that?

01:20:12.860 Well, I think we ran a, we ran an experiment, uh, that tells us pretty well what that is.

01:20:18.700 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, uh, that were not exposed to incessant American world order, uh, Western propaganda for 70 years.

01:20:34.120 Um, they all, they don't have these same problems.

01:20:37.300 You go to Hungary, even a place like Poland, which obviously the leadership class of any of these countries is, you know, oh, you always have to be suspicious of them because, you know, they, they.

01:20:46.540 Even Romania, which is, you said, suffered more than, you know, most countries.

01:20:50.440 Yeah.

01:20:50.740 And so, but those countries, like, they don't mind.

01:20:54.080 And again, the, the tipty top leadership class might be one thing. 0.79

01:20:57.200 You know, somebody went to the London School of Economics or something, but like.

01:20:59.960 Taking NATO money.

01:21:00.760 The people have no problem saying, no, this is a country, this is Hungary.

01:21:04.680 This is a country for Hungarians.

01:21:06.380 This is a Christian country.

01:21:08.000 This is our country.

01:21:09.640 They don't have a problem saying that.

01:21:11.520 That is not something that anybody west of the Iron Curtain, for the most part, is comfortable.

01:21:17.600 Loosening up a little bit, thank God.

01:21:19.240 But, you know, the question is whether it's loosening up too late.

01:21:22.580 You go to a place like, like Britain, go to a place like Germany. 0.87

01:21:26.460 I mean, there's no country on planet Earth that is, has been subjected to a more pervasive

01:21:33.820 and destructive psychological warfare campaign than Germany over the course of the Cold War.

01:21:39.400 I mean, these people have very, just, I mean, they're, they, you, you really hope that it's

01:21:45.940 not the case, but you wonder if, if there's even the material that would be necessary to

01:21:52.280 construct a psychological defense of, of their nation, their people.

01:21:56.600 And the lesson that we took from World War II, and again, this wouldn't have been the lesson

01:22:01.600 that any of our soldiers who stormed the beaches in Normandy would have taken or anything like that.

01:22:05.400 But, you know, the official kind of court history lesson is that when Europeans start thinking

01:22:12.880 in terms of group, they're very dangerous.

01:22:16.220 And that process needs to be subverted.

01:22:20.200 It needs to be eventually eliminated, like the possibility for that to happen again.

01:22:24.680 But just Europeans, not Asians or Africans? 0.76

01:22:28.200 Well, I, you know, I think, well, there's a lot of elements to that.

01:22:32.160 I mean, part of it is, part of it is the, the people that were victimized during the Second World War

01:22:40.300 were not victimized by Africans, you know, people were, obviously Chinese people were victimized

01:22:47.380 by the Japanese, but that's a, it's a different, you know, China's, China's got a very powerful

01:22:52.680 immune system that kind of preserves them as, as a, as a culture.

01:22:57.100 So does Japan. 0.56

01:22:57.760 And so does Japan. 0.75

01:22:58.800 And so that's, you know, there's a little, little, little bit different.

01:23:01.600 But from a Western perspective, I think it's fair to say, our leaders make the case implicitly

01:23:06.360 that it's really only when Europeans have a sense of themselves as Europeans that the

01:23:11.040 world is in peril, but everyone else is fine to do that.

01:23:15.140 Yeah.

01:23:15.480 I mean, you know, that's, uh, they, they don't see those other people as a threat, you know,

01:23:20.960 either because, uh, the people who formulate these narratives don't live in those places

01:23:24.740 or they don't have historical experience with those people.

01:23:27.780 And so they don't see them as the same kind of threat.

01:23:31.300 So, so Germany is because totally self-hating place. 0.95

01:23:35.560 It's a husk. 0.99

01:23:36.500 Yeah.

01:23:36.880 Um, it's depressing as hell, though also wonderful in a way, but it's going away, but

01:23:43.460 they lost, at least you could say they lost two world wars in a row.

01:23:47.440 Yeah.

01:23:47.980 Britain won two world wars in a row.

01:23:51.240 And if anything, it's more degraded than Germany. 0.93

01:23:53.400 So like, just to take it back to the first thing I said, and I'll shut up and let you answer,

01:23:57.500 but if Churchill is a hero, how come there are British girls begging for drugs on the street

01:24:03.780 of London and the place is, you know, it's just, they're London is not majority English

01:24:10.520 now.

01:24:10.920 Like what?

01:24:11.680 Well, the people who formulated the version of history that considers Churchill a hero,

01:24:16.360 uh, they like London the way it is now, you know?

01:24:19.720 And...

01:24:20.200 That's not victory.

01:24:21.140 That's like the worst kind of defeat, is it not?

01:24:23.580 I mean, I'm just confused.

01:24:24.060 If you're an English person who cares about England, then yeah, absolutely it is.

01:24:27.900 Um, I mean, it's, it's...

01:24:29.860 Forget about victory and defeat.

01:24:31.300 It's the worst thing that can happen.

01:24:33.020 You know, if you look at what's going on over lately in, uh, in England, where you're

01:24:37.660 having riots, you're having these, you know, sort of budding violent confrontations between

01:24:43.780 nationalists and the police and so forth, which, um, you know, I think our natural, we

01:24:50.320 like order, right?

01:24:51.480 Yeah.

01:24:51.660 Like Europeans, we like order, order, and we see things like that and we have a natural

01:24:55.440 aversion to disorder, to, to street violence.

01:24:58.580 Yes, for sure.

01:24:59.260 We might be, um, you know, war might be necessary, but disorderly mob violence, things like that,

01:25:04.680 like immediately make us kind of take a step back because most of our experience with those

01:25:08.660 things is really bad.

01:25:09.600 And, and, and at the end of the day, like it is an unleashing of evil spirits, no matter

01:25:13.620 what the cause or the reason is.

01:25:16.220 Um, and yet when I look over there at what the British people, some of them are trying

01:25:20.740 to do, I, I, I kind of, I refuse to judge them for, uh, whatever, for doing whatever it

01:25:30.300 is that they feel they have to do as their homeland, their ancient homeland is being

01:25:36.340 taken from them, because that is not something that can be walked back.

01:25:40.300 That is permanent.

01:25:41.460 That is something that ends your existence as a people.

01:25:44.900 Like, unless you're going to be like the Jews and, uh, you know, go off into exile and 1.00

01:25:49.420 sort of manage to maintain yourself, you need, and even the Jews, they understood that they 0.96

01:25:53.800 needed a little spot somewhere on earth that was their special place to develop their

01:25:58.940 culture and to work things, work out their history among themselves as a community of

01:26:03.400 people.

01:26:04.320 And the English people are having that taken from them.

01:26:07.960 You know, the, the Irish people, Ireland is on track to be minority Irish by like 2070.

01:26:15.080 And you say, okay, hang on.

01:26:17.260 Like, A, they never colonized anybody.

01:26:20.060 B, they were colonized and like got the really nasty end of that a lot of the time.

01:26:25.920 Uh, you know, suffered a lot.

01:26:27.500 But they fought for hundreds of years against brutal, uh, British attempts to try to bring

01:26:35.000 them into the British fold and squash that uniqueness, you know, that they had out there. 0.88

01:26:39.720 The British couldn't do it. 1.00

01:26:41.140 And the British for a while there could do damn near anything. 0.94

01:26:43.920 Yeah.

01:26:44.360 Okay.

01:26:45.240 And.

01:26:45.780 They spent a lot of time trying to oppress Ireland. 0.61

01:26:48.220 A lot.

01:26:48.560 Yeah.

01:26:48.940 And it was a, I mean, not only that, it was a, it was a chief priority for a long time.

01:26:53.240 Yeah.

01:26:53.400 Bring it to heel.

01:26:54.240 And, you know, we have a, we have a, a bit of a, um, skewed view of the British empire

01:27:01.220 just because, and I, and there are a lot of things that are glorious and wonderful about

01:27:03.880 the British empire, but in the United States, like we don't quite understand like the way

01:27:08.140 the, you know, how bad it was to fall on the wrong side of the empire because they really

01:27:12.600 treated us with kid gloves during the revolution.

01:27:14.900 And, you know, we had half a parliament that were on our side.

01:27:17.920 But they did to the Boers.

01:27:19.060 Yeah, exactly.

01:27:20.160 That's what, you know, they could have done to us.

01:27:22.160 They created the concentration camp. 0.91

01:27:23.960 Yes.

01:27:24.640 Yeah.

01:27:25.140 And they ran a lot of them during World War II, actually.

01:27:27.580 You know, that's another thing that's actually pretty awful is, uh, you know, as soon as the

01:27:31.700 war broke out, Churchill had all of the German and Italian nationals in Great Britain all

01:27:38.560 rounded up and thrown into concentration camps where they would stay to the end of the war.

01:27:42.660 And this is 1939 and a huge number of those people were Jewish refugees who had come over

01:27:48.340 from Germany to England.

01:27:49.800 They were just rounded up and thrown in camps for six years.

01:27:52.620 And he also had the opposition party thrown in prison for the duration, Oswald Mosley and

01:27:56.840 his wife, uh, right after giving birth, you know, spent the duration, people died.

01:28:01.840 Um, that doesn't look like democracy to me.

01:28:04.880 Are you saying that Zelensky is not running a democracy?

01:28:07.800 I'm saying if you don't have elections and you're throwing priests in jail, if you're murdering

01:28:11.620 people who disagree with you as he has, you know, you call whatever, that's like basically

01:28:16.160 a pretty constant form of government throughout history.

01:28:18.500 It's fine.

01:28:19.140 I mean, that's like less barbaric than most forms of government actually through history.

01:28:22.480 It's not democracy.

01:28:23.820 Yeah.

01:28:24.060 So please don't lecture me anymore about that.

01:28:26.220 Well, I mean, we've seen this in the United States, even obviously a much smaller scale

01:28:30.800 crisis.

01:28:31.660 Um, although maybe not, maybe it is an existential crisis for the people who are making the

01:28:35.440 decisions, but ever since 2016, where democracy is great.

01:28:40.060 We love democracy, but that's for normal times.

01:28:42.800 It's not for World War II. 0.64

01:28:45.060 Right.

01:28:45.180 It's not for when we've got insurrections going on.

01:28:47.720 And sometimes, you know, you've got to take extraordinary measures that may not be democratic,

01:28:52.380 but it's to preserve democracy.

01:28:53.640 It's always the excuse, right?

01:28:54.860 It's the excuse of every time.

01:28:55.860 Always.

01:28:56.320 It was Lincoln's excuse.

01:28:57.700 Yeah.

01:28:57.820 Exactly.

01:28:58.100 But can I just, so the, what's happened to, uh, the UK and Ireland is not accidental.

01:29:09.080 Is there any evidence that the people of those countries whose ancestors have lived there

01:29:13.860 for thousands of years, or the indigenous peoples of those countries, that they wanted 0.95

01:29:18.400 this?

01:29:18.800 They wanted to be?

01:29:20.200 I mean, certainly not the majority of the people who live there, right?

01:29:23.600 Obviously, like you can go to any Western country, the most just, you know, degraded,

01:29:30.320 cucked country you can possibly find in the West.

01:29:32.860 And the majority of people there don't want any of that happening to them.

01:29:36.100 This is something that has a class element to it.

01:29:38.760 It has, uh, as these countries have become more multi-ethnic and multicultural, it has,

01:29:43.300 um, ethnic, you know, elements to us.

01:29:45.660 Like there's a lot of things that create a sort of a class of people and it's a class of

01:29:51.140 people who have most of the influence and power who actually do want these things because

01:29:55.860 they don't identify with the people who are against it on the ground.

01:29:59.580 And this is something that if you see in the United, you know, we've seen in the United

01:30:02.240 States and the West in general, that was budding already.

01:30:05.540 I mean, I would say personally, it goes all the way back to the foundation, but like definitely

01:30:09.160 you see in like the 1960s, if you think of somebody like John Lindsay, right?

01:30:13.360 John Lindsay was the mayor of New York for a while and he was sort of the quintessential,

01:30:17.620 he didn't grow up like super rich old money.

01:30:19.800 He was the last wasp mayor of New York.

01:30:21.140 But he was like, he was like that, he was the wasp, right? 0.99

01:30:25.380 He was the guy who limousine liberal, the term was invented for, right?

01:30:28.460 Of course, he had the chin, yeah.

01:30:29.140 Yeah.

01:30:29.400 And if you look at the way he conceived of himself and the way that he, uh, in his class,

01:30:36.140 the people who supported him, the Eastern establishment types and people like him, um, where they

01:30:41.640 sort of drew their own sense of self-worth and their collective identity was first, we're better

01:30:47.920 than those white people in the South who are protesting Martin Luther King and so forth,

01:30:52.940 we're better than them.

01:30:53.900 Or the parents in South Boston who don't want busing for their own children.

01:30:57.000 But then, right.

01:30:57.580 So as the, after the civil rights movement kind of came to a conclusion, uh, in 1965 and the

01:31:04.200 great migration was starting to create a lot of conflict in the Northern cities like New

01:31:09.780 York, uh, that idea, the Southerners are always there, they're, they're always there as

01:31:14.980 a foil for, uh, Northern and Western elite, you know, identity construction, but it shifted

01:31:20.540 to these ethnic groups that lived, that lived in the cities, the Jews, which sounds strange

01:31:25.180 today that like a, you know, a wasp mayor who's publicly obsessed with social justice would 1.00

01:31:31.920 be against the Jews in a, you know, in a, in a conflict.

01:31:35.000 But he was at the time and it was because, you know, all these people, the Irish and the 0.79

01:31:39.620 Italians, these people who think that like, that's their neighborhood because it's been 1.00

01:31:43.280 their neighborhood for a hundred years now.

01:31:45.420 And, you know, it's a, everybody in the neighborhood goes to a parish church that, um, they've gone

01:31:52.000 to, their grandparents went to, um, they have internal social structures and, um, dispute

01:31:59.020 arbitration structures and all of these sort of organic institutions that, that grew up

01:32:04.620 from ground level that gave them an ability to self-govern in a way that made it so they

01:32:10.500 really like, were not as dependent on, um, the state bureaucracy to do these things for

01:32:15.400 them, right?

01:32:15.740 They could do a lot for themselves.

01:32:18.000 And, um, and these are the people who, uh, were resisting, you know, the movement of African

01:32:24.540 Americans into their communities.

01:32:26.160 When people look back, for example, like when, when Martin Luther King went up to Chicago in

01:32:30.000 1966 and there was the Marquette park riot to this day, like you can go, you have to go

01:32:35.880 into a pretty deep, serious history book about that period to get the fact that, you know,

01:32:40.720 everybody sees that as, as a bunch of white people who came out to protest, a bunch of

01:32:45.200 black people moving or, you know, trying to open up their neighborhood. 0.67

01:32:48.420 Uh, but that wasn't a bunch of white people. 0.55

01:32:50.880 Those were Lithuanian people.

01:32:52.720 That was a Lithuanian neighborhood that had been a Lithuanian neighborhood for some time.

01:32:56.960 These were a bunch of people who had come over here as refugees and had set up a little

01:33:02.140 community for themselves that they didn't want changed.

01:33:05.320 You know, when, uh, that's a Latino community with a bunch of arts, white art students moving 0.99

01:33:11.120 into it and gentrifying it in Brooklyn or, uh, Los Angeles, you know, people don't have

01:33:17.340 a problem saying that they have a right to, you know, to, to maintain this community that

01:33:21.780 they've built for themselves.

01:33:22.840 And I actually kind of agree with that.

01:33:24.300 Like when I see gentrification happening, it's like, you know, um, I'm sympathetic at 1.00

01:33:29.880 the very least.

01:33:30.360 I'm very sympathetic.

01:33:31.480 Yes.

01:33:31.880 The crime thing makes me, look, I'm against, I'm against crime, I'm against hurting people,

01:33:36.000 you know, strangers, but the idea that people of all backgrounds, races, everybody, every

01:33:41.680 human being has a right to like have a cohesive social network around him and live the way he

01:33:47.900 basically wants to without bothering others and shouldn't be subject to, you know, abstract

01:33:53.360 social planning that takes no account of human beings.

01:33:55.740 Like, yes.

01:33:56.920 Yeah.

01:33:57.480 Yes.

01:33:57.940 I'm on this.

01:33:58.560 Yeah.

01:33:58.860 You know, there's this very interesting, uh, well, actually, you know what, that'll take

01:34:02.360 me off on a whole other tangent.

01:34:03.500 I want to stick on the topic you were talking about.

01:34:05.160 You bring up like what's happening in England and Ireland.

01:34:07.620 And I think, I think it's hard for a lot of Americans to really understand, uh, the tragedy

01:34:14.780 of what's happening over there for the simple reason that, and I'm not, I'm not trying to

01:34:20.360 trivialize our struggles with similar issues here in the United States.

01:34:24.280 I just say that they're, that they're different, that, you know, in the United States, we've

01:34:28.640 essentially had, uh, unending demographic turmoil from the very beginning.

01:34:32.840 You know, we fought our revolution and within a generation, uh, most of the major cities

01:34:39.420 on the East coast were all majority Irish.

01:34:41.340 And this was at a time when English and Irish, Wasp and Irish was like, you know, these were

01:34:47.320 foreign, foreign peoples to each other, you know, Catholic and Protestant.

01:34:50.880 That was still unresolved when I was small.

01:34:53.060 There you go.

01:34:53.740 I mean, it went on a while.

01:34:55.040 And so within a generation, you know, of the revolution, most of the cities on the East

01:34:59.840 coast are majority Irish, or at least huge chunks of them are super majority Irish, even

01:35:03.860 if the whole city's not quite, not to mention there's a lot of Germans, uh, although they

01:35:07.520 assimilated to the Wasp, uh, majority pretty well, pretty quickly.

01:35:11.360 But then within a generation of that, just as the Irish are kind of starting to move out 0.99

01:35:15.100 of the slums a little bit and become middle-class kind of members of the society, you start getting

01:35:20.620 a ton of Italians, a ton of Jews, a ton of all the Southern and Eastern Europeans who

01:35:25.120 start coming in.

01:35:25.740 And you see a repeat of the same process, a lot of the same problems, the institutions

01:35:30.020 all start to break down, the schools break down, the infrastructure breaks down, and

01:35:33.420 they blame the people coming in.

01:35:34.880 Actually, you get a lot of violence and revolutionary movements.

01:35:37.180 You get a lot of violence, organized crime, revolutionary movements, all those things.

01:35:41.540 I mean, people forget that, you know, a lot of the lynching victims in the late 18, early

01:35:45.080 1900s were Italians.

01:35:47.100 There's a famous one in New Orleans, but there are a lot of famous ones.

01:35:50.680 And, uh, and so that happens.

01:35:52.260 And then we cut off foreign immigration in 1924, um, but then we start the great migration 1.00

01:35:58.420 of African-Americans out of the South.

01:36:00.580 You have the Okie migration out West from, uh, the Dust Bowl. 1.00

01:36:05.080 You have the, the, the big hillbilly migrations out of Appalachia up to Detroit and Chicago, 0.77

01:36:10.540 those places.

01:36:11.320 And, um, so we're just used to the, like, the fact that we're always renegotiating our

01:36:17.760 identity here.

01:36:18.600 You know, we were this, this British, former British colonies that just fought for our

01:36:24.020 independence, but now we've got to figure out how to construct a collective identity

01:36:28.000 that includes all these Irish people that came in.

01:36:31.220 And, like, one of the ways that we've done that traditionally has been through war.

01:36:34.840 You know, the fact that there were so many Irishmen who came into the country and fought

01:36:38.560 on the side of the Union and the Civil War, if you look at, like, uh, I mean, World War

01:36:43.760 II to a great, I mean, if you think about the city of Vicksburg, which didn't, didn't

01:36:49.500 celebrate the 4th of July after it was conquered during the Civil War, like, stopped celebrating

01:36:54.960 the 4th of July.

01:36:56.200 And I remember I was watching, uh, the, the Kenwood, uh, Ken Burns documentary about the

01:37:01.040 Civil War.

01:37:01.280 He mentioned this and he said, and they didn't, they didn't celebrate the 4th of July again

01:37:05.380 for, like, X number of years, and it's not off the top of my head, because I don't remember

01:37:08.660 exactly what year they were, uh, it was a 63, Vicksburg, anyway, um, he said for X number

01:37:15.840 of years, and, uh, I thought about it for a second, I was like, oh, that was July 4th,

01:37:20.580 1944.

01:37:21.620 Yeah.

01:37:21.640 It was a month after D-Day.

01:37:23.120 And that's what got this place that was extremely bitter over all this, uh, you know, to raise

01:37:28.480 the, the flag and celebrate the 4th of July again.

01:37:31.160 So, we've used warfare.

01:37:32.500 So, 80 years.

01:37:33.260 Yeah, yeah, and we've used warfare for that purpose, and that's not an uncommon thing, 0.64

01:37:39.220 but it's, it's, it's one of the, one of the means that we've done to unify our people.

01:37:43.120 And as, as, you know, wave after wave of, at the time, very foreign people, you know, 0.88

01:37:49.800 it's hard to explain to people today how foreign an Eastern European Jew was to a wasp or an

01:37:56.060 Irishman or a German American in New York in, in, you know, 1880.

01:38:00.620 I mean, this is, these are, these people might as well have been coming out of the

01:38:04.180 Congo, you know, and, and, and in some ways, even more foreign than that, because all of 1.00

01:38:09.520 us, like, we're kind of, even if we've never met anybody from the Congo, just through mass 0.99

01:38:14.040 media and everything, we've kind of got a more cosmopolitan view of the world.

01:38:17.420 So, we're not, it's sort of familiar in a, in a strange way.

01:38:21.400 These are people who are coming from all over the world.

01:38:23.540 And we've all, I mean, if you think about like, uh, the 1798 naturalization act, right?

01:38:28.160 You see a lot of like, uh, white identitarian types who point to that because it says all

01:38:32.980 people, all white people of good character can come into the United States and become

01:38:38.180 citizens.

01:38:38.620 And they say, see, 1798, like they're already thinking in terms of race and America is a

01:38:43.260 white country, excuse me, and, and so forth.

01:38:45.300 And I say, you're not understanding the historical context of, of that, of that law.

01:38:50.160 That's not to prevent you from bringing in like half of the African subcontinent or, you

01:38:55.560 know, the, the Arab population in the middle East or whatever that was inconceivable to

01:38:59.360 these guys in 1798, that anybody would ever do that, or that that could happen.

01:39:02.960 That was not the point of it.

01:39:05.160 And if you really look at the law and you place it in the context of its time, the context

01:39:10.680 of Europe at the time, remember again, Catholics and Protestants, like the different people across

01:39:15.500 Europe, they've got two world wars still ahead of them.

01:39:18.160 They've got a Napoleonic war still ahead of them.

01:39:19.960 And they're going to be butchering each other for the next couple of centuries.

01:39:22.780 Right.

01:39:23.700 And we said, think about how just a revolutionary level of inclusivity this is to say all you

01:39:32.040 Europeans, anybody, if you live in Europe and you're Protestant, you're English, you're 0.99

01:39:38.400 Irish, you're Catholic, you're Jewish, whatever you come over here. 0.86

01:39:42.040 And when you come over here, you will be accorded the full rights and privileges of a citizen,

01:39:48.120 the same as the richest guy in this country.

01:39:50.780 That is a revolutionary.

01:39:52.320 I mean, nobody had ever heard of anything like that.

01:39:54.140 It was unbelievably just open and inclusive.

01:39:57.060 And the reason that they said that they limited it to free white people was they didn't want, 0.61

01:40:02.880 you know, some Southern state including their slaves as citizens, but not really including

01:40:11.300 them and kind of gaming the federal system, getting representation because they decide to

01:40:15.200 say, oh, all of our Native American population are their citizens now, but not really allowing 1.00

01:40:20.240 them, you know, in.

01:40:21.180 And so that's what they were trying to prevent, like the idea of bringing in just, you know,

01:40:25.840 an overwhelming number of people from what became the third world was obviously the farthest 1.00

01:40:29.560 thing from their minds because they couldn't conceive that anybody would do something like

01:40:32.740 that.

01:40:33.380 And so, but that's the point is that this, even from the very beginning, there was a

01:40:36.200 recognition that we need to be a radically open country if for no other reason than the

01:40:39.820 fact that we've got a gigantic continent that we've got to go settle and build up, right?

01:40:44.720 Because if we don't do it, then these European powers are circling like vultures and they're

01:40:48.600 going to do it.

01:40:49.220 And so we have to get out there and build this place up.

01:40:51.840 And so, you know, that required a level of openness that has transformed the world in

01:40:56.240 a lot of ways.

01:40:57.060 So it's just interesting to hear you say that the point at the time of mass immigration was

01:41:01.460 to build the place up.

01:41:02.960 Clearly, the point of it now is to tear the place down.

01:41:05.640 Yeah.

01:41:05.840 And isn't that interesting how, you know, it's like, I think the psychologist Carl Jung said

01:41:11.520 something like inequality and excess becomes its opposite.

01:41:14.660 Yes.

01:41:15.060 That's exactly right.

01:41:16.200 And it definitely, you know, that applies to inclusivity or openness.

01:41:21.260 I think I was saying that, like, you know, in the United States, because of that experience

01:41:24.460 of just constant demographic turmoil, as soon as the Great Migration petered out in like

01:41:30.860 60, like literally the early 60s, we passed the Hart-Celler Immigration Act and opened up

01:41:35.580 the floodgates to the third world.

01:41:36.940 And that's the world that we're in now, right?

01:41:38.860 So it has just been an unending wave after wave after wave of your neighbors, people

01:41:43.920 you have to negotiate politically and a social collective identity with, are changing all

01:41:49.100 the time.

01:41:49.640 And that's just sort of, it's built into the American understanding of themselves and how

01:41:54.120 societies work and all of that.

01:41:57.120 Like, I would say that there's only maybe the only time the United States, like, really,

01:42:02.000 at least maybe like you could say right after the revolution, but like the period, like

01:42:07.000 from 1941, you know, right around that time up to maybe the mid-50s when the Great Migration 0.58

01:42:15.820 started to drive all of the European ethnics out of the cities into the suburbs and stuff. 0.99

01:42:20.540 Like, there was that period where we almost pulled it off.

01:42:23.220 We almost pulled off constructing a solid and sustainable national identity that, you know,

01:42:30.920 obviously the fly in the ointment ended up being that there was 10% of the population

01:42:34.800 who weren't really included in that, the African-American population.

01:42:38.120 And that became the sort of, you know, the wedge that allowed people to pry apart that project

01:42:45.260 in the 1960s.

01:42:46.580 And thank you for acknowledging that was the point of the exercise.

01:42:49.420 Right.

01:42:49.780 And, and which, you know, again, not to diminish, uh, um, you know, especially after going through,

01:42:56.360 um, you know, the, the Jonestown series and spending so much time reading about the history

01:43:01.220 of African-Americans in the country.

01:43:02.620 And, and I, you know, I grew up around in African-American neighborhoods mostly and, uh,

01:43:06.640 around different places.

01:43:08.320 Um, I'm, I'm more sympathetic than most people who are as far right on a lot of political issues

01:43:14.400 as I am to the plight of people who live in the ghetto.

01:43:16.960 I mean, it's.

01:43:17.300 I couldn't agree more.

01:43:18.200 No, but that's kind of the point that I'm making.

01:43:20.480 If the point of the civil rights movement was to, um, uplift black people, which I would

01:43:26.480 be completely for, then Selma, Alabama would be a great place.

01:43:30.300 And so would Jackson, Mississippi.

01:43:31.680 And so would Little Rock, Arkansas and all the kind of holy sites of that period.

01:43:36.300 And in fact, they're all far worse than they were in 1960.

01:43:39.180 So like, what was the point of that?

01:43:40.840 Clearly if the point of BLM was to help black people, again, I could kind of be for that. 0.99

01:43:45.360 But, but I mean, the point of it, so there's, there's two elements, there's two answers

01:43:49.540 to that question really, right?

01:43:51.740 Uh, one is there are people out there who absolutely saw it as, um, a wedge issue to

01:43:57.700 spark revolution in one sense or another, you know, disintegration of the country.

01:44:01.960 You saw this in the 1960s.

01:44:03.300 Tom Wolf's written about it, but a lot of people have written about how, you know, you

01:44:07.280 remember back in 2008, how, when, uh, Obama started to rise to prominence and a lot of

01:44:13.320 the older Republicans were throwing out, he's a community organizer.

01:44:16.420 He's a community.

01:44:17.080 None of the younger people that just didn't land with younger people at all.

01:44:20.180 Cause they had no frame of reference for the sixties and seventies and stuff.

01:44:22.820 They didn't know what that meant that you literally had these vast government programs

01:44:26.940 who were just handing out money to revolutionary organizations, the people who were going out

01:44:31.240 and planning and organizing riots at city hall.

01:44:34.860 Oh, a hundred percent.

01:44:36.280 Like that happened in New York.

01:44:37.280 Like a group who was not like they got some funding through three different kind of, you

01:44:43.820 know, degrees of separation from some government program.

01:44:47.140 They were literally just basically an agency of the New York city government.

01:44:51.600 They were literally just fully funded.

01:44:53.820 Their leaders were appointed.

01:44:54.540 Well, they're, they're paying for all the street gangs.

01:44:56.300 And these, yeah, that too.

01:44:57.540 And, and this group went and held a protest at, um, at city hall, invaded city hall, trashed

01:45:04.300 the place and everything.

01:45:05.140 And this is a government funded like organization.

01:45:07.220 So that's what people had in mind.

01:45:08.620 And it didn't land with the younger people I noticed back then.

01:45:12.320 Um, so you have those people, you know, you have the people who, uh, uh, at Columbia in

01:45:18.340 the 1960s, who wrote all the papers that led New York and then other places to, uh, you

01:45:24.040 know, to embrace busing at schools and to embrace, uh, expansion of the welfare, you

01:45:29.560 know, uh, programs.

01:45:30.840 And they were very open about, I mean, it's, it's really crazy how these two professors

01:45:35.100 at Columbia who were sort of the, like the expansion of, uh, welfare in New York under

01:45:39.780 James Lindsay was kind of their brainchild.

01:45:41.580 They wrote the paper and the articles about it and everything.

01:45:43.420 And they were brought in as consultants.

01:45:44.680 Once the decision was made, they're literally writing in their papers.

01:45:48.220 If anybody at city hall had cared to read them, they weren't saying this is going to

01:45:52.080 make poor people less poor.

01:45:54.060 In fact, they directly say what this is going to do is it's going to increase tension between

01:45:59.400 the lower class, lower classes in the middle class.

01:46:02.340 It's going to drive a wedge because there's going to be like an unavoidable racial angle

01:46:07.780 to this because it's going to be transferring resources from the, you know, European ethnic

01:46:12.520 groups in the city over to African-Americans and Puerto Ricans.

01:46:15.240 And this is all good because this is going to start to create that tension that we need.

01:46:20.180 And it, it even, it even says-

01:46:22.340 They said that out loud?

01:46:23.620 Yes.

01:46:24.660 They were, they wrote about it in, in a, um, I can't remember which magazine it was at

01:46:29.380 this point, but it was, it was like the Atlantic or something.

01:46:31.760 It was like that prominent magazine.

01:46:33.400 It was like a summary of their academic findings, right?

01:46:36.120 That, and these are the guys who, they were the impetus for the, the expansion of the welfare

01:46:40.760 programs in New York.

01:46:42.240 They were brought into city hall to like explain how to implement it and stuff.

01:46:45.120 They even say that a positive benefit of this is it's going to make all of these people

01:46:51.560 more dependent on the government.

01:46:53.900 You know, it's going to make them where they're, so, I mean, you have that angle of it, right?

01:46:58.840 You have that side of things in those people who do, they know what they're doing and they

01:47:02.740 want to tear this down.

01:47:03.860 I think that in a lot of ways, they're the drivers of a lot of it.

01:47:07.580 Um, but a lot of people are the one, you know, the ones being led, a lot of them, it's just

01:47:13.800 a lot of white people who use it to feel good about themselves.

01:47:16.400 Oh, there's no, oh, and I, and they don't have, they're able to insulate themselves from

01:47:21.980 the consequences of their decisions in a way that, you know, and this is again, to take

01:47:26.060 it international again, you go over to Europe, uh, it's kind of what's gone on is, you know,

01:47:30.960 if you're the leader of Hungary, like Viktor Orban right now, like you're the leader of

01:47:35.440 Hungary, if you're the leader of like Germany, if you're the leader of Great Britain, yeah,

01:47:43.240 like you're, you're, we're, we're still at the point where like you still, not in England,

01:47:47.320 we're not, but like where you still have to be German to like get elected, you know, we,

01:47:51.220 we can't like take it so far yet that we've detached it completely from like some illusion

01:47:57.020 of, of the fact that this is a nation state that's self-governing, but really this is an

01:48:01.980 international superclass, you know, that they identify much more laterally with people of

01:48:06.900 their own class across borders and they do with the people in their own countries. And, um, you

01:48:13.240 know, that mentality is what makes it possible for them to do the things, uh, that they're doing to

01:48:18.940 the people that they have power over. So what at this point, um, you describe what's happening to

01:48:37.380 Europe as the worst thing, not just the UK, but maybe especially the UK, but also Germany, Spain,

01:48:43.020 Ireland, as you noticed, really everything West of Central Europe of Hungary, um, is increasingly

01:48:51.280 not European. So what does that trend continue or stop or what happens? Wow. I mean, that's going 0.81

01:48:58.600 to be up to the Europeans. I don't, I say this with, um, not without pride at all, but I think that, 0.86

01:49:08.500 I think that as long as the United States remains the dominant power in the world and the dominant 0.93

01:49:14.560 power in European geopolitics and, in, in a lot of places like, like Germany is still a significant

01:49:20.380 factor in their domestic politics. Um, I think that we are a very negative influence on that front.

01:49:25.120 Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting to watch, um, a ghoul like Ann Applebaum become literally hysterical, 1.00

01:49:31.940 like shaking with rage in, in the way that people with no self-control do when Victor Orban says stuff

01:49:38.260 like, well, you know, I just don't want to admit like a million non-Hungarians into my country. 1.00

01:49:44.080 Yeah. And they go, they go crazy. Yeah. I mean, you look at how they respond to somebody like Orban

01:49:49.160 and like they would color revolution that dude in a second if they thought they could get away with

01:49:53.440 it. If they didn't think it was Orban. Well, he's hardly like a right wing crazy. He's like very

01:49:57.740 moderate and kind of like a liberal in an eighties way. I think that's probably the only reason they

01:50:02.040 don't try it is they know that like his chief opposition is far to the right of him. So that's

01:50:06.280 probably why they don't do it. But he's like the least extreme world leader I've ever met.

01:50:10.880 Yeah. It's funny. It's like, it's, it's, I get a similar sense from Mr. Putin in Russia where,

01:50:16.200 you know, he's a hard man. You don't drag Russia out of its state in the 1990s without being a hard

01:50:20.920 man. Uh, but it's a, it's probably, uh, hoping for a little too much that whoever follows him up,

01:50:29.040 you know, if we were to do something that would end his rule, that whatever would come next would be

01:50:32.900 beneficial to us. So Trump, Orban and Putin, I can say, this is my perception of all three of them

01:50:40.140 is that none of them is particularly ideological. Um, all three are pretty sincere nationalists,

01:50:47.500 not like crazed ideological nationalists, but just sort of want to do the best for their country.

01:50:52.860 Um, none of them is like a religious nut and none of them is like, especially right wing.

01:50:57.980 They're all in, you know, in the 1984, five, six context, they would be sort of moderate,

01:51:05.360 maybe conservative Democrats, liberal Republicans. Like they're not, they're not at all what people

01:51:09.760 claim they are. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, the, the, the post-World War II order is really defined

01:51:16.260 by the fact that, you know, after Nuremberg, uh, it really became effectively illegal in the West to

01:51:23.140 be like genuinely right wing. Like the things we call right wing, I mean, it's all flavors of liberalism

01:51:28.180 basically. Of course. Right. And like, if you go back and read pre-war conservatives, pre-war

01:51:33.520 right wing writers in, in Europe, like literally in a lot of places, it became illegal to be that way.

01:51:38.720 Right. And here again, it's not quite illegal, but we have control mechanisms that are almost as effective.

01:51:43.860 U.S. governments had a lot of people to prison over the years for their political use a lot.

01:51:47.240 That's true. And, um, that's like a defining aspect of the post-war European order. Right. And

01:51:53.300 as long as that order remains in place and remains a dominant factor, it's going to be very hard for

01:51:57.560 them to escape this cycle. And I want to be clear too. And I say like that it's the worst thing that

01:52:01.980 can happen. I don't mean that, well, now you have to live next to these people who don't look like 1.00

01:52:06.940 you or who, you know, speak differently. That's something to do with that. I get it. You know,

01:52:11.820 you're talking about a people and again, this is why I spent so much time on, on why it's harder for

01:52:18.460 Americans to kind of really understand this. It's because of our historical experience with just

01:52:22.940 demographic turnover. Right. We kind of have this idea, even though we're being pushed to our limits

01:52:27.260 right now, you know, and you're really starting to see that because of the, uh, the, the, the ideological

01:52:33.080 forces, um, and the cultural forces that are making it much, much harder to swallow and digest the

01:52:40.160 current, uh, the current crop of, uh, new immigrants since 1965, much harder to assimilate for various 1.00

01:52:46.080 reasons. So we're approaching our limit here, but still, we still have this kind of idea in America

01:52:51.480 that, you know, yeah, these things are going to happen and then we'll figure it out and renegotiate

01:52:57.340 and kind of America will, yeah, we'll be different, but you know, in another generation or two,

01:53:03.020 more change will be happening. And that's just, you know, the dynamic of the United States. And so we

01:53:07.800 always have this sort of feeling that terms of our collective identity, like we'll figure it out.

01:53:12.760 You go to a place like, you know, I mean, any European nation where this is an, this is a

01:53:18.060 people's ancient homeland and there's actually such thing as, you know, an Englishman. There's such

01:53:24.920 thing as that, like there's an American is something that, again, the definition of it changes

01:53:29.400 with every generation. And it's always been that way. The definition of an Englishman has never

01:53:33.980 changed and it never will change. And those people, the English people. 0.61

01:53:38.520 Not for over a thousand years, not since 1066.

01:53:41.960 Right. And so in those people are going, they're in the process right now of forever losing the only

01:53:50.780 spot of land that they have on this earth that is dedicated to the flowering and the preservation

01:53:55.820 of the English people. Like the only, and it's a tiny little spot. 1.00

01:54:00.440 It's true for the Dutch. It's true for the Spanish. It's true for the Germans. 0.69

01:54:03.960 It's true for the Belgians. It's true for every Western European nation. So why not have a Nuremberg 0.96

01:54:10.460 trial for the people who did that? I don't understand. I mean, that's such a crime.

01:54:14.120 Well, we have to win first.

01:54:15.940 Yeah.

01:54:16.380 No, but I just think it's important to say out loud that that's a crime.

01:54:19.400 It's against hundreds of millions of people.

01:54:22.000 If you go back to, again, to bring up like Louis XIV or any powerful monarch, they never

01:54:26.800 would have dared imagine that they could do that to their people without getting their 0.96

01:54:31.760 head cut off. They wouldn't have dared imagine that they could just replace their people with, 0.99

01:54:37.400 you know, people from a different continent, different religion, different land, just to

01:54:41.160 overwhelm them, to make their own people a minority in that country for whatever reason, 0.95

01:54:46.600 ideological, economic, whatever it was. They just, it would, they wouldn't imagine that

01:54:51.380 they had the right, the power, the ability to do that, you know? And I, I said something

01:54:56.420 to you yesterday when we were having dinner that I would probably feel somewhat differently

01:55:00.980 about this if it was a situation where, you know, over the last eight generations of English

01:55:06.960 people, of British people, that they had just sort of like gradually brought people in

01:55:12.060 from around the world. And over the course of 200 years or 300 years, they had just transformed

01:55:17.380 the demography of their island into something unrecognizable. Because you could look at that

01:55:21.320 and say, well, you know, I don't necessarily think that's the best idea for them or, you

01:55:26.060 know, I don't like the changes that are being made. But hey, the English people, they made 1.00

01:55:30.280 this decision over the course of 200 or 300 years, right?

01:55:31.980 Exactly. It's like their food. I won't eat their food. It's disgusting, but they like it

01:55:35.760 and that's okay.

01:55:36.500 But this, one generation decided that they had no responsibility to any of the people

01:55:43.840 who came before them and they have no responsibility to any of the people who are coming after them.

01:55:48.360 They are going to permanently, radically, irreparably transform their society in ways that they know

01:55:56.120 hurt the majority of the population. They've immunized themselves from, you know, at present,

01:56:01.620 but that they know are not welcome and are harmful to the majority of the people that they rule over.

01:56:07.120 And one generation of people decided that they had the right to do that.

01:56:11.860 And it's the post-war generation. It's the generation born in 1946, between 1946 and 1964.

01:56:17.900 That's who did that. 0.51

01:56:19.280 So it's hard to escape the obvious conclusion, and I suspect this is part of what's driving your

01:56:24.000 current project, that that war didn't just redraw borders, but it changed the world in ways that are

01:56:31.620 still unfolding and that whose profound nature we're only now beginning to appreciate. Is that right?

01:56:36.820 Sure. I'm a big fan of the writer René Girard, right? He talks about, he's got this whole big

01:56:43.180 theory about the origin of human religion and sacrificial ritual and stuff, but putting aside

01:56:49.140 like his broader speculations about the origin of religion, one of the things he talks about is

01:56:54.340 if you look through the myths of every society you can pretty much think of throughout history,

01:57:00.840 if you look at like the national origin stories of any nation or people that you can think of,

01:57:07.420 it is almost without exception, and it may be without exception, that there's blood at the

01:57:12.380 beginning of that story. There's, and it's framed because it's a sacred story, it's framed as

01:57:18.480 sacrificial blood, right? And now sometimes, like, he'll give examples of-

01:57:22.760 That is true.

01:57:24.020 He'll give examples of sometimes, you know, there's a, like, his basic theory, right,

01:57:28.000 is that when a society finds itself in a time of tremendous turmoil, and it may be just disunion,

01:57:36.360 you know, or like people can feel like we have right now. Since like 2015 or however long it's been,

01:57:42.760 there's just this tension where people kind of, and moderate people, regular people that you,

01:57:48.940 that aren't typically political, right and left for that matter, everybody kind of has this feeling

01:57:53.720 that this can't just keep going the way it's going. Like, you know, we're approaching some sort of a

01:58:00.400 point where decisions are going to have to be made, confrontations are going to have to occur,

01:58:03.980 and a decision is going to have to be made because there's just too much ambivalent energy pulling us

01:58:08.600 in every direction. People feel it in their daily lives, and they're, you know, uh, and so that

01:58:13.820 starts to happen to a society, and, um, he points to, uh, all these examples throughout history in

01:58:22.040 ancient mythology, right, where, uh, he'll talk about how there's some problem that was, you know,

01:58:27.580 a plague is, uh, is plaguing Thebes, and, um, you know, whatever example you want to give,

01:58:34.020 and they find the scapegoat person for this, and, you know, Jonah being thrown overboard into the

01:58:39.960 sea, you know, to calm the storm, and what do you know, we found the culprit, we found the perpetrator,

01:58:45.480 the one who had, like, brought this curse upon the city because of his own private sin, or whatever

01:58:49.400 it was, and we got rid of that person, and now everything is actually better, and now the plague

01:58:55.320 went away, and the storm stopped, and something, and so what Girard says is, is a, this is a very

01:59:02.100 interesting insight, I think, is he says, what these all are, these are post hoc apologias for

01:59:07.460 what these people did, you know, they're looking back and saying that, uh, you know, this person

01:59:14.000 who we murdered, um, that, A, we had to do that, but then there's another little weird dynamic where

01:59:20.880 that person sort of becomes deified because at the end of the day, they did have the power to restore

01:59:25.420 order and peace to the society, to make the plague go away, and there's also a sort of ambivalent

01:59:31.040 feeling because somewhere in there, they do know that they murdered, you know, murdered this person

01:59:34.860 as a scapegoat, and, uh, so, so he gives an example, by the way, of, like, obviously he talks

01:59:41.300 about the Christian story, the crucifixion, and he says, you have a time, like, where this is like a,

01:59:45.960 you know, Jerusalem was full of revolutionary ferment, there were, you know, there were, there were

01:59:50.980 rebel leaders and riots, there were messiahs cropping up saying that they were going to lead a

01:59:56.320 resistance against the Romans, it was a very, very, very tense time, and the community, the Jewish

02:00:03.320 community in Jerusalem was able to sort of go through this process of uniting around the need

02:00:09.420 to eliminate this victim who, at least at present, is, like, responsible and, and emblematic of all of

02:00:15.720 the, uh, the insane, the mounting insanity that's sort of engulfing us all right now, and the difference

02:00:21.300 though, and why Christianity is what it is, like, you think about the idea that we have the cross

02:00:26.300 as our symbol, which is so strange to people who are not Christians, like, you know, it's like,

02:00:32.160 like, to, for people today, you would have to think about, like, for the, for the, for the visceral sort

02:00:37.120 of way that somebody in the Roman world would have witnessed that, would have seen that, it would be

02:00:41.740 like your religious symbol was like a corpse hanging from a noose. Exactly. Or a meat hook. Or, yeah,

02:00:47.100 right, and so, like, that's what they would have seen. That's kind of crazy when you think

02:00:50.780 about it. Like, wow, what is going on there? Like, your, your God came down and he was murdered

02:00:56.880 and tortured, put up on a cross, and that's, like, your sacred symbol of him. You're not trying to

02:01:02.440 forget that part of the story or sort of pretend that didn't happen. That is the story. Very strange,

02:01:07.280 right? And it's because this process that every myth, Gerard says, was based on throughout history

02:01:13.240 that you see apologized for and rationalized in every one of these myths, there were people who were

02:01:19.740 following Jesus who refused to go along. And they said, no, no, no, no, no. He was innocent

02:01:24.020 and you murdered him. And they refused to back down from that. And you look like in the book of Acts,

02:01:29.560 when Stephen gets martyred, they freak out and stone him, not when he's making doctrinal points.

02:01:35.720 It's when he gets the point, he says, you murdered him. He accuses them of murder and they stone him for

02:01:40.720 it. And you had these people who were willing to die for that. You know, they, they, they were willing

02:01:45.340 to stand with the victim of, you know, this mob attack of this scapegoat attack and die with him

02:01:52.040 if necessary. Because, you know, to a Christian, like, that's what martyrdom means. It's different 0.74

02:01:55.980 than, like, what a Muslim means by it usually, right? You can go to war and die in war and you're 0.97

02:02:02.060 a martyr, like, in, in the Muslim world, which is fine. Like, they have their way of looking at things.

02:02:06.720 But to a Christian, it doesn't mean you're dying for an idea, dying for Christ. It means you're

02:02:12.500 willing to die with Christ. If you see a mob picking up stones and surrounding an innocent

02:02:17.160 victim, you're not going to slink away. You're not going to pick up stone. And, and if you do,

02:02:22.840 then, you know, then you're, you know, you're making an irreparable, sort of irrevocable choice

02:02:28.560 at that point. You are going to stand with that person against the mob, even if it means that you

02:02:33.440 die with him. That's what it means. And if everybody does that, then you have a transformed society and

02:02:37.800 the kingdom of God is here. And so, as a counterexample, Girard uses a holy man, first

02:02:45.420 century, late first century, early second century, called Apollonius of Tyana. And he was a pagan holy

02:02:50.700 man who, they constructed a biography for him that is essentially the same as Jesus. Virgin birth,

02:02:58.380 born in a manger, 12 disciples, eventually died and, like, was brought back to life. And,

02:03:05.600 like, so it's like, it's, it's, it's a, it's a clear, like, ideological refutation of this growing

02:03:10.160 Christian myth that's starting to take over the pagan world. And one of his most famous miracles 0.94

02:03:14.820 that he performed was there was a plague that was engulfing the city of Ephesus and they,

02:03:20.820 nobody knows what to do. And so they call up Apollonius of Tyana, you got to help us with this

02:03:25.040 plague. And so he goes up there and he says, okay, I'll help you, but you have to agree ahead of time.

02:03:29.380 You do exactly what I tell you to do. And you say, okay, great, just help us. And so he leads the

02:03:34.580 community to this town square and there's this old beggar who is, uh, you know, raggedy clothes, 1.00

02:03:43.060 filthy, no teeth. He's just a, you know, a destitute, broken, like old beggar. And he tells 1.00

02:03:49.620 the people around, he says, now pick up stones, kill that man. And at first they're like, I don't 0.99

02:03:56.540 know about this little warden. He's like, you want a plague to continue or not? Kill that man.

02:04:00.840 And so one stone flies. And as soon as one flies, two fly, then their whole thing. And so they cover 1.00

02:04:06.260 and they stone him to death. And he's covered with like a cairn of stones essentially. And as they're

02:04:11.540 stoning him, his eyes flash red and he bares his teeth and they realize it's a demon. And so they

02:04:16.960 finish him off. And at the end, they clear away the stones. And what they find is this giant frothing

02:04:22.040 at the mouth, like dog demon thing. And then the plague goes away. And what Gerard says, or he doesn't

02:04:28.680 put it this way, cause this is a little too provocative for him, but I'll put it this

02:04:31.520 way. What you're reading there is the story of the crucifixion as it would have been written

02:04:38.000 from the perspective of the Pharisees. That's what that is. You know, of course he was, cause

02:04:43.560 like, here's the crazy thing is it's not, they're not imagining that after they kill that

02:04:49.460 guy, that everything's getting better. It does get better because all of these people

02:04:54.140 who were ready to just tear each other apart yesterday, once they all came together around

02:05:00.180 that guy, that's the guy who's responsible for all this. And we all came together to commit this

02:05:06.460 crime against him. We're all in this together in a way that we weren't before.

02:05:10.580 Right. There's catharsis and then unity.

02:05:12.200 Yes. And so it actually does work in a very perverse way. And that is the, now of course it

02:05:17.020 doesn't last. And eventually you have to go through that cycle again.

02:05:19.440 Well, that's why human sacrifice continues.

02:05:21.460 That's what Gerard said.

02:05:23.060 Have an abortion, be happy, right? 0.99

02:05:24.720 And that Christianity is the answer to all that. And it's why that, you know, you can

02:05:28.680 look and show similarities between, you know, ISIS, Horus, Osiris, and all these various

02:05:34.040 things. Yeah, sure. Like there's structural similarities in other myths to certain aspects

02:05:38.400 of the story, whatever. But at a fundamental level, they are, they are not just different.

02:05:44.340 They are radically opposed. They are 180 degrees opposed.

02:05:47.560 Right. And it's also possible that it's not just a function of human psychology, but that

02:05:51.880 there's also an element from the outside acting upon people. There is just, maybe you are appeasing

02:05:57.300 the gods or the demons actually for a short time.

02:06:00.300 Yeah. I mean, that's a, you know, most people come to me for history stuff, so I don't usually

02:06:05.560 dive into that. But occasionally I do. And my more tolerant subscribers, they, you know,

02:06:11.360 they say they enjoy it. So, but yeah, that's.

02:06:14.280 So when can, just to tie a bow in the World War II project, for, I, the reason I keep 0.72

02:06:24.460 focusing on this is probably the same reason you're doing it. I think it's like, it's central

02:06:27.820 to the society we live in, the myths upon which it's built. I think it's also the cause

02:06:34.400 of like the destruction of Western civilization and these lies. And so I just very much look

02:06:42.720 forward to, to your honesty on this question. When does this come out?

02:06:47.020 I think I'll probably be ready to put out the first episode in maybe six months or so. Cause

02:06:52.940 the, I've got another big long episode I'm doing on, uh, the history of the labor movement

02:06:58.700 wars where it's, it's a great story about, um, basically a big war that took place between,

02:07:04.900 uh, the mafia and the American communist party over control of the Hollywood unions.

02:07:10.260 It's a fascinating story, a lot of larger than life characters and stuff. So I'll finish that

02:07:13.900 up and then I'll start wrapping up my research and start moving on to that. Um, can I say real

02:07:18.320 quick too, because, uh, I did the thing, you know, your, your interview with Mr. Putin,

02:07:22.300 I think probably prepared you for interviewing me because we both do the same thing.

02:07:26.020 Like you asked me something about world war two and pretty soon I'm talking about Apollonius of

02:07:30.820 Tyano. Right. You're telling me about the Rus. And so, uh, I can't help myself. That's, you know,

02:07:36.280 you either love it or hate it. That's what I do in my podcast too. Um, but you know, I think that

02:07:41.820 world war two is a founding myth in that Girardian sense for us. If you think about like just the

02:07:48.000 strategic bombing campaigns, the ethnic cleansing of the Germans after the war, what the Soviets did to

02:07:53.240 East Germany after the war, just everything that happened, that we did to, to, to win that conflict.

02:07:59.940 I mean, these are things that. Or even the things that, or maybe especially the things we did after

02:08:03.920 we win. Right. Right. And so we do those things. Nuremberg, the farce of Nuremberg and the whole thing.

02:08:09.420 Well, and that's just it. I think that Nuremberg like is that sacrificial ritual. And I might mean 0.86

02:08:14.480 that literally, but I'm not married to it. If people don't want to take it literally, they don't

02:08:17.840 have to, but, um, you know, but I probably do. And I think it was that sacrificial ritual that

02:08:23.360 was the founding event of the current global order. It brought us all back together. It told

02:08:27.940 us who the bad guys were, why they are by in a binary sense, different from and opposed to us,

02:08:35.200 which makes us the good guys. And now we can all again, you know, uh, Vicksburg celebrated the

02:08:41.200 4th of July. But I do think there's something else going on because look, I, I think a lot of what

02:08:46.520 we hear about World War II is a lie. I've agreed with everything on the basis of much less knowledge

02:08:50.120 than you have, but all of your conclusions are consistent with mine. Um, but I'm totally happy

02:08:55.160 to say the Nazis were bad. I think they were. I'm totally happy to say the United States was the, 1.00

02:08:59.520 you know, most virtuous player among the three. But you're not talking about a historical event.

02:09:04.220 You're talking about a myth. Go, go tell a Muslim that yes, Muhammad is a great guy. He did a lot of 0.99

02:09:09.940 great things, but, and then see the reaction. Everything comes after, but. Right. No, you're totally

02:09:15.140 right. I just can't get over the fact that the, the West wins and is completely destroyed in less

02:09:23.880 than a century. Well, the West was conquered. The rest, the West was conquered by the United 0.78

02:09:29.400 States and the Soviet Union. Okay. But I'm including the United States in the West. Right.

02:09:33.040 Somehow the United States and Western Europe won. That's the conventional understanding.

02:09:38.140 And both have now look like they lost a world war. So like, what the hell is that? Like,

02:09:44.900 there's something very, very heavy. Uh, yeah. I mean, it's all the things that we have been

02:09:50.260 talking about and probably, uh, some things that, you know, we only talk about privately,

02:09:55.500 but, um, we can see the results of it. I mean, yeah. So that's, that's it. So that's how you.

02:10:01.680 The real question is, is if they were trying to achieve that destruction that you're talking

02:10:05.420 about, if they, if they were trying, they couldn't have done it more directly or more effectively,

02:10:10.480 you know? And so, uh, there are trends and forces. There are things that drive people,

02:10:15.560 you know, like incentives that drive people that they're not aware of. Uh, there's a lot of things

02:10:20.800 going on. Uh, but if they had been doing it intentionally, there are a lot of incentives

02:10:25.500 that drive people that are not aware of, boy, that is so true and worth. Well, in your business,

02:10:30.320 I think it's really important to remember that, but for all of us, it's important to remember.

02:10:33.200 We're not quite sure what drives us or other people sometimes.

02:10:35.820 It's a value of history in a lot of ways is we have the benefit of hindsight. And, you know,

02:10:40.900 one of the things that you find, I found this again on pretty much every single topic that I've

02:10:46.100 covered, even the labor movement, like ones that I'm doing now where I'm like, especially back in

02:10:51.060 the old days, you know, before it became big labor, like I'm a fierce partisan of the labor movement

02:10:55.980 back in the late 18 or 19. Big time. I totally agree. Yeah. And so I expected going into it,

02:11:00.380 like, this is just going to be like a big, you know, screw the bosses, like, you know,

02:11:05.020 pro-union, pro-everything kind of, and I am still pro-union, pro-everything on that side,

02:11:11.520 but it's made me be able to see where the bosses were coming from and what they thought they were

02:11:16.840 looking at. And if you take that, any historical topic, any historical topic, if you allow yourself

02:11:23.720 to be open about it, you know, I have gotten an email, I got an email back in 2017, 2018,

02:11:31.820 from an active duty Israeli soldier who was serving actively in the West Bank, who told me that he

02:11:38.120 heard my Israel-Palestine series and that it opened up his, you know, his understanding of how things

02:11:47.180 did look to the other side and how the history was understood from the other side, and that it affected

02:11:51.120 the way he interacted with people on a daily basis, Palestinians on a daily basis at his checkpoints

02:11:56.420 and things like that. And it's because if you, and all praise to that guy, you know, good for him,

02:12:03.500 because that's a tough thing to do, you know, especially when you're enmeshed in it like he is.

02:12:07.600 But if you allow yourself to be open and look at almost anything honestly, what you find is you,

02:12:14.260 you end up with at least a certain amount of sympathy or understanding for almost everybody

02:12:20.160 involved.

02:12:20.680 And that's the only perspective from which you can see the truth. I mean, I used to say to reporters

02:12:27.760 who work for me as I'd be assigning stories, would say, you know, you don't get to write a story about

02:12:31.760 your girlfriend or your mom because you're blinded by love, but you're also not allowed to write a

02:12:36.520 story about someone who you hate, like, because hate is irrational. You know, strong dislike,

02:12:41.860 disagreement, disapproval, all allowed, encouraged, in fact. But hate blinds you. And if you don't see

02:12:47.740 the person as a person, you're not going to write about him accurately. Like people are fellow human

02:12:54.000 beings, however evil they are, right?

02:12:56.420 And you see this with like in good novelists versus mediocre novels, right? Like you think of somebody

02:13:02.200 like a great writer, like good prose writer, like Jonathan Franzen, right? He's got this one book,

02:13:08.360 what book was it? I can't remember the title of it, but it's, it's this sort of like urban

02:13:12.420 rural book where the New York City, you know, cosmopolitan guy goes back to visit his family

02:13:17.260 for Christmas in the country. And for instance, a great writer, okay? You can develop characters.

02:13:23.520 If this, the character that's from New York, richly developed. He deeply understands that man.

02:13:29.140 And you can tell by the way he writes it, nothing but caricatures and stereotypes for his family

02:13:34.060 members. And it's because he just can't step into their shoes and understand them.

02:13:39.720 And they're like screaming racist epithets as they're smoking meth or something.

02:13:43.080 It was just hokey and like, you know, kind of a, like just a Hallmark card version of what you

02:13:48.520 would expect those people to be like. It just was not anybody who's been around people like that,

02:13:53.160 or who's been people like that would just, I mean, you literally laugh at it. And this is a great

02:13:56.600 writer, but if you can't put yourself into the shoes of the people you're writing about,

02:14:00.800 at least to the point where you can humanize them. You don't have to say like, oh, I could see if I

02:14:05.740 was Stalin, I would have done that too. That's not what it's about. It's, can you at least like,

02:14:10.480 can you get yourself to a place where you can see how a person in that position at that time was

02:14:14.620 seeing the world and the factors that they were taking into account when they were making their

02:14:19.700 decisions. And now you have people out there who are Jeffrey Dahmer. I'm not talking about people

02:14:23.880 like that. You know, those people who are pathologically broken, psychotic, you know, you think of a world 0.62

02:14:28.980 leader like Idi Amin and even Mao to a certain degree, who I consider like much less like Stalin

02:14:35.220 than he is like somebody like Idi Amin. In other words, just like a, a childlike psychotic, you know, 0.77

02:14:41.580 like a true psychotic, like. Who enjoyed killing. Yeah. Yeah. And, um, I mean, so you have those 0.98

02:14:47.120 people and I'm not saying you should figure out how to identify with those people. Those people are

02:14:50.780 operating on a different program than you are that you're not going to be able to step into and

02:14:54.700 understand. But most people are not. Even the people, even the monsters in the world,

02:15:00.200 the people that are not, you know, there are people who zigged when you would have zagged and

02:15:05.900 over the course of a whole lifetime of making, you know, different decisions ended up in a radically

02:15:11.100 different place. You know, there are brothers and sisters, siblings who one of them ends up a drug

02:15:17.720 addict and a porn star and the other one is an engineer and a family man or something. Like they grew

02:15:23.240 up in the same household that happens, but they respond to the things that confront them in life

02:15:29.240 in different ways. And those things start to add up and eventually gain a momentum of their own.

02:15:33.540 And pretty soon, unless you, uh, you know, unless you, you, it's, it's very easy to get caught up in

02:15:39.640 that and let that rule you. And that's what happens, uh, in most, you know, most historical events,

02:15:45.580 because most historical events are about groups, you know, they're prominent individuals,

02:15:50.360 but ultimately they're about groups of people. And so, uh, you know, the averages, uh, tend to,

02:15:55.800 tend to win out over time. So last thing, um, for people whose appetites have been whetted to,

02:16:04.040 to experience what, you know, the history that you produce, where can people find this series,

02:16:11.500 your labor series, your Israel Palestine series? Um, you know, how can they hear this?

02:16:17.720 Sure. So, um, my main podcast is the Martyr Made podcast. Um,

02:16:22.160 How are we spelling Martyr Made?

02:16:23.820 M-A-R-T-Y-R-M-A-D-E. I think when, uh, Joe Rogan and Dave Smith were talking about the,

02:16:31.160 or no, it was when Josh Barnett was on there, my buddy Josh, they were talking about it and

02:16:35.160 Rogan had never heard of it at the time. And he called me, his name's Marty R-Made. So,

02:16:40.880 but yeah, Martyr Made, uh, Martyr like Allahu Akbar made, like a made in America. Um, 0.60

02:16:48.520 and, uh, those are my long form history podcasts.

02:16:51.520 And they're found where?

02:16:52.680 iTunes, Spotify, wherever you want to look for them. Um, they also,

02:16:57.160 they appear on my sub stack as well. The, uh, the sub stack is where I do a ton of subscribers

02:17:01.860 only content. Once you get done with the countless hours of long form history podcasts, there are

02:17:07.100 50, 60, maybe 70 more podcast episodes behind the paywall on sub stack along with, um,

02:17:15.500 thousands of pages of essay series and things like that, where I kind of get, uh, deeper into

02:17:22.400 subtopics and just tangential topics that I would like to talk about in my main podcast,

02:17:27.320 but just can't quite fit them in and keep the narrative on.

02:17:29.880 Your main podcast has no advertising?

02:17:32.280 No.

02:17:32.400 So total revenue to you for years of work is right around zero in that range?

02:17:38.320 For the podcast itself. Yeah. The podcast itself.

02:17:40.960 I just think that's amazing. We had dinner last night. I'm like, hmm,

02:17:44.380 you're saying it took me five years to do this. I said, you know, how do you,

02:17:47.880 I'm sorry to be vulgar and like a capitalist about it, but like how, you know,

02:17:51.640 how do you pay your mortgage? What do you make on that podcast? Like nothing.

02:17:55.180 Yeah. Well, the podcast is an advertisement, right? If people listen to them,

02:17:59.020 they like them and then they find out that I have a subscriber.

02:18:01.780 In TV, we do a tease. It's about 30 seconds long.

02:18:04.320 There you go. Yeah. Mine are seven hours.

02:18:08.240 So your, uh, Substack also Martyrmaid.

02:18:10.900 Yes. Uh, and that's subscribe.martyrmaid.com. And it has to be that because if you go

02:18:17.500 martyrmaid.substack.com, Elon kills it on the X algorithm. So, um, subscribe.martyrmaid.com.

02:18:24.880 I do another podcast with my friend Jocko Willink, who's a retired Navy SEAL commander. A lot of

02:18:29.120 people have heard of, uh, we do one called the unraveling. And, um,

02:18:32.800 How often?

02:18:33.920 Well, lately, not as often as we should. We've been having trouble making our schedules meet up,

02:18:37.740 but we've got 40 some episodes out at this point where we talk about more current historical topics.

02:18:43.500 Um, sometimes we get into politics, uh, like our last one was on, uh, deinstitutionalization and the,

02:18:49.760 kind of the fallout and the homeless crisis. It's, you know, partially resulted from that. So

02:18:53.260 we get into all those things. You get to hear, you know, uh, like a, like a hardened warrior,

02:18:58.440 like Jocko comment on mental health crisis, for example. So that's, it's a lot of fun.

02:19:04.860 Joe Cooper, Martyrmaid. Thank you. Thank you for this conversation and for your addition to the

02:19:10.020 sum total of knowledge. I really appreciate it.

02:19:11.900 It's always fun.

02:19:13.020 Thanks.

02:19:15.140 Thanks for listening to Tucker Carlson show. If you enjoyed it, you can go to

02:19:18.500 Tucker Carlson.com to see everything that we have made the complete library. Tucker Carlson.com.

The Tucker Carlson Show - September 02, 2024

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

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