In this episode, Tucker Carlson sits down with the most important historian in the U.S. to discuss his work on the formation of Israel, the early history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and his new book on the founding of the modern state of Israel. He also talks about his new podcast, "The Most Honest Person in the World," and why he thinks that's one of the most honest books he's ever written. Tucker also discusses the importance of having a solid foundation in history, and how he got to where he is today as a historian and a writer. Tucker and his team are on the road this fall hitting the road for the entire month of September. They'll be in cities across the United States and we're excited to see where they'll be stopping off. Check out all of our content at tuckercarlson.net/tuckerandrewshow and all of the great shows on The Tucker Carlson Show. Stay tuned for the rest of our fall tour, starting on September 5th. See you in Phoenix, Arizona on September 6th, where we'll be at the Phoenix Museum of American History. and in San Francisco on September 7th at the San Francisco International Airport. Thank you so much for listening to The Tucker Show! -Tucker Carlson and the Tucker Carlson Podcast! Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Subscribe to the podcast "The Tucker Show" by Suneaters, LLC. -Our theme song is "Goodbye Outer Space Traveler" by The Good Morning America, by Skandalor "Good Morning America" by Fountains of San Francisco, California, and "Outer Space by FSM Records, LLC., courtesy of Epitaph Records, Inc., - Our ad music is by Haley Shaw, produced by Skynyrd, courtesy of Lotuspool Records, and our ad is by F&W Records, a proud record label, and we hope you enjoy the music is better than the sound quality of the music we're getting better than you'll get in your ears in the next week. -- Thank you! --The Good Morning Coffee and Good Morning, Thank you for listening? -- -- and we'll send you back to sleep and rest in the morning! -- Our ad is out in the afternoon, we'll get back to you soon! --
00:08:06.320Yeah. Well, you know, one of the good habits I picked up from it was reading because it gave—
00:08:12.420you know, books were what gave me a sense of continuity from environment to environment to environment, right?
00:08:18.080I'm in the middle of a book and I moved to another school and I have to adjust to that,
00:08:22.060but I'm still reading this book and it sort of patches me over.
00:08:24.680And that became sort of the background reality of my life as, you know,
00:08:30.180I sort of moved around in this unpredictable way, like, for most of my early years.
00:08:35.340I still have this thread that was coherent that I was following, you know, consistently.
00:08:40.580And so it definitely helped with a sense of stability like that.
00:08:44.160And it implanted this idea that, you know, like, I take refuge in books.
00:08:48.200It'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.
00:08:56.560Books make—they make my anxiety go away, right?
00:09:05.840And I had a lot of time to read books.
00:09:08.080And 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.
00:09:19.180If I was in a meeting and we were waiting for the next speaker to come in, I was working on the podcast.
00:09:28.720Evening, I was working on the podcast.
00:09:30.100And, 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.
00:09:39.420That'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.
00:09:52.400But, yeah, that's—I mean, the way you do it, you know, people who want to do—
00:09:58.320There'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?
00:10:12.280And 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.
00:10:22.860Not everybody wants to listen to a seven-hour podcast on Jim Jones.
00:10:26.520And, by the way, that's only the fifth out of seven episodes on the topic, right?
00:10:55.840You 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.
00:11:05.520You've got to read and read, and then when you think you've read enough, you've got to read some more.
00:11:09.240And because there's just—there's so much out there.
00:11:12.360Like 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.
00:11:29.440Yeah, 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.
00:11:41.620I at least would have just been repeating that.
00:11:45.580This was like the full midwit kind of meme, you know, in production where you know enough to really embarrass yourself.
00:11:54.240And I'm glad that I sort of recognized that at the time.
00:11:56.960And I went back and, like, scrapped the whole thing.
00:11:59.280Didn't start it for another year after that, probably, because I just realized that, you know, I've got to get deeper into this.
00:12:05.460And 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.
00:12:20.600Like, 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.
00:12:30.260It'll get harder and harder to discipline myself to stay on that topic, because there's something that's pulling me away.
00:12:37.700And 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.
00:13:00.820Well, 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.
00:13:06.020Unless it's like, sometimes I'll do a single episode, and I kind of know the story.
00:13:09.260But when I start a long series, it's going to take me a year and a half to put out every episode.
00:13:13.380I don't necessarily know how it's going to turn out.
00:13:16.280And, 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?
00:13:25.840And 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?
00:13:41.280At the direction of this preacher, Jim Jones.
00:13:44.500That's what most people know about it.
00:13:46.860When you open any book about it, even mainstream books about it, which, you know, again, most people don't get to that point.
00:13:51.920This won't be in any of the documentaries, for the most part, that you see.
00:13:55.620We 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.
00:14:05.580From 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.
00:14:14.820So these were migrants who had come from the South as part of the Great Migration, right?
00:14:19.600And 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.
00:14:38.580I always knew about Jonestown on the surface level, but I saw that.
00:14:42.020I'm like, I have to understand this better.
00:14:43.340And 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.
00:15:03.380And, you know, I get emotional when I think about the Jonestown story.
00:15:35.700I had their like backroom midnight meetings where they're all going through struggle sessions, screaming at each other, beating each other up.
00:15:42.960All of their recordings of these late night torchlight sessions that they would have out in Guyana in the jungle.
00:15:50.420You 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.
00:15:59.400These people have been together for 20 years.
00:16:01.280You know, he started his first church in the 1950s.
00:16:03.940And 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.
00:16:18.920It was more of a Midwest and Northern urban anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish movement.
00:16:24.500And so Indianapolis was one of the strongholds.
00:16:27.080And he lived, that's where he lived at the time.
00:16:33.680He's 24 years old, starting his first little Methodist church in this storefront with folding chairs, you know.
00:16:39.700And 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.
00:16:50.680He'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?
00:16:57.760And 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.
00:17:29.560And so I started to read about this stuff.
00:17:32.800And I realized that there was this theme that was starting to emerge in all of my podcasts for the most part.
00:17:38.940And the Israel-Palestine one and this one, which is here's this guy who really is an idealist.
00:17:44.340And 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.
00:17:59.060But 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.
00:18:07.880And 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.
00:18:13.820And that's when I knew I'm, I just, I'm very suspicious of all those stories, you know.
00:18:19.980And 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.
00:18:31.760Like, he really believed these things.
00:18:33.780He really did treat people in a way that in 1953 in America was uncommon, you know.
00:18:39.400And 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.
00:18:51.500And 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.
00:19:03.280And 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.
00:19:16.760And 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.
00:19:30.320And 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.
00:19:44.040You know, boycotting a local business to get them to integrate.
00:19:46.820Right around the time, a few years before, but like that Martin Luther King was going to start that kind of thing.
00:19:50.960And then, so you have Greensboro, you have these things.
00:19:52.720And 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.
00:20:10.080I mean, it is uncanny, like, how perfectly it follows.
00:20:13.240It makes perfect sense because of how plugged into it they were.
00:20:15.900It 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.
00:20:30.980I 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.
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00:22:31.720The number of true well-known Democratic politicians who were patrons of the People's Temple is quite amazing.
00:22:54.620But sure, I mean, every mayor of San Francisco.
00:22:56.680Look, 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.
00:23:14.020You 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.
00:23:29.180Another 300 to 400 were people over like 60 years old.
00:23:33.000Okay, so, you can, I mean, that's who's out there.
00:23:37.980Two-thirds, fully two-thirds of the people who committed suicide out there were kids or senior citizens, right?
00:23:43.300And 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.
00:23:56.800They're certain that the CIA is going to come and kidnap their children and put them through brainwashing.
00:24:02.300And this is not just Jim Jones and his charisma telling these people this.
00:24:05.920These people understood themselves as a revolutionary movement, and they were true believers.
00:24:10.260Like, they were true believers, these people.
00:24:13.540A lot of people like to say that at the end, it was basically murder.
00:24:17.860These people were, at least for the vast majority of them, were not forced to do it.
00:24:21.860They believed in what they were doing.
00:24:23.080And they, Jim Jones by that point was almost like a figurehead of the movement, to be honest with you.
00:24:29.760He was just sort of the titular leader, but the movement, the organization was running itself.
00:24:35.000And you had a bunch of true believers who were out there trying to start the revolution and start a new society in the jungle.
00:24:40.340And 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.
00:24:56.120Who 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.
00:25:05.320And we just want you to know that we have your back.
00:25:07.940And, you know, there's just, the whole world is coming after you, but we're there for you.
00:25:13.400This 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.
00:25:20.380And that's what these people are doing, calling in, just feeding into it.
00:25:24.300And, 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?
00:25:56.280You know, it was, and they show a musical performance.
00:25:59.640And this woman, who's the lead singer and band conductor, is up there.
00:26:04.120And 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?
00:26:14.640Well, 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.
00:26:24.100Like, her mom came to the church sometimes, something like that.
00:26:26.720And after Jim Jones and his people left, you know, she got abandoned by her mother.
00:26:34.940She ended up being pimped out by her drug dealer boyfriend when she was 15, 16 years old.
00:26:44.620And 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.
00:26:55.380She's committed suicide three or four times at this point.
00:26:57.600And 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.
00:27:08.860And she just kind of knew who the Jones family was.
00:27:12.120She said they treated her with kindness and her mother with kindness when she was a little girl.
00:27:15.580And she's in the depth of suicidal depression, drug addiction, you know, just close to the end, right?
00:27:23.540And, man, even in the podcast when I was recording, it makes me emotional because they got out there.
00:27:32.600She 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.
00:28:17.460They 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.
00:28:32.040They put her into an environment where she felt like she belonged.
00:28:37.020And it really was the people cared about her, and she cared about the people there, you know.
00:28:41.960And so she ends up being the band leader.
00:28:43.820She's, like, a super talented musician, and she's writing the songs.
00:28:49.320She's leading the practices for the band.
00:28:51.920She'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.
00:29:02.760She committed suicide with everybody else.
00:29:05.740The night after you see that video where Ryan's out there.
00:29:08.700It's amazing that you watch that video.
00:29:11.420I mean, I don't think I'd want to see something like that.
00:29:17.700Like, 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.
00:29:24.920Although it's a lot of people's favorite episode.
00:29:26.900Like, 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.
00:29:37.160I 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.
00:29:52.900And 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.
00:30:06.280There 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.
00:30:24.040It was one woman who was in the Capitol.
00:30:26.720She wasn't, she was at their office in the Capitol.
00:30:28.620She wasn't out at the, at the actual compound.
00:30:31.460And 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.
00:30:37.120I mean, this is, and yet, these people loved each other.
00:30:45.040These people actually did believe, like, in equality.
00:30:50.180They believed in, like, human brotherhood and all these things, and she slashed her kids' throats.
00:30:55.640And you, if you're going to tell a story like that, you can't do what all of the biographies of Jim Jones do.
00:31:01.540You 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.
00:31:14.400And all these other people just got sucked into it.
00:31:28.860There 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.
00:31:39.640Uday Hussein, Joseph Stalin, I don't care who you're talking about.
00:31:42.660There was a time where that was a little three-year-old kid.
00:31:51.700And so, how did they become what they ended up being, you know?
00:31:56.400So, I think you're approaching this, which is why I am so impressed by what you do and want more people to experience it.
00:32:04.480So, 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.
00:32:16.620What you're not doing is using history as a weapon, a cudgel, or as a kind of propaganda tool to make policy.
00:32:27.420So, in that, you almost stand alone, I would say, right now.
00:32:31.380Well, I'm really interested in the project that you're working on now.
00:32:37.140So, I'm just going to answer my own question.
00:32:38.680So, 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.
00:32:48.800I can't think of one that has occasioned more books.
00:32:53.640Well, 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.
00:33:07.460And 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,
00:33:20.340for 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.
00:33:28.580Everything in between and before those things, you can do whatever you want.
00:34:06.000It's the justification for a lot of those structures, right?
00:34:09.140Whenever you have those things, you're going to have taboos.
00:34:13.920You'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.
00:34:24.560And 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.
00:34:39.080And 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?
00:35:16.380But, you know, you could write a book.
00:35:19.160You could take any angle on it you want.
00:35:20.760You're not going to ever get a job or have a publisher want to publish or anything, but you could do it.
00:35:24.980You can go out on the street corner and stand on a box and say whatever it is you think.
00:35:28.740But 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.
00:35:44.160From 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?
00:35:55.340And, again, you're going to find that – I'm sure the Peloponnesian Wars were like that for the ancient Greeks.
00:36:17.560What you're saying is absolutely right.
00:36:19.300It's not just the Second World War that is sort of uniquely censored or protected.
00:36:26.300The mythology around it, it's every event that's central to a nation's understanding of itself, and then that changes over time.
00:36:32.240So, 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?
00:36:45.280I 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.
00:36:57.040But, 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.
00:37:12.160Over 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—
00:37:24.820Literally, it's a crime to ask questions, yes.
00:37:26.740That 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.
00:37:41.860That's just how it's going to seem to people who are very locked into this side.
00:37:45.940And 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.
00:38:11.860And then they all turned into demons for a few years and now they're fine again.
00:38:15.540Like, that's sort of the official story.
00:38:17.100And I think deep down we all know that makes no sense.
00:38:21.500You know, again, to go back, like Uday Hussein got to be Uday Hussein from that three-year-old little kid.
00:38:26.820Jim Jones got to be Jim Jones from being that guy who was just an earnest local Indianapolis civil rights activist.
00:38:35.460They all got to be those people that led to the chaos that they eventually invited into the world.
00:38:41.480And 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.
00:38:59.840I 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.
00:39:09.940For months, I would have my headphones in as I was working, listening to Jim Jones.
00:39:15.880Were you the only guy in the office doing that?
00:39:17.500I think I'm probably the only person in the world that's done that.
00:39:19.720And so, like, and I got to the point where I felt like I knew this guy.
00:39:26.220I could notice from tape to tape, I would hear changes in his tone of voice.
00:39:32.240And I knew whether he was high on amphetamines that day or if he had taken his barbiturates already.
00:39:38.200And now he's, you could just, I felt like I knew this guy.
00:39:41.760And their tapes, by the way, they're not all from like one year.
00:39:44.320They're from like 15, 20 years, right?
00:39:46.720So, you can watch this process of a descent into madness as it's happening.
00:39:54.720And, 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.
00:40:06.920And at the very, very, like, base level, their motivations are the same as yours.
00:40:13.780But that we're a very, we're a multivariate species that can go a lot of different directions, right?
00:40:19.660And to be able to do that and force yourself to do it is the key.
00:40:23.620And 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.
00:40:32.360You shall not look at this topic and try to understand how the Germans saw the world.
00:40:38.040Like 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.
00:40:50.560That they were the ones being victimized by their neighbors and by all these, by the allied powers.
00:40:56.800You 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.
00:41:08.120But again, that's, it's, I think we're getting to the point where that's very unsatisfying for people.
00:41:13.520Most 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.
00:41:26.120Think 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.
00:41:41.020These companies aren't developing expensive products and just giving them to you because they love you.
00:41:46.800They're doing it because their programs take all your information.
00:41:49.520They hoover up your data, private, personal data, and sell it to data brokers and the government.
00:41:57.020And all of those people who are not your friends are very interested in manipulating you and your personal political and financial decisions.
00:42:30.900The purpose of the phone is to protect you from having your life stolen, your data stolen.
00:42:38.720It's designed from a privacy-first perspective.
00:42:42.640It's got an operating system that they made.
00:42:44.660It'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.
00:42:56.640They 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.
00:43:11.860It also has, believe it or not, a true on-off switch that shuts off the power.
00:43:16.920It actually disconnects your battery and ensures that your microphone and your camera are turned off completely when you want them to be.
00:43:24.460So they're not spying on you and, say, your bedroom, which your iPhone is.
00:43:30.040So 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.
00:44:17.240And 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?
00:44:32.500And so, like, there are sacred symbols and national myths that any group of people are going to need to hold themselves together.
00:44:40.140And there's also peril in knowing the truth about things.
00:44:43.060I 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.
00:44:50.760When we really get to the truth of that, will we be better off or not?
00:44:54.440I mean, you know, those are fair questions.
00:44:57.360But let me just say what I completely agree with you, particularly any unifying myth, you know, is important.
00:45:08.020I'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.
00:45:21.280But not just the war in Ukraine, so many others, you know.
00:45:28.480You 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.
00:45:38.120And so, I do think it's fair to ask, like, what, what really was going on?
00:45:41.980So, 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?
00:45:51.000Uh, 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?
00:46:07.620He thinks that, he really thinks that.
00:46:09.360And 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.
00:46:20.100Now, 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.
00:46:40.420Or, 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.
00:46:49.060Why don't you just make the case, make the case for that.
00:46:51.160Okay, 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.
00:46:58.780Well, 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.
00:47:09.760That they're the good guys, if you think he's a villain, that's not the case, that's not what I'm saying.
00:47:12.800You 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.
00:47:41.340They went in with no plan for that, and they just threw these people into camps, and millions of people ended up dead there.
00:47:47.960You 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.
00:48:06.100And they're writing back to the high command in Berlin saying, we can't feed these people.
00:48:11.540We don't have the food to feed these people.
00:48:14.320And 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?
00:48:22.820And so, this is, like, two months into the invasion, right?
00:48:26.680And, 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.
00:48:35.340Look, man, like, maybe you, as the, you know, the Germans, you felt like you had to invade to the east.
00:48:43.020Maybe 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.
00:48:54.920And 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.
00:49:08.300And millions of people died because of that, right?
00:49:11.460And you can look at it and say, like, you know, there, well, yeah.
00:49:17.560So, you know, get back to your, like, your main question about Churchill.
00:49:21.380You 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.
00:49:37.940He was, he didn't expect them to declare war, actually.
00:49:40.160Like, 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.
00:49:46.880And so he doesn't want to fight France.
00:50:33.440So there's just, there's literally no opposing force on the, on the continent.
00:50:38.320And 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.
00:50:52.800Like, we don't want to fight you, offering peace proposals that, you know, said, you keep all your overseas colonies.
00:51:08.260And 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.
00:51:32.520You know, we don't, which is not what ended up happening, but that's what everybody thought was going to happen.
00:51:37.420And so Churchill, I mean, you have a guy who wants, Churchill wanted a war.
00:51:44.140Uh, and the reason that I, I don't begrudge him that, you know, people can, national leaders, you can fight whoever you want.
00:51:50.220If, 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.
00:52:01.320And you play them the way you feel like you need to play them.
00:52:04.140The 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.
00:52:14.220He 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.
00:52:23.360Just, 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.
00:52:37.220And all the men were out in the field, all the fighting-age men were out in the field.
00:52:40.840And 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.
00:52:54.660Because 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.
00:53:02.300And so, he needed to keep this war going until he accomplished what is, you know, what he, what he hoped to accomplish.
00:53:08.180We know now, there's actually a really great series of books.
00:53:10.640It's, it's one of the best, uh, I recommend it to everybody, but it's really expensive now.
00:53:14.900And, um, it's six long volumes called History of British Special Operations in the Second World War.
00:53:19.720And 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.
00:54:08.760Um, 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.
00:54:28.920I 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.
00:54:37.060And so I think part of it was probably kind of personal.
00:55:00.820People 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.
00:55:10.580And would get mad when people would, uh, would interrupt him, you know, when he was doing that.
00:55:14.640So this is a strange, strange fellow, you know.
00:55:18.500Um, 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?
00:55:32.460Uh, one, you know, like in 1920, he wrote a kind of infamous now article called Zionism versus Bolshevism.
00:55:38.760Um, 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.
00:55:54.600Um, 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.
00:56:06.500It was the 60s here on steroids, right?
00:56:09.600And in a much more serious, uh, and ended up being destructive way.
00:56:29.620There was an ideological component of it.
00:56:31.980But 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.
00:56:49.300I think his hostility to, put it this way, I think his hostility to Germany was real.
00:56:53.120Um, I don't think that he necessarily had to be bribed to have that feeling.
00:56:59.900Um, 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.
00:57:19.040And, 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.
00:57:44.500And 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.
00:57:55.680And I don't say that in a way of like, oh, I don't want to offend anybody or whatever.
00:57:59.200It's that I, it's, you know, you know that things are going to be misunderstood.
00:58:03.240And so this is why I do 30 hour podcasts.
00:58:05.840Well, 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.
00:58:12.020I see you actually as a product of the West and as a defender really of the West or its values.
00:58:17.360Um, you know, in your approach and your open-mindedness, rigor, you know, belief in accuracy and honesty, I mean, those are Western notions.
00:58:25.760Uh, and yet Churchill has been positioned and has been really is accepted as like the defender of the West over the last hundred years.
00:58:56.640Well, it's, it has to do with what you said earlier, right?
00:58:59.420Uh, 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.
00:59:11.660You 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.
00:59:19.200Hitler'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.
00:59:27.680And finally, because nobody listened to him, the war ended up breaking out and we were forced to like go stamp out this threat.
00:59:36.840And now it's a much bigger threat than it ever would have been if we just would have listened to him.
01:00:02.140Like, cause when you think about, like, if you go back to, think about like, um, in Machiavelli's The Prince, right?
01:00:08.640And he, he starts that book out kind of talking about why he's writing this book.
01:00:12.900And 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.
01:00:19.200And 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.
01:00:32.880Um, 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.
01:00:40.180And so that's why I'm writing this book.
01:00:41.660It's an instruction manual and like a call to action kind of.
01:00:45.160Well, 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?
01:00:57.480Like 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.
01:01:08.500So 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.
01:01:21.380And 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.
01:01:31.780And they, that's what their, uh, position in the world depended on people being able to do that.
01:01:38.040I don't think that's a mistake, right?
01:01:39.280And I don't think it's a mistake when you look at other societies where, uh, charioteers, you know, really expensive branch chariots.
01:01:46.080Or, 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.
01:01:59.920And 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.
01:02:08.680And 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.
01:02:20.240I mean, you're talking, you get to the first world war, I mean, millions and millions of men.
01:02:24.680And 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?
01:02:35.020And 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.
01:02:45.100And, um, it was because they saw that.
01:02:47.360And 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.
01:03:03.520Look at like Louis the 14th, the sun king, right?
01:03:07.300Powerful 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.
01:03:32.260And 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.
01:03:40.540They had to work through existing structures and systems to get their will, uh, actually carried out.
01:03:45.520And 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.
01:04:02.420And 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.
01:04:27.580And, you know, they were fighting this war as whole societies.
01:04:30.860Like they, they figured out a way that they could do what Louis the 14th could never dream of.
01:04:35.800They could mobilize their whole society for war.
01:04:39.520And that was what you had to do if you wanted to compete on the level of Germany and France and so forth.
01:04:46.340And 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,
01:04:56.920what they thought they were doing was that this was a war between nation states like world war one and so on and so forth.
01:05:04.120And 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.
01:05:25.060But, you know, we didn't start out with a whole continent under our control, right?
01:05:29.420We 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?
01:05:40.280I mean, that's, that's really, there was a formative experience of, of, of America and, and, in its early history.
01:05:45.920And 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.
01:05:53.140And, 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.
01:06:02.140There'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.
01:06:13.640I mean, that, obviously he was talking about the eventual conflict with the Soviet union very early in his career that was there.
01:06:19.620But 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.
01:06:31.080Because he saw himself as the sort of European defender of Messiah guy, right?
01:06:36.280So, 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.
01:06:46.920Like, Trotsky's been banished from the country and his followers are all dead.
01:06:51.800You know, they were killed during the purges of the late 30s.
01:06:56.880Those 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.
01:07:07.060And Stalin, he never quite gave that up, you know, just like the United States.
01:07:11.040He saw it as his, as his duty to build up ideologically aligned allies and so forth.
01:07:17.500But 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.
01:07:28.300You 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.
01:07:35.680And then once that happens, the chips will follow where, fall where they may.
01:07:38.880They 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.
01:07:47.500And I have, you know, don't, I mean, I have nothing good to say about Stalin.
01:07:50.780I don't either, but I don't, I don't think it's been misadvertised a little bit.
01:07:54.920And 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.
01:08:03.460Um, 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.
01:08:20.820And, 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.
01:08:58.840But 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.
01:09:51.040But the thing that it overturned, I mean, I'm older than you, so maybe you always knew this, but growing up, we didn't.
01:09:56.360Everyone thought Stalin was this bloodless technocrat, not a true believer at all.
01:10:00.840That was Lenin, was certainly Trotsky, seemed like a true believer.
01:10:04.600Zinoviev, Kamenev, you know, all the guys around him might have been, but he was not.
01:10:09.400And you learn in reading this, so he was actually a devout, like religious level communist.
01:10:14.580Which 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.
01:10:23.740And 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.
01:10:31.220But your whole kind of accepted view of something can turn out to be utterly false.
01:10:36.460Like a lot of history is just completely fake.
01:10:39.700And so when you see someone who's diving in face first with like courage and honesty, you just have to applaud.
01:10:46.480I can't wait to find out what you conclude.
01:10:50.480We want to announce something big that we've been working on for months now.
01:10:53.980It's a documentary series called Art of the Surge.
01:10:57.080It'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.
01:11:05.560If 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.
01:12:10.720And, 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.
01:12:18.260Because 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.
01:12:35.540And, 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.
01:12:51.220And from the Irish migrations to the Jewish and Italian migrations and everybody that came after that, there was conflict.
01:12:59.180And 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.
01:13:06.400And 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.
01:13:18.000The transit workers pretty much all Irish.
01:13:33.920But that was their economic territory.
01:13:36.300And they had certain neighborhoods that were theirs.
01:13:38.860And 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.
01:13:45.700But everybody knew that this was an Italian neighborhood and it was going to stay that way.
01:13:49.240And they had all kind of come to this settlement in a natural way.
01:13:52.080Like it just, it was an emergent order that came over the years.
01:13:55.180And when, and again, there was conflict at every stage of that.
01:14:01.460After 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.
01:14:15.680And 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.
01:14:26.080And it turned out when they got up there that they had a lot of the same problems that they had had previously.
01:14:31.980But 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.
01:14:54.720And if you read, what's the, what's the book, Nathan Glazer and it's Beyond the Melting Pot, you know, that he wrote.
01:15:02.320And they, in the, I think they wrote that in 1971.
01:15:06.500And what they predicted in that book was Moynihan and Glazer.
01:15:10.040And 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.
01:15:16.920But 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.
01:15:25.520It's going to be Italian and Jewish and Puerto Rican and black.
01:15:29.040And 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.
01:15:35.540And 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.
01:15:48.160They, you know, they, they sort of, they, they get into that.
01:15:58.260Of 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.
01:16:14.080And it doesn't seem to be remembered for some reason.
01:16:16.580No, it's, it's remembered or misremembered, like right alongside the Crown Heights, right?
01:16:28.260Um, used to live in South LA when those were all black neighborhoods down there.
01:16:32.660And 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.
01:16:44.860Those are all Latino neighborhoods and that transition was not accomplished peacefully.
01:16:48.900You know, there were, and there are, there are good studies and write-ups about this.
01:16:53.000Um, 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?
01:17:07.060That'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.
01:17:15.080And the great migration out of the South to these cities is actually in reverse right now.
01:17:18.920And a lot, like net African-Americans are moving back to the South.
01:17:22.160And, uh, you're into the Indian Empire or just like away from the coast.
01:17:57.260Killing people because of the color of their skin.
01:17:58.480And 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.
01:18:04.000But 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.
01:18:11.400So that's what bothers me about the recording of history.
01:18:13.740I mean, I think it, what happens matters, reality matters.
01:18:17.220And 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.
01:18:32.160Like, that's a level of manipulation that's like, that's just mind control.
01:18:38.200Yeah, 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.
01:18:50.120And 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.
01:19:04.000Like 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.
01:19:13.220And so if you change those stories, all of those things change as well.
01:19:17.400Okay, so that's a perfect segue to something that I'm just itching to talk to you about, itching to get your view on.
01:19:23.800So 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.
01:19:37.160Like that's what, ask anybody, that's just a fact.
01:19:39.400And 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.
01:19:50.960I try not to go there because it's so depressing.
01:20:12.860Well, I think we ran a, we ran an experiment, uh, that tells us pretty well what that is.
01:20:18.700And 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.
01:20:34.120Um, they all, they don't have these same problems.
01:20:37.300You 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.
01:20:46.540Even Romania, which is, you said, suffered more than, you know, most countries.