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Speaker 1: to one of your friends who might find it interesting.
Speaker 1: So every little bit helps. That's the important thing that
Speaker 1: I want to get across now. This particular episode, as
Speaker 1: you see in the title maybe from the description, already
Speaker 1: is a returning Champion, returning guest friend of the show,
Speaker 1: my pal CJ. Kilmer from the Dangerous History podcast. We
Speaker 1: got to catch up a little bit before recording.
Speaker 2: That was really nice and he's doing.
Speaker 1: Well, and it looks like the Woodrow Wilsons series is
Speaker 1: back on track as of this recording. He just released
Speaker 1: a it looks like an epic four and a half
Speaker 1: hour installment of that series.
Speaker 2: So I recommend going to check that out.
Speaker 1: But if you haven't already, go check out the episode
Speaker 1: he did before that. I believe it was one before
Speaker 1: that where he spoke about Woodrow Wilson's Eugenicist, because that
Speaker 1: is what we talk about in our conversation today, and
Speaker 1: about the eugenics movement itself and how it fits into
Speaker 1: the broader philosophy known as progressivism. We also had a
Speaker 1: little bit of a bonus chat about a film we
Speaker 1: both rewatched in preparation for this episode. I will not
Speaker 1: say anything more, so please give this episode a listen
Speaker 1: and hopefully find yourself surprised when you hear us talking
Speaker 1: about it, because hopefully, like us, you haven't thought about it.
Speaker 1: But now as soon as you are reminded of it,
Speaker 1: you'll go back and watch.
Speaker 2: It, because it's a really good movie.
Speaker 1: But I will say no more. So with all that said,
Speaker 1: let's get into some more impossible history. Well, let me
Speaker 1: to tell you what you would have seen and heard.
Speaker 1: If we're not do pleasant.
Speaker 3: Listening, if you're at lunch, or if you have no appetize,
Speaker 3: now is a good time to switch off the radio.
Speaker 1: An ancestor of mine main Chaine that if you eliminate
Speaker 1: the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, was.
Speaker 3: Neva Usten banjiant to that.
Speaker 1: You know GENEROPI one.
Speaker 4: Who knows that a unify some thousand years.
Speaker 1: I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace
Speaker 1: is inside. I don't see in the laughing dream.
Speaker 2: I feel a laughing night bore.
Speaker 1: I pray if we hear were asue to Gail, if
Speaker 1: we share, we're asu to Gail. Some say the world.
Speaker 3: Will end in fire.
Speaker 1: Some stay anie. From what I've tested of desire, I
Speaker 1: hold of those of flavor fire. But if it had
Speaker 1: to perish twice, I think I know him a pok.
Speaker 4: Hate to say that for destruction, I say is also
Speaker 4: great and looks sufficed.
Speaker 3: This is history possible.
Speaker 1: I am happy to be joined by my longtime friend
Speaker 1: and comrade CJ. Kilmer of the Dangerous History podcast. Welcome
Speaker 1: back to the show. CJ. I am glad to see
Speaker 1: you're doing well.
Speaker 3: Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here. It's
Speaker 3: been a while since we've chatted.
Speaker 1: It has, yeah, I at least outside of like social
Speaker 1: media back and forth and all that. But yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: But the main reason is because you did an episode
Speaker 1: as of this recording, I think what like a week ago,
Speaker 1: two weeks ago, Yeah, about Woodrow Wilson's eugenesist. We can
Speaker 1: call him a man named doctor Katzen Ellen Bogan, who
Speaker 1: you had talked about before in an earlier episode in
Speaker 1: your series. But what really got like got me going
Speaker 1: with this wasn't just the story of him and how
Speaker 1: he's connected to Wilson, but because you started talking about
Speaker 1: a subject that I guess I'll tell my audience now.
Speaker 1: I'm planning on doing a long form series on at
Speaker 1: some point in the future about the American eugenics movement,
Speaker 1: mostly because of how many people it implicates and just
Speaker 1: the disturbing, counterintuitive I guess we could say aspects of
Speaker 1: it that you talked about a bit, because you also
Speaker 1: cited two books I own right from the beginning, which
Speaker 1: is Edwin Black's War Against the Week, which I've read
Speaker 1: parts of but not in full yet. It's incredible. Edwin
Speaker 1: Black is a very good writer. I more used his
Speaker 1: I used his work in my currently ongoing series about
Speaker 1: the Muslims being used by the Third Reich. But also
Speaker 1: if I'm I don't remember his name, his last name
Speaker 1: is Leonard.
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, Thomas Leonard.
Speaker 1: I believe Thomas Leonard. Yeah, his his book illiberal reformers,
Speaker 1: I believe, is what it's called. Right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah, that's an interesting one too, because it's nominally
Speaker 3: about the way that eugenics sort of influenced progressive academics
Speaker 3: of the early twentieth century. Right, Really, it's about American
Speaker 3: eugenics as like an intellectual force, and in particular the
Speaker 3: way that it it in progressivism are like an almost
Speaker 3: one hundred percent overlapping Venn diagram of people and ideas.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, yeah, that's sort of what was really getting me interested.
Speaker 1: It actually was a subject that I came very close
Speaker 1: to making sort of the centerpiece of my thesis in
Speaker 1: grad school. I mean, I've gone a completely different direction
Speaker 1: since then, but it's such a fascinating legacy of thinking
Speaker 1: and I wanted to get into that with you a
Speaker 1: little bit here. But I think, you know, just because
Speaker 1: we like doing you know, this stuff on our podcast,
Speaker 1: Let's do some context here. Let's talk about the eugenics
Speaker 1: craze itself of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century,
Speaker 1: like what it was, what drove it, major players. I
Speaker 1: actually made a list of some names that I've come
Speaker 1: up that have come up more than once, and I'm
Speaker 1: sure you'll find all of them, if not, if not
Speaker 1: most of them, if not all of them familiar. But
Speaker 1: you know, we have a Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton. He's
Speaker 1: the inventor of eugenics. But then there's also guys like
Speaker 1: Madison Grant, who I didn't know this about him. He
Speaker 1: was the Bronx Zoo founder, but I'm more new him
Speaker 1: for his writing, known for his writing that is unbelievably
Speaker 1: Nazi es skin a lot of ways. And then we
Speaker 1: have this guy who I am more aware of than
Speaker 1: I think most people who's talking about eugenics, just because
Speaker 1: of where I'm from, and that's University of Minnesota medical
Speaker 1: professor Charles Fremont Ditte, who, until I just found out
Speaker 1: until two years ago, had a street named after him
Speaker 1: in my hometown of Minneapolis, and I always I always
Speaker 1: recognized Dyte Avenue. It was like this weird back avenue
Speaker 1: near the McDonald's I used to go to. But they
Speaker 1: finally renamed it. And that's one of those moments where
Speaker 1: I'm like, you know, maybe it's probably good to rename
Speaker 1: some things. Let's not honor a eugenicist who was a
Speaker 1: pen pal of Hitler's because that was dit in that case.
Speaker 1: But then you also have the American Museum of Natural
Speaker 1: History director H. Fairfield Osborne, and he was a noted
Speaker 1: anti semite. And of course I think this is the
Speaker 1: most controversial one, the early birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger.
Speaker 1: All these people were involved in the eugenics movement, in
Speaker 1: supporting it, like pushing it forward in their supposed research,
Speaker 1: and it also had this political angle to it. And
Speaker 1: I don't know if you have had a chance to
Speaker 1: read this book, if you've heard of it, and I'm
Speaker 1: actually holding it up so you can see it. It's
Speaker 1: called The Guarded Gate by Daniel Okrint, and he tries
Speaker 1: to demonstrate that this eugenics craze was actually what was
Speaker 1: used as a basis to restrict immigration between eighteen ninety
Speaker 1: one and nineteen twenty one. And it implicates a lot
Speaker 1: of politicians and probably one of your favorites is at
Speaker 1: the top of that list, and that's Henry Cabot Law. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it also includes Teddy Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, so it's
Speaker 1: cross partisan in a lot of cases too. It was
Speaker 1: just my point of bringing up all these names is
Speaker 1: that it really was everywhere, and it really did sort
Speaker 1: of speak to the spirit of the time that you're
Speaker 1: sort of you know that you've talked about, but I
Speaker 1: want to turn it over to you to just like
Speaker 1: give us some background on this craze, on this movement,
Speaker 1: and just the broad strokes of it.
Speaker 3: I guess, yeah, yeah. So, in my mind, eugenics comes
Speaker 3: out of a combination of Darwinian science on the one
Speaker 3: hand and then progressive kind of politics and social science
Speaker 3: on the other. And it is, at least in its
Speaker 3: original form, it's primarily an Anglo American thing. It's mostly
Speaker 3: I mean, the Germans would develop sort of their own
Speaker 3: version of it, and then they would kind of take
Speaker 3: American progressive eugenics and you know, go off the rails
Speaker 3: even further into Nazism eventually. But really, the beginning of
Speaker 3: you genics in the late nineteenth century, as far as
Speaker 3: I'm aware, is mostly a bunch of these Transatlantic elites.
Speaker 3: And the first book where I've really bumped into the
Speaker 3: Transatlantic aspect and really into a lot of the ideas
Speaker 3: behind eugenics, not not so much eugenics itself, is there's
Speaker 3: a very interesting kind of hard to find. Luckily, I
Speaker 3: have a copy history book. It's called Race and Reprochemont
Speaker 3: and the author's name, if I remember right, is Stuart Anderson,
Speaker 3: and it the subtitle is something like Anglo Saxonism and
Speaker 3: I forget American and British special relationship or you know,
Speaker 3: something like that. I know I'm way off in the
Speaker 3: exact words, but basically makes the argument that there's this
Speaker 3: weird thing where, you know, prior to say, the mid
Speaker 3: to late eighteen nineties, Americans, including a lot of America's leaders,
Speaker 3: tended to see the British as like the biggest threat.
Speaker 3: And then eventually when that sort of simmered down a
Speaker 3: little bit at least as a rival, and you know,
Speaker 3: you go back to the days like Andrew Jackson and
Speaker 3: whatever it's like to them. Even though Andrew Jackson, you know,
Speaker 3: was of Scott Scottish, Scott's Irish kind of ancestry or whatever,
Speaker 3: he still saw the British as the enemy. He saw
Speaker 3: him as the guys as much as he hated the Indians.
Speaker 3: He tended to think that like behind every Indian attack
Speaker 3: was like scheming Brits, putting them up to it on
Speaker 3: the frontier and stuff.
Speaker 1: Well that's part of a tradition, right just to just
Speaker 1: to click side, because I mean that that just seems
Speaker 1: to be kind of like a generational holdover of well,
Speaker 1: the Revolution and the War of eighteen twelve, especially when
Speaker 1: Jackson's case, I would say.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, But then for a long time, for a
Speaker 3: long time though, the British were still seen sometimes with
Speaker 3: justification as a threat. You know, they still had Canada
Speaker 3: right on America's northern frontier and border issues between the
Speaker 3: US and Britain over you know, the border between American
Speaker 3: and Canadian territory continued throughout the nineteenth century in various places.
Speaker 3: And you know, as the US started to get more
Speaker 3: immigrants from places like Ireland, it was also a way
Speaker 3: they call it twisting the lion's tail. It was a
Speaker 3: way too. You know, Let's say you're politician campaigning in
Speaker 3: a heavily Irish part of a big northern city. I
Speaker 3: talked some shit about the Limeys, and you know, it's
Speaker 3: a great way to get get your make voters to
Speaker 3: you know, go out and fire up the base for
Speaker 3: you if you're a Democrat. You know, back then, I.
Speaker 1: Think that would still work for me at this point, honestly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, especially in light of what they're doing as far
Speaker 3: as you know, completely obliterating free speech and threatening to
Speaker 3: extradite people of other countries that are slightly less unfree.
Speaker 1: We're going to be talking about We're going to be
Speaker 1: talking about predictive, a particular predictive movie at some point
Speaker 1: in this conversation. But to just bring up another one, sorry,
Speaker 1: to seem like Children of Men is coming to pass,
Speaker 1: at least in the Great Britain context. Let's hope things
Speaker 1: don't get that bad though. Yeah, yeah, yeah, anyway, I'll
Speaker 1: let you contigue.
Speaker 3: Sorry, so yeah, So, this this very interesting book, Race
Speaker 3: and Reproachemont tries to answer this question of like, how
Speaker 3: come right around the end of the nineteenth century into
Speaker 3: the very first years of the early nineteenth century or
Speaker 3: early twentieth century, how come all of a sudden, the US,
Speaker 3: especially in terms of its political class, goes from seeing
Speaker 3: it portraying the Brits as like the biggest potential rival
Speaker 3: and even threat to there are best buddies, we need
Speaker 3: to have a special relationship. We're going to bail their
Speaker 3: asses out in World War One in the name of
Speaker 3: you know, saving democracy worldwide and whatever. And he argues
Speaker 3: that a lot of it is this racialist this racialist
Speaker 3: ideology which you know has a whole lot to it
Speaker 3: that I can't do justice here, but you know, it's
Speaker 3: the idea that the the Anglo Saxons are the most
Speaker 3: advanced quote unquote race on earth in every way, including
Speaker 3: by the way, they're more advanced than the Saxon Saxons
Speaker 3: from from which they're derived somehow, which always interesting that
Speaker 3: you know, you would claim the Anglo Saxons are the
Speaker 3: greatest race in the world and the Germans are horrible?
Speaker 3: Who do you think where do you think Saxony is?
Speaker 3: You know, but well, this racialist idea.
Speaker 1: I just wanted to introduce real quick that that's you're
Speaker 1: what you're talking about, is that Anglo Saxonism that you've
Speaker 1: spoken about, and that if I remember right, and I
Speaker 1: feel like I do, Woodrow Wilson's a giant fan of that.
Speaker 2: Oh for sure.
Speaker 1: I didn't want to jump shun, but I just wanted
Speaker 1: to throw that out there.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, most progressive politicians of the era of progressivism
Speaker 3: one point zero, the era of Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt,
Speaker 3: those guys, overwhelmingly, almost all of them were Anglo Saxonists
Speaker 3: with with very few exceptions, and you know, some of
Speaker 3: them eventually made their peace with the idea that some
Speaker 3: other white people can be part of America too, although
Speaker 3: in some cases I wonder how much of it was
Speaker 3: genuine and how much was it was just that they realized, like,
Speaker 3: all right, we want to given what's happened in terms
Speaker 3: of immigration, Yeah, I gotta get some Irish and maybe
Speaker 3: even some damn Italian votes to win.
Speaker 1: So you know, I mean, maybe we gotta be nice
Speaker 1: of the Jews a little bit, but we're not gonna
Speaker 1: let them in our country clubs. Don't worry.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, we just you know, want them to
Speaker 3: funder campaign. Yeah, that's a whole.
Speaker 1: Other subject of progressive anti semitism that you know that
Speaker 1: that that's a that's a tangent. We'll we'll, we'll leave
Speaker 1: that for another day, I think.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So So there's this idea that comes out of of
Speaker 3: certain prominent families in both the US and UK, and
Speaker 3: it is is kind of building on ideas of Darwinism, Darwinism,
Speaker 3: taking them in ways that I think Darwin might have
Speaker 3: actually agreed with, but that don't necessarily don't necessarily stem
Speaker 3: from just basic ideas of things, you know, like survival
Speaker 3: of the fittest and you know, explaining how the origins
Speaker 3: of different species and whatever doesn't necessarily mean you have
Speaker 3: to conclude that, you know, the people of this part
Speaker 3: of Europe are superior to the people of that part
Speaker 3: of Europe, who are all superior to the people of
Speaker 3: this other continent next door and whatever. But you know,
Speaker 3: that's that's what they believe. And now if you believe that,
Speaker 3: then there's all kinds of things that stem from this.
Speaker 3: I mean, you could go in a las a fair direction.
Speaker 3: There were some people who kind of had some Anglo
Speaker 3: Saxonist racial ideas but were also kind of libertarian, which
Speaker 3: just like, well, you know, that's fine, the more advanced
Speaker 3: races are going to succeed, just leave things alone. But
Speaker 3: progressives are never comfortable with leaving anything alone, and they
Speaker 3: believe that you have to have interventionism into everything or
Speaker 3: else it won't work.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: They're very much OCD control freaks. And so if you
Speaker 3: give somebody with that sort of psychology and attitude this
Speaker 3: idea that some races are spirit to others, they are
Speaker 3: going to say, well, well, we can't just leave things
Speaker 3: to chance to let them work work itself out, like
Speaker 3: we have to intervene positively. They would say multiple you know,
Speaker 3: connotations of the word in order to actively encourage certain
Speaker 3: people to reproduce more and actively discourage other people from reproducing.
Speaker 3: And there's a racialist aspect to it, for sure, but
Speaker 3: there's also non racialist aspects. A lot of it also
Speaker 3: had to do with labeling people, regardless of race as
Speaker 3: being defective or feeble minded or all these other you
Speaker 3: know we get words like moron and imbecil come from
Speaker 3: these people. These were originally scientific terms. They had charts
Speaker 3: and things of like rating different levels of idiocy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you brought up the famous, infamous and heartbreaking case
Speaker 1: of Carrie Buck in your story, which she was sterilized
Speaker 1: and she was considered feeble minded, as was the term
Speaker 1: I believe they used. The Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and
Speaker 1: his infinite wisdom wrote the I think concurring opinion on
Speaker 1: that in the Supreme Court. I'm getting the year right,
Speaker 1: It was nineteen twenty one, I want to say a
Speaker 1: little bit later on later it was twenty seven, oh right, right, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: but regardless Carrie Buck was raped by I believe. I
Speaker 1: don't want to make this up. I don't want to
Speaker 1: say it was a member of her family, but she
Speaker 1: was raped and was forced to carry the baby to term,
Speaker 1: and then was sterilized afterward by order of the court
Speaker 1: because she was seen as a defective. And those laws,
Speaker 1: as you also mentioned in your episode in some parts
Speaker 1: of the country, stayed in place until the seventies, and
Speaker 1: you know, they weren't enforced in the way that they
Speaker 1: were in the twenties, but they were there. And you know,
Speaker 1: again I got to, you know, bring up my alma mater.
Speaker 1: The University of Minnesota was one of the academic institutions
Speaker 1: at the forefront of this movement. They were very much well,
Speaker 1: it's funny. They had a I believe this is actually
Speaker 1: the guy I mentioned earlier, Charles Dight. I believe he
Speaker 1: founded it. They had the Eugenic Society, the Minnesota Eugenic Society,
Speaker 1: And technically that society, or that depart meant rather at
Speaker 1: the U of M, still exists. They just want under
Speaker 1: a name change. And I couldn't tell you off the
Speaker 1: top of my head what that name change is, but
Speaker 1: it's one of those things where it's more about rebranding
Speaker 1: than actually questioning what we're really doing and what we're
Speaker 1: actually talking about here. Now I'm not employed. I don't
Speaker 1: want to make it sound like I'm implying that they're
Speaker 1: still engaging in secret eugenics. I'm just kind of, yes,
Speaker 1: adding the idea that you brought up that this is
Speaker 1: about a certain type of psychology at work.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, And they kind of blended together, you know,
Speaker 3: various types of what we would consider physical and mental handicaps,
Speaker 3: along with various types of you know, what we might
Speaker 3: call maybe mental illness or mental abnormality, maybe even in
Speaker 3: today's chronology neuroetypical things sometimes blended with racism. But yeahs,
Speaker 3: as Buck v. Bell shows, and as lots of things show,
Speaker 3: actually progressive eugenesis, Anglo American eugenesis of the turn of
Speaker 3: the last century, they often as much as we we
Speaker 3: focus on their racism towards you know, non whites and things,
Speaker 3: which is definitely definitely part of the mix.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah.
Speaker 3: They also really had a lot of hatred and contempt
Speaker 3: for lower class whites, including even lower class like Anglo Saxons,
Speaker 3: like they really looked down heavily on things like say,
Speaker 3: the white folks of Appalachia, even though technically those are
Speaker 3: mostly like Anglo Saxon people. Those are mostly English, Scottish, Scots,
Speaker 3: Irish and a little bit of German in a few places.
Speaker 3: That's your that's your appellations, that's your Hillbillies. And yet
Speaker 3: they would see those as like sometimes it almost comes
Speaker 3: across like they they have the most contempt for those people,
Speaker 3: even more so than like black people or whatever, because
Speaker 3: like almost like they should be better, you know. But right,
Speaker 3: it's like, look at them, they're white, but they're like
Speaker 3: they're like they're defective white people.
Speaker 1: Right. It's it's something that we've talked about before that,
Speaker 1: you know, the progressive mindset, whether you're talking about one
Speaker 1: point zero or four point oh, it doesn't really matter
Speaker 1: which version is that it's very much driven by the
Speaker 1: soft bigotry of low expectations. Probably the best thing we've
Speaker 1: been we were granted by George W. Bush is that
Speaker 1: that Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I wonder if he actually came up with
Speaker 3: that that phrase, or somebody smarter wrote it for.
Speaker 1: Him, you know, I mean, yeah, it's possible. I mean,
Speaker 1: but I regardless, he deserves credit for making it a
Speaker 1: very I really like that concept. It's a very real concept.
Speaker 1: And there is that sort of as you say, I
Speaker 1: think at some level there's a resentment of the poor
Speaker 1: white working class by this Anglo Saxonist deleite.
Speaker 3: They yeah, yeah, yeah, Well, if you look into the
Speaker 3: background of of let's just say, the American side of
Speaker 3: the Anglo Saxonism camp, who were you know, the over
Speaker 3: overwhelm or overwhelm overlap on the ven diagram between them
Speaker 3: Anglo Saxonist and New Genesis is virtually one hundred percent. Yeah,
Speaker 3: just look at the American side. Almost all of them,
Speaker 3: with a few exceptions here here and there, almost all
Speaker 3: of them their family has been in America since the
Speaker 3: colonial period. Most of them can go back to very
Speaker 3: early in the colonial period. But but also they're more
Speaker 3: commonly from Yankee families. By Yankee, you know, it just
Speaker 3: mean north of the Mason Dixon line. They're mostly from
Speaker 3: New England families. Even if even if the people you know,
Speaker 3: the later generations, say in the eighteen nineties, don't live
Speaker 3: in New England anymore. Maybe they live in in New York,
Speaker 3: or maybe maybe they live in maybe they live in
Speaker 3: Illinois or whatever. But but their families are New England families.
Speaker 1: The roots more than anything else.
Speaker 3: And yeah, yeah, yeah, And and the Yankees. And here
Speaker 3: I use Yankee in the specific sense of somebody of
Speaker 3: kind of New England purits and ancestry, not just anyone
Speaker 3: from north of the Mason Dixon line. The Yankees have
Speaker 3: always been in this country. They've always seen themselves as
Speaker 3: the kind of rightful ruling class. And that's just as
Speaker 3: true if you if you're looking back in the early
Speaker 3: stays of the New England colonies, they kind of looked
Speaker 3: down on the other British North American colonies. It's true,
Speaker 3: say you're looking at eighteen nineties, nineteen hundreds of the
Speaker 3: way somebody like Henry Cabot Lodge would have looked at
Speaker 3: even people of Anglo Saxon race, but from other parts
Speaker 3: of the country whose families were more humble and didn't
Speaker 3: go back to sixteen hundreds Massachusetts. You know, these are
Speaker 3: the people that founded places like Harvard and Yale, and
Speaker 3: those are the people who dominated those institutions. And what's
Speaker 3: interesting to me anyway, is that if you look at
Speaker 3: the kind of leaders political intellectuals such as they are
Speaker 3: of today's version of progressivism. Like they've given up, at
Speaker 3: least explicitly on a lot of their anti black racism
Speaker 3: and anti non white racism, but they really are all
Speaker 3: in still on their anti white working class, anti poor
Speaker 3: white people, Like they have really a lot of their
Speaker 3: hatred of the Trump movement is that they hate I
Speaker 3: believe they they hate the white working classes.
Speaker 1: They see a lot because yeah, like they for good reason.
Speaker 1: He positioned himself as you know, their avatar, as the
Speaker 1: white working classes avatar. So I mean, you know, because
Speaker 1: that was a vacuum that wasn't getting filled politically speaking.
Speaker 1: But what that ends up doing is it sort of
Speaker 1: as you imply there, kind of pulls the mask off
Speaker 1: a little bit. And what it reveals to people who
Speaker 1: at least read the history is, oh no, no, this
Speaker 1: is just a continuation of a very old American tradition.
Speaker 1: As you say, mean New England is really what we're
Speaker 1: talking about here, not even just I mean, I think
Speaker 1: I said this to you in a message earlier that
Speaker 1: I've been doing a lot of reading about the Puritans
Speaker 1: for my thesis because I'm talking about how the sale
Speaker 1: of witch trials were sort of a breaking point for
Speaker 1: American Christianity and it just changed everything. But I've been
Speaker 1: doing a lot of reading about Puritanism and the Puritans
Speaker 1: who came here, and as you said, they look down
Speaker 1: on everybody else because they saw themselves explicitly as the
Speaker 1: moral inspiration for the rest. They wanted to be a model, essentially, and.
Speaker 4: On a hill.
Speaker 3: That's where comes from. It does not come from Ronald Reagan.
Speaker 1: No, no, well, but if you want to go back
Speaker 1: even further, they took it from something that Thomas Aquinas
Speaker 1: said in the thirteenth century. I can't remember the actual quote,
Speaker 1: but it's obviously very explicitly about putting yourself in the
Speaker 1: position of being closest to God. And while today obviously
Speaker 1: we have a more secular bent to that, I argue
Speaker 1: that the most strident expressions of progressivism today are really
Speaker 1: just a new form of American Christianity that just hasn't
Speaker 1: really coalesced quite firmly yet, and specifically from the Puritan tradition.
Speaker 1: And I think the I mean, there's actually I wanted
Speaker 1: to just highlight a book that people should read. I
Speaker 1: didn't even think of this, but you were talking about
Speaker 1: the sort of Puritan tradition if people want to really
Speaker 1: get into like this very interesting divvying up of American subcultures,
Speaker 1: should check out Colin Woodard's American Nations. It's a very
Speaker 1: good book and it absolutely gets into what you're discussing
Speaker 1: in a very accessible way. So I think people should
Speaker 1: check that out. The other thing that really struck me
Speaker 1: about how you're talking about this is it's always it
Speaker 1: kind of lines up like this hatred of like the poor,
Speaker 1: like the poor white trash of America, lines up in
Speaker 1: a way with how the Nazis, or at least German
Speaker 1: anti Semites looked at Jews, German Jews in particular, And
Speaker 1: trust me, this will make sense in a second. It's
Speaker 1: more that I think what is being noticed, and I'm
Speaker 1: saying noticed in air quotes because it's not real, but
Speaker 1: it's being noticed by progressive elites, post puritan elites, whatever
Speaker 1: you want to call them, that the poor white working
Speaker 1: class are not like them, but they look like them,
Speaker 1: so therefore they must be counterfeits. And that's the basis
Speaker 1: of racism, really, but it's definitely the basis of anti Semitism,
Speaker 1: and that was especially the case in Germany, where Jews
Speaker 1: were looked at as both simultaneously being inferior and conniving
Speaker 1: and plotting, and therefore superior with outsized power, and we're
Speaker 1: therefore seen as counterfeits, a counterfeit Germans, because by the
Speaker 1: time the twentieth century rolls around, German Jews are just
Speaker 1: as German looking as other Germans. That's why there was
Speaker 1: such an obsession with those phenotypic traits of blonde hair
Speaker 1: and blue eyes and stuff, because that's already rare enough.
Speaker 1: The thing is, what Germans didn't really consider is there's
Speaker 1: plenty of blonde hair, blue eyed Jews. So but my
Speaker 1: point is just bringing this up is just saying that
Speaker 1: I think that what we're tapping into is a sort
Speaker 1: of essence of a very particular kind of racism. We
Speaker 1: can say, and you could call it maybe intergroup racism
Speaker 1: or inter color racism if you want to get into
Speaker 1: that aspect of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, you know what it. It sort of reminds
Speaker 3: me of I forget the term, what is it, the
Speaker 3: tyranny of small differences, somethings small different yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: where you know, in a lot of ways, like as
Speaker 3: much as as as Christians and Muslims hate each other
Speaker 3: much as you know, Jews and Muslims hate each other,
Speaker 3: at least in certain parts of the world, certain context. Man,
Speaker 3: no one hates each other more than like Sunnis and Sheites,
Speaker 3: you know, or you know, it's bellowed out a bit
Speaker 3: in recent uh you know, decades and whatever. But man,
Speaker 3: no one hated each other for a long time. No
Speaker 3: one hated each other more than than Catholics and Protestants.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, And and like they hated each other more
Speaker 3: than either of them hated Muslims or anything.
Speaker 1: How many millions of people are dead because that's split
Speaker 1: in human history. I mean, it's pretty crazy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah, yeah, I mean. And in
Speaker 3: Northern Ireland in the twentieth century, it's like they were.
Speaker 3: I mean, you'd be hard pressed if you didn't ask
Speaker 3: them what religion they were, you'd be hard pressed to
Speaker 3: tell them a part. They looked the same, they had,
Speaker 3: you know, in most cases, similar accents and everything.
Speaker 1: I know, I've mentioned this story before, and I think
Speaker 1: I might even mentioned it to you, But there was
Speaker 1: famous story Christopher Hitchins told about when he was in
Speaker 1: Northern Ireland. And this is back in the you know,
Speaker 1: pretty much the height of the troubles if I remember right,
Speaker 1: and he's stopped by a group of thugs and they're
Speaker 1: just like and all they just they slamo up against
Speaker 1: the wall, holding by his lapels and say Catholic a Protestant,
Speaker 1: and he just says atheist Jew because he's just like,
Speaker 1: I don't want to be involved in this. And then
Speaker 1: they kind of confer with each other, and then they
Speaker 1: come back to him and they say Catholic atheist Jew
Speaker 1: or Protestant atheist Jew. So your point is very well
Speaker 1: taken there, and I think, yeah, internacine squabbles is you know,
Speaker 1: very real. I mean, if you want to get into
Speaker 1: like silly territory. But it's very relevant. Who are the
Speaker 1: people who fight the hardest against each other when a
Speaker 1: social media pylon happens. Who's doing the most shaming. It's
Speaker 1: usually white women going after other white women. It's very
Speaker 1: much a there's a very strange human tendency that I
Speaker 1: think we're sort of talking about here, and I think
Speaker 1: it animated a lot of I think actually it might
Speaker 1: have been the animating sort of psychological at the core
Speaker 1: of I'd say, I'll say the eugenics movement, I'll say
Speaker 1: all more broadly. I think it's you know, progressivism itself.
Speaker 1: I think that that might be the sort of a
Speaker 1: defining feature of progressive psychology. But let's just stick to
Speaker 1: the eugenics thing. I'm trying to find a way to
Speaker 1: transition to your character though, and I think that, you know,
Speaker 1: bringing up Nazi Germany kind of helps as well as
Speaker 1: anti Semitism, because your figure doctor Katzen ellen Bogan. I
Speaker 1: would say he's infamous for a lot of things, but
Speaker 1: one thing.
Speaker 4: Is that he was a He was Jew who ended
Speaker 4: up while being a prisoner of the Nazis working for
Speaker 4: them and their medical experimentation apparatus.
Speaker 1: So why don't you just give us some quick background
Speaker 1: on him. I think people should just go listen to
Speaker 1: your episode, of course to get the full story. But yeah,
Speaker 1: why don't we talk about him and his time with
Speaker 1: the Nazis here?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, So he was He's a guy who was
Speaker 3: born in the eighteen eighties in a part of what
Speaker 3: today's Poland. Of course, back then Poland wasn't a nation
Speaker 3: state at the moment, and he is of Jewish background.
Speaker 3: I'm still uncertain as to, you know, if we have
Speaker 3: any any way to know, like percentage, you know, was
Speaker 3: he just a quarter of Jewish or I don't know,
Speaker 3: but he but definitely had some some significant percentage of
Speaker 3: his background was Jewish. And he went to Catholic school
Speaker 3: though growing up and and kind of identified as Catholic,
Speaker 3: and seems to have been at least at some points
Speaker 3: in his life of practicing and believing Catholic, and seems
Speaker 3: to have been kind of ashamed of his Jewish ancestry,
Speaker 3: did try to minimize it and kind of cover it
Speaker 3: up a lot in various ways. And he eventually goes
Speaker 3: to university, gets a medical degree, starts to get into
Speaker 3: early psychiatry, such as it was, and eventually he moves
Speaker 3: to the United States. Mary's a daughter of a wealthy,
Speaker 3: influential New England family coincidentally and maybe not, and he
Speaker 3: starts to he he gets into treating epileptics. He gets
Speaker 3: into one of his sort of specialties was trying to
Speaker 3: identify people who were faking psychiatric symptoms in order to
Speaker 3: get themselves off the hook for crimes, which is interesting.
Speaker 3: Eventually gets into hypnosis, and then he also eventually gets
Speaker 3: into eugenics and he works at some prestigious hospitals in Massachusetts,
Speaker 3: he teaches at Harvard, he teaches abnormal psychology, and then
Speaker 3: in nineteen eleven he goes and works at a New
Speaker 3: Jersey facility for mentally you know whatever you would call
Speaker 3: him today, people with severe psychological and mental handicaps and things,
Speaker 3: and specializes in the epilepsy there, but also is getting
Speaker 3: more and more into eugenics. And at that point, Woodrow Wilson,
Speaker 3: soon to be elected President of the United States, is
Speaker 3: serving his brief time as governor of New Jersey, which
Speaker 3: was clearly, you know, just a step stone sort of
Speaker 3: a thing for him and Woodrow Wilson, who I believe
Speaker 3: had even given him the position at the New Jersey
Speaker 3: State Epileptic Home or whatever it was called. Woodrow Wilson,
Speaker 3: who being a good progressive, was a believer in eugenics.
Speaker 3: As he's pushing through all kinds of progressive reforms in
Speaker 3: New Jersey during his first year as governor. One of
Speaker 3: the things, and this kind of slips under the radar
Speaker 3: of a lot of historiography on Wilson. I think, you know,
Speaker 3: maybe there's some reasons it might happen accidentally, but maybe
Speaker 3: some reasons that it would happen consciously. It rarely gets
Speaker 3: mentioned in books covering Wilson's political career in general. To
Speaker 3: be fair, his times in New Jersey governor generally gets
Speaker 3: almost no coverage. But even so when they do, they
Speaker 3: talk about various reforms and things he foisted on the state,
Speaker 3: but they don't mention that this guy who is later
Speaker 3: going to show up collaborating with the Nazis in book
Speaker 3: involved wrote a eugenics bill that created a state board
Speaker 3: of experts that would have the ability to declare people
Speaker 3: to be you know, defective basically and have them sterilized
Speaker 3: with nothing that we would consider like reasonable due process.
Speaker 1: And I was gonna say, these experts they're not democratically elected,
Speaker 1: not that that would make matter, but I'm just saying
Speaker 1: they're unaccountable at that point, and that makes it even
Speaker 1: worse and much more obviously sort of in keeping with
Speaker 1: the ideology.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah, Well, well, to me, where where progressivism
Speaker 3: often often leads naturally to some form of eugenics, whether
Speaker 3: it's explicitly racist or not, or whether it's just classist,
Speaker 3: or whether it's just you know, going after people with
Speaker 3: various real or alleged handicaps and things, is that progressives
Speaker 3: and one of the things at the heart of it
Speaker 3: is this sort of technocracy idea that there is such
Speaker 3: a thing as experts who are ideology free they believe,
Speaker 3: I of course, would not not agree with that at all.
Speaker 3: But this idea that there are such thing as enlightened, objective,
Speaker 3: ideology free experts the science, if you want to call
Speaker 3: it that, and that these experts are should be put
Speaker 3: in charge of just running as much of society as possible.
Speaker 3: And in the same way the progressives would say, well,
Speaker 3: you can't just let you know, the free market interplay
Speaker 3: of supply and demand determine what happens in the economy.
Speaker 3: They would also say, well, no, no, no, you have to
Speaker 3: have these economists with degrees from Ivy League schools come
Speaker 3: in and intervene in the economy.
Speaker 1: But those those economists better not be from the Austrian
Speaker 1: school or anything like that. They need to all be
Speaker 1: like they all need to be like a post knees
Speaker 1: in or whatever.
Speaker 3: Right, right, right, right, yeah. This idea that no, you
Speaker 3: can't just let farmers make their own decisions about what
Speaker 3: to do with their farms. You've got to have a
Speaker 3: Department of agriculture run by a bunch of eggheads with
Speaker 3: you know, PhDs and farm administration technology or something like this.
Speaker 3: It's the same idea again and again, and to me
Speaker 3: that's one of the biggest through lines of all the
Speaker 3: different variations of progressivism over the last you know, one
Speaker 3: hundred and twenty years or so. Is this idea of
Speaker 3: the scientistic idea, this technocracy idea. Yeah, you just need
Speaker 3: to have these experts with all these formal university credentials
Speaker 3: and give you give them power, and you don't want
Speaker 3: them to be subject to the whims of the masses, right,
Speaker 3: Or we love to play lip service to democracy, but
Speaker 3: we don't love to actually have it influence policy in
Speaker 3: any fundamental way.
Speaker 1: Right. And I've always said about the wholely technocratic idea,
Speaker 1: I actually have in the most abstract vacuum sense, I
Speaker 1: have a sympathy for the idea of technocracy, the way
Speaker 1: that anybody with a working brain has sympathy for the
Speaker 1: idea of a benevolent dictator. Like that is one of
Speaker 1: those things where in principle you can make pretty good
Speaker 1: arguments for why we should only be run by experts,
Speaker 1: but in practice we see what happens with that. And
Speaker 1: even if you just want to set aside the history
Speaker 1: of that. I think there just is an element of
Speaker 1: people not really considering the trade offs at work when
Speaker 1: you're talking about something like a technocracy. Yes, you're going
Speaker 1: to have experts running things. They are more likely to
Speaker 1: get certain things right than than certain things wrong. However,
Speaker 1: you're going to have to trade off individual freedom. And
Speaker 1: I would say democracy itself democratic principle. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: always struck me as very strange when people who would
Speaker 1: advocate for direct democracy on one hand also preing on
Speaker 1: and on about how we have to trust the experts.
Speaker 1: You just can't have both. I just I don't believe
Speaker 1: you can have both. And that's like a whole a side.
Speaker 1: I wanted to jump back to Katin Ellenbogen during his
Speaker 1: time actually specifically in the United States around that time
Speaker 1: when he became appointed by Wilson. Did he have like
Speaker 1: a like a status, like did people talk about him, like?
Speaker 1: Was he famous? To Madison Grant was famous? As another
Speaker 1: you genesis goes. I remember the Madison Grant. People can't
Speaker 1: underestimate how famous that man was, whose book The Passing
Speaker 1: of the Great Race, which is as racist as it sounds,
Speaker 1: He was a name checked in The Great Gatsby. I
Speaker 1: don't know if people remember the Tom character says, have
Speaker 1: you read the Passing of the Great Race? And I
Speaker 1: think and I think that was Fitzgerald's way of referencing
Speaker 1: his uh. I think it was his publisher, if I remember, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was Maxwell Perkins, the editor of Fitzgerald was a
Speaker 1: big fan of scientific racism. And I think that might
Speaker 1: have been Fitzgerald's way of sort of casting a little
Speaker 1: bit of shade on him, because as we know, Tom
Speaker 1: and The Great Gatsby not exactly the most sympathetic character.
Speaker 1: So but he's very much that prototypical like you know,
Speaker 1: New England blue blood, So of course he would be
Speaker 1: really into Madison Grants. So I guess what I'm wondering
Speaker 1: is was there any anyone any sort of perception of
Speaker 1: doctor Katz and Ellen Bogan like that that you're aware of,
Speaker 1: or was he a little more underground? I guess I
Speaker 1: think he was.
Speaker 3: Like slightly below a lot of those big names, but
Speaker 3: not much. It is interesting too to think about, even
Speaker 3: you know, just ignoring for a moment what we what
Speaker 3: we know happens, because we know the later plot that
Speaker 3: he later is going to collaborate with the Nazi. Even
Speaker 3: setting that aside, it is kind of interesting that this
Speaker 3: even looking at him during the he was he only
Speaker 3: lived in the United States for about a decade before
Speaker 3: he moved back to Europe. But even during that time,
Speaker 3: you know, he was a fairly big big player on
Speaker 3: the kind of medical psychiatry side of eugenics. And yet
Speaker 3: he's a guy of who is an immigrant to the
Speaker 3: United States, who is of Jewish ancestry, and a practicing Catholic,
Speaker 3: two things that both like to somebody like Henry Cabot Lodge,
Speaker 3: I mean Henry Cabot Lodge. Here's this guy, he's an
Speaker 3: Henry Cabot Lodge the way he would look at Katsan
Speaker 3: ellen Bogen, Right, Henry Cabot Lodge's family is like New
Speaker 3: England blue blood aristocracy going back to the sixteen hundreds.
Speaker 3: Then you've got Edwin Katzton ellen Bogan, a recent immigrant
Speaker 3: to the United States from Eastern Europe. Oh, of Jewish ancestry,
Speaker 3: who's a practicing Catholic. Like you would think that that,
Speaker 3: you know, the two would have nothing in common, but
Speaker 3: they definitely both would believe in this idea of eugenics.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I think katsan ellen Bogen he was like
Speaker 3: just one step below the biggest names in eugenics.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: Another one is was it Harry or Henry Laughlin?
Speaker 1: A big name, there's familiar. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So, as I mentioned in my in my episode, there
Speaker 3: was something called the Eugenics Research Association, which was a
Speaker 3: major professional, you know, organization of very of eugenicis from
Speaker 3: various academic and medical disciplines, and Kats and ellen Bogan
Speaker 3: was a founding member of that organization. He was charter
Speaker 3: member fourteen. So you know, he was a pretty a
Speaker 3: pretty big dude in the movement. He was not quite
Speaker 3: as big as some of these other, you know, better
Speaker 3: known names of eugenesis that that we've mentioned, but he
Speaker 3: was like just one step below them, you know, in
Speaker 3: the same way that I don't know, let's see trying
Speaker 3: to come up with a with a metaphor on the fly,
Speaker 3: which is always dangerous, but you know, in the same
Speaker 3: way that like, if you look back at the history
Speaker 3: of nineties alternative rock, like there's Parl Jam and then
Speaker 3: there's Stone table Pilots. Yeah, like Stone double Pilots. They
Speaker 3: were pretty big, right, they were pretty good. Yeah, but
Speaker 3: they but they were not Pearl Jam in terms of
Speaker 3: just how gigantic they were. I didn't putting putting both
Speaker 3: bands at their peak.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I didn't know STP until I got the Crow soundtrack,
Speaker 1: So yeah, I mean that. But of course I knew
Speaker 1: who Pearl Jam was because you know, I had a radio.
Speaker 1: So not that STP didn't get you know, radio play,
Speaker 1: I'm sure they did in some cases. But yeah, like
Speaker 1: that's that seems like a good enough analogy. We could
Speaker 1: probably do it with punk bands or metal bands too.
Speaker 1: I mean it's always defer to like popular and less
Speaker 1: popular bands for those kind of metaphors I think those are.
Speaker 1: That's a good move. Yeah. I So he goes back
Speaker 1: to Europe and he ends up working for the Nazis.
Speaker 1: But we should be clear he wasn't doing He didn't like,
Speaker 1: just go to the Nazis to start working to them.
Speaker 1: He didn't. He didn't raise his hand and say, you know,
Speaker 1: uh my fureor please hire me to be your chief eugenesist.
Speaker 1: It was it was. It was much more. It was tragic,
Speaker 1: don't get me wrong. And what happened to him, but
Speaker 1: then how he conducted himself, that's a that's a different question. Actually,
Speaker 1: just on a side note, I you really got me
Speaker 1: thinking about how he's like this sort of moral inverse
Speaker 1: of the other. Probably the most famous Jewish doctor forced
Speaker 1: to work with the Nazis, and that was doctor Miklos
Speaker 1: Neasley at Nauschwitz, who was Mengel A's assistant. He was
Speaker 1: Mangl's assistant in human experimentation, not because he was a
Speaker 1: fan of what was going on, but because that was
Speaker 1: the only way he'd keep his wife and child alive,
Speaker 1: if I remember right. That is not the case with
Speaker 1: doctor katzenellen Bogen.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, it helped him, like
Speaker 3: live a much more comfortable life than most people in
Speaker 3: bogenvolved for sure, but yeah, it wasn't like and yeah,
Speaker 3: I mean, to be fair, the guy tried to escape
Speaker 3: the Nazis twice. He just made poor choices and where
Speaker 3: he fled to he didn't go far enough. Like yeah,
Speaker 3: you know, he actually was in Germany when the Nazis
Speaker 3: really took over, and you know he understood the funny
Speaker 3: part that he shared most of their like he thought
Speaker 3: that Nordic's were the best you know, quote unquote race
Speaker 3: of people there was, and that they should be privileged,
Speaker 3: like literally privileged in the real sense of the word.
Speaker 3: But he also, you know, knew that under the laws
Speaker 3: that the Nazis were passing, he would be labeled as
Speaker 3: Jewish and they would have all kinds of This is
Speaker 3: still well before the final solution, but it still had
Speaker 3: all kinds of negative things would happen to you, and
Speaker 3: and you know, oh yeah, so he fled.
Speaker 1: Well, and that's that's just to me, that the very least,
Speaker 1: I mean, he must have been at least half Jewish,
Speaker 1: because then that's I mean, well, I don't know, though,
Speaker 1: I you know, I have Jewish ancestry, and I don't
Speaker 1: think i'd have enough to be thrown in a camp.
Speaker 2: But I might have.
Speaker 1: I might have enough to have been sterilized or at
Speaker 1: least prohibited from marrying certain people if I was alive
Speaker 1: back then. So I don't I don't know. But in
Speaker 1: his case, it sounds like he was very aware of
Speaker 1: the precarious situation that he was in racial.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, And and he fled. But the problem
Speaker 3: is he fled to Czechoslovakia.
Speaker 1: That's really funny.
Speaker 3: And it was only like one or two years before
Speaker 3: the Nazis took that over, so, you know, and then
Speaker 3: he hey managed to get out of there. But where
Speaker 3: do he flee? He fled to France and then France.
Speaker 3: I think within a year of him getting to France,
Speaker 3: France gets conquered by the Nazis, you know, so he
Speaker 3: he he made the mistake of not going far enough
Speaker 3: both times that he tried to flee the Nazis. Once
Speaker 3: he's in France, he can't get out. It's too late
Speaker 3: at that point, and he's sort of in limbo for
Speaker 3: a little while where the the Gestapo. They they know
Speaker 3: who he is, they have him on their radar. They
Speaker 3: arrest them a few times, but let him go a
Speaker 3: few times. You know. He's kind of in this limbo
Speaker 3: that a lot of people I think sort of were
Speaker 3: in in in various Nazi occupied park.
Speaker 1: Do we know why he was getting arrested? Was it
Speaker 1: just because of the Jewish ancestry or was he doing
Speaker 1: things that was like making drawing attention to himself? I
Speaker 1: guess is what I'm wondering.
Speaker 3: That's a good question. I there's still so much about
Speaker 3: him that is just murky as hell, and I don't know, Okay,
Speaker 3: I don't know for sure. What I've come across, you know,
Speaker 3: seems at this point that it was point to the
Speaker 3: fact that they were just you know, looking around for Jews,
Speaker 3: but they were also I think he wasn't around for foreigners, right,
Speaker 3: and he was.
Speaker 1: An intellectual, so that also already makes him a target.
Speaker 1: And I assumed that he was well enough known in
Speaker 1: places that he went, I mean, not just in America,
Speaker 1: like he must have had a reputation built for himself.
Speaker 1: So I would just if I was to a you know,
Speaker 1: I guess speculate it would be because he was probably
Speaker 1: well enough known, they probably had him on their radar,
Speaker 1: and because he was Jewish and also an intellectual, that
Speaker 1: probably just made him be seen as a potential threat
Speaker 1: or which is just so funny that, I mean, the
Speaker 1: Nazis were just so hyper conscious of so called threats,
Speaker 1: and they everything that they saw is threatening was not
Speaker 1: threatening at all.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, And with Kats and Ellen Bogan too. He
Speaker 3: was an American citizen, had gotten citizenship when he was
Speaker 3: married to an American woman, and he had he moved
Speaker 3: back to Europe in the middle of World War One,
Speaker 3: and he initially went to Russia and then he kind
Speaker 3: of bounced around multiple countries over the next couple of
Speaker 3: decades to point.
Speaker 1: Out he had the worst luck with picking places to go.
Speaker 1: He went to Russia during World War One. I just
Speaker 1: had preter naturally bad luck.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, he would have
Speaker 3: been better off just stay in America. Stay in America.
Speaker 3: If you're going to move back to Europe, I don't know,
Speaker 3: go to Switzerland or going to like why Sweden or something?
Speaker 1: Right like, why did he not go to Switzerland? That's
Speaker 1: always my question. It's probably as heart easier said than done.
Speaker 1: I mean, I know they have very uh strict immigration
Speaker 1: laws and whatnot, but still it just it's just seems
Speaker 1: really yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So I think it was just that he just
Speaker 3: had this bizarre background of of you know, having some
Speaker 3: Jewish ancestry, being an American citizen, having lived in a
Speaker 3: whole bunch of different countries. I think he just I
Speaker 3: think I think maybe why they they had him on
Speaker 3: the radar, they arrested and let him go, rest and
Speaker 3: let him go and then finally rest them for good.
Speaker 3: I think it was just because they didn't know what
Speaker 3: to do with them. It wasn't so like if he
Speaker 3: was a guy who was part of the French resistance,
Speaker 3: or he was a guy who was out there like
Speaker 3: speaking publicly against the Nazis or whatever. They just gotten
Speaker 3: rid of him right away. But you know, I think
Speaker 3: they were just looking at him, like, what the hell
Speaker 3: do we do with this guy, Like he's a eugenicist.
Speaker 3: We're all in on the eugenicists, you know, but but
Speaker 3: he's got all these other things about him. We don't
Speaker 3: quite trust him.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Well it makes me think that, uh, well,
Speaker 1: just that I that someone like him is uh is
Speaker 1: similar to those people who you would see in Britain
Speaker 1: and America especially, who didn't have an issue with the
Speaker 1: Nazis beliefs or their racism. They just didn't like how
Speaker 1: quote unquote thuggish they were. And they were thuggish, don't
Speaker 1: get me wrong, but they really just take issue with
Speaker 1: just how they executed their objectively heinous ideology instead of
Speaker 1: just like looking at the whole picture, you know, right.
Speaker 3: Right, you know, Well, this, this to me, it reminds
Speaker 3: me of why I think a lot of American kind
Speaker 3: of warhawckey neocon and needle libs hate Trump so much,
Speaker 3: is because he puts a brutish, uncouth an ear on
Speaker 3: American imperialism. And I mean, he still really kind of
Speaker 3: like holds to a lot of neocon ideology in a
Speaker 3: lot of ways.
Speaker 2: But he's.
Speaker 3: But the problem is he he said Trump says the
Speaker 3: quiet part out loud too much with that stuff, and
Speaker 3: he's like, I just just kill their families, you know,
Speaker 3: or whatever. He puts a he puts an ugly face
Speaker 3: on American imperialism. He doesn't actually make it any worse.
Speaker 3: In some ways, he makes it a little bit better. He's
Speaker 3: a little bit less in reality, you know, slightly less
Speaker 3: mass murderous than a lot of these neocons would be.
Speaker 3: But he he doesn't do it in the smooth talking,
Speaker 3: genteel way. And and I think that that that's the
Speaker 3: way that somebody that a lot of the to tie
Speaker 3: it back to progressivism version one point zero, early twentieth
Speaker 3: century America. I think that's the way that somebody for example,
Speaker 3: and this came up in my episode I did a
Speaker 3: while back about Woodrow Wilson and Race, where I talked
Speaker 3: about the famous story of him watching Birth of a Nation.
Speaker 3: Oh yes, and how it's probably not true that he
Speaker 3: came out of it totally positive and gushing that's probably
Speaker 3: not true. Even though that's still repeated by a lot
Speaker 3: of people. It was even repeated by me for a while.
Speaker 3: Sunce I dug into it more. And I think that
Speaker 3: a lot of these people, like like Woodrow Wilson or
Speaker 3: Henry Cabot Lodge or or you know, maybe a John
Speaker 3: d Rocke Hiller junior, they these were not fans of
Speaker 3: the kou kucks Klan, even though superficially it'd say like, well,
Speaker 3: the both of them are prejudiced against black people and
Speaker 3: don't like Jews, and both of them, you know, want
Speaker 3: to have a stricter immigration policy, all these different things.
Speaker 3: But like, but it's the same dynamic of like why
Speaker 3: why a more suave devoneer neokon warhawk doesn't like Donald Trump?
Speaker 3: It's not so much policy. May be a little bit
Speaker 3: of policy difference here and there, like he doesn't want
Speaker 3: to start World War three with Russia as quickly as
Speaker 3: they do or something. But it's it's these it's these
Speaker 3: things of like, well, you know, he he says the
Speaker 3: quiet part out loud. He puts an ugly face on
Speaker 3: a lot of the ship. We actually believe and culturally
Speaker 3: we're not comfortable with that just just you know, in
Speaker 3: a cultural sense, we don't. We don't like that. It's
Speaker 3: like the guy who comes into your country club and
Speaker 3: is like Belgian and shit, you know. But also, yeah,
Speaker 3: it might put people off. It might it might cause
Speaker 3: some people to put on the they live sunglasses and
Speaker 3: realize that, you know that lurking behind the nice speeches
Speaker 3: of of Woodrow Wilson or a Barack Obama is a
Speaker 3: hardcore imperialist.
Speaker 1: Mm hmmmm. Yeah. And I and I get the feeling
Speaker 1: that that might have been doctor Katz and Allen Bogan's
Speaker 1: sort of mentality. I mean, it stands to reason it
Speaker 1: would be just because the circles he ran in the
Speaker 1: and I think it also stands the reason that he,
Speaker 1: as you say it, seems to very clearly have been
Speaker 1: trying to hide his uh, his Judaism or Jewishness rather
Speaker 1: like well before the Nazis took power. He sounds like
Speaker 1: he was doing that from a very early age. And
Speaker 1: you know, for whatever reason that was, I mean, maybe
Speaker 1: he was alienated from the religion. Maybe it was you know,
Speaker 1: racial shame or something. I don't, we don't know, I suppose,
Speaker 1: But but the point is is he saw himself as
Speaker 1: like appreciating that. I would imagine he saw himself appreciating
Speaker 1: then as someone who could appreciate the Nazis like ideas,
Speaker 1: but their methods were just beyond the pale for him,
Speaker 1: and that might have led to him speaking a little
Speaker 1: loosely at times, and that might have resulted in him
Speaker 1: getting picked up. And then the fact that he was
Speaker 1: Jewish like just made it all the better or made
Speaker 1: it all the more likely that the Nazis would do that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, And in general, the Nazis tended to often
Speaker 3: zero in on like intellectuals and professors, like unless they
Speaker 3: were obviously there were some intellectuals and professors they loved and.
Speaker 1: Spottinger, yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: But basically, if you were an intellectual or a professor
Speaker 3: or something along those lines, and you were not like
Speaker 3: vociferously actively, you know, one hundred percent cheerleading the Nazis,
Speaker 3: they would tend to view you with suspicion. Even if
Speaker 3: you weren't one hundred percent dead set against him against them,
Speaker 3: they would still, I think, tend to view you with
Speaker 3: suspicion if you weren't totally on board, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And in that sense, that's why it's helpful to
Speaker 1: remember that even though people can make those cheap comparisons
Speaker 1: to modern day American populism to the Nazis is obviously
Speaker 1: very different in almost every way.
Speaker 3: That is.
Speaker 1: One area of similarity is that they're both popular. I mean,
Speaker 1: populism is populism, doesn't really matter what ideology is propping up.
Speaker 1: There's always going to be a suspicion of the intellectual
Speaker 1: at that point, and it's going to, you know, like
Speaker 1: result in some cases deportation to a camp. In the
Speaker 1: case of the Nazis, and you said he went to
Speaker 1: book involved. Was that the first place he was sent
Speaker 1: like just straight up? Or was he sent to other camps?
Speaker 1: Like did he bounce around?
Speaker 3: I don't think he went to any other camps. He
Speaker 3: was in custody. I don't know like what kind of
Speaker 3: facility he was in. But he was in custody in
Speaker 3: France for a little while, and they shuttled him around
Speaker 3: to work for them as a to work for them
Speaker 3: as a doctor in a few places. But as far
Speaker 3: as I know, that wasn't for very long. And then
Speaker 3: they sent him to Bukenvald and there he was, you know,
Speaker 3: for the remainder of the war.
Speaker 1: What kind of experimental work was he doing there? I mean,
Speaker 1: it obviously depends on what the you know staff and
Speaker 1: so called medical staff of Buchinvald were interested in. I mean,
Speaker 1: do we have any information on what kind of experiments
Speaker 1: he was taking part in?
Speaker 3: I don't think we do with one hundred percent certainty.
Speaker 3: The trial of him and I read some of the
Speaker 3: transcripts from his trial by you know, the Allied courts,
Speaker 3: as I believe, so it was trying to remember unless.
Speaker 1: It was done before Nuremberg, I mean, it doesn't really matter.
Speaker 1: I suppose it's like wherever it was happening, he was
Speaker 1: being questioned for his complicity and.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it was one of those you know, crimes
Speaker 3: of humanity type tribunals, and it was all very messy.
Speaker 3: He didn't actually get arrested by the Allies until several
Speaker 3: months after the war was ended and Bukenwald was liberated,
Speaker 3: So I guess, at least initially, you know, the Allies
Speaker 3: didn't really know who he was.
Speaker 1: What he might have done there, and that was a
Speaker 1: story with a lot of post war like war criminals
Speaker 1: who got away with it too.
Speaker 3: I mean, I've been such a chaotic situation too. When
Speaker 3: you think about it, I mean, just you know, everything's
Speaker 3: bombed into rubble. How do you even know who's who
Speaker 3: if like half the public records in existence are are
Speaker 3: just gone, right, either just from the natural destruction of
Speaker 3: war from people at the last minute, you know, on
Speaker 3: the Nazi side trying to destroy records to.
Speaker 1: Hide in which they did a lot of that.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Then you got the American oss going in there
Speaker 3: and paper clipping people and covering up their crimes because
Speaker 3: they wanted to recruit him to work for Uncle Sam,
Speaker 3: and just just chaos going on. Yeah, and and so
Speaker 3: I think initially it was just like, oh, here's this guy,
Speaker 3: and nobody thought like, oh, really, he's a he's a
Speaker 3: prisoner here, huh?
Speaker 2: Why why is he fat? Why was he fat?
Speaker 3: And every other prisoner we're seeing is like a twig,
Speaker 3: you know, is a walking corpse about to die of
Speaker 3: starvation tomorrow. I have to wait.
Speaker 1: So when they found him? Do we know this is
Speaker 1: such a small detail, but it just seems so interesting
Speaker 1: to me. Was he wearing the striped pajamas so to
Speaker 1: speak when they found him? Because that is a good question,
Speaker 1: because what I'm wondering if he was my first assumption
Speaker 1: is oh he put those on, like, oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I guarantee you he was wearing a suit the entire
Speaker 1: time he was working there.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah. That was one of the one of
Speaker 3: the many privileges he got for working with the Nazis
Speaker 3: was he he didn't have to wear the prisoner uniform.
Speaker 3: He got a decent room food. I think he had
Speaker 3: to think, yeah, a roommate. Yeah, I think he had
Speaker 3: a roommate, but like only one. He didn't have like
Speaker 3: twenty eight guys in a tiny like two y two
Speaker 3: cell the way a lot of the unlucky people at
Speaker 3: Bugenwald had had to go through it. You know, he
Speaker 3: got decent food, he got like, he got all kinds
Speaker 3: of little perks and things. Yeah and so yeah.
Speaker 1: So we don't know specifically what he was doing, but
Speaker 1: he definitely mounted a pretty epic defense for himself self defense.
Speaker 1: And again I recommend people just listen to your episodes
Speaker 1: so they can get the full like transcript treatment that
Speaker 1: you gave it. But I mean, was there any highlights
Speaker 1: from his self defense that like, what were your takeaways
Speaker 1: from that self defense?
Speaker 3: Well, as I mentioned, and I think Edwin Black points
Speaker 3: this out too. This is not an original insight to me,
Speaker 3: but he had a lot of advantages in a trial
Speaker 3: like that that the other Nazi defendants didn't. He was
Speaker 3: fluent in English, he was. He was fluent in a
Speaker 3: lot of languages, he really was. But you know, he
Speaker 3: lived in America for about a decade so, and he
Speaker 3: taught at Harvard and he worked at American Hospital, So
Speaker 3: you know, he's very fluent in English. That's a huge
Speaker 3: plus that most Nazis didn't have. He also, by living
Speaker 3: in America and being in these sort of Ivy League
Speaker 3: circles and things like, he was familiar with how the
Speaker 3: American judicial system works, which the you know, the trials
Speaker 3: of the Nazis were largely American style jurisprudence. So so
Speaker 3: his defense is much more clever than a lot of
Speaker 3: the Nazis. A lot of the Nazi defense it's kind
Speaker 3: of like typical, you know, and I say this as
Speaker 3: someone who is of partially German ancestry and does have
Speaker 3: a touch of the tism. Germans a lot of times
Speaker 3: seem to all be autistic, and so you know, they
Speaker 3: have their like I'm not guilty because look, here's the
Speaker 3: piece of paper, that says I was following Arders, So
Speaker 3: you know, I was just following the rules. How can
Speaker 3: I be guilty of anything if I was following the rules?
Speaker 3: You know, it's this very autistic thing.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, because there's a certain logical sense to it.
Speaker 1: There's no moral sense to it, but there's a logical
Speaker 1: sense to it. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, this is also, by the way, something else I've
Speaker 3: been covering for a while and need to put out
Speaker 3: more episodes on. But the way that say, from nineteen
Speaker 3: fourteen to nineteen seventeen, British and German propaganda operations, we're
Speaker 3: both trying to target American public opinion in regard to
Speaker 3: World War One. The British were so much slicker at
Speaker 3: propaganda because they understood how it works. They interstood like,
Speaker 3: you don't go into it with logic and rationality and
Speaker 3: like you know, literal or metaphorical charts and graphs and
Speaker 3: things you like, you might actually be one hundred percent right,
Speaker 3: doesn't matter. You go in and tell an emotional stop
Speaker 3: story that might be ninety percent bullshit, but it gets
Speaker 3: the job done. And the Germans will come in and
Speaker 3: be like, well, you know, the British are actually violating
Speaker 3: the laws of Sea even worse than we are. And
Speaker 3: here I'm in a site a treaty from eighteen forty seven,
Speaker 3: and you could see in sub paragraph B the British
Speaker 3: are actually violating it worse than we are. And the
Speaker 3: British would come in and be like, yeah, well you're
Speaker 3: banatic Belgian babies. How do you like that? And the
Speaker 3: Americans would be like, oh my god, the Germans are
Speaker 3: doing what And so that's sort of how I see
Speaker 3: a lot of the Nazis. I mean, they were guilty,
Speaker 3: hell the don't get me wrong, but they also they
Speaker 3: also were totally ham fisted in their defense a lot
Speaker 3: of the time and caston Ellenbogen though, you know, he
Speaker 3: used his his familiarity with the English language and with
Speaker 3: American kind I think kind of culture, but also the
Speaker 3: American legal system, and his defense was more like, I'm
Speaker 3: just gonna muddy the waters as much as I possibly can.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna seize on every little technicality and inconsistency. I'm
Speaker 3: gonna just, you know, do all these different things. And
Speaker 3: and so it ends up where he succeeded in muddying
Speaker 3: the waters enough that nobody was able to and he
Speaker 3: also I think had the luck of not being arrested
Speaker 3: right away, and there's more time for you know, records
Speaker 3: to be lost and for witnesses to what he had
Speaker 3: done to be lost in one way or another fall
Speaker 3: out of contact, and so they they weren't able to
Speaker 3: ever explicitly to the legal standards. They wanted to pain
Speaker 3: like specific killings on him, things like that that might
Speaker 3: have gotten into the death.
Speaker 1: But there was accusations that he had killed like over
Speaker 1: a thousand prisoners with lethal injections. Oh yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: I think he probably did. I mean that number might
Speaker 1: be lowballing it, to be honest.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, he was, like he was. He got very
Speaker 3: close to the head doctor there, a doctor, a German
Speaker 3: doctor named Schladowski or something like that. He got very
Speaker 3: close to him. He even was sort of acting as
Speaker 3: the guy shrink for a while and and definitely was
Speaker 3: assisting him in all these things. And it's like, if
Speaker 3: you're doing all that, and if the Nazis are like
Speaker 3: being by the standards of Bukenvalve being very nice to you,
Speaker 3: giving you better food and lodging and letting you wear
Speaker 3: regular clothes, and like you're fat while everyone else is
Speaker 3: starving to death. It's like, you're probably not drawing too
Speaker 3: many lines of like, wait a minute, I'm willing to
Speaker 3: do this, but but euthanize someone who went through an
Speaker 3: experiment and lived somehow I draw the line there, or
Speaker 3: what you want me to assist you and doing some
Speaker 3: kind of like Mangalis style medical thing of trying to
Speaker 3: change someone eye color with surgery, or you know, trying
Speaker 3: to implant artificial glands at a gay person to science
Speaker 3: the gay away. It's like, I don't, I don't. I
Speaker 3: just don't believe that he was actually drawing those lines.
Speaker 3: But of course he's going to pretend in his trial
Speaker 3: because as we saw by his behavior in Buganval, he's
Speaker 3: he's willing to do whatever it takes when it comes
Speaker 3: to save in his own skin.
Speaker 1: The part that like blew me away the most with
Speaker 1: how clever it was. By the way, and as you say,
Speaker 1: he was very skilled in this was I totally forgot
Speaker 1: about this, but I just did a quick google and
Speaker 1: I remembered correctly. He requested the death penalty at his
Speaker 1: own trial, which is crazy. And I actually if you
Speaker 1: have if you don't have the quote it in front
Speaker 1: of you, I found it, but I could just say
Speaker 1: the part that really blew me away is where he says,
Speaker 1: you have placed the mark of Cain on my forehead.
Speaker 1: Any physician who committed the crimes I am charged with
Speaker 1: deserves to be killed. That's so clever because he's not
Speaker 1: admitting to doing anything. He's saying, you're to want to
Speaker 1: kill me if you believe I did these things, but
Speaker 1: I didn't do these things.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, And that's the thing. And and I kind
Speaker 3: of thought about it after I recorded that episode and said,
Speaker 3: maybe I didn't quite make clear sort of my take
Speaker 3: on it enough because I don't actually believe that he
Speaker 3: I don't actually believe that he legitimately wanted capital punishment.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 3: I think it was just another part of his defense,
Speaker 3: and it was sort of like a drama queen move
Speaker 3: where he's like, well, gee, whiz, if you think I
Speaker 3: like you were saying like, if you think I did
Speaker 3: do this, why y'ada just kill him, sort of saying
Speaker 3: like I think he was almost trying to pull like
Speaker 3: an all or nothing move of like, if you think
Speaker 3: I'm this bad, give me the death penalty, with the
Speaker 3: unstated flip side being or let me go. You know,
Speaker 3: it's kind of kind of the move of like on
Speaker 3: cop shows and guys like, well, either you need to
Speaker 3: charge me or you need to cut me loose, you
Speaker 3: know that certain thing. Now, they didn't. They didn't give
Speaker 3: him his wage on either case either his I think
Speaker 3: not not serious, not not earnestly meant to request for
Speaker 3: capital punishment or or what he really I'm sure wanted,
Speaker 3: which was to be let go. But they gave him
Speaker 3: life in prison, which ended up amounting to in practice
Speaker 3: less than a decade.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was commuted, I remember you talking about that,
Speaker 1: which happened a lot. Yeah, with the Nazi collaborators. I mean, really,
Speaker 1: the only punishments that maybe I'm wrong, but I'm pretty
Speaker 1: sure the only punishments that stuck, so to speak, were
Speaker 1: the ones that involved the Nazis being hung.
Speaker 2: So yeah, which, you know, I'm yeah, that brings.
Speaker 1: Up a whole question of you know, when is a
Speaker 1: death penalty appropriate. Some say never, some say only in
Speaker 1: extreme cases. I think in the case of someone like
Speaker 1: doctor Mengela, him being assassinated in Argentina probably the appropriate
Speaker 1: punishment for him, especially because he got away.
Speaker 3: But regardless, yeah, yeah, yeah, Well with with Katson, Ellenbogen.
Speaker 3: You know, it's circling back to the question of what
Speaker 3: specific experiments did he participate in as part of this
Speaker 3: like just almost Bill Clinton esque. You know. I did
Speaker 3: refer to that in my episode of like It's Finding
Speaker 3: Me of a Bill Clinton move, where you're just like, well,
Speaker 3: it depends on what the meaning of the word is is,
Speaker 3: you know, it's just like seizing on all these technicalities
Speaker 3: and things like that. That when it came to the
Speaker 3: question of did he help any of the things we
Speaker 3: know happened at Bugenwald as far as nasty experiments and things,
Speaker 3: he said something like, oh, I didn't participate in any
Speaker 3: actual experiments on human subjects, but I did assist some
Speaker 3: of the camp you know, Nazi doctors and scientists with
Speaker 3: quote unquote pure research. And so it's this again, this
Speaker 3: weird just muddying the hell out of the waters of like, look,
Speaker 3: I'm not saying I didn't help them with anything, but
Speaker 3: I didn't have but I didn't help them with anything
Speaker 3: that's bad enough to potentially get me the death penalty,
Speaker 3: you know what I'm saying, Like that's sort.
Speaker 2: Of the move.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's the master the mastery of the euphemism, you know,
Speaker 1: and obviously euphemism's don't hold any ideological loyalty. But I
Speaker 1: will say that there is that element that we're kind
Speaker 1: of touching on without using the word euphemism, of like,
Speaker 1: what kind of helps define progressivism in a lot of
Speaker 1: ways is the is there? We don't want the blunt
Speaker 1: Nazi esque, you know, thuggery, but we want what they
Speaker 1: want is essentially what you know, someone like kats and
Speaker 1: Allebogo would say's like, yes, we want to get rid
Speaker 1: of the defectives, but we don't want to be storming
Speaker 1: into mental hospitals and shooting them, you know, oh yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we know we need to do this with the scientific
Speaker 1: measurement in mind.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, and and scientific sounding language and soft, you know,
Speaker 3: kind of nanny state sounding language. I mean, really, I
Speaker 3: think where where a lot of progressives would want to
Speaker 3: end up. And I'm not talking about the rank and file,
Speaker 3: because I think the rank and file, most rank and
Speaker 3: file self identifying progressives don't even understand what progressivism is.
Speaker 2: No, so they have some vague thing.
Speaker 3: About like, oh, it's about helping the poor and cleaning
Speaker 3: up corruption or some some vague crap like that. But
Speaker 3: when you look at the hardcore, you know, people back
Speaker 3: in the day or today who are who are hardcore
Speaker 3: progressives and at least have some understanding of what it
Speaker 3: really is. I think where a lot of them would
Speaker 3: like to end up, if they were being honest, is
Speaker 3: in the world of demolition Man, where there's this like
Speaker 3: very soft you know, yeah, yeah, like Gavin Newsom reminds
Speaker 3: me a lot, or Justin Trudeau, they remind me of
Speaker 3: doctor Cocteau. They're they're these very soft kind of beta males.
Speaker 3: There's very like, oh no, this is for your own good.
Speaker 3: We're not here to It's not at all like classical
Speaker 3: fascism where it was like it's a boot on your
Speaker 3: face and you know it's a bunch of goose step
Speaker 3: and tough guys or whatever like that. It's like, oh no, no, no,
Speaker 3: we're not here to hurt you. We're here to help you. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and this is for your own good and please let
Speaker 3: us help you.
Speaker 1: Yeah. It strikes me as that it just reminded me
Speaker 1: of that. How even though it's a very brutal book
Speaker 1: and it's also over referenced, but it's one of my
Speaker 1: favorite books of all time in nineteen eighty four and
Speaker 1: the last part of it when O'Brien is deprogramming Winston,
Speaker 1: and there's multiple moments where when he's not using the
Speaker 1: very brutal, upfront language that he uses throughout it. Or
Speaker 1: Well painted him in very sort of sympathetic ways, like
Speaker 1: he seems like he's sympathetic in his in that way,
Speaker 1: I think what Orwell was doing was trying to demonstrate, like,
Speaker 1: that's the real horror of totalitarianism, is that is the
Speaker 1: idea that we're doing this for you, no matter how
Speaker 1: cruel it might actually be. And to address something that
Speaker 1: you said about how most rank and file progressive identifying
Speaker 1: people don't even think about it this way, I think
Speaker 1: what it is is because if you just kind of
Speaker 1: step back, or don't step back, and just think about
Speaker 1: what does progress mean? It's hard in the twenty first
Speaker 1: century to think of that as a bad thing because
Speaker 1: we associate progress with things like medical advancements, and that
Speaker 1: is a good form of progress. Technological progress isn't necessarily
Speaker 1: a bad thing. In fact that say, it's usually a
Speaker 1: good thing, with probably the exception well, we're starting to
Speaker 1: see if social media and things like that that's effects
Speaker 1: on the brain. But regardless, progress when only looked at superficially,
Speaker 1: does seem like a good thing. But what it really means,
Speaker 1: and I've tried for so long to define it in
Speaker 1: my own in my own words, Like why I find
Speaker 1: it so uncomfortable as a philosophy, not even as a politics,
Speaker 1: just as a philosophy is that it's this idea that humankind,
Speaker 1: human humanity itself and society is perfectible and that there
Speaker 1: is some ideal world, of course defined by very particular people,
Speaker 1: quote unquote experts, but regardless of who's defining it's like again,
Speaker 1: it's just more who's defining it, because you know, like
Speaker 1: I did say this once, is an inversion of the
Speaker 1: terrorist freedom fighter thing. I think that one man's progress
Speaker 1: is another man's tyranny. You just can't. You can't be
Speaker 1: making these points about progress if you purport to have
Speaker 1: a democracy, like we were kind of talking about earlier.
Speaker 1: And one thing I thought was really interesting about the
Speaker 1: trajectory of progressivism is that the constant is that idea
Speaker 1: that humanity or society is perfectible. That's the constant. But
Speaker 1: perfecting it through nature or through nurture is what changes.
Speaker 1: And I think, right now we're kind of in this
Speaker 1: like post LBJ era where it's about perfecting society, perfecting
Speaker 1: nurture in order to perfect society. Back in the days
Speaker 1: of katzen Ellenbogen, we're talking about perfecting human beings through
Speaker 1: you know, through nature, through the tampering with nature. And
Speaker 1: I think that the uh, the the constant being, that
Speaker 1: impulse is just what I find so disturbing about what
Speaker 1: we call progressivism. And it's I don't really have a
Speaker 1: question with this, It's just I more wanted your thoughts
Speaker 1: on this idea that is defined by this desire to
Speaker 1: engineer humanity, Like that's how I would define progressivism in
Speaker 1: this most fundamental science.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, well, well this idea of progress which you know,
Speaker 3: if we want to get into intellectual history nerddom for
Speaker 3: a moment, sure, and its immediate its immediate origin in
Speaker 3: American progressivism is German historicism. It's it's a particular school
Speaker 3: of kind of German political philosophy from the mid to
Speaker 3: nineteenth century that says, among other things, that history it's
Speaker 3: very teleological, that history is moving in one particular direction,
Speaker 3: and there are occasional little minor setbacks and occasional like deviations,
Speaker 3: you know, groups that go against the tide of history,
Speaker 3: that are on the wrong side of history, if you
Speaker 3: want to put it that way. But this idea that
Speaker 3: history is like moving from point A to point B,
Speaker 3: and that the enlightened intellectuals and whatever can accurately understand
Speaker 3: and identify the direction, and that therefore then they have
Speaker 3: the responsibility like not just to sit by passively as
Speaker 3: commentators describing the the direction of history, but to like
Speaker 3: actively make it go that way. And if you want
Speaker 3: to go further back, I mean, you could argue that
Speaker 3: this whole teleological understanding of time itself and the human
Speaker 3: story in some ways goes back to Christianity, this or
Speaker 3: even Judaism before this, this linear idea of time as
Speaker 3: opposed to a more cyclical or a more just is
Speaker 3: if you think about it, even evolution itself, like Darwinian evolution,
Speaker 3: it's not really telelogical because there's not really an endpoint
Speaker 3: that life is moving toward. It's more just. You can identify, Yeah,
Speaker 3: you can identify the process and the patterns, but really
Speaker 3: all you're doing is pointing out look. For this length
Speaker 3: of time, this adaptation was advantageous. Then the environment changed
Speaker 3: it was no longer advantageous that you know, organisms with
Speaker 3: that adaptation suddenly were at a disadvantage and died off
Speaker 3: organisms were totally different. But it's random as far as
Speaker 3: who has what adaptation and then who just happens to
Speaker 3: have the luck of that adaptation is good right now,
Speaker 3: and so your species is fruitful and multiplies, and another
Speaker 3: species is eyes off and so. But but this Christian
Speaker 3: idea that like there's in the beginning, there's genesis, and
Speaker 3: then it goes all the way to revelation. And again
Speaker 3: the maybe the Puritan ideology is sort of the connective
Speaker 3: tissue that caused a lot of the American Anglo Saxonist
Speaker 3: elites to be very open to the ideas of Germanist's Soricism,
Speaker 3: because it played into this linear progressive in the in
Speaker 3: the broad sense of the word, idea of history itself,
Speaker 3: the idea that that we are moving towards an end
Speaker 3: of history. This did not originate with Francis Fukuyama in
Speaker 3: the nineteen nineties, and in fact, I'm currently for an
Speaker 3: upcoming possible little kind of mini serious thing I'm doing
Speaker 3: having to do with the relationship of oligarchian democracy I'm
Speaker 3: reading for the first time an essay of Woodrow Wilson's
Speaker 3: that was unpublished and now it's it's you can get
Speaker 3: it if you get I believe it's Volume five of
Speaker 3: his collected papers, which I happen to have, and it
Speaker 3: is called something like for you. Yeah, yeah, it's called
Speaker 3: it's called something just like modern Democracy or something like that.
Speaker 3: And it was an essay he wrote that was unpublished
Speaker 3: during his lifetime that he had dreams of eventually expanding
Speaker 3: into like his magnum opus of political philosophy, that he
Speaker 3: never got around to because before he could, before he
Speaker 3: could work it out into a full length book, you know,
Speaker 3: he got sidetracked being President of Princeton and the president
Speaker 3: the United States and then destroying the world. But it's
Speaker 3: very interesting because his his teleological Hegelian idea of you know,
Speaker 3: the end of history that we're all moving toward. It
Speaker 3: comes through there even more so than in some of
Speaker 3: his other writings that I've read, where he's like, oh,
Speaker 3: yeah it, you know, I'm not too far off from
Speaker 3: his words. It's like, of course, it's obvious to all
Speaker 3: all thinking, uh, you know, intellectuals, that history is moving
Speaker 3: in a particular direction and that certain races are more
Speaker 3: you know, further along the path, but that ultimately all
Speaker 3: races are going in that and his his end of
Speaker 3: history is what he calls modern democracy, and so it's
Speaker 3: in a way very neo Commish in terms of that.
Speaker 3: And his view was that the British and the Americans
Speaker 3: are the two most as he would say, matured or
Speaker 3: adult races when it comes to moving down this path
Speaker 3: towards the end of history, which just happens to be
Speaker 3: modern democracy is his form of government.
Speaker 1: You know, I just got to interject, like the irony there,
Speaker 1: especially when he's writing it, how old is America that
Speaker 1: it's not even two hundred years old at that point?
Speaker 1: Come on, Like, that's just ridiculous. And I know he's
Speaker 1: probably gonna make an argument that like, oh, well, we're
Speaker 1: descended from the English, of course, that's why we're so advanced.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I got to.
Speaker 1: Say, like, as somebody who has been looking at all
Speaker 1: these different quote unquote theoretical frameworks, because I'm in grad
Speaker 1: school and they make us do that. But it's interesting.
Speaker 1: If there's one thing that I think people who are
Speaker 1: skeptical of progressivism should be thankful for in the world,
Speaker 1: it's actually postmodernism, because for all of its faults, postmodernism
Speaker 1: is the first major philosophical breakaway in the modern era
Speaker 1: from this idea of inevitable progress, and that I would
Speaker 1: say is to its credit. It very much makes the
Speaker 1: argument that I was saying is that you know, progress
Speaker 1: is not progress for everybody. It's progress for those who
Speaker 1: believe in it, and it's tyranny for others. Now where
Speaker 1: postmodernism took that is into some pretty awful and in
Speaker 1: my opinion, objectively stupid directions. But that's because it's a
Speaker 1: deconstructionist philosophy and that has nowhere to go unless you
Speaker 1: create some sort of template for what you want out
Speaker 1: of it. But it is a valuable tool for becoming
Speaker 1: skeptical of the idea of progress for its own sake,
Speaker 1: because I think that's also what it is, is that
Speaker 1: it's that's why it's such an attractive ideas that it
Speaker 1: self perpetuates, and that's why it can just shift between
Speaker 1: perfecting nature perfecting nurture. And I would not be surprised
Speaker 1: if at some point we would see a return to
Speaker 1: trying to perfect nature, which is my way of transitioning
Speaker 1: us into our sort of last little thing we wanted
Speaker 1: to just sort of touch on, because what we're talking
Speaker 1: about is something that, honestly, the alarm was getting sounded
Speaker 1: on of how awful progressive utopia actually would be. In
Speaker 1: a film from at this point almost thirty years old,
Speaker 1: called Gatica from nineteen ninety seven, starring Ethan Hawk and
Speaker 1: Uma Thurman and written and directed by Andrew Nickel, who is,
Speaker 1: despite some misses, he's a pretty damn good filmmaker. He
Speaker 1: made that other movie I don't remember if you've seen
Speaker 1: it with Nicholas Cage called Lord of War, all about
Speaker 1: the weapons trade. Very good movie. Yeah, And he made
Speaker 1: a couple of other weaker movies, including a justin Timberlake
Speaker 1: movie called In Time that was just awful. But putting
Speaker 1: that aside, Gatica is I would say one of the
Speaker 1: most shockingly prescient sci fi films ever made. And it
Speaker 1: we're not there yet, but with the advent and the
Speaker 1: growth of genetic engineering technology, I think it really does
Speaker 1: highlight what the logical endpoint of trying to engineer nature
Speaker 1: would be, because once you actually can as they can
Speaker 1: in this movie, that is at an unspecified time in
Speaker 1: the future, there actually wrote down the line we now
Speaker 1: have discrimination down to a science where they literally have
Speaker 1: people that they call godchilds, as in people who are
Speaker 1: born naturally, and then everybody else who is engineered, and
Speaker 1: the natural divide that comes from such a thing. And
Speaker 1: I think that it just fits in so nicely with
Speaker 1: everything we've been talking about, both in this episode in
Speaker 1: other times we've had conversations about progressivism. Is that that's
Speaker 1: what it looks like, That's what the end goal looks like.
Speaker 1: Is you really get this down? You finally reached the
Speaker 1: goal that I think a lot of progressives like doctor
Speaker 1: Katson Allenbogan had, which is we have made this truly scientific,
Speaker 1: and from there one could make the argument there's no
Speaker 1: going back, knows. So I want to let you respond
Speaker 1: to that though. And did you get a chance to
Speaker 1: rewatch it?
Speaker 3: Yes? I did, Yes, I did. It's my first time
Speaker 3: watching it in a few years now, so you know,
Speaker 3: it's like anything else. You watch a movie you haven't
Speaker 3: seen in a while, and you pick up new things.
Speaker 3: You know, different things strike you than the last times
Speaker 3: you watched it and whatever, and yeah, well one of
Speaker 3: the things that it made me think of, you know
Speaker 3: now here in twenty twenty four and where the world
Speaker 3: is and where I am and everything is. It made
Speaker 3: me think of one of the things that's a problem
Speaker 3: with this idea of technocracy and just letting the experts
Speaker 3: run things is that they're just as imperfect and flawed
Speaker 3: as anybody else. They might have more education about certain things,
Speaker 3: but they also have a million blind spots. Even the
Speaker 3: smartest person is ignorant about ninety nine point nine percent
Speaker 3: of all knowledge.
Speaker 1: Ever, Elon Musk proves that all the time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, And so you know why, how come when
Speaker 3: you put a bunch of you know, ivy educated economy
Speaker 3: is in charge of running an economy central planning style,
Speaker 3: it turns into a disaster and everybody starves. Well, there's
Speaker 3: a lot of reasons. What a big part of it
Speaker 3: is like there's just no way that they can they
Speaker 3: can know all the diffuse knowledge necessarily to know. Even
Speaker 3: if they could, they couldn't make all the correct value
Speaker 3: judgments in every case to allocate resources. Meanwhile, it's not perfect,
Speaker 3: but if you let individual entrepreneurs and consumers just make
Speaker 3: their own choices, the net result overall of the invisible hand,
Speaker 3: as imperfect as it is, is going to be better
Speaker 3: than having the poll up Bureau just run everything. And
Speaker 3: it's the same thing you know in Gatica. They it's
Speaker 3: it's that if you're an expert, you're almost inevitably a specialist,
Speaker 3: and you're going to be inclined towards towards reductionism to
Speaker 3: your specialty. And so in Gatica, everybody assumes that the
Speaker 3: only thing that matters to produce to predicting your success
Speaker 3: is your genetics, and that there's no other factors that
Speaker 3: need to be taken into account. We you just look
Speaker 3: at a sample of your blood and say, oh, you're
Speaker 3: going to be success.
Speaker 1: Oh you're not, your scum And those those job interview
Speaker 1: scenes are oh eerie, they're very eerie. Yeah where yeah,
Speaker 1: he says in the narration. All they got to do
Speaker 1: is just take a sand Like if you don't want
Speaker 1: to give them your blood, because they always want a
Speaker 1: blood test or a sample, they'll just take it from
Speaker 1: the envelope you send it in, Which is funny because
Speaker 1: that's all that's pretty quaint, the idea of it being
Speaker 1: all on paper. But in a world where everything is
Speaker 1: determined by your genetics, I could see people going back
Speaker 1: to paper.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well and if if you're if you're an expert
Speaker 3: in genetics, then you're going to be inclined to think
Speaker 3: that genetics are the only things you need to think about.
Speaker 3: And yet here's this guy, you know, the Ethan Hawk character,
Speaker 3: who is successful essentially by hard work determination, and it
Speaker 3: shows that, well that there's things and also the Gorvidal's character,
Speaker 3: who genetically is not supposed to be violent. He is violent.
Speaker 3: Yeah plot spoiler, he actually committed a murder. And so
Speaker 3: it shows you that no, actually reducing everything to your
Speaker 3: genetics is is you know, not good. It's in the
Speaker 3: same way that you know, experts on anything tend to
Speaker 3: become arrogant and think that their field of expertise is
Speaker 3: the only thing needed to know to understand and run
Speaker 3: the world.
Speaker 1: And then they start to like have that what's it
Speaker 1: called Dunny Kruger effect on other things that they don't
Speaker 1: know anything about.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And what it made me think about was the
Speaker 3: the virologists and epidemiologists who told us that we needed
Speaker 3: to have draconian lockdowns during COVID. They did not take
Speaker 3: into account what does this do to everyone's mental health?
Speaker 3: What does this due to the economy. What does this
Speaker 3: do to somebody who has spent thirty years building a
Speaker 3: small business and now you shut that business forcibly for
Speaker 3: a year and they go under. What does that do
Speaker 3: to their life? What does that do to their family?
Speaker 3: Does that cause them to become an alcoholic and their
Speaker 3: marriage to fall apart and they commit suicide? What happens
Speaker 3: if that's happening to millions of people, you know, in
Speaker 3: the same several year span, during and after these lockdowns. Nope,
Speaker 3: they focus, They did a reductionist move down to one thing.
Speaker 3: They said, we think if we institute these coney and
Speaker 3: lockdowns will stop the spread of the virus. Turns out
Speaker 3: they weren't even right about that anyway. The damn things
Speaker 3: spread like crazy anyway. But you know, I think that's
Speaker 3: a classic case of the specialist expert being given power
Speaker 3: they should never be given over millions of people. And
Speaker 3: what happened. They destroyed millions of people's physical and mental health,
Speaker 3: including mind. Personally, So yeah, I think it's kind of personally.
Speaker 2: Well, no, and I don't blame you.
Speaker 1: There's I We can measure how many people died of
Speaker 1: the virus, and it is a shocking number actually, in
Speaker 1: the long term, it's it's pretty bad. But we have
Speaker 1: yet to quantify the full extent of the damage that
Speaker 1: the pandemic era actually caused. And I think you're talking
Speaker 1: about the invisible wreckage, which I'm always the most fascinated
Speaker 1: by and heartbroken by usually too, because then you start
Speaker 1: to hear numbers involving things like suicide, addiction, things like that,
Speaker 1: and failed businesses. I mean, the closest we've gotten to
Speaker 1: being able to sort of put a number to just
Speaker 1: destruction caused during the pandemic is just the destruction caused
Speaker 1: by the riots of twenty twenty, which are bad enough
Speaker 1: on their own, but those are a blip. Those are
Speaker 1: a mere blip. And you know, I think that, you know,
Speaker 1: whatever the actual damage ended up being, it lessened mercifully
Speaker 1: quickly in the grand scheme of things, but it doesn't
Speaker 1: take much time for things to really unravel and become
Speaker 1: truly decimated. And I think like it does speak to
Speaker 1: the desire for people to have security and safety and
Speaker 1: what do you call it, a continuity of life that
Speaker 1: they would defer to experts in such a way, because
Speaker 1: when you watch Gatica, you notice that at least I mean,
Speaker 1: I've seen this movie dozens of times at this point.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm a weirdo who watches movies multiple times,
Speaker 1: especially if he loves them. And one thing I've always
Speaker 1: noticed is how clean it is. And everyone's wearing a
Speaker 1: beautiful suit. Everybody is gorgeous looking, and it's like, you
Speaker 1: look at what is being portrayed in this film and
Speaker 1: you don't think about it very hard. You're thinking, oh,
Speaker 1: this is like Star Trek. This is perfect. Everything is good,
Speaker 1: everything is great. I'm assuming there is, you know, money,
Speaker 1: because they're going to like restaurants and stuff, but you
Speaker 1: never see people exchanging money. It has that classic utopian vibe.
Speaker 1: But what Andrew Nickel did, which I think is just
Speaker 1: so brilliant, is that he just sort of presents the
Speaker 1: He presents it in a very attractive way, but really
Speaker 1: highlights the horror of it. And and as you said,
Speaker 1: and this is an important thing that I didn't really
Speaker 1: think about because I tend to be more negative minded,
Speaker 1: But there is something very inspirational and a very old fashioned,
Speaker 1: like older like the kind of a very old fashion
Speaker 1: kind of message that older millennials were getting. I would say,
Speaker 1: up until like kids born in like the nineties and
Speaker 1: participation trophy started to become a thing where like I mean,
Speaker 1: I was taught at least maybe I'm maybe I'm an outlier,
Speaker 1: I don't know, as a younger or mid mid lefe
Speaker 1: level millennial born in the mid eighties, but I was
Speaker 1: always thought that hard work would get you everywhere. So
Speaker 1: you know that that message in that movie when I
Speaker 1: saw it as an eleven year old when it came out,
Speaker 1: is you know, it really resonated with me, and it
Speaker 1: stuck with me ever since, because it is a way
Speaker 1: of saying, you're not constrained by your genes, You're not
Speaker 1: constrained by anything. And if you and if you are
Speaker 1: constrained or being made to feel like you're constrained, prove
Speaker 1: the constrainers.
Speaker 3: Wrong, yeah, or or figure out a way. And this
Speaker 3: is from back when I used to still like Malcolm
Speaker 3: Gladwell that great book David and Goliath, where it's like,
Speaker 3: figure out a way to approach the problem differently that
Speaker 3: they didn't expect, you know, figure out a way to
Speaker 3: fight smarter and beat your bigger opponent just because you
Speaker 3: chose to fight in a smarter way. Yeah, and yeah,
Speaker 3: that's what struck me. I think one of the things
Speaker 3: that struck me watching the movie recently is that in
Speaker 3: you know, now we're living in the midst of the
Speaker 3: Great Awakening, maybe hopefully fingers crossed towards the letter stages
Speaker 3: of it, but but we're back to like judging all
Speaker 3: the most important things about someone by their race, their gender,
Speaker 3: et cetera, which I thought we were trying to get
Speaker 3: away from for so long.
Speaker 1: But now it's now it's all just about nurture though.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's that's that's the ropodope, is that everything
Speaker 1: is being framed in social terms and nurture terms, but
Speaker 1: we're really just saying the same thing that we were
Speaker 1: saying that Kats and Ellenbogen and Woodrow Wilson were saying.
Speaker 1: Like look, I think I mentioned this to you. Look
Speaker 1: at the rhetoric. It's always talking about how great white
Speaker 1: people have it, But what they're really saying is how
Speaker 1: great white people are and how terrible black people or
Speaker 1: non white people have it or are. That's really what
Speaker 1: they're saying. There's no material I mean, there's the only
Speaker 1: difference is how it's being framed. But it's the same argument.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Well, I just thought of how you know. One.
Speaker 3: One aspect though, of the woke regime, whatever you want
Speaker 3: to call it, is they they explicitly are against meritocracy though, yes,
Speaker 3: And so I was watching Gatica, thinking, huh, the main character, Vincent,
Speaker 3: he has to cheat in order to just get meritocracy.
Speaker 3: In other words, he has to cheat the system and
Speaker 3: break the law in order to be able to compete
Speaker 3: fairly based on merit to get the job he wants
Speaker 3: to get going into space. And so I thought, wow,
Speaker 3: having to cheat in order to just get a fair
Speaker 3: meritocratic opportunity. You know, if you were applying to go
Speaker 3: to an elite university, or to get certain jobs, or
Speaker 3: you know, maybe to be a writer at Disney Boy,
Speaker 3: wouldn't you be better off if you're a straight white male.
Speaker 3: Wouldn't you be better off if you could manufacture that
Speaker 3: you're you know, part Native American and your trans and
Speaker 3: whatever like, you're more likely to get hired, and you're
Speaker 3: more like to get promoted, You're more likely to get
Speaker 3: into certain schools. Let's be honest, if you have those
Speaker 3: those boxes checked. And so I could imagine a scenario
Speaker 3: in which a straight white man who wants to get
Speaker 3: you know, into certain schools, hired at certain companies, promoted,
Speaker 3: et cetera. Might or even Elizabeth Warren, you know, might manufacture,
Speaker 3: might manufacture an ancestry that's false, might pretend theoretically to
Speaker 3: be whatever, gay trans who knows what. And so it's like, yeah,
Speaker 3: I can imagine a scenario in today, as different as
Speaker 3: it might be, where somebody might make the decision to
Speaker 3: cheat just so that they could be judged on their merits,
Speaker 3: like just so they could get in the door at
Speaker 3: a job that they should have an opportunity at based
Speaker 3: on their merits, but that there is being denied them
Speaker 3: based on their ethnicity or their lack of checking certain
Speaker 3: diversity quart of boxes.
Speaker 1: All Right, that was a great conversation with C. J.
Speaker 1: Kilmer of the Dangerous History podcast. I hope you all
Speaker 1: enjoyed it. Apologies for the somewhat abrupt ending. We were
Speaker 1: short on time, but I think we were able to
Speaker 1: cover all the bases we wanted to cover. There's always
Speaker 1: next time. He and I never get tired of talking
Speaker 1: about a lot of this stuff because it's always interesting.
Speaker 1: I'm sure after I listened to his next episode, I
Speaker 1: might want to talk to him again. Because that man
Speaker 1: is on a tear with his Woodrow Wilson series. I
Speaker 1: recommend you just started from beginning to end to get
Speaker 1: a good idea of why one might not like him
Speaker 1: as a president. But I will leave you guys to that.
Speaker 1: I want to before I say anything else, thank a
Speaker 1: couple people for their longtime support of History Impossible over
Speaker 1: on patreon dot com. That would be Bob Downing, Eric Hodges,
Speaker 1: Greg Hunter, s O, Skip Pacheco, Molly Pan, Jump Pisano,
Speaker 1: an A, R PJ Raider, Emily Schmidt, andF you.
Speaker 2: You all are awesome.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much, And if any of you guys
Speaker 1: still listening want to be awesome like them, head over
Speaker 1: to patreon dot com slash historym Possible and become a
Speaker 1: supporter today. Like I am often known to say, every
Speaker 1: little bit helps. There's not really much I want to
Speaker 1: get into with this episode at this point in terms of,
Speaker 1: you know, further housekeeping. Just know that there's been a
Speaker 1: bit of drama in the History podcasting community sort of
Speaker 1: in the last couple of days. I'm sure something will
Speaker 1: come out of me about it in the very near future.
Speaker 1: I won't get into it here because it just really
Speaker 1: isn't worth it. I'm speaking off the cuff and I'd
Speaker 1: rather say something more prepared about such a thing.
Speaker 2: So just know that I'm aware of it, I'm paying
Speaker 2: attention to it.
Speaker 1: I'm hopefully not making it worse by talking about it
Speaker 1: when I am talking about it.
Speaker 2: But yeah, we'll leave it at that.
Speaker 1: In terms of what you have to look forward to,
Speaker 1: I'm still waiting to hear back on an interview I
Speaker 1: did with the Israeli equivalent of the BBC called con.
Speaker 1: They had me on one of their radio shows to
Speaker 1: talk about an article I wrote for Quillette and Queer
Speaker 1: Majority about the origin of homophobia in the Palestinian territories
Speaker 1: and how the idea that it is something created by
Speaker 1: the British Empire, by the active imperialism is frankly silly.
Speaker 1: So that's coming soon. Keep an eye out for that
Speaker 1: links to that on my social media accounts. I will
Speaker 1: probably blast it on the substack as well, But yeah,
Speaker 1: that's coming. In terms of other things, I'm back at school.
Speaker 1: I'm having a great time getting deep into the weeds
Speaker 1: with the research for my thesis, as well as getting
Speaker 1: into modern European history. That's sort of the main topics
Speaker 1: of discussion this semester. It was a lot of fun
Speaker 1: this last week talking about the classic ep Thompson's The
Speaker 1: Making of the English Working Class. Believe me, it was
Speaker 1: actually a lot more fun than that might sound. But
Speaker 1: you know, maybe that's why I'm studying history. I find
Speaker 1: that stuff fine. So with that said, yeah, I'm focusing
Speaker 1: more on school right now, but I'm trying to get
Speaker 1: stuff out to you. I've been reaching out to people
Speaker 1: for conversations. We have some things cooking, hopefully. I really
Speaker 1: appreciate all your patients. Between the big narrative episodes, don't worry,
Speaker 1: I am working on them. I am also hopefully going
Speaker 1: to be putting out some narratives, but that will be
Speaker 1: shorter in nature in the near future, for you all
Speaker 1: to consume and enjoy as much as one can enjoy
Speaker 1: some of the material I talk about. So yes, with
Speaker 1: all that said, thank you again, and please stay tuned
Speaker 1: for the next episode of History Impossible.