Morning Wire - Inside The 1916 Project with Seth Gruber

Episode Date: October 19, 2025

The 1916 Project dives deep into the birth of Planned Parenthood and its controversial founder, Margaret Sanger. Her organization, the film argues, was “never about healthcare.” Host and writer of the film Seth Gruber joins the show to discuss. - - - Wake up with new Morning Wire merch: https://bit.ly/4lIubt3 - - - Today's Sponsor: NetSuite: Download the CFO’s Guide to AI and Machine Learning for FREE at ⁠https://NetSuite.com/MORNINGWIRE - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy morning wire,morning wire podcast,the morning wire podcast,Georgia Howe,John Bickley,daily wire podcast,podcast,news podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Evil is now being called Good. For 65 million murdered, unborn children. We're all asking the same question right now, aren't we? How did this happen so suddenly? Well, all the answer is it didn't happen so suddenly. Margaret Singer, the founder of planned parenting. I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world. There are human beings who are alive.

They don't even know that they were marked for death. That was from the trailer of the new film, The Namede. 1916 project, which is now streaming on Daily Wire Plus. It's a film that takes an unflinching look at the birth of Planned Parenthood and its controversial founder, Margaret Sanger. Her organization, the film argues, was never about health care. Instead, it stemmed from radical ideas, including racist population control that the filmmakers say grew into America's culture of death.

In this episode, we sit down with the host and writer of the film Seth Gruber to discuss the roots of Planned Parenthood and its far-reaching cultural impact. I'm Daily Wire, Executive Editor John Bickley with Georgia Howe. This is a weekend edition of Morning Wire. What does the future hold for business? Ask nine experts and expect 10 conflicting predictions. If only someone could invent a crystal ball for businesses. Until then, over 43,000 businesses have future-proofed their operations with NetSuite by Oracle,

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and seize your biggest opportunities as they emerge. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netseweet.com slash morningwire. That's net suite.com slash morning wire. NetSuite.com slash morning wire. Seth, great to have you in the studio. And this is based on a book, this film. And it has the same name, 1916 project.

I actually wanted to start with the name of the film. It turned heads here. I think there's a story here. Tell us about this. Yeah, probably 75% of the podcast hosts that have me on, they go, Seth Gruber, a filmmaker of the 1619, I mean, the 19, you know, so I kind of did that intentionally. It's a teacher not a book.

Yeah, that's right. It wasn't just a linguistic trick. Obviously, everyone remembers, most people remember the 1619 project. I mean, some of you folks here at Daily Wire were some of the boldest voices and exposing, like, this is just critical race theory, cultural Marxism, make the next generation hate America and scream George Floyd and white people suck. Like, you guys did great job exposing how horrific. 1619 project was Nicole Hannah-Jones, New York Times.

That gets released at the end of 2019. And I did the math. It was like about nine months before George Floyd. And that became a series of podcasts, essays, and K-12 curriculum. Who remembers that? 1619 project teaching in public high schools. He ate America because the, you know, the first back slaves came to America in 1619. And so their whole thing is that's our real heritage.

That's a, it's not 1776. But historically problematic. As we found out. That's right. That's right. There's a lot of debunking of all the major claims. Yeah, I mean, they said that like the, the revolutionary war was fought to maintain and protect slavery in the colony. Okay, so just historical revisionism, Howard Zinn was very happy.

And so anyways, what's interesting about this is not just that I flip the numbers, but there's a philosophical political relationship between the New York Times 1619 project and my 1916 project now streaming on Daily Wear Plus. So as soon as George Floyd happens, summer of love of 2020, mostly peaceful, somewhat fire. as we remember. And then we all remember this whole cancel culture campaign to go after any corporation, institution, university, college, or company that the radical left argued had any links to or basis or genesis in racism. And so this launches this whole, remember Aunt Jemima? That was one example. She's gone now.

Yeah. But that was one of dozens that we remember from the summer of 2020. And here's where it gets hilarious. And here's how we opened the book in the film, The 1916 Project. The Radical Left, 1619 Project Revolutionaries. They went after Planned Parenthood in the summer of 2020. People forget this. This was not like Glenn Beck and Ali Best Stuckey and Michael Moles going after.

No, it wasn't a conservative attack. It was a radical left who already supports abortion attack against Planned Parenthood. And they said, your founder, Margaret Sanger, she was a racist and a eugenicist. And then the director of Planned Parenthood of Greater New York, Karen Seltzer, which is hilarious. Karen and Seltzer light alcoholic drink. It's like, what's her middle name? Cat lover? Like, that's just so funny to me. That's literally her name, guys. And she says, we're done making excuses for our founder and the damage that she did to communities of color.

They stopped giving out the Margaret Sanger Award. They renamed the Manhattan Planned Parenthood Clinic, which, by the way, just got shut down a few months ago because of defunding from the Trump administration. They renamed it, and New York City took her name off of the street corner that was called the Margaret Sanger Square. So Planned Parenthood, because of pressure from the 1619 Project revolutionaries go, you're right, our founder was a piece of human, And we're going to get rid of all of our awards and all of our signs. What's the real history? Right. As opposed to the 1619 project.

You guys present the real history. Are they correct in saying that she actually was racist? Oh, absolutely. Here's a quote from the founder of Planned Parenthood. Birth control is not contraception, thoughtlessly and indiscriminately practiced. Birth control means the cultivation and release of the better racial elements in our society and the gradual suppression, elimination, and eventual extinction. of defective stocks, those human weeds, which threatened the blossoming of the finest flowers

of American civilization, end quote, from Margaret Sanger's birth control review, which was Planned Parenthood's magazine. Wow. Right. So this is eugenics. This is the founding, this is, it coincides with the eugenics movement. And some other things, you guys highlight this in the film. It's not just eugenics.

It's not just racial population control. What else is going on with the elite that are driving this abortion movement? Yeah. So one of the important things. to understand about, let's just call it secular progressivism, the sexual revolutionaries of today, is, have you noticed any of their core pagan sacraments get compromised, they tend to walk in lockstep together to defend them, particularly the sexual mutilation of kids and the weird trans cult stuff, abortion, the sex ed, porn, the filth in the schools, bringing the angry moms and dads

the school board meetings? Any of that kind of stuff, they tend to walk in lockstep. Why does that matter this conversation? Because Margaret Sanger was really the first modern leftist academic academic revolutionary to bring together the disparate aspects of woke progressivism. So socialism, depopulate the earth, the whole belief that there's too many people on planet earth. Neo-Malthusians, the sexual revolution, cultural Marxism. She was one of the first people to kind of bring these ideas and really treat the culture war, the attack against Western civilization as one battle.

And unifying various leftist revolutionary academics who were in their own kind of of lanes in camps and saying, no, this is all one fight. It's all one battle. Sanger actually didn't have any original ideas. She just brought multiple original ideas and made them into one war against the foundations of Western civilization, which of course is a byproduct of Christianity. So how do we see that manifest today? Well, Planned Parenthood, many people know, is the largest abortion provider in the world. But did you know in 2025, they're also the largest provider of cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers? And they're also, and this is on their website, it's in my book for people that want to dive deeper than the documentary.

They're the largest provider of comprehensive sexuality education, which goes back to Kinsey, Hugh Heffner, and Planned Parenthood's medical director, Mary Calderon. That's where the origins of that filth in the schools, that you're like, why are you showing this to kids? Planned Parenthood boasts on their own website, they're largest provider of that filthy, comprehensive sexuality education. And so to understand how that all happened,

you kind of have to go back and look at the origins of Margaret Sanger, who are her influencers, Who were her funders? Who were her mentors? And how did she lay the foundation for the most murderous organization in world history in 1916 when she opened the first birth control clinic? And we can trace a little bit of those mentors and influences

that I'll tell you what, even warriors in the conservative movement have never heard. We have been lied to about the origins of wokeness. We don't want to spoil the film. I'd like to hear some of them. Yeah, I mean, who were some of her comrades at that time? Yeah, let's do an Easter egg. So let's actually start right after.

the chaos of the French Revolution. There's a guy named Thomas Malthus. He was actually an English clergyman, so he was a pastor. And he became convinced that food production cannot keep up with population growth. So what's the inevitable result? Massive starvation and everyone's going to die. So we need to radically depopulate the earth. This is the first guy to predict overpopulation.

Guess who he was very influential to? Guy named Charles Darwin. Red Malthus extensively. Malthus, Darwin's half-cous was a guy who coined the term eugenics. Francis Galton, his half-cous. Eugenics is the root word means good in birth. So some people are good in birth,

some people are bad in birth, and we don't want those bad people in birth to have any kids. We don't want them to reproduce. So then Galton begins to mentor a sexual revolutionary leftist academic in the UK by the name of Havelock Ellis. Havelock Ellis was the UK's Alfred Kinsey.

Does that help? He hosted orgies in his home. his wife watch him. Okay. Yeah. So then this this young woman, Margaret Sanger. Perfect content for Morning Wire, by the way. This is great. Margaret Sanger fleeing New York City at the end of 1914 because she had broke the Comstock laws, the anti-obscenity laws, which prevented filth from being sent in the mail, porn, sending people's houses. We actually had laws against this stuff once, guys. And instead of, uh, being turning herself into the police, she ships her kids off to be raised by her socialist friends. She has her friends

afford her a passport. She flees to the UK. And she, she then meets, have, Locke Ellis, the UK's Alfred Kinsey, who was mentored by Galtin, the guy who coined the term eugenics, who was inspired by his half-cousant Charles Darwin, who was inspired by the first overpopulation as Thomas Malthus. They have orgies and sexual relationships together. He coaches

Sanger's journey back to America to launch the first birth control clinic, the first Planned Parenthood Clinic in 1960. So like when we talk about this woman, this founder of the most murderous baby killing organization in American in world history, Planned Parenthood. We actually have to understand what motivated her. There was a

whole toxic brew of overpopulationism, of racism, and eugenics. And so it should not surprise us that her first board member of the American Birth Control League before it was renamed Planned Parenthood was the high official of the Massachusetts KKK chapter. Wow. How did they, and when did they pivot from wanting to sterilize black women and or abort their babies to taking them under their wing and bringing them into the coalition of the aggrieved? Yeah. So a lot of people who are to the culture war. They think that Planned Parenthood was always an abortion organization. But of course, you know better, Georgia. They did not start with abortions. They did not perform abortions until the late 60s or early 70s when the first states began to legalize abortion

before Roby Wade in 73. They wanted to sterilize people that they thought had bad genes. There's even some evidence that Sanger opposed abortion, but I have a lot of evidence in my book that actually she was already expressing her, that she was down with the abuse and killing of infants who were not up to Scruff, if you will. So there's a lot of history there. But it's important, this is an important point because people will work out the internal logic of the worldview they adopt, even if they're not aware of the worldview they've adopted. Like, ideas are incredibly powerful things. Richard Weaver said ideas have consequences. And I like to add, and bad ideas have victims. Because we're rational beings created in the Amago Day,

in God's image, we have rationalities what separates us from the orangut. We will almost walk a sort of ideological, consistent path from the worldviews that we've imbibed and absorbed. But most Americans couldn't express to you what that worldview is. It's such an important reminder. The year before Planned Parenthood was established, G.K. Chesterton, writing in the U.K. said, we are not so far off from even the sacrifice of babies. If not to a crocodile, at least to a creed. Nine months later, Planned Parenthood was founded.

He's a prophet. You mentioned this idea of sort of the omni cause, and that Sanger really led the way on this. I'd love you to unpack that force. This is something that Ben Shapiro speaks about a lot, that you see these rallies and these protests, and you feel like the protesters don't seem to know what they're protesting. It's kind of everything all at once. Of course, what is that process? How did that work?

I mean, so they're working with the same general worldview basic premises? Right, right. And then that's how it aligns it. How did we get here? Yeah, so I don't think this will shock you guys, probably won't shock your listeners, that the radical left really loves sex. They're obsessed with it. And it's important for conservatives to not like treat sex as like this bad taboo thing and pendulum the other way. Fundamentalists tend to do that.

That's not helpful either. But the left pendulum is the other way and they go, everything is sex. I mean, Margaret Sanger literally wrote in the birth control of view. She said, through sex, mankind may attain. the great spiritual illumination, which will transform the world and light up the only path to an earthly paradise. In other words, sex is salvation. So the answer to your question, that's the beginning of the answer. The answer is that sex is an incredibly powerful tool when politicized to get power. And we all understand that we do have a sexual nature as human

being. We need to not say what Kinsey said that we're sexual beings and that's all we are. But we all have a sexual nature. And you see this with, I mean, you see this with Caligula, who's the Caesar during the events of the Book of Acts. You see this with Epstein. You see this with Sean Diddy Combs today. That sexual liberation, passion, when unmoored from restraint, always bubbles over into passion of a bloodier sort. Those who believe they have the right to orgasms without responsibility, which is basically a paraphrase of Margaret Sanger, by the way, will not hesitate to turn bloody when those quote-unquote rights are compromised. So sexual revolution as a right historically has been a very powerful way to mobilize the masses who believe that their quote unquote sexual rights are being compromised.

Abortion is pitched as a sexual right to the culture. They believe that they have the right to live however they want and not adopt responsibility for their sexual choices. That's one of the key elements of the radical left in our culture wars today. Everything has been sexualized. The gay marriage debate, the IVF third party reproductive technology debate. because, you know, two gay guys believe they should be able to get kids and children no longer have a right to a mother and a father. The trans movement has been sexualized. The abortion has been sexualized. The curriculum on children has been sexualized because it's a powerful way to mobilize people who think that they're having their rights taken away. That's one of the key, I think, observations that's usually the common denominator in that why the left gets so riled up into a frenzy.

Anytime conservatives say, maybe you shouldn't live that way. It can be particularly effective here in the U.S. where our personal rights are a massive focus for us, obviously. You tie this to rights. You've got a powerful argument that can motivate a lot of people, like you said. Do you see a chipping away of the Planned Parenthood legacy at this point? We do see, like you mentioned, we have a lot of clinics closing now. There is an awakening. Maybe it's short-lived.

I don't know. But even from the left, where you see the racial origins of it, and the current disparity, racial disparity of the outcomes. of in terms of abortion. Is there a turning of the tide here or not? I think there is. I think, well, I'm praying that my film goes viral on Daily Wire Plus. And every liberal and run-of-the-mill Democrat learns the true history behind this agenda.

And so, yes, no, there is a turning of the tide. People are waking up. Doing university campus events, it's fascinating. The next generation learning the truth. Gen Z has a more sophisticated, refined BS sniffer. than millennials, my generation, who are, millennials are pretty pathetic. And so this next generation,

I actually see a lot of hope with people who are like, already, because they grew up during the scambemic. Gen Z had their formative years during the scammemic. They grew up realizing that we're being lied to from the highest levels

of the federal government. And so they're just more quick to go, oh, I bet I've been lied to about other things too. So we actually have this really interesting window and cultural opportunity, especially with the revival that seems to be happening

because of how Jesus has used the martyrdom murder of our friend Charlie, that people are waking up and they're realizing there's more to life, that they were made to fight and they were made to fight for what is true and good and beautiful. And where else could that be more true than the family, babies, children, the next generation, viewing children as a blessing. Margaret Sanger, the Planned Parenthood Revolutionaries of our death cult today, have never seen children as a blessing.

They believe that they're a burden to be eradicated so we can achieve whatever kind of lifestyle that we want. And so one of the things you'll learn about from the film is that Margaret Sanger, right after she launched Planned Parenthood, launched the Negro Project. That's what she called it, not me. She called it the Negro Project. And the plan was to put birth control clinics in primarily minority areas because she defined those people as human weeds and defective stocks. Those were her words. Now your film ends on a positive, hopeful note. Would you speak to maybe that's how we can close out here. Speak to that. How does the film end? Yeah, so my ministry is the White Rose Resistance. That is the producer as the CEO of the film. And we named it after this anti-Nazi Christian youth movement in Munich, Germany in 1942 and 1943. Except for one professor, all of the youth were in their 20s. And Hans and Sophie Scholl, this brother-sister team, 21 and 24 years old, started riding and distributing leaflets. And they even went to the University of Munich, where we film at in the 1960. project and they dropped these illegal leaflets, mobilizing people to wake up.

They said things like, if you know, why do you not act? They said, we are the White Rose Resistance. We are your bad conscience, and we will not leave you alone. And they were caught by the janitor at the University of Munich distributing these illegal leaflets, and four days later they had their heads chopped off. And so we named our daughter, Sophie, after Sophie Scholl of the White Rose Resistance. And that's the kind of courage. That's the kind of hope.

That's the kind of inspiration we need today, is people. who care more about protecting the vulnerable, the marginalized, those that our culture treats as less than, I mean, the unborn child is like the most marginalized, discriminated human being in America and are willing to sacrifice to stand up for those children. And one of the key lessons of history and of Nazi Germany is that when good people, particularly Christians who know better and don't speak up, by the time you decide that you should speak up, it's too late. That's why Mildred Jefferson said, today it is the unborn child. Tomorrow it is likely to be the elderly or those who are incurably ill. Who knows but that a little

later, it may be anyone who has political and moral views that do not fit into the new distorted order. In other words, those who murder the unborn cannot be trusted to govern the born. And those who murder the unborn and deny an entire class of human beings their right to life, you should not be surprised when they deny and come after your rights as well. These are foundational fundamental building blocks of our civilization, the right to life. liberty and the pursuit of happiness. So the White Rose resistance, we took that mantle to really honor their legacy, their sacrifice, and try to do what they didn't see, awaken the church in America to do her job and stop waiting for politicians to do the work that the local church is called

to do. Well, a very powerful film. We're excited to have it on the platform. Thank you so much for sitting down and talking with us today. Thank you. And if you want to learn more, you can go to the whiterose. Life to pick up the book or host it at your church. When you watch it on Daily Wire, go tell your pastor to host a screening. Great luck. Thank you so much. Thank you guys. That was Seth Gruber discussing his new film, The 1916 Project, now streaming on Daily Wire Plus, and this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.