The Daily Signal - What's Behind 'The Plot to Change America'

Episode Date: July 29, 2020

How have identity politics, victimhood, and identitarian division contributed to the destruction of America? How can this ideology be rebuffed? Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow in the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation, joins The Daily Signal Podcast to discuss his new book, "The Plot to Change America." We also cover these stories: Attorney General William Barr defends the decision to send federal officers to Portland, Oregon, in testimony to the House Judiciary Committee.  Senate Republicans introduce a $1 trillion coronavirus relief package.  Twitter restricts Donald Trump Jr.’s account for 12 hours after he shares a video by a group called America’s Frontline Doctors. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, July 29th. I'm Virginia Allen. And I'm Rachel Del Judas. Is America turning into a country gripped by victimhood and Identitarian Division? How has this happened and how have the riots and protesting of recent days contributed to the current division of the country and a misrepresentation of America's values? The Heritage Foundation's Mike Gonzalez joins me on the podcast to discuss this and his new book, The Plot to Change America. Don't forget. If you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. Now onto our top news.

Attorney General William Barr defended the decision to send federal officials to Portland while he testified before the House Judiciary Committee for the first time on Tuesday. Violent riots and unrest in Portland led to the government sending federal troops to the city, to protect the courthouse and other government buildings. Democratic leaders, including Portland's mayor, Ted Wheeler, have criticized the action. Barr explained the necessity for federal officials during his testimony, per Bloomberg quicktakes. In the wake of George Floyd's death, violent rioters and anarchists have hijacked legitimate protests to wreak senseless havoc and destruction on innocent victims. The current situation,

The situation in Portland is a telling example. Every night for the past two months, a mob of hundreds of rioters have laid siege to the federal courthouse and other nearby federal property. The rioters have come equipped for fight, armed with powerful slingshots, tasers, sledge hammers, saws, knives, rifles, and explosive devices. Inside the courthouse are a relatively small number of federal law enforcement personnel, charged with a defensive mission to protect the courthouse. What unfolds nightly around the courthouse cannot reasonably be called protest. It is by any objective measure an assault

on the government of the United States. The House Judiciary Committee also questioned Barr on his handling of the Roger Stone and Michael Flynn investigations and a number of other issues. Fox reported in a series of live tweets that Representative Steve Cohen, Democrat of Tennessee, moved quickly through various claims against Barr. Representative Doug Collins, Republican of Georgia, responded to Representative Cohen's list of grievances against Barr with, wow, I'm beginning to believe that you're probably the cause of the common cold and possibly even the COVID-19. I'm not sure at this point. Senate Republicans are unveiling an approximately $1 trillion coronavirus relief package.

The package includes $105 billion for schools and $16 billion for coronavirus testing and a shield for five years that keeps entities such as schools, businesses, or government agencies from lawsuits related to coronavirus unless there is gross negligence per the hill. It will also cut stimulus checks for those making up to $75,000 a year, like the care of acted in March and loans to small businesses under the Paycheck Protection Program. Donald Trump Jr.'s Twitter account was restricted for 12 hours after he shared a video by a group called America's frontline doctors. In the video, one medical doctor praises the benefits of the drug hydroxychloroquine. The video which gained 20 million views on Facebook has now been removed

from the site for spreading misinformation. The New York Post does still have a clip of the video on their website. Take a listen. So I came here to Washington, D.C., to tell America, nobody needs to get sick. This virus has a cure. It is called hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and Zetromax. I know if you want to talk about masks, hello. You don't need mask. There is a cure. Andrew Sarabian, Trump Jr.' spokesperson, tweeted in response to Twitter's action on Tuesday that Big Tech is the biggest threat to free expression in America today. And he added that, while there is indeed much disagreement in the medical community about the efficiency of hydroxychloroquine in treating coronavirus,

there have been studies reported on by mainstream outlets like CNN, suggesting that it may in fact be an effective treatment. Those pretending otherwise are lying for political reasons. Now stay tuned for my interview with Mike Gonzalez on his new book, The Plot to Change America. Americans have almost entirely forgotten their history. That's right. And if we want to keep our republic, this needs to change. I'm Jared Stepman. And I'm Fred Lucas. We host the Right Side of History, a podcast dedicated to restoring informed patriotism

and busting the negative narratives about America's past. Hollywood, the media, and academia have failed a generation. We're here to set the record straight on the ideas. and people who've made this country great. Subscribe to the right side of history on Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Stitcher today. I'm joined today on the Daily Signal podcast by Mike Gonzalez. He's a senior fellow in the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy at the Heritage Foundation. Mike, it's great to have you back on the Daily Signal podcast.

It's great to be back on with you, Rachel. Well, thanks for coming on. Thanks for making the time. And you actually have a new book coming out. The Plot to Change America. Congrats on this new book, some heavy topics, but definitely a message we all need to read and educate ourselves on. Before we get into the nitty-gritty, can you tell us just a little bit about the book itself? Yeah, it's a book that is, unfortunately, I say, very timely because of the disturbances that we're seeing and our divisions.

My book really is about identity politics. And you may ask, what is identity politics? Well, identity politics is the division of the country into groups based on race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, gender, even disability status. And it is based on the concept that American society and all societies are divided between the oppressed and the oppressor. They are oppressor groups, or one main oppressor groups. and you have different groups with different degrees of oppression, the subordinate groups, and that all of life is this group dynamic and a very important part of this is that identity politics, the proponents of identity politics have really raised the members of the oppressed groups

with this idea of grievances. They have instilled grievances, a sense of victimhood, that they have been victimized and that their victimhood entitles them to attention, to justice, to rewards, to compensatory justice. And the problem with that is, once you derive your idea of pride, your idea of self and your claim on compensatory justice from your victimhood, you have no incentive to overcome whatever it is that is victimizing you. In fact, the proponents of identity politics constantly tell you that you can individually never surmount your problems. You can only collectively try to change society completely. And that is really the end part of the definition of identity politics.

It aims to change America from a free market, some would say capitalist system, to socialism, to the government, from individualism to collectivism, from individual decisions and family-based decisions to central planning. And that I argue in my book, the plot to change America, it was the end goal of the ideologues who first put in this blueprint in society. Well, in the book, you note that the first myth that you talk about and unpack, and you discussed it a little bit just now, but you talk about how there's this myth that identity politics is a grassroots movement. Why is this a myth?

Yes, so there are several myths that the proponents of identity politics created. One of them, I said, this is a grassroots demand for compensatory justice. I show in my book how it is not data in the least. In fact, it's an elite project begun by ideologues by people who were quite leftists. In fact, they're neo-Marxists or Western Marxists or cultural Marxists. And their idea was to impose on the grassroots, the sense of grievances is an idea that we get from Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist leader in the 1920s, and also from Herbert Marcusa, a German-American intellectual who lived in the, who was active in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. this idea that Marcusa had an expression, which is all liberation depends on the recognition of servitude.

And that once you tell a member of a group that they are being oppressed by servitude, that they're in a state of servitude, then you fill them with these grievances, then they will rise and overthrow society. That unless you do this, the worker will fail to rise out. and overthrow the bourgeoisie and capitalist society because the workers too contented has bought into the cultural the cultural blueprint of the oppressor class has brought into religion, the idea of the nation state, the idea of the family and the economic system. So what these ideologues wanted to do was and these ideologues believed that these workers

had false consciousness, and they wanted to remove false consciousness through struggle sessions and raise, have, you know, consciousness raising exercises, raise their consciousness. That we're seeing today, by the way, with the wave of anti-racism training that we're seeing by all entities in society, whether it's professional sports or Congress or corporations, that are hiring these consultants to do anti-racism training. I'm talking to people like Robin DiAngelo or Marcus Moore. And they say that they want to end the free market system, they want to end the capitalist system.

They say that capitalism is racism and that racism is capitalism. This is all untrue, by the way. But so the theories that I describe in my book are very much alive today and very much being instilled in our to our students. Well, Mike, since you mentioned that, let's talk about that a little bit more. This book is coming out at a time where we've seen tons of different protests against police brutality, now people calling to defund the police.

Also, as you mentioned, just a whole movement against racism that has, you know, much deeper roots. If you look at, for example, Black Lives Matter and other organizations, there's a lot more that comes along with that movement than just the phrase that black lives do matter, which they do. But can you talk a little bit about the larger picture here and why this book is coming out at such a critical time? Yeah, I mean, once again, to repeat myself, my book is very timely for reasons that I don't like in the least. You take Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter. Well, of course, Black Lives Matter greatly.

All Lives Matter and Black Lives Matter. Black compatriots matter to us. we want to see all Americans flourish and thrive. The problem is with the Black Lives Matter organization, the Black Lives Matter Global Network, which is the main Black Lives Matter organization, the founders of the BLM Global Network were three women, and they were the ones who founded the Black Lives Matter movement. So let's say, you go to Google and you Google Black Lives Matter,

it sends you first and foremost to the BLM Global Network, Well, who are they? The founders are Alicia Garza. Then you have Patrice Cullors. And then you have the third one, which is Opal Tometti. And, you know, in a 2015 interview, Patrice Cullors, one of the founders, one of the three founders, said that she and Alicia Garza would train Marxists, which is true. And then you did the next issue. The next question is, well, who trained? Patrice Collaris, for example. You go back and you see that she was trained in something called the labor community committee, which is run by none other than Eric Mann. Who is Eric Mann? Well, Eric Mann is a former member of the Weather on the Ground. The weather on the ground was a radical organization in the 60s, classified by the FBI as a domestic terrorist organization.

He is the one that founder, the Labor Community Strategy Center. Sorry, that's the, and that's where Patrice Kolaris was trained for 10 years, the Labor Community Strategy Center, founded by Eric Mann. She was trained by Eric Mann, a man who spent time in prison for conspiracy to commit murder, who now he's still a committed communist who wants to have World Revolution. And so you have to ask yourself, why are organizations giving money to the BLM Global Network? When the BLM Global Network, one of its stated objectives is, for example, to get rid of the traditional family, to get rid of the nuclear family, which they see as oppressive, is this really something that's going to help anybody, but especially the most impoverished in our society?

Well, you also talk about how the book examines the belief that America has grown into a nation that's gripped by victimhood and identitarian division. What is the history of thought, Mike, that led to this in the first place? And also, what is the role that Marxism plays? Let's talk about that a little bit more. Well, Marxism is the key role. Antonio Gramsci, who was the one. that came out with the theory of egemonic culture in the 20s that had just described in my talk

with you, he was a communist. He was a communist leader from Italy. Marcusa was a communist. They were all what is known as neo-Marxists, Western Marxists. But Marxist nonetheless, and Marx was the inventor of communism. So it is not a stretch to say that all these ideas are Marxist at base, right? Because Marxism is the theory that sees all of life as being a question of group dynamics of the oppress and the oppressor. And this is exactly what identity politics is all about. Then you have this theory of a culture of victimhood. We're living in a culture of victimhood. It used to be that you drew your inspiration. You drew your claim to fame from the fact that you overcame challenges.

We all have challenges. Life is full of challenges. But you were famous. You wanted others to see you and respect you and pay attention to you because you could show a record of having overcome the challenges of life through your way. Under a culture of victimhood, it is rather the opposite. Your claim to fame, your claim for attention. and your claim to compensatory rewards is based on your degree of victimhood.

The more victimhood points that you have, the more claims you have on rewards. So a system such as this is very corrosive to society because rather than have than turn out before we had people striving to be their best. Right now we have people striving to be a victim, to have their grievances curated and shown and exhibited. And the problem with that is that then problems are never overcome. In a culture of victimhood, you have zero incentives to overcome anything. And of course, the promise is you will overcome challenges collectively by changing society, by changing the nature of men. Again, to quote Robin DiAngelo and to, to quote Ibrahim Kendi, in the other people who sell this snake oil, they say,

we will change the way human nature functions. We will change human nature. People will no longer base their actions on their self-interest, on their enlightened self-interest. And there's where the problem, that's where the problem hits, right? Human nature is unchanging. No ideology can change human nature. If you read ancient texts, read the Bible, or you read any books, you read the Quran, any book from ancient times or any of the classical, any of the text from the classical age, you see that man was back then exactly the same way we are today. Abraham and Moses are recognizable men, just like we have today, they have the same vices and virtues.

So human nature is unchangeable. And the people who peddle this utopia then run against the unchangeability of human nature. And that's what leads them to use coercion. They must coerze people into acting a certain way. And that's why all Marxists, all totalitarian enterprises and in tears. And with people in prison for long prison terms or people at the firing squad or people hanged because you must use violence, you must coerce people into changing their nature, which and they never can.

So, Mike, we've talked a little bit about this so far, but as racial tensions are high following the death of George Floyd, we've heard so much talk about minorities and people of color in America. What is the history of those terms, and how did they come into play? Yeah, that's a great question. We have a lot of words that we use today that we didn't use to use them. in that manner. Minorities is one of them.

And the first time a dictionary defines minority in the way we do today, I believe is 1961 Webster. Prior to that, we had minorities in the first part of the 20th century and for most of the 19th century, we meant the minorities in the large empires of Europe, that is the Habsburg, Ottoman. empire, the Russian empires, and minorities were people like the Ruthenians, the Irish, the Serbs, the Bosnians, and it was not a, there was a certain negative connotation that went along with

that because they were seen as bickering. I guess you have some flavor of that in the grievance and the grieve minorities that we have today. And prior to that, obviously in the 18th century, in the 1700s, when people like Madison and people like Jefferson used the term minority, they obviously meant legislative and ideological minorities factions, and they meant they cared for the fact that ideological minorities would have their rights respected, even though they happened to be in a minority after a given election. So that word, minority, with the connotation of victimhood, really first emerges with social scientists in the 1940s and then enters a dictionary in the 1960s.

A person of color is another one because minorities through the process that I described in my book, the plot to change America were given compensatory justice as a result of past grievances. There was an attempt to associate minorities with a certain phenotypical look, phenotypical meaning the way somebody looks, one can be identified as a member of a group just by looking at you. And then they term people of color, which previously only really applied to black Americans, began to be applied more generally. The problem with that is you have some people who can be phenotypically sometimes identified, for example, some Italians, some people of Slavic ancestor, some Jewish people, you know, can look a certain way. And you have the opposite.

You can have, for example, people from Latin America that are just completely European, that are not really any different from any other European than not phenotypically different. So what we have under this really term of art, person of color, is an attempt to give justification for the compensatory justice, that is one of the ways in which you entice Americans to adhere to group membership. The way it's used politically is just as a catch-all term that serves a certain political term. So you have all these new terms. You can write, somebody's actually writing an encyclopedia of the new terms, like problematizing,

which crops up a lot. lot in the literature of the critical theory. So all these new terms, what I say in my book is that we should actually not play into the playbook of the left and use these terms as wantonly as we use it. But, you know, we should be very more careful that we understand what the political project is. So, Mike, as we talk about how we can move forward, How would you encourage the ideology of victimhood and identity division? How can that be rejected? Well, I mean, and I want to give credit what creditors do here.

You have a sociologist Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, who were the first ones to identify this culture of victimhood, as opposed to a culture of honor or a culture of dignity in an essay in 2014 and then later a book. What I want to do with my book, the plot to change America, is to change the terms of the debate, the way we Americans at all levels think about these issues. Because a lot of Americans have bought into these myths, the myth of the grassroots claim for recognition, the myth that it was the demographic changes that took place after the 1965 immigration law that have really reframed the debate. you know, America has always been changing demographically. America has been changing demographically from the very beginning with the incoming of the Scots Irish in the early 1700s and even before that in the 1690s of Germans who came in here for religious freedom. But especially after 1850 when you have a massive wave of European immigrants.

So American demography has always been changing. There was no real reason why changed the model of America, the model of liberty after the 1965 law. This was done again by people with malice of forethought, people who wanted to replace the freedom principle in America, the liberty that we had. What made America exceptional was this radical love of liberty. And what I want to do then is by, I see my book,

The Plot to Change America, as exposing all these things. So people say, oh, wait a second, this is the reason why this is done this way. Some colleagues of mine who have read it, some professors have writing me as saying they have a lot of aha moments. You know, places when they come, they go, oh, oh, this is why this happened. So I do hope it's full of aha moments for the readers. People who then say, oh, wait a second, do you mean the Hispanic panethnicity was invented by the Office of Management and Budget? and introduced a policy proposal in 1977 that, you know, we had a, this is, this is Professor Christina Mora who writes about these issues, she writes about it from the left, but she's written a very good book

called Making Hispanics, and she says that the desire was to have a moment of massive amnesia, a moment when we would all forget that, no, there was a time when the Hispanic ethnicity did not exist, that people were Americans of Mexican origin or of Cuban origin. But now you have millennials and you have Gen Z, Americans who think that they're listening to, quote, Latino music, whereas the tango is a very different music from a Tejana music or from a Cuban music. Ponto. There's no such thing as Latino music. These are very different musical traditions. They are very different culinary traditions. And when you come to the term Asian American, forget it. They are Americans as varied in origin as Pakistan, India, China, Korea, the Philippines,

Malaysia, China, etc. So I strive to explain who created these identities, who led the the three waves of the feminist movement to what ends. And that's my book really is to shed light on all of this. Well, Mike, speaking of creating identities, where did the more recent phenomenon of canceled culture come into play? And how is that also impacting today's society and what you talk about in your book? Well, cancel culture really can be traced by any kind of totalitarian dictatorship will need cancel culture.

But you can trace it. It's really the direct air of Herbert Marcus's repressive tolerance. He writes his essay, I believe, in 1965, in which he says, we're going to be tolerant of only left speak. We're not going to be tolerant. We can not be tolerant of conservative ideas. Conservative ideas must be made illegal, driven from the marketplace of ideas. And so this is now repressive tolerance, which is obviously a contradiction in terms. being put into practice through cancel culture. And it goes back to what I was saying earlier. Since the Enlightenment, we have dealt with human nature as it is. Human nature being men is going to be self-interested. We're going to use that self-interest for the benefit of all humanity. As Adam Smith said, it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the baker. I forget the third one now.

I quote this all the time, or the brewer, that we get our beef, our beer, or our bread. It is from their self-interest. So capitalism, the free market system, I don't use capitalism, really. I use a free market system. Liberty works with human nature as it is. Communism, Marxism, is a vain, a supremely vain attempt at changing human nature. It wants to change man. This is what Che Guevara called the new man.

But you can't. You cannot change human nature. It is deeply ingrained. So when humans begin to resist and say, no, you must use coercion. You must say you're not going to be allowed to say that, whatever that conservative thing is. And if you say it, you're going to lose your livelihood. You're going to be driven from your job. You're going to your children are going to be left without a provider.

And that is what canceled culture is. It is repressive tolerance, which owes its origin to the fact that Marxists are engaged in a very vain but very painful. It always ends in pain attempt to changing human nature and they can't. Mike, practically speaking, how would you encourage everyday Americans to reject identity politics? I suggested my book that the government get out of the business of creating categories. the government really should not be creating ethnic categories. But I think in terms of everyday Americans, I think when the head of HR or somebody,

some pencil pusher in HR comes to you and says, you must put a sign on your desk that says, I am an ally. I think you have to push back and say, I'm an ally. Why? Are we at war? Who am I an ally of?

What exactly are we doing? or if you're sitting in a boardroom and somebody says, we must give in a desperate attempt at showing that we have good intentions and to prevent us from being attacked as uncaring, we're going to give money to the BLM Global Networks. You should be able to raise your hand and say, does anybody have any idea of who they are? Has anybody gone to their website, to the About Us section,

and looked at the list of demands? I think putting a break on things individually is important. I'm not counseling anybody lose her, his job. But we have to remember that very brave people came before us in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe and today in Cuba, people who say no and face the consequences. And as I said, I don't want people to lose their livelihoods. But pushing back and saying, you know, I'm not going to say X, Y, and Z. I am actually going to look into what these things mean.

I think pushing back politely is important. Otherwise, we're going to lose our freedoms. Well, lastly, Mike, this book does cover a range of heavy themes about what is dividing this country, what has been dividing it. What did you find to be most disheartening about when you're writing the book? And then on the flip side, where did you find reason for hope? Well, I think this hardening is the fact that these terms and these ideas and these modes of thinking have been around for so long now that people, even conservatives, buy into it lustily. They use these terms and they embrace the whole people just speak now in terms of minorities, in terms of groups. we assume all these things to be true.

And that is. But I am very optimistic. First of all, because I understand, I know that I have human nature on my side. And second, because I think that this is an inflectioneer. I think many Americans have finally beginning to understand that indoctrinating a children to, in many ways, hate their country or think that the founders are very bad individuals. And the whole thing was a con job.

for them to retain their privileges. I think that many Americans are understanding that this has been a colossal mistake. I was crabbing in a creek off the Chesapeake about two weeks ago. Very good crabbing this season, by the way. And I pulled out a book. I was reading on the dock. And these boaters have been laying traps. And they come over and say, hey, what are you reading there?

And I said, well, it's a book about the founders. It's a book about the nation's founding in one of the boaters said, that's what our children should be reading these days. I think there's been a click moment for many Americans and they're beginning to get all these things. So I think for reasons that are perhaps negative for the country, my book comes at a very propitious time. Well, Mike, thank you so much for taking the time to join us on the podcast.

We appreciate having you with us. Rachel, as ever, thank you very much. And that will do it for two. today's episode. Thank you so much for listening to The Daily Signal podcast. Please be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or Spotify. And please leave us a review or rating on Apple podcasts and give us your feedback. Thanks again for listening and we'll be back with you all tomorrow. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. It is executive produced by Kate Trinko and Rachel Del Judas, sound design by Lauren

Evans, Mark Geinney, and John Pop. For more information, visitdailysignal.com.