The Eric Metaxas Show - Richard Weikart

Episode Date: February 23, 2022

Richard Weikart lays out his argument for Charles Darwin's theory that helps sprout and spread atheism and racism throughout the world in his new book, "Darwinian Racism."

Folks, welcome to the Eric Mattaxas show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m.investments.com. That's legacy p.m. Investments.com. A Texas show with your host, Eric Mettaxas. Hey there, folks. Today is President's Day. Now, can I just be up front with you, Albin? Yes.

Today's February 22nd, 2002. So we know it's 22, 22, 22, 22, 22. which means we're all going to die. Obviously, the scripture is very clear. Very clear. But when they say that it's President's Day, that always gets on my nerves because I want to say, no, February 12th is Lincoln's birthday.

I'm a traditionalist. February 12th is Lincoln's birthday. February 22nd is Washington's birthday. That's today. And by the way, the father of our country would have been 290 years young today. Wow. Can you imagine?

That's so long that maybe he would have grown another. set of his own teeth by now. Maybe it's that long. Well, anyway, I always, when I hear President's Day, because I was an adult when they decided to change it, as you were, from, they used to have Lincoln's birthday, February 12th, and then they 1809, then they used to have February 22nd, Washington's birthday, 1732, and then they said, nah, let's put it together, make it President's Day, President's weekend, but it sounds so vague.

I feel like, is it William Henry Harrison's day also? Is it all the presidents? this is a question I have, and I know I'm not going to get any answers on this. So we're going to move ahead. What else do we have to talk about? Actually, we have two very exciting guests today. So let's mention that right out of the gate. First of all, in our two today, we have our friend Doug Giles. Doug Giles is straight up crazy. He's so crazy. He's more sane than anyone you'll ever meet. He says things that sound crazy, but they are like deadly. sane. He's also, he speaks in a very colorful way. I suspect he's cussing

and we're just not listening carefully enough. But if you listen carefully, our two today, you're going to, if you don't know who Doug Giles is, get ready for a treat because there's nobody. Because I'm almost ready to press the bleep button. I know. We don't have one. I know. He's using phrases that's like, let me look that up quick.

Let me look that up, put that on delay. No, he is just fantastic. We've had him on before, but that's our two. He's fun. He's fun. But in a couple of minutes, We have a really serious conversation with Richard Weikert. Richard Weikert has written a book called Darwinism and racism. Folks, if you've heard me talk to John Zmirak, John Zemirak has talked about this,

but Richard Weikard has written a book about Darwinian racism. And this is going to be, I think it's extremely educational. I think some people's minds will be blown, not literally, but I want to say that. Now, Albin, this weekend I'm going to Phoenix to work on my first. my tan this past weekend I was in Albuquerque. And Albuquerque, it snowed, but then the next day it was like in the mid-50s. And the sun is so strong there that I got color just from being outside for short season. And I love Albuquerque. Yeah, I understand when people put their high beams on, you get a tan. That's actually true because I'm Greek. But, you know, the church that I usually speak at

in Albuquerque, it's Skip Heitzig's church. And some of these pastors are so cool. Greg Lorry is another one, and they're friends. But, like, his office is so cool that he has a 1942 mint condition Harley Davidson motorcycle in there. 42. And he let me sit on it, and he took a picture of me, and I thought, I'm going to look like Dukakis in the tank. But it's not that bad. So I posted it on Instagram. Maybe I put it on Twitter because the stuff I post on Twitter is so political and depressing.

Maybe we need to lighten up my Twitter file. And, by the way, speaking of social media, I'm on. Gab. I'm on parlor. I'm on getter. And I try to sign up for Trump has a new social media thing. It's called truth. Right? But it's been, I think it's so popular that they cannot keep up. So all my friends, Jenna Ellis, different people, they're having trouble like getting on there because so many people are signing up. I think it's a good problem. But I'm going to be on there as well. Okay. Okay. So do, should we read a letter? Should we talk? This week, I mentioned I'm going to be in Phoenix, speaking at a church. I believe in Tempe, Arizona this weekend. And I'm looking forward to that. Then we're going to be at the NRB in Dallas. I was going to say in Dallas. No.

We're going to be at the NRB in March. It's the second week of March, and it's in Nashville. That's going to be crazy. And we're going to have some weird announcements. Should we prepare the audience that we have some announcements? We just tell them we have some announcements. We're launching a late-night television. program. Why wasn't I told? You're not supposed to know about it. Surprise. But I believe the other sidekick may die

soon and you may be getting a phone call from my agent. No, seriously, we're going to have some interesting announcements to make at the NRB. The Bonhofer film, I think I've said this, is funded and it's probably shooting in the fall. I can't give you details. I'm not allowed to. Legally, I'm not allowed to. but illegally, I am allowed too. But that's exciting.

There's a lot of interesting projects and things that we're working on. And I said, let me just do what I normally do and say, if you want all the information, sign up for our newsletter, Eric Mataxis.com. A lot of people listen to this as a podcast or as on the radio. Please go to ericmetaxis.com. Please sign up for the newsletter because there are tons of things that, trust me, when I tell you, you're missing them.

When I was in Albuquerque, so many people said, I didn't know that you had this on your program or that any program. They said, since you got knocked off YouTube, I've kind of lost track of you. A lot of people say that because, folks, we took a giganto hit when YouTube decided that we're so radioactive. And of course, we are. We're so radioactive that they had to destroy the program. The Erkmatakis show is no longer on YouTube. Tons of people are missing out on this information.

So we're in a real war where people are saying, we just want to take you out. We have the right to do it. We're wrong to do it, but nobody can do anything about it, and we're going to take you off. So I say to people, folks, please help us by going to Ericmataxis.com. Sign up for the newsletter. And once or twice a week, we'll send you all of the stuff that you're obviously missing. Yes, right. Right? Okay.

Now, this week also, I don't want to scare people, but we've got a lot of crazy stuff coming up. We have James O'Keefe in the studio. Folks, do you know who James O'Keefe is? If you don't know, you're going to... I mean, there's no way to sum that up. He's probably undercover, and he's examining you right now. He's ready to expose whatever you're doing. Right.

He's that good. He's going to come in here dressed as a pimp from 1974. I just want to warn you. That's James O'Keefe. All right. Then we've got Zmirak, of course. Tomorrow, I'm talking to Frank Gaffney. Some people know Frank Gaffney.

Frank is one of the heroes in America. And he's going to be talking about what's going on with the Durham investigation. Yeah. And Hillary Clinton, it is just, anyway, that's tomorrow. Also coming up, Dennis Prager, remember Dennis Prager? I love Dennis Prager so much that I can't, I can never get serious with him. But Dennis Prager, I guess I should also, I have a letter I wanted to read. People write letters.

Folks, every letter you write, I read. I don't get to respond to everyone. but every now and again, I'll read one on the air. But I read everyone in my own time at home. This one says, Dear Eric, on a recent episode of your radio show, you briefly spoke about the woman at the well in the Gospel of John, chapter four. You said that it was not in the earliest manuscripts.

Was this correct? Or is it being confused with the woman found in adultery? And this is written Matthew from Irvine, California is writing. Matthew, you are correct. Go to the head of the class. I misspoke. I meant the woman found an adultery where Jesus writes in the sand, and then he says, whoever's without sin cast the first stone.

Okay, that's not in the earliest manuscripts. I still think it's biblical, but I just want to be clear. Yes, I misspoke. Yes, Matt, from Irvine, California. You are correct, and I feel busted. Yeah, you should feel that way. A lot of mistakes on this program. You do, and I don't call you out because I feel like then my job's on the line, right?

Exactly. Oh, if you called me. It's one thing for Matt from Irvine, California to call me out. But if you were to call me out, you'd be out of here so fast, it would make Linda Blair's head spin. Actually, that's not a good. I like that. That's not saying a lot. Okay, so in a couple of seconds, we're talking about Darwinian racism.

Now, whenever I talk about my book is atheism dead, usually if I'm asked to speak, I talk about that. Eventually, I get to the point that if you believe in Darwinian evolution, if you believe that there is no God, it genuinely leads to a racist worldview. That's not debatable. It's people try to avoid it, but that's one of the things I'm going to talk about with my guest today. Richard Whitehart, don't go away. Hey, folks, I've got to tell you a secret about relief factor that the father, son, owners, Pete and Seth Talbot have never made a big deal about. I think it is a big deal. I really do. They sell the three-week quick start pack for just 1995 to anyone struggling from pain like neck, shoulder, back, hip, or knee pain, 1995, about a dollar

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Let Bambi run your HR. Go to Bambi.com slash Metaxus right now for your free HR audit. BAMB-B-B-E-E-com slash Mattax. access. Hey, folks, very, very exciting topic, perhaps depressing, but very important. I have as my guest, Richard Weikert, he's a professor of history at California State University. He's written many important books, but the new one is called Darwinian racism, how Darwinism

influenced, now this is not hyperbole, so take this in, how Darwinism influenced Hitler, Nazism, and white nationalism, Darwinian racism, and the author Richard Weikart. Richard, welcome to this program. Yeah, hi, Eric. Great to be with you. Look, you wrote a previous book called, from Darwin to Hitler, where you cover some of this ground. Isn't it strange that we live in a time when most people don't know these facts. These are facts. This is not really debatable. Some people may not like what is here, but it's not really debatable. Is it debatable that Darwinism led to Nazi thinking, to racism? I mean, it just doesn't seem to me to be debatable. It's just unknown. Yeah, most historians actually do agree with me, although most don't emphasize it as much. They pretty much put it in the background to some degree.

there actually is one prominent historian who has actually tried to debate me on the issue, but his position is completely untenable, and I completely destroy it in this book. Well, so lay it out for people, because my friend John Zmirach, he's been on this program, he's talked about this a lot, lay it out for folks who really are unaware with the argument. And first of all, why don't you define, you know, Darwinism so that people really understand what we mean by? Darwinism leading to racism. Yeah, Darwinism is the theory of biological evolution through natural selection, just as Darwin himself posited it. And Darwin himself used human races as an example of variations. He thought

that racism was a way to support his theory, in fact. And not only that, but even worse than that, Darwin thought that races were locked in this inescapable Darwinian struggle for existence with each other and that would lead to the extermination of those that were less fit and the supremacy of then those that were more fit. And of course, he thought the Europeans were the ones who were more fit. And that's why they were going out and exterminating the Aboriginal peoples and other parts of the world. Right. It fit the narrative that was in the, well, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of, the 19th century, a lot of part of the 19th century, this idea of, you know, there's manifest

destiny, there are a number of ways that it can be framed, but the idea that nature read in tooth and claw, this is just the way things are. And it is by definition amoral, right? In other words, that there is no God. This is just, we're just describing reality. At least that's how they would put it. Yeah, exactly. They thought that this was part of nature. And we really can't escape this part of nature. And so when one race is exterminating another race, it's just part of the way that nature has operates. Yeah.

I mean, you must find it funny. Everywhere I go, I mean, I'm talking about my new book is atheism dead. And I talk about the idea that, listen, if you want to be an atheist, I mean, first of all, atheism is by definition preposterous. But if you say that there is no God, you have no basis on which to say, racism is wrong. Zero. And yet you find a lot of people who somehow identify as atheists who believe that we can construct our own meaning. We can just demand that people agree that racism is wrong. And I think, well, I know it's wrong, but I know why it's wrong. Darwinists, people who believe that

we got here via natural selection, which is to say mutations and accidents, they really don't have the ghost of an argument for why racism would be wrong. But they're not. they're afraid to talk about that. Yeah, I think you're right. In fact, what's interesting is that a lot of them blame religion for racism. And so if you look at a lot of the scholarship that's going on today among scholars

who are writing about the history of race, you find all sorts of books about how evangelical Christianity is the root of racism. That's a lot of what's being put forward in academics, in academia today. But they ignore the scientific racism because that was progressives. That was scientists who were, you know,

promoting these kinds of things in the late 19th and early 20th century especially. And by the way, in my last chapter, my book, I show that there are white nationalists today who are recycling the same arguments, trying to use science to try to prove their racism too. Actually, I think you opened the book with the shooting in, you do, in Denver in 1999 Columbine.

Let's talk about that, because I was startled myself by that. I had forgotten that. If I'd ever read about it, I'd forgotten about it. Let's start there. Spring 1999, Columbine. Talk about that. Yeah, Eric Harris carried out his killing at Columbine on Hitler's birthday because he was wanting to honor the furor. And he was wearing a t-shirt that said, natural selection. And if you go back and if you read Eric Harris's journals, he kept a journal, a diary. And if you read his diaries, he has a lot to say about Darwinism and its importance in his journals. his worldview. He definitely was a white supremacist and bought into Hitler's ideology. And again,

he's recycling the ideas that were being put forward by the Nazis. And by the way, it's not just the Nazis. In my earlier book from Darwin to Hitler, most of that book is on pre-1914 German thought. And it's looking at the ideas that fed into Nazis. Hitler was not an original thinker. The ideas were all out there before he came on the scene. And he just took them in a rather fanatical fashion. But I mean the idea, I have myself forgotten all of this. The Columbine shooting was on Hitler's birthday. Yes. I had completely forgotten that. But this is what we're up against, Richard. We're dealing with the media that absolutely is hostile to the narrative that you're putting forth, which is fact. I mean, they murdered on Hitler's birthday, and he's,

He's wearing a T-shirt that says natural selection. Yeah. And that's like the cartoon version, except you're telling me that actually happened. Yeah, and that's not the only time that something similar to that has happened. There have been mass shootings in other countries. In Sweden, there was a mass shooting that was by a guy who was claiming that he had, his worldview was based on Darwinism and natural selection. We had a situation just a couple of years ago in 2019 at the garlic, at the gilip. Hilroy garlic festival here in California, where a young man killed three people and wounded others

at the garlic festival. And he posted to social media just before he did that, that people should read a book by a guy named Ragnar Redbeard called Might is Right. And the subtitle of that book is Survival of the Fittest. And if you read Ragnar Redbeard's book, which I have in the course of my research for this book. It's one of the most incendiary pieces of social Darwinism I've ever read. He quotes Darwin explicitly. I mean, you're not just reading into it Darwinism. He actually quotes from Charles Darwin. And he makes very clear that he sees races being locked in a struggle for existence and such. And Ragnar Redbeard's book is being promoted on a lot of white nationalist websites today. And even, I think there's even a PDF version of it somewhere out there.

But Redbeard's book is just incredible. Well, I mean, it really is fascinating that we're in a war of ideas, that we want to help people to understand that apart from the Bible, where do you get the idea that racism is wrong? I mean, if you follow the atheist science, whether you go back to Darwin or you go back to Nietzsche, whatever it is, they have an almost coherent set of ideas. is, but people just want to ignore all the bad stuff and kind of pretend like, well, we'll take

the good part, racism bad. But they don't have the beginning of an idea why it's bad. They can't talk about the fact that it was, you know, Bible thumping evangelicals who led the abolitionist movement in England and in the United States. It comes out of the Bible. Where else would it come from? I mean, it's just a fascinating thing. They like, there's something about it. they like, but they want to deny where that idea comes from. Yeah, it's a great point. And in fact, I have colleagues who I've talked to who explicitly say that they are moral relativists, but then when you start talking about race, and I have, I've mentioned about race and told them this very thing that you're saying, you know, that you don't really have a basis for

claiming that racism is wrong. I do have a basis for claiming that racism is wrong because we're all created in the image of God. But still, they somehow want to, so have their each, have their cake and eat it too. They won't be able to say that there's no such thing as morality, but then you're immoral if you're a Christian. If you're pushing your particular views that they don't like, then that's immoral. But it's just based on, as far as I can tell, there are feelings. But that's where you get into issues of postmodernism and the kind of postmodernist thought that just says, well, we can manufacture or create whatever reality we want to. And so my truth is my truth and your truth is your truth. But of course, I'm going to try to impose my truth on you,

in a Nietzschean kind of fashion. So I'm going to try to be the overman to, you know, impose my views on you and dominate. So what you get is this really weird situation where you have a lot of intellectuals who are, you know, pushing real strong against any kind of oppression, such as racism. But on the other hand, they're trying to impose their views on everyone else. Irony, irony, irony, irony. It's unbelievable. We're talking to the author of Darwinian racism.

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Wish I could borrow. Hey, folks. I'm talking to Richard Weikert, Professor of History at California State University. The book, folks, this is important stuff. It's called Darwinian racism, how Darwinism influenced Hitler Nazism and white nationalism. These are just facts, but they have been so airbrushed out of history and out of the narrative that's important. We revisit them, familiarize ourselves with them. Richard, I just turned to a page.

You have a photo, a picture here of Hitler wrote a message in a book on Christmas. And Hitler wrote, I just want to say this in German first, just because I can. The whole nature is a revoltings ring in between craft and shone. A evager Sieg of Starken over the Schwachen. Very impressive. What does he mean? He says all of nature. I mean, this is vintage Nazism, ladies and gentlemen.

Vintage Darwinism. It says all of nature is a powerful struggle between power and weakness and eternal victory of the strong over the weak. Parentheses, kill the Jews. That's really, you know, the idea that in 2022, you, Richard Weikard, have to point this stuff out. This has been out there since the Nazis. but very few people in the academy have been willing to take this on.

Why have you taken this on, not just in this book, but generally? Well, interesting, I came about it through sort of a back door. When I was doing my graduate work, I was working on the socialist reception of Darwinism, and I noticed that a lot of Darwinists were promoting evolutionary ethics, and so I got very interested in the topic of evolutionary ethics in the late 19th century. But as I began investigating evolutionary ethics, I started thinking a lot of these ideas that these people are putting forward based on evolutionary ethics like eugenics, the idea that we should engineer humans improve their human heredity, euthanasia, the scientific racism. These sound a lot like Nazi ideas. And so I wasn't really originally thinking about Nazism when I started my research on the impact of Darwinism on other things like ethics. But it became obvious that it was just so, it was just so, it was. just so patently obvious, but no one had really, I mean, I shouldn't say no one. A lot of historians who write about the Nazi period do write that they're social Darwinists.

That's not an unusual thing. I mean, again, there's a lot of historians that make that claim. So I'm not the first person that's claimed that this kind of thing, but I have brought it out in greater detail. And I've shown in irrefutable detail, in fact, that they were in fact relying upon Darwinists, not just for peripheral things, but for the core parts of their ideology, the struggle for existence between races, racial inequality. expansionist warfare and killing of those that you deem as inferior. Well, I mean, obviously, if you believe in an atheistic, strictly Darwinist view of the world, then there is no right or wrong. They're killing people, murdering people is not wrong, you know, any more than it's wrong to swat a fly. They don't really want to be explicit about that thinking, but that thinking is there.

Yeah, it is. And it's why when Hitler took this to fanatical ends, he was relying upon these ideas that had been put forward by scientists and anthropologists and others before him. Again, he was not just sort of an complete outlier. There were a lot of scientists who were saying similar kinds of things. There were a lot of scientists in Germany who were promoting not only racism, but anti-Semitism, which is racism. It's a specific kind of racism. But yeah, the the ideas that were being promoted by Darwinian biologists in the time before Hitler and during Hitler's regime were very similar to some of the things Hitler's. Now, he took him in a more fanatical direction than maybe many of them would have, but still, it was their ideas that formed the basis for his worldview. I want to mention, some people, if they're familiar with, you know, Darwinism, generally they're familiar with the Heckel illustrations. That's the ontogeny, capitulates philogyny story. Heckel, of course, a German in the 19th century, you have printed here a picture of, it's the frontest piece of his 1868 book on evolutionary theory. And it's very

clear that he is saying that the African races, the Australian Aboriginal races, that they are closer to apes than the Europeans. I mean, this was, quote, unquote, common knowledge in these circles for many decades. Yes, that's true. And Heckel was, by the way, even more racist than Darwin was. He claimed that there actually were 10 different human species. So he divided the human races into different species, even. But this was not just something that was being put forward in Germany either.

It was something that was scientific racism was very prominent in the United States and Britain in other parts of the world as well. If you looked at textbooks, biology textbooks, in the early 20th century, many of them were promoting scientific racism and claiming that the races were different, not just physically, but also intellectually, and even morally, that they had different moral traits

because a lot of biologists in the late 19th and early 20th century believe that moral traits were also biologically inherited. So they're total fatalists. They don't believe in anything, really. I mean, it's just fascinating to me. I mean, we have to walk this through again. When you're talking about strict Darwinism,

the idea, of course, is that through random natural processes, we get whatever it is that we have, this panoply of creation. And it follows perfectly logically that all creatures, including all human beings, are, by definition, unequal. That some are beyond, certain standards and some are below certain standards. And it is just fascinating that the people who are proponents of Darwin and of this kind of naturalism, they simply refuse to have these conversations because they know that they'll get in trouble.

So they sweep it under the rug and keep moving. We're not going to let them do that. We'll be right back talking to Richard Wyckhardt. The book is Darwinian racism. Hey folks, if you listen to this program, of course, you've heard me talk at infinitum about my pillow and my friend Mike Lindell. Well, Mike has just announced that you will receive one of his books and the book is next level insane. It is called What Are the Odds from Crack Addict to CEO? It's his story.

You will receive it absolutely free with any purchase using the promo code Eric. Did you hear that? it would be a great time, by the way, to buy his warm and wonderful my slippers. For a limited time, he's offering 50% off my slippers. We all wear them in my extended family, my slippers, check it out. 50% off. Go to my pillow.com, click on the radio listener square and use promo code Eric. You'll also get deep discounts on all my pillow products, including some overstock products,

such as individual towels, blankets, comforters, and much more. Or call 800, 978, 30978. That's 800, 978, 305, 7. and use the promo code. Eric. Hey there, folks. If you've been listening to me for a while, you know I have a book I called His Atheism Dead. And everywhere I go, I keep talking about the issues that I'm discussing with Richard Weikart today. His new book is Darwinian racism. And I think it's incumbent on us. I say this to you, Richard, my guest, and to my audience. It's incumbent on us to take these

arguments lovingly but forcefully to people who say, I don't believe in good. God. I believe in Darwinism. I believe that we got here through natural selection, through accident, and force these folks to see where their ideas lead, that their ideas lead inevitably, inevitably to racism and how they have to somehow figure out how to deal with that. Your book, of course, Darwinian racism does exactly that. But it's a basic idea. I mean, I just turned to another page. You have some beautiful illustrations. It's a Nazi school poster.

Okay, so my mom in Germany, she would have seen these kinds of things. This is propaganda in Germany in the 30s. And the school poster says, elimination of the sick and weak in nature. And it shows, you know, a strong bird eating a rodent. It shows somebody chopping down a weak-looking tree. In other words, this was like it became a religion for them, The idea that the weak deserves must be destroyed and the strong must thrive.

If you don't look too carefully, it sounds like a nice idea. And then you look at it a little bit and you realize it's satanic. It is absolutely evil. It leads to the most savage butchery in history. We only need to think of the Holocaust. But I think Stalin was thinking along these lines. This is what real atheism leads to. Yeah, and as you're suggesting, it's not just a matter of back in the Nazi period either.

You know, we see these same ideas being recycled, although usually in different forms. Today, racism isn't so popular among a lot of progressives, but things like euthanasia, assisted suicide, killing disabled infants or killing them in the womb. These have been our ways of trying to devalue humans. And so sometimes we may change the categories, but still the weak are being targeted. Well, this is a theme, right? In other words, if you're walking with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, you know these are bad ideas, they're dangerous ideas. If you're not, one way or the other, you will drift over to these ideas. I mean, the demonization of the Jews in Germany is similar to today to the demonization of Christians.

I mean, it's not, we're not there yet by the grace of God. But the idea that we're going to find a group that we feel free to demonize, that we feel obliged to demonize, to crush, because they are the problem. Just as the Jews were the problem, now it's other people who have different views that are a problem. And the idea of identifying a group and crushing them, which is, really, that's at the very heart of what racism is, at its core, its Darwinist natural selection taken to the next level. Sure. And the eugenics movement was an outgrowth of that in the early part of the 20th century. And I have a chapter in my book where I talk about how the Nazis relied upon Darwinism

as the basis for their eugenics movement. But eugenics is resurfacing, of course, in our day as well. And a lot of times it has the same Darwinian basis. We're also seeing movements like transhumanism, which is basing itself on Darwinism too. And again, a lot of these ideologies that are trying to use Darwinism to decide what's valuable and what's less valuable are committing the same kind of fallacies that these early Darwinists were that I talk about. That is, they're seeing some humans as being valuable and other humans is not being valuable. And some of them are some people today, some academics today are very explicit about this.

I mean, Peter Singer, for example, whom you're probably familiar with. He's a professor of bioethics at Princeton University. Peter Singer is one of the leading figures promoting things like infanticide, euthanasia, and such. And animal rights, interestingly. But on the basis of his understanding is atheistic understanding of Darwinism. Well, I mean, it is interesting that Hitler, I can't remember the quotes, but when I was writing about Bonhofer, I found so many quotes where he makes it very clear

that whatever religion or philosophy he adheres to looks at Christianity as weak, very Nietzschean idea, right? That mercy is antithetical to the natural process. Mercy is foolish. Why should we care for the cripple, the sick, the weak? We should crush them. We should wipe them out.

They're useless eaters. That follows logically from, this worldview. He had his T4 euthanasia program. You know all about this stuff. But it follows perfectly logically, whereas Christians have a dramatically different view. We say we want to care for those who are weak who cannot care for themselves. That really flies in the face of, you know, the laws of Darwin's nature, this idea that the weak, they almost have a duty to get out of the way. Yeah, exactly. And Hitler thought that by killing off the weak and the sick, and it wasn't just Jews, you know, that's the one that was his primary target, but he also killed people with disabilities, Germans with disabilities. There were 200,000 Germans who were killed with disabilities during World War II, as well as tens of thousands in occupied territories. And this was done in the name of trying to get rid of the unfit. And they use these Darwinian terms, too, you know, unfit, the people who are not up to snuff. in the Darwinian struggle for existence.

And so they're using Darwinism as a rationale for then killing people. And they thought then that by doing this, they're going to be improving humans hereditarily and thus driving the evolutionary process forward. So he thought that he's bringing about evolutionary progress by killing off the Jews as well as other people. And one of the more ironic things, too, is that Hitler actually, because he thought that the Jews were biologically immoral. That is, he thought that some of these immoral traits that were stereotypes of the Jews

like being greedy and deceitful and lascivious, that these kinds of things were biologically ingrained. He thought that by killing off the Jews, he was actually making the world more moral because he thought the Germans were moral and the Jews were immoral. So we kill off the immoral people and we'll make the world more moral.

I mean, there's a diabolical logic to it, right? That's what's so fascinating is very few people, are willing to see things through to the end. And Hitler and his cronies, they were. And there are other people in history who've been willing to do that. Stalin again, another one, although that's a whole other story.

We're going to be right back, final segment, talking to the author of Darwinian Racism, Richard Weichhard. Don't go away. Hey, folks, I'm talking to the author of a new book, Darwinian racism, how Darwinism influenced Hitler, Nazism, and white nationalism. And Richard Weichhardt, the author, my guest. You say over and over how Nazism, it really arises, their racialist view, arises

out of Darwinism. And of course, we have to remember Hitler's own book, Mine Kampf, My Struggle, was clearly an allusion to this idea of struggle. You have here a Nazi periodical cover with the message life requires struggle. Leben erfordot kumpf. It all sounds like. sounds pretty dramatic when you say it in German. But this was an idea that was just baked into people's thinking in the 20s and in the 30s in Germany, and Hitler rode that to victory, to the Holocaust, to his grave. Again, the headline for me is, why aren't more people facing this? when you have people like Peter Singer and others talking the way they are, they seem to know this is true, but they don't care.

They just think, I like this view, so I won't focus on the negative side of it. Yeah, so as you're suggesting Hitler with his confidence, one of the interesting things, too, Hitler, as he was talking about the difference between his worldview and the worldview of the Marxists, whom he hated, he said that the key difference was that the Marxists believed in class struggle, but he believed in racial struggle. So that really was really a central core idea. And when he's talking about racial struggle, he's talking about a struggle for existence. And interestingly, before Hitler came on the scene, in the late 19th century, there was a German biologist who became a geographer. His name was Friedrich Ratzl. And Ratzl coined the phrase Labensraum, meaning living space, which meant, and basically, and he talked about a Kampf um's living ums Leibens realm, I struggle for living space.

So the idea is that the struggle for existence is all about gaining territory. And that's one of the reasons why Hitler launched his expansionist war. So these ideas really were core ideas in Hitler's ideology. They weren't just sort of peripheral things, you know, Darwinism wasn't just some of an add-on kind of thing. This is really the core of his thinking about how to carry out his ideas. So if you look at the different policies that were atrocities, under his regime, you know, the euthanasia program, the offensive warfare, the extermination of the Jews, the extermination of the gypsies, the extermination of Slavs, because they killed millions

of Soviet POWs also because they thought Slavs were inferior people, too. We can see that Darwinism really was a core ideology for the Nazis, not just some peripheral kind of thing. Well, also at the heart of all this is a deep fatalism, the idea that you are your genes. So if you're a Jew, it doesn't matter if you convert to Christianity. It doesn't matter. Nothing matters except your genes, your blood. So it is really fathomlessly fatalistic that there is no, nothing matters except nature, nothing matters except the material, which again is a radical.

atheist view. And I think we have to take this argument to the radical atheists and say, this is not looking good for you. Yeah, it seems like atheists have sort of waffled between biological determinism, which is what the Nazis had, and environmental determinism, which is what the Stalin and the Marxists have. And they really have to sort of choose one or the other, or they else to have to break free of that with a Nietzschean kind of perspective. But all of those of the Judeo-Christian view that humans have free will, that humans have a spiritual nature to them as well, that we're not just formed by our heredity or by our environment. This is not complicated. When you look at it squarely, it's fairly simple. I hope folks will get

a copy of Darwinian racism. It's just all right.