The Glenn Beck Program - Ep 23 | Arthur Herman | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Episode Date: February 9, 2019

Glenn is joined this week by Arthur Herman, an American popular historian, currently serving as a senior fellow at Hudson Institute. They discuss his book "Freedom's Forge" which is the untold story behind the amazing WWII production of armaments in America and the necessity of cooperation between government and private industry. Arthur talks through the history that you know and don't know and how looking at the past can reveal a lot about our future.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You are one of my favorite historians. This is like a dream come true to sit with you. At your service. It is great. You have written so much, and I want to, I mean, I want to hit on a lot of these, the idea of the decline in Western history. Joseph McCarthy, how the Scots invented the modern world, the rule, to rule the waves, how the British Navy shaped. I've got questions on that one. Gandhi, Churchill, I am fascinated by those two.

One of my favorite books of all time is Freedom's Forge that you wrote, how American business produced victory in World War II, The Cave and the Light, Douglas MacArthur, and 1917 Lenin Bies. I know you do. I know you do. And my feeling as an historian, you can't afford to despise your figures.

What you're trying to do is get inside their minds and figure out why they did, what they did and what the consequence of what they did. Was it a good thing or was it ultimately a bad thing? And I think we have to say about Wilson, ultimately it was a lot of bad things. A lot of bad things. Do you think he was a really a bad guy,

the way he loved the clan and all of that stuff? That was part of the times, I think, and also part of his background. It was, there are many things to dislike about Wilson. and a lot of his thinking on things like race is very, very different from where we think. Now, not so different from the way a lot of people did at the time, of course, particularly if he came from Virginia, rural Virginia as he did. But the thing that's so fascinating about Wilson is that he was a man so utterly convinced of his rightness,

of a level of self-righteousness that would allow him, in his own mind, to lie to people. Yeah. That would allow him, you know, the meeting, you know, the ends justify any means. Yeah. That's very much part of Wilson's personality. Very much. And I guess what I don't like about him and some of the people that surrounded him

and the progressive era that he really kind of pushed forward is that arrogance. Yep. And we're seeing it today. day. I think so. I think it permeates. It's always permeated the progressive mind and the progressive movement in this country and in Europe, but in this country, particularly because it's able to latch on to that kind

of Protestant evangelical zeal that lies at the basis to so much of American culture, good and bad. But when it's linked to political movements, boy, watch out. Yeah. Because it can cause so much pain and suffering. all for a higher cause and all for a higher motive. So would you, because people don't, they don't realize that social justice,

you know, started out as a Catholic thing in the 1800s, and it was a good thing. And then it has morphed and morphed and it became more and more about politics and the government's power to create justice, social justice, even things out. I think, you go ahead. You know, I think it took on a Marxist. machine. And now it's become virtually the equivalent. The Marxist social and historical analysis,

which is really at the bottom very, very simplistic, now underlies so much of what the left does that I think if you go to Marx, you go to Lenin, you understand so much more about the American left today than he would by reading any of the classic figures of American progressivism like Herbert Crowley or Bellamy or Edward Bellamy, any of the other figures

who were Wilson's contemporaries and Wilson's admirers. But Marx is the name of the game today. And that's been it's part of what drives the extremism that you get on the left.

And it's also, I think, what makes the life of the mind in places like universities and colleges now really so, what's the word I'm looking for, so stagnant, so lacking in any kind of, any kind of intellectual vitality at the same time, of course, in which they're shutting down dissent, shutting down any view which in any way deviates from what they consider to be the party line. you mentioned, you know, when, when social justice is connected to, you know, the Protestant, you know, viewpoint or evangelical, the left has its own religion now. I mean, it is getting to the point to where science doesn't matter, nothing matters. It is a religion.

and if you dare to question, it is almost... It's heresy. And to cross, when a system of beliefs becomes an orthodoxy, it signals two things. One is dissent is not to be tolerated. Or even the hint of dissent. I mean, that's really where we are now. It's not even if you don't dissent, but you don't push... You don't stand up enough.

Right. Or you don't hit the exact points when discussing issues such as race, issues such as class, issues such as gender, you can be cast out. But what it also does is that at the same time it becomes, as I say, this fierce enforcer of that orthodoxy, what it also is Glenn is a sign of vulnerability. Orthodoxes, the whole nature of orthodoxies is that they're rigid, they can't adjust to change, they can't deal with reality. Reality has to be seen through a lens, which is defined by the ideology or by the system of religious beliefs, and the hardening of that system into an orthodoxy is a sign that it knows it's in trouble. And this is where we are today. We're with a left which is intellectually bankrupt.

I would argue too, morally bankrupt, but which has seized the means by which to enforce its standards and its creed so that being a conservative, being a conservative commentator, having a different view of these kinds of issues becomes a form of social death. I mean, that's really what's happening now. I know people who worked in the Obama administration. and say they are no longer welcome in the circles of the left. Nothing surprised me.

Right. Revolutions devour their own children. Yeah. And this is exactly what we're seeing with the left today. Wilson and Lenin for a minute. Since Marx plays a big role now, let's go to Lenin and show me how that plays out here. Well, in the case of Lenin, what you have is someone for whom Marx, was less of a way to understand the world and more as a way to understand power.

Lenin in the end was only concerned about one thing, and that is getting power and holding on to it. He isn't the one who sort of said power comes from the barrel of a gun, but that basically underlies everything that he believed and understood about the politics of his own day, how it was that the Tsarish government was able to control the masses and dominate that empire, and that was the power that he wanted in order to reshape it. And didn't he say right around the time of the revolution, no, no, no, we're not communist.

We're, I think he used social Democrats, didn't he, or something along those lines? Well, social Democrats, yeah, social Democrats at that time were, of course, mainstream Marxists. Right. And in a country like Russia, being a social Democrat, you were bound to endorse some form of revolution because it was very unlikely that you were going to wait long enough for. or a conscious working class to come into existence to create the kind of revolution

that Marxists were anticipating in countries like Germany and Great Britain and France and the other leading industrial nations. So you were bound to endorse some sort of revolution. In Lenin's case, the revolution that he saw was one that would be driven not by a certainly not by the masses and not by the workers, but we'd be driven by

a tiny revolutionary elite who understood how to seize events to topple the old order and then to use it to impose a new order run by them. And from his standpoint,

the whole question of sort of waiting for the right occasion, writing for the right opportunity at terms of what was happening in the society itself, waiting for that moment, waiting for that moment when industrialization, which was, as I explained in the book, was already well underway in Russia.

Russia was on its way. We would call today, we would think about it as basically an emerging economy and where it was headed. But the event that he sees is on as the moment to seize power is when Russia makes the terrible mistake of entering World War I and fighting a war, which is way beyond its capacity.

to sustain or to deal with the consequences with when defeat comes on the battlefield. If you read Fabian Socialists in England and all throughout Europe, they know the pain that's going to happen with World War I. They know it. They're looking at it like Lenin did. This is a good opportunity to redraw the map and to bring in a new world order. do, for instance, with Lenin and Stalin Mao, do they at any point stop and say, this doesn't work? That's a really great question.

Is there even a moment of self-reflection? But yet, just a moment. Or do they just not care? I think that they don't particularly care. I think that's exactly right. And I think also, too, what, again, as I was going to say, say with regard to Lenin and Marx, what Marx does is justify a way to seize power and to hold it. And once you have power, power is itself self-justifying.

Right. There are no moral principles. There are no ethical standards to appeal outside the realm of power and the realm of politics. And once you've located yourself in that space and all the men that you just described did, and we can throw Hitler into the mix, too, if we want to, and Himmler. and the other key figures who organize that particular totalitarian dictatorship, then you're in.

I mean, then there's never a moment of doubt. You know exactly what you need to do, and that is to consolidate power and to hang on to it and that every move you make is a means by which you extend it and grow it. Probably the only one of that mix who had any kind of lingering self-doubts

was probably Mussolini, actually. I was going to say. Franco. Yeah, Franco is in a totally different, totally different camp. But Mussolini, he is, after all, the founder of fascism as a political doctrine and even as a working ideology for running a state, in this case, his own, Italy. And yet at the same time, when you look at Mussolini, you look at him, he's a man, I think, who is ultimately really plagued by self-doubts and a deep sense of shame about the country

that he runs. You know, his son-in-law became foreign minister, Count Chiano. And you read Kansciano's diaries, which are fascinating reading, Glenn, you really got to pick them up and look at them. But one of the scenes in which in the book, in the 1930s, is where a delegation of peasants have come from, I can't remember where it was, from

Sardini or from Piedmont, and they've come to see Mussolini, and just before they go have the, you know, the meeting and these office and so on, they relieve themselves underneath the stairwell going up that. And Mussolini finds out, and he's

so, this destroys his day, destroys his week. Here I am trying to make this country a modern, efficient state and government and a new model, a new order that's going to emerge from it. And then they do this. And then I'm still dealing with this sort of peasant, this peasant material leftover. So behavior like that makes Mussolini ashamed. Behavior like that, you're shot if you're in, if by Stalin or by Lenin, or by Mao in those circumstances. But Mussolini, there was still an element of conscience left for him that for those other dictator figures, it had all been, it had all been wiped away. There's this thing in America that we just don't want to look at Russia, you know, the Soviets.

We, you know, FDR, there's not a communist that I've met that I don't like. I think is one of his phrases, something along the, I know a lot of great communists. I think that's what he said. We all know, you say fascist, you immediately think of Hitler, and you immediately think of the death camps, and that's really bad. With a direct association for one to the other. Correct. Mao, Stalin, killed many more than Hitler. I mean, it's not a contest, but it's just as bad and evil, if not worse.

And yet we don't have that. Where is that breakdown? Well, you know, I did this book, biography of Joseph McCarthy, and I explored a lot of those issues there. The very important issues you're just raising. Why is it now from our modern lens and we think about really evil societies and evil dictators? Why is it that Hitler is always front and center in those discussions? Stalin a little bit, Stalin more so than it used to be. You know, when I went to University of Minnesota, there was a professor in the physics department

who actually had a portrait of Stalin on his wall, and the kids sort of chuckled about it. I think now that would be more difficult to get away with. I think there would be more fuss would be made about that, but certainly not the fuss that would be created. if you know, you have a picture of Hitler or had an SS banner in your office. Of course. This, this, you would be in serious, serious water if you tried something along those lines. And I think there's two things. One is, of course, that the writing of history has tended to be dominated by the left. And it's the, it's the left's view of that books like Howard Zins. For example, his history, the United States, look at the number.

how much of that book is used as the standard textbook in high schools. That's nuts. It's a very bad. Gary Nash is another one too. They're very smart. They have targeted schools and textbooks as a means by which to spread that propaganda, which really is. I have a very one-sided, lopsided view of history.

I have a first edition of Zinn signed and inscribed by him to somebody. I don't remember who it's inscribed to, and it talks about. Kim Il-sung, perhaps. Yeah. It talks about how, you know, we've held for a long time. We just have to keep, you know, keep on pushing through. And all of us who are on this side will understand that these kinds of books will change the world. That's right. And it's the old German student leader, Rudy Dutsche, right, who coined the phrase, the long march through the institutions. And he was talking about in the early 70s, and they've succeeded. It's been, it's been, it's been. in an impressive enterprise, the means by which they have seized key institutions in this country and made them purveyors of and now enforcers of a leftist orthodoxy.

It's amazing because people will say Americans don't have long vision. I think the left does. The left has a much longer vision. I mean, this has been something in the works since the turn of the century, last century. Yep. I think that that's true. True. And they know how to use, they know how to use allies and dupes. Yeah. The useful idiots, right? Yeah.

They know how to do that. And American progressives became part of that team of useful idiots, the people who were recruited by the NKVD and by Soviet espionage and by the Communist Party USA to become tools by which to infiltrate the federal government in the 1930s. Men like Alger Hiss, for example, Harry Dexter White. There's another ingredient, I think, also. And that is, and this is something that I know you're very interested in. And that is, is that what is able to make that leap from Hitler fascism to the death camps? Yes. Visual images.

Yeah. Images of Buchenwald and Dachau, which, by the way, were not actually the worst of what was happening. You know, what was happening at places like Auschwitz and places like Treblinka, the Holocaust was played out. Dachau and Buchenwald, although they shifted later to becoming part of the death factories of the Nazi regime, that was sort of collateral damage really by comparison to where the final solution was really hit, which was east, not in Germany. But set that aside. The point is that we have visual images of this, film of it,

being able to watch again and again to be played and to be linked. linked in people's minds to what's happening. The visual images for the Great Leap Forward? Not very much. For the great family of Ukraine, a few photographs of people lying dead in the streets. Not much else than that. You talk about the Holodomboer.

No one knows what it is. No one's ever heard of it. No, they don't. And again, the household names, right? Auschwitz, Treblinka, Buchanval, Daqau. But the camps, the Gulag camps? I don't know the name of any of them.

They're not very well known. Colima, for example, which was the great gold mine at which, you know, thousands and thousands of people died working that for Stalin. The White Sea Canal, this pointless effort to cut thousands of miles of a canal. to connect the White Sea to the Baltic, I think it was. In any case, the point is, is that these were as much death factories as anything that Auschwitz and Berkinau were involved. But we don't have, and we live in a visual age now, Glenn.

The written word is being replaced and has been replaced by the visual image as the key carrier for cultural transmission today. And it's one of the things that you and I and all of us who are engaged in is how do we get our country back? How do we get our heritage back need to really think about? And that is, is it's through the visual image, through the icon that we now have to carry on that fight. That's not to say, I love my written words. I'm very proud of that work. No, I know.

But it has to be, the key transmitter is this. I talk about this all the time. I fact, I was just on tour recently, and I showed a picture of proud boys fighting Antifa in the street. And I asked the audience, tell me who the good guys and the bad guys are. Can't tell. They all look like. They're all moving the same way. They're all throwing punches.

You can't tell. Then I show them a picture of Martin Luther King and groups without King in it, walking through with the police and the dogs and the batons. Tell me who the good guys and the bad guys are. You know instantly. You know immediately. And the struggle that's happening here in America is that both sides are not understanding that it's visual first. It's visual first.

And if you blow it on the visuals, if you are beaten and you are not defending yourself, what's left of the Judeo-Christian value in society will say you are the oppressed, and that is the oppressor. and without those images, you don't... It remains too abstract for most people. You know, this has happened in history before. I mean, the advance of Christianity in the 4th and 5th century

was driven by Christianity's ability to monopolize and to seize control of visual images. And that's going to continue all the way through the Middle Ages. You go to a Gothic cathedral, right? The statuary, the stained glass windows, the mosaics on the floor. All of this were the means by which Christianity was able to convey its message

to the masses when the written word had become more and more marginal to the way in which culture and cultural messages were both transmitted and reinforced. So I think this is a shift that we can say has happened before

and it can swing back again. It didn't European history with the Reformation. The written word in the book came back. as the powerful tool of Christianity and Christian thought. But we have to now think about our strategies going forward and come to realize that it's in the realm of the visual, the realm of the icon that this battle now has to be joined. You have that with triumph of will.

Oh, of course. You know, you have that. But you also have exactly what I was talking about with the Jews. The Jews did not fight back. So you have all these pictures of the Jews, peacefully being rounded up. And you would know better than I do. This is my guess.

I have been trying to figure out Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He said in... Amazing, man. Amazing. And he said, I've got to talk to Gandhi. He has the answer. I've got to talk to Gandhi. Well, my guess is that what Dietrich Bonhofer was doing,

even if he would have, you know, been able to lead the march, wouldn't have worked because the people of Germany had already gone over the cliff away from those Judeo-Christian values. And Gandhi was playing to England, not to India. He was playing to England. A marvelous point. Very profound insight. And yes, if Dietrich Bonhofer had tried to conduct the equivalent of the march on Selma, we can just imagine what carnage would have resulted from that. And if you would have had the West covering it, it may have worked. It may have worked. It may have worked. It may have worked. It may work. But he was looking to.

It was much too late. It was far too late for that kind of change to take place. And you know, this happened. You have, for example, in the Netherlands, you had days of solidarity. Yeah. In which Dutch citizens would put on, for example, yellow stars or even interfere with the efforts to round up Dutch Jews. And what happened? Well, the Nazis came down and rounded up everybody.

Yeah. And has shot them all. But at least they kind of kept their soul. I mean, if you look at that, it's not the same story as the German. the Dutch in the end still, they did a lot. And I'm finding out in the new book that I'm working on that the Danes did a lot, Norwegians did a lot, Raoul Wallenberg, he had company.

He had company in his efforts to protect Jews in a very, very dangerous situation, which was in Nazi-occupied Budapest. So there were efforts underway, but when you have the apparatus of the total police state at your behest, as they do in China, as Vladimir Putin does in Russia, there's all kinds of ways in which you can deal with dissent in ways that no one knows about and no one is able to confront and no one dares confront when it's aimed at them.

Let me stop with Wallenburg for a second. Six years ago, Christmas, my wife came to me, and she gave me a present. She handed it to me. then she took it back and she said, I can't give this to you on Christmas. And I said, I want to open it. And she said, I know you. You're going to spend all day crying. So if you promise you won't cry. And I said, of course I won't. I opened it. I cried all day. It is, it was one of the last letters, passports that Raoul Wallenberg gave to a Jewish person. Oh,

how precious. Oh my gosh. It's unbelievable. And I went over to Sweden and I was talking to one of the main historians of Wallenberg. She was surprised an American and even heard of him. I'm kidding. And I talked to her and the way I understand the story, maybe you can shed some light on this. We asked him to go. The Americans came to him and said, hey, we need you to go over there. We need you to help out.

We need you to get some information, yada, yada. he then became so committed to it. The guy was a giant. That's my impression, too. He was, in effect, an intelligence agent first. Right. And then a humanitarian, yeah. And then a humanitarian second when he saw what was actually taking place.

And then we don't even ask for him when he goes to the Soviets. How does America, I mean, that's just one of the great. This is the atmosphere of the immediate post-war period. I mean, think of all the, think of the British, right, and all of the Baltic and Russian citizens who had fled Soviet tyranny who were handed over to Stalin for disposal by the British because you didn't want to cross an ally. You didn't want to get mixed up with this. It seems sad and it seems brutal to say so. but in those 46, 47, 48, there were lots of issues that were being dealt with big issues.

And the question of a figure like Raul Wallenberg slipping through the cracks, it's not surprising. It's not, it's tragic. But you know what, Glenn, this is one of the things I think it's important always to emphasize. How much of history reveals to us, not the fact that some are, you know, inescapably good and some are simply insuperably bad, but how much of what happens in the world is really involves a tragedy of human beings

who find themselves in circumstances in which they are forced to act according to their, either their social role or their cultural assumptions or their religious beliefs, or even a sense of, you know what, this sounds like, I have to do this, because I have a feeling this will lead to the consequences that we all want. And you make the wrong decision. You make blunders. One of my favorite sayings in history is it's always difficult for us to remember that events that are in the past were once in the future.

And that the people who initiated those actions and who made those crucial decisions and think about the long list, I don't have to walk through them, all the time, never knew what the outcome would be and simply had to make a guess or a judgment based on their own experience and their own context. And their own humanity. They're own humanity. We don't like to look at the worst case scenario. It goes against everything in us as an animal.

And it rests upon our self-confidence or lack of confidence to make those decisions. And sometimes I think it's important. It's one of my main beefs with the way in which the left has twisted and distorted how we look at history. Like, for example, the Civil War, that we don't see it through that. lens of individuals making decisions which have tragic consequences, sometimes for the right reasons, sometimes for wrong, but sometimes for reasons which were understandable at the time. And that being able to understand that and understand our own humanity through history, this is one of the missions that I've set for myself from the very first book I wrote.

and it's one which I think I hope that readers and those who appreciate my books also understand. It's an exploration of the nature of humanity, of human nature through our actions in the past. And the more you can illuminate what it is that makes us us as human beings by understanding what has been done in the past, what's possible and what's not, that's, I think, a key enterprise for an historian. Whereas right now, I think a lot of history is driven by the idea of either assigning blame. Yeah. Or absolving blame. Yeah.

I think that most people that we look at as heroes, it's important to see that they didn't know how it would work out. That's right. That's exactly my point. Right. And they, you know, my son said to me, I have all these artifacts and pictures in the Raul-Wollenberg, you know, stuff. on my walls in my office. And we were having a conversation about courage. And I said, you know, I have all these people.

He said, yeah, because they were all heroes. I said, yeah, well, they were, but that's not what I have them. And he said, because they weren't afraid. And I said, no, I think the exact opposite is true. I think each, you know, courage is not the absence of fear. It is the, oh, well, it's right to do any way come what may. I think these people were terrified. but they did it anyway.

Do we all have that in us, or there's just a few of us that have it in us? Because I have no idea of crap hits the fan. I don't know who I'll be. I hope I hope I will be some, you know, one of these guys. But I don't know. What is that when you're looking at the great men of history? What is that?

That's a very profound, That transcends history, really, you've brought us into the realm of philosophy, I think, and how we understand and how we evaluate human behavior within the purviews of our ability to make judgments based on what we know, what we draw upon from our experience, from our perception of the world around us, and how we make right. decisions versus wrong decisions. That's an issue that I think haunts all of us, isn't it? I mean, what would you do?

What would I do if I were a German in 1935? What would I do if I were a Russian in 1917, 1918? You know, would I join the whites? Would I join the Reds? Who would I be fighting? Because if you look at the record of human carnage during the Russian Civil War. It's pretty bad on both sides.

What would I do if I'm in living in Virginia in 1860? All those decisions are going to be made. I would like to think I would make the decisions that would make me look really good, right, in 2018. What's the likelihood of that happening? Almost none. Well, I think on that particular case, I think we know there are more slaves today,

today than there were in the entire 400 year of the Western slave trade combined. Combined. And nobody wants to talk about it. No, nobody's going to talk about that. We're not doing. And no one's going to talk about the other aspects of the slave trade either,

the way in which it was run and profited the Arab world for hundreds of years before the Western Europeans got into the act. And it's never stopped. And it's never stopped. And so we're no different. People are saying, The one thing that the Arabs did, which has helped to sort of obliterate the traces of the human carnage they left was is they castrated all their slaves. So you don't have the problem of large numbers of offspring as you do in the Western Hemisphere.

That keeps it, again, come back to the visual, right? That keeps that, that's a history which has been obliterated visually, whereas the history of slavery in the Western Hemisphere in both North and South America. If they're looking at. Let me just stop on some people here while we're in this territory. Sure. FDR, in your book Freedom's Forge, you know, you don't say anything surprising to me about FDR. In writing a book where you're spending time with these people as much as you can, what do you walk away with on FDR? I would say in general, with the books that I've written, and the, the,

It's a fair number of biographies. You mentioned the Gandhi and Churchill. I'll tell you the story about the Pulitzer Prize finalist and how I found out about that at some point, too. But the McCarthy book, the Douglas MacArthur biography, and then the characters who really dominate the stage in Freedom's Forge. The view that I took when I came into the book, he was usually different from when I came out.

Right. And this was the case with FDR. You know, people have urged me to write a biography of FDR. Lay it out there. Talk about all the kinds of really awful things that he did, both domestically, but also in foreign policy. You look at the record at Yalta, for example, of his gullibility and cunning and dealing with Stalin. And really...

If Churchill would have been... If we would have flipped those two? Flip those two. And Roosevelt wasn't there. So when I came to this book, I was sort of thinking about Roosevelt and that kind of of that kind of light. But what I found out in working on this book

was I came out with more of a positive view in this sense and that is that everything for those of you who don't know the book he calls up

when it becomes clear the United States is going to get involved in the world work it's going to happen this is in the May of 1940 when France is falling apart

Britain is isolated the war is going to come to America within two years his military advisors tell him we've got to gear up for war

we've got nothing to fight a modern war with what are we going to do, how are we going to arm ourselves? He calls the CEO of General Motors, Big Bill Nudson, and says, come to Washington and help me get it. Oh, he's a fantastic character, isn't he? He's a guy. He's a guy that had been targeted by FDR. By FDR, I know. As a guy who's a bad capitalist who's just, you know, money grubbing, and his family, when he gets the call from FDR. He says, you're crazy to do this. You're not going. You're crazy to sign up with this guy. Why would you do that?

And he goes? It's because I'm an American. My president called me and I have to go. And yet everything that Bill Nudson represented was the exact opposite of what Roosevelt believed and thought about. I mean, you talk about sort of someone who stands for everything that you're against. But FDR, as I explained in the book, understood that if America was going to gear up to fight this kind of modern warfare,

to have the equipment and resources that it would need for a war on this scale. And we're just talking about Europe now. The war in the Pacific wasn't even on the horizon, just to fight the war in Europe, a war in Europe. He realized it can't be done by government fiat. This has to be a bottoms up effort led by the businesses that I'm going to need, and Nudsen's my tool in which to do that. So FDR liked Mussolini's policies generally.

Hitler said he's one of us, FDR, he's one of us. He did believe in, you know, the big state, et cetera. But the thing that's different about fascism, as I understand it, is it directs companies. We all have to do this, but then it lets those companies do it. So was this a crap I was wrong about the capitalist system? We have to have these guys in? Or was this kind of in his head kind of a, well, this still works because the government is really kind of in charge. And it's kind of this new, modern.

I think there's a certain amount of truth to that. And I think also, too, he realized there were limits to what government could really do. And, you know, Roosevelt would always say to people, I don't know why they're beating me up about the new deal destroying capitalism. Hell, I'm saving capitalism. George Bush said the same thing. I think Roosevelt's case and probably in George Bush is too. I think Roosevelt did actually believe that.

In the end, what separates Roosevelt out from the other figures you mention, in my view, including Wilson, is his basic humanity. He in the end is still a human being. Except for the Japanese. Well, in the Japanese thing, again,

I mean, we've got to look at the historical context. And the context was that it wasn't Bill Newtonson, but it was others who told him, we are going to have huge problems if we're going to have plants

doing wartime production on the West Coast, if we have a large Japanese population there, who may be able to spy in it, who may be able to do. It's going to create all kinds of problems.

for us later on. You had the whole issue of the prejudice against Japanese Americans that was part of West Coast politics, including democratic politics at the time. I think in, I think in Roosevelt's case, this was one in which the end justifies the means. The Pentagon, though, said, don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. And who else said, don't do it? Jayhger Hoover said, we've got them all. We've rounded up all of our, all the spies here. You don't have to go through this length. No, the one person who emerges is a real hero and all that. And by the way, I'm not excusing Roosevelt. And somebody's saying, this is what was in his thinking. The one person who emerges is

the real hero, there's Bob Taft. The one person in the Senate, the one person in Congress, who said, this is wrong, and I'm going to vote no. And everybody else was shocked and horrified at the decision that he had made. Just as they would all be horrified when he said, these Nuremberg trials, there's no basis for this international law. You're making it up as you go along. These trials shouldn't take place. Likewise, you support for Israel, which again, flew in people's, what? You want to send arms to Israel?

I'm telling you right now, I think, Glenn, one of the most interesting movies that you could make right now would be a life of Bob Taft. Never heard of him. Robert Taft, Senator from Ohio. He was Mr. Republican. In fact, that was his name. He was Mr. Republican.

Ran for president a couple of times. May have been able to beat out Dwight Eisenhower in the 1952 election, as a matter of fact. But Eisenhower working behind the scenes and his team were able to be able to thwart him. He was well known as being an isolationist during the 1930s. He was an opponent of NATO. So what are we doing getting ourselves involved in this North Atlantic Treaty organization? What's this going to involve? what's going to involve us in.

And he's a dedicated anti-communist. He is a dedicated foe of the New Deal. He's a strong and staunch supporter of civil rights in the South. He is the one who even mounts a campaign to expel a Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi from the Senate because of his demagogic racist speeches here. He's an extraordinary man. Robert Taft.

Look him up. I will. I will. let's let's um kind of stop here for uh in the kind of the 1950s and talk a little bit about mccarthy sure McCarthy you know edwin black's book blacklisted by history so i read that and i read the first couple of chapters and as i was reading it i thought this is going to change everything i think i know about McCarthy and i uh i didn't know if i was prepared for it and I wanted to call and make sure, I wanted to call Edwin and make sure that he wasn't

out of his mind crazy. What was your conclusion? I think he's buttoned up. I think he's buttoned up on the Holocaust for sure. He's quirky. He is quirky. But I read that. I have not read yours, and I wish I would have before this. But I walked over. from that thinking, okay, McCarthy is not this evil dude. He's just a bad mess. He's a mess of a guy.

He really is. And made some stupid mistakes and claims. And he was just a mess. But there is, there was this group

in the State Department, et cetera, et cetera. Whether he knew it or not, he was just a bad mess. but he was not the guy that we learned about in history. Yeah, he was a bad messenger who came to distort the message as he, as his, as his influence grew and his self-importance. Right. He just became, yeah, it's all about me.

And yet, again, in the point of view from the context of the time, what's interesting, if you look at trajectory, I talk about this in the book, of his popularity and his support in the country. And really the springboard to all this was the revelations about Alger Hiss. The man who really stands out as, I think, the hero of the anti-communist movement and revealing what was really happening, it's not Joe McCarthy, but it was actually Richard Nixon. And his single-minded pursuit of that case of saying, no, Whitaker Chambers, the guy is a physical mess, that's true. And Alger Hiss is this handsome Gregory Peck-looking, you know,

a wasp male model with impeccable credentials and... Again, visual. Visual. That's right, exactly. And letters of recommendation, you know, a resume that is just outstanding. He's a Soviet spy. Whitaker changes telling the truth about who he is and who he was working for and what he was doing to this country through his espionage efforts at the behest of the Soviets.

What is a result of that, and when you look at McCarthy's career as he begins to sort of say, who is this political party that allowed someone like Al Jury Hiss to rise to important posts, influential posts in the corridors of power? Not simply at the Yalta Conference,

but in line to be the next Secretary of State, for God's sake. How did this happen? How are the Democrats so soft on this threat, this totalitarian threat to the free world? When he preached that message, McCarthy's popularity soared. His influence grew. He became really a leader of his political party because the American people sort of said, looked at the record and said, yeah, the Democrats have a lot to answer for.

What turned around for McCarthy, what turned his career in a downward trajectory was when he began making the accusation of Republicans and began to say that Dwight Eisenhower, Ike had been soft on communism and allowed confluence infiltration in the U.S. Army, in the Defense Department, and that he was really as soft on communism as Truman and his cohorts had been in the Democratic Party. And the American people sort of said, forget it. I don't believe this. Everybody puts the, you know, assigns Edward R. Murrow in this great heroic role of exposing McCarthy and turning around America from seeing McCarthy as the great crusader for anti-communism

and seeing him as a demagogue instead. McCarthy's popularity had fallen off long before that, and Murrell was simply riding on a train, which was already headed out of the station, and had left McCarthy behind. That was his crucial mistake. That was his crucial error. And it sprang from the same elements that we see in other,

figures who rise to a level of a position of feeling as if they can do no wrong, that they understand the world and that their judgments are the ones that really will determine the future here. And everybody, either it's my way or the highway, right? That hubris, McCarthy had it, Wilson had it, and these are the things that make their stories both tragic but also so predictable. You know, we hear about the military industrial complex. And it's become this conspiracy thing.

It's become almost a joke. But if you really go back and listen to what Eisenhower said in that speech, it is so prophetic. And I'm trying to put myself into his shoes as a guy who he was Mr. Pentagon. I mean, he was the war machine. And the courage that that must have taken to come out against his own set of people. You know, never, you know, you don't cross the blue line. He did. He crossed the green line.

You did. You know, I've spent a lot of time analyzing that speech and looking at it. Because it is, as you were suggesting, it is a slightly sort of jarring phrase to come from a person whose life was spent in the U.S. Army. Yeah. Commander-in-chief, the person who really built it. He didn't establish the Defense Department, but who gave it this sort of central role in terms of the development of the key technologies

in air, in aerospace, in nuclear power, and nuclear weapons. This is all springs out of the Eisenhower, I had an administration, what they call the new look, the new look for the military. It was all arrested on. a new technological base, which was inevitably an industrial base for America at the time. And what you see is what were Eisenhower's overriding concerns?

One was the question of debt, that this was going to be a growth in terms of America's ability to spend itself into oblivion trying to maintain this technological edge and the cost that would go with it. His fear that out of this would emerge a kind of garrison state, that American military figures would now suddenly take on a dominant role in American politics because of the ways in which the American economy was geared around their needs and their requirements. And then I think also there was another fear that he had, which was is that the purely military objectives that any soldier would understand when looking at the world or looking at a situation in which should America go to war,

or not, that these decisions would be dictated by industrialists, by civilians who had a, if you like, a financial stake, financial stake in going to war, kind of the merchants of death sort of stereotype about people who are involved in armaments industry. And I think you have to say in the final analysis that all of those concerns on the part of Eisenhower were never really realized. military men did not emerge as sort of key figures in politics. I mean, after MacArthur, you know, they occasionally pop up. But they're always contained in the right way. They're contained in the right way.

Civilian leadership has not been long. So we've hardly become a garrison state. From the point of view of going to war for the sake of industrious, if you look at the wars that we've been involved in from Vietnam on, it's not the industrials who push for or even the military guys. It's the civilians who have these grandiose, ideal ideas about, you know, saving the world from itself. Very Wilsonian causes as opposed to that.

And then from the point of view of cost, how could Eisenhower have ever guessed that the costs for the Defense Department's budget would be totally dwarfed by the costs for the American welfare state? And that that is, in the end, what is going to consume us as a debtor nation, and not the cost for more planes or more missiles or even for more soldiers and service personnel. What do you think of, I'm trying to remember his name. He wrote Tragedy and Hope in what's 1962.

Harvard. He's the guy who came out. He was with Eisenhower. He was with Kennedy. And then he went low for a while after this book came out. Then he was with Nixon and maybe with Carter. But he wrote that the great tragedy of the world was these last two wars. And now we have something even worse on the horizon.

And so the hope is that we have tied our economies together and we've made it mutually assured destruction. So if we fire these missiles or even if we fight an all-out global world, war, we'll all collapse the financial situation. I've always thought he was... Gosh, that's really comforting notion, isn't it? Yeah, I know. In the book, it's about, you know, it's about 800 pages. And in the book, there's only one reference. And nobody seems to recognize this, because what he said has happened, whether it happened the way he said or not, I don't know, but it did happen. And he says, the only problem with this is if there's ever an unflagged group of people that do not care about the nation states and do not care about finance, industry, banking,

if they're living, you know, some nomadish kind of culture. It's almost if he's talking about ISIS. It is. It is. And yet in some ways, you know, the ISIS phenomenon, I have to say, I think, has turned out to be rather more transitory than a lot of us had worried about in the shadow of 9-11. I think there was a feeling that the war with Islamic terrorism was. going to go on and get worse. And I think what we've seen is that it has been more, what shall I say?

It has had more to do with the transitions that were taking place in the Middle East than it did with a head-on confrontation between Islam and the West. Now, that's not to rule out the importance in a philosophical sense, or even you can say theological sense of that confrontation. But in terms of how it affects events on the ground and the developments of movements that much of what was happening here had to do with, well, with the internal dynamics of these Middle Eastern countries and societies,

Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, of course, but also Iran. What, the, a lot of the work that I'm doing now, Glenn, at Hudson Institute, has really been focused on the issue of advanced technologies and the ways in which they are going to be changing and altering how we think about national security and economic security. And one of the questions I always get asked about this book, Freedom's Forges, could we do it again? Could this happen again?

And, you know, funny you should say that because right after I published that book, my answer was, yes, we can. We just have to harness all of the advanced technologies that we see emerging in Silicon Valley. Yeah. And it will happen. What I've come to realize, working now in Washington for the last five years and working on this problem, these issues, is we face an enormous challenge. I don't say we can't do it, but the biggest challenge we face towards getting us into this shape to fight a protracted war to sustain our military and technological edge over our adversaries, particularly China, isn't financial. It isn't technological. We still lead in all of these areas.

It's cultural. You know, I was invited to attend a symposium at the National Defense University, which was about the book, and to talk about, because they were working on a project, what would happen? How would America be able to ramp up its military for a protracted conflict

with a near-peer competitor, read China, in 2040? And so I spelled out for them. What would be different from where we were in 1940, to 2040. It was a good discussion. But the main thing that I stressed was the biggest difference is cultural. When Bill Nudson goes out to the leading industrialists and business executives and technology

and engineers and says, America needs you to work to build the planes and the ships and the equipment that we're going to need to fight a modern war, they say, you bet, Bill, I'm right there for my country. We're not going to get that kind of response. right now. And it's precisely, it goes back to what you were talking about, those stereotypes about what it is to become part of the military industrial complex. And companies like Google, and all across Silicon Valley, there's this fear and concern that if you join forces with American in terms of protecting national security, that you are basically working for the

evil empire. But they don't. That underlies a lot of what's happening there with those 20 and 30-somethings. I agree. Here's the problem. They don't see that with working with China. Exactly. I think that's one of the big problems. And that's the real problem here is they see us as an evil force where they don't see that way. Well, I think what they see is they see a globalist agenda. And they see China's part of the globe and America's part of the globe. And that we're all involved in a marvelous convergence of our, of, of humanitarian. goals that, again, the part of the whole globalist agenda that underlies it is this belief that we have more in common than we do in difference.

And in a rather sort of physical or physiological, even psychological way, that's true. I tend to agree with that. Human nature is the same everywhere you go. But it completely ignores all of the other factors that make us all different rather than the same. It ignores culture. It ignores social dynamics and social evolution. that makes a society like the United States different from a Denmark or from a Saudi Arabia.

These aren't just cultural differences, where we are as societies, and how we think about confronting the problems and issues that we deal with. The globalist agenda sort of says 80% of what humanity's experience has been in the present and in the past, we just set aside as irrelevant. We're just going to focus on that 20% where we see that commonality. after all, right? Every time I pop on a plane flying from Los Angeles to Bali, right, I'm able to go there. I mix with other people who think like I do, who are in the same, you know, software engineers like I am, right? Or I fly to Thailand or I fly to Sri Lanka. The world looks very small from the business class seat on an airliner as you're moving from place to place. doing business or engaged in charitable work of one kind or another, or working on environmental kinds of issues.

It's bound to reinforce that globalist bias. But down on the ground, down where the rest of us are, 80% of the human experience runs in a very different direction, which is there's lots that divide us around the world. There's lots that unites us in a nation state, in a community. And the globalist agenda tends to ignore what unites, just as well as what divides us. You know, I try to explain to members of the media,

tried to do this privately, and they just, there's no interest. You know, if you look at Europe, they don't have the American system of left and right. Their system is communist fascists. You know, that's the left and right. It's not the American right here. The American right is as close to anarchy as you can possibly get without it grabbing you. Right. So it's different.

But when they look at what's happening in Europe, and they interpret people as being racist, there are racists, there are racist, and probably a bigger racist moving over there by far than over here. I would say that's currently true, yeah. Correct. But it's because they have no place to go. But what feeds it every time?

All those issues have been channeled into the fringe. Yes. And to marginalized political groups. And that's where that's where they've popped up. Yes, because the media and the ruling elite will not listen to the people on the ground who are very different than the people in the front of the plane, who their communities are being disrupted. They're being told, I can't fly my flag because I'm a racist. Their children are being raped or whatever.

That's right. And they being accosted in the street. Right. And because the media won't admit it because of political correctness. because the government won't admit it, the first person on the scene, usually a fringe group, that says, I can solve your problem, they go to because I may not agree with anything they're saying except this one thing, and they see the problem. But I'm desperate enough to turn to someone who can offer an answer.

This has repeated itself over and over and over again. And I think we're going to, we're kind of moving in that direction too, as we become more and more PC-driven in terms of a media and in terms of government and in terms of leading institutions. I think we're even to raise the issue, to even raise the issue of whether men and women are built differently in terms of their response to questions of science and math gets you ejected.

Without even a moment to explain what you were thinking or to justify or even present the arguments to be true or false or not, but you're simply even to raise the issue. kicks you out. That's that's kind of where we're going right now. What do you think about this analysis as a historian? And I know you'd have to put yourself in the future to look back. So I get it. But that's why Donald Trump won. It's not his border policy. It's not anything else. What it is is his willingness to say things that everyone

says you're not supposed to say. And then he never backs off it. Beck's off, he doubles down. Yeah, yeah. And that's the beginning of that. I'm tired of being told I'm a racist. I'm tired of all these things. And the people that I know that support Donald Trump, they'll all say, I wish he would get off a Twitter.

I wish he would stop saying some stupid stuff. But it is that sense that enough Americans have had enough of this political correctness. Yeah. And the Twitter feed, it's his bully pulpit. Yeah. and it is, I think, very strategic. I think it's aimed in order to force the mainstream media to deal with issues they don't want to deal with.

For example, with the Christine Ford case, you know, he was able to bring that out in a rather sort of, I suppose, not in a way in which you would think a politician would bring it out, the fact that her story really had no substantive basis. And the media was forced to cover it because he had made it, not case not in the Twitter, but at one of his rallies. This is one of the things that I think Trump has done.

It's been a two-edged sword because I think it's alienated. Many, and we've seen that in the midterms. We've seen the ill effect of that approach to using your bully pulpit. I think CNN could, you say the same thing about CNN. The way they're using it is isolating and polarizing and strengthening their core. And Donald Trump's strengthening, and I think there's a lot of us in the middle going, I don't want to talk to either of you guys. Knock it off.

You're acting like seven-year-old kids. Stop it. Well, I understand Trump's position more than I do CNN's to tell you the truth. And what I find with CNN, what I find with CNN is a level of hypocrisy with regard to where they are on these kinds of issues and the way in which they deal with, you know, some wise person said once there is no such thing as a double standard is only a single hidden standard. and those who play that game, I think, get earned the title of hypocrisy. I don't think anyone would ever accuse Donald Trump of being a hypocrite in that standpoint.

He says what he thinks and puts it out there, and there are millions and millions of Americans who agree with that, and who, as you just pointed out, have been so fed up with the hypocrisy and the cant that's come from the other side that they're willing to tolerate the uncouthness of this president because they see a larger,

they see him pushing a larger truth that needs to be put out there and hasn't been. Wow. I have so much. How much time do we have left? Do you know? It's two o'clock in a minute. At what time do we start? It's done one hour.

Okay, good. We got another night. Let me finish up World War I, World War II, and then I want to go. You want to do Franco? Franco-Prussian War. I'm happy to talk about that. I know, I know. I started, you know, I started, when I was a kid, my interest in history really sprang from ancient history. You know, when other kids were going out playing baseball and stuff, I was reading Herodotus and Livy and Caesar's commentaries. My parents have, you know, some of my first drawings that I ever did, just about the time I was learning to write, the first drawings were like the Battle of Farsallis. Oh, my gosh. I know, I know. But my other great fascination was civil war. And so, The earliest drawings are, you know, Roman legionaries, you know, bashing each other on the planes of Faisal's, but, or Hannibal's elephants, but the other ones are of soldiers in blue, soldiers in gray. And so history is something which I, it's like, it's built in. Ancient history, medieval history is what I did is, is it an undergraduate, I thought I was going to become a medievalist.

It was my plan here. So what I'm saying to you, Glenn, is that if you want to go and explore, Fundamental issues having to do with the late Roman Empire. I'm your guy. And I can't wait to take you up to one of our vaults. We have a lot of museum pieces. Oh, I can't wait. I have Mary Lincoln's funeral dress.

We have a lot of stuff from the Civil War that I think you'll just love. That's the other thing I like about you. You're a collector. And I'm a collector. My stuff is political memorabilia, in particular to campaign buttons. And I've been doing that since I was a kid. I think I still had the very first button I got was for the 1964. campaign. It was a Johnson button. And all the other kids were telling me that, you know,

that would come clear that if Goldwater were elected, that we'd all have school on Saturdays. That was the level of, that was a level of sort of campaign propaganda. I don't know if it's really improved very much this last year. But that was, that was part of it. You know what interests me in the political, I was just thinking about this and talking to my wife about it like a week ago. I was looking at my collection, which is pretty extensive at this point. I'd love to see. The range of candidates and stuff. And what I've noticed is that over the years, over the decades I've been doing it,

I've gravitated towards the losers in presidential campaigns. When I was a kid, I read a really interesting book by a guy the name of Irving Stone. You remember Irving Stone? He did Agony in the Ecstasy, The Life of Michelangelo. He did one on Van Gogh. They both made into movies. movies. But he did a book called They Also Ran, which was about defeated presidential candidates that ran out. The book was written in 1949, so you only got as far as Tom Dewey.

But my Dewey collection is quite extensive. My Truman collection, I have a handful. I have a big Richard Nixon collection, but it's really focused on the 1960 campaign. The year he lost. There's something to me that's fascinating about, and this goes back to human nature and the issue of human beings making decisions for which there are often tragic consequences. These were the stories of men, and they are predominantly men, after all, who ran for the nation's highest office, who were nominated, in many cases, by their party in the convention, who had every reason to believe that they would wake up in the morning and be president,

and they lost. and some of them try it again. I mean, the man who's always fascinating to me is William Jennings Bryan. How can you do that? How can you run three times for president and lose each time, but keep coming back and keep thinking

you can make it work again. How do others think that somehow the third is going to be a charm? Hillary Clinton. She's still thinking that. Well, she's too, you know what? She's too close. Yeah.

She's too close to events for me to become a collector in those areas. But the losers in presidential candidates There's something interesting to my mind distinct and special about them and the way in which the winners, the Truman's and the Eisenhower's, Eisenhower nice collection,

it hangs in my office right now, but it doesn't draw me the way in Edleigh Stevenson. It does. I have a campaign button that I bet you don't have. Let's hear it. And it was in the Truman era, and it was for Israel, and it's Truman, I want to say it's Heim Solomon, but it's not.

Payne Weizement? Yeah. They made very few, but it's the two of them on a button together to campaign for Israel. Oh, that's really, that's tremendous. That's tremendous. I was at the Jewish Leadership Conference in New York, the weekend last. And one of the things that they were talking about was the role of Jews and Jews, Jewish Americans in presidential campaigns.

And on the cover of one of the brochures was a picture of a button, a dual portrait of William Jennings Bryan and his running mate Adlai Stevenson the third, right? The first Adlai Stevenson and so on. And all of the lettering in Hebrew. Oh, wow. I said, oh, I got to have that button. I need to get that button. But I don't know how that's going to happen.

But you were going to say something else. Yeah, so let me take you, I just, I just want to kind of hit these quickly. Sure. you wrote to rule the waves how the British Navy shaped the modern world. Just one question. I believe that a case could be made that had we not sunk the British Navy and been so arrogant under Wilson, that perhaps we wouldn't have had all the problems that we had with World War II. Well, you know, I have an op-ed which is coming out on Monday.

Okay. on Wilson's responsibility with the way in which World War I ended that set the stage for World War II, which I think you'll find very fascinating, and I think that will raise a lot of the issues you just raised here. The real problem, the real problem that I think, one of the points I was trying to make in that book was that the British were the first empire in history,

in which conceived of their use of power, military power, in the case of the Navy, as a means by which to create a global community on which freedom and prosperity would persevere. And it's that role that we inherited after World War II, the passing of the torch, the transition of power from the British Empire, the Pax Britannica to the Pax Americana.

And it was, I think you have to say that there was a lot of good that came as a result of that. But just as with the rise of Britain's empire, as it became expanded to become a colonial empire, not a mercantile empire, protecting the seas and keeping the lanes of commerce open and free for the use of all merchants,

not just British merchants, but the merchants of all nations. That was the great mission that emerged in the 19th century for the British Navy. But as they emerged as a colonial power with possessions in Africa, possessions in Asia, with its concessions in China, the character of that empire changed, the character, I think also of Britain changed in ways that were not good, and that ultimately led to the downfall of that empire. And one of the things that I think we have to worry about when we think about what comes after the Pax Americana is how we preserve those aspects of the idealism of what American power can do

without being absorbed into the temptations that American power bring to us. And unfortunately, we've seen that played out in time and time again. And we keep making the same mistake. Can make the same mistakes. All right. Churchill. I love. I love Churchill.

But as I read about Churchill from the Asian perspective, not a good guy. Screwed up, racist, screwed up. You make all kinds of excuses, but not a good guy from that perspective. Gandhi. Everybody loves Gandhi. He's great. Unless you go to South Africa, he's a racist. He's a really bad guy.

And I spell that all out. Right. His problem was his fight in South Africa and where he really creates the whole ideology of civil disobedience and develops the tools by which it will work in India later on when he goes there. It was all about getting what was not breaking down the color line. It was getting the Indians on the right side, namely on the right side. Which you say that to people and they're like, no, that's not true. That can't possibly be Gandhi. Right.

But it is true. So real quick, the left, well, everybody loves Gandhi, but it's because they don't know the other side of him. The left hates Churchill. The right loves Churchill. And the left will say, well, Churchill is bad. Look what he did, yada, yada.

No, no, no. They're both the same kind of people. They're all of us. They're both good and bad. Glenn, that's exactly right. And that was one of the things. that I think that emerged from the course of that book was how very different these two men were, how they saw the world very differently, and yet under the skin, what made them, what made them

do what they do, and what made them great men sprang from the same roots. Incredible courage, indomitable will, at times enormous blindness. Again, belief in the rightness of their decision and following it through to the end. and in Gandhi's case at the end of his life it costs maybe a million and a half lives in the partition of India which I describe in I think it's a harrowing story

but takes place again often forgotten when we think about not just Gandhi but the whole history of that subcontinent why the relationships between Pakistan and India are so tenuous and well went to the brink of nuclear war

yeah if you don't understand understand partition, you won't understand what happens in that part of the world, in that subcontinent. And yet at the end, I think, when I started that book, I was thinking, in my own way, Gandhi is going to come out as the big villain. Churchill is the big hero. And yet, the more I worked on it, the more the two converge. And a lot of my Churchill admiring friends, like Andrew Roberts, for example, still haven't forgiven me for them. Because, of course, they do want to see Churchill as being very distinct and see Gandhi as someone who was in the end a political opportunist and manipulator

and more than his share of hypocrisy, which I acknowledge. But I don't think, I don't think if you look at the man himself, look at what he had to deal with and the forces and his skill in being able to bring Great Britain. And you're right, you said this earlier. His audience was Great Britain. Right. It wasn't even India.

And it wasn't the Soviet Union. or the Nazis or anyone like that who could have snuffed up movement out in the minute. When you look at the skill in which he was able to do that and to transform himself this unlikely figure, physically, linguistically,

all the thing counts against him and yet he would emerge as a world icon. It's an extraordinary story. You wrote a book. I just started reading last night and I'm so bummed. I'm going to have to have you back. the idea of the decline of the West. Right.

And it's stress on the idea that it's not a book about the decline of the West. It's about those who have prophesied it and have been wrong again and again and again and explaining why. So understanding what, why they were wrong,

but also most importantly, understand what the impact of that loss of faith in our Western heritage has cost us over the course of the last, well, really the last, century and a half.

So you've listened to me before or watched me before, right? Certainly have. I mean, I'm a pretty gloomy guy on... Oh, I don't get that impression at all. Oh, I'm anxious to hear that at all. I get very much a person who is both depressed and hopeful. I love you. I'm an optimistic catastrophes.

Do you know how I first found you? No. I first found you, I was in, I can tell you exactly where it was. I was in the Borders bookstore in Richmond, Virginia. Remember Borders? And I was going around, I was signing copies of, I don't remember what it was. It may have been, I don't remember which book it was. And there it was, your book was sitting on a table.

And it was a book by Glenn Beck. And there was this picture. And it was, I had heard something about you having a radio show. And I was like, who is this guy, this Glenn Beck? This sort of pasty-faced character with a, with a, with a, with a, plain vanilla name. And he said, what is this? He's trying to be the next Rush Limbaugh or something.

And then I heard you for the first time on the radio, and I said, this is a guy who exists in a totally different plane from Rush. Rush Limbaugh is, and the key to his success, he knows who he is. He knows what he thinks. He knows what he believes. And it's been part of his upbringing. He must have had the most extraordinary family, don't you think? The bond that existed with his father, his grandfather, or his brothers.

It's just, it's amazing. But he's a man who knows his mind, who knows what's important and what's not, and speaks on that. You're a searcher like me. You have more questions than you do answers. And the more answers I get, the more questions I have. And that's what I appreciate about you

and what you've done right up, ever since I started listening to you and up to this moment. I realize that's who you are. Do you ever get frustrated? You're like, how is nobody interested in asking these questions? I was in a theater last week,

and it was the Carnegie Theater in Pittsburgh, Carnegie Homestead, I think. And I was down in the basement with the old coal burners before the audience got there. And I was literally down on my hands and knees in the looking, reading, who made the seats in the theater. I'm fascinated by,

everything. And most people are not. They're just not. No, I think so. I mean, I'm a relentlessly curious person. This is why I've written the number of books in a range of topics that I have. And I won't walk you through it, but every book has sort of led to the next one. It's out of writing one book, there's a problem has developed. And I said, no one else has worked on this, but I need to know the answer myself. So the way in which I deal with it is I write a book on it. That's the easiest path for me to get some of it. and answers with it. And you're a searcher for truth. And I, in my own way, I've tried to do that in the historical field. And now that I'm, now that I'm working at Hudson Institute,

working in Washington, D.C., which I've been doing for the last five years, I've now began to sort pursue that the same endeavor, but now not so much to the writing books, although I'm still writing books, but rather through policy, through analyzing why we're doing what we're doing, in policy ways and going to Capitol Hill and organizing conferences and hitting up commissions to deal with these real problems and finding ways to try and get a handle on them and to understand how we can get some answers to the questions we both have about all of these things. How do we get beyond the military industrial complex stereotypes? How are we going to stay ahead of China in the competition for the high-tech supremacy?

in these areas that, whether you're talking about quantum computers or artificial intelligence, autonomous systems of unmanned vehicles, both undersea and in the air. How are we going to get Americans interested in science and engineering ways that we can win that contest? Do you see that China this week they just did a contest? They're recruiting all of their brightest children for their areas. AI projects. It should be a moonshot for us, and we're not doing it. And we need a sputnik moment.

And if we wait for a sputnik moment, it's going to be too late. Too late. And this is one of the big issues that I'm addressing now is how do we get American students involved at the K-12 level? Because right now, Glenn, right now, look at our colleges and universities. All of our major science and engineering programs, the majors, the graduates, the graduate, students, the numbers of Americans there are shockingly low. Computer science. Computer science.

Of every 10 students who is a computer science graduate student or a major of the 10, two are Americans. I don't think anyone has captured, you know, when I was a kid, I grew up around the space program. Yeah, that's right. So I had all the little toys that were space program. And that was Walt Disney. Nobody, nobody captured.

has captured the imagination. I go out and I talk about AI and what's just over the horizon, just even the 5G network. And how that's... We have a conference coming up next week on 5G and China. And it's going to change everything. And nobody knows it.

I'll sit and I can talk to an audience for an hour and I'm telling you you can hear a pin drop. People are starving for it. They don't know it. And all you have to do is explain because it is both terrifying, if you look at the moral machine of MIT, both terrifying and exhilarating. The opportunities are endless.

Endless. Unlike anything anyone has ever dreamt. And we face a competitor in the case of China who does not fear the risks involved. They don't worry about that for a minute. Right. All they see is the opportunities and the means. by which the comparison I draw, and it goes back to rule the waves. It's like the British and the Germans before World War I and the race for naval supremacy in which the Germans decided that they

needed to pour all of their industrial resources, all of their technical skill into building a battle fleet that would give them maritime supremacy. And the British, who took that supremacy for granted, suddenly woke up one day and said, oh my God, if we don't act, it's over. We need to step up. We're at that point. We're at the point now where, and just as the German military time supremacy. We're what, two to five years? Well, I would say this.

I would say that with 5G, in fact, the timeline may even be shorter. China is in the process of getting countries around the world to sign memorandum of of understanding to allow the test of Chinese built equipment for a 5G. Oh, my gosh. And they've got 45 countries signed up now, including many of our closest allies, by the way, Glenn. Why, we make the stuff. We make it better than anybody else. But we're dithering over the question of, well, what kind of standard should we set?

Oh, my gosh. Who is you going to pay for? Because it's enormously expensive. The fiber optic networks on which it depends who cost billions of dollars. And so while we dither, they're moving. the Chinese are moving. Oh my gosh. And likewise, with high-tech STEM and with education, the children, right?

The children are being recruited at grade school level to go into these areas, artificial intelligence, quantum. China's a command economy. They can say to a kid, you are going to study computer engineering, and you are going to go to MIT and learn everything you can from your professors and download every file you can get back. And you're going to come back here, and you're going to work for the People's Liberation Army so that we can apply what you've learned there to boosting our military edge here. We don't have that kind of thing, thank God.

But we have to do is incentivize. And it's developing incentivization to get America where we were at the time of the space race, to get people, minorities, women, this is their moment. When you look at quantum physics, quantum technology, it's the coming thing,

it's going to dominate the 21st century, Why not draw kids into what's going to give them the future for the rest of the century here? The moments are here. It's all here waiting for us. All we have to do is be aware of it and start moving to incentivize it. And then this will happen again, Glenn. I am totally convinced. I have to have you.

I have to have you back because I've got another hour and a half of topics with you. Happy to do it. Let me leave you with this one question. Please. You're a historian, 2075. Look at today in America. How does that book start with you? Wow.

That's very interesting. Now, where would this story start? In what? You're going to have to be a little bit more into politics in terms of American society. The American experiment. The American experiment. I love that.

Where has that happened? I would say, I would see two inflection points. One would be 1968, which is when our politics took a really bad turn with the assassinations, the radicalization of American campuses,

radicalization of a major American party, the Democratic Party. I would also point where I think the American experiment also nearly ran aground and received scrapes on its hull that were still suffering from and still trying to plug the holes, was the Clinton presidency. I think that though, and you remember what that was like, the Clinton impeachment, the whole Monica Lewinsky all at the time, was an all-consuming soap opera. So what we're going through now or?

But this is where it started. This is where the polarization of American politics and the shift from what the media was able to do with regard to absolving Bill Clinton from real crimes. Real crimes. Not serious crimes. They weren't physical crimes, but there were real crimes of getting,

of what's the term, I'm looking for, for inducing people to commit perjury, for lying to a federal judge, contempt of court. This was the kinds of things which seriously damaged the fabric of the American presidency, the most important institution at the time in our polity. I would talk about the Trump presidency. I would talk about Barack Obama, of course. but I think in the end, and here I may surprise you,

I think in the end, the theme of the book from 2075 is how did we go from being as low as we were at that point to being as high as we are today? I hope you're right. Neither of us will be around us see unless... Oh, I intend to be there. You better be there, too. I'm counting on it. If Ray Kurzweil is right, we will be.

Thank you so much. Thanks, Glenn. What a pleasure. Cheers. Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.