The Pete Quiñones Show - EPISODE 1020: THE POST WW2 'ORDER' W/ MARK WEBER

Episode Date: February 29, 2024

58 MinutesPG-13Mark Weber is the director of the Institute for Historic Review.Mark joins Pete to examine the American "order" from WW2 to the present day.IHR.orgGet Autonomy Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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in the show, head on over to freemam Beyond the wall.com forward slash support. You can see the many ways that you can support me there. The best way is right on that website. You can send me something in the mail. P.O. Box 413, Lineville, Alabama, 36266. I look forward to trying to do. You do a lot more this year with the show. And any support you can give me helps with that. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekanino show. I'm very happy to have Mark Weber here with me today. How you doing, Mark? Very good. Good to be on. Why don't you tell everybody a little bit about yourself? Well, I was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. I come from my father was working class and then middle class. My mother was both my

parents were well educated. From a very early age, I had a big interest in history. This was encouraged a lot by my father for a number of reasons. And that's what I studied in college. And then in university, I went to graduate school at Indiana University. I also studied in Munich for two semesters. I lived in Germany for two and a half years, but I traveled pretty extensively all over Europe. I've had a long interest in history. That was my, it's my passion. I regard myself as a pretty curious person. But it was when I was 18, 19, 20, that I began to realize that the narrative that we hear about,

especially modern history, but history in general, is often not very accurate or certainly slanted. I think I began to sense this even before that. In high school, a high school teacher lent me a tube, a vacuum tube shortwave radio. And at an early age, I listened to Radio Moscow, Radio Havana, Cuba, Voice of America, BBC, other radio. And I learned that how people view things isn't a question of what's right or wrong or true or not true. how what's emphasized and what's not emphasized. Very rarely do people when they're shaping the public's opinion lie. What they do is they leave things out or they emphasize some points rather than others. And that's something that was an important lesson for me in understanding the 20th century.

We're, we'll be talking about the Second World War. And when I grew up, most Americans had a fairly clear, organized narrative of World War II. But that's a very American view of the war, very different than the view that people have, of course, in Russia, or in Ukraine, or in Japan, or in China, and certainly in Germany or Italy or so forth. Anyway, we'll be talking about that. And what I, So out of all of that came a very great interest in that. And I've done a lot of writing, reading on this subject. And the reason it's important, I think, is because so much of how Americans are supposed to look at the world, look at America's place in the world, is through the lens of the narrative of the Second World War

that came out of the victorious conclusion of the war by the United States, but also the Soviet Union, Britain, and so forth. And that view has very much shaped how America deals with the world. I mean, just to give one example, when I was younger during the Vietnam War, politicians would make continual references to Munich and Hitler, and the necessity of stopping dictators now, because if we don't stop them now, they'll be on the rampage, and it'll be terrible.

And that was cited as a major reason why the United States had to be involved in the Vietnam War, cited by President Johnson and by many others. And we've heard this before in the Iraq War. We're told, oh, I see, Saddam Hussein, he's like a new Hitler. We've got to stop him. And now we hear people talk about Putin. He's a new Hitler. Hillary Clinton said that.

My point is that how we view the Second World War is still very relevant. I say still, even though it's almost 80 years now since the war ended, it nevertheless is a kind of important template for many Americans and how we are supposed to view history in the world and America's place in the world. So that's a little bit about myself and why I'm here today. Why don't you mention your organization? Oh, well, yes, I should mention that. I'm not promoting myself well enough. So shamelessly I'll mention that I'm director of the Institute for Historic Review. We're headquartered in Orange County here in Southern California.

And we publish books. We distribute a lot of books. We have a website that's updated two or three times a week with news items and so forth that I think are relevant. And I urge people to take a look at our website and our sales website, IHR. Store, which gives descriptions of all the various books and discs that we distribute. Yes, I should have mentioned that. Yes, that's been my job for quite a while now. No problem. One of the things that has been said to happen out of coming out of World War II was that basically being right-wing or I think, I heard, I actually heard Nancy Pelosi say this the

other day, and I forget who she was referring to, but she called someone right-wing, and then she said, well, no, he's a conservative, and that's okay. But no, but no, this other person is right-wing, and they're far-right, and we can't allow that. Do you think that that attitude right there is something that springs from World War II? No, it springs from something else, I think. It's interesting. I was interviewed a few months ago by a journalist, actually from Japan, and he asked, what's the state of American conservatism?

And I said, it doesn't really exist anymore. People are not called conservative or non-conservative. They're called right-wing or left-wing. And it doesn't have anything to do with being conservative anymore. It used to be that right wing was conservative. But that's changed. Right wing is now used as a kind of odd way of referring to people who have any kind of ethnic, national sensibilities.

It's a term for people who are basically nationalist. And our society permits, as it were, a kind of civic nationalism, a kind of patriotic nationalism. But any nationalism that is ethnic in character is called right wing. So that's really where that comes from. But I would say, though, to get to your point, it's considered very dangerous. Nationalism is considered something we should be on the alert about because the end of the Second World War by the United States and the Soviet Union was by powers that openly proclaimed they were in favor of a unit of one world. They were going to create a new world order in which never again would there be war and conflict. Now, that seems incredible, given that very shortly after the end of the war, the Cold War began,

the rival between the United States and the Soviet Union. But during the war itself, President Roosevelt and the American government and American propaganda kept on telling the American people that what we're fighting for, what the United States was fighting for in the war, wasn't just to defeat those bad people in Germany or Tokyo or whatever, but to create a whole new world, a kind of one world. In fact, that was a very popular book of the war years, written by Wendell Wilkie that was a huge bestseller. And the United Nations was supposed to be the instrument of this kind of unipolar world.

The United Nations was supposed to have its own military, and it was supposed to go around the world and stop bad guys, stop aggression. And with the idea that nationalism is a very, very, very, very. very dubious thing, because after all, during the Second World War, the United States proclaimed, this is a country for everybody. It doesn't have an ethnic identity. That was not true before the Second World War. Officially, the United States didn't have that view. It had a very different one. And the Soviet Union also proclaimed it was a country for, it was everyone. In fact, the Soviet idea, the Soviet vision of the future was the entire world would be a union of Soviet socialist

republics. The seal of the Soviet Union was the hammer and sickle not over Russia, but over the entire globe. In other words, and the Communist Manifesto even says that. I mean, the working people have no fatherland. They have no nation. So my point is that especially from the Second World War, the idea of nationalism, especially any kind of robust, overt nationalism was looked upon with a great deal of suspicion arising from the outlook that was the dominant, prevailing, guiding one for the United States during the Second World War. You said that before the war, basically the United States didn't consider itself to be, oh, we're for everyone.

This is a universalist kind of idea. Why do you think that changed? And what do you think caused that change? There was a number of reasons. Well, up until, I mean, when America was founded by the founders, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Monroe, Madison, so on and so forth, they assumed and took for granted that America is a country of for white people, for Europeans. Indians were alien. They were not considered Americans. They were, in fact, up until the 20s, 1920s and 30s, the word Native American referred to white people, not to Native Indians. They were Aboriginal.

And that was the view that Americans sort of took for granted. Abraham Lincoln had that view. Essentially, this is a country for white people. During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt and even before Woodrow Wilson had this very universalist thing. No, Woodrow Wilson was more overt about the white aspect of it, a racial aspect of it. Roosevelt was not. Roosevelt seemed to really believe, we don't know how much House and Siri was, but he seemed to really believe in a kind of universal world, a one world. and that was for the first time it became part of American official propaganda.

During the war of the United States government, War Department, they used to call the Defense Department the War Department. It was a little more honest name back in those days. But the War Department, the U.S. government, put out a series of propaganda films called Why We Fight. You can find them on the Internet very easily, made by Frank Capra, who's a well-known filmmaker. And these began with a introductory, the first of the series, emphasized that America, this is a country for everyone. Now, that's a dominant view. That's a view now that both Republicans and Democrats embrace in America today.

But that's not what Americans thought up until the 1930s or so, and certainly not officially, until World War II. And that changed. Why did that change? There's a number of reasons, but it's almost inevitable because America was never very strict about its racial policy. It had an idea of itself as a country, well, it's a white country, but there were a lot of people who weren't. And so they were more and more accepted and integrated into the society in the same way that Americans assume it's more or less a Christian country, too. But Americans were rather tolerant of people holding individual views. And that was part of the American experience, a kind of easygoingness.

As long as things don't affect me or my family personally, we're fairly tolerant of what people do, who they are, and so forth. And anyway, that's a process that, you know, it wasn't until the 1920s that American Indians were U.S. citizens. They were considered up until the 1920s, alien, members of alien foreign nations. That's the relationship between the United States and the Indians in the 1700s, 1800s, was between nations, separate countries, not between different people within a society. Anyway, this is a process that's been going on for some time. But anyway, it was in World War II that this was really forcefully. And then during the Cold War, for the United States to be a competitor, as it were, with the Soviet Union, which was very

universalist. In fact, the Soviet Union tried to say, we're championing the struggle. We're on the side of the oppressed. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design. They move you, even before you drive. The new Cooper plug-in hybrid range for Mentor, Leon and Terramar. Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2000 euro. Search Coopera and discover our latest offers. Coopera. Design that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services

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Come see for yourself. The Liddle New Bridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Liddle, more to value. Non-white countries of the world in Africa and Asia and so forth. And the United States to meet this propaganda challenge of the Soviet Union said, okay, it became even more emphatically a universalist kind of society. It was during the 1950s, Supreme Court and other agencies and so forth did away during the 50s and 60s with the last vestiges, you might say, of racial segregation in America. And that was part of the motivation of that was to counter the accusation by the Soviet Union that the United States is hypocritical. It claims to be for one world and for humanity, but really it's a segregated racist society.

Do you think that what Senator Joseph McCarthy did and what Hewack did, was that like the last shot any kind of right wing had of trying to keep. the country, keep the country going in the direction it was going before the war? No, no. I mean, Joseph McCarthy was such a blustering, thoughtless man that in many ways he hurt the very cause that he was espousing. He grabbed onto the anti-communism as a kind of, you vehicle, but he made all sorts of irresponsible statements. I mean, most famously, he would say, I have in my hand documentary evidence that in the state department are 200 or whatever, card-carrying communists, and that the Secretary of State knows this, and he's permitting these people. Well, that's not true. That wasn't the case. Now, remember, during the Second World War,

the United States was an ally of the Soviet Union, of Joseph Stalin. It was a very, as everybody knows and acknowledges now a very brutal dictatorship. And so being a communist during the Second World War was not itself such a terrible thing. It's only after the war, of course, when the only thing that held the United States and the Soviet Union together was the fact they had a common enemy, Germany, really, and its allies. And after the war was over, of course, these two power centers, Moscow and Washington, or the United States and the Soviet Union became rivals and adversaries. And so Joseph McCarthy, of course, there was a big reaction to communism.

It was tied up with a kind of American idea of nationalism. Of course, communism isn't something Americans really supported. But he was so reckless and irresponsible in how he did things that actually, I think he hurt the cause he was espousing. And he himself wasn't a very deep or sophisticated thinker. He barely understood really much about, I think, communism. But anyway, that's a sort of side thing. I mean, I think for younger Americans today,

Joseph McCarthy is about as relevant a figure as William Jennings Bryan in an earlier time in American history. But what an interesting thing, though, is that McCarthyism, was held up by the left for a long time as being a very dark chapter in American history when people lost their jobs because they had been communist party members or members that had been communists in their sympathy. We have something much worse going on today. There's this sort of cancel culture of the woke culture has resulted in far more people losing their jobs or being punished for their views than was true during the world.

the McCarthy era. Even at the height of the McCarthy era, the Communist Party could hold rallies in New York and have meetings at major hotels. Communists still existed on college campuses and were active on college campuses. People today who are not woke, they're really suppressed in a way far, far more than the McCarthyite so-called persecution of communists was and leftists during the early 1950s. Do you think the election of John F. Kennedy was a way of people leaning into this new ideal, this, you know, all of these promises to the moon, you know, to the moon, all of these things. Was it more, was it more, well, let me ask it this way.

Was he preaching a more nationalist message, or was he preaching a more nationalist message? or was he preaching a more universalist message, in your opinion? You know, this is a very good question. One of the reasons, I think, that so many people... Those people who love going out shopping for Black Friday deals, they're mad, aren't they? Like, proper mad. Brenda wants a television, and she's prepared to fight for it.

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Or you know, fight branda. A very moved by the whole Kennedy legacy and the assassination is because John F. Kennedy, in my view, was the last American president who combined both a kind of civic nationalism and a universalism in the same administration. America could do that back then because the country took for granted its identity. And so talking about we're the leader of the free world and these kind of noble sounding sentiments, he could do that.

At the same time, John F. Kennedy was actually, in many ways, more, well, nationalist or civic nationalist. Otherwise, he was the one that launched the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1962, or 61-62. And he was one who set up the green berets, which was supposed to be this elite American fighting force. But he also established the Peace Corps, which is kind of a universalist kind of thing. He's the last president who could, could do that in part because he didn't face the consequences of the policies he supported. After he died, Lyndon Johnson became president, and those contradictions became apparent. And Johnson tried to carry on both. In fact, he tried to expand the civil rights and great

society welfare programs that Kennedy had given support to but never really did anything about at the same time that he pursued the Vietnam War, and his administration sort of came down, came apart over the Vietnam War. It's hard to know what Kennedy would do, but almost everyone who looks back nostalgically at Kennedy, and this is older people especially, they read into Kennedy what they want. They select, but he was the last one who people who were flag-waving patriots could both support and people who were in favor of equality, civil rights, a progressive agenda at the same time. But remember, in those days, there was a consensus in America. It's really interesting to look at the televised debates between Nixon and Kennedy.

Each of them spoke about the other and to the other with great respect. They both emphasized explicitly how much they respected the other candidate and how they differed only on means, not on goals, not on their vision of America. Americans had enormous consensus or unanimity about what America was at that time. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but that existed. It was in part because of the media, but there's a lot of reasons for that.

My point is that the inner contradictions that were already in beginning in the 1950s and 60s are now so obvious that politicians will not speak to each other with anything like the respect and regard that Kennedy and Nixon had. Nobody thought if they supported Kennedy that if Nixon was elected, the country was going to fall apart. Nobody who supported Nixon thought that if Kennedy was elected, it was a catastrophe for America. Today, this is a common thing. Trump supporters will even say Biden is destroying America or the Democrats are destroying America. And the Democrats say, Don Trump and his supporters are destroying America. That was not at all the mood in the 1950s and

the 60s that began breaking down during the Vietnam War than during the Nixon years. And ever since it's gotten worse and worse or more and more like that. Brown versus Board of Education happens in 1954, 64 and 65, you see the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Right. Do you think that was done by people who had a genuine feeling of inclusion and wanting to bring people into the fold as equals, or do you see that as something more nefarious? It's the logical. the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 1968, the Brown versus Board of Education, those were completely

logical steps. If one accepted, you might say, America's proclaimed ideals during the Second World War, this is a very important point. It's something that many people don't really pay much attention to. That is the importance of basic principles or ideology. If one accepts the premise that societies should just be collections of individuals, that individual rights are the most important thing, then the Brown versus Board of Education makes sense. America is not going to make any distinctions about race. And then the civil right, the breaking down of the last vestiges of segregation in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and 1968, and the changing of the immigration laws in 1965, which had been weighted or biased in favor of Europeans. That was

changed, too. And that's logical given how the, given the principles that America said it was fighting for during the Second World War. That's understandable. And to see, this is a very common thing. There's a long history, I think, of American leaders who give lip service or affirm principles, and then they are not happy about the policies based on those principles, but they don't really get angry about them until the consequences of those policies, based on the principles they've supported, start to really have an impact. For example, I mean, people will, America has always been, or not always, but in recent years, it's been very lax about immigration. Well, if you're in, I mean, once you get into America,

if you sort of get settled and so forth, well, they're not going to round you up. I mean, America has had a problem with illegal immigration for a long time. But now it's reached a point where even mayors of large liberal cities that even call themselves sanctuary cities say that the problem's gotten out of control. Well, the time to have dealt with this would have been years ago. But politicians, especially in the United States, I think, or in America, they're very reluctant to take measures that seem harsh or are going to be difficult or unpopular until the consequences gets so bad, then it's really, in a sense, too late. But my point is that America's been on this trajectory for many, many decades now, and that the movement to the left, if you will,

toward ever more egalitarian, every more individualistic society has been in place for a long time. When Ronald Reagan was running for president, he said he wasn't even going to approve making Martin Luther King Day a national holiday. People who called himself conservative in those days were against Martin Luther King Day as a national holiday. They didn't believe in his worldview and what he wanted. But when Reagan became president, he signed it into law. Republicans then eventually went along with it. Now Republicans say, oh, Martin Luther King is one of us. We really, we're the real champions of his thing. And that's typical. of American Republicans or conservatives

because they are continually fighting a rearguard action. When Social Security was introduced in the 1930s, they said, no, nope, that's a form of socialism. We're against it. Well, they don't object to it now. When Medicare was introduced under the Johnson years, they call it socialized medicine, we can't have that. And they objected to that.

But then it was put in place, and then Republicans accept it. Martin Luther King was a bad guy for many most conservatives, but then now they all say, then they embrace it. Because most of these conservatives cannot really tell you what it is exactly they're conserving, except a kind of vague holding on to the past. And that's one of the reasons why the trajectory of America continues to be to go in this direction, which is the guiding principles of which are universalist and individualist. That is universalist in the sense that it's for everybody and individualist in the sense that the individual is the most important thing, not the society. So that inevitably then any such society, it's going to lose any kind of racial, ethnic,

cultural, religious coherence and cohesion. How much did the Vietnam War start that division? One of the points about the Second World War to keep in mind, and this is a point that is true of American history in general. Americans, and this is something I learned when I first lived in Europe, war for Americans is not what people around the world understand by war. War for people in Japan or China or Poland or Germany or Russia means something very different than it does for Americans. except for the American Civil War, we haven't had any real fighting or war in our country. For Americans, wars are conflicts that take place overseas. There's something a little bit like a football team.

Win or lose, when it goes off and plays football, win or lose, it comes back home and life goes on. It doesn't really affect us. So that Americans don't have the same revulsion about war as Americans do. Americans like to think we're a peaceful country. We want peace in the world. And yet, no country, certainly in modern times, has attacked, bombed, invaded, occupied more countries than the United States of America. And the larger reason, much of the reason that Americans put up with this is that most of these wars are overseas.

We don't see the impact of them very much. So the Vietnam War, there was a revolution against that because the opposition to it really only grew when large numbers of Americans started getting killed and coming home. And then, and of course, younger people didn't want to be drafted into the war, didn't want to go to war. And this is a very common thing in America. We will go to war and then when it gets too bad, we say, well, we're out of here. Because fortunately, the United States of America has two big oceans and no really powerful neighboring countries on our borders. So we don't have the same sense of security or anxiety about our place in the world compared to other countries which have powerful and often dangerous neighboring countries as other countries. as adversarial countries as neighbors.

And, of course, Americans have never experienced bombs falling on our cities. Our cities reduced to rubble or soldiers marching around and destroying things, raping women, looting and so forth. Europeans have, Asians have. And Americans have not experienced in that. And Americans talk very quickly easily about supporting wars until it gets really hard. And today, I mean, American leaders talk about how much you've got to stand with Ukraine. Well, yeah, to the point, but they're not going to do it to the point where they have to draft people to force them into war.

Or they're not going to, or if the cost is a really a painful one for Americans. Americans don't have much stomach for that. My point is that Americans will talk very much about, well, if there's a bad guy, we'll go and destroy them. But that shows a kind of really a lack of empathy with what the consequence, the terrible consequences of war are and have been. And Americans have not really experienced that. So when we moved forward, let's move forward to the 80s. The 70s seems to be disastrous, especially the later 70s.

Carter's presidency is seen as a total failure. And Ronald Reagan is elected as a, you know, save us. You know, come and save us, Ronnie. And how do you see the tension starting there? I mean, I was alive for this. I remember this. But I was only, I was still in school. I was young and still in school.

And I remember that there were a lot of people who were upset about it. People were upset that the moral majority was in the white. House, things like that. What kind of division did you see happening when Reagan was in office? Ronald Reagan did nothing really to change the trajectory that America had been on. I'll give just one example. Reagan talked a lot about fiscal responsibility. He was against big government. That was a big point he made over and over for years in speeches and so forth. He felt that he used to joke that the most dangerous words in the English language are, I'm from the government and I'm here to help. He said, there's inaugural address. Government is not the solution. Government is the problem.

Well, his actual administration, his actual policies were very different than the rhetoric. He actually vastly increased the federal government. He promised that when he was running for president, that he would abolish the Department of Education. He says it's not constitutional. He's right. There's no provision in the federal constitution for a government, federal government being involved in education. But under Ronald Reagan, he increased the budget of the Department of Education, didn't decrease it. And he greatly increased the size of the government altogether and the spending. In fact, Ronald Reagan began a process, which now were, which is even more galloping than it was before, of massive federal deficits. He promised to lower the size of the federal government,

increase military spending, lower taxes, and balance the budget all at the same time. And his budget director, David Stockman, said, that's just not going to happen. That's just not possible. And Reagan seemed almost oblivious, but his speeches were so uplifting for so many people that people overlooked it. They didn't really care. The economy did reasonably well. It wasn't great, but it did reasonably well. And as long as the economy was doing reasonably well, And as long as the policies don't seem to affect us too badly, his rhetoric alone was enough to carry him. Also, he's just a nice guy. He's the kind of person everybody would like to have as a neighbor.

He's easygoing, likes to tell jokes, not too grim. But his actual policies accelerated the trends we had. It was Ronald Reagan never did away with so-called affirmative action programs, which are anti-white discrimination. In racial policy, he carried on and continued the policies of his predecessors. He actually exacerbated. And today, and ever since Ronald Reagan, the American people are enjoying the living standards such as it is, as well as it is, because we are putting so much on the national credit card, the deficit. We're saying, in effect, we'll live well, and we'll give the bills for all of this to our children and grandchildren. Reagan was already

guilty of that, and that's a kind of legacy of his. But people look back on that because America was still doing very well in the world. It was during the Reagan years that America shifted from being the number one creditor nation in the world to the number one debtor nation in the world. Those trends, of course, got much, much greater in the years since. But there was still enough of the old America, you could say, to hold on to things. And Reagan captured the kind of national mood at the time. And everybody liked him, what he would say about America's greatest days are still ahead. People love to hear that. One of the odd things is that if a Republican today were to run for president on the platform that Reagan supported in so many ways, he would be regarded as bad.

He was in favor, for example, of a two-state solution, Palestinian state and a Jewish state in the Middle East. Today, Republicans are very reluctant to say that. Reagan signed off on an amnesty bill to give amnesty to three million illegal aliens in the so-called Simpson-Mazzoli Act. And if a Republican today proposed something like that, he'd be considered completely out of bounds, terrible, awful, and so forth. But see, the reality of, again, Reagan's view of America was kind of almost a naive, G. Shucks, we're just great. Let's just all be nice and everything will work out kind of attitude. He was several times he was asked about his vision of America, how he views America. And he liked to talk about America as a city, shining city on the hill, a kind of model for the world.

and he said it would be a place of people from all over the world who would go there because they have a special love of freedom. What does that mean exactly? He just sort of assumed that that's all good. Well, are people coming across the Rio Grande to come to America? Do they have this special love of freedom? People like to hear it because they think, well, I have a special love of freedom. That sounds good. But it's naive. It's childish, really. Because countries, aren't good or bad because they have, quote, this special love of freedom, whatever that is, it's based on much, much more than that. Certainly the unity of a country depends on something much more than having this, what he called a special love of freedom.

But it sounded all good. It sounds great. And that has been an allure, a kind of ideal for many Americans from the very beginning. This idea that America is especially providentially good. a blessed country, and that the problems of other people, we are not going to really have. We don't really have to worry about them because we're a special people. Well, in some ways, that's true, because America, unlike other countries, had tremendous abundance of resources and land, forests, natural resource, oil, coal, timber, gold.

Other countries don't have that. It's much harder to, and America could afford to be very, very optimistic, nonchalant. When America was founded, when the United States of America declared independence in 1776, almost 250 years ago, white Americans live better than people anywhere in the world. That wasn't because of a special blessing from God, although you could say it was because of the abundance and the, of a free land and very good land here in the United States that was made that possible. But of course, it's not because America's special

in some political or providential way. Canada didn't break away from Britain, but Canadians don't live any worse particularly than Americans do because they had the same advantage as we do. I mean, the objective circumstances in Canada are very similar to those in the United States, though they didn't have a declaration of independence, they didn't break away from Britain, they didn't talk about how it's a city on a shining hill and it's a special kind of society.

But Americans like to believe that the objective advantages that we've had in the United States are due to because we're better or there's a special blessing from God, which in a sense it's true because we have these best blessings from nature. And Americans could take all of this land. The only resistance came from Stone Age Indians, aboriginals, who had no organization. They didn't have any written language. They had very little organization. And they were small in numbers, so they were easily pushed aside.

That's insignificant, compared to the challenges that other countries have had to face to carve out a country and carve out a society where they happen to live. The Cold War ends, the Soviet Union breaks up, and it seems like right after that, during Clinton's presidency, is where you really start seeing the woke, starting to present itself, starting to infiltrate, you start a lot more about political correctness, Do you think that has anything to do with that, the fact that now we're not at war anymore, because we had to hide under our desks in case a bomb dropped, in case a nuclear bomb drop,

do you think that it was just a way of people just being like, well, now we can act out and do whatever we want because we don't have this threat hanging over our head? No, no, I think this is, again, this is the inevitable consequence of things that have come before. Up until, you know, Ronald Reagan once said, when I was young, we didn't know we had a race problem in America. What do you mean by that is because race wasn't even an issue. Black Americans were basically invisible. They played no role in political life. They appeared occasionally in the media as comic figures, sometimes as entertainers.

But America didn't just ignore. basically white America was white America, just ignored blacks. And what happened to them wasn't of any real concern to most people. But once the civil rights laws are made, and once blacks start playing an active role in political life, then they have, then they understandably will say, well, we want our slice of the pie. How come we're still at the back of the bus when it comes to jobs and income and wealth compared to white Americans? And blacks have a very, have a legitimate point because white Americans have been promising them this equity and have been assuming that once the last vestiges of segregation were done away with, black people would be like white people with dark skins.

Basically, it would all work out. Well, that's not true, and it didn't work out. But black Americans are understandably furious because they've been promised by both Republican and Democrat presidents an idea of what will be which has never been delivered. Black Americans will point out that over the last 50 years, huge numbers of immigrants have come to this country from Vietnam or from the Middle East or from Mexico. And within a generation, they're doing better than blacks. And the black people will say, hey, we're still at the back of the bus. We're still at the bottom of the barrel. You haven't delivered.

You've made a country that's given a better break to people from Syria or Mexico or Vietnam than it has to us. And white Americans are really sort of oblivious to the consequence. of promises that are unfulfilled this way. Anyway, my point is, though, that the wokeness is now even more emphatic, because people who say, well, we should have this society of equity are saying, if we're serious about it, we should enforce it. I thought this already in high school. I thought if white politicians, both Republican Democrats, say they want a society in which

race doesn't matter. And I thought, well, if they're really serious about it, why don't they pursue that goal with the same vigor and determination that they do a war? But they don't. They don't. They sort of think, well, it'll all sort of work out. And that's what Reagan thought. That if we're all sort of nice and our motives are good, it'll all work out. No, that's not true.

But that's kind of an American view. People pay more attention oftentimes to the intentions than the reality. If the intentions are good, people think, well, it'll all work out. No, absolutely not. It has to be based on reality. And my point is that this woke thing is now the consequence of the failure of white America to live up to the pledges that they've made. Where's the equity that white Americans have been promising?

Remember, affirmative action policies have been in place since the years of Nixon and Johnson. White Americans have approved those policies. Those policies are based on the idea and the notion that white America collectively is responsible for the lower income and the lower educational level and the lower achievement level of black Americans and that some sort of munking around with standards is okay until we make this all work. Senator Dea Conner is a Supreme Court Justice, and she said not too long ago, she said a few years ago, she said, well, when we approved affirmative action, we thought we'd have it in place for 20 years at the most and then wouldn't be necessary anymore. Well, no, it hasn't worked and it's not going to work, as people warned at the time. But Americans thought, well, we'll have affirmative action and we'll give special advantages, as Lyndon Johnson and other politicians said, for a while until everything evens out. It hasn't even out, and it's not going to. Joe Biden, at the beginning of his administration now, almost four years ago, three years ago, promised that in his administration,

he was going to do away with what he called systemic racism in America. Well, I haven't heard many reporters and journalists ask President Biden or his administration, well, how are you doing on that eliminating the Inequity, they say these things, but they're not serious about it. They're not really, they sort of think, well, we'll make the right sounds, we'll pass a few laws. But if it doesn't work, too bad.

Well, heck with it. But that's why black Americans have an understandable grievance about the failure of white Americans through their politicians to make good on the promises that have been made to them. Well, you can make all the promises you want, but if the group that you're making these promises too can't stand, can't raise, come up to the level to achieve, I mean, we're, the competency crisis is right in front of us. We saw this Fannie Willis DA in Atlanta get up on the stand and it's obvious that she was a diversity hire. She sounded like a. a waitress at Waffle House once she opened her mouth and started talking. So what do I mean, the promises, it seems to me that the promises that white people made were seemed to be in the realm of impossibilities. Well, black people will say, okay, you're saying we're not competent. Are you, you're blaming us then for our condition.

That's not what your leader said. You're a leader. After the 1968 riots, President Johnson appointed a, a blue-ribbon committee called the Kerner Commission. And it dealt with a big report, and it said the reason that there's riots in America, the reason these periodic uprisings or explosions of violence happen in black areas is because black people live under inferior conditions. And this is because of white America.

The Kerner Commission report said they live in these ghettos, which are maintained and tolerated and kept by white. America. Now, black leaders will say, well, that's what your own leaders say. Your own leaders say, white America is responsible for this. If you say we're not competent enough, you're saying, well, it's only, I mean, if your own leaders say the reason for this disparity is because of racism, now you can't turn around and say, no, it's your fault. If it's our fault, then that's not what you've been saying for years. We're holding you to what you've seen. that is through your representatives.

Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, I guess that is just we're at a, we're at an impasse now. Well, here's something when it comes to the woke. Okay, you can talk about the underclass, if you want to call them that, and the promises that were made to them. Why, what do you think accounts for everything that we've seen, you know, in this post-war error that would lead to like transgenderism becoming something that would you know it's and you know that isn't I don't think that that's a an underclass issue I think that that's a you know a lot of the a lot of the

people you see dealing with that come from families of means if not wealthy families definitely you know middle to upper middle class families I mean how do we get that how do we get that out of all of this? The short answer is the word individualism. Americans like to believe that we can have a well-functioning, orderly, agreeable, healthy society. At the same time, it's a society of individuals. If individuals want something and want to do it, and it's not going to hurt other people, they should be allowed to do it. In other words, there aren't any standards, social standards that are enforced. If you want to believe this or you want to do this, that's go for it. If you will, but a healthy society does have standards that it enforces. In other words, there's a coercion of

a sort that's involved. It's reached this point now where it sort of defies common sense where a person can say, I want to change my gender. Well, you can people can change their race. They can change all sorts of things. See, that's what's broken down in America is any sense of communal identity. That's the big change that's taken place. And people will say, well, the whole point of society is me, my rights, what I want. You know, America now tolerates people sleeping on the streets, doing drugs on the streets. That used to be considered, no, that's not tolerated.

But they would say, well, this is what I want to do. Screw you. And they will say, and they'll say, look, I'm expressing my idea of freedom. They'll say, who's more free? A homeless person on the street, he gets up when he wants. He poops where he likes. He doesn't worry about child support or marriage or going to jobs. And then there's another fellow, and he's driving two hours back and forth to work each way every day in order to have a little house where his wife and three kids are living.

And he's having trouble meeting the mortgage and his wife is having trouble getting groceries. Who's more free? The person who's living in the street says, I'm a lot freer than that guy. He's a slave. He's got to get up at a certain time. He's got to listen to problems from his wife. he's got his kids, they're wanting this and that, and they've got dental problems and so forth. And this is, this idea of individualism and a society of individuals is really at the root of

where we've gotten today. So if a 12-year-old says, I don't really feel like a girl, I feel like a guy, or vice versa, well, who's to say you're wrong? I mean, some parents will say, well, no, you're a girl, just shape up or whatever. Who knows what they'll say? But the point is, if it's all up to just whatever we think or imagine, and there's no reality to anything, except what we imagine it to be true, and there's no standards that are imposed by mores, by custom, and by law, then that's where we end up.

And it's now reached a point of really absurdity in our society, but it's going to go more in that direction, because both Republicans and Democrats, both people who call themselves even conservative, they don't have a countervailing worldview. They still, conservatives, in fact, they believe even more, you might say, in individualism. And the proof of that, probably, or expression of that, I should say, is their support for a man, Donald Trump, who is about as self-centered as any political figure has ever been in American life. It's all about Donald Trump. His whole life has been dedicated, not to the country,

not to his people, not to any ideal, not to any religious view, but to what's good for Donald Trump and his immediate family. That's what's most important. And Americans, I mean, he's the epitome of this kind of narcissistic, individualistic worldview. Well, let's end it right there. I'm going to include in the show notes the links for iHR.org and you already did your plugs at the beginning so I want to thank you for coming on the show I ask just stay in the studio for a couple seconds after I after I end the recording and thank you thank you and I hope you'll consider coming back one day and maybe we'll just pick like one subject and one one time frame like some part of the part of the war or something like that and we'll go over that

How does that sound? Peter, yeah, I'd like to talk with you for a few minutes, though. I want to ask you some questions, but okay. Can they do that? Yeah, no problem, but I'm going to end the recording right now, though.