The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1149: The 'Blessed' Life of Mr. Bernard Baruch w/ Philo's Miscellany

Episode Date: December 22, 2024

70 MinutesPG-13Philo's Miscellany has a YouTube channel in which he reviews rare books.Philo's joins Pete to talk about the life of Southern Democrat, Bernard Baruch.Philo's YouTube ChannelPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete'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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Phylos Miscellany hasn't been here in a while, but he's back. What's going on, Phylos? Not much. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me back on. You are welcome. I can't wait for this because there was a name that came up in the recent series I did with Stormy on the robber barons. And we never really dove into who that was. And you had mentioned that you had a book on them and then you started researching them and going down a rabbit hole. And it was like, hey, let's talk about this on the show. Who are we talking about today, Phyllis? We are talking about a man named Bernard Baruch, but I'm not going to say it like that because it's going to get really obnoxious. So I'm just going to call him Baruch.

The book that was written about him is a hagiography, written while he was still alive, by a woman named Margaret Coyt in 1957. Mr. Baruch himself commissioned the book, and she spent seven years writing. She had access to all of his personal papers, interviewed everyone that he knew, but Baruch disliked the final product so much that he entirely withdrew permission to access his private papers. And the author vowed never to write the biography of a living person again. But that doesn't tell you so much about who the man is.

To keep it very brief, he is responsible for the mobilization. of commodities and the logistics operations behind most of World War I and a good portion of World War II. And he was a close advisor to every U.S. president from Wilson all the way through to Truman before he fell out of favor with President Truman in the late 1940s and sort of retired from politics. he was a political connection to a vast majority of any powerful people within Washington at the time, and he was responsible for gearing the wartime economies in both of those wars. He is a critical piece of understanding the American rearmament for World War I and World War II. That sounds like somebody who not only can pull strings, but I mean, where does someone like that come from? Like, what's the, I mean, I know people know what the early

life is. But what's the early life on Bernard Baruch? How did he, how did he gets it to where he got? So, he was born in 1870, five years after the end of the Civil War in Camden, South Carolina, but he was not a southern boy. His parents and his grandparents and all of his previous lineage on both sides of the family was Jewish, and his parents were not born in the United States proper. So there's a whole thing about his Jewish lineage, which I'll get into in a bit, but he was the son of Simon Baruch, who was a surgeon in the Confederate Army, and that man as a surgeon was very involved with the Confederacy, and the treatment of the wounded during the the war, and after the war, he was a member of the KKK, which would explain the prominent

democratic political partisan tendency that Mr. Baruch had for his entire life, and also his connection with many other Jews throughout his career. So a lot of the connections that he makes are Jews, and we can get all into that, but that's the gist of his background in the South. I think something that some people bring up sometimes is the fact that, you know, there were a lot of Jews in the South and even like Judah Benjamin, obviously, is the most obvious one when it comes to the war and when it comes to the Southern government. Some people make the argument that one of the reasons why the South didn't win is because the, well, there was a what some would call, a historically subversive element in charge and in power and controlling a lot of wealth in the South. So what would you say, from what you've studied, can you comment on that? I can't comment generally as to it, but as to his family specifically, they were immensely wealthy

for first generations. They owned several plantations. They had a columned mansion. kind of the idealic Southern childhood data mammy, so to speak. So evidently, the family's fortunes were not destroyed in the war as much as many other southerners. So I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions from that. So when he's making connections and he's growing power, how is he accumulating his power to get to the point where he can influence presidents and basically have a good part in controlling the two biggest wars of all time. So the rise is pretty interesting. He's a smart man, a good boxer. At age 10, he moves up to New York City,

and at the time, Jews were not allowed in the Ivy League's in the United States. They were simply forbidden from attending. And instead of going to an Ivy League, he went to City University in New York, which was the primary pathway for very powerful Jews to get a college degree and make business network connections. And there was a sort of funneling effect where the nation's wealthiest and most powerful ones would go to this college, generally on their own merit. they had kind of uniquely as far as colleges go, universal entrance exams that Jews would go through and get on to the program. But he also meets very interesting people when he's at City College. He befriends a man called Louis Rothschild.

That might come up later. I'm sure your audience knows about the Rothschilds. He also meets a man called Josephus Daniels. After college, sort of the network of people he's meeting include people like Guggenheim. And to get back to kind of his time in school a little bit here, he is a very athletic guy. Most Jews in the 1890s that were kind of known for boxing, strangely enough. This is something that's not widely known today. very talented boxer. He was a very tall guy for a Jew.

Non-Jewish sources will say six feet tall. Jewish sources will say six foot three to kind of compensate. He goes in 1890 to where his parents were born in Scherlsen in East Prussia to meet his grandparents. There's a few interesting lines here about his Jewish background that I'll kind of read. This is right out of his biography, quote, when he saw the handsome process, Russian hussars and nice uniforms and scarred faces, something tightened within him, for his was the heritage of 1848, and this was the hateful militarism from which his father had fled. And there's another interesting anecdote, which is that he meets his grandparents who are still living there, and his grandfather takes him into the closet and shows him a human skull that has writings of various languages on it, like Hebrew, Portuguese, Spanish, and German, and I quote,

even tongues long forgotten and spoken no more. This was the genealogy of the Baruch family, descended from the Baruch who was in Jeremiah's scrolls in the Babylonian captivity. So there's probably some Kabbalistic magic going on, or some kind of weird past background, because as your audience may or may not know, I was raised Jewish, and I've never met another Jewish family that has a skull in the closet.

Very unusual. I want to talk a little bit now about how he makes his fortune. I'll keep it brief. He joins a small firm on Wall Street, and he speculates on rubber, gets very wealthy. He's a millionaire by the time he's 30 in 1905, and he starts making a whole bunch of connections. And he's known for getting people what they need, when they need it. So he's described in the book as not necessarily the frontman of industry like a Carnegie or a J.P. Morgan, but he knew the key players in back places. One such example of this is there was a man named Josephus Daniels who needed a whole

bunch of zinc. And in order to facilitate this connection for the New Jersey zinc company, he met with some very strange people to facilitate raw commodities. And later on in his career, this back dealing becomes a tremendous strength of his. Later on, he's very successful in the commodity trading, and he ends up getting very, very close also with key members of the Democratic Party. I'm thinking specifically of a guy called Colonel House, who I believe you've talked about before, Pete, maybe briefly.

But for those who don't know, Colonel House was kind of the go-to man in Washington between 1912 and 1918, and he was kind of the one running the show for Wilson, if it wasn't for his wife's involvement. President Wilson's wife at the end of the war. So it gets very close with Colonel House. He gets very close with the president and chairman of the DNC, a guy named William McAdoo, and all these connections that he's making lobby very hard

for Baruch's involvement in politics. The man who was kind of his mentor, McAdoo, was Wilson's key man and married Wilson's daughter in 1914 for his second marriage. It was very close. connections. That man was the Treasury Secretary at the outbreak of World War I. In addition, and this is the last kind of connection, and then I'll go into his World War I career, Baruch was also friends with Justice Louis Brandeis, who also supported Baruch's career progression

to President Wilson as well. So I don't believe it's a matter of coincidence that every powerful Jew in the Wilson administration was known to Baruch through his time at City College in New York and also his business connections prior to World War I. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive by design. They move you even before you drive. The new Cooper plugin hybrid range for Mentor, Leon, and Teramar. Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2000 euro,

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Relax in our exquisite accommodations. Step outside and be captivated by the wild Atlantic surrounds. your five-star getaway where every detail is designed with you in mind. Give the gift of a unique experience this Christmas with vouchers from Trump-Dunbeg. Search Trump-Ireland gift vouchers. Trump on Dunbiog, Kush Faragea. So you had mentioned, and I know you said, we talked about this a little bit, the first time you were on that you were raised Jewish.

What do you now? Of his religious involvement? No, talking about you. Oh, me personally? Yeah, you mentioned that you were raised Jewish. Yeah, so my background, born and raised Jewish, went through the whole thing, Brit Mila, Bo Mitzvah. I lived for a few years in Israel, and then eventually I recognized that Christ is the Messiah,

and you can't remain a Jew if you decide and know that Christ is the Messiah. So I became a Christian, married a Christian woman, my wife and I are Orthodox Christians. So I no longer believe in Judaism. But I could tell you that the patronage network of things is very powerful even today, as far as getting into places that you wouldn't be able to get into otherwise having career advancement. I know that a lot of business dealings and a lot of things happen over Shabbat dinners and, you know, there's, it's, it's very, I think also a lot of my early career success, which I won't go into, I owe to my Jewish background, the education that I got, the people that I met. I think that's that's that's kind of the strength, the in-group preferences. So is that it? Is it in-group preferences?

or is at the high verbal IQ? Not all of us have high verbal IQs, even though I'm talking a lot. It's, no, it's also, it's a bifurcation. It's a split between being an ethnicity and being a religion. So whenever you need to, you can switch between the two. You can sort of play up the ethnic card, right? So, for example, I could claim that I'm white or that I'm Jewish selectively.

Or it's a religious thing that I have some kind of mystical connection with the divine being chosen. I remember as a kid, part of the kid's books that we would read in the synagogue would have, like, the Prague Golem and stuff is like this avatar of Jewish sentiment against bigotry. and you know when you're a kid you don't really question any of this stuff but um you know i lived in israel for a few years it's a religious ethno state and you know when you do that long enough uh you know it's kind of like yeah and maybe regular joe schmo in america should kind of have this too you know these connections these benefits these opportunities and uh maybe they should be able to be proud of their heritage and believe in their own narrative and their understanding a history. Like maybe they shouldn't be shamed for that intrinsically. Yeah. Yeah. And I know that

from reading Shahak, once a Jew does start professing Christ, their life in Israel is pretty much over. Oh, toast. Like my rabbi wouldn't even speak to me. Like the whole the whole Jewish side of the family that ostracized me. And it's, yeah, you know, it's this weird thing because, like, you're dead to them. And for what? Exactly. Like, you're still ethnically Jewish. And the funny part is, like, 80% of Jews or something don't even believe in God.

And, you know, that's the whole thing. I mean, oh, my gosh, it's just a mess. It's just a total, total mess. All right. Let's get back to Mr. Baruch. since we know that you don't have any in your family doesn't have any skulls hiding in the closet. Yeah. Yeah.

So let's get into World War I because that's when somebody has that much power to do the kind of things he did, we need some explanations for that. So he is appointed by Wilson to head the War Industries Board. I'm not an economist, but the best I can figure, what the War Industries Board does in World War I is they acquire raw commodities for industries, and then they go in with the backing and blessing of the federal government to dictate to corporations what they're producing for the war effort. And because they're the federal government, they can control the commodity supply chain and the production and the logistics of shipping the final product overseas. They're doing this for the Americans. Before the entry into World War I, they're doing this for the French and the British. So a lot of the material assistance that we see during World War I, the reason that the allies were able to hold out so long against the central powers

was because of the American logistics that were backing them up. And that's a pretty neutral statement. But what's not a neutral statement is how he went about getting the materials and also how he profited from being in charge of this. Now, technically speaking, Wilson's executive order that created this War Industries Board stated that the chairman could not explicitly set the price of things. But if you're the man that's controlling the supply of the commodity and the demand of where it goes to, you're going to have an innate knowledge of that item's price. So he was able to strike these insane deals. One example of a deal is he talked Daniel Guggenheim

into selling 45 million pounds of copper at half the market price, saving $3.7 million in 1916, $1917, which is an insane deal. And the war industry's board, created all these facilities all over the country to coordinate the food, the fuel, the railway administration, the shipping board, the war trade board. Every decision of the commodities and the production of the economy and wartime passed by him. But this was not something that was created by an act of Congress. And, you know, he was also backed up by all of Wilson's cabinet and Colonel House as well. Let's see here.

So word on the street, even during World War I, was that Bernard Baruch was profiteering from the War Industries Board, and he was. It's very difficult to know, and I believe that before Baruch himself in this biography ordered the stripping out of all details of personal correspondence, that there was probably some pretty damning stuff in there. But one thing that stayed in the book was that in 1917, he wrote a check for $5 million worth of bonds for the first Liberty loan drive. As you know, wars are very expensive, and there's three main ways you can finance war, taxation, borrowing, and the expedience of printing money. So in World War I under his plan, according to the Fed's website, the Federal Reserve, that is, the government relied on a mix of one-third new taxes and two-thirds borrowing from the general population. The securities were issued by the Treasury, but the Federal Reserve and its member banks conducted the bond sales. They taxed the richest and exempted the poor.

The highest marginal rate eventually reached 77% on incomes over $1 million. This was part of an effort to not only sell the bonds, but to sell the war. So I want to break this down because that sounds very financial and technical. But the way that I perceive it is that the federal government is shutting down private industry and excessively taxing very wealthy people. And yes, it funds the war, but it also destroys an aristocratic class of people that had existed and made their money outside of the federal government in private corporations. Baruch during the war had a system of interlocking committees

and a single controllable outlet for each separate commodity. Washington put forth the demand, and industry gives out the supply. So, you know, in terms of profiteering, you just have to look at the facts in the book. Baruch was working with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who boasted in 1920, He had broken enough laws during the war to go to jail for 900 years. In June, 1918, there was such a shortage of vital steel that the United States steal their net income for 1917 in the previous year was $224 million with dividends of $7.62 a common share. So just to make that make sense, these numbers were not reached again by this company until 1954. So somebody's making a whole shit ton of money. Excuse my language. And I want to also point to some other very interesting profiteering and economic machinations that are going on for this.

So one thing that you have to supply in warfare is explosives, a whole lot of ordinance. And Baruch was the man for explosives. His big thing was nitrates. And nitrates have a dual use. You can use them in explosives, but you also need them for fertile. the Allies encountered a situation where most nitrate production they were getting was from Chile. German-owned nitrate facilities in Chile, as well as Chile, having their gold reserves in Germany. So to seize these German-owned nitrate factories would violate the trading with the Enemy Act that they had set. And so what happened was every allied buyer of nitrates just withdrew from the Chilean market for three months. And that left Chile with no ability to sell their nitrate. The country almost was on the verge of starvation. And then the Allies returned to the market and bought their nitrates at four and one-eighth cents a pound,

which is just dirt cheap for nitrate. A very interesting thing. I know that Stormy mentioned the DuPont family. Baruch screwed over the DuPont company and required them to turn over all nitrates to the government when they had made a previous deal with Chile before this strategy was in effect. So the way I kind of conceive of this big picture

is they're kind of squeezing the old aristocracy of all of their money, and they're federalizing a lot of these different industries. He also did the same supply and demand machinations on Southern Cotton. to go like, and let me go, let me know if this gets like way too granular. Stormy also mentioned that in America in the 19th century, there were these factories that would produce perhaps something as small as a niche little button. And that industry, those types of industries were totally destroyed in the 20th century.

And I believe that this is the root of how they began to get destroyed. within the book it details that war conservation had reduced styles, varieties, and colors of clothing. It had standardized sizes of machinery. It had outlawed 250 different types of plow models, 755 types of drills, 232 different types of buggy wheels, nearly 6,000 different shapes and sizes of pocket knives

vantaged from country stores. So what does that mean? that means that like your town pocket knife factory is toast because there's a big one near the city that's been federalized for the war effort that can produce a standardized one at the government's request for the military. And that kills a lot of very small industries. But it has like a parallel benefit. And it doesn't go and it doesn't go out of, it doesn't close after the war. ends. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Lidl Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favorite Liddle items

all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Liddle New Bridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Liddle, more to value. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive. by design. They move you even before you drive. The new Cooper plugin 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 Ireland Limited, subject to lending criteria, terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland.

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They know that the Soviet Union really industrialized, and China during the Cultural Revolution kind of failed, but did a lot of different things, too. modernize their economy, but this is sort of how it happened really within the United States as far as the synchronization of both state and private industry. Previously, these were very separate things, but through the coordination of the central government in the U.S. and the war effort, it totally changed the economic landscape. So here's an example. In 1914, the U.S. produced 5901.

tons of chromite. Into 1918, at the end of the war, it produced 60,000 tons. So similar to World War II, we were the only economy that was in this position at scale. There was a kind of international austerity

that gripped the world. France couldn't give up its gold for the American cars, and Germany had no gold and few raw materials left. So I want to get into briefly the Paris Peace conference and why I think that this man did some really evil actions during his lifetime.

So Bernard Baruch was named the Peace Commission at the Paris Peace Conference in January 1919. By executive order, $150,000 or $2.7 million was put at his personal disposal to assemble a staff and do what he wished. So he supported Wilson's having France seized Germany's Cole in the Rour. The plan from Mr. Baruch was to, and in these proceedings, he was considered the voice of reason,

if you can believe this. The plan was to let Germany build up enough industry to just be bled further financially. As Pete's mentioned, probably on previous streams, but to the audience's knowledge, the average German citizen at

this time was consuming just eight or 900 calories a day. That's starvation level. American soldiers were eating steaks, and British soldiers at the time threatened to open mutiny. They were seeing children wandering around the streets starving. Baruch continued the blockade along with other people in Wilson's administration. When Herbert Hoover did a count as president, looking back on it, he assessed that three and a half million German children were of subnormal physical stature due to malnutrition due to this blockade.

Baruch was also in favor of an army of occupation of the Allies remaining for 25 years in Germany and the Ruhr as well. Just completely devastating Germany. And that I do think is an evil act. Yeah, but the question, it always comes back to my favorite question of why. Well, I believe it was to personally, financially, enrich Beruch, and a lot of other Jews, and a lot of other wealthy and powerful people in Europe and the United States. Is that just by... basically stealing all of their natural resources. I know that Italy and the Czech Republic or Czechoslovak at the time had control of southern parts of Prussia.

Obviously, Poland had parts of Prussia. And is that what that was, just basically while you're starving these people, you're fleecing and taking their forests and deforesting. deforestation, things like that. Totally. And they would do stuff like withhold the sale of nitrates, like I mentioned, very briefly earlier. So on the one hand, they're getting carved up and they're not able, Germany isn't able to produce materials. And let's say they can bring a car to market somehow. They are now dealing with an American industry, which has spent the last four years standardizing and making the cheapest possible and highest quality car.

And there's just no way on the macro scale that you can compete with that. It stuns me that nobody at the Paris Peace Conference really was able to kind of see the long-term implications of this. I mean, a few people were. But generally, like, I mean, it's interesting because, like, The centralization of stuff with the economy is Bruce's similar playbook in World War II, which is fascinating. I mean, it's just a very similar thing. You know, you have to understand also, and this is speculation.

You know, the man's parents were driven out of Prussia one generation prior for some reason that we don't know. and that he was in somewhere in the lineage there was an 1848-type communist mindset and that you know he was a democrat and a lot of people he was hanging around Harry Hopkins very left-leaning people and I think there is a general trend of resentment against Germany I mean in the book it really describes it more in the 30s and But, you know, it's very strange that he writes about an 1890 going to Prussia and disliking what he sees with Prussian people. So I can't, I think you have to take a man holistically. And I think that, you know, there's all these different things that suggest he had a real

personal animosity towards Germany. Ready for huge savings? Well, mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehead sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Lidl items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Liddle New Bridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Liddle, more to value. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design, they move you, even before you drive. The new Cooper plugin hybrid range.

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Search Trump-Ireland gift vouchers. Trump. On Dunbiog, Kush Farag. Yeah. That seems to be a pattern, especially when, you know, when you see certain people within our government so intense on destroying Russia. I'll agree with that. So let's go. We're at Paris Peace Conference, quote unquote, and we're moving forward with Mr. Brue.

Absolutely. So we are going to look a little bit at the 20s and then the 30s and then World War II. Um, there is, uh, let's, let's, let me just, I'll crack up in the book here real quick. Two, three, ninety. Um, Baruch came under attack in the Dearborn Independent. That's Henry Ford's newspaper. Um, in a exposition, exactly, like, I don't know, like five years ago, I wouldn't have thought this, but now I'm looking at it just, oh, man, based. So, so the scope of Jewish dictatorship in the, um, the scope of Jewish dictatorship in the, the United States, the details of which have already been described.

He wrote a friend that the outstanding man himself must expect attack and jealousy. Anti-Semitic bigotry restricted his activity in the Democratic Party. But of course, we know that he's doing all of his business dealings with Jews, and he's making all of his money off of doing the, these multi, multi-million dollar deals with the Guggenheims and Josephus Daniels and Neu Brandeis and all these others. And, you know, they're then coming into these companies around the country and telling them what they should produce and how much of it they should produce. And, you know, he's not like a Cincinnati's figure who just walks away at the end of the war

and goes back to private business. No, like, he continues onwards politically. In 1927, he begins to sell off all of his liquid, I don't know, money. I'm not an economist, so I'm probably going to screw a lot of this up. He sells most of his stuff before the Great Depression and profits off of it. In 1929, in February, he points out the Coolidge and Mellon were responsible for stimulating public participation in the stock market, which he was against. He was concerned over the lowered rates from the Federal Reserve, and he was in favor of the gold standard. He had some pretty, and again, profits off of the Great Depression.

He was very close to Henry Morgenthau. and then of course after the Great Depression he's advising all these people he mostly is spending his time working with the farmers on a mass bargaining scale for I think trying to help out

with the dust bowl circumstances that are going on but I'm not too clear on the specifics getting into of course the more relevant political part here, he was very close friends with FDR, going all the way back to World War I and continuing through the 1920s and 1930s. He was also Churchill's, Winston Churchill's,

oldest American friend. So he kind of stays in the circle the whole time. He very much disliked the Brain Trust Committee or Organization of Group of Men of the New Deal. As far as his own political views. He supported the eight-hour workday, and he put the first private money into a public housing project. One of his other opinions, especially of John

Maynard Keynes, he said of economists that if they knew the rules, they would not be writing books. They would be making money. I want to transition briefly to World War II here. In the early 1930s, far

earlier than people have an idea of. In 1932, Baruch starts advocating for the consolidation of rubber and steel stockpiles in the United States, because he has a pretty good idea and anticipation

that World War II is going to occur. And he kind of sets up the 1930s to rearm and bolster the American wartime economy in a very similar manner to way to how he had conducted himself during World War I. And as we've, as, you know, I've listened to your previous dreams, a lot of the United States was very

isolationist and even sympathetic, perhaps, to Germany. And this was a very unusual view at the time. He was, let's see, in 1938, He meets with FDR. He knows, and he tells FDR that Germany has spent 105 million German marks rearming the country. He advises FDR that 50,000 long-range bombers should be built. He also, in the mid and late 1930s,

is building munitions factories. And as we learned in your earlier podcast and streams, these were producing non-American ammunition. And even more interesting in 1938 and 1939, he's urging Harry Hopkins to take the secretarieship of war. And Harry Hopkins did the lend lease arrangement. So that's sort of the administrative element here behind Harry Hopkins and the rearmament in the munitions. And you also have to consider that he's, again, similar. theme, he's profiteering off of all of this. He's making a whole lot of money doing this

because he knows from his career all the commodity prices and all the productions that go into wartime. He suggested total embargo economically of Japan in the early 1940s, late 1930s. He believes that nothing should be sold to the enemy, that there should. There should be no assistance given to any other nation except the United States. He was very close friends with George Marshall. And this is something I didn't know. Most rationing in World War II, the rubber rationing, the victory gardens, the bonds, that was all done at Baruch's request.

And he was very frustrated with anything going on in the economy that wasn't oriented towards. wartime production. His daughter bought an airplane in 1940, and he was evidently tremendously upset about this. And he was also very opposed to the efforts of a certain James Forrestall, who I would love to do a stream on because I think he's a hero. And there's very interesting facts about him as well,

very positive facts, unlike the negative facts of Mr. Baruch. Do you do that? To kind of sum up. up here. He was a troubleshooter. In a sense, the word troubleshooter is kind of used to describe him because he would come into these big bureaucracies where you'd have a corporation with a lot of power and industry and he would use the leverage the federal government to kind of squeeze them for everything. And he was known throughout his career as going industry to industry and just basically bending them over

and is responsible for a lot of the change and the federalization of the economy. I did some outside research on Mr. Baruch, separate from the main hagiography that was written about him during his lifetime. I read a little bit of the section

from tragedy and hope on him, and there's another great book called the Fabian Freeway. The Fabian Freeway. way quote is that the phrase, Colonel House, is the man behind Wilson or has his hands and everything. That was attributed to Bernard Baruch. And in tragedy and hope, Bernard Baruch has mentioned in relation to his 1946 efforts to present a plan to the United Nations to set up an international control body for nuclear energy. he advocated for international inspection, both Soviet and American, so that the American stockpile of nuclear bombs would be dismantled after the war,

and that they would all be placed in the hands of this magical agency. He was also back in World War I very in favor of the League of Nations, the one-world governance model. The Baruch Plan in 1946 was rejected by the Civil, Union. And like many, many other figures that were prominent in FDR's term, he fell out of favor with Truman. And I think from reading other people's lives, especially the life of James Forrestall, pretty much everyone got on Truman's bad side eventually. And after that, after the late 1940s, he kind of semi-retired.

He would hang around in a place called Hyde Park, where he'd sit on a bench. He was a very powerful, connected man with a lot of money. And he generally just moved back to his estate. The book was written when he was about 80 years old. It's absolutely glowing in how it describes the man. so a lot of the coverage that I got was biased and I think we'll never know exactly how much he profiteered off of what he was doing. However, he dies in 1965 and like many, many other people, he is forgotten about to history. We know the names of people like MacArthur and Eisenhower and Hitler and Churchill.

but there were a lot of these other figures that perhaps on purpose or perhaps accidentally we no longer know about. So that kind of concludes the life of Bernard Baruch. I was going to ask a question until you got to the end and you started talking about like League of Nations, things like that. I was going to ask what you would say his ideology was. Did he have an ideology? It's, hmm. So, I mean, there's some free, there's some free market in there. It seems like he was probably a gold standard guy.

Also, you know, the, but saying, oh, the United States, no one should have nuclear weapons except this one, you know, global organization is kind of insane. It's, um, I guess. So I am working from a biased biography. But some of those are the best because sometimes the best biographies are biased because they're bragging about what they do. People brag about what they do. And it's like, and they present it as a good thing. And then you're just like, wait a minute. No.

No, I don't think this is a good thing at all. So I get the sense that he was really more of numbers, man, than anything else. The book never paints him as like a orthodox new dealer. I mean, he's in the inner circle, and he has a lot of sway, and he's very close to FDR, because Eleanor Roosevelt likes him. And he, just for the gold standard, so he's described in economic terms. in the book as conservative. But he

was a staunch the whole time he was a staunch member of the Democratic Party. He knew every major player. He would work very diligently on appointments. He didn't really have any moral scruples

about working with guys like Harry Hopkins or Colonel House. So it seems like the seedier elements of the Democratic Party didn't really phase him. I think he you know

there wasn't I'm also not seeing like a particular ethnic love from him like when he's when he's at the Paris Peace Conference there's a part where Jews come up and there's like this bickering between like for whatever reason there's a Jewish

sort of delegation there or a Jewish question that has to be settled in Poland and he's not really on the side of the Jews in Poland. He kind of asserts that they need to just become Poles singularly no hyphenates. That's an interesting term at the time hyphenates for people. So it seems as though he worked with a lot of Jews. He certainly benefited from their power. He was a strident southern Democrat. And I think also primarily there was this weird streak of like,

because he was doing so much for the U.S. economy, and he was changing so many things and federalizing so many things. I really did think he, I don't know if nationalist is the word, but he was in favor of a strong America, America that would win in warfare. That was kind of his single-minded effort. And I also think as terms of ideology, this didn't really stop his freedom of association. He had to meet with all kinds of people and politics and members of various businesses and corporations.

And I'm not seeing anything in the book that really paints him as like ideologically attached to, you know, the Democrats beyond like the power politics of it. I don't see that he's, you know, this flaming communist or anything. But I mean, he worked with a lot of communists and he helped out Harry Hopkins and he is directly responsible for communists and the New Dealers and everything else gaining a huge amount of ground in this country. Was there any evidence that he, like what was his opinion on the founding of Israel and Israel from 1948 forward? Did you see anything? Let me see.

It'll just give me one moment too. Actually, it might be the question. Let me see here. So I'm looking. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, sorry, let me just look through the index here. I'm not seeing him as present. So I'm actually looking at my Forrestall notes because Forrestall was in the cabinet

in May of 1948 and took notes on everything. So Baruch wasn't there. Let me see, is he? Yeah, because later in life, like, even Henry Morgenthau became like a financial advisor to Israel. and, you know, there were a lot of people who just, even though Morgan Thoud died in the United States, he immediately a lot of people like him. Sorry. Again, there's like so many streams of research for this. Okay.

February 3rd, 1948. Secretary of Defense, James Forrestall goes to lunch with Bernard Baruch. I'm reading this from the Forrestall Diaries from Bernard Baruch. quote, he took the line of advising me not to be active in this particular matter that is on Zionism, and Forrestal was against the creation of the state of Israel. So Baruch is basically telling him, stop worrying about it. And that I, Forrestal, was already identified to agree that this was not in my own interests with opposition to the United Nations policy on Palestine.

Baruch, I'm just going to insert it here, Baruch said he himself did not approve of the Zionist's actions, but in the next breath said that the Democratic Party could only lose by trying to get our government's policy reversed and said that it was a most inequitable thing to let the British arm the Arabs and for us not to furnish similar equipment to the Jews. So I can kind of clarify that statement, if that makes sense. So in 1948, there's the Truman Dewey election, and both are trying to win over the support of very powerful Jews within the party.

And Baruch knows that any major member of Truman's cabinet standing against the creation of Israel might compromise the democracy. Democratic Party's political chances in the upcoming election by trying to change the policy, which was like kind of broadly pro-Israel. And he was also in favor of arming the Israelis as well, Baruch was. Because, of course, I mean, and you have to just connect it to his career, like the guy made his money by arming people. Yeah, I was thinking that. Like, it's like he doesn't necessarily have to ideologically agree with the founding of the state of Israel. But, I mean, this is, there's a guy who made money during war.

Sure, arming them is profitable. And you also have to consider that in 1948, like the Ilgun, the Haganah, these organizations that were operating in Israel, they were terrorists. We're killing a whole lot of Brits. And that's a huge problem because, I mean, the American people are perceiving. There's not like this Schofield Bible, weird APAC-style worship of Jews in 1948 in the U.S. People are looking at this and saying, like, these people are terrorists. And I think Baruch is really only concerned with that time about, the political fortunes of the Democratic Party.

I mean, I think that really is his primary concern throughout his career, because that is his ability to have access to power is through that party and through those types. Yeah, what was that thing? Yeah, it's when you take into consideration polls that were done in the late 1930s about what Americans, what Heritage Americans, what their opinions were of Jews, it wasn't good. It was, I think, 70%, as high as 80%, they didn't trust them.

So what changes, what's going to change in the matter of 10 years? A lot can change in the matter of 10 years, but not much. Not the public's opinion, full opinion of a group that they consider to be outsiders. Totally. And throughout the biography, right, he's not going around the world presenting himself as a Jewish guy. He's presenting himself as a Southern Democrat. That is his persona, as it's described in the book. The woman who wrote his biography previously wrote a book about John Calhoun, a very positive book. That I'd be interested in reading because I think when we were talking on the phone the other day, I said that I think Calhoun was, is the greatest political thinker in American history. And I've read his disquisition on government the whole thing on my podcast. It's just a great, a great thinker. And, you know, one of those guys who was like, we can't have, do this Mexican,

we can't do this Mexican-American war in, in the 1840s because Mexicans are going to end up coming here and they're not like us. You know, that's that's very astute considering, like, the way people understood the U.S. involvement in Mexico. Like, that's really far thinking. That's interesting stuff. I haven't really read anything about John Cahoon. Yeah, if you read his disposition on government, it's 100 pages. I mean, it's just, it's great. Another thing I think that's very interesting about Baruch is when you look at pictures of him, he does present.

as a Southern Democrat. Oh, totally. The suits, the way he wears his hair, everything. Even the manner he takes pictures, way he takes pictures. Well, I mean, you got to like, this is kind of like, there's a thing in Judaism where, like,

like the more white you look, the more you can kind of blend. The guy was six-foot blue eyes, wasp looking, you know, came from like a wealthy, South Carolina family. I mean, outside of the last name

and going to City College, there's really not much about him that would give him away. And, you know, throughout his life, he never really draws attention to his Judaism at all. I never, in the whole, like, 900-page book, I never read about him going to synagogue.

I think, let me see here. I think he, yeah, he married an Episcopalian you know, their family was raised, their children were raised Episcopalian. Like, I don't think he ever, the Judaism thing didn't really matter much for him besides, like, business connections. He also owned a gigantic 17,000 acre plantation in South Carolina that had Negro quarters on it. And so, you know, made like a huge effort to help with the Southern heritage and the history, there and uh and you know it's not like some defense of the man but uh you know when you read these like

huge biographies about people like you know it's it's it's not black and white good or evil like you know schemer or not but he definitely did a lot of uh he did a lot of bad stuff for sure one i'm reminded of um when you mentioned city college of new york um the um libertarian in thinker Murray Rothbard, he used to jokingly refer to that because it was the only school that one of the only colleges Jews could get into. He would call it circumcised citizens of New York. That's pretty good. That's pretty good.

Oh, man. Oh, man, that's funny. Yeah. Yeah. No, definitely. I mean, it is like the big thing. It's like NYU kind of. Are you similar?

But, I mean, it's just crazy when you start looking at his, you know, in the clan, you know, a slave owner, plantation owner. I mean, it's just, yeah, it's wild stuff. I mean, and, you know, the, he was a U.S. representative to the United States Atomic Energy Commission, you know, through the, you know, is just amazing. Just amazing the things he was able to, you know, is, I. I refer to people like Kim as like they're like Forrest Gump. They show up every, you know, how he would always show up at everything. Yeah. Any kind of popular thing that like, yeah, if you, if you look at anything from like the first half of the 20th century, there, Bernard Baruch is there?

Yeah, no, it's kind of incredible. And I think I'm, a lot of it's, again, speculation, but he was close with Colonel House for like eight years. straight. And Colonel House had this very interesting style of going about his network, which was kind of, he was totally unavailable, except people had to come to his house. And in his house, he had this whole network of telephone lines that would connect to the Army and connect to the Navy, and he could very directly access all these different politicians in a time when you had to have like a phone operator, right? So you had to have a room with a switchboard somewhere that people would route your phone calls through. He kind of made his house into.

to a node and also made himself very exclusive and hard to contact. And so he was like the central point of connection for all of these people. And if Mr. Baruch was working with him and knew him personally for all this time, and most of the quotes and information, the famous ones about Colonel House we know from Baruch of all people, that suggests he picked up a lot of his methods. And, you know, he, you know, all the, I don't know if you want to call him anti-Semitic, but he was accused of profiteering off the war,

which he did. He was accused of consolidating industry and putting all these companies out of business and monopoly, and he did. And he was written about by the Dearborn Independent, and, you know, it's like every allegation they throw at him, it's kind of true. And as far as having a network of people and knowing all the most powerful people in the early 20th century, Jewish or not, he's this point of connection.

He's facilitating all these things. And he's getting these crazy rates on everything around him. I mean, again, to bring up that example, 45 million pounds of cotton for half of copper, excuse me, during wartime for half. for half the market price from another Jewish person. Like, would that deal ever exist in normal circumstances? I doubt it. And it also put a huge amount of independent businesses, smaller businesses, out of commission and kind of left him and his friends in charge the American economy. You know, you have the Federal Reserve, which most people know that.

most people that are libertarians have probably read Secrets of the Temple or the creature of Jekyll Island. And yes, the finance stuff is fascinating, but you have to look at the logistics and the materials, the physical items that were being produced and how they came about. And, you know, the man not only had these powers during both World Wars, but he had it for the entire 1920s and 1930s through something like four other presidents. Harding, he was close with him. Calvin Coolidge, close with him, close with Herbert Hoover, and close with FDR the whole time. So no one else, no other figure throughout that time period had that much power and connection to the presidents of the United States. No one.

And it's very interesting that this man is just kind of there and making money the whole time. and yeah. I think that to go back to your earlier point very briefly, I think that's why he's not some kind of hardline ideologue. There's a certain pragmatism where you're meeting all of these people and you're interacting with all these different top figures and you kind of have to be almost sociopathically apolitical in order to get what you want done.

Right? and his really his only interest was ordinance and rearmament and federal control over corporations and supply and demand. Well, I appreciate this. Thank you. Are you ever going to do anything for your YouTube channel, ever? Yeah, no, I have to. I have a whole bunch of books back here, and I have to put out some more content. Yes.

Maybe don't put out, if you're going to put it on YouTube, some of those books you may not want to cover on YouTube. It's not smart to cover those on YouTube. Yeah, very good to know. Hopefully, in the Trump, if I may, a few final points. I hope in the Trump administration, censorship is not as bad and that content creators can just kind of speak more freely. It is critical.

And I think also one thing I forgot to mention at the very start of the stream is that if you look at the incoming Trump administration, It's not just the people that are going to be saying the party line and having the right opinion. It's going to be the people that have the administrative strength and the ability to muster and martial logistics and power into onshore manufacturing and to produce stuff in this country for this country. And, I mean, maybe not a man like Baruch, but, you know, the way. that he went about consolidating American industry and getting everyone to sing to the same tune, I think the Trump administration would benefit tremendously from having someone who can sit down every company in the country and just make stuff happen, make manufacturing happen, make

standardization happen, and restore the American economy. Well, that is yet to be seen. And of course, blackpilling over it now when, you know, nothing's been done is foolish and literally retarded. So we're in wait and see mode now. And, I mean, everybody's picking apart every little thing that he says or anything his appointees say. So, yeah, it's just annoying. I try to spend his little time on Twitter now, unless I'm trying to bait congressmen into admitting that they're traders to traders to the United States. Unbelievable, unbelievable, that guy.

What are they paying him? I'm so curious what they could possibly be paying him that much in money for. Did you see? Yeah, 1.1 million for like a Nebraska congressman? That makes no sense. whatsoever. The only thing I could think of is some kind of defense contract that's like totally not publicly known, but there's no reason. Like, you know, he's looking into him, he had

kind of, you know, support for the you know, the October 7th, whatever proclamation. You know, a lot of these lip service moves that they do in Congress, anytime Israel does anything. but there's just like it's yeah I couldn't I couldn't believe what he said to you

that was unreal for sitting U.S. congressman I think Stormy made a really good point he said if you go from being a brigadier general to a congressman that's like the biggest emotion in the world what the hell are you doing in Congress generals have their own fiefdoms

in the military. Why are you in Congress? I would presume it would be for the money, but... But there's... You can make much more... I don't know. Hey, maybe some people can't enrich themselves outside of Congress. Maybe they're not capable outside of that organization.

You would think a Brigadier General can just be appointed to the board of like, you know, 20 different military contractors or something like that. I don't know. I find it, I find it odd, and I also find it odd that he's fighting with people on Twitter. Yeah. If it's him. If it's him. A general is more of a staff position in the sense that, I mean, not all of them, right? Obviously, there are generals that, you know, I agree with Stormy. They say something stuff happens.

But you also have to consider that something like the Navy has more admirals than ships. and that there's a lot of it's a lot of it's just kind of an upgraded colonel in a sense as far as the administrative bloat goes you know that the managerial aspect of like a general now is something very different not all again not all of them there are war fighters out there but uh there there there are there are man like this men out there as well yeah well i gotta get going thank you and um until the next time when I think we just may have to cover Mr. Forrestall. Absolutely. A true hero, unlike Mr. Baruch. All right, man. Have a good night. You too. Take care, Pete.