Why Young Conservatives Are Being Fed Hitler Online │ James Lindsay

[00:00:14] Welcome to The Jenny Beth Show. Today we're discussing the rise of anti-Semitism on college campuses, online, and inside some of our institutions. Joining me is James Lindsay, host of New Discourses podcast and a leading critic of Marxism, critical theory, and identity politics. I'm Jenny Beth Martin. This is The Jenny Beth Show. James, thanks so much for joining me today. Hey, thank you for having me.

[00:00:40] So, James, today we're talking about the rise of anti-Semitism. You have spent years studying different ideological groups in America and the rise of radical groups and radical thinking that's happening in the center left of our country right now. What have you seen that is alarming you when it comes to anti-Semitism? And when did it begin to become such a problem in our generation in America?

[00:01:10] I mean, it's been on a meteoric rise, actually, especially since October 7th, 23. So for the last getting on two and a half years, I don't think that's a coincidence. I don't think that that date is irrelevant to the story. But at least there's an interesting way to look at this, which is that there is the right-wing version and there's the left-wing version.

[00:01:33] And at this point, everybody knows about the left-wing version and nobody can go on denying that the right-wing version has happened. But the right-wing version was very scarce before October 7th, 2023 or October 8th, really, the day after is when the propaganda really began. But the left-wing version goes back a long time. I mean, you have people like Angela Davis, for example, who is a kind of arch leftist.

[00:01:58] She was a PhD student to Herbert Marcuse, the father of the so-called new left back in the 1970s. She said she was radicalized twice. Once she was radicalized under Herbert Marcuse in grad school. And the second time she was radicalized, she says, in Palestine.

[00:02:16] So she actually traveled to Gaza and or Judea-Samaria, the West Bank, as people call it, and trained under people there to learn how to do her radicalism, which she's brought back to the United States. And was a leading light in the foundations of critical race theory and the foundations of intersectional theory as it kind of developed through the 1980s, 1990s. So the left has been doing this for decades and has been getting worse and stronger.

[00:02:43] You can look at survey data when mainline Democrats started to skew anti-Israel and it predates October 7th by a lot. But there's a sharp dip when you get to October 7th, 2023. But this is part and parcel with their theory. Their theory is that there are some kind of elite powers that control the world and oppress everybody. And it's a very small leap to say, you know, to go from the world is controlled by white supremacy or bourgeois agents or whatever it is.

[00:03:13] It's a very small leap to say in those agents themselves are controlled by Jews or are Jews. And so you have books written in the 1990s under the critical race theory canon called How Jews Became White Folk and What That Means About Race in America, where it basically alleges that the entire critical race theory story of white control over American institutions actually got co-opted by Jewish control through the 1950s and 1960s and going forward.

[00:03:39] You also have all of the post-colonial nonsense scholars like Edward Said, who was a Palestinian American writing back in the 70s. His most famous book is Orientalism, talking about how the entire project in the Middle East and in Eretz Israel is, in fact, a settler colonialist project.

[00:04:00] That's the language we hear that, you know, foreign powers like British or French or the United States have come in or the Jews themselves have come in as occupying forces. So the left has been doing this for decades. They have a well-developed ecosystem. They are very strongly taken by this mindset. But the alarming thing for us is watching this rise precipitously after October 7th and then to watch it rise precipitously, not just on the left where you would expect it.

[00:04:27] The campus protests were surprised nobody, really. Maybe some Jewish people who had leaned left were surprised, but nobody who's been tracking the radical left for the last 10 years was surprised to see them go full pro-Palestine in the wake of October 7th.

[00:04:44] But the shocking part was watching this radical right decide that the U.S.-Israel alliance is, in fact, the cause of all of America's problems, that it's Israel first versus America first as two possible options for one's politics.

[00:04:58] So either you have an isolationist, anti-foreign intervention, anti-foreign aid, anti-getting involved in the rest of the world where it actually matters policy, or you're Israel first and you're a controlled puppet of the state of Israel with the full kind of protocols of the elders of Zion conspiracy theory kind of getting downloaded into the now rabidly anti-Semitic, what a lot of people call woke right.

[00:05:55] And I think it's alarming. People actually have been back to President Trump and have reverted to form as leftists that they always were who insinuated themselves into the movement, maybe even deep state operatives running intelligence operations against American people, as we know they have been trying to do for years.

[00:06:10] But it's become very bad. And a lot of our younger American conservative men in particular, and our comedians, for whatever reasons, and our conservative veterans, usually kind of with a sort of a social PTSD, not literal PTSD about the Iraq war and the conflict in Afghanistan and so on, being tapped into this anti-Israel.

[00:06:39] Israel is causing all these wars. We don't need to get mired in more wars mindset that's gone quite toxic and metastasized. So this is a very big concern. It came on very quickly. I don't think we were ready to believe that it would happen. And now it's a mess we have to deal with. Right. I certainly was not prepared to deal with this at all on on October 7th.

[00:07:04] And in fact, a couple of days before it, maybe even maybe even on the night of October 6th, I remember this very well, because my son had to have a medical procedure and I had to he was in college. I had to fly out to see him. And there was a conversation with some of the people we were around about Israel. And I was saying, oh, I heard there's a group that does a really good job if you're thinking of going to Israel.

[00:07:34] I had never been. I still have never been to Israel. And then the next morning I was supposed to do Newsmax for my hotel room. And I did do Newsmax, but I was talking about October 7th. So it just because I had to immediately get up to speed on what had happened on October 7th. I remember vividly what was going on the night before. But the night before, I wasn't thinking about anti-Semitism at all.

[00:08:01] It isn't even something that crossed my mind in terms of modern America. Of course, I know that it happened and that it exists and certainly that it happened during World War Two. But in modern America, I thought naively we had moved past that. And now just a few years later, what you were saying about what we see on the left, of course, is a huge problem.

[00:08:27] But we also have a problem on the right that we've got to figure out how we're going to deal with. And whether we wanted to be here dealing with this problem or not, it's something that we have to pay attention to. And it's what I've been trying to do in my podcast. James, I want to delve into some of what you said about the propaganda and the things that people on the right have experienced.

[00:08:55] But before I do that, would you please explain what the protocols of the elders of Zion are? Because before October 7th, I'd never even heard of that. And I've never read it, but I have come to understand the history of it somewhat. And I imagine there are a lot of people in this listening and viewing audience who have never heard of it either.

[00:09:20] Yeah. So the protocols of the elders of Zion is a it's it was a document. The word that's usually used, I'm hesitating because the word that's usually used is forgery. But it's just a false document. It is a document that was produced by the Russian secret police sometime between 1899 and 1902 when it was then published.

[00:09:43] The purpose of this document was to allege that there was a Jewish conspiracy that was headed up by what were called the learned elders of Zion. And that this Jewish conspiracy was to basically control the world, to start wars, to use all of their banking influence, to use their influence over the media and so on to sow discord and cause all of the kinds of problems that you might imagine Jews getting accused of today.

[00:10:08] Because ever since this was published in Russia by the Russian secret police, the Okhrana, which was supporting the czar, these stories about Jews have been repeated, that they control the banks, they control the media. They control all of these important institutions and society from shadowy behind the scenes places. And they just get recycled again and again. But the purpose of this document was that the czar was having his power basis slip out from under him.

[00:10:36] There were threats, real threats of revolution in Russia. The czar was losing his base of support and he needed a scapegoat to blame in order to be able to consolidate power. And in fact, he needed to be able to take some pretty radical actions himself in order to consolidate power. And he needed somebody to blame other than his own secret police. This is like kind of false flag operation central.

[00:10:58] He was going to go out and, you know, bust up a neighborhood and he wanted it to be blamed on Jews rather than his Okhrana that was actually doing it. And so this document was actually it's not just a forgery. It's a it's a direct plagiarism of a French play that was criticizing Napoleon III as satire. That's called A Conversation in Hell Between Montescu and Machiavelli.

[00:11:23] And all they did was took out all of the references to different French politicians and stuck in these so-called elders of Zion. So there's allegedly 24 or 27 protocols. It's supposed to be the meeting minutes of of these alleged, you know, secret meetings that these alleged learned elders of Zion had in order to figure out how to control and take over the world. But it is the source book of virtually every one of these.

[00:11:53] The Jews control the world conspiracy theories since the beginning of the 20th century. And it's so important for people to understand that it's a forgery that even within a decade or two, it was well known and demonstrated side by side. Pieces of the text were published, proving that it was a direct plagiarism of that work and another and that its purpose was to consolidate. It was to blame Jews in order for the existing power structure as it started to lose its grip on power to consolidate its grip on power. It had a purpose.

[00:12:23] This, of course, was a central object that the Nazi party used to blame Jews. And Hitler very curiously put forth the idea that the protocols were true in spirit, even though he knew it was a forgery. So he pushed the same conspiracy theories and he said, yeah, yeah, yeah, this book is actually not real. It's a forgery, but it talks about the real thing. This is really what's happening, even though this book is fake. And the Nazis were very strongly hooked on this idea.

[00:12:53] It was central to their thoughts about why Germany and the central powers lost World War I. It was that Jewish finance and Jewish Marxists and Jewish media and Jewish press had conspired to undermine the German sentiment, the German business environment, the German will to fight the war. And that, therefore, something had to be done about these Jews, which we all know what Hitler's plan to deal with the Jews was.

[00:13:18] It was to get rid of them one way or another, which eventually became called the final solution as we move into 1939, 1940. Certainly by 1941, that's the decided upon plan. So the protocols are a forgery that was designed to lie to people about Jews so that a corrupt power could maintain its power position by alleging that they are the source of a global conspiracy to rule with Jewish supremacy or Jewish power.

[00:13:47] But the whole thing was fake. The whole thing has always been fake. But I've had people in the past. It's not just like, you know, coming out in the propaganda from like, you know, powers that be. I'm having people in my regular life, conservative, good conservative patriots, American patriots that I know that have good hearts who've been reaching out to me over the last couple of years. James, have you ever read the protocols of the elders of Zion? You need to read it. It's happening. It's really happening.

[00:14:18] They kind of just kind of go dumbfounded. They don't know what to do. They can't process the fact that they've fallen for what's I mean, just to be very blunt about it, which was it was rank propaganda. Black propaganda is how it's classified. Black propaganda designed by a secret police force specifically designed to trick illiterate peasants into blaming Jews for the things that the corrupt power structure was doing instead. And it's just being recycled into today.

[00:14:47] We're hearing that, you know, Israel controls President Trump, for example. We hear that Israel controls all the banks. We have that, you know, everybody's getting $7,000 apparently from Israel if they post anything that's pro-Israel or that's against anti-Semitism or against anti-Zionism. And that they control the media, that they've created and disseminated pornography to undermine our society.

[00:15:10] These are all doctrines that came out of this forgery written over a century and a quarter ago specifically to trick Russian peasants into supporting a corrupt czar as his power began to slip. James, I think it's these conspiracies as you're talking about it. And what I'm about to say to you are things that I've learned over the last three years as I've seen this horrible anti-Semitism rise.

[00:15:40] But the conspiracies, they're the exact same. It's shocking to me that it's the same thing recycled over and over and over for decades. It's the same lies about Jewish people for decades. And I imagine that it probably goes back even before 1899 when the czar did this.

[00:16:05] That we probably could look at even further in history and see that the Jewish people have had this kind of slander against their entire race for a very long, long time. And the words may change slightly. So it's, oh, you're being Israel first instead of America first. Well, that implies that you are allowing Israel to control you and that Israel is somehow the puppet master pulling all the strings.

[00:16:34] And there are literally cartoons of President Trump. We have Benjamin Netanyahu controlling President Trump like he is a puppet. And President Trump is anything but a puppet. He's nobody's puppet whatsoever. So I just find that so insulting to him. And then his own supporters who love him, who've been to rallies, who understand and voted for him because he's America first, wind up falling for this. It's it's it's troubling.

[00:17:04] Yeah. Well, the way that they work is they find anything that's not going according to plan, so to speak, anything that's not working out the way you think it would. So, you know, President Trump campaigned on no new wars, but now he's fighting in Iran. That's one kind of thing. Even though he also campaigned on Iran never having a nuclear weapon. And he's been saying that consistently since 1980, which turns out to be a lot longer ago than his campaign. You know, President Trump, you know, said he was going to. Well, I don't know if he even said that he was going to go after the people on the Epstein list.

[00:17:34] But the Epstein list did not manifest in the kind of evidence that's necessary for prosecutions. President Trump said he was going to do this or that about illegal immigration. A lot of people kind of lost the bead on what's going on with illegal immigration after this kind of eruption in Minnesota in the winter, January and February. And they don't know how successfully President Trump is prosecuting the illegal immigration problem because it's not as visible anymore.

[00:18:01] And it's one, you know, just whatever it is, one thing after another. President Trump isn't delivering, as I like to phrase it, at the speed of podcast. Right. He's not he's not creating world changing outcomes at the speed that podcasters need more content. Which let me just interject something right here. He he is delivering at a rate and speed at which most presidents can only dream of being able to achieve. He is achieving so much and so quickly.

[00:18:32] And and yet it's still not good enough for some people. Right. So this is in I mean, just to tie it to the leftism as a way of thinking that's underneath all of this, even on the right, the way of thinking of leftism has crept in. This is a critical theory. Things aren't working the way that they could in your imagination. Maybe some things get like held up. Maybe some things are impossible. Maybe things aren't the way that we imagine that they were in reality. And you get upset.

[00:18:58] And then what you do with these with the the grifters and the agitators and the bad actors and the propagandists do is they agitate people's emotions about those issues. They push those buttons to try to get people agitated. You know, President Trump, the reason he's not really doing anything about Epstein, the client list is because he's in on it. He's doing the cover up. He's a pedophile protector, blah, blah, blah. And you agitate people at those points where they're the most uncomfortable.

[00:19:26] Like, you know, with the Maha people were very concerned about about glyphosate in as a herbicide in our, you know, food supply. And it turns out that that didn't go the way they wanted it to. So now Trump is bought by big pharma. They said, you know, there's some huge nefarious interest behind it.

[00:19:43] And any time you have this mentality that there's a nefarious interest behind it, that mentality of the protocols of the elders of Zion comes back because you can say that the, you know, the special interests that are controlling the president are themselves controlled by the secret special interest of Israel or Jews or whatever. And you're right, Jenny Beth. This has been this has gone back centuries. I mean, it takes on different forms.

[00:20:06] It was anti-Judaism during the Middle Ages where you see even things like the Spanish Inquisition testing people with delicious pork products to find out if they were Jews or Muslims. But the Jews were the cause of all these different problems. They were ghettoized and abused in Europe. I had a meeting with a rabbi when I was in Israel last time who told me that actually as dark as the Holocaust is, one of the darkest periods that rivals it in Jewish history is around 1100 in Europe.

[00:20:36] And so they're in diaspora, they're in Europe. But it was so bad for Jews around 1100. So we're, you know, much earlier than we usually think that they think of that as kind of a low point that's rivaled only by the Holocaust when you look at Jewish history. So this has been around forever. It changes to anti-Semitism. Now it's anti-Zionism. That was largely a Soviet construction building off of the protocols of the elders of Zion mentality. But effectively, after World War II, Israel ends up getting created.

[00:21:05] The Soviets thought because it was created actually as a socialist state that it would join with the Soviet Union and it did not. And so they launched this massive anti-Zionism campaign and repurposed a lot of these anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish tropes into an anti-Israel, anti-Zionist program in order to try to punish Israel and to make it the object of division through all the different Western countries that they wanted to attack. And it was a Soviet project.

[00:21:35] It was a deliberate Soviet project to try to undermine the state of Israel because it wouldn't join with the Soviet republics. And thank goodness they did not join with it. And I suppose that the Soviet republic probably wanted Israel to join because it wasn't exactly the most capitalist society, I don't think, when Israel first began. No, it was socialist. It was flatly socialist.

[00:22:02] They probably thought there was a lot of alignment there so they could maybe wind up controlling them. But I think that after everything that Israel, well, that the Jewish people had been through after World War II, they wanted to make sure they were in control of their own destiny and not completely dependent on another country. I don't, I'm not the historian the way that you are, even though you're a mathematician. But I'm saying what I think might have happened, and you're welcome to correct me on that if I'm wrong.

[00:22:31] I mean, in that story, World War II is sort of a punctuation mark and the kind of Zionist endeavor. The Zionist endeavor really started in the late 19th century to try to reestablish the Jewish homeland. Jews have prayed to reestablish the Jewish homeland since they went to Diaspora in 70 AD. So this has been a vision. And it started, you know, you have the father of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl. He's writing a book. He's trying to get people to move. Not very many people are there.

[00:22:59] At this point, what you could, I don't know what to call the region except Eretz Israel, which means land of Israel. It's the region where Israel stands today in the world. Some people like to call it Palestine. You could call it Syria-Palestina, which is the old name for it. Whatever. It was controlled by the Ottomans at the time. The Ottoman Empire controlled that entire region back to 1517. And then they lost it in World War I.

[00:23:24] The Ottoman Empire decided to join the central powers in World War I, this giant war that nobody's quite sure why it happened. And they lost. They lost big. The French and the British forces in particular really hammered the Ottoman forces where they had allied with Germany and Austria.

[00:23:42] And when they beat them in 1917 and they made the Balfour, the British made the Balfour Declaration, that region, which became known as Transjordan, it's Syria and the British mandate Palestine, came under the control of the French and the British. The part that we call Syria today was put under the control of the French and the part that we call Israel today was put under the control of the British. Most of Jordan was also under the control of the British.

[00:24:10] And then you have this long period of time from 1917 to 1947 where the British for 30 years are trying to manage this tinderbox. But when they set out the Balfour Declaration in World War I, took control of the land, and when the League of Nations ratified this in the following years after World War I fully formally ends,

[00:24:34] part of their original mandate, the actual mandate for the control of the British, now that they've taken that land from the Ottomans following World War I, was to rebuild the Jewish homeland. So the British got in behind the Jews in the project of moving Jews there legally to take that land, to buy it from, you know, lapsed Ottoman landlords to lapsed Arab landlords and so on. They bought about 6% of the land, a lot of it very poor land, swampy land, rocky land, whatever.

[00:25:03] But they built out some land. They got a small amount of the population to move over there. And again and again and again and again they get attacked by the Arab Palestinians who don't want them there, who think that this is a violation at kind of the core levels of what it means for that land to have been Islamic and that Jews cannot come back to this. And so the British threw up their hands in 1947. The UN steps in. They say they're out. The UN steps in and says we're going to partition the land.

[00:25:33] The Jews say okay. We'll take the partition and it's going to be basically a two-state solution. The Arabs reject it, immediately launch a war. So there's now a civil war in what's left of British Mandate Palestine. Things go such that in May of 1948 the British are able to fully withdraw and within hours the Israelis declare independence. So now it becomes a war that the Palestinian side refers to this day as the Nakba.

[00:26:03] But five different armies attacked to try to drive Israel out of existence. They lost that war. So like if you're an American, right, we hear this a lot that we're on stolen land from this or that Native American tribe, blah, blah, blah. We hear this all the time, right? And then the usual reply from these right-wing guys, especially even these hardcore right-wing guys that don't like Israel that much, is like, no, we conquered the North American continent. It's ours. They lost the war. We won the war. It's ours. Well, guess what?

[00:26:31] The Arabs lost the war to the Ottomans in 1500s. Then they lost the war to the British in World War I. Then they lost the war to the Israelis in 1948. You could kind of say the end, but they keep launching more wars and they keep losing those too. And so the history here is this really interesting circumstance that concludes fundamentally with the fact that Israel exists. It is there. It is a country. It is a fully recognized country everywhere in the world.

[00:27:00] The only people who don't recognize it are people who are subject to Sharia, who don't recognize the establishment as having been legitimate because it was Islamic land not under Islamic control starting in 1917. And we have decades or a century of insane conflict in the region.

[00:27:20] And the best weapon that these people have is propaganda, is to mistell this story about a story of settler colonialism coming in and displacing them through violence or whatever else in order to get people to pity the so-called Palestinian side in the conflict and to reject the legitimacy of Israel. But if they reject the legitimacy of Israel, if they're anti-Zionist in that regard, there's only one possible solution, which is what they chant, from the river to the sea. From the river to the sea what?

[00:27:50] But Israel will be free of Jews. There will be no Jews here. We're going to sweep them all into the Mediterranean or drown them all in the Jordan. And so those are the river and the sea if people don't know. So this has been a conflict for a century that is predicated on the fact that the Arabs lost a bunch of wars throughout history, lost control of the land, and are still mad about it.

[00:28:13] And if you believe that the American colonists conquered the North American continent and that this land acknowledgement stuff is nonsense, then you also, by the same standard, believe that Israel has a perfectly solid standing claim. It's Zionist claim to occupy the land that it's on.

[00:28:34] But it's not – the Holocaust is actually in the reaction to the Holocaust in a mass kind of migration from World War II is just a kind of a punctuation mark and this longer story of Jews returning to their ancestral homeland. Under legal provisions, there was very little illegal immigration.

[00:28:51] There were some during World War II because to satisfy the Arabs, the British strongly limited the total number of people who are allowed to immigrate to something like 15,000 per year during the Holocaust when people needed to get out the most.

[00:29:05] So, yes, the Holocaust is relevant to the story, but it's a punctuation mark and a much longer story of a legitimate reestablishment of a country and a set of people neighboring that country that refused to recognize its legitimacy partly for religious reasons, partly out of pride, partly out of claims to a nationalism that they should be able to determine what they're going to do, and partly due to the fact that the circumstances upon which this all happened were wars.

[00:29:34] And ugly things happened in wars. Yes, that is absolutely correct. And some of what you are saying, it doesn't – what we hear, especially from the left when it comes to free Palestine, doesn't completely add up because you're right.

[00:29:55] If they really wanted to follow through with saying that Americans don't have right to the land that America is on, then it should follow that Israel actually has a right to the land that Israel is on by that same line of thinking. But in that case, it doesn't work for them. I – it's – you do a much better job of making sense out of the left when they don't make sense.

[00:30:24] It's very – it's very, very simple. Okay. American and Western civilization are bad and shouldn't exist. So anywhere they're succeeding, they have to be destroyed. That's the entire logic. That's it. So you twist every single fact, every single detail such that it only applies to wherever Western civilization and values are. They need to be stamped out because they don't deserve to exist. They are the universal oppressor of everything else in the world that needs to be destroyed.

[00:30:52] And the ultimate reason is because these people are Marxists. And the ultimate reason behind that is that Western values going back now centuries recognize the importance of protecting private property rights for individuals and protecting individual rights including of conscience and belief. That's especially strong in America where those two are extraordinarily strongly protected, even more strongly than in Britain or certainly than in the continent.

[00:31:20] And those values themselves are the problem. They want people to have to depose of their property to redistribute it, and they want people to have to believe that this is the way that people have to live. They have to adopt the socialist mindset. And if they have their own free thoughts or they have their own property or can set themselves apart as individualists who can take care of themselves and take care of their families and help raise up their communities, then they're a problem that has to be destroyed. So Israel is really good at that. Israel is very good at self-determination.

[00:31:48] Israel is not imperialistic, has no desires to take over other lands. Israel has the same philosophical foundations as most of the Christianized West and certainly the United States of America, which based 70 percent of its foundational law on the Hebrew Bible. That's not a claim in dispute. That's a solid fact of history. This is why Leviticus, if it's either Leviticus or Deuteronomy, that's quoted on the Liberty Bell.

[00:32:17] And you can go see that in bronze where the Hebrew Bible is quoted more often by our founding fathers than any other group of people, not the Greeks, not the Romans, not the Enlightenment thinkers, not Montesquieu or any of these great high-minded people. The single most commonly sourced material for the founding fathers for setting up the American Republic was, in fact, the Hebrew Bible.

[00:32:43] And that deep philosophical resonance between our two countries is the foundation for something intolerable to the left. And that thing has to be stamped out. And the fact that Western countries like Britain and France and the United States have now historically helped Israel, although less than one would think, maintain their presence. I think the World War I is the most significant aspect of that entire story, honestly.

[00:33:09] But since the West has helped that the state of Israel come back into existence and helped it in recent years with its defense, it's seen as an outpost of Western civilization in a place where it allegedly doesn't belong.

[00:33:25] But, I mean, geopolitically, the people paying the left, like Russia and Iran and China, understand the geopolitical relevance of the central corridor through the Middle East, whether it's Turkey, whether it's Iran itself. These are – whether it's Egypt, whether it's these waterways, Strait of Hormuz, Strait of Malacca or the Suez Canal. Now, these are incredibly important transportation corridors by air, by sea, and by land.

[00:33:54] And the communists want to control them, period. And so they mobilize the left into getting Western presence out of the Middle East because they know that the Arabs will make a deal with whoever can make the best deal. And that'll probably be communists in a lot of cases. And that brings us back to what they are doing, the communists, both China and Russia, are doing right now even on the center right of the political aisle.

[00:34:21] And I thought it was important to go through the protocols of Zion because people need to recognize what it is when they see these tropes come up in their social media feed. And this one interview probably is not enough for them to understand all of it. But when you and other people who are speaking with authority say that is an old conspiracy theory against Jewish people and against Israel,

[00:34:48] you're saying it because it's stemming from this or it's stemming from other things in history that it's being rehashed. And it's Russia doing it again to Jewish people. But this time they're using people even on the center right in America as the tools or their weapon in this ideological war with Jewish people and to dominate the world. No, that's right.

[00:35:15] So Russia is uniquely good at this, right? So if you look at the different countries and the way they do their propaganda, China is very subtle. It knows how to sneak in. It knows how to make alliances and friendships and so on. And then you're just kind of stuck. The Islamic world just projects. They are the most unbelievable projectionists in the entire universe. They tell you exactly what they're doing but say it's the enemies doing it. They have everything backwards.

[00:35:41] It's the most unbelievable reversed story propaganda in the world. But the Russians know how to take a cohesive movement and divide it against itself. They know how to take it and turn it into a red team or a blue team or an A team and a B team that are fighting with one another. And they know how to pick the issues that will get right underneath people's skin. So they understood that President Trump, for example, built this giant movement, MAGA. But in conjunction, President Trump has been calling it America first.

[00:36:10] He was going to put America first again. And he was going to upset all of these, you know, imbalanced alliances, whether it was NATO or whatever else, where these guys weren't pulling their weight, where we have, you know, Canada barely has a military. Europe is not pulling its weight. We look at even their defense spending. You know, Trump was like, get it up to like 5 percent of GDP. They weren't even close. And then they just rejected it. And so America has been pulling the weight for a lot of these countries.

[00:36:39] We can consider that a good thing or a bad thing, depending on what where you fall in like certain politics. But it's not a it's it's it's a simple fact of the world that America was pulling the weight for a lot of the Western alliance. And Trump said no more. Right. And so Russia understood that this was very significant to its ambitions, which I if you ask me, what are Russia's ambitions? I honestly think its primary ambition is to humiliate America for causing the Soviet Union to fall.

[00:37:06] I think that it has a debt of envy and a debt of of what am I looking for? Revenge that it wants to exact against the United States for destroying Soviet Union and humiliating it on the world stage. And I honestly think that they're they're motivated strongly by this. But they understood that as Trump started to pull this, that it was going to be very, very easy for them to get in underneath with this America first mindset.

[00:37:33] And so this idea that America first means America only, that it means actually America needs to isolate, focus on domestic issues. And if you can inflame these domestic issues and get people fighting, do we need a national divorce, which was a heavily seeded by Russia propaganda effort that we went through a couple of years ago? People like Marjorie Taylor Greene were pushing it very strongly on her show and from her congressional pulpit. I mean, it was a very bad situation.

[00:37:59] So if we can get, you know, this radical left stuff just going so crazy and we can feed radical right people this idea of Balkanization or separatism or national divorce or whatever, that you can start to split people over this idea of whether or not we're going to focus on domestic issues and make the domestic issue so bad that that's all they care about.

[00:38:18] And then as soon as soon as something comes up in the world, knowing that this conflict with Iran was eventually going to show up because Iran was enriching nuclear materials in order to make nuclear weapons. Iran was building cruise missiles with medium to long range capabilities. Trump wasn't going to allow this. They knew this conflict would come up. So if you could sow this idea that anything to do with some foreign country outside of the United States is a betrayal of America first, you could split MAGA straight in half.

[00:38:46] And Israel became the wedge to be able to do it. If you could get all these people who believe in every conspiracy that every single institution, the media, the government, whether it's the NIH, the CDC, the FDA, whatever, it's all lying to us, et cetera, et cetera. If you can get this huge amount of conspiracy minded distrust and then you can just attach to it because Benjamin Netanyahu is pulling the strings behind all of it. It's all about the Israel lobby, the Israel agenda.

[00:39:16] It's all AIPAC lobbyists. If you can sow this idea, these conspiracy minded people are 10 times as susceptible as a general population to the conspiracy theory of anti-Semitism. And then what can you do? Well, strong conservative Christians in particular are – evangelical Christians are not about to bend on Israel. So now you have a population that will go crazy and a population that won't move. And what are they going to do? They're going to fight. This has Russian fingerprints all over it.

[00:39:44] And when – you know, we bring up the protocols of the elders of Zion being recycled. But it's not just that, Jenny Beth. It's Mein Kampf. I've been doing a series – if I shill for myself for a second. I have a podcast. It's called The New Discourses Podcast. I've been doing a series for over a year called The Nazi Experiment Podcast Series.

[00:40:01] And I'm 15 or 16 episodes deep or something like this now where I'm directly reading to people from Nazi sources, primarily Mein Kampf, to bust the myths that we're hearing about what the Nazi regime was really about, what it believed, all this historical revisionism. And I'm just telling people – I'm not telling them what the Nazis believe. I'm reading Hitler to them. Like this is what Hitler literally wrote in 1924, 15 years before he did it. This was always part of the plan.

[00:40:29] It was always part of the plan to drive every Jew out of Europe by one means or another. It was always part of the plan to advance east through Poland toward Russia to take land. These were always part of the program, and you can read it in Hitler's own words. So I'm presenting this, and I keep getting messages from people that are of the effect that, James, I can't believe that this podcast series – because what it's caused me to realize is that what I've been reading on X, unattributed, on social media for months, is Mein Kampf.

[00:40:57] I'm seeing Mein Kampf recycled, fed to our young men by podcasters who never tell them where it came from. So they're not coming out necessarily and saying, oh, some of them are. Hitler is great. Hitler had it all right. They're saying, hey, look at the problems that you have. Look at this. We have all these Americans who are allegedly American citizens that are doing all these awful things. A lot of them are elected Democrats, but they're only Americans by paperwork. They're not really Americans, right?

[00:41:23] They were anchor babies or they were made an American by paperwork. They don't have the blood and soil background. They're not real Americans. Look at the awful things they're saying. They're not fully loyal to America, of course, and the dual loyalty to Israel thing gets dragged into this. And these guys, they're like, this is a big problem. Well, Paperwork Americans is the third chapter. It's a chapter on Hitler outlining citizenship in Mein Kampf volume two.

[00:41:47] It's chapter three of volume two of Mein Kampf where he talks about how there's this magic trick of paperwork by which you fill in the racial epithet that you want can be turned into a German. And Hitler goes through the whole thing and he just mocks this idea. So the paperwork American narrative was straight out of Mein Kampf. But depending on the chapter, the first episode that I did under this branding, it was chapter one of volume two of Mein Kampf. I read the entire chapter to people.

[00:42:16] And there are 23 locations where the narratives that people are seeing regularly on X. A friend of mine identified them. I checked with Grok. Grok found the exact same 23. 23 locations in that one two-hour long podcast where the exact same narratives that people are spouting on X to our young people and on podcasts to our young people appear in one chapter of Hitler's book about how to organize a movement.

[00:42:43] So it's being fed to our kids without them knowing what they're being fed so that they'll become Nazi minded without actually knowing that they're walking the Nazi road. And this is this has to be being done deliberately. So it's not even just the protocols. It's literally Mein Kampf as well. This is I'm talking literally feeding our children Hitler as a reactionary measure against all of this, you know, woke insanity and covid insanity that we've all been put through. It's really dark.

[00:43:11] James, it's alarming that they can take something like Mein Kampf and the protocols of the elders of Zion and turn it around and twist it and update the language and then manipulate people in America. And they're manipulating people, as you said, on the right and they're doing it on the left. So Russia has been good at figuring out how to break up the Trump coalition and to divide that up.

[00:43:36] And it's also figuring out how to divide us as Americans and turn us against one another and Americans. I think that's why there are about 17 to 19 percent of Americans who think that political violence is actually OK in in some circumstances when when you and I would say absolutely not. We can't have political violence in this country.

[00:44:00] But it's like that kind of division that can wind up leading to to the kind of problems like assassination attempts and the actual assassination of Charlie Kirk. And I'm not saying his assassination was. Motivated by anti-Semitism. I'm just highlighting the danger that can happen when foreign governments come in and start turning Americans against one another. Yeah, it's actually really it's a very alarming situation.

[00:44:30] And this this is one of these things that ratchets upward. Right. So if the left adopts an assassination culture position, which it does and it has, that's been demonstrated by the Network Contagion Research Institute, for example, at Rutgers. If the left adopts it, the reactionary right will also adopt a position of, well, you know, maybe that's just how it is sometimes rather than saying, no, that's absolutely off the table.

[00:44:56] Well, in the idea of as you hear on if you go on social media, you see it all the time. The left wants us all dead. The left wants to kill us all. Well, you tell enough young people that and they start to believe it. They want all white people dead. You still enough young people that they start to believe it. They start to get defensive. And what happens is they become more and more desensitized. This is actually a technique that's deep in leftist education theory. This is how critical pedagogy works. All of our schools are controlled by critical pedagogy.

[00:45:23] It was developed by a Brazilian Marxist named Paulo Freire. The brand name he gave it was Education for Liberation. It got updated by Henry Giroux, a Canadian-American educator, a communist, a card-carrying communist, updated it to critical pedagogy. It's been since turned into things like culturally relevant education and so on, all these brand names that you hear. It's woven into social-emotional learning, although it's not identical to it.

[00:45:49] And the way that this works is that you find something that is personally agitating to the individual. It's actually based off of the Maoist mass line campaign strategy. And Paulo Freire says that explicitly in his book, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, that it's based off of Mao's program. Okay? It's literally footnote number 10 in chapter 1. I'm not exaggerating. You can read it for yourself if you get the book. So it's literally the mass line turned into a personal agitation program.

[00:46:16] So you find out what's bothering young people, and you feed them enough to get them very upset about it. And then you tell them the real reason behind it, which might be straight out of Mein Kampf, or it might be straight out of the Communist Manifesto, or it might be straight out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. You can't buy a house. It's hard to get a girlfriend. Well, that's because Jews created porn, or that's because we're sending $3.8 billion a year to Israel for military aid.

[00:46:44] That's why you can't afford a house, because we're not focusing on domestic issues. This kind of thing, this critical pedagogy-based agitation is rampant. This is how they're radicalizing not just our young people, but beyond, but especially our younger Americans. And they are using it also for political violence. I recently had a conversation with a young American who I think is good-minded, and he's maybe 20 years old, 19 years old, something like this.

[00:47:10] I don't know, 22, somewhere in this recent college graduate or in college now. Age bracket, strong conservative, decent kid as far as I can tell, talking with him, or a decent young man, I should say. He's not a kid anymore. And, you know, Smart clearly has a head on his shoulders, and he's explaining to me literally that he literally said that after Charlie Kirk was assassinated, his whole generation, he said, is desensitized to the idea of political violence.

[00:47:39] Political violence is just something that's on the table. Now, I don't believe that he arrived at that conclusion on his own. Rather than being horrified and saying this has to stop, he says, well, this is just what we do now. I believe he was selectively fed the outrage. I know that Charlie Kirk meant a lot to him. I know that, therefore, it's a very sore emotional spot, and I know that that spot is being pushed by people. They want you dead. They all want us dead. Look at Luigi Maggioni. They want us dead. They want us dead.

[00:48:05] And this is being pushed on them until our own good kids are breaking, and then the explanations are being given to them out of the most radical literature in history to radicalize them into terrible beliefs while they're in that state of vulnerability.

[00:48:49] The thing is, is you don't have to have a trained person to do this. This becomes kind of a pattern that anybody can learn, and it gets tons of clicks, and you can amplify the people that are doing this to make them much bigger. And a lot of very popular voices have taken this road, and then people do it to each other. It's like the cycle of abuse where you traumatize somebody about the worldview that they occupy. You make them believe they don't understand the world. Then you feed them radicalized material that explains the problem that they think they're experiencing.

[00:49:19] The reason you can't buy a house is because we send money to Israel, can't get a girlfriend because Jews distributed porn. The reason that you can't get ahead at your job is because the capitalists are controlling everything. The reason groceries are expensive is because the grocery stores are price gouging. These kinds of messages coming in, whether it's Marxist literature, fascist literature, national socialist literature, or other radical veins, are being fed into these vulnerable spots and radicalizing our young people.

[00:49:46] And again, there is no way at some level that this isn't being done deliberately. The lines are too exactly taken from communist literature, from fascist literature, from Nazi literature. And the people that engage in this behavior actually cite that literature too often for it not to be something that's being deliberately done to our young people, mostly through podcasts, TikTok, etc. I mean, yeah, it's happening in schools on the left, but it's not happening in schools on the right.

[00:50:15] Right. And this is the horror story that we all have to figure out how to engage. How do we break this cycle of abuse where our young people are being trained not to trust us old people who don't know anything anymore, who are just bought into the boomer mindset or whatever else? How do we break this cycle and help them see that they're being agitated on their emotions?

[00:50:37] Like I said, most – I think the most evil thing that I can think of, having been a close personal friend with Charlie, is to use his death as an excuse to lead our young people into believing that there should be more political violence or that it's normal. It's just on the table now. If they were willing to do that, it's just on the table now rather than it being a national wake-up call for us to get away from this disaster before we sleepwalk ourselves into a third-world country.

[00:51:01] Yeah, and I would say – and I was friends with Charlie, especially professional friends with Charlie. I don't know Erica, and in fact, I've never met her. That's why I kind of clarified that I was professional friends with him.

[00:51:20] But I watched Erica online, and I watched what she put online after the shooting and the assassination attempt yet again of President Trump at the White House Correspondence Center. And she was saying – she just put up – and they were repeating old videos of Charlie where he was saying, I'm just here to have a conversation. We need to have a conversation. And she was saying that's what he's about, and that's what we need to be doing.

[00:51:46] Because I think she is horrified by this as well. And I am too. I knew Charlie since he was 19 years old. And what happened to him cannot be used as an excuse on our side of the aisle for that kind of behavior to continue. And it needs to be an example to all Americans of what we don't want to see happen.

[00:52:16] And the same thing with the shooting and the murder and the assassination of the CEO from UnitedHealthcare. This is not normal. It's not okay. Has it happened before in the past in our country? Yes, absolutely. And we've gone through terrible phases and terrible times in our country. But it's happening not but, because that would discount what I just said.

[00:52:45] It definitely has happened. And now it's happening in our time. And we have a choice every single day with how we're going to engage and how we're going to figuratively fight. And the way that you're doing it and the way that I'm doing it is trying to educate people so they understand what's happening and trying to give them an outlet so they can take action that will make a difference. History is the greatest teacher in this way, right?

[00:53:12] You know, human beings are – we have agency. We're complicated. Societies are complicated. Communities are complicated. That's all true. But the fact is that the currents that you see happening in history – the saying, of course, is history doesn't repeat but it rhymes. The currents that happen throughout history happen again. And so you can look back to periods in history where you see rising movements toward political violence and you can see what happens.

[00:53:40] And like I said, I just recently spoke in Canada at a anti-anti-Zionist conference in Canada. And my – I didn't intend – I had a whole bunch of remarks from my panel that I thought I was going to be able to get to. I never went to them because the moderator asked the question about, you know, well, if it's this bad now, what is it going to look like in five or ten years? And it just immediately struck me. It's like, that depends on us. What are you talking about? What is it going to look like?

[00:54:08] We're not inexorably on a slide into disaster. We are in a position where each one of us has to make a choice. Do we reach out to somebody and talk to them and say, hey, look, I understand that you're scared. I understand that you're angry. I understand that you're hurt. I loved Charlie too. And what's the right – what's the really right answer about this? You know, how do we really deal with this? And, you know, I know that we want the problems that the left has created in our country fixed. I'm frustrated.

[00:54:37] I wish they could all – I wish I could snap my fingers and they all go away. Half of these guys go to prison if they deserve it, you know, due process of law, yada, yada, of course. And that's not how it works. This is going to take time. It's going to take a lot of hands and a lot of cool, sane, smart heads working together. And President Trump's delivering, you know, he's what, a year and a half into delivering on one of the hardest projects that our society is ever going to face. It is a literally generational project.

[00:55:06] Every single person who's alive today has to work on it if they care about this country and where it's going. And so how do we do that? You know, so I feel like we have this choice every day. Can we reach out to people and say, look, we need you in this game and we need your head in the game right. We need you to understand that historically, if history is our teacher, when you see cycles of escalating political violence, what you see is a disintegrating society and what comes next is not better.

[00:55:35] The good guys don't take power. That is not what happens. You don't have a sudden seizure of power by somebody who fixes everything. They might, if you look at, you know, I see the example brought up a lot of Franco in Spain. You know, Franco stabilized Spain in the 1920s for about six years, stabilized it. OK. And then he went on for about 40 more years and made a disaster of the country. Actually, it didn't work. And Spain is not exactly anti-communist today.

[00:56:05] As a matter of fact, it seems like they're tipping over the edge. So it didn't actually stop communism. What it did was it radicalized generations of Spaniards to to distrust right wing authoritarians and to veer to the left more than they should. So we have to think about this a better way. We have to think about this in the American way. We have to remember what is exceptional about America is that we have this constitution. Like so, for example, one of the things I'm reading in Mein Kampf right now is Hitler's criticism of parliaments.

[00:56:34] This is appears in the third chapter of the first volume. It's actually very good. His criticism, I hate to say it, but it's true. His criticism of parliaments is actually very strong. He understands why they are a rather poor form of government. And when I read this, you know, there's kind of two answers. OK, we don't like parliaments. Hitler took the answer like, OK, so we need a dictatorship. We need executive decisionism to rule the day, to use the formal language. We need the Führer principle is what he actually they actually called it.

[00:57:03] The leader principle was going to be the governing model. And it was a disaster. It was a complete catastrophe. I read through this thinking about that. Right. So he's right about parliaments. Hitler's right about parliaments. But what? But his answer to this dictatorship was also really bad and in a lot of ways worse. But thank God I'm an American where we have no parliament. We have a Congress that's in divided houses that's separate from the executive, that's separate from the judiciary.

[00:57:32] Our executive does not come out of our Congress. The prime minister is a member of parliament. Right. He is a legislator. He's not necessarily even an executive. He might not have even been elected to be an executive. He might have been elected to be a legislator. As our mutual friend Bob McEwen and I were talking about recently, he said that he actually fundamentally thinks that legislative and executive capacities are two different talent sets and that legislators

[00:58:00] do not often make great executives. This is a further weakness of the parliamentary system. And all I can think reading Hitler, reading this trenchant criticism of parliaments, it's that I think the thing he got the most right of anything he said, period. He's reading. I'm reading this and I'm just thinking, thank God I'm an American where our founders knew better than to give us a parliament. We have the parliamentary legislative branch and we have two other branches that are wholly

[00:58:27] independent from it that except for the regular checks and balances that each weigh on each other. You go back to the Federalist papers, you read Federalist 51 at this point, you know, is either Madison or Hamilton wrote it. And it's just like genius. Thank goodness these guys wrote this stuff. Thank God for America. And it just made me so proud to be an American reading this. And, you know, this kind of message, we have to reach our young people and say, look, we have uniquely American ways of dealing with problems.

[00:58:57] We don't need this European radical garbage, whether it's Marxism, fascism or national socialism to solve our problems. And it's not helping. We don't need escalating political violence cycles. We have an American way to do this. And we can we can solve this problem. We just have to be American. James, I think that is really important that we have to be American. And as you were saying that I was thinking about how oftentimes there will be a problem in in America.

[00:59:23] And I can agree with AOC about what the problem is, whatever it might be, like housing prices are are a problem. And it's difficult for people to get into a home at an entry level at a young age. I can agree with with the fact that there is a problem. What we have to guard against is making sure that we're finding the American solution to the problem and not the Marxist solution to to the problem.

[00:59:52] And oftentimes I think that's where a lot of the disagreement comes from or used to come from in America was we'd see a problem and we have different visions and approach to how we're going to solve the problem. Right now, what I think we've we also have we do that still exists that certainly still exists. But then piled on top of that, you have everything that social media does to complicate and it

[01:00:18] makes our lives better because we can have access to instant information. And it also is creating all sorts of problems. And then on top of the social media, just see the issues that are exist with social media. We have foreign influence and we never you don't even know sometimes if the person you're talking to is in America or from somewhere else and what their motives true, truly are.

[01:00:43] So we we have to find ways to insulate and guard against it. And I think that what you just said about reminding people we are uniquely American and we have to use that unique American to solve our problems is extremely important. Yeah, the social media aspect is tremendous. People have got to start looking for their salt shaker, so to speak, to get lots of big grains of salt to deal with to deal with social information they get off social media.

[01:01:13] It's very, very fast, but it's also very, very suspect. And like you said, you don't know who you're talking to or who's talking to you or, you know, what their motivations are. You don't know if they're paid. You don't know if they're real. There there's millions, millions of bots. It's the last I saw X alone has something like 200 million users that are located in the third world. You know, the saying is import the third world, become the third world.

[01:01:39] The only solution that you can conclude then is that social media is a third world country. So it's a low trust society. It believes that gaming people and tricking people is is, you know, it's their fault for being stupid. Trust is is is really naive error to make. So you've got to be cautious in that way. And then you have, like I said, influence campaigns. At one point, this being early 2025, I was involved in a little bit of a research project

[01:02:09] kind of behind the scenes that was showing that in certain veins was like, where is all this neo-Nazi content coming from on X? And it was showing that upwards of 40 percent of that was actually coming from Russian affiliated accounts. But wasn't America. They had American bios, but it wasn't Americans producing neo-Nazi content, pro-Hitler content, pro-SS content. It was, in fact, Russians sowing this at least 40 percent of the accounts. And so how many people are getting caught up in it? I don't know. What's the story? I don't know.

[01:02:36] But you do have this ability for foreign governments. I think my favorite story of all this is when the conflict in Iran kicked off back in January at some point, maybe it was before January, they cut the Internet cable. And for like three or four days, the Internet went down. And when the Internet went down in this part of the Middle East, not just Iran, but in Pakistan, and around the region, when the Internet went down, the Scottish, it's not American, but

[01:03:03] the Scottish independence movement's Twitter presence disappeared because it wasn't Scottish. It was completely a foreign influence op that was affecting some Scots and addling their brains. This is happening in the United States as well. It's happening in Canada as well. We're interacting in a propaganda battle space and pretending that, you know, we're just sitting safely in our living rooms. And so it's a very important thing for us to keep in mind, especially given that our young

[01:03:31] people get virtually all of their information from social media now. And a lot of it, not even on X. X is kind of aging. They're getting it on TikTok. They're getting it on Instagram. And they're getting it from, you know, short form, 30 second, 45 second videos that are, you know, mis-explaining some issue and propagandizing them. Or they're getting it from these very long, almost hypnotic cult-like streaming podcasts like

[01:03:58] Nick Fuentes runs, you know, multiple hours a day usually. And this is not where we would want our young people ideally getting educated about politics in the world from propaganda videos from God knows where and from streamers being paid or put up to things by God knows what, which might be actually just chasing analytics, chasing audiences. Right. The who's buying all of this racist and anti-Semitic content.

[01:04:28] Is it really everyday Americans? Is it Canadians? Who is it? Is it, you know, recent imports from Muslim countries that want to see America, you know, America going in that direction so they support the American podcasters? Well, the answer to that is probably, yeah, there's probably a lot of disposable income and a lot of disposable time and a lot of demand side interest in that kind of thing. So you have people chasing their analytics without any concern for the damage that they're doing to their country or their countrymen. And caveat emptor, right?

[01:04:57] Back in, you know, 120, 130 years ago, we didn't have great consumer protection. We had these corporations exploding, making God knows what, you know, white paint and water and selling it as milk or whatever else because it's cheaper. The saying in Latin is caveat emptor, which is let the buyer beware. Well, in social media, we are the buyer when we're consuming the content that we're looking at when we're watching podcasts, when we're watching reels on Instagram.

[01:05:25] We're the buyer and let the buyer beware because we have to be much more vigilant about what we're putting into ourselves. I watch these young people. It kind of cracks me up because they're like the most obsessed with health that I've ever seen in my entire life. Right. They just had this huge argument on the Internet that like having to eat ham sandwiches and deli meat would give them cancer and that everybody thinks they're peasants or something because they're trying to be fed all this garbage food that every one of us grew up on.

[01:05:49] But they'll fill their minds with the equivalent of mind cancer, like carcinogen information all day, every day. And they think that this somehow makes them more wise, more intelligent, more worldly, more knowledgeable. And it's just poison them even within the context of their faith, just complete misinterpretations of the Bible and of their faith in ways that lead them into the darkness. So they're so concerned about health.

[01:06:15] They're so concerned about eating clean, getting good sleep. They drink less than any generation ever because a lot of them care so much about health, but they fill their heads with utter carcinogenic garbage. And it's just kind of this weird irony that, you know, for such a savvy generation in terms of how important it is to take care of your health, they're not taking care of their mental health, they're not letting the buyer beware with what they're actually putting into

[01:06:42] their minds that then fills their heart, that then fills their spirit and then fills their communities. And it's a really sad situation. So this is where we are, though. We can't, I don't know how to regulate the internet. I don't know if they can regulate the internet. I know that the people at X have been trying to do something with the algorithm and they can't actually. The bad guys are better at gaming it than they are at fixing it at X.

[01:07:08] And so you have this kind of problem where the solution falls where on that American individual, right? We have to be individually responsible for what we put into our minds, what we put into our hearts, what we fill our spirits with, what we bring to our communities. And if we're not, then we're part of the problem. And we can't fix the world out there. We have to, you know, take that responsibility for ourselves. There's ironies and hilarities and sadnesses all around this.

[01:07:38] But this is the, like, if social media is going to be a part of your life, we've got to think much more seriously about what it does to us. Yes, I completely agree with everything that you just said. And I'm constantly warning people, you've got to be careful who you're following. You've got to be careful what you're reading. You've got to pay attention to where it's coming from because you become what you think. You become what goes inside your brain.

[01:08:04] And you've got to guard that very, very, very, very carefully. And if you are a parent and your children are online first, if I had to do it all over again, my children are 23 now. If I had to do it again, knowing everything I know now, my kids would not have social media until they're 18 years old. And even then I'd be like, you really don't need it till you're 21. If you can't legally drink, you don't need a computer. You don't need a phone with social media.

[01:08:31] And we understand the addictive nature of alcohol. And we protect our children against that. And I think that we need to be thinking in terms of whether what these devices are doing has the same kind of impact because it is addictive. And I know we also have to be careful because we have a right to free speech.

[01:08:56] And it becomes tricky to make sure we continue to see uniquely American and our approach to it. But what you just said is a way to take care of it, take individual responsibility and parents take responsibility for your children. And kids can't afford a phone on their own. So you're not depriving them of anything. You're just letting them know when they're older and they can afford it on their own, they can get it.

[01:09:24] James, this kind of brings us back to what we were talking about as we were getting started. We talked about the problem that we see. I keep pointing to my left, but if you're watching it on video, it's over here. On the left with anti-Semitism. But we've also seen this rise of it on the right.

[01:09:47] And we've gone through the protocols of Zion and Mein Kampf and how foreign propaganda is using these horrible, horrible books from history to twist them against us with conspiracy theories. And you mentioned how the rise of anti-Semitism on the right is really hitting younger conservative men.

[01:10:10] I think you said comedians and then also conservative veterans who are still dealing with things from, from, I guess, from the war on terror with George W. Bush. Before we get into that with anti-Semitism, I think that in each of these groups there are

[01:10:33] people who are concerned about America's influence across the world and the things we're doing across the world. And they are, which you have even said, you know, the kind of thing where, well, if they're taking care of this foreign country or they're engaging in Iran or wherever it might be, they're not taking care of America. And they worry about themselves and their own life and how America is going to be able to take care of them.

[01:11:02] I think that there are always, always legitimate arguments and debates about how much money the government spends, whether we need to be involved in a military conflict, how much we're going to engage when other countries are fighting in a military conflict, and how much money we're going to put towards those other conflicts, even when it's not Americans doing the fighting. So I think those are legitimate complaints and arguments and debates.

[01:11:31] And I don't think either you or I are saying that every single person who has those kind of concerns, that means that they are anti-Semitic. But we understand that. And then we also understand that there is a rise of problems right now where in these groups that you laid out and what we see online, there is a rise where people are blaming Israel for

[01:12:01] all the problems in the world. And when they do that, sometimes maybe they just mean the country of Israel and its government. Oftentimes what it seems that they mean is Jewish people. How, what are, what do you think we should do about that in light of everything that we've been talking about today? Well, I mean, I agree with you absolutely. Just to be clear for everybody out there that, yeah, there's, this is always a legitimate

[01:12:28] debate as to whether or not we should be involved, how involved, how much money, what does it do, et cetera. That's all, it's always on the table. And there's a range of different positions in that kind of debate. You know, there's the engaged realist position. A lot of people don't even know the terms of this debate. There's an engaged realist position. Actually, Donald Trump is very much an engaged realist. Ronald Reagan was too. But then you start sliding toward the bushes. You get toward more of what is called interventionists.

[01:12:54] That's kind of beyond being realistic about the world and engaging it as it actually is. But then you have something that's very popular in libertarian circles that are thinking, which is called strategic disengagement. There's a lot of positions. There are lots of legitimate debates. I'm not going to get into all of those things and what they are. But, you know, your kind of typical libertarian view that's not just a blind anti-war guy is probably a strategic disengagement proponent.

[01:13:21] Somebody like Donald Trump or Ronald Reagan is going to be what's called an engaged realist. Then there are interventionists like the Bushes. And I can understand why a lot of people would be upset about that. But what we're dealing with here is a completely different situation. And it's the result of a lot of propaganda. And the situation is that all of the regional instability, all of the problems in the Middle East are caused by Israel's presence in the Middle East. And Israel is therefore using its power, whether it's over financial institutions or blackmail,

[01:13:50] or whether the golden beeper they gave Trump is allegedly an armed weapon like our Secret Service wouldn't have got rid of it already if that was the case, somehow to control our politicians to fight their wars for them. This is not, first of all, it's not even close to real. But this mentality is very poisoned thinking. It suffers from the mind virus that certainly concludes in a very anti-Semitic view. Whether or not it's anti-Semitic, though, is this fraught kind of world because it's like,

[01:14:19] oh, if you're just calling us anti-Semitic, you're woke and you're trying to shut us up and you don't want to deal with the facts. Well, actually, we do want to deal with the facts and none of those are facts. But when it becomes that that's the default explanation for every single thing, for example, you know, this week, nobody knows what's gone on for sure in Iran and there's deals here and there's deals there and there's no deal and there's a deal and there's no deal, whatever. But when it first was announced, when President Trump first announced, you know, we're going to make a deal with Iran early in the week.

[01:14:48] The very first thing I saw on social media from the agitators, people like Cenk Uyger or from the young Turks and so on was watch Israel. Israel is going to trick us. The first thing I saw within seconds of Trump saying we're working on a deal, we're trying to get peace, whether it works or not, it's its own question. He says this instantaneously. Joe Kent, Ro Khanna. I don't know if Thomas Massey did it or not. They're out there immediately. Got to keep an eye on Israel. They're going to drag us into their war. They're not going to let this stand.

[01:15:18] And it's been nothing but this is not healthy thinking. Ladies and gentlemen, this is, in fact, anti-Semitism. This is not a healthy debate about America's role in the Middle East or in Iran or in Lebanon or wherever else or even foreign aid that they used to buy American military equipment being sent to Israel. This is nothing of the kind. To say that Israel is this kind of mastermind country that is dragging us into its wars that

[01:15:44] it's starting for its purposes is way off the path. We're not even talking about reality anymore. And you are buying into those kind of protocols, Mein Kampf style tropes. And so this is the kind of distinction I think that we need to be making. We need to be able to talk about the difference between legitimate policy disagreement and debate because it's rooted in the real facts of the situation, which can include, as a matter of

[01:16:13] fact, Israel having designs that they're trying to pull their allies in the direction of or push them away from or whatever. It can include that. That's not off the table. And then this other thing, which you can bring it up, but it's just actually crazy talk, is that, you know, Israel is the uniquely evil force in the circumstances dragging everybody into every possible problem. This is no longer a legitimate policy debate.

[01:16:37] This is no longer about America saying that everybody you disagree with is Israel first and therefore somehow a turncoat to the United States is not a legitimate discussion. It does not represent the person you're talking to correctly in almost every single case. And when you what we need to develop is a instinct for when we start to see this kind of talk, because I'm not I don't want anybody censored. When we see this kind of talk, what we need to do is tune out, you see, because the freedom

[01:17:06] of speech contains four ultimate freedoms as the freedom to say what you will and the freedom not to speak when you wouldn't. You don't have to speak under duress. You can hold your silence with the freedom of speech, but it also is the freedom to hear what you wish to hear and to not be forced to listen to what you don't want to hear. So you always have the freedom to tune out. You don't have to listen to a guy like Cenk Uygur because he's yelling and sweating on

[01:17:33] television and blaming some, you know, doing some kind of a Russian style agitprop or Soviet style agitprop to agitate an audience into angry misbelief. You don't have to. You can turn this off. We need to develop an instinct that when people start to rant in this kind of conspiratorial ways that blame Israel for every problem in the world, that we just tune them out, that they're cranks, that they're actually maybe agitators or problems and that they're not

[01:18:03] providing us a perspective. I see this like, you know, you said earlier on social media, we should be careful who we're following. I see this all the time where somebody, you know, you follow somebody on social media, they become very objectionable. They go way down the path into what seems to be madness. And it's people are very reluctant to unfollow somebody they've ever followed. It's so easy to just say, wow, like I said, one interesting thing, follow. And then you'll never unfollow them. And I see all these people continuing to follow people that they know are problems.

[01:18:33] And this is the kind of thing you need to develop that instinct for. It's like, you know what? I don't need to listen to that guy. It's just like tune out. You know, if they want to rant on their show, let them. If we want to see the clips and criticize them, great. That's called debate. That's called criticism. That's called free speech. That's the rough and tumble. That's the public square. But we've got to develop this same caveat emptor public or personal responsibility mentality

[01:18:58] that when we start to see people who are effectively ranting and saying false conspiratorial nonsense that we just don't listen to these people anymore and we encourage other people not to listen to them, too. Yeah, I think that's just it's perfect advice. And that's the way that we need to handle it. Unfollow, guard our minds, guard what we have, what we're following on social media. Be more willing to unfollow and exercise our personal responsibility when it comes to this.

[01:19:28] And the other thing is unfollowing doesn't. You know how you said a little while ago you were talking about the protocols and that some people who you know who are really good in the conservative movement have come up to you and said, but look, look at all of this, whatever it might be. And you said, no, let me show you. This is from from the protocols of Zion or this is from Mein Kampf. And here's where it originated.

[01:19:53] And you show them and they don't quite know what to do with it because because they feel embarrassed because they they fell for it. I think that that might be part of the reason why people are a little bit hesitant to unfollow. Unfollowing doesn't mean you even made a mistake. It means you like something at one point and now you don't like it anymore. And we all we all go through phases where we like something or someone said something and we're like, yeah, I agree with that. And I don't agree with this or this or this or this.

[01:20:23] I think I'll just unfollow you. You don't need my attention anymore. Right. It doesn't have to be some it's not a big breakup. It's just choosing not to have them in your feed anymore. Yeah, that's right. And people as far as people, you know, making a mistake, you know, this is tough time on social media. The ideas are every one of us is messed up. Every one of us has believed something crazy probably in the last 10 years. There's so many crazy things put in front of us to believe some of us fell into, you

[01:20:51] know, being a jerk for a little while about covid. Some of us fell into I mean, a lot of people try to hide and pretend they didn't get all into the BLM stuff. But some people went further into that than, you know, they would they would countenance now. And so what? You know, that's the whole idea where you made a mistake. You repent. You say, whoops, I messed up. It doesn't have to be more dramatic than that. And then you move forward and, you know, no harm, no foul. We all make mistakes.

[01:21:18] So, you know, if you find yourself in that position where you think you maybe got sucked into believing something crazy or bad, don't be too hard on yourself. It's a very difficult environment right now. There's so much crazy stuff, so much unbelievable stuff happening, even just happening. And then there's all the nonsense on top of it. It's very easy to get tricked or to fall into something and just. Let it go and just let it go. You can move forward. It's OK. We've all done it.

[01:21:46] We can all kind of laugh at ourselves over it. It's a complicated time to be, you know, engaged. I won't say to be alive necessarily, but to be engaged is a very complicated time. It is. And I think that what we've done today has helped bring some clarity on on it. I'm sure that there are things that we've talked about today, like including your podcast where people are going to have to go and listen to the 15 episodes you've already done about

[01:22:12] Mein Kampf and Hitler so they can understand that more because we have to be able to learn from to learn from history. But it also you and I both are trying to find solutions and trying to find ways to give people so they're not just outraged and they're just not just angry all the time so that we can take that passion, that emotion that they have and turn it into something productive.

[01:22:38] And do exactly the opposite of what the Marxists want, which is to get rid of our love for the country and completely replace it. That's right. Yeah. Stand by your principles and stand by the Constitution and you're probably going to come out OK. James, thank you so much for joining me today. I want to have you back because I just love talking to you. It seems like every time you and I talk, whether it's on the show or in person, we talk forever because I have a million questions for you. Thanks for being patient with me and teaching me so much. No, anytime. Thank you so much.

[01:23:08] If you enjoyed today's conversation, go ahead and hit like and subscribe. It really helps us reach more people who care about liberty and the Constitution. You can find this and other episodes at JennyBethShow.com, as well as Facebook, YouTube, Rumble, Instagram, X, and your favorite podcast platform. The Jenny Beth Show is hosted by Jenny Beth Martin. The Jenny Beth Show is a production of Tea Party Patriots Action. For more information, visit Tea Party Patriots.org.

[01:23:35] For more information, visit TeaPartyPatriots.org.