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Hey everyone, it's Reed. Before we get started, I just want to say it's been three years since I took over as the host of The Lincoln Project, and I cannot say thank you enough to each and every one of you who listens, who downloads, who shares. I meet people out who said, I've heard you talk. Thank you so much. And all I can say is thank you. Thanks to everybody out there. As we get deep into 2024, please,
Rate us five stars. Share it with your friends. Share what we're talking about here at The Lincoln Project and how we're going to win this fight in November. Thanks, everybody. And on with the show. Welcome back to The Lincoln Project. I'm your host, Reed Galen. Today, I'm joined by author and journalist Jacob Heilberg. He's the editor of The National Interest, columnist for The Spectator, and a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council.
His latest book is America Last, the rights century long romance with foreign dictators, which was released just last week and is available wherever fine books are sold. Today, he's coming to us in studio from Washington, D.C. Jacob, welcome to the show. Thank you, Reid. All right. So I have to start with someone who I only ever thought of because he's always like on the top quotables list.
And they were always funny quotes, at least I thought they were, until I had a deeper exploration of who and what this person believed. And that is the person of H.L. Mencken, satirist, sort of all-around curmudgeon. You know, I've got my quotes here. Every election is a sort of advanced auction sale of stolen goods.
Those are all, in the abstract, sort of funny.
But when you explore who H.L. Mencken was and what he believed in the types of people he liked, those quotes take on a much darker sort of film, which is he liked authoritarians. He wasn't he said those things not because he was funny. Maybe even there's some truth to them, which makes them funny, but because he really didn't like democracy.
That's absolutely right, Reid. And I try to show in my book that H.L. Mencken was in many ways the founder of what we today call the old right, which tends to have anti-Semitic overtones, contemptuous of democracy, believes in elite rule, and a host of other nasty things. And Mencken certainly was a brilliant humorist.
and satirist, but it had this dark side to it. As I try to show in the book, this first really manifested itself during World War I, where he poured scorn on the British and their democracy and upheld Prussian absolutism in the form of Kaiser Wilhelm II as a model for America.
and was so vehemently on the side of autocracy that he actually wrote a piece for The Atlantic
calling for the Germans to conquer the United States. And again, it sounds preposterous and ludicrous from today's perspective, but he actually meant it. I'm going to ask an oversimplified question that has many layers. What is it? And we've had Ruth Ben-Ghiat on to talk about strongmen before, but from your perspective and your experience, because you don't come from the left.
Right. You are, I assume, I don't know, I don't even know if you want to describe yourself as a conservative or whatever it is now, but you certainly didn't come from sort of the left wing of the left wing. So give us your sense of why, you know, the right wing loves these guys so much and they're typically all guys. It's actually not just guys. As I was doing the book, I found a lot of women, too, who were attracted to authoritarianism, including a lot of figures in the 1930s. Why they are attracted to this.
There is hostility to immigrants, a hostility toward what they see as liberalism and decadence. It's a culture war. At the heart of it, I think, is the belief that the America that they would like to see is being snatched from them. And that was already present with H. L. Mencken. He viewed the Southern Confederacy
And the antebellum South, really the antebellum South, is the acme of American civilization. That that was the one true chance that the United States had to enjoy a real aristocracy. And a lot of these figures that I talk about aren't interested in an aristocracy of merit. They are interested in bloodlines and racial theories that most of us look upon with horror. But
This is a strand on the right that has existed. One of the things I try to point out, I get attacked
By people on the right who say, well, you're making everyone sound like this. No, I'm saying this is a tradition on the right, not the soul tradition. And, you know, I've been thinking a lot about this lately, you know, listening to I just listened to a podcast that broke down Robert E. Lee. Right. And the whole idea that, you know, he was this great hero that at the end of the day, he held what was left of the country together, his country together at the end of the Civil War. He he was a man of honor.
Right. He he chose his state over the union and the lost cause, all that stuff. And I think sometimes I don't want to make this an episode about the Civil War, Jacob, but it feels like that the Civil War never really ended. It's sort of like our own hundred years war. Maybe it doesn't take place on the battlefield like it did in the 1860s.
But it's with us all the time and it's either ebbing or flowing. And it seems like a century ago, and there are many other great books about that period too, which I think deserve lots of praise as well. That World War I era where civil liberties gone for a lot of people during the course of the war. But it feels like we're still fighting this battle just in different ways and different frames. Yeah.
Definitely. And of course, slavery is the original sin of the United States, and we're still grappling with that. The question is, do you try and bury and suppress this and deny it, or do you confront it honestly? What you're talking about with Robert E. Lee is flummery, the attempt to create some kind of romanticized notion of Robert E. Lee as this paragon of virtue. And I read those books too when I was a kid. It
It just doesn't add up. And the flip side of that was that they turned Grant, Ulysses Grant, into some kind of a demon. There's a book by UCLA scholar named Joan Walsh. It's very interesting how history gets manipulated. Grant was demonized by Southern historians and turned into this drunken crook who had been one of the worst presidents in United States history. It turns out it actually isn't. That isn't the truth.
Well, they never forgave him, right? They never forgave him. They never forgave Sherman. They understood the nature of the war that the South had started and was willing to take it to them. Right. So my basic take is I condemn the fellow travelers who went to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the starry-eyed idealists who went to Mao's China in the 1960s and claimed that this was some kind of utopia.
What's interesting is that it isn't that I'm single-mindedly focusing on the right. It's just no one's ever done it before. There's been ad nauseum on the left. But we have to be honest. We have to accept and look at this strand has manifested itself. It's come roaring back with Donald Trump. You start your book with Kaiser Wilhelm II.
And there's a whole litany of insanity about him. He abdicates after World War I, but he still maybe secretly hopes, and I think there's probably plenty of Germans and plenty of the folks in your book too that hope maybe that the aristocracy will be restored, the monarchy will be restored. But Hitler, not a bad guy. Mussolini, not a bad guy. And I want to talk a little bit too about not just the Minkins of the world or the philosophers of the world or the
Charles Lindbergh's of the world. But I've mentioned this before to the listeners. And so, Jacob, if you haven't seen the movie, The Holdovers, it's a great little movie. I have. And as you know, when he takes the student to the museum in Boston, he said, you know, there's nothing new in human history. It's all been done before.
And we just have to remind ourselves. And that's what history is, right? Is it supposed to be a reminder of like, hey, we did these things before. Maybe we shouldn't do them again. But here we are now. And I want to talk about particularly the media, which is William Randolph Hearst was very much the Rupert Murdoch of his day. He's asking Hitler and Mussolini to pen essays for his newspapers.
Precisely. And he went to the Nuremberg Party rally. He signed a deal with Hitler in which he would get copy in exchange for the rights to run his productions in German newsreels in the 1930s. There was a monetary aspect to it. But Randolph Hearst became known as Hitler's guy. It's shocking the readiness of these people to prostrate themselves
before someone they knew was a dictator. William Randolph Hearst went to Germany after the Night of the Long Knives when Hitler, his bloody purge of his brown shirts. There could be no illusions about what you were dealing with at that point. Yet, all of these figures, many on the right, fell over themselves to curry favor with Hitler, and some even held up Nazism as an example for the United States.
And it's this idea that there's also this thread of, you know, the people, whether or not that's the individual or, you know, the people as a community, as a group, as a country, whatever it is, are sort of too stupid for their own good. Right. That they're, you know, the bunch of mouth breathing morons who need to be told what to do, that we need order. Order can only come from the top.
And so, well, you know, a guy like Hitler, he fixes the roads. Right. Look at the economic miracle. Oh, by the way, like, you know, the T4 program and all the other stuff and, you know, that he carried on, you know, Mussolini, you know, you go down to Chile and Pinochet. Right. Like for every like, oh, they'll bring order. We're OK because they're not communists.
You're saying whether or not it's bloodletting on the level of a Hitler, right, or the disappearing of people in places like Franco's Spain or in Chile, that we're OK with a little bloodshed.
In fact, some of them may have admired it as someone that these dictators were ready to get down to cases and take the fight to the enemy directly, that you didn't have a pallid American democracy where you couldn't take action. And I think that drives a lot of it. And then the hostility to unions, you know, that Hitler essentially smashed the unions.
I mean, he could dispose of the country as he pleased. You could sign a contract with Adolf Hitler and know that his signature meant that it was valid. He didn't have to negotiate bargain with dozens of different people. It would get done. And so it's that sort of power and authority, but so often, as we see, without...
Any sort of commensurate responsibility or accountability, which is, you know, when these guys and the leaders tend to be mostly guys, right? I mean, you know, Kaiser Wilhelm, like he lived, I assume, to a ripe old age in Germany.
the Netherlands or Holland, wherever the heck he was. Hitler, when the time came, blamed the German people for failing him, right? Blamed them for their own demise and then shot himself. Pinochet runs off. Franco, one of the rare ones, actually died in office. And so it's one of those things where like
the Menkens of the world, the Lindberghs of the world, the Hursts of the world, to your point, and I think you had an Orwell quote in there about these intellectuals, right? That's the other part too, is we think about modern day MAGA, they are often painted as the red hat, the redneck, right? They're goofy. But the truth is that the intellectual power of this movement, which I think, you know, as you explain in your book is really MAGA is the next iteration and or evolution of its continuance.
comes from people who have very steeped backgrounds in philosophy, in history, and do consider themselves, even if we believe them, if I believe them, I want to speak for you, even if we believe them to be kooks, nuts or whatever, like they consider themselves to be well above the average person, certainly the average American. And they believe that they should be in charge because they're better than you and me.
We're witnessing a new version of what the French writer Julien Benda called the treason of the intellectuals. You have an entire phalanx of conservative intellectuals who have decided that they are going to ally themselves with Donald Trump, that he is the figure that can finally take it to the enemy, the liberals. And take a look at the Claremont Institute, Conservative Partnership Institute here, and
They're not dummies. They're not crude. They're, in fact, quite sophisticated. But they know that you need a horse to ride, and they're ready and waiting to try and corral Trump. Now, I think that the question mark is, can Trump actually be corralled? Would he be able to enact the kind of programs that the Heritage Foundation or the Claremont Institute are talking about? Or is he simply too undisciplined?
Well, and I want to get to that in a second. But before we do that, you mentioned the Claremont Institute. And I want to talk about academia for a second, because, boy, Jacob, Harvard comes up a lot in this deal. The Ivy League comes up a lot in this deal. So what is going on? Why is it that what is considered some of the greatest intellectual universities in the world, but certainly in the United States, like, how do they continue to be breeding grounds for this stuff?
Many intellectuals have a predilection for extremism, whether on the right or the left. And the fastest way to profile yourself today, the way to be a rebel, is to be a right-wing intellectual. It is a form of radical chic on a college campus. And thus you have people like Senator Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz.
They're all Ron DeSantis. They're all. Yes, they're all graduates. I mean, even Trump went to Penn or to Wharton. I mean, yes, they all revel in attacking the institutions that helped to birth them. And they pretend that they're not part of the elite.
And so I guess that's my question is, I mean, you can see that there's certainly elitism on the left. They handle it worse than elites on the right because elites on the right claim not to be elites and elites on the left are like, oh, yes, we are elite and we are better than you. Like they don't they don't hide it very well or even at all. But now you have a situation here where you call it America last. Right. That's in reference to America first, which goes back to
Lindbergh pre-World War II or America's entry into World War II, I should say. Reagan utilized it again and, you know, and then Trump sort of resurrected it. But America last, what is it about what makes the desire for authoritarianism, for the ugliness of, you know, racial biases or gender biases, religious biases, and then this decision to basically build up walls around the country? Why does that all go together?
Well, in the 1920s, there was a huge fear of immigration that had taken place in the United States. And you had the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the fall of the Romanov dynasty. And you had millions of Jews in the United States, particularly in New York and in Manhattan, and you had immigration from Southeastern Europe. So there was a big backlash to this.
And people on the right, in 1924, the Reed-Johnson Act was passed, essentially terminating immigration from southeastern Europe. And the Los Angeles Times calls it a victory for Nordic supremacy is seen. And one of the authors of that act, Senator David Reed from Pennsylvania, says a few years later, if this country ever needed a Mussolini, we need him now.
So there is what we've been talking about, this fear of uncertainty, of cultural decadence, of immigration, and the idea that your side, the Nordic side, is being overrun by what Lothrop Stoddard in a famous book in the early 1920s called The Rising Tide of Color.
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Can I talk about the cultural decadence piece for a second? Because so many of the people that you're describing in your book and we are now seeing today, these are not people who wear scratchy robes and live in monasteries, right? They live the high life.
And they want to demonstrate their decadence, their superiority materially and financially. So how is it that, you know, you can on one hand and I know, look, I understand hypocrisy sort of as part and parcel of this. But what is it about this group, this ethos that says we're decadent, we're soft, we love everything. But at the same time, the people saying that are just as decadent and soft as everybody else.
Well, no one likes to point the moral censure at themselves. But what really prompted me to think about this was that Warren Harding sent a man named Richard Washburn Child to be his ambassador to Italy just at the moment that Mussolini's seizure of power took place.
And one of the things that attracted Child to Mussolini was what he saw as his manly virility and his emphasis on family values. Mussolini was desperately trying to get the Italian birth rate up, much as Viktor Orban is trying to do in Hungary today. And Washburn Child wrote regularly for the Saturday Evening Post, and what he would do is he would say, under Mussolini, Italy is practicing Catholic virtue, restraint.
Unlike the hedonism that's running rampant in the flapper decade in 1920s America, where you have the widespread drinking, you have riotous parties, you have the great Gatsby lifestyle.
So that was part of the conservative backlash. But again, this in and I don't want to get too ribbled here on a family program, Jacob, but just to talk about this a little bit, you know, like historically, Adolf Hitler was a basket case of human sexuality, right? Was always a freak. Maybe it tended to the familial, if you believe some stories, maybe it tended to the, you
I mean, Mussolini was, you know, we call him a sex addict today, maybe a serial rapist. Right. Donald Trump is not exactly what I would call a paragon of family values. For Christ's sakes, he can't even remember his own wife's name and all of this other stuff. So is it as simple as do as I say, not as I do?
Definitely. And be fair to Trump. I mean, I'm starting to think that Melania may actually leave him now that he can't pony up the money for his New York fraud trial. Right. Well, yeah, for her, actually, I don't worry much about her, but for her sake, I hope she had all that all the cash she was promised in an escrow account somewhere. She's not likely to see it. Look, we know many, many of the people who pronounce family values end up getting outed in some kind of way.
Right. And, you know, I point to the Southern Baptist Convention or anybody else who tells you how you should or shouldn't live your life. Yeah, they're almost always, you know, they don't protest too much.
I should tell you, there's a famous quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson where he says, the louder someone talks about their virtue, the faster I count my spoons. That's great. I love that. I'm going to write that down somewhere so I remember it. Okay. There's one last bloodline I think I need to bring up, Jacob, so that we understand that there is a literal through line of all of this too. And that is a person in the name of Fred Koch.
who is the father of the Koch brothers. And he is a fan of Germany in 1938. And, you know, 90 years later, 85 years later, right, you know, they have espoused this sort of radical libertarianism. You know, one of them ran for, I think, vice president on the libertarian ticket in 1980. It was David.
And so this is not new, right? And it's also interesting about the number of wealthy, hyper-wealthy Americans who historically have espoused these kinds of values. Is it because they think that because they're so wealthy, they'll be left alone? I think it's because they sometimes see themselves as under threat and that their position is menaced. Another person that I talk about a lot in the book is New York
businessman named Merwin K. Hart, who visited Franco's Spain in the late 1930s, wrote a book called America, Look at Spain! He
He held up Franco as a Christian model for the United States. He was a virulent anti-Semite. He gave a speech in 1940 at the Union League Club saying that we should brush aside this word democracy, which he put in quotation marks. And he was denounced. These were not obscure individuals at the time. He was denounced by both Harold Ickes, who was Roosevelt's Secretary of the Interior, and Robert Jackson, who was Attorney General.
I guess the broad point that I think you're getting at and which is there are no new arguments on the right. My book tries to show that from the 1920s on, we hear the same arguments about immigration, globalists, bankers, nefarious forces over and over again. It's old wine in new bottles.
I think that that's one of the interesting things, too, is, you know, so much of this, I think, also goes back to Roosevelt and the New Deal and the strengthening of centralized government control in a time of crisis, which then, you know, layered into World War Two. And then in post-World War Two, you see the strength of unions.
And, you know, now you see, you know, adventurism, if you want to call it that, in the 50s with the CIA, in the 60s in Vietnam. Well, you know, whatever the case might be, you know, the communists are the godless heathens, right? They're the enemy of all enemies.
But, you know, it's now like it feels like the American right is desperately trying to win back the social war in this country or societal war, maybe. But they have been pretty successful economically. I mean, they have denuded unions for the most part. Right. They have made an American oligarchy. If it's not already with us, Jacob, it's certainly we're on the precipice of it. So as we sit here now in, you know, late February 2024, where we're
Where does this movement find itself from someone who has a pretty good background understanding it?
My gut is that the GOP is on the precipice of disaster. If we're talking about politics here, I think that Trump has never been in a weaker position and that this is going to be a calamity for the Republicans. I don't believe as threatening as everything and as ominous as everything that I talk about in the book is for me personally.
It's not a selling message. It's not something that you can sell beyond the base that Trump already has. I am completely unpersuaded that Trump is some kind of political titan who's going to be able to persuade independent voters that this is the way to go. Right.
I mean, look, I don't want to get too far into policy, you know, Jacob, but the truth is, is that if you look at most of the things being held up by, say, a speaker, Mike Johnson in the U.S. House or certain members, Republican members, the United States Senate, like these are not unpopular things. They're not on firm footing saying, no, you know, I'm going to stand to thwart history and make and make sure these things don't happen like they're not.
on firm footing politically, I think, and I agree with you electorally. I do want to ask one philosophical question. Let me reflect on this for a second. So I grew, I literally grew up in Republican politics, went to the NRCC with my dad, interned at the RNC, right? It worked a bunch of conventions, worked for George W. Bush, worked for John McCain, all these other people. And I'll tell you this, I don't think until probably
2007, when I read Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom for the first time, that I ever gave one thought to somebody like William Buckley or anybody of his ilk. To me, politics was a purely numbers game. You win, you lose. And I don't know if I was blissfully ignorant. I don't know if I was willful. I don't think I was willfully ignorant. I just don't think I knew any better
So it's, you know, as I think back about this now and in the place I found myself in in the last four, five, six years, Jacob, is how much intellectual and philosophical firepower
has been laid on over the course of the last century to continue the movement that we see today, which I think I agree with you is that MAGA is it has philosophical underpinnings, but they're not very popular and all things considered, not particularly well organized either. I think it's a dead end, but it is amazing the extent I mean, Trump himself.
has somehow imbibed a lot of these ideas, at least on immigration and on foreign policy. I was just looking again at the interview that he gave in 1990 to Playboy in which they asked him about his ego. Then he says, "You know, you need an outside ego to succeed in business." Then he continues, "And you need one in foreign policy as well to be a leader of a nation."
And he goes on to denounce Mikhail Gorbachev for allowing the Soviet Union to collapse. And he praises the Chinese for their ruthlessness and for the violence that they exercised to crush the uprising at Tiananmen Square. So Trump has this pronounced theory. He believes in violence and mass mobilization on behalf of his movement.
Right. And singular control. Yes. And, you know, I think I mean, look, we're seeing that play out now. Right. And it's interesting, you know, to bring some of these threads together, Jacob, is that to your point about Trump's weakness politically and electorally. Right. Who would actually vote for him? I mean, think about the rogues gallery. And I in rogue is too good a word for a lot of these people whose help he needs. Again, Vladimir Putin, once again, he needs help.
direct Russian intervention, active measures, as they call it. You know, they could be, you know, some of these third party people, right, that I think they've wrangled. It could be the Iranians. It could be the Saudis. It could be the Emiratis. It could be a whole bunch of these people who without their
interference and intervention on his behalf, he's in a world of hurt. But for him, that's just one more day at the office. He likes that stuff. He likes these people. You know, Kim Jong-un wrote me a beautiful letter, right? I mean, these people are murderous thugs, most of them.
There's no question. And foreign leaders are talking about it too. Malcolm Turnbull, the Australian conservative, just said that Trump was like an awestruck sports fan watching Putin. He gets excited to see Putin. He regards him as a hero. So I think that bottom line is,
Trump wants to be the Putin of the United States or the Orban of the United States. He admires them for what he sees as their decisiveness and their ability to represent the nation. It's a very old fashioned, almost European style version of blood and soil nationalism.
You talk about Viktor Orban in the book. It's interesting to see the charisma that Trump described in that article. You know, Viktor Orban has put it to good use, right? I mean, he is the state.
at least in his mind, and I think to a lot of other people. I can't speak for Magyars or Hungarians, right? But he has done everything he can. And then it also goes to the enrichment of friends and allies, the sort of ritual humiliation of opponents or friends even, and the systematic dismantling of the functioning pieces of democracy that matter to leave a shell that just guarantees one's own re-election.
Right. Trump's dream would be to construct an American version of illiberal democracy in which you still have elections, but the substance has been removed. It's just a pageant. In fact, he's talking about he tried to do that with the Republican primaries by stating that he should simply be declared the winner without having to endure the indignity of going through the primary process. He would like to suppress independent media in the United States.
and deploy federal government contracts as a weapon and as a favor, he could enrich his friends by stacking the process of how these contracts are awarded. There's no doubt in my mind that that's Trump's goal. And it's always in line with bogus, outdated economic theories that have been discredited decades before, which is,
I hate government. We should shrink government so you can drown it in a bathtub. But it needs to be big enough so I could pay people off and I can, you know, rob the cookie jar. Well, he wants to make the government an instrument of his own will. And you see that in this immunity, his version of immunity, right? Where he says, I'm the king. I define what's legal and what's illegal. I can do whatever I please. Let me ask you to project forward. And I'm going to ask you to project forward.
In a way that I hope we see the outcome, which is in the wake of Donald Trump's next electoral loss in November, right, from from our lips to God's ears. What does what does the next step look like? You know, he will still have some cachet. He will still be Donald Trump.
But, you know, where does it go from here? I mean, I could make an argument and I'd love to get your thoughts that it's already seeped down into the basically the old Confederacy and, you know, certain Mountain West states. So what is a...
movement like this? What is a collection of people like this? So if you've got H.L. Mencken years ago and now you've got Tucker Carlson, if you had Hearst and now you've got Murdoch, like where do these people go from here? Do they sort of recede for a minute while they sort of figure out the next vehicle that they can glom onto?
My guess is that the movement itself cannot survive without Trump's brand salesman abilities, that he is in fact a unique figure. We've had populist upsurges in the past revolving around Williams, Jennings, Bryan.
I think Trump is a figure similar to that. None of the others have the mojo. Ron DeSantis flamed out in this election. Josh Hawley, no. Maybe J.D. Vance, but even he has no real charisma.
Trump's myth rested on that he was a successful billionaire, a businessman, a tycoon, a larger-than-life figure who swoops in on his airplane like Hitler in the beginning of Triumph of the Will. The plane circles around and he meets the adoring crowd. None of these guys are on that level. So I think that actually the nimbus around Trump
is already going to start evaporating right today because the guy can't come up with the money that he needs for this New York fraud trial. He is not a billionaire. In fact, he's probably closer to broke than not. Right. And, you know, for a guy who, you know, in some strange perverted way got a real
sort of gross charge out of seeing his name on buildings, right? That name's going to start coming down because he's got to go sell these things. And who God knows, especially not to make it a commercial real estate discussion, Jacob, but commercial real estate, not exactly the best business to be in at the moment either, right? There is one point of revenge. George Soros could buy Trump Tower and rename it Soros Tower. Ha ha ha ha!
Oh, my God. Heads, heads would explode from sea to shining sea, Jacob, with an idea like that. And I think but, you know, that brings all of it together, which is you need that sort of charismatic salesman, for lack of a better way to put it. And, you know, look, Holly, for all of the fist bump. Right. He's also the guy running through the hallways running away.
All of them are enablers and that Trump needs them. But I don't again, I don't think that they have this force, this brute force of character that he exercises. He really is a mafia don of the conservative movement. Let me ask you this. Are we as Americans, are we as a country destined to deal with
this virus sort of like shingles, right? It lives inside the body politic and occasionally under stress, it makes itself known. Or is there a way to eradicate it? And I don't mean physically. I mean politically, philosophically. No, it can only be suppressed. It's clear from these virulent eruptions that it is part of American history, part of American politics, part of American culture.
And there will always be a remnant that clings to this. And if it can find a persuasive salesman in a time of crisis or national difficulty, it will rebound. It does, as hokey as it sounds, we did take our democracy for granted.
Yeah. You know, look, it's akin to when you're going to be, you're in the process of becoming an American citizen, right, Jacob? You have to take a test, right? And you have to study for this test because you have to pass it. And the question is how many native born Americans could pass the test if it was put in front of them? And the answer is probably a shockingly few number, right? Who could actually do it? And that's the thing is that when, and this is why I think your book and any book that starts to highlight our history, and this goes a century back is important because
I don't want to crib Francis Fukuyama and say we're at the end of history, but in some ways I feel like sometimes we're in a post-history thing, which is we don't teach it well enough in school, clearly, or we argue about what it is we should be teaching history-wise. Well, you've got to teach this, and if you teach that, you've got to teach this. But the truth is that if the old expression was that Stalin, right, who said the victors write history, right now no one's writing history. And so everybody can come up with their own version of it.
And say, this is really what happened. You just, you know, I was talking to my co-founder, Rick Wilson. You saw it with Vladimir Putin and Tucker Carlson a couple of weeks ago. He's like, well, you know, the truth is, Tucker, is that Hitler had to invade Poland like he it was a thing he had to do. Like, it's it's ludicrous.
And the American right is signing on to that, which is interesting because they used to condemn moral relativism all the time and argue that it would lead to the baddie of baddies, which was nihilism, in which you no longer believe in anything. And that's where they're ending up, which is kind of mind boggling. Does something like this ever end up in anything other than nihilism? Because once the means justify the ends and vice versa, where else do you find yourself?
Yeah, it's definitely slippery territory. And there's simply the other thing about it is that there's not really a policy end to Trump. It's more of a culture war. It's a battle for what he perceives as the essence of American nationhood by stamping anyone who doesn't agree with him as an enemy of the people.
Yeah. And that's one thing you referenced, you know, the Heritage Foundation and this Project 2025 thing, which I have and I have not read it. And I understand it's quite lengthy. So I want to spend some time on it. We'll do a series on it when I finally get around to reading it, Jacob. But my sense of it is reading the little bit I have about it is that it wants to basically get rid of anything in the federal government that's probably helpful.
to the individual American at the expense of everything that can control the individual American and turn them from citizens into subjects. And it's the opposite of the libertarian strain that Ronald Reagan represented during his presidency. It shows you what a somersault heritage and other places have made and why the bottom line is to ingratiate themselves with Trump and glom on, as you put it, to the MAGA movement.
Right. Because at this point, other than the several hundred seditionists and insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol three years ago, the truth is most of these people, perhaps none of them, Jacob, have faced any real sanction for their actions. Well, I think the January 6th, I think that those prosecutions did send a message. And that's why you're not seeing real violent eruptions right now around the country.
And if there were one, I think it actually would play into Biden's hands and would be crushed fairly quickly. Right. And I mean, as we've seen before, you know, the the Proud Boys and the three percenters, you know, I think they fancied themselves better organized than they probably were. But then we have, you know, the lone wolves and the stochastic terrorism. Right. I'm not saying you should do this, but maybe you should do this. And then somebody goes out and does it.
And that's, I think, something that we need to keep an eye on. Okay, Jacob, is there anything we left out? Is there anything else? Because you probably, I think you probably wrote the book last year. Since you wrote the book, is there anything else you think our listeners should be taking a look at or anything else you think they need to know? I think the most significant issue of our time is Ukraine and the fact that Trump is
has forced House Speaker Mike Johnson to prostrate himself on this Ukraine issue of aid that we're not even allowed to give the Ukrainians the ability to defend themselves against what is clearly a neo-Stalinist regime in Moscow is stomach-churning. And the fact that Tucker Carlson went over and tried to propitiate Vladimir Putin in an interview
and sounded like a fellow traveler out of the 1930s, like a Walter Durante or George Bernard Shaw. I would take those things very seriously. Absolutely. And I'm going to do something on Tucker sometime sooner than later because, you know, he likes to ask questions of people, Jacob. And I think once in a while someone needs to ask questions of him. Okay. Before I let you go, where can we find your work? Where can we find you? If you dare to be on social media, where can we find you there?
I'm on Twitter at Jacob Heilbrunn and we're at www.nationalinterest.org and my book is available in independent bookstores and on Amazon. All right. As always, gang, you can find me on Twitter and TikTok at Reed Galen on threads and Instagram at Reed underscore Galen underscore LP and over at Substack, the home front. Jacob Heilbrunn, thanks for joining me. Thank you. And everybody else, we'll see you next time. Thanks again to everyone for listening.
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