The Elites Who Would Play God (w/ CJ Killmer of Dangerous History)

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I want to get across now. This particular episode, as you see in the title maybe from the description, already is a returning Champion, returning guest friend of the show, my pal CJ. Kilmer from the Dangerous History podcast. We got to catch up a little bit before recording.

both rewatched in preparation for this episode. I will not say anything more, so please give this episode a listen and hopefully find yourself surprised when you hear us talking about it, because hopefully, like us, you haven't thought about it. But now as soon as you are reminded of it, you'll go back and watch.

your series. But what really got like got me going with this wasn't just the story of him and how he's connected to Wilson, but because you started talking about a subject that I guess I'll tell my audience now.

I'm planning on doing a long form series on at some point in the future about the American eugenics movement, mostly because of how many people it implicates and just the disturbing, counterintuitive I guess we could say aspects of it that you talked about a bit, because you also cited two books I own right from the beginning, which is Edwin Black's War Against the Week, which I've read parts of but not in full yet. It's incredible. Edwin

Black is a very good writer. I more used his I used his work in my currently ongoing series about the Muslims being used by the Third Reich. But also if I'm I don't remember his name, his last name is Leonard.

Let's do some context here. Let's talk about the eugenics craze itself of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, like what it was, what drove it, major players. I actually made a list of some names that I've come up that have come up more than once, and I'm sure you'll find all of them, if not, if not most of them, if not all of them familiar. But you know, we have a Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton. He's the inventor of eugenics. But then there's also guys like

Madison Grant, who I didn't know this about him. He was the Bronx Zoo founder, but I'm more new him for his writing, known for his writing that is unbelievably

Nazi es skin a lot of ways. And then we have this guy who I am more aware of than I think most people who's talking about eugenics, just because of where I'm from, and that's University of Minnesota medical professor Charles Fremont Ditte, who, until I just found out until two years ago, had a street named after him in my hometown of Minneapolis, and I always I always recognized Dyte Avenue. It was like this weird back avenue near the McDonald's I used to go to. But they

finally renamed it. And that's one of those moments where I'm like, you know, maybe it's probably good to rename some things. Let's not honor a eugenicist who was a pen pal of Hitler's because that was dit in that case. But then you also have the American Museum of Natural History director H. Fairfield Osborne, and he was a noted anti semite. And of course I think this is the most controversial one, the early birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger.

All these people were involved in the eugenics movement, in supporting it, like pushing it forward in their supposed research, and it also had this political angle to it. And I don't know if you have had a chance to read this book, if you've heard of it, and I'm actually holding it up so you can see it. It's called The Guarded Gate by Daniel Okrint, and he tries to demonstrate that this eugenics craze was actually what was used as a basis to restrict immigration between eighteen ninety

one and nineteen twenty one. And it implicates a lot of politicians and probably one of your favorites is at the top of that list, and that's Henry Cabot Law. Yeah, but it also includes Teddy Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, so it's

cross partisan in a lot of cases too. It was just my point of bringing up all these names is that it really was everywhere, and it really did sort of speak to the spirit of the time that you're sort of you know that you've talked about, but I want to turn it over to you to just like give us some background on this craze, on this movement, and just the broad strokes of it.

even further into Nazism eventually. But really, the beginning of you genics in the late nineteenth century, as far as I'm aware, is mostly a bunch of these Transatlantic elites. And the first book where I've really bumped into the Transatlantic aspect and really into a lot of the ideas behind eugenics, not not so much eugenics itself, is there's a very interesting kind of hard to find. Luckily, I

have a copy history book. It's called Race and Reprochemont and the author's name, if I remember right, is Stuart Anderson, and it the subtitle is something like Anglo Saxonism and I forget American and British special relationship or you know,

something like that. I know I'm way off in the exact words, but basically makes the argument that there's this weird thing where, you know, prior to say, the mid to late eighteen nineties, Americans, including a lot of America's leaders, tended to see the British as like the biggest threat. And then eventually when that sort of simmered down a little bit at least as a rival, and you know, you go back to the days like Andrew Jackson and

whatever it's like to them. Even though Andrew Jackson, you know, was of Scott Scottish, Scott's Irish kind of ancestry or whatever, he still saw the British as the enemy. He saw him as the guys as much as he hated the Indians. He tended to think that like behind every Indian attack was like scheming Brits, putting them up to it on the frontier and stuff.

they call it twisting the lion's tail. It was a way too. You know, Let's say you're politician campaigning in a heavily Irish part of a big northern city. I talked some shit about the Limeys, and you know, it's a great way to get get your make voters to you know, go out and fire up the base for you if you're a Democrat. You know, back then, I.

to have a special relationship. We're going to bail their asses out in World War One in the name of

you know, saving democracy worldwide and whatever. And he argues that a lot of it is this racialist this racialist ideology which you know has a whole lot to it that I can't do justice here, but you know, it's the idea that the the Anglo Saxons are the most advanced quote unquote race on earth in every way, including by the way, they're more advanced than the Saxon Saxons from from which they're derived somehow, which always interesting that you know, you would claim the Anglo Saxons are the

greatest race in the world and the Germans are horrible? Who do you think where do you think Saxony is? You know, but well, this racialist idea.

all right, we want to given what's happened in terms of immigration, Yeah, I gotta get some Irish and maybe even some damn Italian votes to win.

to conclude that, you know, the people of this part of Europe are superior to the people of that part of Europe, who are all superior to the people of this other continent next door and whatever. But you know, that's that's what they believe. And now if you believe that, then there's all kinds of things that stem from this. I mean, you could go in a las a fair direction.

There were some people who kind of had some Anglo Saxonist racial ideas but were also kind of libertarian, which just like, well, you know, that's fine, the more advanced races are going to succeed, just leave things alone. But progressives are never comfortable with leaving anything alone, and they believe that you have to have interventionism into everything or else it won't work.

And there's a racialist aspect to it, for sure, but there's also non racialist aspects. A lot of it also had to do with labeling people, regardless of race as being defective or feeble minded or all these other you know we get words like moron and imbecil come from these people. These were originally scientific terms. They had charts and things of like rating different levels of idiocy.

but regardless Carrie Buck was raped by I believe. I don't want to make this up. I don't want to say it was a member of her family, but she was raped and was forced to carry the baby to term, and then was sterilized afterward by order of the court because she was seen as a defective. And those laws, as you also mentioned in your episode in some parts of the country, stayed in place until the seventies, and you know, they weren't enforced in the way that they

were in the twenties, but they were there. And you know, again I got to, you know, bring up my alma mater. The University of Minnesota was one of the academic institutions at the forefront of this movement. They were very much well, it's funny. They had a I believe this is actually the guy I mentioned earlier, Charles Dight. I believe he founded it. They had the Eugenic Society, the Minnesota Eugenic Society, And technically that society, or that depart meant rather at

the U of M, still exists. They just want under a name change. And I couldn't tell you off the top of my head what that name change is, but it's one of those things where it's more about rebranding than actually questioning what we're really doing and what we're actually talking about here. Now I'm not employed. I don't want to make it sound like I'm implying that they're

still engaging in secret eugenics. I'm just kind of, yes, adding the idea that you brought up that this is about a certain type of psychology at work.

today's chronology neuroetypical things sometimes blended with racism. But yeahs, as Buck v. Bell shows, and as lots of things show, actually progressive eugenesis, Anglo American eugenesis of the turn of the last century, they often as much as we we focus on their racism towards you know, non whites and things, which is definitely definitely part of the mix.

That's your that's your appellations, that's your Hillbillies. And yet they would see those as like sometimes it almost comes across like they they have the most contempt for those people, even more so than like black people or whatever, because like almost like they should be better, you know. But right, it's like, look at them, they're white, but they're like they're like they're defective white people.

early in the colonial period. But but also they're more commonly from Yankee families. By Yankee, you know, it just mean north of the Mason Dixon line. They're mostly from New England families. Even if even if the people you know, the later generations, say in the eighteen nineties, don't live in New England anymore. Maybe they live in in New York, or maybe maybe they live in maybe they live in Illinois or whatever. But but their families are New England families.

down on the other British North American colonies. It's true, say you're looking at eighteen nineties, nineteen hundreds of the way somebody like Henry Cabot Lodge would have looked at even people of Anglo Saxon race, but from other parts of the country whose families were more humble and didn't go back to sixteen hundreds Massachusetts. You know, these are the people that founded places like Harvard and Yale, and

those are the people who dominated those institutions. And what's interesting to me anyway, is that if you look at the kind of leaders political intellectuals such as they are

of today's version of progressivism. Like they've given up, at least explicitly on a lot of their anti black racism and anti non white racism, but they really are all in still on their anti white working class, anti poor white people, Like they have really a lot of their hatred of the Trump movement is that they hate I believe they they hate the white working classes.

As you say, mean New England is really what we're talking about here, not even just I mean, I think I said this to you in a message earlier that I've been doing a lot of reading about the Puritans for my thesis because I'm talking about how the sale of witch trials were sort of a breaking point for

American Christianity and it just changed everything. But I've been doing a lot of reading about Puritanism and the Puritans who came here, and as you said, they look down on everybody else because they saw themselves explicitly as the moral inspiration for the rest. They wanted to be a model, essentially, and.

position of being closest to God. And while today obviously we have a more secular bent to that, I argue that the most strident expressions of progressivism today are really just a new form of American Christianity that just hasn't really coalesced quite firmly yet, and specifically from the Puritan tradition. And I think the I mean, there's actually I wanted

to just highlight a book that people should read. I didn't even think of this, but you were talking about the sort of Puritan tradition if people want to really get into like this very interesting divvying up of American subcultures, should check out Colin Woodard's American Nations. It's a very good book and it absolutely gets into what you're discussing in a very accessible way. So I think people should

check that out. The other thing that really struck me about how you're talking about this is it's always it kind of lines up like this hatred of like the poor, like the poor white trash of America, lines up in a way with how the Nazis, or at least German anti Semites looked at Jews, German Jews in particular, And

trust me, this will make sense in a second. It's more that I think what is being noticed, and I'm saying noticed in air quotes because it's not real, but it's being noticed by progressive elites, post puritan elites, whatever you want to call them, that the poor white working class are not like them, but they look like them,

so therefore they must be counterfeits. And that's the basis of racism, really, but it's definitely the basis of anti Semitism, and that was especially the case in Germany, where Jews were looked at as both simultaneously being inferior and conniving and plotting, and therefore superior with outsized power, and we're therefore seen as counterfeits, a counterfeit Germans, because by the time the twentieth century rolls around, German Jews are just

as German looking as other Germans. That's why there was such an obsession with those phenotypic traits of blonde hair and blue eyes and stuff, because that's already rare enough. The thing is, what Germans didn't really consider is there's plenty of blonde hair, blue eyed Jews. So but my point is just bringing this up is just saying that I think that what we're tapping into is a sort

of essence of a very particular kind of racism. We can say, and you could call it maybe intergroup racism or inter color racism if you want to get into that aspect of it.

in recent uh you know, decades and whatever. But man, no one hated each other for a long time. No one hated each other more than than Catholics and Protestants. Oh yeah, And and like they hated each other more than either of them hated Muslims or anything.

I don't want to be involved in this. And then they kind of confer with each other, and then they come back to him and they say Catholic atheist Jew or Protestant atheist Jew. So your point is very well taken there, and I think, yeah, internacine squabbles is you know, very real. I mean, if you want to get into like silly territory. But it's very relevant. Who are the people who fight the hardest against each other when a social media pylon happens. Who's doing the most shaming. It's

usually white women going after other white women. It's very much a there's a very strange human tendency that I think we're sort of talking about here, and I think it animated a lot of I think actually it might have been the animating sort of psychological at the core of I'd say, I'll say the eugenics movement, I'll say all more broadly. I think it's you know, progressivism itself. I think that that might be the sort of a defining feature of progressive psychology. But let's just stick to

the eugenics thing. I'm trying to find a way to transition to your character though, and I think that, you know, bringing up Nazi Germany kind of helps as well as anti Semitism, because your figure doctor Katzen ellen Bogan. I would say he's infamous for a lot of things, but one thing.

his background was Jewish. And he went to Catholic school though growing up and and kind of identified as Catholic, and seems to have been at least at some points in his life of practicing and believing Catholic, and seems to have been kind of ashamed of his Jewish ancestry, did try to minimize it and kind of cover it up a lot in various ways. And he eventually goes to university, gets a medical degree, starts to get into early psychiatry, such as it was, and eventually he moves

to the United States. Mary's a daughter of a wealthy, influential New England family coincidentally and maybe not, and he starts to he he gets into treating epileptics. He gets into one of his sort of specialties was trying to identify people who were faking psychiatric symptoms in order to get themselves off the hook for crimes, which is interesting.

Eventually gets into hypnosis, and then he also eventually gets into eugenics and he works at some prestigious hospitals in Massachusetts, he teaches at Harvard, he teaches abnormal psychology, and then in nineteen eleven he goes and works at a New Jersey facility for mentally you know whatever you would call him today, people with severe psychological and mental handicaps and things, and specializes in the epilepsy there, but also is getting

more and more into eugenics. And at that point, Woodrow Wilson, soon to be elected President of the United States, is serving his brief time as governor of New Jersey, which was clearly, you know, just a step stone sort of a thing for him and Woodrow Wilson, who I believe had even given him the position at the New Jersey State Epileptic Home or whatever it was called. Woodrow Wilson, who being a good progressive, was a believer in eugenics.

As he's pushing through all kinds of progressive reforms in New Jersey during his first year as governor. One of the things, and this kind of slips under the radar of a lot of historiography on Wilson. I think, you know, maybe there's some reasons it might happen accidentally, but maybe some reasons that it would happen consciously. It rarely gets mentioned in books covering Wilson's political career in general. To be fair, his times in New Jersey governor generally gets

almost no coverage. But even so when they do, they talk about various reforms and things he foisted on the state, but they don't mention that this guy who is later going to show up collaborating with the Nazis in book involved wrote a eugenics bill that created a state board of experts that would have the ability to declare people to be you know, defective basically and have them sterilized with nothing that we would consider like reasonable due process.

I of course, would not not agree with that at all. But this idea that there are such thing as enlightened, objective, ideology free experts the science, if you want to call it that, and that these experts are should be put in charge of just running as much of society as possible. And in the same way the progressives would say, well, you can't just let you know, the free market interplay of supply and demand determine what happens in the economy.

They would also say, well, no, no, no, you have to have these economists with degrees from Ivy League schools come in and intervene in the economy.

hundred and twenty years or so. Is this idea of the scientistic idea, this technocracy idea. Yeah, you just need to have these experts with all these formal university credentials and give you give them power, and you don't want them to be subject to the whims of the masses, right, Or we love to play lip service to democracy, but we don't love to actually have it influence policy in any fundamental way.

of that. I think there just is an element of people not really considering the trade offs at work when you're talking about something like a technocracy. Yes, you're going to have experts running things. They are more likely to get certain things right than than certain things wrong. However, you're going to have to trade off individual freedom. And

I would say democracy itself democratic principle. I mean, it's always struck me as very strange when people who would advocate for direct democracy on one hand also preing on and on about how we have to trust the experts. You just can't have both. I just I don't believe you can have both. And that's like a whole a side. I wanted to jump back to Katin Ellenbogen during his time actually specifically in the United States around that time

when he became appointed by Wilson. Did he have like a like a status, like did people talk about him, like? Was he famous? To Madison Grant was famous? As another you genesis goes. I remember the Madison Grant. People can't underestimate how famous that man was, whose book The Passing of the Great Race, which is as racist as it sounds, He was a name checked in The Great Gatsby. I don't know if people remember the Tom character says, have

you read the Passing of the Great Race? And I think and I think that was Fitzgerald's way of referencing his uh. I think it was his publisher, if I remember, Yeah, it was Maxwell Perkins, the editor of Fitzgerald was a big fan of scientific racism. And I think that might have been Fitzgerald's way of sort of casting a little bit of shade on him, because as we know, Tom and The Great Gatsby not exactly the most sympathetic character.

So but he's very much that prototypical like you know, New England blue blood, So of course he would be really into Madison Grants. So I guess what I'm wondering is was there any anyone any sort of perception of doctor Katz and Ellen Bogan like that that you're aware of, or was he a little more underground? I guess I think he was.

he moved back to Europe. But even during that time, you know, he was a fairly big big player on the kind of medical psychiatry side of eugenics. And yet he's a guy of who is an immigrant to the United States, who is of Jewish ancestry, and a practicing Catholic, two things that both like to somebody like Henry Cabot Lodge,

I mean Henry Cabot Lodge. Here's this guy, he's an Henry Cabot Lodge the way he would look at Katsan ellen Bogen, Right, Henry Cabot Lodge's family is like New England blue blood aristocracy going back to the sixteen hundreds. Then you've got Edwin Katzton ellen Bogan, a recent immigrant to the United States from Eastern Europe. Oh, of Jewish ancestry,

who's a practicing Catholic. Like you would think that that, you know, the two would have nothing in common, but they definitely both would believe in this idea of eugenics. But yeah, I think katsan ellen Bogen he was like just one step below the biggest names in eugenics.

pretty big dude in the movement. He was not quite as big as some of these other, you know, better known names of eugenesis that that we've mentioned, but he was like just one step below them, you know, in the same way that I don't know, let's see trying to come up with a with a metaphor on the fly, which is always dangerous, but you know, in the same way that like, if you look back at the history of nineties alternative rock, like there's Parl Jam and then

there's Stone table Pilots. Yeah, like Stone double Pilots. They were pretty big, right, they were pretty good. Yeah, but they but they were not Pearl Jam in terms of just how gigantic they were. I didn't putting putting both bands at their peak.

That's a good move. Yeah. I So he goes back to Europe and he ends up working for the Nazis. But we should be clear he wasn't doing He didn't like, just go to the Nazis to start working to them. He didn't. He didn't raise his hand and say, you know, uh my fureor please hire me to be your chief eugenesist. It was it was. It was much more. It was tragic, don't get me wrong. And what happened to him, but

then how he conducted himself, that's a that's a different question. Actually, just on a side note, I you really got me thinking about how he's like this sort of moral inverse of the other. Probably the most famous Jewish doctor forced to work with the Nazis, and that was doctor Miklos

Neasley at Nauschwitz, who was Mengel A's assistant. He was Mangl's assistant in human experimentation, not because he was a fan of what was going on, but because that was the only way he'd keep his wife and child alive, if I remember right. That is not the case with doctor katzenellen Bogen.

he fled to he didn't go far enough. Like yeah, you know, he actually was in Germany when the Nazis really took over, and you know he understood the funny part that he shared most of their like he thought that Nordic's were the best you know, quote unquote race of people there was, and that they should be privileged, like literally privileged in the real sense of the word.

But he also, you know, knew that under the laws that the Nazis were passing, he would be labeled as Jewish and they would have all kinds of This is still well before the final solution, but it still had all kinds of negative things would happen to you, and and you know, oh yeah, so he fled.

a little while where the the Gestapo. They they know who he is, they have him on their radar. They arrest them a few times, but let him go a few times. You know. He's kind of in this limbo that a lot of people I think sort of were in in in various Nazi occupied park.

So I would just if I was to a you know, I guess speculate it would be because he was probably well enough known, they probably had him on their radar, and because he was Jewish and also an intellectual, that probably just made him be seen as a potential threat or which is just so funny that, I mean, the Nazis were just so hyper conscious of so called threats, and they everything that they saw is threatening was not threatening at all.

to do with them. It wasn't so like if he was a guy who was part of the French resistance, or he was a guy who was out there like speaking publicly against the Nazis or whatever. They just gotten rid of him right away. But you know, I think they were just looking at him, like, what the hell do we do with this guy, Like he's a eugenicist. We're all in on the eugenicists, you know, but but he's got all these other things about him. We don't quite trust him.

quote unquote thuggish they were. And they were thuggish, don't get me wrong, but they really just take issue with just how they executed their objectively heinous ideology instead of just like looking at the whole picture, you know, right.

genteel way. And and I think that that that's the way that somebody that a lot of the to tie it back to progressivism version one point zero, early twentieth century America. I think that's the way that somebody for example, and this came up in my episode I did a while back about Woodrow Wilson and Race, where I talked about the famous story of him watching Birth of a Nation. Oh yes, and how it's probably not true that he came out of it totally positive and gushing that's probably

not true. Even though that's still repeated by a lot of people. It was even repeated by me for a while.

Sunce I dug into it more. And I think that a lot of these people, like like Woodrow Wilson or Henry Cabot Lodge or or you know, maybe a John d Rocke Hiller junior, they these were not fans of the kou kucks Klan, even though superficially it'd say like, well, the both of them are prejudiced against black people and don't like Jews, and both of them, you know, want to have a stricter immigration policy, all these different things.

But like, but it's the same dynamic of like why why a more suave devoneer neokon warhawk doesn't like Donald Trump? It's not so much policy. May be a little bit of policy difference here and there, like he doesn't want to start World War three with Russia as quickly as they do or something. But it's it's these it's these things of like, well, you know, he he says the quiet part out loud. He puts an ugly face on

a lot of the ship. We actually believe and culturally we're not comfortable with that just just you know, in a cultural sense, we don't. We don't like that. It's like the guy who comes into your country club and is like Belgian and shit, you know. But also, yeah, it might put people off. It might it might cause some people to put on the they live sunglasses and realize that, you know that lurking behind the nice speeches of of Woodrow Wilson or a Barack Obama is a hardcore imperialist.

he was alienated from the religion. Maybe it was you know, racial shame or something. I don't, we don't know, I suppose, But but the point is is he saw himself as like appreciating that. I would imagine he saw himself appreciating then as someone who could appreciate the Nazis like ideas, but their methods were just beyond the pale for him, and that might have led to him speaking a little loosely at times, and that might have resulted in him

getting picked up. And then the fact that he was Jewish like just made it all the better or made it all the more likely that the Nazis would do that.

of little perks and things. Yeah and so yeah.

plus that most Nazis didn't have. He also, by living in America and being in these sort of Ivy League circles and things like, he was familiar with how the American judicial system works, which the you know, the trials of the Nazis were largely American style jurisprudence. So so his defense is much more clever than a lot of the Nazis. A lot of the Nazi defense it's kind of like typical, you know, and I say this as someone who is of partially German ancestry and does have

a touch of the tism. Germans a lot of times seem to all be autistic, and so you know, they have their like I'm not guilty because look, here's the piece of paper, that says I was following Arders, So you know, I was just following the rules. How can I be guilty of anything if I was following the rules? You know, it's this very autistic thing.

propaganda because they understood how it works. They interstood like, you don't go into it with logic and rationality and like you know, literal or metaphorical charts and graphs and things you like, you might actually be one hundred percent right, doesn't matter. You go in and tell an emotional stop story that might be ninety percent bullshit, but it gets the job done. And the Germans will come in and be like, well, you know, the British are actually violating

the laws of Sea even worse than we are. And here I'm in a site a treaty from eighteen forty seven, and you could see in sub paragraph B the British are actually violating it worse than we are. And the British would come in and be like, yeah, well you're banatic Belgian babies. How do you like that? And the Americans would be like, oh my god, the Germans are doing what And so that's sort of how I see

a lot of the Nazis. I mean, they were guilty, hell the don't get me wrong, but they also they also were totally ham fisted in their defense a lot of the time and caston Ellenbogen though, you know, he used his his familiarity with the English language and with American kind I think kind of culture, but also the American legal system, and his defense was more like, I'm just gonna muddy the waters as much as I possibly can. I'm gonna seize on every little technicality and inconsistency. I'm

gonna just, you know, do all these different things. And and so it ends up where he succeeded in muddying the waters enough that nobody was able to and he also I think had the luck of not being arrested right away, and there's more time for you know, records to be lost and for witnesses to what he had done to be lost in one way or another fall out of contact, and so they they weren't able to

ever explicitly to the legal standards. They wanted to pain like specific killings on him, things like that that might have gotten into the death.

assisting him in all these things. And it's like, if you're doing all that, and if the Nazis are like being by the standards of Bukenvalve being very nice to you, giving you better food and lodging and letting you wear regular clothes, and like you're fat while everyone else is

starving to death. It's like, you're probably not drawing too many lines of like, wait a minute, I'm willing to do this, but but euthanize someone who went through an experiment and lived somehow I draw the line there, or what you want me to assist you and doing some kind of like Mangalis style medical thing of trying to change someone eye color with surgery, or you know, trying to implant artificial glands at a gay person to science

the gay away. It's like, I don't, I don't. I just don't believe that he was actually drawing those lines. But of course he's going to pretend in his trial because as we saw by his behavior in Buganval, he's he's willing to do whatever it takes when it comes to save in his own skin.

Any physician who committed the crimes I am charged with deserves to be killed. That's so clever because he's not admitting to doing anything. He's saying, you're to want to kill me if you believe I did these things, but I didn't do these things.

unstated flip side being or let me go. You know, it's kind of kind of the move of like on cop shows and guys like, well, either you need to charge me or you need to cut me loose, you know that certain thing. Now, they didn't. They didn't give him his wage on either case either his I think not not serious, not not earnestly meant to request for capital punishment or or what he really I'm sure wanted,

which was to be let go. But they gave him life in prison, which ended up amounting to in practice less than a decade.

and things like that. That when it came to the question of did he help any of the things we know happened at Bugenwald as far as nasty experiments and things, he said something like, oh, I didn't participate in any actual experiments on human subjects, but I did assist some of the camp you know, Nazi doctors and scientists with

quote unquote pure research. And so it's this again, this weird just muddying the hell out of the waters of like, look, I'm not saying I didn't help them with anything, but I didn't have but I didn't help them with anything that's bad enough to potentially get me the death penalty, you know what I'm saying, Like that's sort.

ways is the is there? We don't want the blunt Nazi esque, you know, thuggery, but we want what they want is essentially what you know, someone like kats and Allebogo would say's like, yes, we want to get rid of the defectives, but we don't want to be storming into mental hospitals and shooting them, you know, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, we know we need to do this with the scientific measurement in mind.

really is. I think where a lot of them would like to end up, if they were being honest, is in the world of demolition Man, where there's this like very soft you know, yeah, yeah, like Gavin Newsom reminds me a lot, or Justin Trudeau, they remind me of doctor Cocteau. They're they're these very soft kind of beta males. There's very like, oh no, this is for your own good.

We're not here to It's not at all like classical fascism where it was like it's a boot on your face and you know it's a bunch of goose step and tough guys or whatever like that. It's like, oh no, no, no, we're not here to hurt you. We're here to help you. Yeah, and this is for your own good and please let us help you.

very brutal, upfront language that he uses throughout it. Or Well painted him in very sort of sympathetic ways, like he seems like he's sympathetic in his in that way, I think what Orwell was doing was trying to demonstrate, like, that's the real horror of totalitarianism, is that is the idea that we're doing this for you, no matter how

cruel it might actually be. And to address something that you said about how most rank and file progressive identifying people don't even think about it this way, I think what it is is because if you just kind of step back, or don't step back, and just think about what does progress mean? It's hard in the twenty first century to think of that as a bad thing because we associate progress with things like medical advancements, and that

is a good form of progress. Technological progress isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact that say, it's usually a good thing, with probably the exception well, we're starting to see if social media and things like that that's effects on the brain. But regardless, progress when only looked at superficially,

does seem like a good thing. But what it really means, and I've tried for so long to define it in my own in my own words, Like why I find it so uncomfortable as a philosophy, not even as a politics, just as a philosophy is that it's this idea that humankind, human humanity itself and society is perfectible and that there is some ideal world, of course defined by very particular people, quote unquote experts, but regardless of who's defining it's like again,

it's just more who's defining it, because you know, like I did say this once, is an inversion of the terrorist freedom fighter thing. I think that one man's progress is another man's tyranny. You just can't. You can't be making these points about progress if you purport to have a democracy, like we were kind of talking about earlier. And one thing I thought was really interesting about the trajectory of progressivism is that the constant is that idea

that humanity or society is perfectible. That's the constant. But perfecting it through nature or through nurture is what changes. And I think, right now we're kind of in this like post LBJ era where it's about perfecting society, perfecting nurture in order to perfect society. Back in the days of katzen Ellenbogen, we're talking about perfecting human beings through

you know, through nature, through the tampering with nature. And I think that the uh, the the constant being, that impulse is just what I find so disturbing about what we call progressivism. And it's I don't really have a question with this, It's just I more wanted your thoughts on this idea that is defined by this desire to engineer humanity, Like that's how I would define progressivism in this most fundamental science.

American progressivism is German historicism. It's it's a particular school of kind of German political philosophy from the mid to nineteenth century that says, among other things, that history it's very teleological, that history is moving in one particular direction, and there are occasional little minor setbacks and occasional like deviations, you know, groups that go against the tide of history, that are on the wrong side of history, if you

want to put it that way. But this idea that history is like moving from point A to point B, and that the enlightened intellectuals and whatever can accurately understand and identify the direction, and that therefore then they have the responsibility like not just to sit by passively as commentators describing the the direction of history, but to like

actively make it go that way. And if you want to go further back, I mean, you could argue that this whole teleological understanding of time itself and the human story in some ways goes back to Christianity, this or even Judaism before this, this linear idea of time as opposed to a more cyclical or a more just is if you think about it, even evolution itself, like Darwinian evolution, it's not really telelogical because there's not really an endpoint

that life is moving toward. It's more just. You can identify, Yeah, you can identify the process and the patterns, but really all you're doing is pointing out look. For this length of time, this adaptation was advantageous. Then the environment changed it was no longer advantageous that you know, organisms with that adaptation suddenly were at a disadvantage and died off

organisms were totally different. But it's random as far as who has what adaptation and then who just happens to have the luck of that adaptation is good right now, and so your species is fruitful and multiplies, and another species is eyes off and so. But but this Christian idea that like there's in the beginning, there's genesis, and

then it goes all the way to revelation. And again the maybe the Puritan ideology is sort of the connective tissue that caused a lot of the American Anglo Saxonist elites to be very open to the ideas of Germanist's Soricism, because it played into this linear progressive in the in the broad sense of the word, idea of history itself, the idea that that we are moving towards an end

of history. This did not originate with Francis Fukuyama in the nineteen nineties, and in fact, I'm currently for an upcoming possible little kind of mini serious thing I'm doing having to do with the relationship of oligarchian democracy I'm reading for the first time an essay of Woodrow Wilson's that was unpublished and now it's it's you can get it if you get I believe it's Volume five of his collected papers, which I happen to have, and it

is called something like for you. Yeah, yeah, it's called it's called something just like modern Democracy or something like that. And it was an essay he wrote that was unpublished during his lifetime that he had dreams of eventually expanding into like his magnum opus of political philosophy, that he never got around to because before he could, before he could work it out into a full length book, you know, he got sidetracked being President of Princeton and the president

the United States and then destroying the world. But it's very interesting because his his teleological Hegelian idea of you know, the end of history that we're all moving toward. It comes through there even more so than in some of his other writings that I've read, where he's like, oh, yeah it, you know, I'm not too far off from

his words. It's like, of course, it's obvious to all all thinking, uh, you know, intellectuals, that history is moving in a particular direction and that certain races are more you know, further along the path, but that ultimately all races are going in that and his his end of history is what he calls modern democracy, and so it's in a way very neo Commish in terms of that.

And his view was that the British and the Americans are the two most as he would say, matured or adult races when it comes to moving down this path towards the end of history, which just happens to be modern democracy is his form of government.

say is to its credit. It very much makes the argument that I was saying is that you know, progress is not progress for everybody. It's progress for those who believe in it, and it's tyranny for others. Now where postmodernism took that is into some pretty awful and in my opinion, objectively stupid directions. But that's because it's a deconstructionist philosophy and that has nowhere to go unless you create some sort of template for what you want out

of it. But it is a valuable tool for becoming skeptical of the idea of progress for its own sake, because I think that's also what it is, is that it's that's why it's such an attractive ideas that it self perpetuates, and that's why it can just shift between

perfecting nature perfecting nurture. And I would not be surprised if at some point we would see a return to trying to perfect nature, which is my way of transitioning us into our sort of last little thing we wanted to just sort of touch on, because what we're talking about is something that, honestly, the alarm was getting sounded

on of how awful progressive utopia actually would be. In a film from at this point almost thirty years old, called Gatica from nineteen ninety seven, starring Ethan Hawk and Uma Thurman and written and directed by Andrew Nickel, who is, despite some misses, he's a pretty damn good filmmaker. He made that other movie I don't remember if you've seen it with Nicholas Cage called Lord of War, all about

the weapons trade. Very good movie. Yeah, And he made a couple of other weaker movies, including a justin Timberlake movie called In Time that was just awful. But putting that aside, Gatica is I would say one of the

most shockingly prescient sci fi films ever made. And it we're not there yet, but with the advent and the growth of genetic engineering technology, I think it really does highlight what the logical endpoint of trying to engineer nature would be, because once you actually can as they can in this movie, that is at an unspecified time in the future, there actually wrote down the line we now have discrimination down to a science where they literally have

people that they call godchilds, as in people who are born naturally, and then everybody else who is engineered, and the natural divide that comes from such a thing. And I think that it just fits in so nicely with everything we've been talking about, both in this episode in other times we've had conversations about progressivism. Is that that's what it looks like, That's what the end goal looks like.

Is you really get this down? You finally reached the goal that I think a lot of progressives like doctor Katson Allenbogan had, which is we have made this truly scientific, and from there one could make the argument there's no going back, knows. So I want to let you respond to that though. And did you get a chance to rewatch it?

is and where I am and everything is. It made me think of one of the things that's a problem with this idea of technocracy and just letting the experts run things is that they're just as imperfect and flawed as anybody else. They might have more education about certain things, but they also have a million blind spots. Even the smartest person is ignorant about ninety nine point nine percent of all knowledge.

judgments in every case to allocate resources. Meanwhile, it's not perfect, but if you let individual entrepreneurs and consumers just make their own choices, the net result overall of the invisible hand, as imperfect as it is, is going to be better than having the poll up Bureau just run everything. And it's the same thing you know in Gatica. They it's it's that if you're an expert, you're almost inevitably a specialist, and you're going to be inclined towards towards reductionism to

your specialty. And so in Gatica, everybody assumes that the only thing that matters to produce to predicting your success is your genetics, and that there's no other factors that need to be taken into account. We you just look at a sample of your blood and say, oh, you're going to be success.

all on paper. But in a world where everything is determined by your genetics, I could see people going back to paper.

Yeah plot spoiler, he actually committed a murder. And so it shows you that no, actually reducing everything to your genetics is is you know, not good. It's in the same way that you know, experts on anything tend to become arrogant and think that their field of expertise is the only thing needed to know to understand and run the world.

Does that cause them to become an alcoholic and their marriage to fall apart and they commit suicide? What happens if that's happening to millions of people, you know, in the same several year span, during and after these lockdowns. Nope, they focus, They did a reductionist move down to one thing. They said, we think if we institute these coney and lockdowns will stop the spread of the virus. Turns out they weren't even right about that anyway. The damn things

spread like crazy anyway. But you know, I think that's a classic case of the specialist expert being given power they should never be given over millions of people. And what happened. They destroyed millions of people's physical and mental health, including mind. Personally, So yeah, I think it's kind of personally.

and failed businesses. I mean, the closest we've gotten to being able to sort of put a number to just destruction caused during the pandemic is just the destruction caused by the riots of twenty twenty, which are bad enough on their own, but those are a blip. Those are a mere blip. And you know, I think that, you know, whatever the actual damage ended up being, it lessened mercifully quickly in the grand scheme of things, but it doesn't take much time for things to really unravel and become

truly decimated. And I think like it does speak to the desire for people to have security and safety and what do you call it, a continuity of life that they would defer to experts in such a way, because when you watch Gatica, you notice that at least I mean, I've seen this movie dozens of times at this point. I mean, I'm a weirdo who watches movies multiple times, especially if he loves them. And one thing I've always noticed is how clean it is. And everyone's wearing a

beautiful suit. Everybody is gorgeous looking, and it's like, you look at what is being portrayed in this film and you don't think about it very hard. You're thinking, oh, this is like Star Trek. This is perfect. Everything is good, everything is great. I'm assuming there is, you know, money, because they're going to like restaurants and stuff, but you never see people exchanging money. It has that classic utopian vibe.

But what Andrew Nickel did, which I think is just so brilliant, is that he just sort of presents the He presents it in a very attractive way, but really highlights the horror of it. And and as you said, and this is an important thing that I didn't really think about because I tend to be more negative minded, But there is something very inspirational and a very old fashioned, like older like the kind of a very old fashion

kind of message that older millennials were getting. I would say, up until like kids born in like the nineties and participation trophy started to become a thing where like I mean, I was taught at least maybe I'm maybe I'm an outlier, I don't know, as a younger or mid mid lefe level millennial born in the mid eighties, but I was

always thought that hard work would get you everywhere. So you know that that message in that movie when I saw it as an eleven year old when it came out, is you know, it really resonated with me, and it stuck with me ever since, because it is a way of saying, you're not constrained by your genes, You're not constrained by anything. And if you and if you are constrained or being made to feel like you're constrained, prove the constrainers.

that's what struck me. I think one of the things that struck me watching the movie recently is that in you know, now we're living in the midst of the Great Awakening, maybe hopefully fingers crossed towards the letter stages of it, but but we're back to like judging all the most important things about someone by their race, their gender, et cetera, which I thought we were trying to get away from for so long.

at the rhetoric. It's always talking about how great white people have it, But what they're really saying is how great white people are and how terrible black people or non white people have it or are. That's really what they're saying. There's no material I mean, there's the only difference is how it's being framed. But it's the same argument.

to get going into space. And so I thought, wow, having to cheat in order to just get a fair meritocratic opportunity. You know, if you were applying to go to an elite university, or to get certain jobs, or you know, maybe to be a writer at Disney Boy, wouldn't you be better off if you're a straight white male.

Wouldn't you be better off if you could manufacture that you're you know, part Native American and your trans and whatever like, you're more likely to get hired, and you're more like to get promoted, You're more likely to get into certain schools. Let's be honest, if you have those those boxes checked. And so I could imagine a scenario in which a straight white man who wants to get you know, into certain schools, hired at certain companies, promoted,

et cetera. Might or even Elizabeth Warren, you know, might manufacture, might manufacture an ancestry that's false, might pretend theoretically to

be whatever, gay trans who knows what. And so it's like, yeah, I can imagine a scenario in today, as different as it might be, where somebody might make the decision to cheat just so that they could be judged on their merits, like just so they could get in the door at a job that they should have an opportunity at based on their merits, but that there is being denied them based on their ethnicity or their lack of checking certain diversity quart of boxes.

is on a tear with his Woodrow Wilson series. I recommend you just started from beginning to end to get a good idea of why one might not like him as a president. But I will leave you guys to that. I want to before I say anything else, thank a couple people for their longtime support of History Impossible over on patreon dot com. That would be Bob Downing, Eric Hodges, Greg Hunter, s O, Skip Pacheco, Molly Pan, Jump Pisano, an A, R PJ Raider, Emily Schmidt, andF you.

in the last couple of days. I'm sure something will come out of me about it in the very near future. I won't get into it here because it just really isn't worth it. I'm speaking off the cuff and I'd rather say something more prepared about such a thing.

links to that on my social media accounts. I will probably blast it on the substack as well, But yeah, that's coming. In terms of other things, I'm back at school. I'm having a great time getting deep into the weeds with the research for my thesis, as well as getting into modern European history. That's sort of the main topics of discussion this semester. It was a lot of fun this last week talking about the classic ep Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class. Believe me, it was

actually a lot more fun than that might sound. But you know, maybe that's why I'm studying history. I find that stuff fine. So with that said, yeah, I'm focusing more on school right now, but I'm trying to get stuff out to you. I've been reaching out to people for conversations. We have some things cooking, hopefully. I really appreciate all your patients. Between the big narrative episodes, don't worry,

I am working on them. I am also hopefully going to be putting out some narratives, but that will be shorter in nature in the near future, for you all to consume and enjoy as much as one can enjoy some of the material I talk about. So yes, with all that said, thank you again, and please stay tuned for the next episode of History Impossible.