I’m only 30 minutes into the episode, but people like Cooper and Owens, et al., are basically illiterate. Sure, they can read a lot and write a lot, but they have no ground, no foundation. And so they react to every new (for them) “revelation,” not knowing that it is not only not new, but has been proven untrue numerous times.
Numbskulls have overtaken the institutions. Is this what Ortega was getting at in The Revolt of the Masses?
I'm going to defend Cooper here. I thought the criticism of his Tucker interview was justified, and I think he probably does hold authoritarian right wing personal viewpoints, but I found the characterizations of what he said in the JRE interview on Twitter to be mostly in bad faith. My background is I was a European history major at a shit undergrad like 20 years ago, but have read a bunch of the authoritative tomes of the era (Kershaw's 2-part Hitler biography, Evans' 3-part history of the Third Reich, etc...) more recently. A lot of the criticism seems to come down to these few points (these were not so much the criticisms on the pod, but I get to those briefly at the end)
1) Cooper makes an offhand reference to Hitler growing up in a "small town in Germany." This is the one that kind of bothers me the most. Obviously, Hitler is from Austria. Basically everybody knows this. Do people really think it's more likely that Cooper didn't know this versus him just making a slip of the tongue?
Say what you want about him, but it's obvious he has read a ton of books about the era. In the middle of the pod, he even gives a critique of Sir Ian Kershaw's history. To be sure, that doesn't mean that ANY of his opinions are correct. But to me, it makes it exceptionally unlikely that he read all of these books and managed to miss the fact that Hitler was not a German citizen for a long time (this would pose modest obstacles at various points in his political career).
2) Cooper makes a statement that "Hitler wasn't going around making anti-Semitic speeches in public" before 1938. I believe this is hyperbole, but also directionally correct for the point he was making, but that's not a point that makes Hiter look sympathetic. It is just a statement that Hitler took effort to tailor his message to whatever audience he was speaking to in order to gain power. This point is made in the mainstream histories. Again, I think Cooper's claim was worded too broadly, but it is definitely true that Hitler devoted extensive time to non-Jewish enemies in the earlier years of his Chancellorship in addition to Jews. Chief among them were Marxists, which (to anticipate a rebuttal) were not always explicitly tied to Jews at the time. Again, the basic point is that Hitler was a paranoid lunatic about multiple topics. I don't see it as apologia.
Also, people (including Moynihan) have cited the "prophecy speech" as evidence that he always talked about Jews and made his plans crystal clear. First, this speech was in 1939, so it was after the period being discussed on the podcast. Second, and more importantly, I am not an historian but I know enough to know that the meaning of this speech is one the most hotly debated issues in the academic discipline of history. It is basically coextensive with the intentionalism vs. functionalism debate. So if you are saying this speech is clear evidence of Hitler's genocidal intentions, you have a reasonable view shared by many eminent historians, but also a view that is not shared by other eminent historians.
3) He made a comment that we should take what Hitler said in Mein Kampf with a "grain of salt" because it was political propaganda. I disagree with the grain of salt part of it to the extent that it implies that what Hitler was saying in it were not his true beliefs. I think Hitler's subsequent conduct made it clear that they were. However, I'm not sure that he meant to say that. The other branch of this--that Mein Kampf was political propaganda--is supported by mainstream historiography on the subject. Before I read some of these histories of the era all that I knew was that Hitler wrote this book in prison after the failed Beer Hall Putsch and my assumption was it was just a personal account from someone giving his true thoughts who was in despair that his political career was ruined. This is actually not the case as while in prison Hitler very quickly began planning his next steps upon release and writing the book was part of that. Again, that doesn't mean that anything in there doesn't reflect his actual beliefs.
4) If people want a more legitimate criticism of Cooper's approach to this go look at his recent tweet where he posted a stack of all the books he was reading to prep his podcast series on the topic. Not only does it include a lot of David's Irving work (which is now discredited and Moynihan got at on the pod), it includes a few books where I noted "IHR" on the spine. Google it (Moynihan will be familiar).
5) Finally, Moynihan's claim that Cooper "holds himself out as a serious historian" is unfair as everything Cooper actually says on this is to the contrary. For this reason, his saying he didn't want to debate a professional historian which Moynihan brings up as a dunk is to his credit on this point. Also, it's a bit unfair to leave out that Roberts is not only a professional historian but basically a professional rhetorician and debater. I'm not sure Cooper being apprehensive about debating him indicates anything but sensibility.
I just want to point out the obvious- if students in Columbia would have done all these things to ANY other group of people. Black students, LGBTQ people, Latino, pick your group- this would not have been tolerated even for a second. If Columbia would have taken steps to make sure this won’t get out of hand, we wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with, with every TikTok account becoming an expert on immigration laws, or his poor wife (who everyone makes sure to mention- is pregnant) claiming that “he was kidnapped”, and Rashida stealing the bring them home slogan for the hostages for this creep. And now, we need to sit with our burned popcorn while these idiots are making him the new George Floyd.
It means only that those jobs (at least welders) are chronically underfilled, despite the high pay. Especially among native-born Americans. Channeling Mike Rowe, if inarticulately.
Thanks for the reply, and forgive my nastiness. I still don’t understand your point in context of that thread, which was about tariffs, free trade, and globalization. If welding, etc., pay a shit-ton, and the jobs are there but under-filled, what explains it?
I think it depends on location. I see it all the time here - kids get into it because of the high pay expectation, but they don't actually want to do it so they end up either bad at it (unemployable) or struggle to find placement because they refuse to move from a heavily saturated area.
The funniest thing Cooper ever said was on Twitter. Sometime around 2017 or so, in what must have been an effort to prove that he was an open minded guy who entertained a variety of perspectives, he tweeted -
I follow two liberals….Dave Rubin and Eric Weinstein
Reset my phone and closed out of the podcast app hoping that the audio issues were related to my phone. Unfortunately not, and it was only the “guy” with no nuts causing problems.
Can we reach a compromise and agree that the government should not deport this Khalil scumbag because of his speech, but at the same time hope and pray that he gets cleaned out by a sprinter van on his way to his next Hamas rally?
I had to pause and walk up the street to see if it was my neighbor/coworker who got in the horrific accident.
Great talk this evening. You guys tackled all the fuckers. Went great with my Sierra Nevada Bigfoot 2025 on this Friday evening. I do believe Moyn would've TP'd Candice Owens' home multiple times and keyed her car by now if he was 12.
Judging by his audio, Kmele must be staying in one of Matt’s murder motels.
Yeah, it’s annoying.
Here is the link to the Andrew Roberts Spectator interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zM6b-zogMvs
Including a solid "rhinocerine capacity for Alcohol" quote about Churchill.
I’m only 30 minutes into the episode, but people like Cooper and Owens, et al., are basically illiterate. Sure, they can read a lot and write a lot, but they have no ground, no foundation. And so they react to every new (for them) “revelation,” not knowing that it is not only not new, but has been proven untrue numerous times.
Numbskulls have overtaken the institutions. Is this what Ortega was getting at in The Revolt of the Masses?
I'm going to defend Cooper here. I thought the criticism of his Tucker interview was justified, and I think he probably does hold authoritarian right wing personal viewpoints, but I found the characterizations of what he said in the JRE interview on Twitter to be mostly in bad faith. My background is I was a European history major at a shit undergrad like 20 years ago, but have read a bunch of the authoritative tomes of the era (Kershaw's 2-part Hitler biography, Evans' 3-part history of the Third Reich, etc...) more recently. A lot of the criticism seems to come down to these few points (these were not so much the criticisms on the pod, but I get to those briefly at the end)
1) Cooper makes an offhand reference to Hitler growing up in a "small town in Germany." This is the one that kind of bothers me the most. Obviously, Hitler is from Austria. Basically everybody knows this. Do people really think it's more likely that Cooper didn't know this versus him just making a slip of the tongue?
Say what you want about him, but it's obvious he has read a ton of books about the era. In the middle of the pod, he even gives a critique of Sir Ian Kershaw's history. To be sure, that doesn't mean that ANY of his opinions are correct. But to me, it makes it exceptionally unlikely that he read all of these books and managed to miss the fact that Hitler was not a German citizen for a long time (this would pose modest obstacles at various points in his political career).
2) Cooper makes a statement that "Hitler wasn't going around making anti-Semitic speeches in public" before 1938. I believe this is hyperbole, but also directionally correct for the point he was making, but that's not a point that makes Hiter look sympathetic. It is just a statement that Hitler took effort to tailor his message to whatever audience he was speaking to in order to gain power. This point is made in the mainstream histories. Again, I think Cooper's claim was worded too broadly, but it is definitely true that Hitler devoted extensive time to non-Jewish enemies in the earlier years of his Chancellorship in addition to Jews. Chief among them were Marxists, which (to anticipate a rebuttal) were not always explicitly tied to Jews at the time. Again, the basic point is that Hitler was a paranoid lunatic about multiple topics. I don't see it as apologia.
Also, people (including Moynihan) have cited the "prophecy speech" as evidence that he always talked about Jews and made his plans crystal clear. First, this speech was in 1939, so it was after the period being discussed on the podcast. Second, and more importantly, I am not an historian but I know enough to know that the meaning of this speech is one the most hotly debated issues in the academic discipline of history. It is basically coextensive with the intentionalism vs. functionalism debate. So if you are saying this speech is clear evidence of Hitler's genocidal intentions, you have a reasonable view shared by many eminent historians, but also a view that is not shared by other eminent historians.
3) He made a comment that we should take what Hitler said in Mein Kampf with a "grain of salt" because it was political propaganda. I disagree with the grain of salt part of it to the extent that it implies that what Hitler was saying in it were not his true beliefs. I think Hitler's subsequent conduct made it clear that they were. However, I'm not sure that he meant to say that. The other branch of this--that Mein Kampf was political propaganda--is supported by mainstream historiography on the subject. Before I read some of these histories of the era all that I knew was that Hitler wrote this book in prison after the failed Beer Hall Putsch and my assumption was it was just a personal account from someone giving his true thoughts who was in despair that his political career was ruined. This is actually not the case as while in prison Hitler very quickly began planning his next steps upon release and writing the book was part of that. Again, that doesn't mean that anything in there doesn't reflect his actual beliefs.
4) If people want a more legitimate criticism of Cooper's approach to this go look at his recent tweet where he posted a stack of all the books he was reading to prep his podcast series on the topic. Not only does it include a lot of David's Irving work (which is now discredited and Moynihan got at on the pod), it includes a few books where I noted "IHR" on the spine. Google it (Moynihan will be familiar).
5) Finally, Moynihan's claim that Cooper "holds himself out as a serious historian" is unfair as everything Cooper actually says on this is to the contrary. For this reason, his saying he didn't want to debate a professional historian which Moynihan brings up as a dunk is to his credit on this point. Also, it's a bit unfair to leave out that Roberts is not only a professional historian but basically a professional rhetorician and debater. I'm not sure Cooper being apprehensive about debating him indicates anything but sensibility.
Thank you for the episode guys.
I just want to point out the obvious- if students in Columbia would have done all these things to ANY other group of people. Black students, LGBTQ people, Latino, pick your group- this would not have been tolerated even for a second. If Columbia would have taken steps to make sure this won’t get out of hand, we wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with, with every TikTok account becoming an expert on immigration laws, or his poor wife (who everyone makes sure to mention- is pregnant) claiming that “he was kidnapped”, and Rashida stealing the bring them home slogan for the hostages for this creep. And now, we need to sit with our burned popcorn while these idiots are making him the new George Floyd.
Can we get Kmele a working mic? That was really hard to listen to.
Okay you fucks you got me paying again. Bravo. Make sure to have a few drinks and take a few edibles.
And insulin
And Adderall.
Matt: People don’t want to become plumbers and welders, and they get paid bank!
Tell that to the plumbers and welders and electricians and roofers and dry-wallers and painters I recently hired.
I never once got the impression that any of them were there against their will. They all seemed to “want to be” those things.
What does his comment even mean?
Matt can sometimes be a dumbass.
It means only that those jobs (at least welders) are chronically underfilled, despite the high pay. Especially among native-born Americans. Channeling Mike Rowe, if inarticulately.
The rise of AI could make “Learn to Weld” the new “Learn to Code”—as to plumbing, “Learn to Snake”?
*learn to snek
Thanks for the reply, and forgive my nastiness. I still don’t understand your point in context of that thread, which was about tariffs, free trade, and globalization. If welding, etc., pay a shit-ton, and the jobs are there but under-filled, what explains it?
I think it depends on location. I see it all the time here - kids get into it because of the high pay expectation, but they don't actually want to do it so they end up either bad at it (unemployable) or struggle to find placement because they refuse to move from a heavily saturated area.
The funniest thing Cooper ever said was on Twitter. Sometime around 2017 or so, in what must have been an effort to prove that he was an open minded guy who entertained a variety of perspectives, he tweeted -
I follow two liberals….Dave Rubin and Eric Weinstein
Reset my phone and closed out of the podcast app hoping that the audio issues were related to my phone. Unfortunately not, and it was only the “guy” with no nuts causing problems.
Can we reach a compromise and agree that the government should not deport this Khalil scumbag because of his speech, but at the same time hope and pray that he gets cleaned out by a sprinter van on his way to his next Hamas rally?
If he’s actively campaigning for a terrorist group wouldnt that be grounds for sending him packing? Maybe some gray area idk but fuck him.
I hope that whoever gave Mahmoud Khalil a green card has a dog that poops in his shoes every day.
Audio issues aside this was a great episode!
I had to pause and walk up the street to see if it was my neighbor/coworker who got in the horrific accident.
Great talk this evening. You guys tackled all the fuckers. Went great with my Sierra Nevada Bigfoot 2025 on this Friday evening. I do believe Moyn would've TP'd Candice Owens' home multiple times and keyed her car by now if he was 12.
A you talk about why mutual funds in gold stick go up in a time like this?
Jesus. can* stock*
If you’re trying to throw together a decent Peterson impression, this guy is a good template https://youtu.be/8MprcNIKYrM