Who Owns the Flag? From the American Revolution to Charlie Kirk

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1:03David McWilliams: To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered by Acast. How are you doing there? It is time for the podcast. And the podcast today comes from New York City. It must be said, John, we are doing a lot of traveling. Well, you are. But I am, exactly. I'm here in New York for two very special events. The first one is trying to put together the rollout of the publication of the book, which was called Money, a Story of Humanity in the UK and South Africa and Australia and all around, and of course in Ireland. It's going to be called The History of Money in the United States.

1:52David McWilliams: So, A History of Money, A Story of Humanity, and it is now available for pre-order. Why did they change? because that's the American way, John. That's the first event, right? I'll tell you all about that. By the way, if you are in New York, pencil in an event on the 18th of November. I will be launching the book in New York University, NYU. I'll give you further details when I get them on the podcast, probably next week. But John, the more important event I am here for, it is my mother's 90th birthday. Ah, happy birthday, Alice. And Cal, my son, is over here. We were sitting around during the summer, and Granny was saying, you know, you're in America.

2:37David McWilliams: I haven't been to New York. She's been here once before. I took her about 30 years ago. Yeah. So at the age of 90, she is here with me. We are having a total laugh. She's seen her grandson. Lucy came over with us, and Shan, so the whole family is here. But I don't know what's with my mother. Her energy is phenomenal. The rest of us are all jet-lized. And Granny's like, come on, go up the Empire State. Maybe keep her out of those weed shops. It's quite amazing. So she celebrated her 90th here. And of course, therefore, we had to stay. She wanted, it's a home from home in Fitzpatrick's on Lexington Avenue.

3:11David McWilliams: Big shout out to everyone. Fitzpatrick's have been amazing to Alice, to my mother. So thank you very much. And also the crew on Aer Lingus, particularly Amy, who looked after Granny on the way over. Thank you very, very much indeed. because again, when you're 90, the world is, you know, it's busy and it's bustling. I'm in awe of Alice, I have to say. 90 and trucking around New York, giving it loads. Giving it loads. We were telling you, we were on this thing called, we're doing lots of touristy things. We're on the Circle Line. I don't know if you know it. It's a boat that goes around the whole island of Manhattan.

3:43David McWilliams: And you can see the skyline, you know, from the water. You can see the Statue of Liberty, the various bridges, the Williamsburg Bridge, you know, the Brooklyn Bridge, all these things. And you can really identify all the various, all the boroughs and all the different areas. Granny's up there chatting away to the compere, the host, you know, finding out that he's Irish-American, where are your people from, all that good stuff. That's hilarious. Did you go down to the Twin Towers? Well, it's funny, I was down there. It's funny you mentioned that, John. I've packed in so much, right? I was down there on Friday afternoon at the Perelman Centre, which is this big performing arts centre, to see somebody that I've always wanted to listen to, Monica Lewinsky.

4:24David McWilliams: Oh! It was the Atlantic Magazine's festival, right? Yeah. Which is a big, big, big festival. And one of the things, you know, I was always fascinated, you know, it's like when you're putting festivals together as well, what's the one that kind of jumps out at you? And it was Monica Lewinsky talking about the notion of shame. What it's like to be publicly shamed. What it's like to live all your life with the echo of just one bad decision, one mistake, you know. And it was amazing listening to her because she was really humorous, very funny, traumatized, obviously, a lot of counselling. But, you know, I was just looking at, there's this woman, she was whatever she was, 23.

5:05Yeah.

5:05David McWilliams: And she's now in her 50s. And it was just, it was a fascinating discussion. I just sat there and just... What did she do now? ...listened... Well, one thing she said was fascinating. She tried to reinvent herself. She went to college in London, in the UK. she tried to emigrate to the UK in order to escape the legacy of the Clinton affair and she couldn't she said that was the worst thing so she went to Grand for about 10 years then she tried to reinvent herself and she just said that the fame but she said the shame followed her everywhere so nobody would give her a job because she was one of Lewinsky and now she's got her own podcast, she writes a lot she does also support groups for people and again you see What she was making the point was she was shamed at the dawning of the internet age.

5:53Yeah, yeah, true.

5:55David McWilliams: But what it's like now for people to be shamed in public, to be the recipients of pylons online, all that sort of anonymous attacking of you, etc., etc., etc. But it was fascinating. But that was down. That was the Perelman Center. It was down just where 9-11, the memorial to 9-11 is. So yeah, I've been doing this. It's a combination of look at the culture war in the United States because it is everywhere. And against the background of next year, next year is the 250th anniversary of the 4th of July, 1776. So it's the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of the American Republic. Right, right.

6:40David McWilliams: That's a huge deal. It's a massive, massive deal. It's a massive commemoration. It's a pivotal hinge point in American history. And what you can see, so evident now, is both sides, the MAGA, Trump side vis-a-vis the Democrat, let's say, centrist side. So it's the liberals versus the conservatives. It's the isolationists versus the interventionists. It's the one nation America versus American global superpower idea. It's exactly what we were talking about the other day. But it has been framed now. And every single public event, every single article, every single editorial is driven by the notion of who gets to own America and the story of America on the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution.

7:33David McWilliams: And I can really see this happening. Yeah. What's interesting, though, as well, is that next year is the midterm elections. Next November, isn't it? 26? So Trump is going to be all out for this. And as you say, owning the flag and America is going to be crucial. It's all about who's going to be the most patriotic person. Who will wrap themselves in the flag? Who's going to be the star-spangled banner? And what is interesting is that although MAGA seems to own the flag at the moment, because it's talking about patriotism, it's talking about history, it's talking about basically white America, right?

8:12David McWilliams: But what you also see is that liberal America also is gunning to own the flag as well. So what you're going to see, I think, is that everything in the next 12 months is going to be framed in that prism. The culture war, the murder of Charlie Kirk, the reaction to it, which is everywhere here. Yeah, oh yeah. The economic policy, political, let's say, bannerism, the whole thing. And the fascinating thing was that the other night I went to what I would say is the first of these things. What was that? The premiere of, so there's a guy called Ken Burns in America. Historians who follow this podcast will probably know, particularly American historians, particularly televisual historians, will know that Ken Burns has been, in a way, the chronicler of American history on public broadcasting.

9:04David McWilliams: So PBS, right? Yeah. The public broadcast service. and he's the guy who has directed and written these big biopics of American history like so one on the civil war in 1990 one on prohibition one on Vietnam one on baseball right so these real American ideas right things that defined America he's usually the guy that they go to to make the big documentaries and the latest rejected by the kind of MAGA heads I suppose Probably rejected by the magazine, but the idea is that public broadcasting would have a bigger budget for these sort of big biopics. So his latest one, now again, it's like American autobiographies.

9:43David McWilliams: There's no American autobiography I've ever read, which is less than 800 pages. They fucking love long books, right? And they love long documentaries. Right. Your book will go down the storm then. Yeah, but they do. I mean, the thing about the Americans is you get like a, you know, for example, a biography of LBJ. will be a four-volume, 500-page work. They don't miss anything. That's just the way they are. It's an American way, whereas we are much more likely to take shortcuts in documentaries. And I assume, when I've been making documentaries over the years, John, you assume that your audience know a huge amount and you're just nudging them in a certain direction.

10:26David McWilliams: Whereas in America, the assumption is everyone's coming from zero knowledge. Yeah, they're taking shit. It's like the cat in the hat approach to documentaries, right? It doesn't mean they're not good, but it means they're very long. So I went to the premiere of this new one, just simply called, and it's going to be out in about three weeks' time. American listeners can catch it on PBS. It's going to be called The American Revolution, right? And it is a massive, massive historical work on what happened, who the protagonists were, all that sort of thing. The most fascinating thing I heard, John, there was, you know this Irish, us Irish people believe that we're always pro-revolutionary, anti-British.

11:08Yeah.

11:08David McWilliams: You know, on the right side, on the side of the angels. Do you know that the general who surrendered the British forces to George Washington was not an English man? He was a guy called General O 'Hara. He was fucking Irish. Really? Really? Let's Google it. Google it. A guy called General O 'Hara. So basically, Washington wouldn't, because the Brits, they surrendered. Cornwallis was the British commander. And Washington decided he would insult Cornwallis and not meet him. Because Cornwallis wanted the Brits to basically surrender five or 6 ,000 troops to go back to the UK. But Washington said, no, no, no, we're going to take you as prisoners of war because we don't trust you in the negotiations.

11:55David McWilliams: And of course, Cornwallis said, well, I can't stand over that because I'm a British general. And he said, well, get your number two to surrender to me. And his number two was a guy called O 'Hara. These are the things you learn, John. So he was thrown under the bus and drew the short straw. He drew the short straw, but the problem was he was Irish fighting for the Redcoats against the American patriots. Yeah. Another thing I didn't realize is that 75 % of the black troops that fought in the American War of Independence fought for the British. Okay. They fought against the American patriots because the American patriots were slave owners.

12:31David McWilliams: Yeah, yeah. So you start to realize that the whole thing was quite complicated. Like what we're going to see in the next 12 months is a sanitized black and white, sorry for the expression, black and white version of history. Good guys on the patriotic side, bad guys on the British side. Okay. Good guys on the republic side, bad guys on the empire side. And then you realize it's really all, it's really complicated. Much more nuanced, yeah. Yeah. But it's interesting as well about how Trump is attacking the American education system, you know, from universities all the way down to schools, you know, banning certain books and subjects like, you know, what was that called?

13:09Critical race theory, etc. But, you know, he's he's distorting history. You know, if you say anything negative about American, you're you're anti-American. Like, where's the free speech gone? But also, as you're saying that who owns the American flag. That's very reminiscent of the UK. Who owns the George flag, St. George flag? And even as we mentioned before about the Irish flag, you know, the Ireland is full, lads are, you know, wrapping themselves in that along with kneecap and all the rest.

13:39David McWilliams: But that's it's who owns history owns the future. This is the key, right? Whoever owns the narrative. So in the case of Ireland, we had this when we were young, a constant struggle between the Irish state and the provost as to who spoke for Irish nationalism. Yeah. And John Hume, and together with Charlie Hawley and Gareth Fitzgerald and all those guys, okay, when they came up with the New Ireland Forum, and this is very much alive in Irish diplomacy. Part of that was wrestling Irish nationalism and the flag away from the gunmen. That was always the case. And we're now in the same situation with the Irish.

14:17David McWilliams: Ireland is full, are basically saying they're the patriots and the people who are not on the Irish in full side, which is basically centrists, are traitors. That's what they call them all these days. Exactly the same stuff going on here, except here the stakes are so, so much bigger. And how are you seeing that on the streets of New York? Like New York City was always the liberal multicultural haven. Well, I think that New York is always, New York is what they would call yellow dog democrat, John. What does that mean? Okay, a yellow dog Democrat comes from a Southern expression, which is, I'd rather vote for a yellow dog than vote Republican.

14:55David McWilliams: That was an expression from Southern Dixie Democrats in the 19th century. Now, what was a yellow dog, John? A yellow dog was a thing called a Carolina dog, which is the only dog in America that doesn't come from European ancestry. It was an indigenous dog. Oh, right. Okay. So it was a dog that was used by indigenous Americans, by Indians. Yeah, yeah. And of course, the white men, so deep was their races, they didn't even trust the dog of the Indians. So they would call themselves, I'd rather vote for a yellow dog than a Republican. So a yellow dog Democrat is a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat. And these people here are dyed-in-the-wool Democrats.

15:36David McWilliams: Trump is deeply unpopular in New York, etc. But another thing, before we get into it, is you might hear all the sirens going in the background. What the sirens are for, and it's really pissing off New Yorkers, is this week is the UN General Assembly. Yeah. And that shuts down all of New York. And the local New Yorkers, they are so pissed off, you know. I would say. So they may be yellow dog Democrats, but they don't like the elite. Again, right? Yeah. And for them, the United Nations is the elite. So what you have is like blacked out cars, cops everywhere, where streets closed, traffic, horns going, all that sort of stuff.

16:17And this feeds into Trump's idea that basically the UN jamboree here this week

16:25David McWilliams: is nothing more than a talking shop for the woke global agenda, right? The woke mind virus, as they call it, okay? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so there's lots of things going on. So let's put structure in the podcast, right? First thing I want to talk about is who owns the flag. Second thing I want to talk about is the reaction to the Charlie Kirk murder and what is happening. Put it into a bit of a historical context, maybe. And then the third thing is this coming battle this week between cosmopolitanism, which is the United Nations, and MAGA-ism, which is patriotic America. But the first thing is this idea of the American Revolution is an effort, a very interesting effort, but I can see the way it's framed.

17:09David McWilliams: It's an effort by liberal America to own the ideals of the revolution, to say that they are the direct descendants. So what are those ideals? The major one is humanism, that all men are created equal. This is the essential essence of the American revolution, at least the document. So liberals want to own that and they're going to do everything in their power to deploy the idea that they, are the direct descendants of George Washington and Hamilton and all those geeseers, right? Yeah. It was that kind of humanitarian, all men are equal view, but under the eyes of God, of a Christian God. Oh, you've got to have God here, John.

17:54David McWilliams: You've got to have God. You've got to have God. Even Granny rejected going to Mass yesterday. Even Granny couldn't be bothered going to Mass yesterday. If we're going to go to St. Patrick's Cathedral, she's not at all. Give me a pumpernickel on rye sort of thing. Anyway, anyway. So let me come back. That struck me as very interesting that next summer. But I'm going to plant a seed in your head here, John. Go on. And the seed is the revolutionary potential of the World Cup in America. So the two big things next year here are the 250th anniversary of the revolution and the World Cup. and their biggest stadiums for the World Cup.

18:36David McWilliams: They're going on about the World Cup, etc. Now, I think liberals will use the World Cup as their weapon against MAGA. Why? Because the World Cup is cosmopolitan. More interestingly, the footballers who will be playing in the World Cup and the successful footballers look like immigrants. They look like the immigrants the Americans try to get. They're going to be black. They're going to be Latin American. they're going to be from what they call the global south. It's a general rule. And the European teams who are successful will be very cosmopolitan. And actually, I was just reading there that Spain have threatened or are threatening to pull out of the World Cup.

19:17You know, and they could win the bloody thing, but they're threatening to pull out if Israel play. Wow, that's a big deal. And something like nine other countries have threatened to boycott or will be boycotting the World Cup.

19:30David McWilliams: Could you imagine the amazing global news headlines if Ireland threatened to boycott the World Cup? I think we already have. Exactly. We both did it ourselves. Exactly. But no, so again, we're going into this weird world. It's America and Israel versus the rest. You'll see this in the UN this week. But to come back to this idea, the World Cup is the biggest sporting tournament on the globe, right? It is watched by billions of people across four major continents. It will have football stars that are household names in a huge amount of the world, except for America. It's a huge thing, because the household names here are basketball players and baseball players and American football players.

20:19David McWilliams: And of course, the support and the ethos of the World Cup is anti-racism, is cosmopolitanism, is all that sort of stuff. So you heard it here first in the Dave McWilliams podcast, the weaponization of the World Cup in America is something to watch for 2026. Because I think that the liberals have to find something that is celebratory, that is joyful, that is fun. Because the thing about Trump is that to his fans, he is joyful, he's celebratory, he's fun, he cracks jokes, all those things. And the liberals are like a bunch of po-faced academics complaining, pointing their fingers saying, you shouldn't do this.

20:58Yeah, yeah.

20:58David McWilliams: So it's all to play for. But what I really saw this week is the beginning of this essential drawing of the lines between liberals and conservatives. The MAGA guys are talking about they are the patriots. The MAGA guys are saying the American Revolution was a bottom-up liberation struggle by small farmers who wanted to be free. Yeah. And the liberals are going to say, but those small farmers who wanted to be free, essentially it was a row between English people over land. One bunch of English people live here and one bunch of English people lived in England. That's what I think, right? But they're going to say the essential difference is those patriots were driven by a higher cause, and that higher cause is that all men are born equal.

21:53David McWilliams: And if you have all men are born equal, then you cannot have ICE kicking out migrants. You cannot have people turning on different races, all that sort of thing. You cannot say that America is white. Now, against all this background, John, of course, this week was the memorial for Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk, yeah. Which has been completely dominant on the airwaves, right? Everyone taking sides. Everybody feeling that they own a bit of this guy. Everybody feeling that, so for example, the progressives initially accused the killer, a guy called Tyler Robinson of being MAGA. Yeah. Jimmy Kimmel, maybe the best known of all the chat show hosts, goes on TV last week and says, you know what, the MAGA guys are trying to pretend that this guy wasn't one of them, but he was.

22:51David McWilliams: He's been fired. Yeah. His show has been taken off air. Well, actually, I think they're going to be bringing back Jimmy Kimmel. But nonetheless, what I find incredible is the pace of the crackdown of free speech in America. You know, it's the hypocrisy of the MAGA lot. You know, when you say anything negative about America, you're automatically anti-American. You know, you talk about Jimmy Kimmel. I think I was mentioning to you before that the Pentagon have announced that all reporters must report only good news. Any negative news will not be approved and will not be allowed to be published or broadcast or whatever.

23:33You know, and we spoke about the schools as well. It's absolutely a crackdown on freedoms. It is certainly not the land of the free.

23:42David McWilliams: Well, Trump has done, it was said to me the other night, Trump has done about 100 things since he got in that if any one of the last 10 presidents did one of those things, there would be a constitutional scandal. Yeah. But there isn't. because basically all of America, powerful elite America, is lining up to kiss the ring. If you saw even at Buckingham Palace the other night, Sam Altman, you know, the guy from Apple. It was kind of the techno-feudal overlords and the monarch kissing the ring of the king of America. Not the president, the king of America. So again, what you see is that this is a sort of vibrant democracy in its own sense.

24:33David McWilliams: But the vibrant democracy, and this is one thing I think the liberals can't get their head around, the vibrant democracy is delivering the autocrats. So even if you think, you know, Orban, he's elected, right? You'd think that Le Pen, she's going to be elected. You think that Gert Wilders, Wilders in the Netherlands, he was elected. Farage, elected. ADFD elected, Meloni elected. These people are all essentially Democrats. And I think what the Democratic liberals can't understand is that what the people are voting for is a rejection of what they have been fed for the last 30 or 40 years. And this is, I think, why the liberal world, particularly here in America, is kind of lost because they're trying their best to understand what's going on.

25:20David McWilliams: They talk to me about, oh, we need a messiah. This is their whole idea. We need somebody, we need a white man, preferably with military experience, who is a liberal, but who was hard on this, this, this, and this. And what they're looking for is they're looking to make personal what is in effect a deep systemic crisis for the centre, the centre-left, or even the centre-right. And it's fascinating to see it here. But, Mac, you know the whole Charlie Kirk thing? You know, obviously that was a really serious incident, and a tragedy, you know, to be fair. But, you know, we've had this kind of thing before in history, but is that the kind of event that could spark not just the division, which it has already done so, but, you know, could it bring it to something even more serious?

26:11Civil war, God forbid. But before you answer that, let's do a bit of this first.

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28:17So you're in New York. Do the New York shuffle with your map?

28:21David McWilliams: With the 90-year-old map. With the 90-year-old map. But you're also surrounded by MAGA, right, left and centre. And the Charlie Kirk Memorial was on last weekend. And I was just wondering, could that event, that incident, Could that be the spark for something greater than just a division between right and left, Democrat and Republican, MAGA and liberal? You know, could it spark something even more serious? Well, it's across all networks here. Now, Trump at that memorial. So he flies in from London, then to Korea, then to Arizona. so whatever he's taken I want some of that because my ma has it Trump and your ma would get on great I'm sure they probably would actually same generation mum's older Trump basically said and he blamed Kirk's death on what he called the radical left and he vowed to avenge the killing by pursuing political opponents including those what Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, has described as engaging hate speech.

29:40David McWilliams: Now, that could be anything. He also said, Trump said, Charlie Kirk didn't hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. And then, this is what Trump says, that's where I disagree with Charlie. I hate my opponent. I don't want the best for them. Trump said this at the beginning. But, I mean, this is the way he talks. I'm not sure, by the way, if Charlie Kirk actually was full of love. I mean, it doesn't matter. We're now in drama, John. We're now in drama. High drama. And of course, what they are doing is they are taking the murderer of Charlie Kirk, who's a guy called Tyler Robinson, and they are accusing Robinson of being part of a broader global left-wing movement of radical left-wingers against conservative America.

30:31David McWilliams: So this is how it's been framed. The main proponent of this isn't Trump, it's J.D. Vance. But the point is they're feeding into this idea, online in particular, that there is a global Antifa-led conspiracy against American economics, American politics, American patriotism. And America is surrounded on all sides by enemies, but it also has what Mrs. Thatcher described as the enemy within. And the enemy within is a much more insidious deployment of language because the enemy within, Mrs. Thatcher deployed against the miners, for example. She said they are the enemy within. Yes. Then the socialists, then the Trotskyites, then the Labour Party, etc.

31:17David McWilliams: And Mrs. Thatcher, as we know, very democratically, went on a campaign against her enemies within the country. There is an amazing amount of historical precedents and parallels for this, for using one event to besmirch, humiliate, isolate and attack a whole group. Did you ever hear of a fella, John, called Herschel Grinspan? No. Right, so Herschel Grinspan was, and it's a fascinating story. The reason I'm interested in this is because the next podcast we're going to be talking about Alan Greenspan. But Herschel Greenspan is the same name. So Greenspan is a Yiddish name probably from Poland or Russia.

32:08It means green branch.

32:11David McWilliams: And what happened in the Polish and Lithuanian Pale, which was the area which accepted in lots and lots of Jewish people in the 15th century, most of the Jews went by the name of their father. So you were like, which was the case in like, you know, I'm David Mac Williams, David the son of Dahi Mokliem, Dahi the son of Liam, right? Or the son of William, right? Quite very, very normal name structure. But when the Poles and the Austrians further south wanted to have censuses, they required all those Jewish people to acquire names. Okay. Which is why they've got nails at Goldberg and Goldschmidt and all these things, you know.

32:52David McWilliams: And greenspan, and greenspan means somebody who lives in a green area under the span, which is a branch. So somebody lived beside a green tree. In a treehouse. In a treehouse, yeah, yeah. So the geezers who live in the treehouse. Anyway, but this is the fascinating thing, right? On the 7th of November, 1938, in Paris, a young man walks into the German embassy, and he wants to assassinate the German ambassador. Right. His name, not the ambassador, the killer's name is Herschel Grinspan. Now, who was he and what happened? He was a guy born in Germany to Polish Jewish refugees who had moved from Poland to Germany after the First World War.

33:41David McWilliams: And, of course, during the 1920s, those guys tried to integrate into Germany, but during the 1930s they became the subject of all the various different Nazi regulations about Jews not being able to do this, that and the other. Grinspan himself ends up leaving Germany to live with his uncle in Paris, but he is absolutely traumatized by what's happening to his parents and what happened to his parents is his parents were being rounded up because they didn't have German passports and they were being dumped on the Polish-German border. About 12 ,000 or 14 ,000 of these people. and of course what they're being dumped in is in refugee camps.

34:17Yeah.

34:18David McWilliams: They've got no food, no water, etc. Not unlike Gaza, ironically, today. Yeah. So Grinspan decides on his own that he is going to murder and assassinate the ambassador of Germany to France to send a signal to the world that look what is happening to these Jewish people on the border of Poland and Germany. He goes in with a gun. he doesn't know what the ambassador looks like. Surely that's kind of fundamental. I know, I know, exactly. Please have a picture. He walks past the ambassador. He actually almost bumps into the ambassador in the foyer of the German embassy because he's born in Germany, even though he's a sort of, he hasn't been in Germany for a while, he speaks German absolutely fluently.

35:06Yeah.

35:06David McWilliams: He says to the people at the desk, can I speak to the ambassador? The guy at the desk says, no, the ambassador has just left. The guy at the desk is a low-ranking Nazi diplomat called Ernst von Rath. Greenspan panics, realizes he's missed the ambassador, who he should have had a photograph of, I suspect, basically. It's a fundamental thing. What a crap assassin. Takes out his revolver, shoots Ernst von Rath. And when he shoots Ernst von Rath, he says, this is for the 12 ,000 Jews on the Polish border. Right? Right, right. He is arrested. The news gets back to Germany. So this is on the 7th of November, 1938.

35:52David McWilliams: The news gets back to Goebbels. Goebbels says, aha, this is a propaganda moment for us. This is magic. Because we can suggest, because it happened in France, under the auspices of the French police who were supposed to be protecting the German ambassador that there is a global Jewish conspiracy against Germany and Germans. And what we're going to do there is we are going to allow people to take their own revenge on the enemy within, who are the Jews. Right. And what that does, so it's the 7th of November, Greenspan kills, or Grinspin kills von Rath. On the 9th and 10th of November, 1938, you have the pogrom that is known as Kristallnacht, the night of the broken glass, where 30 ,000 Jews were arrested.

36:55David McWilliams: 30 ,000 Jews were arrested. All their property was destroyed, synagogues were destroyed, all that sort of stuff. So when I'm sitting in America and I'm listening to all this inflammatory speech, all this idea that there's a big left wing conspiracy, all this idea that Tyler Robinson is but the thin end of a wedge and he is nothing but the assassin who is at the vanguard of this enormous movement. and we're going to deploy sort of laws against hate speech and all that sort of stuff, what fascinates me is how, as you say, one event can have what can be the spark for all sorts of other events, right?

37:40David McWilliams: If the people on top are sufficiently motivated to use that. So typically what happens is that the political class and the top will, in the last 30 years, try to move to take the heat out of moments, right? Reach some sort of consensus. If there is an assassination, we come together, we say this is an awful thing, it doesn't represent humanity, it doesn't represent us, it's the lone gunman, the lone wolf, etc. What we're now into is an administration and a movement that is very happy to use one event, and rather than see it as the tragedy that it is for this guy and his family, the murder victim right this guy charlie kirk to actually use this as the weapon to galvanize an entire movement yeah and what we saw in germany i would never ever i think anytime you compare anybody to the nazis you lose the argument right i always think that yeah yeah but what you see is that when an administration and a democratically elected president or prime minister or whatever Chancellor identifies an enemy within as well as an enemy without.

38:55David McWilliams: So tariffs in the Trump world are against the external enemy. The idea of depicting China as the number two to America to be always worried about, alarmed about, put down, that's one enemy. But the enemy within is this idea of liberalism and the woke radical left or whatever. And the Grinspan idea tells you what happens when one guy decides to take the law into his own hand, as Robinson did. I think he said, I hate fascists and I've had enough of this guy's hate speech. I think that was his final words. Grinspan's the same and it opens up an entire new internal front of dissent, counter-dissent, oppression, censorship, etc.

39:51David McWilliams: So just remember the name Grinspan. The reason we remember the name Grinspan is next podcast, John, is going to be about Grinspan's obviously fifth cousin, Alan Greenspan, same name, who used to be the head of the Fed. And we'll talk about the Fed, we'll talk about economics, we'll talk about the American financial system, American economy, American debt, all that good stuff. Yeah, because it is the American economy that could derail this whole MAGA movement. You're absolutely right, John. It's the American economy that could derail it, but it's also corporate America that could keep the thing going because corporate America has lined up behind Trump in a way in which nobody imagined.

40:29David McWilliams: And that's what we saw last week in the Buckingham Palace. That's what we're seeing all the time. Yeah. Basically, Trump is saying, jump, and corporate America is saying, how high? so I'm going back to look after the ma to head probably who knows where he's going to be taking me you know I've got vertigo she'll probably say let's go up the Empire State Building this afternoon okay I'll talk to you in a couple of days alright

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