Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to Behind the Bastards podcast hosted by who
Speaker 2: I assume is the new Pope based on reading the
Speaker 2: first two thirds of an article title that showed up
Speaker 2: in my phone the other day.
Speaker 1: Welcome gonna go on? Is my question?
Speaker 2: Exactly? One more episode? Sophie, Okay, I have slightly I
Speaker 2: have slightly more bit to do here, slightly right? Well, yeah,
Speaker 2: that is that is how it tends well now that
Speaker 2: one guy got to quit the Nazi Nazis famous quitters.
Speaker 2: Uh So we are joined once again by Sophie, Ray Lichterman,
Speaker 2: and Blake Westler, our guest for today. Blake, how you doing?
Speaker 3: I'm doing great. I can't wait to hear more about
Speaker 3: this guy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I can't wait to figure out my pope name.
Speaker 2: You know I've been I've been thinking about it. Right,
Speaker 2: What am I gonna do? You know what am I gonna?
Speaker 2: What is? Who am I going to be as pope?
Speaker 2: Because every pope gets to pick a name?
Speaker 1: You're going to be Pope, Sophie.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, I think I figured it out, Sophie.
Speaker 2: I think I'm gonna have a lot more fun if
Speaker 2: if my pope name is just the whole script to
Speaker 2: B movie. I just gotta really content take that bit
Speaker 2: to its ultimate extint. Just destroy the computing systems that
Speaker 2: the Vatican, the entire Catholic Church is like online infrastructure
Speaker 2: falls apart, freests with chromebooks, just lighting on fire and rectories.
Speaker 2: It's going to be beautiful.
Speaker 3: Improvised though, so I don't know how long the script is.
Speaker 3: Steinfeld did a lot of improv in that.
Speaker 2: I do know how long the script is because it's
Speaker 2: been printed on a number of T shirts at this point.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, it's amazing.
Speaker 2: It's an older meme, but it checks out. We're back
Speaker 2: and we're talking about the life of Karl Schmidt, arch
Speaker 2: theoretician of Nazism, well of fascism in general too. We
Speaker 2: left things off on the eve of World War One.
Speaker 2: Our boy Karl is in love with a con artist,
Speaker 2: but his academic career is slowly starting to pick up steam.
Speaker 2: The way academic life works at this point is that
Speaker 2: he's basically locked in a series of unpaid internships and
Speaker 2: thus constantly begging his uncle and his rich friends, like
Speaker 2: the parents of his rich friends, for money. The Eisler
Speaker 2: family is his most reliable source of support. His whole goal.
Speaker 2: He says this often in his diary and when talking
Speaker 2: to Karrie. He wants to get rich, right, he wants
Speaker 2: to be wealthy. And the way to do that then,
Speaker 2: as a public intellectual, just like it is now, is
Speaker 2: to write a book. Right now today you have to
Speaker 2: write the worst book ever, which gets harder every year
Speaker 2: because so many, so many terrible, terrible books are written
Speaker 2: by public intellectuals every year. Back at this period of time,
Speaker 2: your book had to be have a little more depth
Speaker 2: to it. And the first his first stab at this
Speaker 2: is a work called Word of the State. And this
Speaker 2: is that's the English translation. The German phrase that means
Speaker 2: word of the state is a reference to a concept
Speaker 2: in like German law of the state, in which the
Speaker 2: government and its rulers are constrained in what they can
Speaker 2: do to people by the law.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: That's the title of his book, and the purpose of
Speaker 2: this book is to try to figure out what makes
Speaker 2: a state legitimate right and its laws legitimate. Carl comes
Speaker 2: to define a legitimate state as a state with a constitution,
Speaker 2: not a state that does this or that, or that
Speaker 2: treats people a certain way, but a state that has
Speaker 2: like a set of listed rules that institutionalizes the relationship
Speaker 2: between power and right. Right, So how individuals are treated,
Speaker 2: whether they have rights, that doesn't matter. What matters is
Speaker 2: that the state spells out what it can and will
Speaker 2: do when and where somewhere, right, That's the important thing.
Speaker 2: He includes a line in this work that I find
Speaker 2: fundamentally chilling. Quote, whatever it is that makes a person
Speaker 2: is determined by the legal system itself. And that's that's
Speaker 2: a that's bad. It's going to lead you some dark places, Carl.
Speaker 2: You're gonna lead us all some very dark places. Right.
Speaker 2: But it makes sense if you're coming to this idea
Speaker 2: that like, yeah, the law determines ethics and reality, and
Speaker 2: thus the law determines what is a person right and
Speaker 2: can unperson people, which is sort of the He's not
Speaker 2: writing about that at this point, but it's kind of
Speaker 2: the inevitable conclusion. It's like, well, if the law makes
Speaker 2: a person, the law can stop you from being a person.
Speaker 2: And when I say that, I think he's there's a
Speaker 2: degree of brilliance here. It's not that this is a
Speaker 2: good way to think about things, but this is accurate
Speaker 2: to the way states work already. As soon as as
Speaker 2: long as there have been states. This is how states
Speaker 2: have functioned, whether you like it or not, even our state, Right,
Speaker 2: all this bullshit that we have about natural rights and
Speaker 2: that there's inherent rights, No, you should know right now
Speaker 2: by watching the news, none of that means anything. The
Speaker 2: state and the people with guns within it determine what
Speaker 2: is treated as a person by the state. Right, That's
Speaker 2: what Carl's recognizing, Right, And that's what Carl is laying out,
Speaker 2: and that is accurate, whether or not you like it. Right, individuals,
Speaker 2: he argues, only gains significance by working for and supporting
Speaker 2: the state. So again, while he's sort of there's a
Speaker 2: degree to which, even as an anarchist, you could be like, oh,
Speaker 2: this guy's right in a lot of ways. But where
Speaker 2: he differs is he's like, and that's great, it's good
Speaker 2: that it works this way. It's cool. It's cool that
Speaker 2: the state arbitrarily decides what makes a person right. And
Speaker 2: he argues that this is good because individuals only gain
Speaker 2: significance when working for and supporting the state. In other words,
Speaker 2: you mean nothing outside of your place within the state
Speaker 2: and its power structure. He also argues the law is
Speaker 2: not based on power. Power is based on law, and
Speaker 2: he seems to believe. Again there's this almost spiritual knack
Speaker 2: order that the law naturally moves to better represent right,
Speaker 2: which is weird. Now, not long after this Schmidt gets married,
Speaker 2: or at least he thinks he does. They they have
Speaker 2: like a wedding, but Kyrie loses her passport and so
Speaker 2: they can't get it certified.
Speaker 3: And it's the documents, these damn pieces of paper.
Speaker 2: And again it is weirdly like this like proof that
Speaker 2: he's there's there's something fundamentally accurate about his conception of
Speaker 2: the state because like much as he he's like, no,
Speaker 2: Kyrie is my wife, the State's like, no, she's not.
Speaker 2: That's that's on us to decide, And we've decided no
Speaker 2: because she doesn't have a passport, so she has to
Speaker 2: They're like heading back to their house to finally be
Speaker 2: together in like their marital home, and she has to
Speaker 2: suddenly when like this clerk comes out and I was
Speaker 2: like wait, wait, wait, the passport's both like she doesn't
Speaker 2: have a passport. I can't do this. They have to
Speaker 2: bundle her off to live with his mom so that
Speaker 2: they don't live in sin like unlike what's supposed to
Speaker 2: be their wedding, and Carl starts having panic attacks about
Speaker 2: the fact that Kari is now living with his family. Quote,
Speaker 2: she is in the company of my hateful, mean and
Speaker 2: vicious mother and my spoiled little sister Anna. Only father
Speaker 2: makes life easy for her. I don't know what will
Speaker 2: become of me. She's like, she's gonna leave me because
Speaker 2: my family sucks and she has to live with him now.
Speaker 3: I don't know what will become of it. It all
Speaker 3: comes back to him too, Yeah, where it's always about
Speaker 3: He wasn't talking about what was going to become of me?
Speaker 2: Yeah, what's going to become of my wife? Right?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: I also do love that, like, yeah, it's good, Like
Speaker 2: the state determines what a person is, and like this
Speaker 2: is good and our only value comes from the role
Speaker 2: that we play within the state. And also, oh, the
Speaker 2: thing that I want more than anything isn't possible because
Speaker 2: the state has decided my wife isn't a real person.
Speaker 3: I obviously don't know exactly how I mean. I have
Speaker 3: an idea of how the story ends, obviously, like that's
Speaker 3: been established. But it is interesting that it seems like
Speaker 3: he turns on the people close to him, where yeah,
Speaker 3: obviously because of how his ideologies was adopted by Nazis
Speaker 3: his best friend who is a Jew. That doesn't end well,
Speaker 3: and then also a lot of this stuff, No, no,
Speaker 3: it doesn't, and that a lot of his friends were
Speaker 3: these artists, and artists do not work for the state.
Speaker 3: It's the complete opposite, so they don't matter essentially. So
Speaker 3: it's interesting that he keeps doing this.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, and it really is like, yeah, so through
Speaker 2: the end of nineteen thirteen, he's having constant panic attacks,
Speaker 2: and we can surmise his parents this is like a
Speaker 2: family trait, right, because when he describes them in his
Speaker 2: diary in a way that, like a modern reader is like,
Speaker 2: the motherfucker's having a panic attack, right, But he calls
Speaker 2: them Schmidt effects, right, as in like this is like
Speaker 2: a Schmidt family characteristic that we have these freak outs.
Speaker 2: And it's like, oh, yeah, okay, so your parents are
Speaker 2: like also have this problem, right, and they passed it
Speaker 2: on to you, and you'd think it's just you and
Speaker 2: your family that you're the only people who have ever thought.
Speaker 2: Of course you do this period, it's nineteen thirteen. Where
Speaker 2: would you have read about panic attacks?
Speaker 3: No, we just have heart attacks all the time. Yeah,
Speaker 3: when we get nervous, we all have heart attacks. It's
Speaker 3: a schmid thing.
Speaker 2: It's yeah, we're the only ones who do this. So
Speaker 2: he writes about this in his diaries, and Marrying notes
Speaker 2: that in the wake of these he expresses the bulk
Speaker 2: of his anti Semitic opinions, right that while he's kind
Speaker 2: of like dealing with this this really stressful period. If
Speaker 2: I can't marry this woman that I love, the state
Speaker 2: doesn't consider her legitimate. Marrying notes that in the wake
Speaker 2: of these he writes, quote, saw the two Jews Jacobson
Speaker 2: and Lessing bickering and was glad I no longer have
Speaker 2: anything to do with Rosenbaum, who's another Jewish friend of his.
Speaker 2: I don't want contact with Eisler anymore either, So he
Speaker 2: like sees these two Jewish guys he knows arguing and
Speaker 2: he's like, Ah, it's just like it's just what those
Speaker 2: kind of people do. I'm never going to have any
Speaker 2: contact with them again. Now, this is not going to
Speaker 2: be a permanent state. So it shows that bigotry is
Speaker 2: this thing that he comes back to and discards and
Speaker 2: comes back to. But it's not a stable state for him.
Speaker 2: At this point because he and Eisler are going to
Speaker 2: be dear friends again and for a considerable like he
Speaker 2: will continue to talk about him well, and others have
Speaker 2: other Jewish friends after this period. The point is that
Speaker 2: his racism is a erratic, and it's correlated both with
Speaker 2: stressful times in his life and also these flights of fantasy.
Speaker 2: Right well, he'll write out this anti Semitic screed and
Speaker 2: then he'll declare to his diary, I'm going to get
Speaker 2: into politics and become a powerful man. And then the
Speaker 2: next day he'll write about how he and Kari are
Speaker 2: going to have a son named Johan and he's going
Speaker 2: to grow up to be a cardinal. And then like
Speaker 2: a couple of days later, he's going to be like,
Speaker 2: I'm still too broke. I can't marry my wife. This
Speaker 2: is never We're never going to have our kid. And
Speaker 2: he's so fucking Catholic that when he becomes convinced he's
Speaker 2: not going to be able to have a kid with
Speaker 2: this woman for financial reasons and because of her legal issues,
Speaker 2: he writes in his diary, I am a murderer. I
Speaker 2: am destroyed, have turned into nothing and have murdered the
Speaker 2: soul of a child. Where should I seek refuge in
Speaker 2: the Catholic Church? But I can't, I might as well
Speaker 2: go to the great Dalai Lama of Tibet or some
Speaker 2: Mexican god. And first off, bro like, even in this period,
Speaker 2: most Mexicans are Catholic too, Like just as a heads up,
Speaker 2: like it's the same most of them. It's the same
Speaker 2: god you're worshiping, right, Like, maybe you haven't read those books.
Speaker 3: This guy is so conservative, yeah, that he believes that
Speaker 3: life begins before you have sex with the person, life begins, documentation,
Speaker 3: just anything.
Speaker 1: But going to therapy. And I know it's a sign
Speaker 1: of the time.
Speaker 2: When you and your con artist wife are declare that
Speaker 2: you're gonna have a son who becomes a rid y. Yeah,
Speaker 2: we killed this boy. This boy literally Ohan's dead. Now
Speaker 2: this is essentially an abortion. I guess. I am kind
Speaker 2: of impressed that he knows who the Dalai Lama is
Speaker 2: in this period of time. So I don't know, you know,
Speaker 2: it's ax. We contains well on some things. Again, he
Speaker 2: also thinks Mexican people don't aren't Catholic in a large
Speaker 2: part obviously, Like there's religions in that part of the
Speaker 2: world that have existed before Catholicism, but at this period
Speaker 2: of time that's the dominant religion is the same as his. Anyway,
Speaker 2: he comes to see himself as a gnostic after this point,
Speaker 2: in other words, someone who believes that there's this like
Speaker 2: malicious God that created the world. Right. I think it's
Speaker 2: he's basically believes like the demiurge is what other people
Speaker 2: worship as God, and like what these other folks would
Speaker 2: I always raised to believe is God is actually this
Speaker 2: evil being that just wants to fuck with us right now,
Speaker 2: the fact that he comes around to this beliefs heretical
Speaker 2: belief is entirely centered upon his own financial and career frustrations.
Speaker 2: Right before the war breaks out, his wife gets caught shoplifting. Again.
Speaker 2: This lady, she's always stealing stuff. She's the best, she's
Speaker 2: the best. She gets caught stealing shit, and it causes
Speaker 2: like a year worth of problems for him. Is he
Speaker 2: can't afford to pay the cost, and like he's just
Speaker 2: trying to keep her out of jail. So it's this
Speaker 2: whole constant, like stressful issue on him. The fact that
Speaker 2: his wife got caught shoplifting, his con artist wife.
Speaker 3: What was that horrible for his tingle tangle.
Speaker 2: Tingle tangle girl. Yes, right right, yes, his wife, the
Speaker 2: burlesque dancing con artist, has caught shoplifting and it just
Speaker 2: fucks him up. And then while he's trying to deal
Speaker 2: with all of this, Archduke Franz Ferdinand gets shot in
Speaker 2: Sarajevo and World War One starts winding up. Carl is
Speaker 2: twenty six at the time that it becomes inevitable that
Speaker 2: Germany's going to, you know, make some really bad decisions
Speaker 2: along with everyone else. To be fair, Germany's bad decisions
Speaker 2: aren't unique in this period. Now, this is another massive
Speaker 2: moment for most future German fascists, but not for Carl.
Speaker 2: Karl is not a German patriot. Hitler is like Hitler
Speaker 2: is he strong. He's there when the Kaiser announces the
Speaker 2: start of the war in Berlin. He's part of there's
Speaker 2: pictures of it, you can find him in the crowd.
Speaker 2: He's like enraptured. He describes this like religious experience. He's
Speaker 2: so overjoyed to be going to war on behalf of
Speaker 2: the fatherland. And Carl's like, fuck this illegal war, this
Speaker 2: is Prussian bullshit. The Prussians orchestrated all of this. The
Speaker 2: rest of us Germans want nothing to do with this.
Speaker 2: I certainly go to war with the French. My families
Speaker 2: have French. Fuck these people, fuck all of this. This
Speaker 2: is illegal as hell, right, So he is not at all,
Speaker 2: And in fact, he writes in his diary, I hope
Speaker 2: the French win, and he'll be doing that throughout the war,
Speaker 2: like I just hope the I just want the enemy
Speaker 2: to win. So this is done. This is not a
Speaker 2: patriot right, absolutely not at all. So it's interesting because
Speaker 2: he's going to be so influential to the fascist movement.
Speaker 2: He has the opposite reaction of basically all of these
Speaker 2: other guys. Now that said, he knows the war is
Speaker 2: wrong and dumb, but he doesn't protest it, and he's
Speaker 2: not a conscientious objector. He just doesn't really care about it.
Speaker 2: One gets the feeling he fought. He thinks that, like
Speaker 2: the whole conflict, is something that less intelligent people should
Speaker 2: care about, like not him. He has a lot of
Speaker 2: thinking about what law is to do, right. He doesn't
Speaker 2: volunteer immediately like a lot of people do, like a
Speaker 2: lot of his friends do, and he seems to be
Speaker 2: hoping like, maybe the war will end quickly and I
Speaker 2: just will get to miss out on this. Right now,
Speaker 2: you can contrast this to his best friend Eisler, right again.
Speaker 2: Iisler is a Hungarian national who desperately wants to be German.
Speaker 2: He's othered both because he's Hungarian and because he's Jewish.
Speaker 2: And he had tried repeatedly before the war to become
Speaker 2: a naturalized German citizen, and every time he does it,
Speaker 2: the authorities are like, nah, we don't need you. And
Speaker 2: he wants this in part because he's getting his doctorate
Speaker 2: and he can't actually get confirmed as a PhD or
Speaker 2: work in law unless he's a naturalized German citizen. He
Speaker 2: wants to work in the German government, right he wants
Speaker 2: to be a part of the court system, and he
Speaker 2: has to be a citizen. And the chief of police.
Speaker 2: Before the war, the chief of police in Hamburg denies
Speaker 2: Eisler's citizenship petition by writing, quote, due to the Hungarian
Speaker 2: Jewish descent of the applicant and his father's criminal record,
Speaker 2: that he couldn't approve the application. His dad had done
Speaker 2: some petty crimes as a younger man. So when the
Speaker 2: war breaks out, Eisler applies again, and this time the
Speaker 2: German government is number one. The authorities who had been
Speaker 2: like turning him down are in the military now. So
Speaker 2: it's like people who are younger and maybe a little
Speaker 2: less bigoted, who are you making that call? And they're like,
Speaker 2: all right, you want to join the army, we'll let
Speaker 2: you do that, and we'll make you a citizen. But
Speaker 2: you have to sign a paper promising you'll never work
Speaker 2: for the government. Right, You'll never go after a government career,
Speaker 2: or try to take the state exam to be like
Speaker 2: considered a doctor in Germany. Right, if you do those
Speaker 2: things will make you a citizen and you can join
Speaker 2: the army. And Eisler agrees. That's how badly this kid
Speaker 2: wants to be a German patriot, which is such a bummer,
Speaker 2: given not only what Germany's going to do to Jewish
Speaker 2: people not all that far from now, but given what's
Speaker 2: going to happen to him, Because all this kid wants
Speaker 2: is to be accepted as German, and he feels like, ah,
Speaker 2: the military, they can't they can't utter me if I'm
Speaker 2: in the military, right, they have to respect me as
Speaker 2: a as a patriotic German citizen if I serve in combat.
Speaker 2: So despite the fact that Schmidt had pretty recently written
Speaker 2: a lot of racist about Eisler, he writes at the
Speaker 2: time of having great worry for his friend when Isisler
Speaker 2: joins the army and notes, if only he is not
Speaker 2: killed in action, the dear old fellow. Unfortunately, Fritz Eisler
Speaker 2: joins a field artillery unit and he is deployed immediately
Speaker 2: after the outbreak of hostilities. He is killed by shrapnel
Speaker 2: almost immediately, you know his battery is firing. Allied counter
Speaker 2: battery fire hits nearby and he gets like gutted by
Speaker 2: a piece of metal. Merroring writes Schmidt was moved by
Speaker 2: his untimely death. As a last favorite to his friend,
Speaker 2: he edited one of Eisler's posthumous papers, and he like
Speaker 2: goes to Isisler's family to express his concerns to help
Speaker 2: them deal with his dead friends, like you know, stuff
Speaker 2: and get He becomes almost immediately very good friends with
Speaker 2: Fritz's brother George, and the two will remain friends until
Speaker 2: nineteen thirty two. Like he kind of switches his best
Speaker 2: friendship to George Eisler and it will stay that way
Speaker 2: almost until Hitler rises to power, and he gets actually
Speaker 2: much closer with the Isslers. After Fritz dies, he stays
Speaker 2: over at their house and he writes that he's like surprised, Wow,
Speaker 2: these Jews are like a normal German family. I didn't
Speaker 2: think that that was the case with Jewish people. And
Speaker 2: at the end of this, George's father is like, hey man,
Speaker 2: how much money do you need to continue until you're
Speaker 2: able to get to the money making part of your
Speaker 2: career and writes him a check. So again, even up
Speaker 2: to this point, this family is treating him like a son,
Speaker 2: like Karl Schmidt probably doesn't have an academic career without
Speaker 2: the Isislers backing him up, like they really do take
Speaker 2: him in. Now he has to join the military not
Speaker 2: long after this, because he's a young German Man and
Speaker 2: they don't have enough of those very quickly. Germany has
Speaker 2: a lot of young German men ineen late nineteen fourteen,
Speaker 2: and then a couple months after August a lot less
Speaker 2: German young men.
Speaker 3: So there we're really going, where are these German men?
Speaker 2: They're just kind of feeding them into French machine guns.
Speaker 2: You're doing the same thing, right. Everybody's how fast can
Speaker 2: we get rid of our young men turns out very
Speaker 2: so he joins a reserve infantry unit right which the
Speaker 2: fact that he does this suggests he's trying to keep
Speaker 2: himself out of combat again and the hope that the
Speaker 2: war might end quickly. Now most of the reserve units
Speaker 2: in nineteen fourteen wind up on the front line because
Speaker 2: it's just that kind of war. But he's going to
Speaker 2: try in other ways to delay his service. Bala Chrishnan
Speaker 2: writes while he was in basic training, he claimed to
Speaker 2: have sustained a back injury, and the way Balachristian writes
Speaker 2: it suggests that he doesn't really think this is a
Speaker 2: real injury, or that, like Schmidt, plays it up to
Speaker 2: delay things. But once again luck is on his side.
Speaker 2: Schmidt's first mentor Van Kalker, because he's like a respected gentleman.
Speaker 2: He joins the army and they're like, well, you're a major.
Speaker 2: And obviously he had spent time in the military before,
Speaker 2: because everyone does. Basically he had done like his period
Speaker 2: of national service. So when he joins the full time army,
Speaker 2: he's made a major by virtue of the fact that
Speaker 2: he is a very very respected professor, and because he's
Speaker 2: got this position he's able to get Schmidt a place
Speaker 2: in the Prince's personal regiment. Now, this is not safe. Actually,
Speaker 2: if you're in like the Prince's regiment in the German Army,
Speaker 2: you're going to see heavy combat because the Prince wants
Speaker 2: glory and he's going to send boys today to do it.
Speaker 2: A lot of his colleagues get killed. But Van Kalker
Speaker 2: is like na, na, No, Karl Schmidt is not someone
Speaker 2: we want to feed to machine guns. This guy is smart,
Speaker 2: He's going to be somebody, and he gets him a
Speaker 2: job in the headquarters section, basically shuff fulling paperwork around,
Speaker 2: helping to like handle organizational tasks. And as a result,
Speaker 2: for the entirety of the war, Schmidt is never particularly
Speaker 2: close to like direct fire. I don't even think he's
Speaker 2: very close to indirect But he's never in serious danger, right,
Speaker 2: you know, like elevated from his civilian life. But he
Speaker 2: is not fighting, right, And he's not fighting because this
Speaker 2: mentor again comes in and probably saves his life. Right
Speaker 2: to be like, Nanna, this guy, we don't want this
Speaker 2: guy up at the front. It's just a waste.
Speaker 3: A mentor he turns on yeah, right.
Speaker 2: Well doesn't he just stopped. He just kind of abandons
Speaker 2: him at a certain point. Yeah. Now, after training, but
Speaker 2: before he deploys, Karl takes one last stab at Mary
Speaker 2: and Karrie, and this time the whole system works differently
Speaker 2: because there's a war on. The officials who'd held up
Speaker 2: on naturalizing her were either deployed or had decided like, look,
Speaker 2: this boy is probably going to die, like everybody, give
Speaker 2: him a chance to get this girl pregnant and continue
Speaker 2: the family line, right, Like, that's that's the idea. They're
Speaker 2: really they're rubber stamping a lot of marriage at this stage.
Speaker 3: We're gonna send these babies in the front line, the younger.
Speaker 2: Yeah right, we're gonna need more German boys very soon. Now,
Speaker 2: her birth certificate's obviously fake and she's got pending shoplifting charges,
Speaker 2: but they managed to like brute force this through and
Speaker 2: the two finally get married legally. Karl is immediately deployed,
Speaker 2: and he fucking hates it. He hates the army for
Speaker 2: the first time and only time in his life. Because
Speaker 2: of how much he hates being in the army, he
Speaker 2: radically revises his entire legal and philosophical theory about how
Speaker 2: the world works. He describes life in barracks as a
Speaker 2: hell where he was forced to endure the stink of
Speaker 2: plebes because he had and you know he had previously
Speaker 2: he had been like, well, human value depends upon how
Speaker 2: you are serving the state, And now that he is
Speaker 2: serving the state as effectively its property, he's like, oh,
Speaker 2: but that's awful. That sucks. Ass. No, this can't be
Speaker 2: how things work. Fuck, this is what's serving the states,
Speaker 2: Like this is invaluable at all. I hate the state.
Speaker 2: But no, he writes that he hated quote the god
Speaker 2: of this world, the law for its destruction of the individual. Interesting. Interesting,
Speaker 2: this is he's not gonna stay consistent to this, But
Speaker 2: it is very funny to me that like the moment
Speaker 2: he's made to live with his beliefs, he's like, oh, well,
Speaker 2: obviously this is a terrible idea.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now he began even to dislike his mentor Van Kalker
Speaker 2: in this time. This is kind of when the break
Speaker 2: with him begins, because Van Kolker is a smart man.
Speaker 2: He was not an advocate for war, but he serves,
Speaker 2: and he serves enthusiastically and without great disgust, and even
Speaker 2: till they have an argument at one point and van
Speaker 2: Kalker is like, look, if the state has to break
Speaker 2: commits some minor illegality in order to win the war,
Speaker 2: that's okay. And Carl's like, what the fuck. That's not
Speaker 2: what you taught me at all, Like this isn't how
Speaker 2: it's supposed to work, and he writes he has become
Speaker 2: unfaithful to himself. It interesting. Schmid's private musings during this
Speaker 2: period read almost like protest literature quote. I was mad
Speaker 2: with anger about the Prussians, about militarism. I felt like
Speaker 2: committing the most ostentatious insubordinations. So he's like, I really
Speaker 2: wanted to rebel, but he doesn't. Obviously he's not that guy.
Speaker 2: As part of his early service, he goes to Dacau,
Speaker 2: which at that point we know what Daca is going
Speaker 2: to be later it's a munition's plant at this stage.
Speaker 2: And he writes and he's talking about like looking at
Speaker 2: the conditions in these arms factories, and he says, how
Speaker 2: ghastly for an individual to be sitting in such a prison.
Speaker 2: And it's interesting to be that, like that's his attitude
Speaker 2: about Dacau when it's like an arms facility. But he
Speaker 2: is going to be one of the early. You know
Speaker 2: people who helps to fill up concentration camps. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Interesting, and that means that he had the skill set
Speaker 3: to do that, yes, and the yeah, the personality to
Speaker 3: do it, yes, wild.
Speaker 2: But also the ability to understand that something considerably less
Speaker 2: awful than dock out the concentration camp is still bad.
Speaker 2: So theoretically the ability to understand, like what he was
Speaker 2: doing and putting helping to put people in dockout was wrong. Anyway,
Speaker 2: speaking of Nope.
Speaker 1: No ads, Jesus Christ, we're.
Speaker 2: Not doing good with the ad transition today. People.
Speaker 1: It's kind of hard on a subject like this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is my favorite producer on air host Dynamic
Speaker 3: by the way I've ever seen.
Speaker 2: It's just bummed.
Speaker 1: This is just us in real life.
Speaker 3: Anyway, Enough about concentration camps. Here's the word from the Gap?
Speaker 3: Are you worry from baby Gap?
Speaker 2: The Gap?
Speaker 1: I do wish it was the gap?
Speaker 5: You wish it was the gap, But it's going to
Speaker 5: be something so much worse that we're not even aware of.
Speaker 2: I don't know. Is there anything worse than the gap? Yes,
Speaker 2: probably all the things we're about to talk about. So
Speaker 2: the war ends in nineteen eighteen and Schmid's relief is
Speaker 2: tempered by what appeared to be like the dissolution of
Speaker 2: the German state. Germany is falling apart as soon as
Speaker 2: there's like a peace happens, and this whole order, the
Speaker 2: legal order that his whole life been based on, looks
Speaker 2: like it's just going to crumble, Like the legal code
Speaker 2: is going to be gone, the government, the Kaiser's already gone.
Speaker 2: What the fuck's going to be left? And part of
Speaker 2: what's happening is that there is a socialist revolution right
Speaker 2: after peace that like comes pretty close to succeeding in
Speaker 2: some areas. Units of demobilized soldiers the Frei Corps cracked
Speaker 2: down and start massacring leftist intellectuals with the direct endorsement
Speaker 2: of the right and the tacit support of social democratic
Speaker 2: politicians who are like, yeah, it's ugly, but we otherwise
Speaker 2: we won't get to have our democratic state if we
Speaker 2: don't let you know, if we don't let the right
Speaker 2: murder all of these leftists. Schmidt is lecturing at a
Speaker 2: university by this point, and during the late war years
Speaker 2: he'd begun to receive pay for his work as an actademic.
Speaker 2: His office was broken into by what Balakrishnan describes as
Speaker 2: a band of revolutionaries who are just like, yeah, a
Speaker 2: bunch of young people who are trying to like overthrow
Speaker 2: the local government. And while he's at a cafe, an
Speaker 2: officer sitting next to him at a table gets assassinated,
Speaker 2: and he reacts by growing terrified of disorder. It's not
Speaker 2: just that he's like horrified by these revolutionary moments that
Speaker 2: are so chaotic and scary. He also recognizes, oh, when
Speaker 2: things fall apart, you have the chance to dramatically remake society,
Speaker 2: including the chance to remake the law and the concept
Speaker 2: of order, maybe in a way that makes more sense.
Speaker 2: And that's what he's thinking at the time. And so
Speaker 2: it's also noteworthy that even though he doesn't like the leftist,
Speaker 2: you know, kind of uprisings that are happening, they scare him.
Speaker 2: He's not an obsessive anti Marxist at this point either,
Speaker 2: And in fact, Balachristian notes that it's there's not really
Speaker 2: any anti Marxism in his writings from this period, which
Speaker 2: he describes as quite simply puzzling. It's like, really weird that,
Speaker 2: given how he felt about this, he didn't go on
Speaker 2: any rants about Marxism. It's just kind of an odd
Speaker 2: fact here, and it may have something to do with
Speaker 2: the fact that he sees this as more a structural
Speaker 2: thing of like, well, yeah, it's the left doing it
Speaker 2: right now, but when things collapse, opportunity is made for
Speaker 2: people of radical beliefs, and so it's the factor. The
Speaker 2: reality of collapse is more to blame for than anything,
Speaker 2: and he's more interested than like ranting about the left.
Speaker 2: He's more interested in figuring out how to take advantage
Speaker 2: of those moments right now. This period of chaos would
Speaker 2: inspire his first great and truly influential book, Political Romanticism,
Speaker 2: published in nineteen nineteen. This is a pre fascist work,
Speaker 2: because again, fascism isn't really off the ground all the
Speaker 2: way yet. Of what we would call fascist polemics, he's
Speaker 2: basically listing all of the ideologies that exist in the
Speaker 2: world at the time, from socialism and monarchism to liberalism,
Speaker 2: as flawed. He calls them dead romanticism right like these are,
Speaker 2: and he calls conservatism that right. Conservatism is just this
Speaker 2: dead romantic idea right in fact, expresses nothing but contempt
Speaker 2: for conservative reactionaries who in that period sought the Kaiser's return,
Speaker 2: So he's like, you're just looking back on a period
Speaker 2: that was never very good and you're not serious thinkers, right.
Speaker 2: But he's also looking at the liberals in Weimar and
Speaker 2: being like, well, you're idolizing this democracy that number one
Speaker 2: was birthed in blood, and number two isn't going to
Speaker 2: succeed in fixing anything. Now. The core of Schmid's rage
Speaker 2: is reserved not for the political class, but for the
Speaker 2: kind of bohemian artists and creatives who'd made up his
Speaker 2: pre war friend and social circle. We might see this
Speaker 2: as an early attack on the same sort of like
Speaker 2: shallow Hollywood liberal elites that would become such a hallmark
Speaker 2: of conservative politics in our era. And I want to
Speaker 2: quote from an article on the power of Karl Schmidt
Speaker 2: by Richard Cohen. Schmidt reduced and attacked all contemporary political
Speaker 2: art alternatives to fascism, especially liberalism, but also socialism as
Speaker 2: mere romanticism because of their attachment to free speech, discussion,
Speaker 2: and hence parliamentarianism, which smidt owing to his decisionism, dismissed
Speaker 2: his empty chatter, asking a deeper inability to decide. He
Speaker 2: labels such politics romantic for the same reason, because the
Speaker 2: romantics are essentially indecisive esteats, fluttering from one fashion to another,
Speaker 2: always stimulated and excited, but never committed and engaged. So
Speaker 2: that's kind of interesting to me that he is he's
Speaker 2: rejecting all of these different belief systems as based in
Speaker 2: sorts of fantasies about how things should be and not
Speaker 2: a real understanding of how people are right. That's the
Speaker 2: conclusion he's come to at this point.
Speaker 3: He is a fantasizer himself. It's so interesting, like how prone.
Speaker 3: He's not the first fascist who's prone to fantasy and no, no,
Speaker 3: it is interesting the contradictions with him. Yeah, oh, like
Speaker 3: everything has to be rule of law, you know, like
Speaker 3: you are not a productive member of society unless you're
Speaker 3: serving the state. Also, you know, like my wife is
Speaker 3: a you know, like she's not she's but she's yeah,
Speaker 3: she's a countess. She's a countess. Countess is Yeah.
Speaker 2: It's also interesting he has this experience of like, ah,
Speaker 2: all that matters is what you do as part of
Speaker 2: the state, and then it's like, oh wait, that sucks ass,
Speaker 2: And it's like yeah, because you had a romantic view
Speaker 2: of what that meant, that was proven wrong, and he's
Speaker 2: started attacking his enemies for being like romantics but unable
Speaker 2: to see that strain in himself.
Speaker 3: And he's like a professor, like that's not Yeah, he's
Speaker 3: not serving the state either, you know, Like so, yeah,
Speaker 3: it's interesting now.
Speaker 2: But again he is always looking at people. He always
Speaker 2: he's always seeing real problems, Like among this class of
Speaker 2: like artists and celebrities in Berlin, he sees how kind
Speaker 2: of hollow they're they're signaling at these democratic values are
Speaker 2: and concludes the most important source of political vitality is
Speaker 2: the belief in justice and an indignation of injustice. He
Speaker 2: notes that what's important is not like how either of
Speaker 2: them are defined, but that they have a definition and
Speaker 2: stick to it. Like Schmidt, he's kind of got this
Speaker 2: Walter subcheck from the big Lebowski attitude of like you
Speaker 2: gotta have an ethos. It doesn't matter what it is,
Speaker 2: as long as you spell it out right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, just write it down. As long as
Speaker 3: it's written down. It can be whatever the hell you want.
Speaker 2: As long as it's written down right.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: This book marks the last time in his career that
Speaker 2: Schmidt centered ethics in any way For the remainder of
Speaker 2: his decades as a jurist and legal philosopher. He is
Speaker 2: interested only in power, and as the postwar years become
Speaker 2: the twenties, Mussolini marches on Rome and fascism becomes the
Speaker 2: name on every tongue. Europe begins at slow drive to
Speaker 2: the brink, and Schmidt is initially distracted by the collapse
Speaker 2: of his marriage to an extremely obvious KHN woman, and
Speaker 2: you know, things sour and Carl kind of finds out
Speaker 2: that car Carrie's been lying to him the whole time.
Speaker 2: It takes ten years, but in nineteen twenty two he
Speaker 2: files for an annulment on the grounds of wilful descent.
Speaker 1: It took ten years, ten years.
Speaker 2: And ten years to realize that he's been had.
Speaker 3: She's the hero of this, by the way.
Speaker 2: She is good.
Speaker 3: She's amazing. Yeah, she's the best.
Speaker 2: I hope she has a good life after this too.
Speaker 1: Carl ten years, my guy, ten years.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Carl's sweetheart.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, heab what's good?
Speaker 3: I love Carl?
Speaker 2: Ten years of like, sorry, I left my real passport
Speaker 2: and my other skirt or whatever. The Catholic Church is
Speaker 2: not thrilled with his annulment and Carl proves his fundamental
Speaker 2: messiness when sure, while while he's getting annulled, while they're
Speaker 2: doing having like divorce proceedings in court, he meets this
Speaker 2: nineteen year old Serbian girl named Dushka who's like the
Speaker 2: translator who's like translating for his wife in court. He
Speaker 2: starts dating her.
Speaker 1: Is this an episode of Sex and the City?
Speaker 2: Come on, I've heard this before. Yeah, describes Karl as
Speaker 2: living in a quote erotic state of exception, during which
Speaker 2: he continued to cheat with his second wife on multiple
Speaker 2: women right, Like he's he's writing about the law. He's
Speaker 2: writing about like the importance of you know, spelling out
Speaker 2: who you are and what you do and not deviating
Speaker 2: from it. And he is cheating on his second wife.
Speaker 2: And he keeps a diary. Again, this is another thing
Speaker 2: that fascist today, I'll do. He keeps a diary of
Speaker 2: every time he comes, like he's like he's charting his ejaculations.
Speaker 2: His motherfucker would have been no fap so fucking hard
Speaker 2: or like, I don't know what is their speaker of
Speaker 2: the house who like talks about when he comes and
Speaker 2: doesn't with his son, like he's they're all this.
Speaker 1: Guy, don't do that. Don't do that.
Speaker 2: You don't need that data.
Speaker 5: No, maybe maybe if you were busy or paying attention.
Speaker 5: What was going on, Carla when I've taken you ten years?
Speaker 5: God stop, just I'm gonna stop.
Speaker 2: Just stop.
Speaker 1: I was gonna go on a longer ramp, but I
Speaker 1: remember it. Stop as a couplet epits.
Speaker 3: You can stop. Stop.
Speaker 2: So he's gotten his marriage and old to the con artist.
Speaker 2: He's dating a teenager. He's writing in a journal every
Speaker 2: time he comes. He's just living his best life.
Speaker 1: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 3: That journal may have sold better than that satire magazine.
Speaker 2: It's gotta be in his letters. I mean, because it
Speaker 2: gets referenced by marrying I am. I really wish he
Speaker 2: just included an extensive like quotation from it.
Speaker 3: Here's an ex serp.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, as someone who washes their hands a lot.
Speaker 1: I hope he did, because.
Speaker 2: They didn't believe in that back then.
Speaker 3: I have terrible news, ie you he did it. Journal?
Speaker 2: That journal is yeah, sticky pages.
Speaker 1: That was unfortunately, that was my first thought.
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, So Schmidt, while this is all happening after
Speaker 2: he gets divorced, he's watching the early days of the
Speaker 2: Nazi Party right twenty two is when he gets divorced.
Speaker 2: Twenty three is the beer hall puts yeah, which fails,
Speaker 2: and a lot of people think, well, that's it for
Speaker 2: them Nazis, and Karl is not initially interested in joining
Speaker 2: or supporting the movement. He's like, these people seem like Yahoo's.
Speaker 2: What he does do is increasingly analyze and start to
Speaker 2: pick out the obvious flaws in the democratic system of Weimar,
Speaker 2: and he begins to lay out in a book a
Speaker 2: theory for exactly why liberal democracy is doomed and how
Speaker 2: the right can take advantage of these fundamental holes in
Speaker 2: liberal democracy to smash liberalism, gain power and destroy democracy.
Speaker 2: In nineteen twenty three, the year that putsch Schmidt writes
Speaker 2: this about the post war Wilsonian order imposed on Europe,
Speaker 2: the history of political and state theory in the nineteenth
Speaker 2: century could be summarized with a single phrase, the triumphal
Speaker 2: march of democracy. No state in the Western European cultural
Speaker 2: world withstood the extension of democratic ideals and institutions. And
Speaker 2: he writes this in like a mournful way, right that
Speaker 2: it's almost like you can't stop it, and you know
Speaker 2: you've got Mussolini by this point in Italy, but Hitler
Speaker 2: is seen as like an upstart, weirdo discontent, and there
Speaker 2: is this attitude that like democracy is obviously on the march,
Speaker 2: and Schmidt he picks out, he's like, looking at this
Speaker 2: the way fucking the rebels are looking at the death
Speaker 2: Star plans. And he finds a vulnerability in liberal democracy
Speaker 2: that's easy to exploit, and he writes his next book
Speaker 2: about it. That book is called The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy,
Speaker 2: and it comes out alongside economic and social chaos that's
Speaker 2: gripping Weimar right. And I'm going to quote from Richard
Speaker 2: Cohen here. The new crisis of democracy, he argued, stem
Speaker 2: precisely from its victory over monarchy. During that struggle, democracy
Speaker 2: and liberalism were basically co extensive. To believe in popular
Speaker 2: sovereignty was to believe in the necessity of the replacement
Speaker 2: of absolute monarchy with regime characterized by elections, free public debate,
Speaker 2: and legal rights. But in Schmid's mind, this connection is
Speaker 2: far more historical happenstance than conceptual necessity, and that democracy
Speaker 2: properly construed cannot be seen as requiring rights and even
Speaker 2: universal suffrage in the way that liberals understand them. A
Speaker 2: government is democratic, Schmidt argues, if it bases its legitimacy
Speaker 2: on support from the people's will. But this depends on
Speaker 2: how you define the people and choose to assess their will.
Speaker 2: Every democracy depends on excluding some people, most notably foreigners,
Speaker 2: from participating in the selection of its leaders. That means,
Speaker 2: by definition, no democracy rests on universal human equality before
Speaker 2: the law. Instead, the idea of equality and democracy really
Speaker 2: means equality amongst the people in a political community that
Speaker 2: shares a certain identity and core agreements. There has never
Speaker 2: been a democracy that did not recognize the concept foreign
Speaker 2: and that could have realized the equality of all men,
Speaker 2: he wrote in a nineteen twenty six preface to the
Speaker 2: second edition of his book, Every actual democracy rests on
Speaker 2: the principle that not only are equals equal, but unequals
Speaker 2: will not be treated equally. Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity, and, second,
Speaker 2: if the need arises, elimination and eradication of heterogenea. Do
Speaker 2: you see what he's saying here.
Speaker 3: Son of a bitch, right? It's son of a bitch right?
Speaker 2: A couple things are fascinating to me. Number one, with
Speaker 2: the exception to the fact that he endorses this This
Speaker 2: is essentially how anarchists talk about borders, right. The maintenance
Speaker 2: of every border implies violence. And this is both physical
Speaker 2: borders like the border between us in Mexico, and like
Speaker 2: what you're seeing right now with the attempt to legislate
Speaker 2: like what counts as a woman with all these anti
Speaker 2: trans things. Both of those borders are maintained by men
Speaker 2: with guns, with violence. There's the threat of violence behind
Speaker 2: building every one of those borders. If you cross this border,
Speaker 2: or at least cross it in the wrong way, force
Speaker 2: will be used against you. Every democracy does this, and
Speaker 2: it does this not just in terms of who can
Speaker 2: enter the country, but who gets to vote. And so
Speaker 2: even if you have you're saying nice things in your
Speaker 2: constitution about these are universal rights of men. These are
Speaker 2: rights that extend to everyone. These aren't just rights that
Speaker 2: extend to people who are citizens in the country. These
Speaker 2: are universal rights that our society universally recognizes. That doesn't
Speaker 2: necessarily mean squat because what you do is the reactionary
Speaker 2: is you find that border wherever it exists, and you
Speaker 2: start pushing inward. And as you start pushing inward from
Speaker 2: that border, you will start fracturing the democratic consensus that
Speaker 2: exists until you can destroy democracy. And that's how you
Speaker 2: gain power as a reactionary movement within a liberal That's
Speaker 2: how you destroy liberalism. You find the border that they
Speaker 2: placed and you start pushing inwards. Right, that's what Carl realizes,
Speaker 2: and that's what he lays out, and it works today
Speaker 2: as well as it did back then.
Speaker 3: She's got the chills, Jesus. Yeah, oh boy, oh boy,
Speaker 3: it's great. Yeah, it's wonderous. That's right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, No, he's he has accurately identified a flaw
Speaker 2: in the system and how to exploit it. He writes,
Speaker 2: quote democracy and liberalism could be allied to each other
Speaker 2: for a time, but as soon as it achieves power,
Speaker 2: liberal democracy must decide between its elements. The crisis of
Speaker 2: the modern state arises from the fact that no state
Speaker 2: can realize a mass democracy and democracy of mankind. Maybe
Speaker 2: he'll prove right about that in the future. Maybe he won't.
Speaker 2: But we've never tried right. Ultimately, we haven't. The most
Speaker 2: potent part of Cohen's essay, he described Schmidt's academic work
Speaker 2: in the late nineteen twenties as creating a blueprint quote
Speaker 2: adaptable virtually anywhere for using reactionary politics to gain control
Speaker 2: of a destroyed democracy from the inside while pretending to
Speaker 2: be in service of that democracy. Now, elements of this
Speaker 2: had been discussed by several thinkers, particularly in the context
Speaker 2: of the US during the era of slavery, but Schmid's
Speaker 2: big one of his big contributions is that he recognizes
Speaker 2: race and religion can be used to push that border in.
Speaker 2: But they don't matter. That's not the only way to
Speaker 2: delineate the enemy. All the matters that you are delineating
Speaker 2: an enemy, right and pulling them out of being considered
Speaker 2: part of the body politic. They can be Jews, they
Speaker 2: can be black, they could be trans they can be whoever.
Speaker 2: But what matters ultimately is that you're picking an enemy,
Speaker 2: and you are identifying them as not a part of us, right,
Speaker 2: And that's that's the ballgame, right, and less than or
Speaker 2: and less than you know, and a danger to us.
Speaker 3: Right. Yes, right, So.
Speaker 2: Schmidt argued, you know, not only that this is how
Speaker 2: you manipulate democracy, because, unlike what liberals say, exclusion is
Speaker 2: at the core of democratic politics. He writes this in
Speaker 2: nineteen thirty two, in a book considered to be perhaps
Speaker 2: the most important intellectual work of fascism's birth era, the
Speaker 2: concept of the political quote. Every religious, moral, economic, ethical,
Speaker 2: or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it
Speaker 2: is sufficiently strong to human beings effectively according to friend
Speaker 2: and enemy. So he has first this recognition of that,
Speaker 2: like liberalism, inherently liberal democracy always draws a border, you
Speaker 2: start pushing in him from that border, and then he
Speaker 2: refines us to the idea that, like all politics is
Speaker 2: about defining friend and enemy right, And that's how you
Speaker 2: gain power, and that's how you enshrine your power right.
Speaker 2: And once you have, once you have identified a group
Speaker 2: of citizens as the enemy and you gain power, you
Speaker 2: exclude them from the franchise. You turn them into a
Speaker 2: domestic enemy, which you can then purge and destroy. And
Speaker 2: that's how you maintain power. Per an article in The
Speaker 2: New Statesman by Samuel Earle, that a specific distinction to
Speaker 2: which political actions and motives can be reduced is that
Speaker 2: between friend and enemy. Schmidt declared his fellow, anti democratic
Speaker 2: and decorated soldier Ernst Junger described what followed as a
Speaker 2: mind that silently explodes. For Schmidt, the friend enemy antithesis
Speaker 2: was integral for politics in three senses. The enemy needed
Speaker 2: to be something different in alien. Opposing such an enemy
Speaker 2: was the essence of identity, and the implicit combat that
Speaker 2: followed these enemies posed an existential threat. The friend, enemy
Speaker 2: and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they
Speaker 2: refer to the real possibility of physical killing. Schmid wrote,
Speaker 2: war was therefore an ever present possibility. And again, the
Speaker 2: Nazis are doing a lot of this before he writes
Speaker 2: about it. But number one, his initial work on sort
Speaker 2: of this strategy of how to push it on the
Speaker 2: border influences how the Nazis proceed. But also he is
Speaker 2: explaining what they're doing in an intellectual way that is accurate,
Speaker 2: and doing so in a way that's also not ideological,
Speaker 2: in that he's explaining and describing an ideology, but he's
Speaker 2: not doing it as a Nazi propagandist. He's doing it
Speaker 2: as an academic right, and he's doing it in a
Speaker 2: way that provides a blueprint for other people.
Speaker 3: That's such an interesting distinction between Game and Gerbels or
Speaker 3: I feel like that would be you know, like kind
Speaker 3: of the I don't want to say lazy, because this
Speaker 3: is my Yeah, I'm making the comparison, but like my
Speaker 3: lazy comparison where it's like Gerbels obviously, all right, let's
Speaker 3: it's propaganda, you know, like there's more quote unquote spice
Speaker 3: on it, where this with Schmid, it's just this is
Speaker 3: how it works, This is why it works. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: this is why it will work.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And you do get kind of at the end
Speaker 2: of this book, he does give you get a hint
Speaker 2: of his developing ideology, and part of it why he
Speaker 2: hates liberalism is that liberalism is an onslaught against the
Speaker 2: political It seeks to replace conflict, which he views as natural,
Speaker 2: with economic competition and quote perpetual discussion, and that this
Speaker 2: doesn't end in a better society, but like kind of
Speaker 2: a destruction of something important at the soul of humanity, right,
Speaker 2: which is this crusade against an enemy. Right that we
Speaker 2: almost we need this as people. We need to have enemies,
Speaker 2: which is a fundamental part of fascism. Right, we need
Speaker 2: enemies in order to be fully human, like an enemy
Speaker 2: to fight, to destroy, to rally against. Now, Schmidt was
Speaker 2: not an early Nazi. He was not a particular admirer
Speaker 2: of Hitler. In the early nineteen twenties, he described Hitler
Speaker 2: as a hysteric In nineteen thirty two, the same year
Speaker 2: he published the Concept of the Political He argued that
Speaker 2: the Weimar government could and should use the military to
Speaker 2: destroy Nazism, but as the Nazis began taking power, he
Speaker 2: changed his tune quickly from a mix of you know,
Speaker 2: he wants to protect himself, but most importantly because high
Speaker 2: ranking Nazis start to take him seriously as a thinker.
Speaker 2: And he had been doing okay, his books had been
Speaker 2: doing better. But he really starts to become famous because
Speaker 2: there's some high up Nazis who like what he has
Speaker 2: to say. And his particular backer, the guy who's going
Speaker 2: to make him give him the opportunity to be the
Speaker 2: rich intellectual he's always wanted to be. Right, who's going
Speaker 2: to make his life possible is Hermann Gering. Right now,
Speaker 2: Gering is about to be He's this World War One pilot,
Speaker 2: like a fighter pilot hero. He literally takes over the
Speaker 2: red Baron squadron after he gets like shot down. That's
Speaker 2: what Garing does in the war. He gets fucked up
Speaker 2: and horribly injured during the Munich Beer Hall push and
Speaker 2: addicted to painkillers. Relatable there it is, But when Hitler
Speaker 2: takes power. He's the Reich's marshal. Right, He's going to
Speaker 2: lose favor throughout the Third Reich, but he is on
Speaker 2: paper the guy who, if Hitler dies is supposed to
Speaker 2: take over. Right. So that's the degree to which like
Speaker 2: Garring is held in esteem at the start of the Reich,
Speaker 2: and he takes a liking to Schmid's work. He's like,
Speaker 2: this guy, this guy gets it. This guy, and we
Speaker 2: need to bring this guy in and have him be
Speaker 2: like our court philosopher. Right, He's kind of become because
Speaker 2: Nazi intelligencia had been following him for a while. He's
Speaker 2: a little bit of like a Curtis Jarvin figure, right,
Speaker 2: where he doesn't really have as clear a goal as
Speaker 2: Jarvin does. But there are a lot of these guys
Speaker 2: who become Nazi intelligencia who are following him for a
Speaker 2: while and respect him for a while. For his part,
Speaker 2: Carl's part, once it becomes clear that the Nazis are
Speaker 2: going to win, and he's like, well, if some of
Speaker 2: these guys like me, I can get rich and powerful,
Speaker 2: That's what I've always wanted. So he starts sucking up
Speaker 2: and he writes that Gering was the right type for
Speaker 2: these times. As he becomes a darling for the far right,
Speaker 2: Schmidt continues to live a life well out of line
Speaker 2: with the stated morals of the movement for which he
Speaker 2: is becoming the chief intellectual theoretician. Per the Claremont Review
Speaker 2: of books, Guilt and eros combined for Schmidt in Carl
Speaker 2: Theodore Dreer's silent movie The Passion of Joan of Arc
Speaker 2: with an almost sadistic use of close ups, Dreyer depicts
Speaker 2: the doomed heroine a daughter of God, charged with being
Speaker 2: a child of the devil as she pleads that she
Speaker 2: has only fought for God and country. In nineteen twenty eight,
Speaker 2: Schmidt watched the film a dozen times. Marring reports that
Speaker 2: on several occasions in both Berlin and Rome, he picked
Speaker 2: up a prostitute to watch it with him. It seems
Speaker 2: that his longing for redemption from his own psychic turmoil
Speaker 2: fueled a need for a higher absolute obligation, which could
Speaker 2: only come from a commitment to the law promulgated by
Speaker 2: God or by the state. So there's this attitude. Maybe
Speaker 2: it's because he's got this kind of compulsive sexuality that
Speaker 2: he can't just be like eh, people just fuck you know.
Speaker 2: He has to he has to like condemn himself and
Speaker 2: find absolution in this idea of law or the state
Speaker 2: as God as representing some higher natural truth in order
Speaker 2: to gain absolution. It's also just funny that he's constantly
Speaker 2: watching this Joan of Arc movie while picking up prostitutes,
Speaker 2: Like you want to go watch jodah Arc. Speaking of
Speaker 2: watching silent films, here's and I got nothing. I got nothing.
Speaker 2: I don't know how to do a fucking ad transition
Speaker 2: in these episodes. Look, go to Rome, meet somebody nice,
Speaker 2: watch a movie about a French lady getting tortured, you know,
Speaker 2: have fun.
Speaker 5: You become fake pope once and you no longer know
Speaker 5: how to do an ad transition.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, Well popes don't need ads because they have
Speaker 2: all that gold buried under the Vatican, Sophie. That's right,
Speaker 2: we're back, man. I wonder they got to have a
Speaker 2: lot of gold buried under there, right, like a crazy amount,
Speaker 2: like yeah, like enough to ruin the like the price
Speaker 2: of gold worldwide if they ever put it onto the market. Yeah.
Speaker 5: I don't think so, because there were so many different
Speaker 5: things where like things were getting stolen.
Speaker 1: I think they would have. There's probably secret goal, but
Speaker 1: I don't I don't think there's got to be as
Speaker 1: obvious as there.
Speaker 3: Well, what are they used for all the lawsuits like that?
Speaker 2: It has to be Oh, yeah, they had a lot
Speaker 2: lying around for that. What if we all know Rudo
Speaker 2: run into the Vatican archives and just try to, like
Speaker 2: see what we can get.
Speaker 1: I would have so much fun going through the Vatican archives.
Speaker 2: Find the secret sequel to the New Testament where Palpatine returns.
Speaker 2: I'm excited. I think we can. I think we can
Speaker 2: make this happen.
Speaker 1: So I use your new power as FA.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right, that's right. I'll tell the Swiss Guard
Speaker 2: to stand down. Goofy outfits, the stupid ass outfits.
Speaker 1: Call me right behind you as you do that.
Speaker 2: In April of nineteen thirty three, Schmidt joined the Nazi
Speaker 2: Party officially. In May, he published an article that is
Speaker 2: generally considered to be the blueprint for the legal expulsion
Speaker 2: of German intellectuals who had unacceptable political or racial characteristics. Quote.
Speaker 2: Germany has spat them out for all time, he said,
Speaker 2: and he's talking specifically about Albert Einstein. Right. Schmidt authors
Speaker 2: the blueprint for kicking Einstein and other thinkers permanently out
Speaker 2: of the reich Right and describing them as enemies. Right,
Speaker 2: And for him, this is a political term, and this
Speaker 2: is about this one year after he breaks off his
Speaker 2: friendship with Eisler. But he does write, you as an
Speaker 2: individual can be friends with someone who is a political enemy,
Speaker 2: because again that's a political state. You have to treat
Speaker 2: them as an enemy when doing politics. But it doesn't
Speaker 2: mean you can't like them personally. Like we're also accepting
Speaker 2: that it means killing them at a stage, So maybe
Speaker 2: you can't, i.
Speaker 3: Know, killing them politically. Yeah, nuts, yeah his friends.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: So was that logic I check out?
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, sure. I mean as much as anything
Speaker 2: as fucker says does so. Through most of the twenties,
Speaker 2: liberals and liberalism were the center of most of Schmid's
Speaker 2: rhetorical ire, but Jews grew more central as time went on.
Speaker 2: Now we've already covered that he certainly imbibed the racial
Speaker 2: anti semitism of the era, and he had occasional flings
Speaker 2: of bigotry during times of stress and depression, but he
Speaker 2: also spoke glowingly of several Jews in his life. Most crucially,
Speaker 2: he was completely dependent economically upon the kindness of a
Speaker 2: Jewish family who treated him as a second son. Right,
Speaker 2: Like that's a big deal in this period of time,
Speaker 2: is that, like there's these this family that keeps him alive.
Speaker 2: But now that he was a prominent Nazi academic whose
Speaker 2: writings were not just cited but were being used to
Speaker 2: make law under the Third Reich, he starts being critiqued
Speaker 2: by like Jewish academics. I mean, but this happens before
Speaker 2: the Third Reich is established, And this is part of
Speaker 2: what radicalizes him. Is that in the late twenties, when
Speaker 2: it becomes clear that he's like writing in favor of
Speaker 2: elements of fascism, there's several different Jewish academics critique his book,
Speaker 2: The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, and he goes on a
Speaker 2: rant and complains for Jews against one Christian. They attack
Speaker 2: me and all the journals and no one notices what's
Speaker 2: going on. So that's a big part. If you're wondering
Speaker 2: what's the missing piece here between him like dumping his
Speaker 2: Jewish friends and going full Nazi, Well, it's because some
Speaker 2: Jewish professors say mean things about this book. He writes
Speaker 2: later that year, a Jewish professor was being considered for
Speaker 2: hiring by his university, and Schmid wrote in to call
Speaker 2: his would be colleague a disgusting, craven diletant Jew. So
Speaker 2: by the mid twenties he's very consistently racist, but he's
Speaker 2: still friends with Eisler right up until the thirties, and
Speaker 2: he's still able to make exceptions in his head. Unlike
Speaker 2: most Nazis. The justification he gives for his animus is
Speaker 2: not racial, right. He is someone who was like, if
Speaker 2: I think his belief initially at least is that like, well,
Speaker 2: Jews can convert in stuff, and then I don't have
Speaker 2: to treat them that way. But his issue with them
Speaker 2: is that they tend to be liberal, right, and so
Speaker 2: he interprets the battle that is, he's laying out the
Speaker 2: lions how you win a battle against liberal democracy, and
Speaker 2: he describes it as a battle against the Jewish spirit.
Speaker 2: Per an article by Benjamin Ballant for the Claremont Review
Speaker 2: of Books, his friend enemy distinction now fed into the
Speaker 2: contrast he drew between the homogeneous German Vulk and the
Speaker 2: alien Jew. He hastily severed his friendships and associations with Jews,
Speaker 2: including his longtime publisher Ludwig Fuchtwanger, and the young scholar
Speaker 2: of Hobbs and Spinoza Leo Strauss, whom he had recommended
Speaker 2: to the Rockefeller Foundation for a fellowship that allowed Strauss
Speaker 2: to leave Germany a year before. By the early thirties,
Speaker 2: as he moved from scholarship to polemics, Schmidt no longer
Speaker 2: directed his counter revolutionary fervor against Weimar anarchism, and by anarchism,
Speaker 2: the fact that the state doesn't work very well. So
Speaker 2: he cuts off all of these academic friends, including have
Speaker 2: you heard of Leo Strauss?
Speaker 3: I know the name, Yeah, I've heard the name.
Speaker 2: Yeah, very influential. All of the people behind George W.
Speaker 2: Bush were Straussians. And when I say it, I'm talking
Speaker 2: about guys like Bill Krystel, who's now like anti Trump.
Speaker 2: Bill Krystal is a Straussian. The Straussians are the neo
Speaker 2: cons Strauss is initially very close with Schmidt, and Schmidt
Speaker 2: influences Strauss and Strauss influences Schmitt. Schmidt is basically his
Speaker 2: mentor for a while, right, he helps him get this
Speaker 2: scholarship right. And then Strauss comes to the United States
Speaker 2: and he becomes a core intellectual mind behind neo conservatism. Right.
Speaker 2: So again the way in which this guy, even though
Speaker 2: like obviously there's no love lost between them, once Schmidt
Speaker 2: goes full Nazi because Strauss is Jewish. Right. So, once
Speaker 2: the Third Reich gets into power and Schmidt has the
Speaker 2: chance to actually be making laws, he warps his personal
Speaker 2: politics in order to fit the regime that's now in place.
Speaker 2: No longer does he talk about the state working towards
Speaker 2: some sort of natural law. Instead, he begins to argue
Speaker 2: that political sovereignty is constituted in the will of the
Speaker 2: leader or dictator, who was sovereign and who had no
Speaker 2: kind of check and could abide no kind of check
Speaker 2: on his power. Per an article on the power of
Speaker 2: Karl Schmidt by Richard Cohen, the dictator's will is arbitrary
Speaker 2: and must be arbitrary. This is not a fault for
Speaker 2: the fascist, but the highest virtue. The dictator's will is
Speaker 2: a pure will, unchecked and unregulated by any exterior consideration
Speaker 2: beyond itself, like a god. Like the God. Only as
Speaker 2: such is it a truly sovereign will. The dictator can
Speaker 2: never be challenged. In other words, because there are no
Speaker 2: grounds upon which to challenge him. Thus, any challenge, any criticism,
Speaker 2: no matter how rational, realistic, or goodwilled, is by definition
Speaker 2: betrayal from the standpoint of all allegedly legitimizing authorities, whether populist, hereditary, religious, esthetic, utilitarian, economic,
Speaker 2: or what have you. The dictator's decision is beyond reproach. Force,
Speaker 2: power and might are the dictator's first and final resort,
Speaker 2: and submission is the only appropriate response. Rule, call it
Speaker 2: law or not, is to dictate order and command. Thus
Speaker 2: the ubiquitous military trappings of fascism, however ludicrous, the dictator
Speaker 2: wearing battle fatigues or dressed uniforms adorned with metals, the
Speaker 2: pomp and ceremony, the military parades, and the displays of
Speaker 2: weapons in times of quiet, as well as war. Without
Speaker 2: criteria or standards, the dictator is sovereignty itself, no matter
Speaker 2: what he says or does, or the reverse, precisely in
Speaker 2: what he says and does, as he says and does
Speaker 2: it always at the moment of his willing, so he's
Speaker 2: gone from the only legitimate states have a constitution that
Speaker 2: lays out what the rules are, and they follow that
Speaker 2: constitution and law is always working towards some sort of
Speaker 2: natural law to the law is whatever the leader says
Speaker 2: it is. Right, human will creates law. Right, that the
Speaker 2: will of a specific human and put in charge of
Speaker 2: a people creates law. Right. That's where Schmidt has ended.
Speaker 2: You know, now that democracy has been destroyed, now that
Speaker 2: Hitler's in power, and he's working backwards to a degree
Speaker 2: at this point from the fact that Hitler has taken power. Right.
Speaker 2: But this is again like he's he's kind of describing
Speaker 2: what's happening to some extent after the fact. But he's
Speaker 2: also he comes to understand and justifies sovereignty as a
Speaker 2: permanent state of emergency or a state of exception. Right,
Speaker 2: Fascism is like the normalization legalization of arbitrary power. So
Speaker 2: we even do see some of like his early thinking
Speaker 2: on like how judges work and the kind of arbitrariness
Speaker 2: at the center of the legal system. Like this is
Speaker 2: where he winds up right that this is kind of
Speaker 2: the ultimate political system. It's great.
Speaker 3: It is interesting too where he would talk about how
Speaker 3: like democracy was, you know, it's it only works because
Speaker 3: of the eventual force that can be applied. You know,
Speaker 3: where there it's eventual with a dictator just wearing fatigues,
Speaker 3: dressed like a general. You know, with the military parades.
Speaker 3: It's not implied, it's not eventual, it's immediate, you know. Yes,
Speaker 3: it's a very Yeah, the imagery really drives it home. Yes,
Speaker 3: more so, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And thanks to Gerring's influence, he gets made president
Speaker 2: of the Union of National Socialist Jurists. In nineteen thirty four,
Speaker 2: after the Night of Long Knives, Schmidt plays a role
Speaker 2: in justifying and legitimating what had happened. You know, this
Speaker 2: looks like and is an illegal series of murders committed,
Speaker 2: you know, to settle political scores. But Schmidt argues this
Speaker 2: is actually perfectly legal. Right. He publishes an article called
Speaker 2: the Feuror protects the Law, which argues that what Hitler
Speaker 2: had done was the highest justice available right quote the
Speaker 2: fewer protects the law against the forms of abuse when
Speaker 2: in the moment of danger he immediately creates law by
Speaker 2: force of his character, as fewer as the supreme legal authority.
Speaker 2: And again, I think we have to look at maybe
Speaker 2: where we're headed with some of these courts questioning the
Speaker 2: decisions being made by Trump. By Dick tot this is
Speaker 2: already what Trump's people believe Trump creates law by force
Speaker 2: of his character. Right, And you know, Schmidt has provided
Speaker 2: a justification for purging people in situations like this, right,
Speaker 2: because the fewer has to protect the law by carrying
Speaker 2: out a legal acts of violence. Because he then creates
Speaker 2: a new law. And so the concept of law fundamentally
Speaker 2: is protected by the fewer doing this.
Speaker 3: So there is no lawlessness, there's no laws never, there's
Speaker 3: never a gap. It's the new dictator's law.
Speaker 2: There's lawlessness. If there's a conflict right, right, between the
Speaker 2: fear and power, that's lawlessness, right, And that's what Hitler
Speaker 2: was fighting against. Right, That's why he was protecting the
Speaker 2: law by doing what he did. He celebrates like when
Speaker 2: the Nuremberg laws come in, he describes it as proof
Speaker 2: that the National Socialist state is a just state. And
Speaker 2: then in nineteen thirty six he helps convene a conference on
Speaker 2: how to get rid of Jewish influence in German law.
Speaker 2: He gives a speech where he blames the Jews for
Speaker 2: hollowing out the German, healthy, Volcish German way of thinking
Speaker 2: of the state, and he calls for a purification of
Speaker 2: libraries that includes a separate system of citations for Jewish authors, right,
Speaker 2: so he is explicitly endorsing book bannings, the purging of
Speaker 2: books written by friends and colleagues of his, a separate
Speaker 2: way of classifying them because obviously Jewish law is a
Speaker 2: danger to good Germans. Right.
Speaker 3: Well, and they made fun of him, they hurt his feelings.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they made fun of him. They talked about
Speaker 2: his books all right, writing, So he is deeply complicit
Speaker 2: in the early Third Reich and in the purging of
Speaker 2: it intellectuals and people getting put He's incredibly complicit in
Speaker 2: all of this. Now, unfortunately for Schmidt, this in nineteen
Speaker 2: thirty six, this this speech he gives is going to
Speaker 2: be like the high watermark of his power in the
Speaker 2: Third Reich, because once the Nazis are running everything, they're like,
Speaker 2: we don't really need an academic with a mind of
Speaker 2: his own, right, we got it, We've got it. Now,
Speaker 2: we're done thinking. You know, and this guy, he's not
Speaker 2: really loyal to Hitler, right, So in December of thirty six,
Speaker 2: the SS newspaper publishes a hit piece on him, accusing
Speaker 2: him of being a Hegelian, which is basically true and
Speaker 2: a false anti semi which really isn't he talked to
Speaker 2: friends about like fleeing Germany. He was like, maybe I
Speaker 2: need to leave, Maybe this is dangerous, but it's not
Speaker 2: something he ever seriously considered. And he does have some
Speaker 2: defenders who will be like, well, look he thought about leaving,
Speaker 2: and like, I don't know if that counts to me.
Speaker 2: Hannah Hannah Arnt would later write about schmidz Ouster from
Speaker 2: the Nazi Party as a fairly standard move the replacing
Speaker 2: of sympathetic but skilled people with toadies who are utterly
Speaker 2: loyal to the system, even if they're not very good
Speaker 2: at anything. Quote from a rent And this is I
Speaker 2: think an important one, especially for right now. Totalitarianism and
Speaker 2: power invariably replaces all first rate talents, regardless of their sympathies,
Speaker 2: with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and
Speaker 2: creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty. Nothing
Speaker 2: familiar there.
Speaker 3: Yeh, I'm not picking up on you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what an old common themes? Yes, what an ancient idea?
Speaker 2: Hat ahead, Yeah, that's so dated now. He was never
Speaker 2: Schmidt is never hounded by the regime or punished. He's
Speaker 2: never in serious danger. He's out of any kind of
Speaker 2: inner circle. Here he's on the kind of the outskirts
Speaker 2: looking in again, but he maintains his position. He keeps
Speaker 2: being employed at the university. He's a prominent academic, and
Speaker 2: he lives well up and through most of the war years.
Speaker 2: But by the time the war ends and the Allies
Speaker 2: begin to occupy the ruins of the Third Reich, his
Speaker 2: last public identity had been as a Nazi intellectual who
Speaker 2: was participating in the purging of intellectuals. And so he
Speaker 2: gets arrested by the Americans in September of nineteen forty five.
Speaker 2: He's locked up for like a month or so, and
Speaker 2: you know, he's trying to put a brave face on it.
Speaker 2: He tells his wife, like, I'm not going to collapse
Speaker 2: like some of these other guys who killed themselves or whatever,
Speaker 2: Like I'm going to hold up. You know, they'll realize
Speaker 2: I'm not guilty of anything. And unfortunately he's kind of right,
Speaker 2: you know, he gets released. He gets arrested again in
Speaker 2: March and April of nineteen forty seven, and he's brought
Speaker 2: to Nuremberg, where he gets interrogated by the US Chief
Speaker 2: Council at Nuremberg Robert Kempner four times over the course
Speaker 2: of about a month or so, five weeks, and you know,
Speaker 2: he's basically Kempner's trying to figure out is there anything
Speaker 2: we can go after this guy for? Like how much
Speaker 2: is he responsible for? How many crimes did he directly commit?
Speaker 2: And Schmidt is like, look, I wasn't trying to support
Speaker 2: all the horrible things the Nazis, do you know, I'm
Speaker 2: not a Nazi ever? Really, I'm an intellectual adventurer. That's
Speaker 2: how he describes himself as, like, look, I was just
Speaker 2: asking questions. Yeah, he's such a piece of shit. We
Speaker 2: should have shot this guy in the fucking face.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Immediately I want to read a little transcript of his
Speaker 2: interview with Kempner. That makes for fascinating reading because this
Speaker 2: is Kimpner being like, what the fuck do you mean
Speaker 2: by intellectual adventurer? I wanted to give the term national
Speaker 2: socialism my own meeting, Schmidt said, Kimpner, Hitler had a
Speaker 2: national socialism and you had a national socialism. Schmidt, I
Speaker 2: felt superior, Kimpner, you felt superior to Adolf Hitler. Schmidt Intellectually,
Speaker 2: of course, he was to me so uninteresting that I
Speaker 2: do not want to talk about that at all. When
Speaker 2: did you renounce the devil? Kimpner asked nineteen thirty six.
Speaker 2: And I believe that he didn't like Hitler? Right, because
Speaker 2: he doesn't. He's never an intellectual respector of Hitler particularly.
Speaker 2: But this is bullshit, right, Like you participated in purging
Speaker 2: your colleagues. You were so psyched that people were listening
Speaker 2: to you. That's all that matters. You only renounce the
Speaker 2: devil because the SS got angry at you and you
Speaker 2: lost your influence, right, Like this man never had a
Speaker 2: change of heart.
Speaker 3: I'm thinking of who Schmidt I might be getting ahead
Speaker 3: of herself, of who he would favor out of a Hitler,
Speaker 3: And then you have a trump like who was the
Speaker 3: ideal I think it might be Putin might be the
Speaker 3: ideal one for him.
Speaker 2: Fascinating that you bring that up. This brief after war
Speaker 2: period mark the last time Schmid would discuss his support
Speaker 2: of the Nazis directly. He returned to Plettenberg and continued
Speaker 2: to write, although he was fired from his professorship. He
Speaker 2: found no trouble getting published, though, and once around twenty
Speaker 2: years had passed, his name starts getting tossed around by
Speaker 2: conservative intellectuals around the world, first in whispered tones, but
Speaker 2: then in an increasingly brazen manner. Schmidt dies in nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty five, and he lives to see the beginning of
Speaker 2: his second rise to prominence. And one of them, you've
Speaker 2: heard of Marine Lapinn over in France. The she just
Speaker 2: got incarcerated for a bunch of shit, but she's like
Speaker 2: the leader of their fascist party. Her father founded the party,
Speaker 2: her father is a Schmidt acolyte. Her father the whole
Speaker 2: blueprint of the French far right is directly taken from Schmidt.
Speaker 2: That's why it's so centered on immigrants and immigration right,
Speaker 2: Like they are very consciously the French nation, the national
Speaker 2: party that Lapin leads is their whole blueprint is Schmidt.
Speaker 2: Schmidt is the guy. Like they are openly citing and
Speaker 2: quoting his writings at the very start of that party. Now,
Speaker 2: more to the point, there's another fella who becomes one
Speaker 2: of his acolytes, who finds Schmidt's writing and is like, oh,
Speaker 2: this is a really good blueprint for how to get
Speaker 2: in power as a reactionary movement and destroy a nascent
Speaker 2: liberal democracy. And that guy is named Alexander Dugan. Now
Speaker 2: Dugan is an old nationalist who is seen as the
Speaker 2: primary political philosopher of the Russian New Right, and he's
Speaker 2: often called Putin's court philosopher right. These ideas are also
Speaker 2: a major backbone of how Putin gets into power, of
Speaker 2: the strategy he uses, and how a lot of his
Speaker 2: adherents and the new Russian New Rights see what they're doing.
Speaker 2: He's in the French far right, he's in the Russian
Speaker 2: far right. That kind of coalesces around Putin and in
Speaker 2: the US. The main vehicle for Schmid's ideas getting into
Speaker 2: the halls of power is through the work of a
Speaker 2: thinker who had once been his colleague, Leo Strauss. Strauss,
Speaker 2: a Jewish scientist, fled to France when Hitler took power
Speaker 2: on a Rockefeller scholarship, and Karl Schmidt had been his adviser.
Speaker 2: Here's a very good piece in the website libmd that
Speaker 2: traces out the connections here. There are very close ties
Speaker 2: between the conservative political scientist Patrick denan Catholic University of
Speaker 2: Notre Dame, Indiana, Strauss adept and winner of the Leo
Speaker 2: Strauss Award for Best Dissertation, and Vice President J. D.
Speaker 2: Vance and he provides a couple of quotes from Schmidt
Speaker 2: and from Vests. One is, this is a Schmidt quot
Speaker 2: from nineteen twenty two, authority proves that it does not
Speaker 2: need to be right in order to be right. And JD.
Speaker 2: Vance saying judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power.
Speaker 2: And you might even add in some of those statements
Speaker 2: that Vance made about like Haitian like literal lies about
Speaker 2: Haitian refugees, where it's like it doesn't matter what's true,
Speaker 2: you make it true by having power. Right. There's another
Speaker 2: quote here from Schmidt in thirty two, the rule of
Speaker 2: law means nothing other than the legitimization of a certain status. Quote.
Speaker 2: These are all very idea. You could hear basically, these
Speaker 2: fucking quotes being trumpeted, you know, among trumpets among these
Speaker 2: like unitary executive theory guys. And that's kind of it's
Speaker 2: both Schmidt's thinking first starts to influence the American right
Speaker 2: in a major way, with like the neocons who are
Speaker 2: kind of influenced by him, partly through Strauss guys like
Speaker 2: Bill Crystal Right and David Brooks Right, these guys who
Speaker 2: are very influenced by Strauss, but by the time Trump
Speaker 2: comes around and things have gotten too extreme for them.
Speaker 2: The like people like Curtis Jarvitt will just quote Carl Schmidt.
Speaker 2: He's a huge fan of Schmidt, Like, he brings him
Speaker 2: up constantly.
Speaker 4: JD.
Speaker 2: Vance is fans of a Strauss scholar who himself is
Speaker 2: influenced by Schmidt.
Speaker 3: Like.
Speaker 2: Schmidt's thinking is all throughout the entire right wing project worldwide.
Speaker 2: You know, from France to Russia to the United States.
Speaker 2: There's pieces of him everywhere, even though most people are
Speaker 2: not taking his work directly, but they're influenced by thinkers
Speaker 2: who were influenced by Schmidt and who adopted some of
Speaker 2: his ideas for their own. And most importantly, the basic
Speaker 2: strategy that Schmidt laid out I mean, unfortunately still works
Speaker 2: quite well. Yeah. Crazy, yeah crazy, Yeah great anyway.
Speaker 3: Anyway, yeah, anyway, I'm sure that'll go away soon. Sure,
Speaker 3: nothing to worry about.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think we've got it. I think we'll not
Speaker 2: it out. You know.
Speaker 3: So this JD. Vans guy, he's not high up in
Speaker 3: the government or anything.
Speaker 2: Right like, he's I haven't heard of him in years.
Speaker 2: I haven't heard of him in the years.
Speaker 3: You should read his jiz book.
Speaker 2: It's ye, his cum diary. It's fantastic, man. Yeah, the JD.
Speaker 2: Vans Cum Diary is a real quite a publication. Yeah
Speaker 2: it is.
Speaker 3: It is.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, I don't know, how are you feeling at
Speaker 2: the end of this Blake?
Speaker 3: Well, I mean bad, but I do also feel like
Speaker 3: I learned a lot. It does explain. It is very
Speaker 3: interesting to learn how we got to where we are today.
Speaker 3: And the scaryst part is, or one of the many
Speaker 3: scary parts, is that people it's not hidden anymore, you know,
Speaker 3: And even with JD. Vance, you don't have to go
Speaker 3: on a long sleuthing trip to figure out that he
Speaker 3: is a Schmidt guy. It's to one degree of separation. Yeah,
Speaker 3: maybe a Strauss degree. And some people are, like you said,
Speaker 3: just outright.
Speaker 2: Quoting Schmidt, like Javen who's also connected to Vance. And yeah,
Speaker 2: it is interesting that, like in an earlier era, these
Speaker 2: neo cons who now in a lot of cases have
Speaker 2: alligned themselves with anti Trump stuff, are still they're the
Speaker 2: guys who are first pushing unitary executive theory, which is
Speaker 2: like what leads to the presidents basically a king, right,
Speaker 2: Like that's the end result, and there Strauss is a
Speaker 2: big influence on them there, right, And then we get
Speaker 2: to this point where you can you don't have to
Speaker 2: just quote Strauss, you don't have to water it down
Speaker 2: at all. You can just go pere Schmidt. Baby, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's right, right to the source.
Speaker 3: I wonder, I guess my question for you is, I
Speaker 3: wonder how much Schmidt would value an outwardly intelligent dictator
Speaker 3: and if he would even necessarily see value in that
Speaker 3: where you know, Hitler was like incredibly charismatic. Obviously, no
Speaker 3: one would say that he was a fucking genius. Schmid
Speaker 3: wouldn't say that he was a genius. Trump is obviously
Speaker 3: not is outwardly stupid, but very charismatic obviously and can
Speaker 3: speak very well.
Speaker 2: He's got a kind of cunning that's very effective for
Speaker 2: what he needs to do.
Speaker 3: Ye, yes, I wonder, you know, like you have Saddam
Speaker 3: who is his Like he had the dress, you know,
Speaker 3: like he looked the part like I do wonder if
Speaker 3: putin do you know of any like outwardly you know,
Speaker 3: even like faux intellectual you know, like oh, actually, I
Speaker 3: mean we were talking about earlier. Schmidt is a very
Speaker 3: smart guy. He's just horrendously evil. So can you think
Speaker 3: of any dictators who were like learned dictators?
Speaker 2: It depends on what you mean by learned, right, because like, yes,
Speaker 2: Stalin makes a lot of hideous mistakes that cost a
Speaker 2: lot of people their lives, particularly in the other stages
Speaker 2: of the fighting with the Nazis. But like is an
Speaker 2: educated man who liked read extensively, and you know, like
Speaker 2: he's not like a He's not like a rube, right,
Speaker 2: you know, Tito was, I don't, I know, don't know
Speaker 2: nearly as much about his actual education. Was clearly an
Speaker 2: incredibly intelligent person, right, Just the degree of success he
Speaker 2: had both as a dictator and as an insurgent leader,
Speaker 2: presumably like Fidel Castro. Right, that's a smart man, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: It's a man who was a great degree of cunning,
Speaker 2: you know, and understanding. And I do think there are
Speaker 2: very smart people around. I don't think Peter Thiel's dumb.
Speaker 2: I think he's nuts, and I think he has some
Speaker 2: blind spots and a freak, but he understands how to
Speaker 2: do certain things very well. There's kinds of intelligence that
Speaker 2: he has. I think Trump has kinds of intelligence. He's
Speaker 2: been working at this for twenty something years. So I
Speaker 2: don't know, like learned I think they I think I
Speaker 2: guess the answer is they tend to learn the things
Speaker 2: they need to learn to get where they want to go. Right,
Speaker 2: They've expertise, right does Donald Trump?
Speaker 3: Is?
Speaker 5: He?
Speaker 2: Does he have like a great knowledge of all of
Speaker 2: the things that you know, you and I might respect
Speaker 2: being informed of. No, but he knew enough to figure
Speaker 2: out how to dismantle democracy and how to get people
Speaker 2: around him who knew more about it, right, And so
Speaker 2: I guess i'd say dictators tend to be learned in
Speaker 2: the things they need to be learned and to become dictators.
Speaker 3: Right. No, I think that's perfectly put. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 3: agree with that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Anyway, Wow, is this how all these episodes.
Speaker 3: Jesus just us mubbling to ourselves? I don't know what? Yeah, Like,
Speaker 3: where do I even move?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Canada is?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Is it? Portugal? Do I become a Portuguese wind bag?
Speaker 2: Is that? Yeah? Become yours? You become a Portuguese wind bag?
Speaker 1: You guys, it's fine. Robert will let us into the Vatican.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the Vatican, that's what we're all going to hide.
Speaker 2: Well with all the gold, Uh, okay, So I don't know.
Speaker 2: I tend to think what you should do is right. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and you can find a lot of the blueprints you'll
Speaker 2: need on the internet. Anyway, episode is over, Blake, you
Speaker 2: want to plug anything before we go.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would I have a jizz book of my own. No,
Speaker 3: I would like to promote August first. I'm going to
Speaker 3: be doing stand up in Philadelphia also at Blake Wexler
Speaker 3: on all social media. If you could follow me there,
Speaker 3: I would love that. And I'm doing a bike ride
Speaker 3: to raise money for autism research, autism awareness and that
Speaker 3: if you can spare anything, It's times are tough right now,
Speaker 3: but any donation, if you can do it, would be great.
Speaker 3: It's that link is in my bio. And I have
Speaker 3: a stand up comedy special called Daddy Long Legs, which
Speaker 3: is available for free on YouTube. And this was a blast.
Speaker 3: I have so much respect for both of you. This
Speaker 3: is this is I don't I don't know if I've
Speaker 3: ever said this sentence. Is a great podcast, This is
Speaker 3: a great show. This is a fantastic show. I know
Speaker 3: no one, no one does what you do, so I
Speaker 3: appreciate a.
Speaker 2: Company will do. We have the thank you. We have
Speaker 2: the we have the pope.
Speaker 3: You do have the new Pope, and that's how you
Speaker 3: got elected by your fellow colleagues cardinals.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you are.
Speaker 1: Ah my god, there needs to be a podcast conclave.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, oh my god.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, to see who the podcasting pope is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, just like the podcast.
Speaker 2: It better not be one of the pods, save guys,
Speaker 2: or I'm doing a schism.
Speaker 5: I mean it would it's thinking about it would have
Speaker 5: to be in that that guy, Sean Sean Malin who
Speaker 5: just who has the podcast Pantheon book coming.
Speaker 1: Out later this year. That we're we're in that book.
Speaker 1: So we get to be in the conflict if.
Speaker 2: There's a if it doesn't go my way, I'm moving
Speaker 2: to Avignon and I'm going to create like a counter
Speaker 2: conclave and we're going to have us an anti Fast group.
Speaker 1: The fuckery we can get. Oh my god, Robert, we have.
Speaker 1: It has to happen. It has has to happen.
Speaker 3: Ye hope, save America.
Speaker 1: So much fuckery. Oh I'm plotting. I'm plotting. Okay. Anyways, Blake, Blake,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for being Herevis was so lovely, Robert, Robert,
Speaker 1: that was horrifying.
Speaker 3: Did we do it?
Speaker 1: To the podcast?
Speaker 2: We did? The podcast Let's Go Away Okay.
Speaker 4: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 4: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
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Speaker 5: Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes
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