The Nazi Lies Podcast

Mike Isaacson: The holes! The holes! The holes!

[Theme song]

Nazi SS UFOs Lizards wearing human clothes Hinduism’s secret codes These are nazi lies

Race and IQ are in genes Warfare keeps the nation clean Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine These are nazi lies

Hollow earth, white genocide Muslim’s rampant femicide Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde Hiter lived and no Jews died

Army, navy, and the cops Secret service, special ops They protect us, not sweatshops These are nazi lies

Mike Isaacson: Welcome back to The Nazi Lies Podcast. This episode, we’re lucky enough to have Robert Jan Van Pelt, Architectural Historian at the University of Waterloo and chief curator of the traveling Holocaust exhibit Auschwitz: Not Long Ago, Not Far Away. He’s the author of several books including Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present and The Case for Auschwitz where he specifically takes on Holocaust deniers or as he calls them negationists. Thanks for coming on the podcast Dr. Van Pelt.

Robert Jan Van Pelt: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here with you today.

Mike Isaacson: Thank you. So today, we're lucky enough to have a guest who's actually familiar with the Nazi lies he's debunking. So his book, The Case for Auschwitz, documents the testimony in the David Irving libel trial. So before we discuss who they are, why do you call them negationists?

Robert Jan Van Pelt: The term was actually coined in the mid-19th century by a Scottish philosopher, his name is Patrick Edward Dove, in a book called The Logic of the Christian Faith. And basically, he refers to negationist as a German idealist like Immanuel Kant or Wilhelm Fried Hegel, who basically said that physical reality doesn't exist, or at least it's not relevant, that everything is in the mind. And so he talks about them as people who are negating, who are denying, actually the existence of the world as we experience it every day. And so, the term has a philosophical background, but in the 19, late 1980s, early 1990s, it became to be applied by a number of philosophers both in France and also in the United States-- Thomas Nagel is one-- to people who we normally call Holocaust deniers. Now, when I got involved in the struggle against Holocaust denier, so negationist, I was intrigued by, let's call it the philosophical aspects of this whole thing. You can of course say, these are all crazy people or they're bad people, they're anti Semite, blah, blah, blah. All of these guys passed judgment on it. But I was always fascinated by what it takes to actually deny reality. And of course, today, when we're in the middle of many denials that are around; from vaccine denial to COVID denial to climate denial and so on, I think that one of the interesting aspects of Holocaust denial is that it was a trial run that occurred in the 1980s 1990s of actually what we're seeing today. Trial, almost like a laboratory experiment, of how do people deny, what does it take to deny, what actually does it take to actually establish reality in a narrative?

And so when I was asked to join the case, the defense team of Deborah Lipstadt who was being sued by David Irving, a English Holocaust denier, for libel in a British court, I basically took a year off of sabbatical to basically research this phenomenon. I very much went back also to the great what we might call epistemological questions, the questions of how do we know what we know? And going back to 17th century philosophers who talk about skepticism, can we have radical skepticism, under what conditions can we actually challenge a particular motion, when is it okay to accept something going back to legal theory? When actually do we have enough certainty to convict a man or a woman and chop his or her head off? Questions about negotiating a world in which in principle, we can always say, I don't believe this, I don't believe that. But then if we never have any certainty about anything, that we really cannot move forward, either individually or collectively. So I was interested in those questions. So in my choice of the term negationist, I in some way, try to show that larger context in which I was operating. And also, I wanted to connect back to a discourse, an argument that had been made first in the 1950s, by the Jewish German and later American philosopher, Hannah Arendt, who in 1941, ends up in New York after having fled from a German concentration camp or a French concentration camp controlled by Germans. And in a very famous book called The Origins of Totalitarianism, she basically says that one of the central characteristics of fascism, that is also national socialism, and she also puts it totalitarian communism in the statement, is that they basically attempt to acquire control over people and are successful in it for a considerable time, at least, they were in the 1920s and 30s, and 40s, by shaking the belief of people that they ...

Mike Isaacson: I’m sorry, but there’s really no comparison between Irish indentured servitude and African chattel slavery.

[Theme song]

Nazi SS UFOs Lizards wearing human clothes Hinduism’s secret codes These are nazi lies

Race and IQ are in genes Warfare keeps the nation clean Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine These are nazi lies

Hollow earth, white genocide Muslim’s rampant femicide Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde Hiter lived and no Jews died

Army, navy, and the cops Secret service, special ops They protect us, not sweatshops These are nazi lies

Mike: Thanks for joining us for episode six of The Nazi Lies Podcast. We've talked about Hitler survival rumors, neo-Nazis denialism, the Jewish Talmud, critical race theory and even lizard people. Today we are going to tackle the myth of Irish slavery. We are joined by Miki Garcia, author of The Caribbean Irish: How the Slave Myth Was Made. Garcia is a 20-year veteran in the media and consulting industry. She has a master's in journalism from the City University of London and is currently working on her PhD at the University of Westminster. Thanks for joining us, Miki.

Miki: Thank you for having me.

Mike: Before we get into the Irish slavery myth, I want to talk to you about how you came to this research. What sparked your interest in the transatlantic trade of Irish indentured servants?

Miki: When I was a student in the 1990s, I did some volunteer work for street workers in the Kings Cross area. It was a rundown area of London in those days and all the people sleeping rough in the 1990s in this specific area were Irish. It was the time when the IRA were bombing across England and the British media was very biased and had a hostile attitude towards Irish people. We didn't have a St. Patrick’s Day festival in London. It's hard to believe, but Irish history is not in the school curriculum in England or continental European countries either. So, I asked around, but no one knew what was going on.

To clear so many why, I immersed myself in Irish history and language and I play the Irish music instruments as well, and turned out those homeless people were the 1950s immigrant workers. So the decade was the height of Irish immigration. During the post war years, Britain used a substantial number of immigrant workers and many of them were youngsters, teenagers, and I got to know them personally. It was heartbreaking. When Irish people left home, they took a boat and they arrived at Holyhead which is in Wales and they took the train to come to London and the last stop in London was called Euston. And Kings Cross and Euston are basically side by side so there were so many Irish people there newly arrived and settled and so many Irish businesses like Irish pubs, restaurants, hostels, Catholic funeral parlors, barbers and so on. It was a very, very Irish area.

I'm basically interested in the Irish diaspora, how the Irish people were influenced by the British policies. There are quite a few people who are interested in their status within the British system. For example, Marx and Engels, German immigrants in England, they were very interested in the Irish people as workers, and they wrote a lot about them. Irish history is most part a history of struggle against England and British imperialism since 1169, the Anglo-Norman invasion. So it's been going on for such a long time, more than 800 years. 852 years.

The Irish in the Caribbean have been at the back of my mind for a while and this topic contains so many issues and it's also contentious. I wanted to write about them, but I didn't know where to start. It was the Black Lives Matter movement a few years ago. I saw many discussions on the internet, and there are so many innocent questions like, were Irish people slaves or Black? Or to more aggressive ones like “get over it” and so on. I've written some books on the Irish diaspora before so I wanted to write something very easy, simple, and informative. I think a myth is created because quite often people don't know the facts or the truth, so this is how it started.

Mike: Let's start by discussing what Irish indentured servitude was not namely chattel slavery. What were the major differences in how Irish indentured servants and enslaved Africans were treated and dealt with?

Miki: By definition, slaves are for life, so they were basically property, and they were owned, no human rights or civil rights. But indentured servants, they work for a time for a few years and they will be free, so they had human rights and civil rights in theory. But the Irish people were not homogenous. The majority of them who went to the Caribbean were forced, but many were born into service. Some of them were colonizers. They were colonial officers, administrators, traders, merchants, skilled workers, soldiers, sailors, and so on. But during the 17th century, forced...

Mike: No critical race theory isn't racism; though it's cute you think that.

[Theme song]

Nazi SS UFOs Lizards wearing human clothes Hinduism’s secret codes These are nazi lies

Race and IQ are in genes Warfare keeps the nation clean Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine These are nazi lies

Hollow earth, white genocide Muslim’s rampant femicide Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde Hiter lived and no Jews died

Army, navy, and the cops Secret service, special ops They protect us, not sweatshops These are nazi lies

Mike: Thank you so much for joining us for our Juneteenth episode. I'm joined by two scholars today to talk about critical race theory in education. Marvin Lynn is the dean of the College of Education at Portland State University with his Ph.D. from UCLA in social sciences and education. Adrienne Dixson is a professor of education at the University of Illinois-Champaign with her Ph.D. in multicultural education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Together, they are the editors of The Handbook of Critical Race Theory in Education, an edited volume now in its second edition with contributors from many illustrious scholars in the field of critical race theory and critical race pedagogy. Thank you both for joining me on The Nazi Lies Podcast.

Adrienne Dixson: Thank you.

Mike: Okay. So, let's start out with the very basics: what is critical race theory and why is it here?

Marvin Lynn: Well, I think about critical race theory as a subfield within the law that is very focused on how race and racism are represented within the legal structure but also within the application of law in the United States. And legal scholars have been very interested in kind of documenting that historically, but also looking at the ways in which the law is unfortunately limited when it comes to protecting particularly racially marginalized people such as African Americans and so there's lots of examples of that as well. So, that's how I would describe it. It's a body of scholarship that comes out of the law.

Education scholars like myself and Adrienne have been drawing on this for many years, to try to think about how we talk about and theorize about schools and what happens in schools, particularly as it pertains to students of color and gaps in educational attainment and achievement for example. We look at classrooms; we look at curriculum; we look at policies both in higher education and in K-12 context, and we are trying to understand how race and racism are shaping all of those factors.

There's a whole number of tenets that we could describe for you that sort of reflect the principles and the values of critical race theory. For example, this idea of the permanence of racism is an idea authored by Derrick Bell who many considered to be the father of critical race theory. And he argues that racism is a permanent feature of American society because of the way in which the society was structured and so on. I should say there is some disagreement about that within the field. There are other critical race theorists who are a little bit more hopeful than that.

Another principle of critical race theory that you often hear about is intersectionality that comes out of Kimberlé Crenshaw's work, for example. And that's the idea that we have to understand the sort of unique ways in which folks of color are positioned within the racial hierarchy. So with black women, for example, are both gendered and raced, and those things cannot be separated as we consider their experiences with marginalization in our society. There are examples of court cases that have really gotten it wrong and have not been able to figure out how to really think about those things in tandem with each other, and Kimberlé Crenshaw writes about that problem. So, there are a number of other tenets that I could speak about, but those are two that I think probably people hear about the most.

Mike: Dr. Dixson, do you have anything to add?

Adrienne: I agree with what Marvin said for the most part, I think. I would want to kind of underscore in explaining what critical race theory is. For people who study discrimination or racism, it's an analytical or a theoretical frame. For most of us who identify as critical race theorists, it is more than a theoretical framework. It is a perspective on how race and racism, opportunity and inopportunity operate in the US that's grounded in a history of oppressing people of color. And that history is documented, so it's not theoretical; it's not something that is a figment of one's imagination; it is documented history.

One of the things that we try to understand is that even in spite of interventions to address that history or redress that history, we still find ourselves with kind of chronic disparities that map onto race. And so what we endeavor to do is to try to understand, well, if the legal o...

Mike: I assure you there are fascists in the US.

[Theme song]

Nazi SS UFOs Lizards wearing human clothes Hinduism’s secret codes These are nazi lies

Race and IQ are in genes Warfare keeps the nation clean Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine These are nazi lies

Hollow earth, white genocide Muslim’s rampant femicide Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde Hiter lived and no Jews died

Army, navy, and the cops Secret service, special ops They protect us, not sweatshops These are nazi lies

Mike: One of the more pernicious lies I hear about US fascism is that it doesn’t exist, particularly in the present day. So I’m here today with journalist and sociologist Dr. Spencer Sunshine, PhD from CUNY’s Grad School. Spencer has written for Colorlines, Truthout, and The Daily Beast and has an organizing guide out through PopMob called 40 Ways to Fight Fascists: Street-Legal Tactics for Community Activists. Thanks for coming on the pod.

Spencer Sunshine: Thanks for having me on the show, Mike.

Mike: Of course! So Spencer’s here to talk about the American Nazi Party; its successor, the National Socialist White People’s Party; and its remnants today. So let’s start with a brief history of US fascism before the American Nazi Party.

Spencer: Sure, so fascism as an actual political current is about 100 years old in the United States. The first Nazi group, or Nazi cell, in the United States formed in 1922 by German expats in the Bronx. And there were probably earlier groups that were Italian Fascist groups. Like many radical political traditions that started in Europe, in the United States these were first brought to the country by immigrants from Europe.

If we look further than that, if we use fascism as a broader term involving any organized white supremacist groups, of course we’d easily go back to the 1860s and the Ku Klux Klan and similarly styled far right groups go back in the United States well before that. So fascism is a longstanding political tradition in our country. It’s a century old. The fact that people can’t acknowledge this shows something interesting about the psyche of the United States where people just can’t admit that there are radical political movements here, or that such a noxious political movement such as fascism could take fairly, what looks like permanent roots in our country.

Mike: Okay, so let’s talk about the American Nazi Party itself. How was it founded? What did it do?

Spencer: So before the war there were two groups that were pro-Nazi. There was the German American Bund, who were tied to the Nazi Party in various ways; and an American group called the Silver Shirts. As you may imagine, during the war, nazism became taboo in the country. A lot of the leaders were arrested.

After the war it took quite a while for, what then became neo-nazism, neo-nazi groups to establish themselves. There was a group called the National States Rights Party who mostly recruited from Klan members and were the core organizers for nazis, but they did not say on the– On the outside of the package it did not say that; although on the inside it was.

So the American Nazi Party was sort of special because it was the first group to openly declare itself a nazi group and to, the phrase they used was, “raise the swastika,” to actually appear in public. You know, at the time they used the old stormtrooper uniforms, these brown uniforms with a swastika armband. You rarely see it these days, but this was pretty common through the early 90s for nazi groups to do this.

So the American Nazi Party was founded in 1959. There was a precursor group in 1958 by George Lincoln Rockwell. He had done advertising; was very good. And came from a vaudeville family. This is a really crazy story, but Bob Hope was actually at his christening. He used these advertising techniques to form this group. It was designed to get media attention, and the idea was for him that conservatives could never become radical enough and could never really attract the people they needed. So by using this imagery, he could attract the kinds of people that he wanted, and he could use the presence of nazis– He used to say, “No one can ignore nazis marching in the streets.” –use this public image to gain media attention which he could then use as a recruiting tool.

The party was never very big. It continued through the 60s. They did a lot of– It was almost an agitprop kind of project. The kind of murders that we associate with the nazi movement these days– They had punch ups at rallies and stuff. But the kind of violence and murders that we associate with neo-nazism these days did not come until later, which is an interesting thing.

He was assassinated by a fellow party member in 1967. Right before then he had changed his organizing strategy. He had a very successful rally in Marquette Park, Chicago, which was a...

Mike Isaacson: Now when you say recommended dose...

[Theme song]

Nazi SS UFOs Lizards wearing human clothes Hinduism’s secret codes These are nazi lies

Race and IQ are in genes Warfare keeps the nation clean Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine These are nazi lies

Hollow earth, white genocide Muslim’s rampant femicide Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde Hiter lived and no Jews died

Army, navy, and the cops Secret service, special ops They protect us, not sweatshops These are nazi lies

Mike: Welcome to another episode of the Nazi Lies Podcast. Subscribe to our Patreon to get access to early episodes and membership in our book club and Discord. Today we are joined by Dr. Tim Geary, a pharmacoparasitologist or parasitopharmacologist... He studies parasites and makes drugs. He's a professor emeritus at McGill University and still teaches courses at Queen's University Belfast. He's here to talk to us about hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and why they probably won't neutralize Coronavirus. Thanks for joining us, Dr. Geary.

Tim Geary: You're welcome, Mike. Please call me Tim.

Mike: Okay, Tim. Before we get into all the science, tell our audience a little bit about what you've done professionally, because you have a very extensive list of bona fides, and I don't really know where to start. [laughs]

Tim: That’s quite all right. Yes, I have been working on the study of drugs, pharmacology, for about 45 years, and most of that time I've been working on chemotherapy of infectious diseases, primarily parasites. This includes work in Africa. Most of my career has been on veterinary parasites or human neglected tropical diseases caused by parasites. During the course of my career I have worked on malaria, and that's where chloroquine and its derivative hydroxychloroquine come from, and also ivermectin, which I have studied for many, many years, both in animals and people.

In full disclosure, Mike, I once did work for the pharmaceutical industry, the animal health arm of a company called up Upjohn that is now known as Zoetis in Kalamazoo, Michigan. [ed. It’s now part of Viatris.] I also consulted and worked with the World Health Organization, with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and with the Carter Center on various problems of tropical diseases, and I continue to be a consultant for some animal health companies. That's who I am.

Mike: Very good. All right. Now you've done some research on both hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, correct?

Tim: I have, indeed. I worked on both how they work to kill parasites and also how parasites become resistant to them. I have studied them in clinical settings as well as in the laboratory, and I think I qualify as an expert in both medicines in the indications for which they are used, which is essentially tropical medicine and veterinary parasitology.

Mike: Very good. And you've also been following the misinformation surrounding these two drugs too, right?

Tim: I have, with great interest and concern. There aren't very many people in the world who are experts at drug discovery and drug development for these kinds of conditions. That's unfortunate. But yes, I have followed that, Mike, and I certainly have opinions about where the misinformation came from. It was not a malintention, it was just wrong interpretation and wrong design of some initial experiments that led to inappropriate conclusions in a rush to clinical use.

Mike: Okay, so let's talk about each of these medications and then we'll talk about where the rumors started. So let's start with hydroxychloroquine. Since the beginning of the pandemic almost, it was heralded as a miracle COVID cure but was quickly discovered not to be that. What were its recognised clinical uses?

Tim: So hydroxychloroquine is a derivative of a drug called chloroquine, which was also touted initially as a possible solution to COVID. Chloroquine was a miracle drug for the treatment of malaria. It saved, oh my gosh, millions and millions of lives over the course of its use. It's relatively cheap, it's reasonably safe and it was highly effective against malaria parasites until they evolved resistance to it. It's use for malaria has now diminished remarkably.

Hydroxychloroquine was thought to be a safer alternative with a better sort of safety profile. But it never was really used for malaria. It just never displaced chloroquine. Instead, it found use as kind of an immunomodulator compound for people with systemic lupus erythematosus or lupus as it's commonly known, an autoimmune condition. So hydroxychloroquine for people with lupus does help to reduce symptoms, to reduce worsening of the disease, and it is a valuable drug for that purpose.

Mike: Okay, and how safe is it to experiment with?

Tim: Not very. I mean, it does have side effects, especially when you go over recommended...