Bill Kristol: Trump Loves Fraud
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Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It's Monday, January 27th. Trump's been president again for about a week now. Feels longer. And I'm here today with Bill Kristol.
How you doing, Bill? It does feel longer than a week. It does. I don't know if it feels like... A month, six months, or a year, but we're not even talking like a little longer than a week, right?
Yeah. We are gathering today, as you note in the morning newsletter, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, so I think it's probably worth starting there. Shadow President Elon Musk zoomed in to a conference of the AFD. which is the German far-right party. At that gathering, he said he thinks that there's too much focused on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that. You had a little meditation on this for Holocaust Remembrance Day today. I'd like for you to share your thoughts on that.
Well, Musk, of course, had done the salute, which wasn't really, of course, a fascist or Nazi salute. On Monday, he joked about it during the week. I actually wrote about that in Friday's Morning Shots. Then Saturday, he decided to video into an AFD rally in Germany. Okay, he's endorsed them. He likes them. It's indefensible in any case, but I suppose if you wanted to defend him, you could say he likes them for other reasons. They don't like the EU bureaucracy, tax cuts, Gorsuch, whatever they're for, judicial appointments. Instead, he actually focused on- Yeah, I know. I don't know. I feel bad for Gorsuch. That wasn't quite fair. But anyway, and yeah, instead he focuses on what is at the heart of their appeal, one of their major appeals, which is a kind of we've got to get beyond a successive cult of guilt. Musk actually used that phrase, I believe, and that's a phrase they use over there. About, you know, remembering the Holocaust, basically. And so I quote in the morning shots this tweet stream I came across.
I don't know the man at all. Professor Martin Sauerbrei, based on Google. He seems to be a 45-year-old or so German historian.
I love that he's at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research on the Consequences of War. That's a great quote. Great title. Yeah.
He makes some obvious points. I mean, for one point, Musk wants to say, you know, Germany's been crippled by this guilt. You know, Germany's had a pretty good run since 1945. West Germany first, and then all of Germany. We've helped them. They're a good part of the West. I mean, really? Have they been crippled? Is that a country that hasn't done better than we might have expected over the last 70 years? Because they did come to grips with the Holocaust more than others, more than Austria. In any case, Sauerbein makes this point, and then makes a personal point about his own, He is not crippled by a cult of guilt, but he also thinks that not to be serious about one's nation's past and to take that seriously is denial. It is avoidance of moral responsibility and avoidance of political responsibility in terms of how to prevent this from happening.
Again, I didn't draw this, make this point in one of the shots, but you read it and you think a little bit about our own issues with slavery and with, you know, our past and coming to grips with it over the last decade. 60, 70 years, but the last 10, 20, too, as well. And I think how healthy that has been. Can it go a little too far? Sure. But anyway, the idea that Musk calls in on Saturday to encourage them to basically minimize the Holocaust two days before Holocaust Remembrance Day, pretty appalling. And then this morning, they're having these moving ceremonies at Auschwitz. Poland, and as the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army, by Soviet troops coming from the East.
Interestingly, they stopped inviting Putin to these, or any Russian government representative, to these celebrations after the invasion of Ukraine because they correctly understood this is what Putin is doing. It does not entitle him to be on the side of the liberationists, you know? So they have a kind of sense of the current relevance of what they are commemorating. King Charles is there.
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