January 22, 2025 • 61 mins
This week, I had the pleasyre of speaking with, Dr. Dan McMillan. He is the founder of Save Democracy in America, a non-partisan campaign focused on removing the influence of big money from politics using Voter Dollars reform. Dan is also a historian, a former history professor and prosecuting attorney, and the author of the acclaimed book “How Could This Happen: Explaining the Holocaust”. His insights into history and democracy are truly remarkable.
Here’s what we talked about:
- The causes of the Holocaust and why such an atrocity occurred.
- Why Dan believes an event like the Holocaust could not happen again in today’s world.
- How democracy is currently crumbling and what steps are necessary to save it.
- The impact of big money in politics and how Voter Dollars reform can make a difference.
- Why Dan remains hopeful about the future of democracy despite current challenges.
This conversation is packed with historical insights and a forward-looking perspective on making positive change. I hope you enjoy it!
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Save Democracy in America Website: https://savedemocracyinamerica.org/
Dr. McMillan's Website: https://drdanmcmillan.com/
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Link to all things Not in a Huff Podcast: https://linktr.ee/notinahuffpodcast
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
How did it become possible to just completely deny the value of human life and to become utterly
(00:05):
indifferent to the victims? You know, the signature mental state of the Holocaust perpetrator
was not hot passionate hatred. It was an indifference so cold that mass murder evoked no
emotion more powerful than the disgust you feel when stepping on a cockroach in your kitchen.
(00:38):
Hello hello hello I am Jackson Huff. This is Notten Huff. Thanks so much for joining me.
As always, really appreciate it. This week I speak with Dan McMillan and this conversation is
interesting in several ways. One of the ways is as you know I normally have the guests introduce
themselves. I always say you know I'm going to leave the heavy lifting to you and I have them
(00:59):
introduce themselves. Well Dan is a little bit too humble to want to do that so he asked me to read
his biography a short little blurb. Normally don't do that but I'm going to do that now. So I'm having
Dan McMillan on. He's the founder of Save Democracy in America, a non-partisan campaign to get big
money out of politics using voter dollar reform. Dan holds a PhD in history from Columbia as well
(01:23):
as a law degree and has worked as a history professor and a prosecuting attorney. In 2014,
he published an acclaimed book on the causes of the Holocaust. The book was called How Could This
Happen? Explaining the Holocaust. He's a really really great guy. Really really enjoy speaking
with him. We're going to talk about two big things and I just mentioned them in the intro but we're
(01:45):
going to talk first about the Holocaust. How you know an atrocity like this happened. We've talked
to authors in the past that had grandmothers and parents be a part of the Holocaust as people who
have been sent to concentration camps. We talked for the hundredth episode to my grandmother who
(02:05):
had a different experience that she was a German in Germany during this time and was just pretty
much unaware as a child of exactly what was happening. She was not a Jewish person or anyone
else that was being persecuted so that was a different perspective as well. She's going to
talk about just why did the Holocaust happen? How did something like this happen and why he doesn't
(02:29):
think it could happen again? It's kind of a good tie-in because you know a lot of people in today's
current world always kind of rush towards you know that type of thing and it being something that
could happen again or you know our country could go down that path and he's going to talk about
why he doesn't think that's possible or at all likely. He's also going to talk about democracy
(02:52):
and how you know it's slowly been crumbling in our world but you know his overall arching thing is
he does still have quite a bit of hope in that regard. I think you're really going to enjoy this
conversation. I said there were several things that make this one unique. The second part that
makes this unique and I you know I've got to say it is that I don't do a lot of talking in this
(03:13):
episode. In the beginning I said that he is a history professor and I do feel like he kind of
went into that mode and kind of it's a little bit more of a lecture than an interview but that's
what it is. I didn't ask very many questions. Dan kind of came with a slide of exactly what he wanted
to talk about and that's what we did and you know who am I to want to interrupt somebody
(03:37):
just so I can ask a question that they were already answering. So this is a great conversation with
Dan. It's mostly him kind of telling us about a lot of really really important things so
hope you enjoy it. Here is Dan McMillan. Dr. McMillan how are you? I'm good Jackson. How are
you doing? I'm good as well. We're just going to kind of jump right into things and I want to
(03:59):
talk first about your book and that book is called How Could This Happen? It covers the atrocities of
the Holocaust but the book is a little different than some of the people I've spoken with before
that share like their family stories through you know concentration camps and things like that.
Your book deals a lot more with kind of the environment of how it was able to even happen
(04:25):
the way that it did. So I want you to talk a little bit about the book and then what made
you decide to write something I guess so heavy. Well okay you know Jackson you know I read my
first book on the Holocaust when I was 12 years old so we're talking more than 50 years ago now.
(04:47):
We're talking about January or February in 1973. I can remember it quite vividly. It was
the murderers among us by Simon Deezenthal who was a Holocaust survivor who dedicated his life
after the war to tracking down bringing to justice prominent perpetrators of the Holocaust. And so
the book was a memoir of his own survival of the Lvov ghetto and the Mauthausen concentration camp
(05:13):
and as well as the deaths of most of his family and then sort of information on the careers so
to speak of some of these prominent killers that he had pursued. And it just sort of knocked me
flat for reasons that I couldn't articulate at the time although what I did pick up on the time was
(05:33):
the murderers' extraordinary emotional detachment from their victims. And I came to see that
I intuited something that I was only able to put into words decades later indeed after I completed
my book after I published it in 2014 which was that this is kind of the only time in history where
(05:57):
the ruling class of an advanced society really concluded that individual human life has absolutely
no intrinsic value whatsoever. I mean in every war, genocide, mass killing, the murderers,
killers dehumanize their victims, you dehumanize your enemies in wartime even if you're not a
murderer, human life gets cheapened but in the Holocaust the dehumanization at least to the
(06:23):
Jewish victims was complete and the you know human life lost all value whatsoever in the minds of
we're talking about 200,000 and many as 200,000 German and Austrian killers who were involved in
this and these were not the scum of German society indeed the larger fraction of the most
taken away from the elite of German society. You're talking professionals, doctors, lawyers,
(06:49):
academics, high-ranking civil servants, people, captains of industry and so on.
I want to sort of focus specifically on this denial of the value of human life because this is
I think what makes the Holocaust the Holocaust, what it's really what frightens us about the
(07:11):
Holocaust because it is fundamentally it's an assault on the value of every human life,
of yours, of mine, of that, of all the people in the audience and let me spill out a little bit about
how this was especially this is especially extreme with regard to the Jewish victims
naturally the Holocaust but also it's relevant to six or seven million Gentile victims of various
(07:36):
categories like three million Soviet POWs as many as 200,000 Germans with disabilities that they
murdered just to save money for national efficiency and other groups as well but specifically with the
Jewish victims what's unique about the Holocaust among all killings in history the Jews are the
only large ethnic group to be targeted for complete biological extinction. I mean the
(08:02):
the plan of the German government was to what they called the final solution to the Jewish question
was to murder every single person of Jewish ancestry on the German continent on the
European continent and if Hitler had won the Second World War in Europe it had in fact
built a war machine powerful enough to strike at us in this hemisphere and had established
(08:24):
world domination which he certainly would have liked. I personally don't think that he could
have achieved that but had he been able to do so I think I doubt there's any historian who would
disagree with me when I say that his next order of business would have been to strike at every
Jewish community around the globe no matter how small because the the Germans they saw
(08:47):
the Jews the way that public health organizations view polio or smallpox it's a virus and if you
can if you have the opportunity you should never pass up the opportunity to stamp it out everywhere
so that it can never grow back and so that is that is you also see the the radical dehumanization
(09:08):
of the Jewish victims in the way that they process their bodies for value as if they were animal
carcasses they shirred off women's hair with the stated purpose of making textiles as near as we
can tell no textiles were made but the intent was there also as you may have heard in you know in
the death camps harvesting the gold fillings in the in the teeth of people after they've been
(09:32):
murdered with poison gas to melt out the gold they also used you know Jewish prisoners as laboratory
animals for scientific experiments and and they lived in the camps and in the ghettos
because the the German overseers lived among their Jewish victims knowing they they and the victims
(09:54):
both knew that that every Jewish person in the camp they were going to murder sooner or later
there were there were some that they kept alive to help them run the camp and and they had a
a sort of state of execution if you will but but both they and their victims knew
they were going to murder everyone and they moved among them and indeed had conversations with them
(10:15):
and developed in a very superficial way one would appear to even be a friendship with some
with no discomfort with really kind of the same attitude as that of a farmer moving among livestock
that he's destined for slaughter there might even be a goat or a cow or a sheep that oh you know was
sort of a pet you know or that you that you kind of light and in some of these camps like in in
(10:40):
Treblinka no in Kelmno there was there was one young man who was sort of a mascot in some of
these camps they had individual Jewish prisoners who were sort of mascots in a way who got sort of
sort of nicer treatment but they also were going to be murdered too anyway that is you know that is
you know that is what is all I've always found so compelling about the Holocaust and so it became
(11:05):
important to me to understand how such a thing was possible and it's it's an important reason why when
I got to high school I picked up German as my second foreign language when I got to college I
majored in history in German studies spent my junior year in what was then West Berlin at the
German University when I decided to become an academic historian that I wanted to be a history
(11:27):
professor I specialized in German history although I didn't write my dissertation on the Holocaust
topic but across decades I was always kind of putting together piece by piece an understanding
of how this was possible and I wrote my book I started writing in 2010 and I was a professor
(11:52):
in 2010 and the reason what my book does and it's really it's the only strangely enough the only
book of its kind it's a it's a comprehensive essay on the causes of the Holocaust by that point in
time say 2010 you can say that the Holocaust had been thoroughly explained but the explanation was
(12:14):
useless even to academic historians because it existed only in fragments that is to say there
are so many things that are not in the book and there are so many things that are not in the book
and so I wrote a series of books about Hitler about World War I about World War II about all
the things that went wrong in German politics so that someone like Hitler could take power
(12:35):
about anti-Semitism about and so on and so forth but the whole story is really quite complex and
there was no overview that put the pieces of the puzzle together so you could see how they fit
together and I think that's what I wanted to do was I wanted to make the book as short as possible
as possible as possible and I think anyone with a solid high school education can read it without
(13:02):
difficulty which is kind of what I'm proudest of about the book but it raises the question
why did it take so long 70 years after the end of World War II for someone to write such a book
and I think the reason is that again because of this radical denial of the value of human life
(13:23):
it just it has been so terrifying to us that I think that even people who work professionally
and understanding it on some level have been ambivalent about really arriving at an explanation
of how this could happen because we have been in the book for so long and we have been in the book
we have been afraid that we would learn something about ourselves that we cannot live with and
(13:49):
I think the end the other is also that I think because the Holocaust mounts this kind of
you know essentially denies the meaning and value of our life it trenches on the kind of same set
of emotions and ideas and needs that religious faith that religious tradition offers for people
(14:11):
I mean let me put it to you this way if you you know I myself I'm certainly not an atheist but I
was raised by agnostics I don't really have the blessing of religious faith and I think it is a
blessing because it gives people a sense of the meaning of their lives or the purpose of their
lives and if you are devout in any in say any in the Judeo-Christian tradition or these or Islam
(14:35):
for that matter you're beautiful because you're made in the image of your creator and your life
has meaning because God put you on this earth for a noble purpose but you're free if you're
raised by agnostics like I was you're not made in the image of any creator you're a glorified
monkey clinging to an asteroid right and your life the possibility that your brief existence
(14:59):
is utterly without meaning and significance you face it alone and this is not it's not an
experience I recommend it's painful and it was that above all that that drove me that compelled me
and I think that because of that because the Holocaust goes to in a way you know the you know
(15:20):
most of us and certainly I you know we we tend to find our whether or not we have religious faith
whether or not we really spend a lot of time pondering the meaning of our existence I think
most people automatically find meaning in their lives by by loving other people by trying to be
a good person by trying to contribute to society but the killers in the Holocaust pose a double
(15:45):
challenge first of all they would say to us well who cares how much you love people they don't
matter and you don't either and also if we're capable of doing this then how lovable are we
and I think that because of all this you know I'm taking a little time to get to the point the
Holocaust has been sacred it's and if you say that you can explain it but with the same methods and
(16:09):
to the same degree that you can explain the the French Revolution or the American Civil War then
you have you have profaned it you've taken it from the realm of the sacred and I think that too is
created an inhibition and uh and there's really uh for well into the first decade of this century
(16:29):
you had distinguished historians saying that the Holocaust could not be explained at all
and we even hostile to the notion it could be explained uh because because by saying so you
you would again be sort of reducing it to making it just another historical event but of course
the idea that it cannot be explained is is preposterous because the Holocaust was not
(16:52):
perpetrated by Martians it was perpetrated by men and women who in their emotional and cognitive
equipment were not at all no different from you and I from you and me were perfectly normal at
least until they became murderers now let me you know I said sort of early on that let me actually
let me just back up a second I think one of the reasons why so few people really feel they
(17:16):
understand why this happened even though all this has been published is that it's so easy to get
lost when when historians like myself try to explain the Holocaust to the wider public and
for that matter to our students to ourselves we get bogged down in sort of all the details of the
long political story going back really to the 1850s in Germany that leads Germany to develop
(17:45):
to establish democracy only very late and that the first democracy the Weimar Republic is so fragile
and that it is overthrown by Hitler and so on and so forth and all these details are very important
and that's probably two-thirds of my book is devoted to understanding that narrative
but in a way what gets lost in that narrative is what you most need to understand and and that is
(18:07):
what I said at the beginning that that what we most need to understand about this is is that the
people who did this killed you know murdered the Jews and also murdered these other groups six or
seven million Gentile victims of different categories you could say above all because
they saw no reason not to murder them because human life to them had value only in the sense that
(18:32):
their goal was the long-term flourishing of the the German the genotype the German race as they
as they saw it in what they believe was the Darwinian struggle for survival among the races
of the world and if your death were necessary to that end or for them that are just convenient
(18:52):
as in the case for example of the 200 000 germs with disabilities then your life was forfeit and
if we could go back in time and get 15 or 20 of these killers around the table and we would ask
them with anguish in our voice you know why in heaven's name are you doing something so ghastly
so cruel I guarantee you the response would be a shrug of the shoulders and a question they would
(19:15):
put to us why not they're just people and that that's what makes the Holocaust the Holocaust and
it's so horrifying it wasn't really until about a year and a half ago that I was even able to put
that into words as I'm doing now and I and I still you talk to most almost any other historian of
(19:37):
Germany or of the Holocaust and you're still going to get kind of a narrative well there's the treaty
of rossi and then Germany was angry at losing the war and then then there was the great depression
and the inflation and Hitler comes to power and and all of that is true and all of that is very
important and it explains why the Germans were the killers and why the Jews were the victims
(19:58):
but ultimately what we want to understand is how did it become possible to to just completely deny
the value of human life to and to become utterly indifferent to the victims you know people often
ask me why did they hate the Jews so much and they imagine that the Holocaust was motivated by an
(20:22):
especially passionate form of hatred and to that I can say we should be so lucky because
the horrifying truth is that oh yes of course many perpetrators many of the killers did very
much hate Jews but you know the signature mental state of the Holocaust perpetrator was not hot
passionate hatred it was an indifference so cold that mass murder evoked no emotion more powerful
(20:49):
than the disgust you feel when stepping on a cockroach in your kitchen so I've rambled a
little bit but I think that the main point that I really want to get home is this radical denial
of the value of human life that we have to recognize as that aspect of the Holocaust that
most needs to be explained the other parts are all an important part of the story but this is
(21:09):
what we really want to understand but it's so terrifying that for the most part since now 80
years now since then the war almost we've been unable even to recognize it for what it is
it's like staring at the sun it's too painful you have to look away so anyway maybe out of but of
(21:31):
course you know in you know in in light of all the crazy things that are happening in our politics
there's been a lot of talk of whether we're in danger of becoming dictatorship and I've even had
some people say to me because they hear of you know racist language in our politics of of prejudice
or the the spike in anti-semitic hate crimes are we in danger of another genocide you know and but
(21:56):
let me ask you first if it was what I said so far recently clear did you have any follow-up
questions before I know I think that's that obviously it's a topic like you just mentioned
that you know it's taken 80 years 70 years since you know the the Holocaust when your book came
out to even get some kind of answer you're moving right into the direction that I wanted to take it
(22:16):
and that is you you've already mentioned that it took a long time for people even understand it and
maybe some people still don't understand you know exactly why it happened and that's what you tried
to to you know you you talked for a long time but if you think about how complex the issue is you
didn't talk for very long at all and I just wonder exactly exactly how how you are so confident
(22:44):
because you you you could see people say okay well he just talked a lot about how most people
still don't understand exactly how things happened and you know you've got the old the old adage of
you know if you don't understand the history it's doomed to repeat itself but you're also
pretty confident that something like this couldn't happen again and that's exactly what you're about
ready to talk about so how are you uh I guess how where's that confidence come from that you
(23:10):
don't think that this is a possibility again well I doesn't want to say not at all possible but yeah
I actually kind of I would I would argue there's sort of two questions that I think we need to
separate out one is uh is there a danger that the United States could become a dictatorship
and say the next five or ten years which many many Americans fear um but then even if we were to
(23:35):
become a dictatorship would our society be capable of genocide which is a whole other step I mean you
need a dictatorship you really have to have a dictatorship to have genocide democracies do not
perpetuate genocide but just becoming a dictatorship doesn't mean that genocide is going to happen or
could happen and I I'm pretty confident especially confident about genocide not being a threat because
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uh just because we really have become we all of us in the western world all of the world's advanced
prosperous democracies whether it's us Germany Canada all of our cousins in in Europe or in the
Pacific uh Australia New Zealand Japan and so on we have come to value human life first of all we're
(24:19):
democracies and you really need a highly repressive dictatorship to perpetrate genocide secondly
we're vastly less violent than than human societies were 80 years ago and in particular you've got to
remember that the Germany the Germans the generation of Germans who perpetrated the Holocaust
a lot of them were veterans of the first world war including Hitler himself where more than two
(24:44):
million young Germans died in combat as a fraction of the German population if you scale it up to our
population today you're talking about 10 million battle deaths not to speak of the wounded
it's not to speak of the wounded now if we we just come off a war with 10 million dead Americans
we would have a rather different attitude toward violence than we do today altogether moreover
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since the second war we have seen a rights revolution in all the western societies where
it wasn't just men with property who had a measure of rights women had equal rights
ethnic minorities have rights now is there still discrimination yes there is is there still prejudice
yes there is but compared to 60 years ago or even 20 years ago in many respects in our society and
(25:29):
all the the advanced societies we really do we have made massive progress moral progress we value
the human individual we accord the human individual far more worth and dignity than our
self than earlier human societies did anyone who tells me that there is not progress in history or
(25:49):
that things just keep going downhill they haven't studied their history and so in that sense I just
don't I don't see a genocide as being at all possible I mean you can imagine if we were to
somehow become a dictatorship you could see this or that group suffering some kind of discrimination
in employment and so on but and I'm not saying that wouldn't be a horrible thing but that's a very
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far that's quite a distance to genocide now moving to the thing that's like think of a more immediate
concern you know particularly you know the it's interesting in this last election both parties
accused the other parties of wanting to impose a dictatorship if they won so it was rhetoric on
on both sides and you know and because of you know because of a number of things that president
(26:39):
trump has said and done that certainly give ammunition to critics who argue that I offer
no opinion as to president trump's character or intentions because in my own political work I need
to be completely non-partisan but I will say this that even even if for the sake of argument that he
wanted to impose some kind of dictatorship I just don't see how that's possible because you can't
(27:04):
have a dictatorship without the cooperation of the military of law enforcement the courts
and although I think our institutions the democratic formal government has been
over time badly eroded in our country has been damaged uh nonetheless I think particularly of
you know I have friends who've served in the military and I look at public statements by
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by leading officers those men and women I mean they take an oath to defend our constitution
and that oath is a matter of personal honor honor is something that in civilian civilians most of
us civilians don't understand but this is really it goes to the to the sense of one's work to break
an oath of that kind is to just is the old is to disgrace yourself in the worst possible way and I
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just think that I have every confidence that people in our in our armed forces would defend
our constitution and the democratic former government to the death um they would absolutely
not be party so there's just there's no in and altogether people serve in law enforcement
I think the majority of them have probably served in the military that's a very common sort of
career path for people in law enforcement uh the courts you can talk about President Trump and
(28:18):
Mitch McConnell having packed the court with conservative judges um and you can argue that
you know the independence of the judiciary has been compromised but I think we're a long way
I think we're a long way away I think that if we continue down the road we're on for another 30
years or maybe even only 20 if our if government by the people continues to be degraded and
(28:42):
undermined here in the land of its birth um then if you ask me that question you may get a different
answer but I have no concern whatsoever that this this last election is going to be the last free
election in my lifetime uh President Trump is not going to be able to he's term term limited to the
constitution he's going to leave office he's not going to be able to declare himself president
(29:06):
for life and make desigate one of his sons as his as his prince and successor uh we're just not there
I mean you could put Hitler in the oval office next January and or Stalin even they would not
be able to do that it's just that's not the kind of country we are people sometimes try to compare
us to Germany in 1933 but you've got to remember 1933 the German people had had almost no experience
(29:31):
of democracy and all the experience they had was bad they were not committed they had never been
committed to the democratic former government and the elite of German society including the military
all of those people were ferociously hostile to democracy and would have wanted a return to
uh the empire that ended in 1918 which was some semi-authoritarian monarchy or some new form of
(29:55):
dictatorship uh so it's it's the the differences between 1933 and Germany and America they are so
vastly outweigh any similarities uh that that is completely false analogy having said all that
you know this this and this fear about the the future of our democracy doesn't come from nowhere
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I would argue that the democratic former government has been badly um has been badly undermined in
this country across a period of many decades and you know that the American people uh recognize
this I think that probably the if you want to understand my for me the most obvious explanation
(30:36):
for why uh Donald Trump won in 2016 and for his enduring support and why he won this time is that
um is that I think the people who voted for him recognize that the system is is corrupt that it's
rotten that it's dysfunctional that the government that that we the people are not being represented
(30:58):
in Washington um that the government in Washington does not listen to us does not care what we think
is not serving us and people want change um I mean Trump won in 2016 because he was the change
candidate just as Barack Obama won in 2008 with this vague promise of transformative change you
(31:21):
know change we can believe in yes we can and in 2016 both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders
ran as outsiders against the system vaguely perform vaguely promising transformative change
uh Trump was going to drain the swamp Sanders was going to give us a revolution even
then but none of these change candidates back then nor President Trump this cycle ever offered a
(31:47):
a plan for change that was going to go to the heart of the matter because what most needs changing
is money in politics and candidates can't fight the money because they're too busy raising it
and let me just say and so let me move now to the money in politics question because one of
one thing that distinguishes our country from every other every other democratic republic on
(32:10):
earth every other sort of wealthy democracy is that the cost it's the cost of there is no legal
limit to the cost how much money is spent by campaigns or donated by interest groups or
individuals and at the federal level all this money comes from private donations and every other
country for example our our federal elections consequently cost about by one estimate 40 times
(32:35):
as much as they cost in in the UK and in Germany and in those countries in Germany for example
at least a third of campaign costs come are public financed it's it's essentially taxpayer funds that
are given to the parties so that they do not have to rely on private donations and private
donations not payroll we have a system on the other hand in our country where effectively our
(32:57):
government is for sale to the deep pocket of donors who pay for our pay for election campaigns
another way to put this candidates candidates effectively self-censor to avoid sailing and
saying anything that before alienating any potential donors or to put it another way
(33:21):
campaign donors effectively choose the candidates that were allowed to vote for
uh I mean elections have gotten so expensive that it's hard to see how you could challenge
an incumbent in the house with less than a couple million dollars senate campaigns the
minimum price of admission is at least 10 million we've had races in the last cycle in swing
districts that were where there was out of state money you know where hundreds of hundreds of
(33:45):
millions of dollars were spent on campaigns uh the biden harris campaign raised and spent at
least a million and a half the trump campaign somewhat less but um and the thing is you so
you you campaigns you need an enormous amount of money just to get a campaign off the ground just
to be taken seriously by the media uh just to be seen as viable and any idea um or even any just
(34:14):
sort of problem you might want to talk about like say you wanted to talk about poverty or you wanted
to talk about um how the cost we americans pay twice as much for prescription medicines
as do the citizens of every other wealthy society because we're the only wealthy country
that does not tightly regulate the price of prescription medicines right well candidate that
(34:37):
even mentions that right off the bat that means you get no money from pharma and pharma big pharma
big pharma that's one of the biggest donors you're running out or if you talk on the campaign trail
about health insurance companies micromanaging doctors and finding excuses to deny coverage and
rejecting prior authorizations or these uh these deductibles and high out-of-pocket maximum so that
(35:03):
even if you have insurance uh you can be pardon me you can be bankrupted um by medical expenses
any candidate that that mentions any of that well then there's no money from health insurance
companies either and those are just you know there's just a couple of examples out of many
hundreds so that basically any any candidate any policy solution even any question tough question
(35:31):
you might want to ask about what's gone wrong in american life and about why life has gotten to be
such a struggle for the american people those questions those ideas the potential leaders who
might pose them all of those just die off out of sight out of mind because they don't attract
attract the campaign cash and indeed now of course now so many people who who could be who could
(35:56):
represent us in washington and who could be leaders and who could help us solve our problems and and
and seize our opportunities and really you know make our country the um you know make our country
great again make our country once again without without question the greatest most prosperous
country on earth which we have been and certainly can be in future all those potential leaders they
(36:20):
don't even think about going into politics because they know they've already known enough to know
that if they say i want to run for congress the first thing question a campaign manager will ask
them is how much money do you have and how much can you raise and if you're not a millionaire with
millionaire friends so you can hold a fundraiser at your country club don't even bother and it's
(36:42):
and to people who have integrity and good ideas and leadership qualities uh such a prospect is
degrading i mean this is really a degrading process ultimately where um it was i mean now it was
revealed this was eight years ago and it's surely a lot worse now that um members of congress in dc
(37:03):
were spending at least 30 hours a week on the phone in dedicated call centers set up by their
respective parties dialing for dollars that's the term they use to raise money for their next
reelection campaign which of course a leaves them almost no time uh to to start addressing the
country's challenges and passing laws like they ought to be doing but also they don't have time
(37:26):
for us they don't have time to listen to us they don't have time uh they can't even no matter how
well intentioned they might be they can't serve us anymore they're they're essentially held hostage
by this system and by the just the desperate hunger for campaign cash and what what this is done is it
has over time and and this this goes all the way back to the 1980s really uh to you know really
(37:52):
before your time but i can remember because i i started following politics when i turned 20 in
1980 and already by the end of the 80s by by the election in 1988 sort of bush senior against
michael de caques like the political conversation had already become really kind of empty and phony
and sort of trivialized and it didn't seem it just seemed to be nothing but slogans and personal
(38:14):
attacks and but none of us really knew what had gone wrong and we blamed the media for a long
stretch there but they were really just the symptom the problem with the media is they had
nothing to report because politicians weren't talking about anything and what i'm saying is
that in a gradual process that no one really knew was happening the need for self-censorship
(38:36):
uh driven by the money chase as as the cost of campaigns inaction we rose the hunger for
campaign cash just took one issue or policy or idea or potential leader after another out of
the conversation and out of the imagination it basically gradually drained the whole political
(38:57):
conversation of substance it it did it didn't overthrow our democracies as much as it asphyxiated
it you know that's really kind of what happened and and that is that is part of why america so
many americans today just feel kind of mentally helpless and confused it's like i'm powerless but
(39:18):
i don't know why this was done to me and i don't know how to fight back and it's not our fault it's
not because we are weak or because we have lost our love of freedom because we have not we're
americans but you can't fight what you can't see and even more so you can't fight what you don't
know is there and that's exactly what i'm saying is that and the thing is that you know what's
(39:39):
interesting is that even though politicians have every incentive to to conceal from us the the
crucial role played by money and the way that that that money has effectively prevented them
from serving us has made them completely out of touch from us nonetheless the american people
(40:00):
more and more you see in opinion polls in recent polls three quarters of americans left right and
center this is an area where you have cross-partisan consensus this is actually potentially a unifying
issue for the country we're saying money in politics is a huge problem you've got to find
some way to deal with it um but um so and so that's and so that's what i you know and my my focus i
(40:28):
i entered you know i after i finished my book on the holocaust 10 years ago i started researching
and writing what i thought was going to be my second book it's going to be about money in
politics and how we fix it and then in the spring of 2020 i saw that all these other people many of
them smarter than i am who had published great books about money and politics and these books
had not moved the needle politically one iota you know and that's when i realized that i also
(40:54):
realized that the people in washington the people in congress even you know there are some people
especially progressive democrats who make a little noise now and again about money in politics like
bernie sanders or akazio cartes or elizabeth warren but even they i don't question their motives
but the thing is that all of those people in dc they're so dependent on their donors
(41:18):
they can't lead in this issue so the only way that we beat this that we the people take our
government back reclaim our rightful c and how we are governed is we have to stand up a majority of
us really and and demand change and the change i think that has the step that we all have to take
(41:39):
is a reform called voter dollars and after you know years of research looking at the different
types of reform that have been proposed and then in the work that i've done in the last four years
sort of working with other reform groups and talking with people it is it seems clear to me
that the best path forward is this thing called voter dollars and that's the sole purpose of my
(42:03):
organization save democracy in america is to build support among americans left right and center
for this reform and and the reform is easily it's easy enough to explain because the the basic
problem we've got is now the only people in our politics who really have much uh say influence
anymore are big ticket campaign donors and so we've got to make ourselves the donors
(42:27):
and the way we do that the mechanism called voter dollars uh is that for every two year cycle the
federal government would give every registered voter and all of a sudden the government would
voter an online account of campaign cash and you can't take the money out and spend it but you go
online and assign it to the candidates you want to support and if you fund it at the robust level
(42:50):
that that we're demanding candidates who want to serve us can get enough money from the voters to
run a competitive campaign and their opponent uh will no longer have any excuse for taking money
from billionaires or special interests and thanks to some decisions by the supreme court basically
the only path to changing the game in campaign finance that the court will not strike down would
(43:18):
be a public financing mechanism like this and my my position you know that but the question is how
do we get there i talk about the people having to stand up i talk about a majority of americans
needing to want this because and i really think that the only way that we make this happen that
we are that we get a voter dollars act through congress that we establish a well-funded voter
(43:44):
dollar system is if the problem of money in politics and the voter dollar solution become
a top five uh issue in the national conversation in a presidential election year where literally
you know candidates are being grilled on this at town halls by by voters and journalists are putting
them on the spot and on the televised debates the moderators are saying well governor de sanis what
(44:09):
do you think about voter dollars and you know well vice president harris what do you think about
voter dollars short of that because it really has to be something that that the great majority of
americans at least understand and that a large majority of us say are saying to poll takers and
to to to politicians uh look we've had enough we want this and you know to a lot of people think
(44:35):
that that is just too high a hill to climb that that's too heavy a lift and i and i don't and i
i guess i'd like to to state why i think that why i'm so optimistic which is that i think that the
majority we already have a very large majority of americans out there uh you know that the
uh on both sides of the aisle who are saying that the system doesn't work that we are fed up that
(45:03):
americans don't know exactly what transformational change looks like
because no one has presented them with a plan for change you know i was talking earlier about how
we have again and again in the last 20 years given our vote to so-called change candidates you know
to barack obama in 2008 to bernie trump and donald sanders in 2016 to sanders again in 2020
(45:28):
and i think this time also trump won because he more effectively positioned himself as the outsider
who's gonna be the bull in the china shop he's gonna shake shake things up and yet none of these
candidates ever offered the the american people ever offered us a plan for change because again
(45:48):
what most needs changing is money in politics and there's this cash 22 they can't fight the money
because they're too busy raising it um and the thing is that you know you have i mean 85 percent
of americans in a in a poll three years ago said that our political system either a needs to be
completely reformed or b needs major changes and it was about you know it's about 40 percent of each
(46:15):
okay about 50 50 in these groups but either way you're talking 85 percent of americans saying
at a minimum major changes to our political system and there's so many other indications
of the american people's disgust with politics as usual and but the the thing is it's not enough
for everyone to be unhappy with the current system there has to be a concrete uh plausible
(46:40):
you know sort of achievable goal that represents the path to change and that's my my position is
that that voter dollars is the missing plan for change that this is the point that can bring
people together that can rally them and i i say this because a because it's one of the only
reform proposals i've seen out there that that truly enjoys bipartisan support uh and i've seen
(47:06):
the support in more than 100 media interviews on outlets ranging from quite progressive to
to very very conservative talk radio uh people who disagree with each other on every other issue but
say this is really great um um in in more than a thousand conversations i had with americans of
all political stripes and all walks of life i'd say 95 out of 100 say this is a great idea um i
(47:32):
also commissioned a poll of 700 new hampshire voters uh condition it was carried out by a top
uh polling firm target smart this is in 2023 um about money attitudes toward money and politics
and about voter dollars and outrage over money and politics was sky high uh left right and center
(47:55):
by the end by the time we were done with the survey and it explained the voter system we had
majority support across the board for it um and it has also it's a unifying issue it can be a
unifying issue that brings americans together because it's a way of saying to the american
people you know your fellow americans and the other party the other side of the aisle are not
(48:18):
your enemy the money's the enemy which in fact it is and also it is a unifying issue because
it powerfully affirms one of the ideals that make us americans you know one of the reasons why
i'm fundamentally confident that that we and americans are going to reclaim our say in how
(48:39):
we are governed that we're going to fix this political system that we will be once again
the world's most successful democracy and the inspiration for others as we've been in the past
is that every other country on earth membership in the nation depends on language on culture
on religion on you know on race i mean how do you know you're french because you speak french
(49:02):
you're ethnically french you like the food and wine and so on we're the exception the only exception
you know being an american has absolutely nothing to do with the color of your skin or what language
you speak or even where you were born it's about ideals it's about individual freedom it's about
equality of opportunity above all it's about a government by the people which we americans
(49:24):
invented in its modern form and have championed and have given to the rest of the world at a
staggering cost to ourselves and you look at all the americans who who have given their lives and
wars fought for the freedom of others uh i mean we've not not that we haven't made terrible
mistakes not that we're perfect we're flawed human beings like everyone else but we are different
(49:48):
and one thing that makes us different from every other country is that the democratic formal
government defines us and you know this this money-driven politics the system under which
the american people have suffered for decades not only is it inefficient and wasteful and corrupt
and unfair it's unamerican it's a detroit it's an offense it's an affront to the patriotism of every
(50:13):
one of us and this was one of the one of the in the survey that i conducted of the new hampshire
voters i um we had we had a question that they were asked to agree or disagree with some statements
about money in politics and there was one it had there was two two wordings of it was the same
basic statement which is that america stands for government by the people and this money-driven
(50:37):
politics makes a mockery of our ideals or is unamerican and the agreement with that statement
i either strongly agree or somewhat agree was north of 85 across the board it's a very resonant
and also just i have to say in in in conversations with with my with media hosts and and one-on-one
(50:59):
conversations with people it's something that has great resonance and power you know fundamentally
um the the problem is that the two parties have succeeded at this point in persuading us that the
americans on the other side of the aisle are really the problem in the enemy i think partly to distract
us from their own failures but ultimately you know americans really don't want to hate other
(51:23):
americans we would rather like and admire each other and work together um and i think we all
believe in these ideals and i think that that every american to some degree for me as a patriot
because i think all of us believe in these noble ideals that our country stands for want our country
to live up to them and i think that voter dollars is a wonderful very powerful way to achieve that
(51:47):
it also has you know the advantages politically that you summarize it in four words make voters
the donors it's common sense you know you've heard the saying whoever pays the piper calls the tune
well if we want to call the tune in washington we got to pay that piper we got to fund these campaigns
and maybe best of all because it's it directly empowers each and every one of us this system
(52:12):
says to each registered voter we are going to literally put the coin of political influence
into your hands to do as you see fit and now candidates are going to have to come to you
not just for your vote but to ask you for the for something they need a lot more urgently than they
need your vote for the cash without which they're in no position to ask anyone for a vote
(52:34):
and and that is so valuable because right now americans people i talk to i think most americans
feel powerless in our politics uh good reason because we are powerless because no one in
washington listens to us but even worse but because the the role of money is really kind of behind the
scenes and is so insidious and consists of what's not being not said rather than what is said
(52:59):
we don't even know how this is being done to us and so ultimately i i i'm really confident that
we're going to win this um maybe we could even elevate the issue high enough by 2028 hard to say
i'm not going to make that prediction the the two biggest challenges that we face i think one are
(53:21):
just getting the word out breaking through the noise uh because there's just so much information
out there about every kind and the other is is overcoming the pessimism that i think so many
americans feel because i see this again and again and i saw this in the poll that i conducted and in
a focus group some focus groups the year before people will say god you know the system just seems
(53:42):
so corrupt now it's never going to be fixed you know it's beyond redemption and i understand that
you know we've been promised change so many times it's never been delivered we're disillusioned but
the way you how do you you give hope to people who don't feel hopeful the main thing is is just to
get enough people out there and enough prominent people saying this is a good idea this can happen
(54:07):
and so you know i would say to people in the audience um that i if you if you like you know
what i'm saying or if you even if you just think that this voter riot daughter's idea is worth
thinking about and talking about i'd be really grateful if you could go to our website um the
url is save democracy in america dot org save democracy in america dot org if you could sign
(54:32):
up for our newsletter uh help us get those numbers up and get the word out and if you could share our
newsletter and our website or one of our videos or a link to one of my interviews um with your
friends or on social media because you know i i go on radio i go on tv i go on podcasts i speak in
(54:53):
person i make my best case but you know the people in the audience don't know me from adam
but with someone who knows you and trusts you our message about money in politics and the message
that we're not powerless we're not beat we can fix this that message is always going to be a hundred
times more powerful coming from you than it is coming from me and it's just a question it seems
(55:19):
to me getting to a tipping point you get enough people out there talking about this telling each
other about it then hearing about it oh i've heard about it from them and from them and maybe seeing
a few prominent people getting a little more media attention you get to a point where enough
americans say oh wow we're not beat this can be fixed and i think from that point this is the
(55:41):
kind of thing that can snowball very quickly um but in any case you know even if the way the
the path that we find to really taking back our government restoring government by the people
even if voted always is not the path that we take um i have every confidence that sooner or later
(56:03):
you know the american people are going to fix this once once enough of this can at least kind of
rally around a particular approach to to moving forward right now we're just kind of stuck because
we don't even know the first step and we don't really understand exactly who the enemy is but
i think once we sort of keep getting the word out and helping people understand sooner or later once
(56:26):
americans know there is a way to fix this there's no way we're going to take this line down because
you know for every other people on earth government by the people is an option for us it's
existential it defines who we are if we don't govern ourselves as a proud and self-respecting
people in a democratic republic it's like we're almost not even americans anymore you know we
(56:48):
might as well just be 340 million people who live in north america and rather watch baseball than
soccer and that's just that's just not us you know so anyway that's those are some of the many
reasons why um you know i have every confidence that we are going to sooner or later get this done
yeah absolutely and i think that uh you know the the work that you're doing through your organization
(57:09):
and and going on uh different media is is only going to help that so we can we can only hope that
uh you know reform happens at some point you've made this interview extremely easy you know i had
about 10 questions written but you went through them all uh kind of on your own here so i want to
give you a chance i give you a chance to get the word you end wise i really you're so patient
(57:32):
jackson i'm sorry about that i don't know well i i will in in wrapping things up i do want to uh
just allow you one last time to to mention your your website mention the book kind of shout out
all the things that you want people to uh to go check out okay so if you if you're interested in
why the holocaust happened the title of my book is how could this happen explaining the holocaust
(57:57):
and um there's information about the book in uh on the about page of my website uh on my um in my in
my bio the main thing i guess i would ask everyone to do is to please go to our website
save democracy in america dot org save democracy in america dot org um there's all kinds of
information about voter dollars and about money in politics um please sign up for our newsletter
(58:23):
and um please share whatever information from the website uh or share this interview uh that i've
had with jackson today um with your friends or on social media because don't think that you can't
that you can't move the ball down the field you can provide us what we need most which is a measure
of validation you know a sort of seal of approval so that people say oh yeah okay this is not a pipe
(58:49):
dream this is something that makes sense that could happen you can provide a kind of validation
that i can't with people who know you personally uh so don't think that you can't have an impact
absolutely i really appreciate your time thank you so much
i appreciate you for the opportunity jackson thank you very much
so there's dan mcmillan a lot covered there i know it was a different style than than we normally
(59:12):
are used to um but i hope that you enjoyed the the conversation you know i had written a set of
questions and he kind of just went through them one by one without me even having to to ask them
so i just uh let him continue on and and it really provided a lot of good information things that i
had never even thought about and considered when it comes to the holocaust when it comes to uh
(59:35):
when it comes to um the issues with our system in the united states you know those who are not
from the united states listening i hope you learned a lot you know about potential issues
with our our democracy ways to to make it better and and everyone in the world i think knows about
the holocaust and and just more the of insights of why it happened and and why hopefully it could
(59:58):
never happen again i i think we're really powerful so hope you learned a lot today i will put the
links in the show notes to to everything dan mcmillan everything saved democracy i do think
those are some great resources to uh to check out everything that dan is talking about he certainly
is a wealth of information i think you'll find a lot more great information on his websites
(01:00:21):
and then also his uh his book explaining more about uh about kind of what happened within the
holocaust so urge you to check out everything dan mcmillan all of that will be in the show notes
if it's your first time listening or you haven't already go leave a five star rating on apple and
on spotify leave a written review on apple helps a ton go follow along on instagram and on tiktok
(01:00:45):
not enough podcasts not enough which acts enough on facebook really really appreciate that really
appreciate when you subscribe or follow along on apple and spotify to the podcast so many amazing
guests in the past over 250 at this point everything from actors to true crime to magicians and all
kinds of people so bound to be some more interviews that you might be interested in so thanks for
(01:01:10):
being here dan thank you for being here we'll see you next week take it away chris this has been
not in a huff with jackson huff thank you for listening be sure to join us next time where
we will interview another amazing guest who is sure to make you laugh or make you think
or hey maybe even both but until then keep being awesome
How did it become possible to just completely deny the value of human life and to become utterly
(00:05):
indifferent to the victims? You know, the signature mental state of the Holocaust perpetrator
was not hot passionate hatred. It was an indifference so cold that mass murder evoked no
emotion more powerful than the disgust you feel when stepping on a cockroach in your kitchen.
(00:38):
Hello hello hello I am Jackson Huff. This is Notten Huff. Thanks so much for joining me.
As always, really appreciate it. This week I speak with Dan McMillan and this conversation is
interesting in several ways. One of the ways is as you know I normally have the guests introduce
themselves. I always say you know I'm going to leave the heavy lifting to you and I have them
(00:59):
introduce themselves. Well Dan is a little bit too humble to want to do that so he asked me to read
his biography a short little blurb. Normally don't do that but I'm going to do that now. So I'm having
Dan McMillan on. He's the founder of Save Democracy in America, a non-partisan campaign to get big
money out of politics using voter dollar reform. Dan holds a PhD in history from Columbia as well
(01:23):
as a law degree and has worked as a history professor and a prosecuting attorney. In 2014,
he published an acclaimed book on the causes of the Holocaust. The book was called How Could This
Happen? Explaining the Holocaust. He's a really really great guy. Really really enjoy speaking
with him. We're going to talk about two big things and I just mentioned them in the intro but we're
(01:45):
going to talk first about the Holocaust. How you know an atrocity like this happened. We've talked
to authors in the past that had grandmothers and parents be a part of the Holocaust as people who
have been sent to concentration camps. We talked for the hundredth episode to my grandmother who
(02:05):
had a different experience that she was a German in Germany during this time and was just pretty
much unaware as a child of exactly what was happening. She was not a Jewish person or anyone
else that was being persecuted so that was a different perspective as well. She's going to
talk about just why did the Holocaust happen? How did something like this happen and why he doesn't
(02:29):
think it could happen again? It's kind of a good tie-in because you know a lot of people in today's
current world always kind of rush towards you know that type of thing and it being something that
could happen again or you know our country could go down that path and he's going to talk about
why he doesn't think that's possible or at all likely. He's also going to talk about democracy
(02:52):
and how you know it's slowly been crumbling in our world but you know his overall arching thing is
he does still have quite a bit of hope in that regard. I think you're really going to enjoy this
conversation. I said there were several things that make this one unique. The second part that
makes this unique and I you know I've got to say it is that I don't do a lot of talking in this
(03:13):
episode. In the beginning I said that he is a history professor and I do feel like he kind of
went into that mode and kind of it's a little bit more of a lecture than an interview but that's
what it is. I didn't ask very many questions. Dan kind of came with a slide of exactly what he wanted
to talk about and that's what we did and you know who am I to want to interrupt somebody
(03:37):
just so I can ask a question that they were already answering. So this is a great conversation with
Dan. It's mostly him kind of telling us about a lot of really really important things so
hope you enjoy it. Here is Dan McMillan. Dr. McMillan how are you? I'm good Jackson. How are
you doing? I'm good as well. We're just going to kind of jump right into things and I want to
(03:59):
talk first about your book and that book is called How Could This Happen? It covers the atrocities of
the Holocaust but the book is a little different than some of the people I've spoken with before
that share like their family stories through you know concentration camps and things like that.
Your book deals a lot more with kind of the environment of how it was able to even happen
(04:25):
the way that it did. So I want you to talk a little bit about the book and then what made
you decide to write something I guess so heavy. Well okay you know Jackson you know I read my
first book on the Holocaust when I was 12 years old so we're talking more than 50 years ago now.
(04:47):
We're talking about January or February in 1973. I can remember it quite vividly. It was
the murderers among us by Simon Deezenthal who was a Holocaust survivor who dedicated his life
after the war to tracking down bringing to justice prominent perpetrators of the Holocaust. And so
the book was a memoir of his own survival of the Lvov ghetto and the Mauthausen concentration camp
(05:13):
and as well as the deaths of most of his family and then sort of information on the careers so
to speak of some of these prominent killers that he had pursued. And it just sort of knocked me
flat for reasons that I couldn't articulate at the time although what I did pick up on the time was
(05:33):
the murderers' extraordinary emotional detachment from their victims. And I came to see that
I intuited something that I was only able to put into words decades later indeed after I completed
my book after I published it in 2014 which was that this is kind of the only time in history where
(05:57):
the ruling class of an advanced society really concluded that individual human life has absolutely
no intrinsic value whatsoever. I mean in every war, genocide, mass killing, the murderers,
killers dehumanize their victims, you dehumanize your enemies in wartime even if you're not a
murderer, human life gets cheapened but in the Holocaust the dehumanization at least to the
(06:23):
Jewish victims was complete and the you know human life lost all value whatsoever in the minds of
we're talking about 200,000 and many as 200,000 German and Austrian killers who were involved in
this and these were not the scum of German society indeed the larger fraction of the most
taken away from the elite of German society. You're talking professionals, doctors, lawyers,
(06:49):
academics, high-ranking civil servants, people, captains of industry and so on.
I want to sort of focus specifically on this denial of the value of human life because this is
I think what makes the Holocaust the Holocaust, what it's really what frightens us about the
(07:11):
Holocaust because it is fundamentally it's an assault on the value of every human life,
of yours, of mine, of that, of all the people in the audience and let me spill out a little bit about
how this was especially this is especially extreme with regard to the Jewish victims
naturally the Holocaust but also it's relevant to six or seven million Gentile victims of various
(07:36):
categories like three million Soviet POWs as many as 200,000 Germans with disabilities that they
murdered just to save money for national efficiency and other groups as well but specifically with the
Jewish victims what's unique about the Holocaust among all killings in history the Jews are the
only large ethnic group to be targeted for complete biological extinction. I mean the
(08:02):
the plan of the German government was to what they called the final solution to the Jewish question
was to murder every single person of Jewish ancestry on the German continent on the
European continent and if Hitler had won the Second World War in Europe it had in fact
built a war machine powerful enough to strike at us in this hemisphere and had established
(08:24):
world domination which he certainly would have liked. I personally don't think that he could
have achieved that but had he been able to do so I think I doubt there's any historian who would
disagree with me when I say that his next order of business would have been to strike at every
Jewish community around the globe no matter how small because the the Germans they saw
(08:47):
the Jews the way that public health organizations view polio or smallpox it's a virus and if you
can if you have the opportunity you should never pass up the opportunity to stamp it out everywhere
so that it can never grow back and so that is that is you also see the the radical dehumanization
(09:08):
of the Jewish victims in the way that they process their bodies for value as if they were animal
carcasses they shirred off women's hair with the stated purpose of making textiles as near as we
can tell no textiles were made but the intent was there also as you may have heard in you know in
the death camps harvesting the gold fillings in the in the teeth of people after they've been
(09:32):
murdered with poison gas to melt out the gold they also used you know Jewish prisoners as laboratory
animals for scientific experiments and and they lived in the camps and in the ghettos
because the the German overseers lived among their Jewish victims knowing they they and the victims
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both knew that that every Jewish person in the camp they were going to murder sooner or later
there were there were some that they kept alive to help them run the camp and and they had a
a sort of state of execution if you will but but both they and their victims knew
they were going to murder everyone and they moved among them and indeed had conversations with them
(10:15):
and developed in a very superficial way one would appear to even be a friendship with some
with no discomfort with really kind of the same attitude as that of a farmer moving among livestock
that he's destined for slaughter there might even be a goat or a cow or a sheep that oh you know was
sort of a pet you know or that you that you kind of light and in some of these camps like in in
(10:40):
Treblinka no in Kelmno there was there was one young man who was sort of a mascot in some of
these camps they had individual Jewish prisoners who were sort of mascots in a way who got sort of
sort of nicer treatment but they also were going to be murdered too anyway that is you know that is
you know that is what is all I've always found so compelling about the Holocaust and so it became
(11:05):
important to me to understand how such a thing was possible and it's it's an important reason why when
I got to high school I picked up German as my second foreign language when I got to college I
majored in history in German studies spent my junior year in what was then West Berlin at the
German University when I decided to become an academic historian that I wanted to be a history
(11:27):
professor I specialized in German history although I didn't write my dissertation on the Holocaust
topic but across decades I was always kind of putting together piece by piece an understanding
of how this was possible and I wrote my book I started writing in 2010 and I was a professor
(11:52):
in 2010 and the reason what my book does and it's really it's the only strangely enough the only
book of its kind it's a it's a comprehensive essay on the causes of the Holocaust by that point in
time say 2010 you can say that the Holocaust had been thoroughly explained but the explanation was
(12:14):
useless even to academic historians because it existed only in fragments that is to say there
are so many things that are not in the book and there are so many things that are not in the book
and so I wrote a series of books about Hitler about World War I about World War II about all
the things that went wrong in German politics so that someone like Hitler could take power
(12:35):
about anti-Semitism about and so on and so forth but the whole story is really quite complex and
there was no overview that put the pieces of the puzzle together so you could see how they fit
together and I think that's what I wanted to do was I wanted to make the book as short as possible
as possible as possible and I think anyone with a solid high school education can read it without
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difficulty which is kind of what I'm proudest of about the book but it raises the question
why did it take so long 70 years after the end of World War II for someone to write such a book
and I think the reason is that again because of this radical denial of the value of human life
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it just it has been so terrifying to us that I think that even people who work professionally
and understanding it on some level have been ambivalent about really arriving at an explanation
of how this could happen because we have been in the book for so long and we have been in the book
we have been afraid that we would learn something about ourselves that we cannot live with and
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I think the end the other is also that I think because the Holocaust mounts this kind of
you know essentially denies the meaning and value of our life it trenches on the kind of same set
of emotions and ideas and needs that religious faith that religious tradition offers for people
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I mean let me put it to you this way if you you know I myself I'm certainly not an atheist but I
was raised by agnostics I don't really have the blessing of religious faith and I think it is a
blessing because it gives people a sense of the meaning of their lives or the purpose of their
lives and if you are devout in any in say any in the Judeo-Christian tradition or these or Islam
(14:35):
for that matter you're beautiful because you're made in the image of your creator and your life
has meaning because God put you on this earth for a noble purpose but you're free if you're
raised by agnostics like I was you're not made in the image of any creator you're a glorified
monkey clinging to an asteroid right and your life the possibility that your brief existence
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is utterly without meaning and significance you face it alone and this is not it's not an
experience I recommend it's painful and it was that above all that that drove me that compelled me
and I think that because of that because the Holocaust goes to in a way you know the you know
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most of us and certainly I you know we we tend to find our whether or not we have religious faith
whether or not we really spend a lot of time pondering the meaning of our existence I think
most people automatically find meaning in their lives by by loving other people by trying to be
a good person by trying to contribute to society but the killers in the Holocaust pose a double
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challenge first of all they would say to us well who cares how much you love people they don't
matter and you don't either and also if we're capable of doing this then how lovable are we
and I think that because of all this you know I'm taking a little time to get to the point the
Holocaust has been sacred it's and if you say that you can explain it but with the same methods and
(16:09):
to the same degree that you can explain the the French Revolution or the American Civil War then
you have you have profaned it you've taken it from the realm of the sacred and I think that too is
created an inhibition and uh and there's really uh for well into the first decade of this century
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you had distinguished historians saying that the Holocaust could not be explained at all
and we even hostile to the notion it could be explained uh because because by saying so you
you would again be sort of reducing it to making it just another historical event but of course
the idea that it cannot be explained is is preposterous because the Holocaust was not
(16:52):
perpetrated by Martians it was perpetrated by men and women who in their emotional and cognitive
equipment were not at all no different from you and I from you and me were perfectly normal at
least until they became murderers now let me you know I said sort of early on that let me actually
let me just back up a second I think one of the reasons why so few people really feel they
(17:16):
understand why this happened even though all this has been published is that it's so easy to get
lost when when historians like myself try to explain the Holocaust to the wider public and
for that matter to our students to ourselves we get bogged down in sort of all the details of the
long political story going back really to the 1850s in Germany that leads Germany to develop
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to establish democracy only very late and that the first democracy the Weimar Republic is so fragile
and that it is overthrown by Hitler and so on and so forth and all these details are very important
and that's probably two-thirds of my book is devoted to understanding that narrative
but in a way what gets lost in that narrative is what you most need to understand and and that is
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what I said at the beginning that that what we most need to understand about this is is that the
people who did this killed you know murdered the Jews and also murdered these other groups six or
seven million Gentile victims of different categories you could say above all because
they saw no reason not to murder them because human life to them had value only in the sense that
(18:32):
their goal was the long-term flourishing of the the German the genotype the German race as they
as they saw it in what they believe was the Darwinian struggle for survival among the races
of the world and if your death were necessary to that end or for them that are just convenient
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as in the case for example of the 200 000 germs with disabilities then your life was forfeit and
if we could go back in time and get 15 or 20 of these killers around the table and we would ask
them with anguish in our voice you know why in heaven's name are you doing something so ghastly
so cruel I guarantee you the response would be a shrug of the shoulders and a question they would
(19:15):
put to us why not they're just people and that that's what makes the Holocaust the Holocaust and
it's so horrifying it wasn't really until about a year and a half ago that I was even able to put
that into words as I'm doing now and I and I still you talk to most almost any other historian of
(19:37):
Germany or of the Holocaust and you're still going to get kind of a narrative well there's the treaty
of rossi and then Germany was angry at losing the war and then then there was the great depression
and the inflation and Hitler comes to power and and all of that is true and all of that is very
important and it explains why the Germans were the killers and why the Jews were the victims
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but ultimately what we want to understand is how did it become possible to to just completely deny
the value of human life to and to become utterly indifferent to the victims you know people often
ask me why did they hate the Jews so much and they imagine that the Holocaust was motivated by an
(20:22):
especially passionate form of hatred and to that I can say we should be so lucky because
the horrifying truth is that oh yes of course many perpetrators many of the killers did very
much hate Jews but you know the signature mental state of the Holocaust perpetrator was not hot
passionate hatred it was an indifference so cold that mass murder evoked no emotion more powerful
(20:49):
than the disgust you feel when stepping on a cockroach in your kitchen so I've rambled a
little bit but I think that the main point that I really want to get home is this radical denial
of the value of human life that we have to recognize as that aspect of the Holocaust that
most needs to be explained the other parts are all an important part of the story but this is
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what we really want to understand but it's so terrifying that for the most part since now 80
years now since then the war almost we've been unable even to recognize it for what it is
it's like staring at the sun it's too painful you have to look away so anyway maybe out of but of
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course you know in you know in in light of all the crazy things that are happening in our politics
there's been a lot of talk of whether we're in danger of becoming dictatorship and I've even had
some people say to me because they hear of you know racist language in our politics of of prejudice
or the the spike in anti-semitic hate crimes are we in danger of another genocide you know and but
(21:56):
let me ask you first if it was what I said so far recently clear did you have any follow-up
questions before I know I think that's that obviously it's a topic like you just mentioned
that you know it's taken 80 years 70 years since you know the the Holocaust when your book came
out to even get some kind of answer you're moving right into the direction that I wanted to take it
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and that is you you've already mentioned that it took a long time for people even understand it and
maybe some people still don't understand you know exactly why it happened and that's what you tried
to to you know you you talked for a long time but if you think about how complex the issue is you
didn't talk for very long at all and I just wonder exactly exactly how how you are so confident
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because you you you could see people say okay well he just talked a lot about how most people
still don't understand exactly how things happened and you know you've got the old the old adage of
you know if you don't understand the history it's doomed to repeat itself but you're also
pretty confident that something like this couldn't happen again and that's exactly what you're about
ready to talk about so how are you uh I guess how where's that confidence come from that you
(23:10):
don't think that this is a possibility again well I doesn't want to say not at all possible but yeah
I actually kind of I would I would argue there's sort of two questions that I think we need to
separate out one is uh is there a danger that the United States could become a dictatorship
and say the next five or ten years which many many Americans fear um but then even if we were to
(23:35):
become a dictatorship would our society be capable of genocide which is a whole other step I mean you
need a dictatorship you really have to have a dictatorship to have genocide democracies do not
perpetuate genocide but just becoming a dictatorship doesn't mean that genocide is going to happen or
could happen and I I'm pretty confident especially confident about genocide not being a threat because
(23:58):
uh just because we really have become we all of us in the western world all of the world's advanced
prosperous democracies whether it's us Germany Canada all of our cousins in in Europe or in the
Pacific uh Australia New Zealand Japan and so on we have come to value human life first of all we're
(24:19):
democracies and you really need a highly repressive dictatorship to perpetrate genocide secondly
we're vastly less violent than than human societies were 80 years ago and in particular you've got to
remember that the Germany the Germans the generation of Germans who perpetrated the Holocaust
a lot of them were veterans of the first world war including Hitler himself where more than two
(24:44):
million young Germans died in combat as a fraction of the German population if you scale it up to our
population today you're talking about 10 million battle deaths not to speak of the wounded
it's not to speak of the wounded now if we we just come off a war with 10 million dead Americans
we would have a rather different attitude toward violence than we do today altogether moreover
(25:06):
since the second war we have seen a rights revolution in all the western societies where
it wasn't just men with property who had a measure of rights women had equal rights
ethnic minorities have rights now is there still discrimination yes there is is there still prejudice
yes there is but compared to 60 years ago or even 20 years ago in many respects in our society and
(25:29):
all the the advanced societies we really do we have made massive progress moral progress we value
the human individual we accord the human individual far more worth and dignity than our
self than earlier human societies did anyone who tells me that there is not progress in history or
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that things just keep going downhill they haven't studied their history and so in that sense I just
don't I don't see a genocide as being at all possible I mean you can imagine if we were to
somehow become a dictatorship you could see this or that group suffering some kind of discrimination
in employment and so on but and I'm not saying that wouldn't be a horrible thing but that's a very
(26:15):
far that's quite a distance to genocide now moving to the thing that's like think of a more immediate
concern you know particularly you know the it's interesting in this last election both parties
accused the other parties of wanting to impose a dictatorship if they won so it was rhetoric on
on both sides and you know and because of you know because of a number of things that president
(26:39):
trump has said and done that certainly give ammunition to critics who argue that I offer
no opinion as to president trump's character or intentions because in my own political work I need
to be completely non-partisan but I will say this that even even if for the sake of argument that he
wanted to impose some kind of dictatorship I just don't see how that's possible because you can't
(27:04):
have a dictatorship without the cooperation of the military of law enforcement the courts
and although I think our institutions the democratic formal government has been
over time badly eroded in our country has been damaged uh nonetheless I think particularly of
you know I have friends who've served in the military and I look at public statements by
(27:27):
by leading officers those men and women I mean they take an oath to defend our constitution
and that oath is a matter of personal honor honor is something that in civilian civilians most of
us civilians don't understand but this is really it goes to the to the sense of one's work to break
an oath of that kind is to just is the old is to disgrace yourself in the worst possible way and I
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just think that I have every confidence that people in our in our armed forces would defend
our constitution and the democratic former government to the death um they would absolutely
not be party so there's just there's no in and altogether people serve in law enforcement
I think the majority of them have probably served in the military that's a very common sort of
career path for people in law enforcement uh the courts you can talk about President Trump and
(28:18):
Mitch McConnell having packed the court with conservative judges um and you can argue that
you know the independence of the judiciary has been compromised but I think we're a long way
I think we're a long way away I think that if we continue down the road we're on for another 30
years or maybe even only 20 if our if government by the people continues to be degraded and
(28:42):
undermined here in the land of its birth um then if you ask me that question you may get a different
answer but I have no concern whatsoever that this this last election is going to be the last free
election in my lifetime uh President Trump is not going to be able to he's term term limited to the
constitution he's going to leave office he's not going to be able to declare himself president
(29:06):
for life and make desigate one of his sons as his as his prince and successor uh we're just not there
I mean you could put Hitler in the oval office next January and or Stalin even they would not
be able to do that it's just that's not the kind of country we are people sometimes try to compare
us to Germany in 1933 but you've got to remember 1933 the German people had had almost no experience
(29:31):
of democracy and all the experience they had was bad they were not committed they had never been
committed to the democratic former government and the elite of German society including the military
all of those people were ferociously hostile to democracy and would have wanted a return to
uh the empire that ended in 1918 which was some semi-authoritarian monarchy or some new form of
(29:55):
dictatorship uh so it's it's the the differences between 1933 and Germany and America they are so
vastly outweigh any similarities uh that that is completely false analogy having said all that
you know this this and this fear about the the future of our democracy doesn't come from nowhere
(30:16):
I would argue that the democratic former government has been badly um has been badly undermined in
this country across a period of many decades and you know that the American people uh recognize
this I think that probably the if you want to understand my for me the most obvious explanation
(30:36):
for why uh Donald Trump won in 2016 and for his enduring support and why he won this time is that
um is that I think the people who voted for him recognize that the system is is corrupt that it's
rotten that it's dysfunctional that the government that that we the people are not being represented
(30:58):
in Washington um that the government in Washington does not listen to us does not care what we think
is not serving us and people want change um I mean Trump won in 2016 because he was the change
candidate just as Barack Obama won in 2008 with this vague promise of transformative change you
(31:21):
know change we can believe in yes we can and in 2016 both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders
ran as outsiders against the system vaguely perform vaguely promising transformative change
uh Trump was going to drain the swamp Sanders was going to give us a revolution even
then but none of these change candidates back then nor President Trump this cycle ever offered a
(31:47):
a plan for change that was going to go to the heart of the matter because what most needs changing
is money in politics and candidates can't fight the money because they're too busy raising it
and let me just say and so let me move now to the money in politics question because one of
one thing that distinguishes our country from every other every other democratic republic on
(32:10):
earth every other sort of wealthy democracy is that the cost it's the cost of there is no legal
limit to the cost how much money is spent by campaigns or donated by interest groups or
individuals and at the federal level all this money comes from private donations and every other
country for example our our federal elections consequently cost about by one estimate 40 times
(32:35):
as much as they cost in in the UK and in Germany and in those countries in Germany for example
at least a third of campaign costs come are public financed it's it's essentially taxpayer funds that
are given to the parties so that they do not have to rely on private donations and private
donations not payroll we have a system on the other hand in our country where effectively our
(32:57):
government is for sale to the deep pocket of donors who pay for our pay for election campaigns
another way to put this candidates candidates effectively self-censor to avoid sailing and
saying anything that before alienating any potential donors or to put it another way
(33:21):
campaign donors effectively choose the candidates that were allowed to vote for
uh I mean elections have gotten so expensive that it's hard to see how you could challenge
an incumbent in the house with less than a couple million dollars senate campaigns the
minimum price of admission is at least 10 million we've had races in the last cycle in swing
districts that were where there was out of state money you know where hundreds of hundreds of
(33:45):
millions of dollars were spent on campaigns uh the biden harris campaign raised and spent at
least a million and a half the trump campaign somewhat less but um and the thing is you so
you you campaigns you need an enormous amount of money just to get a campaign off the ground just
to be taken seriously by the media uh just to be seen as viable and any idea um or even any just
(34:14):
sort of problem you might want to talk about like say you wanted to talk about poverty or you wanted
to talk about um how the cost we americans pay twice as much for prescription medicines
as do the citizens of every other wealthy society because we're the only wealthy country
that does not tightly regulate the price of prescription medicines right well candidate that
(34:37):
even mentions that right off the bat that means you get no money from pharma and pharma big pharma
big pharma that's one of the biggest donors you're running out or if you talk on the campaign trail
about health insurance companies micromanaging doctors and finding excuses to deny coverage and
rejecting prior authorizations or these uh these deductibles and high out-of-pocket maximum so that
(35:03):
even if you have insurance uh you can be pardon me you can be bankrupted um by medical expenses
any candidate that that mentions any of that well then there's no money from health insurance
companies either and those are just you know there's just a couple of examples out of many
hundreds so that basically any any candidate any policy solution even any question tough question
(35:31):
you might want to ask about what's gone wrong in american life and about why life has gotten to be
such a struggle for the american people those questions those ideas the potential leaders who
might pose them all of those just die off out of sight out of mind because they don't attract
attract the campaign cash and indeed now of course now so many people who who could be who could
(35:56):
represent us in washington and who could be leaders and who could help us solve our problems and and
and seize our opportunities and really you know make our country the um you know make our country
great again make our country once again without without question the greatest most prosperous
country on earth which we have been and certainly can be in future all those potential leaders they
(36:20):
don't even think about going into politics because they know they've already known enough to know
that if they say i want to run for congress the first thing question a campaign manager will ask
them is how much money do you have and how much can you raise and if you're not a millionaire with
millionaire friends so you can hold a fundraiser at your country club don't even bother and it's
(36:42):
and to people who have integrity and good ideas and leadership qualities uh such a prospect is
degrading i mean this is really a degrading process ultimately where um it was i mean now it was
revealed this was eight years ago and it's surely a lot worse now that um members of congress in dc
(37:03):
were spending at least 30 hours a week on the phone in dedicated call centers set up by their
respective parties dialing for dollars that's the term they use to raise money for their next
reelection campaign which of course a leaves them almost no time uh to to start addressing the
country's challenges and passing laws like they ought to be doing but also they don't have time
(37:26):
for us they don't have time to listen to us they don't have time uh they can't even no matter how
well intentioned they might be they can't serve us anymore they're they're essentially held hostage
by this system and by the just the desperate hunger for campaign cash and what what this is done is it
has over time and and this this goes all the way back to the 1980s really uh to you know really
(37:52):
before your time but i can remember because i i started following politics when i turned 20 in
1980 and already by the end of the 80s by by the election in 1988 sort of bush senior against
michael de caques like the political conversation had already become really kind of empty and phony
and sort of trivialized and it didn't seem it just seemed to be nothing but slogans and personal
(38:14):
attacks and but none of us really knew what had gone wrong and we blamed the media for a long
stretch there but they were really just the symptom the problem with the media is they had
nothing to report because politicians weren't talking about anything and what i'm saying is
that in a gradual process that no one really knew was happening the need for self-censorship
(38:36):
uh driven by the money chase as as the cost of campaigns inaction we rose the hunger for
campaign cash just took one issue or policy or idea or potential leader after another out of
the conversation and out of the imagination it basically gradually drained the whole political
(38:57):
conversation of substance it it did it didn't overthrow our democracies as much as it asphyxiated
it you know that's really kind of what happened and and that is that is part of why america so
many americans today just feel kind of mentally helpless and confused it's like i'm powerless but
(39:18):
i don't know why this was done to me and i don't know how to fight back and it's not our fault it's
not because we are weak or because we have lost our love of freedom because we have not we're
americans but you can't fight what you can't see and even more so you can't fight what you don't
know is there and that's exactly what i'm saying is that and the thing is that you know what's
(39:39):
interesting is that even though politicians have every incentive to to conceal from us the the
crucial role played by money and the way that that that money has effectively prevented them
from serving us has made them completely out of touch from us nonetheless the american people
(40:00):
more and more you see in opinion polls in recent polls three quarters of americans left right and
center this is an area where you have cross-partisan consensus this is actually potentially a unifying
issue for the country we're saying money in politics is a huge problem you've got to find
some way to deal with it um but um so and so that's and so that's what i you know and my my focus i
(40:28):
i entered you know i after i finished my book on the holocaust 10 years ago i started researching
and writing what i thought was going to be my second book it's going to be about money in
politics and how we fix it and then in the spring of 2020 i saw that all these other people many of
them smarter than i am who had published great books about money and politics and these books
had not moved the needle politically one iota you know and that's when i realized that i also
(40:54):
realized that the people in washington the people in congress even you know there are some people
especially progressive democrats who make a little noise now and again about money in politics like
bernie sanders or akazio cartes or elizabeth warren but even they i don't question their motives
but the thing is that all of those people in dc they're so dependent on their donors
(41:18):
they can't lead in this issue so the only way that we beat this that we the people take our
government back reclaim our rightful c and how we are governed is we have to stand up a majority of
us really and and demand change and the change i think that has the step that we all have to take
(41:39):
is a reform called voter dollars and after you know years of research looking at the different
types of reform that have been proposed and then in the work that i've done in the last four years
sort of working with other reform groups and talking with people it is it seems clear to me
that the best path forward is this thing called voter dollars and that's the sole purpose of my
(42:03):
organization save democracy in america is to build support among americans left right and center
for this reform and and the reform is easily it's easy enough to explain because the the basic
problem we've got is now the only people in our politics who really have much uh say influence
anymore are big ticket campaign donors and so we've got to make ourselves the donors
(42:27):
and the way we do that the mechanism called voter dollars uh is that for every two year cycle the
federal government would give every registered voter and all of a sudden the government would
voter an online account of campaign cash and you can't take the money out and spend it but you go
online and assign it to the candidates you want to support and if you fund it at the robust level
(42:50):
that that we're demanding candidates who want to serve us can get enough money from the voters to
run a competitive campaign and their opponent uh will no longer have any excuse for taking money
from billionaires or special interests and thanks to some decisions by the supreme court basically
the only path to changing the game in campaign finance that the court will not strike down would
(43:18):
be a public financing mechanism like this and my my position you know that but the question is how
do we get there i talk about the people having to stand up i talk about a majority of americans
needing to want this because and i really think that the only way that we make this happen that
we are that we get a voter dollars act through congress that we establish a well-funded voter
(43:44):
dollar system is if the problem of money in politics and the voter dollar solution become
a top five uh issue in the national conversation in a presidential election year where literally
you know candidates are being grilled on this at town halls by by voters and journalists are putting
them on the spot and on the televised debates the moderators are saying well governor de sanis what
(44:09):
do you think about voter dollars and you know well vice president harris what do you think about
voter dollars short of that because it really has to be something that that the great majority of
americans at least understand and that a large majority of us say are saying to poll takers and
to to to politicians uh look we've had enough we want this and you know to a lot of people think
(44:35):
that that is just too high a hill to climb that that's too heavy a lift and i and i don't and i
i guess i'd like to to state why i think that why i'm so optimistic which is that i think that the
majority we already have a very large majority of americans out there uh you know that the
uh on both sides of the aisle who are saying that the system doesn't work that we are fed up that
(45:03):
americans don't know exactly what transformational change looks like
because no one has presented them with a plan for change you know i was talking earlier about how
we have again and again in the last 20 years given our vote to so-called change candidates you know
to barack obama in 2008 to bernie trump and donald sanders in 2016 to sanders again in 2020
(45:28):
and i think this time also trump won because he more effectively positioned himself as the outsider
who's gonna be the bull in the china shop he's gonna shake shake things up and yet none of these
candidates ever offered the the american people ever offered us a plan for change because again
(45:48):
what most needs changing is money in politics and there's this cash 22 they can't fight the money
because they're too busy raising it um and the thing is that you know you have i mean 85 percent
of americans in a in a poll three years ago said that our political system either a needs to be
completely reformed or b needs major changes and it was about you know it's about 40 percent of each
(46:15):
okay about 50 50 in these groups but either way you're talking 85 percent of americans saying
at a minimum major changes to our political system and there's so many other indications
of the american people's disgust with politics as usual and but the the thing is it's not enough
for everyone to be unhappy with the current system there has to be a concrete uh plausible
(46:40):
you know sort of achievable goal that represents the path to change and that's my my position is
that that voter dollars is the missing plan for change that this is the point that can bring
people together that can rally them and i i say this because a because it's one of the only
reform proposals i've seen out there that that truly enjoys bipartisan support uh and i've seen
(47:06):
the support in more than 100 media interviews on outlets ranging from quite progressive to
to very very conservative talk radio uh people who disagree with each other on every other issue but
say this is really great um um in in more than a thousand conversations i had with americans of
all political stripes and all walks of life i'd say 95 out of 100 say this is a great idea um i
(47:32):
also commissioned a poll of 700 new hampshire voters uh condition it was carried out by a top
uh polling firm target smart this is in 2023 um about money attitudes toward money and politics
and about voter dollars and outrage over money and politics was sky high uh left right and center
(47:55):
by the end by the time we were done with the survey and it explained the voter system we had
majority support across the board for it um and it has also it's a unifying issue it can be a
unifying issue that brings americans together because it's a way of saying to the american
people you know your fellow americans and the other party the other side of the aisle are not
(48:18):
your enemy the money's the enemy which in fact it is and also it is a unifying issue because
it powerfully affirms one of the ideals that make us americans you know one of the reasons why
i'm fundamentally confident that that we and americans are going to reclaim our say in how
(48:39):
we are governed that we're going to fix this political system that we will be once again
the world's most successful democracy and the inspiration for others as we've been in the past
is that every other country on earth membership in the nation depends on language on culture
on religion on you know on race i mean how do you know you're french because you speak french
(49:02):
you're ethnically french you like the food and wine and so on we're the exception the only exception
you know being an american has absolutely nothing to do with the color of your skin or what language
you speak or even where you were born it's about ideals it's about individual freedom it's about
equality of opportunity above all it's about a government by the people which we americans
(49:24):
invented in its modern form and have championed and have given to the rest of the world at a
staggering cost to ourselves and you look at all the americans who who have given their lives and
wars fought for the freedom of others uh i mean we've not not that we haven't made terrible
mistakes not that we're perfect we're flawed human beings like everyone else but we are different
(49:48):
and one thing that makes us different from every other country is that the democratic formal
government defines us and you know this this money-driven politics the system under which
the american people have suffered for decades not only is it inefficient and wasteful and corrupt
and unfair it's unamerican it's a detroit it's an offense it's an affront to the patriotism of every
(50:13):
one of us and this was one of the one of the in the survey that i conducted of the new hampshire
voters i um we had we had a question that they were asked to agree or disagree with some statements
about money in politics and there was one it had there was two two wordings of it was the same
basic statement which is that america stands for government by the people and this money-driven
(50:37):
politics makes a mockery of our ideals or is unamerican and the agreement with that statement
i either strongly agree or somewhat agree was north of 85 across the board it's a very resonant
and also just i have to say in in in conversations with with my with media hosts and and one-on-one
(50:59):
conversations with people it's something that has great resonance and power you know fundamentally
um the the problem is that the two parties have succeeded at this point in persuading us that the
americans on the other side of the aisle are really the problem in the enemy i think partly to distract
us from their own failures but ultimately you know americans really don't want to hate other
(51:23):
americans we would rather like and admire each other and work together um and i think we all
believe in these ideals and i think that that every american to some degree for me as a patriot
because i think all of us believe in these noble ideals that our country stands for want our country
to live up to them and i think that voter dollars is a wonderful very powerful way to achieve that
(51:47):
it also has you know the advantages politically that you summarize it in four words make voters
the donors it's common sense you know you've heard the saying whoever pays the piper calls the tune
well if we want to call the tune in washington we got to pay that piper we got to fund these campaigns
and maybe best of all because it's it directly empowers each and every one of us this system
(52:12):
says to each registered voter we are going to literally put the coin of political influence
into your hands to do as you see fit and now candidates are going to have to come to you
not just for your vote but to ask you for the for something they need a lot more urgently than they
need your vote for the cash without which they're in no position to ask anyone for a vote
(52:34):
and and that is so valuable because right now americans people i talk to i think most americans
feel powerless in our politics uh good reason because we are powerless because no one in
washington listens to us but even worse but because the the role of money is really kind of behind the
scenes and is so insidious and consists of what's not being not said rather than what is said
(52:59):
we don't even know how this is being done to us and so ultimately i i i'm really confident that
we're going to win this um maybe we could even elevate the issue high enough by 2028 hard to say
i'm not going to make that prediction the the two biggest challenges that we face i think one are
(53:21):
just getting the word out breaking through the noise uh because there's just so much information
out there about every kind and the other is is overcoming the pessimism that i think so many
americans feel because i see this again and again and i saw this in the poll that i conducted and in
a focus group some focus groups the year before people will say god you know the system just seems
(53:42):
so corrupt now it's never going to be fixed you know it's beyond redemption and i understand that
you know we've been promised change so many times it's never been delivered we're disillusioned but
the way you how do you you give hope to people who don't feel hopeful the main thing is is just to
get enough people out there and enough prominent people saying this is a good idea this can happen
(54:07):
and so you know i would say to people in the audience um that i if you if you like you know
what i'm saying or if you even if you just think that this voter riot daughter's idea is worth
thinking about and talking about i'd be really grateful if you could go to our website um the
url is save democracy in america dot org save democracy in america dot org if you could sign
(54:32):
up for our newsletter uh help us get those numbers up and get the word out and if you could share our
newsletter and our website or one of our videos or a link to one of my interviews um with your
friends or on social media because you know i i go on radio i go on tv i go on podcasts i speak in
(54:53):
person i make my best case but you know the people in the audience don't know me from adam
but with someone who knows you and trusts you our message about money in politics and the message
that we're not powerless we're not beat we can fix this that message is always going to be a hundred
times more powerful coming from you than it is coming from me and it's just a question it seems
(55:19):
to me getting to a tipping point you get enough people out there talking about this telling each
other about it then hearing about it oh i've heard about it from them and from them and maybe seeing
a few prominent people getting a little more media attention you get to a point where enough
americans say oh wow we're not beat this can be fixed and i think from that point this is the
(55:41):
kind of thing that can snowball very quickly um but in any case you know even if the way the
the path that we find to really taking back our government restoring government by the people
even if voted always is not the path that we take um i have every confidence that sooner or later
(56:03):
you know the american people are going to fix this once once enough of this can at least kind of
rally around a particular approach to to moving forward right now we're just kind of stuck because
we don't even know the first step and we don't really understand exactly who the enemy is but
i think once we sort of keep getting the word out and helping people understand sooner or later once
(56:26):
americans know there is a way to fix this there's no way we're going to take this line down because
you know for every other people on earth government by the people is an option for us it's
existential it defines who we are if we don't govern ourselves as a proud and self-respecting
people in a democratic republic it's like we're almost not even americans anymore you know we
(56:48):
might as well just be 340 million people who live in north america and rather watch baseball than
soccer and that's just that's just not us you know so anyway that's those are some of the many
reasons why um you know i have every confidence that we are going to sooner or later get this done
yeah absolutely and i think that uh you know the the work that you're doing through your organization
(57:09):
and and going on uh different media is is only going to help that so we can we can only hope that
uh you know reform happens at some point you've made this interview extremely easy you know i had
about 10 questions written but you went through them all uh kind of on your own here so i want to
give you a chance i give you a chance to get the word you end wise i really you're so patient
(57:32):
jackson i'm sorry about that i don't know well i i will in in wrapping things up i do want to uh
just allow you one last time to to mention your your website mention the book kind of shout out
all the things that you want people to uh to go check out okay so if you if you're interested in
why the holocaust happened the title of my book is how could this happen explaining the holocaust
(57:57):
and um there's information about the book in uh on the about page of my website uh on my um in my in
my bio the main thing i guess i would ask everyone to do is to please go to our website
save democracy in america dot org save democracy in america dot org um there's all kinds of
information about voter dollars and about money in politics um please sign up for our newsletter
(58:23):
and um please share whatever information from the website uh or share this interview uh that i've
had with jackson today um with your friends or on social media because don't think that you can't
that you can't move the ball down the field you can provide us what we need most which is a measure
of validation you know a sort of seal of approval so that people say oh yeah okay this is not a pipe
(58:49):
dream this is something that makes sense that could happen you can provide a kind of validation
that i can't with people who know you personally uh so don't think that you can't have an impact
absolutely i really appreciate your time thank you so much
i appreciate you for the opportunity jackson thank you very much
so there's dan mcmillan a lot covered there i know it was a different style than than we normally
(59:12):
are used to um but i hope that you enjoyed the the conversation you know i had written a set of
questions and he kind of just went through them one by one without me even having to to ask them
so i just uh let him continue on and and it really provided a lot of good information things that i
had never even thought about and considered when it comes to the holocaust when it comes to uh
(59:35):
when it comes to um the issues with our system in the united states you know those who are not
from the united states listening i hope you learned a lot you know about potential issues
with our our democracy ways to to make it better and and everyone in the world i think knows about
the holocaust and and just more the of insights of why it happened and and why hopefully it could
(59:58):
never happen again i i think we're really powerful so hope you learned a lot today i will put the
links in the show notes to to everything dan mcmillan everything saved democracy i do think
those are some great resources to uh to check out everything that dan is talking about he certainly
is a wealth of information i think you'll find a lot more great information on his websites
(01:00:21):
and then also his uh his book explaining more about uh about kind of what happened within the
holocaust so urge you to check out everything dan mcmillan all of that will be in the show notes
if it's your first time listening or you haven't already go leave a five star rating on apple and
on spotify leave a written review on apple helps a ton go follow along on instagram and on tiktok
(01:00:45):
not enough podcasts not enough which acts enough on facebook really really appreciate that really
appreciate when you subscribe or follow along on apple and spotify to the podcast so many amazing
guests in the past over 250 at this point everything from actors to true crime to magicians and all
kinds of people so bound to be some more interviews that you might be interested in so thanks for
(01:01:10):
being here dan thank you for being here we'll see you next week take it away chris this has been
not in a huff with jackson huff thank you for listening be sure to join us next time where
we will interview another amazing guest who is sure to make you laugh or make you think
or hey maybe even both but until then keep being awesome
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