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Richard Helppie
Hello, welcome to The Common Bridge. It's your host Rich Helppie and we're really enjoying season five. We've got a real good guest today, Russell Dobular of Due Dissidence. I hope I'm pronouncing all those things. Russell, welcome to the show. How are you?
Russell Dobular
Great, how are you doing?
Richard Helppie
I can't complain at all. I hope you had a good Thanksgiving. We're recording this the Monday after Thanksgiving. As we roll into the holiday season it seems really hard to get our bearings on what's going on today. But I came across Russell and his broadcasting partner - I don't know how you describe your relationship with Keaton Weiss - putting out some really interesting stuff so maybe that's a good place to start. Tell us a little bit about the show you're doing, where you're doing it, why you're doing it, and maybe a little bit about your biography and background that led up to this.
Russell Dobular
Well, me and Keaton, we started out the way all great political journalists do - as shit posters. We had a mutual friend who was a hardcore Hill bot and we kept teaming up on him. We kept liking each other's posts. Keaton started the project actually as a blog. He saw that my shit posts were unusual, had unusual literary merit, so he asked me to start writing articles for the blog. Eventually, the blog turned into a podcast. Basically we just had an irregular schedule, it was like a hobby. When one of us wrote an article, we would just schedule a podcast at our convenience, talk about the article. After a while we had so many people who really enjoyed the podcast who said, you guys should do this full time. We said, alright, well, the only way to do that full time really, you've got to go on YouTube, like what you're doing. That's kind of the back alley of this whole world, like YouTube is really where this conversation happens. So we went on and we've kind of exploded. Now ironically, after a long time not writing, we're getting back to writing articles as part of the mix.
Richard Helppie
Where do people find the program?
Russell Dobular
It is on YouTube. We also have a Substack, paid or free, all the content goes in there. You can sign up on Patreon, which will also get you all of our content. And that's all under the Due Dissidence moniker.
Richard Helppie
Great, and I would recommend it. It's interesting that you have this journey in that a very popular guest that has been on The Common Bridge many times...
Russell Dobular
We're also on...Keaton will kill me, we're on Rumble too.
Richard Helppie
You're on Rumble.
Russell Dobular
YouTube and Rumble. (Richard Helppie: Okay. Not Truth Social, though.) No, I mean, that's kind of like another Twitter kind of thing. It's one of the many challengers to Twitter. I mean, of course, we're on X – Twitter - whatever you want to call it, but the main places to watch us are Substack, Patreon, YouTube and Rumble.
Richard Helppie
Great. Well, it's interesting. One of the guests that's been on The Common Bridge several times is Robert Greenfield. Robert and I started off on Facebook - there was a mutual friend, and back in the day when you did political discussion on Facebook - Robert and I would be going back and forth and we eventually developed a respect for each other and said, where are we together here? And he said, Rich even more if we don't agree, you're never nasty about it. I'm like, well, there's enough of that out there. We forged not only a respect but I think, a friendship, and that kind of gives me hope. The Common Bridge we started as a podcast, and then we did a little video on YouTube - we don't do a lot on that - and then went to Substack with an audio product and a video product and also transcription and every now and then I write columns or get a guest columnist. I found putting out a regular column is really hard for me. There are writers like Matt Taibbi, who is a prolific writer, one of the many on Substack. I know I'm not in that league, but (Russell Dobular: I got him right back here.) ah, okay. We did an episode on "Hate Inc." and he came back to talk about a new media model, which Substack is an important part of that; I don't know where it's going to fit in to the fabric. Prior to doing this, what were you up to? Where'd you grow up? What were your early experiences? Any education? What was your career arc like before you got into this?
Russell Dobular
I grew up in Flushing. Anybody who knows anything about Flushing now will know that it is actually the largest Asian population outside of Asia on Earth. But when I was growing up there, it was like the Lords of Flatbush, it was very Italian, Irish, a little smattering of Jews, basically the grandchildren of the Ellis Island immigrants. And that has largely defined my politics because I had a front row seat to seeing the Union Democrats turn into Reagan Republicans and later, Trump Republicans. I saw how that happened and I saw why that happened. It's given me a lot of skepticism...I know we're going to get into the Barry Weiss thing...I share her skepticism - I think more honestly, in my case - of a lot of culture war stuff. It is partly because I want to see economic reforms that benefit the working class. I know, as soon as you lead with a lot of those ideas - ideas that I don't personally agree with, we'll get into that later - many of them, those people are going to run for the hills, you're never going to convince a Union shop of a lot of these ideas, they strike people from that class as very elite, very know it all, very condescending. That definitely informs a lot of my politics. In fact, I think a lot of people - because Keaton doesn't get into those things as much, but I feel like you can't get into economics without culture, you can't separate them like that - so very often I would get into those things and I think a lot of people were surprised about the position I took on Palestine because they misinterpreted what I meant. They misinterpreted what my intention was and where I was coming from because we put everybody into these very narrow categories ideologically. So we expect if they believe this [then] they believe this. (Rich Helppie: Absolutely.) Real people are not that simple. They're not as simple as what MSNBC and Fox and the rest would have you believe.
Richard Helppie
Exactly. In the recent months it was if you don't think part of a second graders education is a drag show, you hate all transvestites. (Russell Dobular: That's it, that's it.) I'm like, no, astonishingly, I passed the second grade - I know that's astonishing in itself - without ever seeing a drag show. Who knew you could do that?
Russell Dobular
Oh, you managed that? You managed that and you grew up to be well adjusted? You didn't wind up hating drag queens as a result of not seeing it in the second grade?
Richard Helppie
Precisely. It's just where we've gone, this point of absurdity. What attracted me to get you on the show was you wrote a great piece, comparing some of the culture with the creation of the Frankenstein monster. First, tell people where this is published and how it's titled, because frankly, everybody should just read this. Wherever you are on the political spectrum, please look up Russell Dobular and Due Dissidence, and read this piece. If it makes you uncomfortable or skeptical or a little bit angry, read it again because you are the person that needs to do this. One of the things you said is that "it's an arrogant creator playing with forces they scarcely understand" and then deftly saying losing control of their creation and then being destroyed by it; a la Frankenstein. Talk to me about your creative process. How did you get from this look at social commentary to drafting that kind of prose?
Russell Dobular
Well, I mean, that's the first thing I thought of when I saw the students who we've so closely associated with the social justice movement - broadly termed - turn around and take a position that, to my mind, the people who created those movements didn't want them to take. They had never thought through the implications of what they were creating when they decided, in my opinion, over the last several decades...and keep in mind, I'm not necessarily saying there's a conspiracy - Keaton often likes to quote George Carlin, as saying there is no need for a formal conspiracy where interests converge - I think coming out of the 60s and 70s there was a vested interest, and we know this. We know this from, I believe it's the Powell memo, where he wrote this extensive memo as a supreme court justice, about how the people had gained too much power over the economy and the culture and corporations needed to use their resources to fight back. They needed to become more involved in politics. They needed to be become more involved in the media. And it worked. We're living in the aftermath of that world. I think part of that...and we know corporations, if you read Anand Giridharadas "Winners Take All" he really gets into this; how corporations threw a lot of money into universities and very willfully took the kinds of people who might have wound up social workers in the past and directed them to places like McKinsey with the argument to them, well, no, but you have to know how the system works, right? I mean, if you really want to change the world, you've got to know how to scale your ideas. You have to learn how the nuts and bolts work. By the time you get out of McKinsey, you're not interested in changing the world anymore, except in the most superficial way. So I think part of that has been to separate identity questions from questions of class and economics. They took the most intellectually shallow crackpots, academics like Ibram X Kendi and Robyn D'Angelo, and elevated them and their ideas far beyond what they ever deserved based on merits or the cohesion of the ideas. Norman Finkelstein, his last book was actually about that subject - I'll burn that bridge when I get to it - he really just took apart Ibram X Kendi, prophetically as it turned out, he got busted for his grift not long after the book was published. But I think they intentionally embraced a very divisive ideology that does not go anywhere, that cannot be concluded, that cannot reach any kind of level of equilibrium or resolution because it's great for business - just keep people fighting over micro-aggressions and get away from the real tangible racism and start getting into concepts that are more akin to a religious idea like sin; you start talking about it's in everybody. Okay, well, how do you prove that? And how do you eradicate it, even if that were true? Very much like the war on terror, it's a great grift because it never ends. They're going to have to pay you forever to go to these corporations to interrogate everybody's racial division. And so they built this thing, they built this monster that was completely ineffectual, arguing about men on women's sports teams and just driving people crazy with these culture wars - why should we have books with graphic sexual illustrations in public schools - just make everybody fight about nonsense. Meanwhile, the corporations that are throwing all the money into these universities that are funding the chairs, that are giving millions of dollars to people like candy, that run away with all the money, they're galloping sunset with their saddlebags while you idiots - you idiots! - are having this absolutely absurd culture war battle. But it worked great for a long time and they never thought through what would happen if a client state - that we support, that is a settler colonialist state by any meaningful definition of that term - went and committed horrific acts of mass murder against a brown skinned marginalized people. This is what you have told them the monster was built for. It was built for this moment, right? It was built to protect the brown skinned marginalized peoples of the earth. That's what it was made for. And much to its surprise, this movement, these students, this monster, found out that they never meant any of that shit. That is why they focused it all on the past. Because you're not going to have any economic impact interrogating slavery from the past. You can't rescue anybody from the past. They just want you pulling down statues and screaming about white supremacy. You want to really examine how authentic any of this has ever been? We have more slaves today than have ever existed in the history of the world. You ever hear about that? You can actually do something about that. You can actually help these people. So why don't we talk about it? We care so much about historic slavery, why don't we care about currency slavery? Because that would mess with international relations. The slaves are in countries we might have supply chains with. You actually have human beings you can actually do something with; they don't want you doing something about it. They want you to bitch about things that cannot be solved, because that keeps you out of the way, while they extract wealth from society.
Richard Helppie
I agree with your central premise here, in that trying to say that everything in the past was an error. I was with some people over the weekend, all with advanced degrees from really good universities. I said, did you have gender inclusive restrooms in your grad school? And they said, oh, no, they didn't. I said, well, shouldn't you have to give up the degree, then, if you've got the degree from a place without a gender inclusive restroom? And they all laughed because, of course, I was making a joke. But it's just an example of trying to take the constructs from yesteryear and bring it into the future and saying everything about that was bad and now you have to pay for it - even though you weren't there - instead of dealing with what we have in the present. You say in your column, again, redirect the famously disruptive energies of youth away from questions of class and economics and towards questions of race, gender, and sexuality to the exclusion of all other things. And if you don't mind...because it's so good, "...the product of this mad science experiment in separating race from class, fat from food, attraction from aesthetics, gender expression from sex, and sex from biology, all with the purpose of driving the public to fight over absurdities while our overlords extract the last scrap of wealth remaining in the hands of the peasantry." I said, I've got to talk to this guy, when I read that. [Laughter.] That's very good and it's not only the war in the Middle East that caused people to say, well, wait a minute, we've had this centuries long confrontation, we've had a, what, 80 some year, establishment of a Jewish state and that's never been fully resolved. We have wanton slaughter and somehow, there were lots of Palestinian flags all over the place, all over the world, seemingly in concert with a horrific attack on innocent people (Russell Dobular: Right.) and now we don't talk about the attack on the Jewish people, that they were victims in this case. But we're not going to talk about that, we're going to talk about the hostages that are being released. Are we going to un-murder the 1200 people that were murdered, are we going to un-rape the women that were raped? I mean, there's got to be a sense of justice here about wrong is wrong, right is right, no matter who's doing it. We seem to have gotten away from that so much. It's not about what's being done but who's doing it, and we're seeing it every place now. It's all about - to your first point - it's all about identity.
Russell Dobular
I think that's a straw man argument. I'm in that space and I have yet to see anybody say, oh, yeah, no, you know, murdering civilians, that is awesome, that's great. I have yet to see anybody say that. At most the aforementioned, Norman Finkelstein, will argue that he can't - and I think a lot of us feel this way - it's very difficult to judge what people who have been kept in a concentration camp do to their captors. Now, that doesn't mean that it's right but there but for the grace of God...He mentions Nat Turner's slave rebellion where they did kill children, they did kill them, and it doesn't mean that it's right and yeah, I have yet to see anybody who says that it is. So I think that's a straw man saying, well, if you're saying stop slaughtering 70% of women and children in Gaza, that means you think it's great to do that with civilians, which by the way, it came out subsequently, a lot of those deaths were from the IDF, but it's kind of beside the point.
Richard Helppie
You wrote about over 200 deaths by the IDF. And what people don't want to face is that in war a lot of people that are non combatants catch bullets and shrapnel. That's what happens.
Russell Dobular
That's the argument that they're trying to put forward. If you look at the sheer numbers, it just really doesn't hold up. Children are being slaughtered at a rate they were not slaughtered in World War II. They were being slaughtered at a rate they were not slaughtered in the Holocaust. So that argument just doesn't hold water. I saw Abby Martin, who does a lot of work in this area, she interviewed a former...I think he was an IDF soldier, he was an Israeli. And he said the greatest propaganda feat Israel ever accomplished was convincing people that this was complicated, it's actually the simplest thing in the world. And he's right. History did not start on October 7, 2023. History started long before that, and it's very interesting to me, I did a second piece about Julianna Margulies, who is just a narcissistic dingbat, who's been running all over the place, just screaming the most ignorant stuff. And she, in an op ed she wrote in USA Today avoids the history, she says, it's complicated, I don't pretend to be an expert in that. Well, if you're not an expert in that, why don't you shut up? Like why are you talking about this with such authority if you don't understand that? Because they don't want to talk about it, because they know once you start talking about that, the whole premise of Israel starts to come apart. And Barry Weiss, who - unlike Margolies who probably doesn't have the brains, God gave her a coconut - is a Columbia Graduate and she avoided that. If you look at that speech, she says, basically the same...she makes it almost exactly the same formulation. It doesn't matter to go back into the history, I don't need to look at the history; you don't want to talk about the history. It is very consistent with these just rabid Zionists that they duck any discussion of the history and it's also very consistent with them that they'll give away the game. Weiss didn't do that in that case, Margolies did it in her podcast on “The Back Room.” If you really press them, a lot of them will start screaming, well, what about the Native Americans? Well now you just gave away the game. Now you just admitted that your position re: the Palestines, is analogous to the US position in relation to Native Americans. Now you've admitted that you are a settler colonialist society? And a very simple answer to that is, yeah, well, if what you're arguing is, it is the great misfortune of Israel to be committing war crimes and genocide against a people in the modern world instead of one hundred years ago, you're right, sorry. I mean, is that what you want? You want sorry? That it's not okay anymore to just mass slaughter these people and take their land, like what what do you expect the response to that to be?
Richard Helppie
These are interesting questions and I think there is some historical parallel, but if you look around through the history of mankind, there are always people that have been subjugated. There have always been people subject to genocide and the formula is the same. (Russell Dubular: So that's okay?) Yeah, no, I'm not saying it's okay. I'm saying that it's the native people [who] are moved off their land. They can't use their religion, their language, their their ways of life, they have things imposed on them. In the process of doing research on a number of indigenous peoples about this, it's basically the same formula every place you go. And then the question is, okay, now what does justice look like today? And as I'm listening to you talk about, well, okay, we can't look at the history, because that's really complicated but if we move to identity, how do we get to a just society? One of the things...a lot of this investment that's going into various programs, like we needed the equal employment opportunity laws, those were clearly needed; those were measurable, definable results. The Voting Rights Act, Civil Rights Act, again, clear things that would be different. Now as I look at a lot of the things under the broad umbrella of DEI, I'm saying, how are you going to measure this? How are you going to know when you've achieved DEI? How do you know when you get there? I'm saying that in the context of can we correct all historical ills. Well, I think probably no, we can't go back there and fix them. What do we do with what we've got today? And I hope the answer isn't any group of any description gets to kill another group of another description.
Russell Dobular
I mean, are we talking about DEI? Are we talking about Israel? Are we talking about both?
Richard Helppie
Well, I think it all goes in saying...this is what I draw out of it is, as you said, we started focusing on things that can't be changed. We talked about identity versus race versus class. What does the just world look like?
Russell Dobular
Okay, so I'm going to take Israel first and then the United States circumstance because I do not think they're the same thing. (Richard Helppie: Okay, please.) In the case of Israel, I again, I thought that was great insight that Israel's greatest propaganda feed has been to convince people this is complicated. When people come out and they say, this state is a Muslim state; we say, that's horrible. Somebody comes out and says, this state is a Christian state; we say that's horrible. Why doesn't that apply to a Jewish state? So your answer, if you want to correctly interpret the phrase "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," you get rid of the core apartheid premise upon which Israel is built. A Jewish state is, by definition, an apartheid premise; in order to maintain a Jewish state it must have a Jewish majority. So what happens to people who are not Jewish? They will try to hide behind the fact that they do have some Arab Israeli citizens, but they won't explain to you who they are or how they got there. Those are people who managed to cling to their land through the Nakba, where 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes. Those are the descendants and some original survivors. What they don't tell you is if you're a Palestinian, you cannot get Israeli citizenship, even through marriage. So they can tolerate this small token group of Arabs, and particularly, they're very politically useful, because whenever you start arguing that Israel is an apartheid state, they always talk right behind the descendants; but we have Arabs; well, not enough Arabs to actually make it not a Jewish controlled state. So you give everyone democracy, you give the descendants of the people that you committed those crimes against the title to their land back, what they call the Right of Return, which is recognized by the United Nations. Every day that Israel does not do that they're in violation of international law. And from the river to the sea, everyone gets to be free, everyone gets to vote, everyone is enfranchised. It's a completely democratic society, from the West Bank to Gaza through what is today called Israel. There you go. Now, they're not going to like that answer and when you start to interrogate why, you realize this is not very complicated; this is a racist, apartheid state that kicked people out of their homes. The only way to give justice is to change the core premise of Israel and make it a state that embraces everyone within that territory. Going to the United States situation, I think a lot of people who I feel have been indoctrinated with a lot of this DEI take and post modernism...we were moving in a good direction. It's not as if...I mean, I'm writing an article partly about the tactics. You know Barry Weiss, in her speech, she also mentioned that they cornered Jewish students in a library here in New York in Cooper Union and she mentioned some other things. Well, what did you think was going to happen when they trapped people like Riley Gaines in a classroom for three hours without consequence? What did you think was going to happen when you let them run Dr. Bret Weinstein off of the campus of Evergreen, without consequence. You've been encouraging them to express their political views through physical intimidation and violence - as long as it was directed at women who feel they have a right to ban penises from certain spaces, as long as it was directed at some poor McDonald's manager who gets accused of a micro-aggression on a TikTok video, as long as it was directed at things that don't cost you anything, you were fine with that. But now the monster is going after something that you are ideologically on the other side of, and these people don't know whether to shit or wind their wristwatch, they don't know how to handle this. Because the cognitive dissonance of telling them - for decades - that the worst thing in the world is a colonizer, to go support a colonizing power that is slaughtering mostly women and children on a daily basis on social media, it's just too much cognitive dissonance. It's just too much. They didn't question Ukraine at all, because that was white on white. It didn't mess with the narrative that you programmed them with, but this is just too much. My hope is they start to question all of this as a result, because now they have seen that they were sold a bill of goods, that these people who told them they care about brown people and marginalized people and people of marginalized identities, it was all con job to keep these people from causing the kind of trouble that they don't want them to cause. So how do you solve it? I think it is very disingenuous to actually say that to be on the side of the Palestinians is uniquely a product of wokeness and post modernism. If you look at the kind of multicultural liberalism that preceded that movement, it would have been on the Palestinian side. I think we were moving in a direction as a society, certainly not perfect, certainly not where we needed to be. I even think there are some useful ideas that come out of intersectionality and critical race theory but even Kimberle Crenshaw says they're using these ideas in ways that she'd never intended. Like, is there some value to the idea that, - as Derrick Bell originally argued with critical race theory - there's an element of injustice in the racial justice system that can only be explained by racism so that it's a bigger problem than changing the law to try to fix it? Yeah, I mean, that is a very worthwhile thing to question. My argument would be we could have asked those questions from a liberal perspective, rather than a postmodern perspective with its attendant roots in the Age of Enlightenment principles of rational thought. Post modernism throws out the idea that there is such a thing or that there are epistemologies that are more useful for interrogating the contours of reality than others. And once you throw that out, that's when you get some of these absurdities, like, well, we need to have a voodoo priest there if we're going to talk about the new academic calendar; like that's where that goes because everything is equal, and everything is not equal. If you're walking around with a smartphone, you should know that, try it, try to create a smartphone throwing bones and leaves and see how that works out for you. Now, at the same time, this is a mask off moment with some people who have been considered allies in civil libertarian issues and free speech, like Douglas Murray, like Barry Weiss. And this is what I mean when I say I think some of our viewers, because they heard me say things like what I'm saying now, thought I would be on the other side of an Israel/Palestine conflict. And no, I mean, I am...I don't want to necessarily put a label on it; people have different understandings of what liberal means but I would say what I understood as the left social project before everybody went batshit, that's what I am.
Richard Helppie
This is what we've lost on this pathway to the extremism and polarization that we have today. And in reading some of the things that you've written and watching some of your shows, it made me smile, because I am a fellow traveler here, I know you're going to get hit from the right and the left. (Russell Dobular: Sure.) It happens to me on the same episode; I'm a libtard, I'm a neocon, I'm a Nazi. There's a certain segment of people that think the world is cut into black and white and there's required speech they need to say, versus unwrapping things that are simple and are complex and what's the right course. My experience is this. Meeting people of all descriptions for a long time, people are basically the same. They all kind of want the same thing. But there's this layer at the political level, and in now the captured established media ecosystem, that keeps feeding us - what is bullshit - that somehow we hate each other. I grew up in a blue collar town, my public education was funded by two Ford plants on the edge of Detroit that has made tremendous strides in racial relations. We have the largest Arab population outside of the Middle East, literally between the area I grew up in and the city limit of Detroit, we have a large Jewish population, large Chaldean population. On the ground, I don't see the problems day to day. Now I'm sure there are things beneath the surface that I don't see. But we've found a way to get along, raise our families, try to build decent communities, maybe build a business, get an education, acquire some wealth even. A lot of it we did just on blue collar work. And to one of your earlier points, I too, watched the loyal union rank and file - the United Auto Workers, the Teamsters, folks that would never consider a Republican - make the pivot. I'm really differentiating now between the rank and file and the union leadership. The union leadership is seen, in a lot of respects, as another layer of taxation and control. The rank and file, the first people I ever heard going for Donald Trump, were my friends that had 30 years at a Ford plant or were in skilled trades, and they said basically, we're sick of being lied to. We think this guy is a train wreck but we're going to vote for him because, as Michael Moore said, it was a big middle finger to the establishment. And since that time now, we have reached this absurd point where we can't acknowledge hermaphroditism without saying that a 13 year old can decide they want to change their genitalia and stuff them full of synthetic hormones. There is a vast difference between those things. Maybe the situation we've had in Israel, [may be] the first steps away from the edge...eternal optimist, but are we starting to back away from that edge of extremism a little bit?
Russell Dobular
It's an interesting question. As somebody...as a very rare person, who has - in what you could broadly term been in the left space - who has spoken out about gender theory and gender ideology in regards to a lot of these excesses, particularly that, particularly the medicalization of children. Which, having been around the block a few times, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that that is going to go down in history like the Satanic Panic, as this social mania driven by psychologists and a medical industry that were completely wrong, and that are going to get sued for millions of dollars. That was how the Satanic Panic ended. That's why you don't see recovered memory therapy. A lot of people say that it's really conversion therapy. It's really conversion therapy, right? You're too gay. You must be a woman, you're not presenting as a man. No, it's just a clown show and I think it's very sad because when you say this, people who are very much part of this ideology will start screaming, are you saying things were good? No, but they were going in the right direction. Are you saying things are better now? Can you say that statistically? Can you say that in terms of people's happiness, in terms of depression, in terms of mental illness? I mean, if you could demonstrate to me - I'm a reasonable madman - if you can demonstrate to me that these ideas have created a happier, saner, more secure population, I'd say, well, maybe I'm just old, maybe there's something here I'm not getting. But the results have been exactly as I would think they would be; that people without definition, without clarity, and being told that life is a zero sum game where all identity...it's all against all in some kind of Thunderdome identity group combat, or even more just absolutely blind to history and human nature, in my opinion, the idea that you have all of these identity groups that - except for straight white people - all have common interests and are all ready to unite together. Some people pointed out the illegibility of Queers for Palestine. Now, I would disagree with that, my argument would be, I think that's very noble. I don't think that people in the Muslim world would necessarily agree with a lot of my beliefs or ideas, and I still don't think that they should be mass slaughtered and particularly in regards to what they believe. If you're in your country, that's really none of my business. That's up to you. That's up to you how you want to live. So in regards to the Israel context, that's what we're talking about. I am somebody who has made this argument. Pew did a poll of the Muslim world showing the majority of Muslims do not support homosexuality, they do not support abortion, they do not support divorce. I don't think that has anything to do with with this situation. That's the Bill Maher argument which is a classic colonialist argument, they're culturally inferior so we have the right to take their land and kill them. I don't agree with that. But in the context of our own country, not to trivialize it, but I felt like Star Trek kind of represented the Left ideal, that was really the Left ideal, that we want to go into this future where everyone is judged by what? The content of their character. That line is so potent and so damaging to the postmodern ethos that many of the writers in that space who interrogate colorblindness, they know they can't disown MLK so they try to argue he didn't mean what people think he meant. Really? Because the man was a brilliant orator, I'm pretty sure he meant what he said.
Richard Helppie
Indeed, and the point of absurdity was the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Those occurred in my lifetime. Jim Crow was the law of the land during my lifetime and those things had to be remedied, segregation had to be remedied. Now we have groups saying, well, we need spaces for our color. What? It's the antithesis of...
Russell Dobular
I know. Right, right. It's going back.
Richard Helppie
We have a lot to talk about, probably can't get it all in this episode. But I do remember when Ahmadinejad from Iran came, he was speaking at one of the Ivy [League Schools] on the East Coast and they were all cheering him on and such and then someone asked him about gay rights and he said, well, we don't have that phenomena in our country, like, there are no homosexuals in the whole country of Iran. At that point, I was like, okay, his star just fell and sure enough, it did. He was not the savior of the world at that point.
Russell Dobular
Well, I think that's what you fall into when you have this very shallow understanding of the world, that it's everyone versus straight white Westerners, and it's just not that simple. I think it's very noble to be Queers for Palestine as long as you understand that, in much of the Muslim world, that feeling is not returned. They are not going to...you're not going to see Saudis for Queers. And as long as you understand that, it's fine. I don't think that's necessarily a crazy position. But understand it's not as simple as what you've been taught. You go back, you watch Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing" and that movie really got into that, how you had tensions not just between blacks and whites, but between the Asians and blacks, the Asians who owned the stores; that's the real world. It is not that simple. And why is it important to understand that, because if you're going around thinking that the only problem with human nature is whiteness, you're going to be very surprised to find out that what you've been calling whiteness is actually, humanness. And the sins of European societies have been the sins of all societies that have reached sufficient levels of material resource and military prowess. Because, guess what sunshine, you've got to start fighting each other. And eventually, somebody of a different shade is going to take over and do very much the same thing, because you never really addressed the problem by just getting rid of the whiteness.
Richard Helppie
Also this dilemma that those that want to define us by identities can't decide if Asians are a minority that we need to protect or if they're a part of the oppressor class. Harvard and other places have made it harder for Asian students to get in. The mayor of Boston, when she was elected, they didn't know whether to celebrate, hey, we now have an Asian woman, a woman of color, first time for Boston or, oops, Asian, is she of color? They can't figure that out. I've said this on this program before, with the nomenclature Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders as a group, anyone that knows anything about the history knows that it is not a united group. They hated each other, they killed each other. The Kingdom of Hawaii was annexed by the United States, Orientals - as they were coined back then - were not allowed to vote. A lot of that really bad history but I can see somebody saying...
Russell Dobular
Chinese, Chinese.
Richard Helppie
Yeah, we're dealing with those, they were very low.
Russell Dobular
Well, that was the Chinese Exclusion Act; that was 1882 to 1943.
Richard Helppie
And the native Hawaiians didn't want to admit they had Chinese blood. They'd copped the Portuguese and German real quick, but not so much to Chinese blood – you know, they're all kind of yellow so we'll put them in one box. I mean, that was the incredibly racist thing that has been done. Russell, this is a great conversation and I want to jump off to a little bit of a lightning round here. (Russell: Sure.) You're so adept at what's going on. I don't know how you find time to understand all this stuff. But looking at...look, we're being fed a narrative by media, and I've been saying we need to get to real reporting. We need to demand that people do real reporting. We've got to get out of this era of affirmation media, and as an optimist, I said, we're exiting, people are on to them, and then I'm saying, wow, people are just more comfortable being lied to. Solzhenitsyn said, quote, "We know they're lying. They know they're lying. They know, we know they're lying. We know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying." Aren't we on the exit of this affirmation programming? Are people fed up or are we just a pause in the action and people are saying, look, just lie to me, let me be comfortable.
Russell Dobular
Well, this is what's really happening. I mean, this is really the subtext of the fights over speech. It is a terrified establishment losing control over the means of communication trying to reassert itself by pretending that it's an argument for defending democracy, when really what they're trying to do is undermine democracy. I shared a meme that had Bill Gates and Fauci and Biden laughing where it said, "and then we told them that free speech is a threat to free speech." That's very much what's going on. Platforms like YouTube, which you used to be very free on, now we call it East Berlin when we do our show, we call Rumble West Berlin. When we're going to have particularly - I had Lisa Selin Davis on who does a lot of writing about transgender issues, particularly with minors - when we do stuff like that these days, we go over to Rumble. This all kind of came to a head with the Israel thing. It's created a lot of weird bedfellows, where you have people like me, who on the one hand will agree with someone like Douglas Murray in his central thesis that singling out Europe as this uniquely foul civilization is not only historically inaccurate, it doesn't move us forward as a society. But at the same time, I think he's a fucking nut ball out there in the desert with his Flak jacket, just absolutely rabid Zionist. And in the end, it's unfortunate, because when someone like that behaves that way and they were an ally of yours in speech, it proves everybody who says he's not really a free speech advocate he's actually just a Western chauvinist, it proves them right. It makes it much harder to make your case when allies in that space turn out like that. Matt Taibbi is probably doing the best reporting on this. We're actually having him on for the second time this Sunday to talk about these issues. But that's what's happening when they go after Elon Musk. And look, I would not piss on Elon Musk if he were on fire. But this is what happens in an oligarchy, you have to choose which billionaire is more likely to defend your rights and he has not been perfect on free speech. But do I think you'd be able to share the things about what's happening in Gaza now on Twitter - that people are sharing - under Dorsey?
Richard Helppie
As we come to the near the end of our time, just looking at US politics, it looks like...and I wrote a column that I didn't think either Biden or Trump would get the nomination. I hope that forecast remains accurate.
Russell Dobular
It could be. Much to the disbelief of my audience. I have been saying all along, they will not let Donald Trump back in that White House, not even if he's on a public tour. They are not letting...the deep state will not allow it, one way or another that guy's not getting back in the White House. I don't care what his poll numbers are.
Richard Helppie
So let me ask you this, if you had to...I'm going to ask two questions at the same time and if you can give me, I don't know, three or four minutes on this...if you were going to give advice to the Republicans and then to the Democratic Party, what would you tell them? And then if Donald Trump is elected again, what do you think might happen? I think you've foreshadowed that a bit. Or if Joe Biden is re-elected, what do you think is going to happen?
Russell Dobular
Alright, so my advice to both the Republicans and the Democrats would be similar but from a different angle. Republicans get to a sane place on the culture wars. You need to drop the abortion thing. I believe at this point it's costing you more than it's gaining you post Roe v. Wade. You were able to get away with it as long as it wasn't actually going to impact most people's lives, now it's very significant in people's lives. I mean, you can see what happened in the two elections post Dobbs decision, it's killing you, it's killing you. You need to undo what Reagan did, sold you out to the evangelical right, and get back to something more like the Rockefeller Republicans on cultural issues, on economics. I think there's definitely a sweet spot, particularly in this country for a kind of economic populism, that is not a welfare state. I think there's a needle to be threaded there and you do hear it articulated by people like Tucker Carlson. Frankly, I hear it articulated by a lot of black conservatives. I myself, we don't have time to get into this, but I grew up on welfare and it has made me sympathetic to some black conservatives who argue that those government programs undermine their communities because I experienced that in my own life. It is very hard, if you grew up never seeing anyone go to work, figuring out how to have that in your life. It took me a long time to find figure out how to make a living and take care of myself because I never saw anybody do it. I pretty much had to figure it out on my own. So you do that to an entire community that is already facing challenges; is there a dark side to that? Yes, yes, there is. It's not as simple as just saying, oh, conservatives, which is what they do to black conservatives they just shut them down immediately. So I think there is a space for the Republican Party to find something that would be a uniquely American form of the hand-off rather than a hand-out. I think that's where you have to go but mean it. Mean it, don't do the compassionate conservatism, George Bush bullshit platitude, actually do it. Actually do it. And really, what that means in an American context is jobs. This is a big part of why Donald Trump won because he articulated something like that. He just didn't actually do it.
Richard Helppie
In a minute or two, if Donald Trump does get elected, you said they won't let him back in the White House. So riots in the street? What stops him?
Russell Dobular
You're saying if he gets elected? (Richard Helppie: Yeah.) I don't think it'll get that far personally. I mean, if you're just playing out the hypothetical scenario, I think no matter who gets elected, this is kind of the last election that in any way resembles regular order democracy, at least at the presidential level. I think wheels are coming off the country. No matter who wins, people who didn't support that person are not going to accept the results. I think we're at the end of this American experiment as we have known it and I think that's true, whether it was Biden, whether it was Trump. Could a kind of third option that's neither one of them calm those wounds? Probably, more than either one of those two could. I have said for a long time, again, much the disbelief of some of our listeners and viewers, I think it's going to be DeSantis. That is my theory, that they will not let Trump be the nominee. He's the one. Who's going to pick up his voters? Haley, they're not going to get behind her. Biden, he's a mummy. Economics is complicated, I'm not going to completely put the economy on him coming out of the bizarre situation of COVID. Maybe it could have been done better, maybe not, maybe the things that Trump would have done would have made things worse, he probably would never have let Powell raise the interest rates like this. What...would we be facing twenty percent inflation or are the economists wrong? Who knows? You get ten economists in a room, they have ten different opinions. But a lot of people said Trump is the anti-war candidate by comparison to Hillary. The Democrats at this point are the war party and I think the Biden presidency has proven that right, not to overstate Trump's peacenik things, he's one hundred percent Zionist, guarding Israel, but do you really think this Ukraine war would be going on if Trump had been the president? I don't think so. Nor do I think what's happening in Gaza would be happening.
Richard Helppie
We've been talking with Russell Dobular of Due Dissidence, please support the publication on Substack. For those of you that are not happy with the reporting you're getting from the established media ecosystem, it's people like Russell that are making a difference [along with] Matt Taibbi and many others. It is a small price to pay to make sure that our First Amendment rights are continually supported. If you don't like what you're getting from the established parties, let them know, you don't have to vote for the lesser of two evils. Together we can find a way out of this polarization by building agreement across The Common Bridge; it's fiercely nonpartisan discussion. With our guest Russell Dobular, this is your host, Rich Helppie, signing off on The Common Bridge.
Societal Divides and the Future of American Discourse