Darryl Cooper
Appearances
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Yeah, I've been told by people who should know that there are a few European countries I shouldn't try to visit because they probably won't let me off the plane.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Because of that podcast. Bro, I'd stay in Texas if I was you. I'd hole up. I'm up in North Idaho, so I'm far, far away.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
I was going to say, too, that overreaction is really counterproductive, too. You know, because to go back to what I said a second ago, like understanding brings you right up to the brink of empathy, you know, that, you know, more understanding to these issues. And I found this a hundred times, you know, because like, look, anti-Semitism is a weird thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
You don't really see it as often. No, you don't. Especially in an era when, you know, the off-your-back jiu-jitsu is kind of, I don't want to say, like, you know, they figured out the game on that yet. But, you know, it's not quite to that level. You still have your Craigs and Oliveros, people like that, who really are dangerous off their back. But it's not as common anymore, you know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And we can talk about some of the history of that if you want. But, you know, it's a it's this thing that. People get obsessed with – you know what I mean? Like it's not like part of their ideology. I've watched this happen to like good, clear-thinking, regular people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
They start listening to a few podcasts that they can't repost under their real name on Twitter because they're funny or interesting. And then pretty soon you can't bring that dude to a party anymore because he just can't go 10 minutes without – In neutral company, like bringing up the Jews. And it's like that happens. You see that happen. I mean the – what you see on social media a lot.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
I mean it's like a – there's no doubt there's been like a big explosion of that kind of rhetoric. Yeah. And I think a lot of it is online trolling and it's the fact that – People are so sensitive about it that like it's just the easiest way to get a huge reaction, you know, from from people. I think a lot of it has to do with that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
But I think a lot of it also has to do with the fact that so many of these of these questions have really been made. You know, it's not like they're off limits, like they're illegal and you're going to go to jail if you talk about them. I'm still sitting here. I mean, I'm on your podcast. And so it's a big platform to talk about these things. It's not like that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
But the attempt is to make it so that you can't be in any kind of respectable society.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Yeah. And that, again, I think is just completely counterproductive because people look at something – I think Theo was talking about this in one of his recent interviews. He was saying you – Somebody sees what's happening in Gaza right now and they just see kids getting pulled out of rubble and it's shocking and horrifying and they see that and they find out that the U.S.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
is sending money and weapons. Why is that happening? And they start looking into it and they go to the websites that are going to tell them the truth about it. And pretty soon one link leads to another.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And when they go ask one of their, you know, history professors at school or something like, hey, you know, Uncle Adolf 1488 in the comments section, like, told me X, Y, Z, like, you know, that you go and ask about it. He gets like shouted down and attacked for like asking the question. And then, you know what?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
That doesn't have the effect of him saying, wow, like, I guess that really is terrible and I should never ask that again. They think, hmm, that's weird. Like why are people responding this way? I was asking that question in good faith, you know. And so it really has like the opposite effect of the one that is at least ostensibly intended, you know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Yes. I mean the interesting thing about the World War II question is something I found through talking to people who disagreed with my Tucker interview is – Like if you put the question to them and maybe if you put it directly like this, they would give you a different answer.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
But you kind of get the – you get to understand that this is how they feel about it, which is if there was two options, one of them is that the Second World War doesn't happen, at least in Europe. Forty million people don't get killed. But, you know, the National Socialists stay in power and, you know, maybe Hitler dies 10 years later. It's like the Soviet Union, Stalin dies and things move on.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
People really kind of feel like and maybe this is because they're not involved in it. Like 40 million dead people is that was a that was a cost worth paying. And I think that is completely insane, man. Like. It's – like if there was a sliver of an opportunity to de-escalate that situation and bring it back down, like if I'm the emperor of America or Britain or whatever, I'm taking that chance.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Especially in a three-round fight. I mean, it's like you let yourself get laid on for three minutes in the first round. Nothing really happens, but you lost that round. You better win the second one.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And if it turns out that – Hitler's full of shit and, you know, he stabs us in the back first chance he gets. All right, then we'll have our war.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
: Right. So what we were talking about and all of the points I was bringing up on Tucker were all from before that. In fact, they were from a full year before the German invasion of the Soviet Union. That was June 1941. And that's where most of the Jews lived. So if Hitler never invaded the Soviet Union, he never even had access to those people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Now, Hitler didn't like the Soviet Union, you know, all the way back in Mein Kampf and everywhere else. I mean, it was central to his ideology that communism, socialism were the enemy and everything. He may have invaded the Soviet Union someday and gone after all the Jews when he did. When did Hitler start going after the Jews? You mean in terms of in terms of rhetoric? Oh, so, yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Like if you take him at his word in Mein Kampf, which is, you know, it's a piece of political propaganda, you know, that he wrote as a sort of a politician in Germany in 1924. And so you have to take it was sort of a grain of salt. But it's also one of the few sources we have. Like given his audience at the time, he probably didn't have a lot of reason to make this part up.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
is that he had been from like small town Germany, right? And he was from a middle class family. His father was a civil servant, respectable people. And nationalism back then was very much like a middle class ideology.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And the middle class people, nationalists would complain about the workers and the proletariat, how they don't want to be socialists and none of them have any national feeling and everything. And Hitler really didn't grow up with any really even knowledge of the Jews. He says his father, he never heard him say the word.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And, you know, if they had any in the small town that he lived in, like they were apparently well assimilated because he didn't know about them. And so then he moves to Vienna when he's a young adult. And there's a lot of Jews in Vienna. And he starts to – he's at the bottom of society now. He's literally living in shelters. He's hungry all the time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
He's like down with the underclass after having grown up in the middle class. Yeah. And so he's starting to get a look at what the German people, the German masses, you know, that he's like sort of as a child and a young man is like worked up this deep sense of like nationalistic fervor. He's actually getting an up close look at the underclass in Vienna.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And what he sees is not particularly impressive, you know, which is often the case when, you know, you can have sympathy for and want to lift up, you know, the underclass in any society. But the reason you want to do that is because they're often living degraded lives and degraded circumstances. And so he gets an up-close look at this and he doesn't like what he sees.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And he says in Mein Kampf that it really caused him like a moral crisis, you know, an ideological crisis. He's like, are these the German people? Like, really? This is what we're talking about? And then he says, and this is the way he relates it. He says it was actually the key that unlocked everything else for him.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
is that he would say he realized, we could say he came to believe, that yes, these German masses, they are in a sorry state right now. But the reason for that is that they're being manipulated by the Jews, by the Jewish press, by the Jews who own the theaters and put out the films and whatever else. They're being manipulated and corrupted by these people. And so for him, it became, I think...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
You know, he has he had a lot of the same explanations and reasons you would hear from any anti-Semite then or now, you know, banking and whatever. All those things were like in there. But I think the thing that gave it emotional valence for him is that his anti-Semitism was what allowed him to love Trump.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
The German people, you know, like it was like the only way for him that he could get around the revulsion he was feeling and actually being up close with the German underclasses. You know, he excused their faults by blaming by blaming Jews. And so it his his sense of love for his people. And I mean, look, Hitler is one of those guys.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
I noticed this when I was reading all the Jim Jones books and stuff, which I think I read all probably all of Hitler. They're not very good. You know, some of them are interesting, like they're good reads, but you can't help but notice, especially after you've read several of the books, that the authors just cannot help but be like cynical and turn it into a polemic on every page.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Like even the thing Jim Jones or Hitler wrote. Did as a child. They have like negative editorializing to it and everything. And it's like, you know, it really kind of it's a lot of them are still good books. You know, you read like the most recent sort of great Hitler biography by Ian Kershaw. It's a great book. He's a good historian, an excellent writer.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And, you know, you have to learn to kind of see through that polemic a little bit. And then you have, you know, a good history on your hands.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And, you know, it's a and so I think that people who knew Hitler pre before World War One. And we have like memoirs and interviews with people who did know him pretty, pretty well. They say pretty much unanimously like we never heard him mention the Jews back then. And this is the period in Vienna when Hitler says his anti-Semitism was developing and he was figuring these things out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And what I think was probably going on, like my read of it at least up to this point, is that his anti-Semitism, just like a lot of people in Europe at the time, was – it was theoretical and abstract. You know what I mean? Like the Jews had never –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
You got to remember, like the Russian Revolution, all of the things that people like Hitler would associate with with the Jews, like none of that stuff had happened yet. Like he might not like them. You know, you might think that whatever, all the stereotypes that go along with him. But it was just sort of an abstract thing that it wasn't dangerous. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
But then the First World War happens and, you know, it's it's really impossible for us today to understand the level of just trauma and devastation. That that war had on, I mean, the European countries that were in all the country countries that were involved. I mean, it was you're talking about a war where.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
You know, for for several Olympics, Olympic Games afterwards, there were a whole sports that like France and Germany played. Just didn't participate in anymore because they didn't have the people for it. I mean, it was you're talking about massive chunks of the young male population being killed out there. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And you take a guy like Hitler who volunteered early, like right away, and he survived the whole four years of the war. And you think about him as just an example of this generation of people who spent like their most formative young adult years in the trenches. I mean in constant terror of doing things that – I mean, forget about just like the physical discomfort of living there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
I mean, you're in the mud. You're covered with lice and fleas all the time. So is everybody else. You're – especially later in the war, you're like living off of starvation rations if you're a German or an Austrian. And you're watching – I mean – Dan Carlin's series on World War I is probably my favorite piece of audio. Incredible. It's so good.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And one of the things he's so good at, way better than me at, is kind of capturing the scale of events. And so when he talks about the Battle of Assam, when the British lost 60,000 guys on the first day. You're like, I don't even know what that like what that even means. Like it's it's just so overwhelming, you know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And so you have this generation that spent their formative years in all of these countries under those just circumstances that we really don't have any context for us to relate to. You know, I mean, think about like you see these stories of like people sleeping in trenches and.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
But he was in fucking trouble. Deep, deep trouble. At the very end especially.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Over there in the corner is their dead friend who's been sitting there decomposing and being eaten by rats for three or four days because you can't go up top to bury him because you'll get shot. And you can't bury him in the trench. In the dirt under the trench anymore because there's already bodies just completely wall to wall down there. You've already taken up all the space, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Just that kind of – I mean if you think about somebody today, if you walk outside your door on the way to work, your average person today – and there's a dead body on your steps – The average person today is going to be in therapy for years over that. I mean that is a traumatic experience, very difficult. And so you have these young men who go through this just unbelievable experience.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
I'm a little biased on this one because I'm an adopted member of the Armenian community. But it was a great fight.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And from Germany eastward after – if you go back and think about what the map of Europe looked like in the year 1900 – It didn't look anything like it looks now. It was basically like just a few big chunks. You know, you had France, you had Germany, the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and then you had the Russian Empire.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And there were a few like Spain, the Balkans and stuff, little things going on. But really it was just a few giant empires controlled everything from the Pacific Ocean in East Russia all the way over to the coast of France, right? And everything east of Germany in 1917 and 1918, those governments –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
literally evaporated they they went away and so you know you get to uh the immediate post-war period after these guys have just gone through this unbelievably harrowing experience you know their their lives have been defined by violence uh for years you know at this point and And all of a sudden there's just state collapse everywhere from Germany to Siberia.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And you literally have, you know, private militias, groups of veterans, communist militias, like they're running cities. They're running the streets like having running gun battles in the streets of, you know, of Berlin and Munich. And this is this goes on for a few years, you know, just total chaos. Social and economic chaos.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And so so you're talking about like the four year war, but then a few more years after that. So you're 18 when you get in and 1914. Now it's 1923 when things kind of start to stabilize. And, you know, you've been you've been at this for like the first nine years of your young adulthood. Right. This is the world that you live in. And it's it's a.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
When you try to think of – I talked about like Uday Hussain being brought to watch torture sessions or something. I mean this is not exactly that. But it's an experience that like we really have no way to relate to. And if you grow up in that world, especially when – if you look at like what happened in Russia, 1917, the Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution and Russia. They won.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
They actually took over the Russian state and created the Soviet Union. It lasted long past the lives of anybody who had fought in World War I for the most part. And so people saw that and they took the lesson both from World War I itself but also from the aftermath and the revolutions that happened. The lesson they took is that violence can accomplish our goals.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Yeah, exactly. The thing I love about them is Armenians love being Armenian.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And whatever we do to accomplish those goals – As long as we survive, people accept it eventually. You know, Roosevelt normalized relations with the Soviet Union in 1933 when Stalin was literally still clearing bodies from the millions of people he starved in the Ukrainian Holodomor and in Kazakhstan, another million people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And like at that time is when and we knew we knew it was going on, obviously. And yet, you know, Roosevelt normalized relations with Stalin and people got over it. Just like with Turkey. Turkey does the Armenian genocide and it's condemned at the time. You know, they were on the other side of the war and everything.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
But a couple of years later, like, look, Turkey is an important strategically placed country like in the world. And we kind of need them on our side. And so, yeah. Sorry, Armenians, but get over it. And so people took that lesson is that violence will accomplish our goals. And as long as we accomplish them and survive, people will get over it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Yeah. And it's important to know, too, that, you know, it's not like Hitler was going and giving big speeches at City Square in Berlin going on and on and on about how we're going to kill the Jews. And the German people said right on, like, let's go do it. That was like the speeches that are out there where he is talking about the Jewish question.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Like almost all of those are like internal Nazi party like rally speeches. You know, they're not him talking. He had to be careful about that. Like in 1938, which is pretty far down the line when Kristallnacht happened, it was kind of a nationwide pogrom against the Jews in Germany that was launched primarily by Goebbels, the propaganda minister. But there was outrage in the German cities.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
People in Berlin, a lot of the places were outraged by what was going on. And Hitler had to actually get on the phone with Goebbels and say, cut this shit out. This is not good, not because he loves the Jews all of a sudden, obviously, but because this is bad propaganda. People are not going for this. And that was the year before the war started.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And so these are just nuances that become pretty obvious when you just remind yourself. You're just talking about people. They're just people. I mean the Germans were a sophisticated, advanced political and cultural place. They didn't suddenly turn into demons for 12 years and then go back to being the nice normal Germans that we know now.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Like these things happen the same way every other historical event ends up happening, which very often is not – what you find is it's not – it's not so much is not really like the result of a plot or a plan or anything. People are often just reacting. And when you see this with the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, you see it with the Israel-Palestine situation, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
In those two situations, like the means that the Bolsheviks and the Zionists used to establish themselves and create their state and like sort of get their foothold, the means that they used were so violent and so over the top that it came to define in a lot of ways the subsequent history of those countries.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
If you look at like Stalin's purges in the 30s and a lot of the stuff that was going on during his reign, it was really that like – They had pissed so many people off and done so many terrible things to take power. And that was really like that was Lenin's philosophy is, again, just, you know, take it up to 11 and go. And as long as we win, people get over it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
But all of a sudden, when you've killed all these people and done all these terrible things, you look around the country and you see a lot of dangerous people who probably don't like you, even if they're not saying it right now. And you start to get a little paranoid and It becomes kind of the definition of how your state works.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
I mean Israel, one of the things I really tried to get into in the early part of that series especially is that the Zionist project – the more I think about it, this is kind of a theme in so many of my podcasts. It started out as an idealistic venture. It started out as something – you have these people. who are in really like kind of a unique situation.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Maybe like the Roma, the gypsies are like the only other group of people you can really point to of like a widespread transnational group of people who do have a sort of cohesive identity, but they don't have a homeland. They're just living in other people's countries. And, you know, I think the lesson from World War II and much of the 20th century probably is
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
It's kind of the opposite of the one that people have taken from World War II, which is nationalism is bad and it's dangerous and bad things happen when people start to think that way. I think the real lesson from World War II is – or from what happened to the Jews specifically is everybody needs a country.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
I put it on my sub stack behind the paywall, but apparently some of my enemies pay me five bucks a month to follow my sub stack.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
You know, you need to have a country that is looking after you and looking after your interests because living in other people's countries, it can go well for a long time. But, you know, it's not just the Jews, like minorities in general, like, you know, bad things happen over time. You know, minorities are just easily scapegoated.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
You know, they're easily made the sort of the outlet for the frustration and resentment of people that are, you know, upset over unrelated things. And it's an uncomfortable position to be in.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And America is very – this is one of the – America is a very unique country in a lot of different ways. But one of the ways that we're so different from the European countries – I mean you can – I guess you could point to a lot of things. The lack of a feudal history that we were emerging out of. We kind of just started out as a liberal republic.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
you know, the fact that we, we have like the frontier experience, which is just, you know, no Europeans can really relate to what was going on out there. I don't know if you've seen that new Netflix series, American primeval.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And all I kept thinking as I'm watching this is like, man, this is not like the U S army that's out there, like on the frontier confronting these situations. These are like, The regular people who went out there and lived. And this is an experience. So you have those things. It's very accurate, too. Yeah, it was fascinating. I love they had Jim Bridger in there. I've always been a fan of his.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Yeah, people don't realize today unless they really know the history. The Mormons were off the hook. They were gangsters.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
They had been fucked with. Ultra cohesive and they were serious about what they were doing. These people were not playing games. This was not like a thing to do for fun. They were dead serious about it. And they had already been ran out of several states. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
So I was going to say like the thing that's so different about America from a lot of the European countries and when we talk about nationalism, like this is something that really – You know, that you have to keep in mind all the time is that America, like we've been renegotiating our identity, like generation by generation, ever since America started, like from the very beginning.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
I mean, if you go back to the American Revolution and, you know, the founding of the country in the late 1700s, before those guys were dead. A bunch of the major cities and eventually all the major cities like very quickly by the middle of the 1800s, they're not majority Anglo anymore. It's not English people. It's a lot of Irish, a lot of Germans, still a lot of Anglos.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
But, you know, you have to – and the fact that different religion, you know, you've got Irish Catholics coming into this Protestant, very Protestant at the time country. A lot of the Germans that were coming in were German Jews who were coming along. You think of people like Astor, the famous Astor family that was a German Jewish family that was in New York. And so that happens.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And you're talking about, again, an influx large enough to – to really swamp the Anglo population in many of the big cities. Well, not another, you know, a generation later, barely 40 years after the, you know, the Irish migration really hits its peak, huge influx from Southern Italy, from Eastern Europe, a lot of Ashkenazi Jews coming in.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And pretty soon, it's not just, you know, Anglos well assimilated, you know, Germans who are well assimilated to the Anglo culture, and then the Irish, which is what it was before. Now you have just as many Jews, just as many Italian Catholics who are Catholics like the Irish, but they're still not quite, you know, they're still different communities. And we've just had to do that all the time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Even in 1924, when we kind of shut down immigration after the First World War, you know, we basically shut down immigration from 1924 to 1965. There was some, but very limited and very selective immigration. But as soon as that happened, as soon as the immigration pipeline was kind of from Europe was cut off, that's when the great migration of African-Americans out of the South starts.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And in about 40 years, you get six, seven million African-Americans coming mostly from the country South into places like Detroit and all the places that you kind of associate with large African-American communities now. It's kind of crazy to think about, but if you go back to like the First World War,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
You know, Detroit's African-American population was like 2 percent, you know, and that was Philadelphia, Baltimore. I think Baltimore had like eight or nine. But like that was how it was. Pretty much all African-Americans still live down in the south. And so over the course of about 40 years, they all move out to all the big cities and you have to still – like they're from America obviously.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
But like you've got to renegotiate like your identity with these people and figure out like a new political compromise in these cities and the various places. And when the great migration of African-Americans starts to peter out in 1965, we reopen the floodgates of immigration with the Hart-Celler Act and that's the world we're kind of in now. And so that's – And look, especially back in the day,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
in the first like two big waves of migration into the U.S., the Ellis Island, you know, migrations. Like those were – like America would not be here today if we didn't do that. Like there were not enough out-of-work English people, you know, over in England to come over here and take over this whole continent. It was just never going to happen.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
The only way it was ever going to happen is if we were radically open and tolerant to people, you know, because you go back to – there's a – Naturalization law. I think it was the first naturalization law on the books in the United States, 1798.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And you see a lot of like racialist types point to this as if it kind of backs up their, you know, their idea of what, you know, of what America's history is and what it should be. Because it says all white persons of good – all free white persons of good moral character, if you come to the United States, can become a citizen.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And people see that and they focus on the white part and they say, see, they wanted America to be a white country or whatever. That is totally the wrong way to understand that law. I mean if you were to go to like France or Germany or England or whatever, for them to pass a law that said –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Anybody in the continent, any European, you guys can come over here and we will make you a citizen with the full legal rights and privileges of our richest citizen. You will be an equal citizen. You can just come here. Radically open. I mean, really like a revolutionarily open kind of law, especially back then.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
You got to remember, like the Europeans still had another hundred and fifty years of just wantonly slaughtering each other, you know, left still ahead of them. You know, you had like. Today, I mean if you have like a person on – who lives to the left of you and they're the Thatcher family and they're vaguely English and then you have the McCoy family on the other side and they're vaguely Irish.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
They're just kind of white people to you now. Like it all kind of seems like what's the difference? Dude, go tell an English and Irish person that they were the same thing back in 1798. Like they didn't – They did not identify with each other at all. It was a lot of bad blood, a lot of hostility.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And so to say all of you people with all your differences, you come over here and get with the program and you can be one of us, just radically open. And again, we had to do that or else the country would not be here. Or it would be an Anglo country sort of clustered around the 13 colonies and maybe moved in a bit. But we wouldn't have been able to hold this whole continent against –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
the French and the Spanish and everybody else who was around unless we were that open. And so that was like a prerequisite for America becoming what it is today. In Europe, it's very different, man. Like there's such thing as a Polish person. And Poland is the country where Polish people live. You know what I mean? And over here in America, we have a much more fluid identity.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
We're constantly having to renegotiate it. And we think it's difficult today to integrate the immigrants that we've got and to try to renegotiate that. It's always been difficult. And and to try to transfer our way of thinking about social identity, our way of thinking about, you know, what a nation is to the European countries. It just it does not apply. It really doesn't work.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
I think it also has to do with, you know, the interesting thing is, you know, Poland, Hungary, a lot of these Eastern Bloc countries Even though communism was extremely hostile to national identity and really took a lot of brutal measures to try to stamp it out because they wanted everybody to be a kind of new Soviet citizen. Those countries that are over there now are much more comfortable.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
sort of saying, yeah, Hungary is a country where Hungarians live and this is a Christian country and we want to keep it that way. Whereas all the countries that were on the other side of the Iron Curtain under the influence of the United States kind of had our traditional way of looking at these things kind of imposed on them. You know what I mean? Or they absorbed it through osmosis.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
I don't know if it's like a program or something, but we were the dominant sort of cultural and military force and everything else, political force. And so they kind of absorbed – The the American openness and tolerance of all comers that we kind of had to have, as I said, in places where it really makes no sense at all.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
I mean, you have you could at least say like with the British Empire or something, you know, they colonized all these places. And so now, like those people in the former colonies, like they're moving to Britain. And, you know, you could like I don't I don't I don't really think of it this way. You could look at it that way, though.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
If you look at a place like Ireland, Ireland didn't colonize anybody. Ireland was a colony. They suffered terribly under the British for a long time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And yet it's very interesting that they were willing to be brutalized, be occupied, be starved, all of these things for centuries to defend their little slice of the world where their people could work out their destiny among themselves, endured so much for that. And then you get up to about the 1960s, 1970s, and you can look it up. This isn't like a conspiracy theory.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
It's the first things that come up on Google if you look it up that Ireland is on track to be minority Irish by like 2070 or something like that. It's like I don't like that. People think of diversity as like every place on the planet should look like Jackson Heights in New York and like then we're diverse. But that's – to me that's not diversity at all.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Diversity is I go to Ireland and it's Irish. I go to China and it's Chinese. You know what I mean? Right. And turning it all into sort of a homogenized like mixed soup. I think when you when you put it in those terms, nobody really wants that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And, you know, people but people get very uncomfortable, you know, and in America with immigration specifically, it's really hard to like, you know, the fact that it's not like we're a Christian country in the sense of it being worked into our political culture so much or anything anymore, but still like the values that most people, even atheists and everybody else kind of.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
that inform their moral outlook are derived from that legacy of Christianity, you know? And it could be very hard for somebody who is working from that moral base to
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
To come up with a reason that – I mean look, imagine you're in a room and you're sitting at a table and across from the table is a man, his wife and their two kids and they're from some poor part of the world and they want to come – they want to be a part of your country. You're not going to be able to come up with a reason that justifies keeping them out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
I mean, the only one that you could come up with is that when you open the door to that room, there's 65 million people standing in line outside and you can't, you know, you can't do that. But like on an individual level, like people really have a lot of trouble.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And I think this is a credit to Americans in a lot of ways, even if it if it causes us a lot of confusion that, you know, it is hard for us to to turn people away like that, you know. And so. Yeah. I think to go back to like what you were originally talking about, I think the World War II story is a huge part of that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
It's a huge part of why people – I think that some of the lessons we drew from that war were kind of not the – maybe not the right ones to take and that they have led us to the point where these – a culture like Ireland who was not involved in the Second World War, never colonized anybody, feels like they don't have the moral right to say this is a country for the Irish – this is a little island where the Irish people –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
It depends on the country. I mean, it's like... But like to Ireland in specific? Yeah, Ireland. There's a lot of, like, Polish folks in Ireland, people from Eastern Europe who go there for work, you know? Mm-hmm. That's that's the the the primary like source of migrants. But there's a lot of you know, there are a lot of third world migrants or global south migrants there now.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
But a lot of Eastern Europeans come in there for work. Yeah, it kind of varies from country to country. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Yeah. I just and the psychological aspect of it of just he made him back up and second guess himself.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
I mean, I'll hold you up there. It might be like anti-American ideals, but that's the history of America right there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
You go back to the 1850s, 1860s, and – You know, Irish dock workers on the East Coast, immigrant Irish dock workers, their life expectancy was 14 years from the time they stepped off the boat. And these weren't 60 year olds coming over and working on the docks. You're talking about young guys who came over to do that 14 years, you know, and horrible, brutal jobs.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Yeah. Fuck off. There's a lot of... You know, they have those political tests online, kind of tells you what you are if you answer some questions. What are you? I always end up right in the center. But I always have to tell people that I'm the farthest thing from a centrist.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
It's just I have a whole bunch of views that are very far right and a whole bunch that are very far left, according to this thing at least. And one of my far left views before this World War II series got kind of pushed to the front of the queue because of the Tucker controversy. I was working through a series on the history of the American labor movement.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And people today think of teachers unions and corrupt big labor organizations and so forth. But I'm a – I mean to me, the American labor movement, the first part of it, it's America's best story in my opinion. I mean because –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
You go back to the 1880s, 1890s, or I did one on the Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia when 10,000, 11,000 coal miners who were just being brutally exploited by the mining companies and their mercenaries. I mean they took up arms and they were ready to – like they were marching on the county next door to go free some of their compatriots and to hang the sheriff.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
I mean, and they only stopped because the U.S. Army finally showed up. This is right after World War I. The U.S. Army showed up, and a lot of the guys who – the miners were World War I veterans, and they weren't going to fight the army. Like they were sort of – not even because they were afraid or discouraged by their prospects. They just weren't going to –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
You know, their problem was with like the sheriff and the mine, you know, the mine operators and stuff, not with the army. They don't want to fight them. And so that diffused it. But, you know, you go back to those early decades of the labor struggles. And I mean, people really have to like...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
It was not some aberration when striking workers got a bunch of people killed, like where a bunch of Pinkertons or other mercenaries or even government forces. I mean you go to like a mine, a coal mine in Colorado back in – I think it was 1912. And the National Guard of the state, which was completely – there was not a lot of people in Colorado at the time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
So the National Guard and the state government was completely run by the mining operators because they were the most important thing in the state. And the National Guard took up positions with machine guns up on a hill overlooking the striking miners' encampment. And the miners were mostly all gone because there were authorities looking for them and stuff.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
It was a lot of their wives and children and so forth. And they just opened up on these people and killed like 22 women and children. And like that kind of thing was – like that's an extreme kind of – example, I guess, of the brutality. But smaller versions of that, that's how it was.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
People didn't believe back then, or a lot of people, the capitalists didn't believe back then that you had a right to strike. Today, we're like, yeah, if you don't want to go to work, you don't have to go to work. And if you all do it together, that's a strike. Of course, people can do it. That's not how they thought about it back then. They thought of a strike as like a form of sabotage.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And so the authorities would be brought in. Mercenaries would be brought in to like deal with these people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And you're talking about like people think of like socialists today or something when like right-wing people – I really try to get this across to them that like today you think like a left-wing socialist or whatever and you think like a blue-haired college student who's screeching to you about this, that or the other. Back then, you're talking about guys –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
who, and women too actually in certain cases, but guys who spent 12 to 14 hours a day turning a wrench or swinging a hammer, and then after that, Then they go to their meetings and they get home to their family and they sleep for four or five hours in a basement two-room apartment that's got mold growing on the walls.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And they have a bowl of cabbage soup with their four kids that live in this horrible place. And then they go back and do it again the next day. These were like working people who were – I firmly believe if it was not for their sacrifices, we would all still be working under those kind of conditions like the, you know, the the the capitalist class.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And, you know, I'm not trying to sound like some kind of a, you know, Marxist or something. I'm just you know, that's what they were like. They were not going to compromise with the people unless they were forced to. And those people, you know, they went out on the picket lines. They they.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
In fact, you know, if you go up to a little bit later in the early 1900s, you know, probably the thing labor unions are most famous for these days is like the corruption, the mob involvement and so forth, labor racketeering. And that kind of got started in the early part of the 1900s.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
But the interesting thing about it is the way it started was, you know, the owners of the businesses, they were hiring like real thugs. I mean, the Pinkertons, the different groups that they would hire, they would get people just out of prison, you know, violent people, war veterans.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And they would send them against the striking workers, have them spy on the workers, have them kidnap like guys who are trying to kind of get people into the union and so forth and get rid of them. This kind of thing was happening. And so the union started to say, well, we need some muscle too. And so who's the muscle?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Well, if you got a bunch of like Irish and Italian guys working on this dock, the toughest guys they know are the gangsters. And so they'd be like, you know, we'll pay you. We need you to defend us from, you know, make sure that we don't get our teeth kicked in by the Pinkertons. And so they would do that. You know, they ran into the trouble that –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
You know, it always presents itself in situations like that is, you know, the people you hire to come in as muscle start to look around and be like, why do we have to take orders from these people again? Can't we run the show? And that kind of started to happen. You started to get these, you know, the unions that were racketeering organizations.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And so, like, you know, these are things about, you know, history is extremely messy. You know, we have to always remember, like... People are often making like the crucial decisions that like turn history this way or that, you know, zig instead of zag are often made under crisis conditions by people who sometimes they're great men and women.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
But a lot of times, you know, they're the person who happens to be there at the time and they're doing their best and they're taking advice from the people that are around them. And they're, you know, they're making the decision that's going to determine if we head off in this direction or that direction, you know. There was one time, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
I can tell the story because it's probably back in the mid-2000s when I was still in the military. I was over at my friend's house. He was at the hospital picking up our other friend who had a bicycle accident and hurt his head. And he was picking him up and coming back with him. And so I was going to meet him there so we could hang out and like welcome him back from the hospital and so forth.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
So I get there and I call him up because he's not home. And I say, you know, Richard, I'm here. Like, what's up? He's like, the doctor's being slow, whatever. So I'm going to be a little while. Well, I got a big 20 ounce Venti, you know, Starbucks black coffee. And so I pound that thing in my car as I'm reading a book. And pretty soon I start to feel that pressure in my gut.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Like I got to take a shit. Like I have to take a shit. It's like that caffeine shit. Right. And I call up my friend like. Where are you like this? I need you to get home now. He's like, the doctor's haven't even brought him to me. I don't know what's going on. He's like, go see if a door or windows open or something. And so now I'm getting up and moving.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
So that's making things worse, you know, and I check all the doors. I check all the windows. Nothing's open. And I'm in the backyard and I'm like this close to just digging a hole in this flower garden and taking a shit in this flower garden. But then all of a sudden I look up and there's a balcony from the master bedroom with no stairs down to the backyard. But it's a balcony.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
You know, there's no access to it. And I'm like, I'll bet they didn't lock that door. And so I kick my shoes off so that I can, you know, they were loose on my feet so that I can more easily like climb up the pole and pull myself up there. And so I'm just in my socks.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And at this point, just like the effort of the effort of, you know, the strain of like pulling myself up to this thing, like it's ready to go. It's coming right now. And that's just that's what's happening. And so I run into the – I run up. The door is open. Thank God. And I run in and run into the master bathroom. And for some reason – but again, like this is a crisis moment.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
I'm not like taking everything into account as I'm making decisions here. I get in there and as I run in there, I see that there's no toilet paper. Now, the obvious answer there is – Cross that bridge when you get to it. You've got to go. But at the time, I was like, oh, no. And so I ran out of the bathroom. I'm up on the second floor. I run over to the stairs.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And, you know, that's you can't just do that by being aggressive. You can't you know, you really got to get in there and you got to hurt him a little bit and you just have to put that on him. And it was it was amazing to watch. I thought it was a great fight.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And they have one of those stairs that kind of goes down halfway. And there's a little platform. And then right angle goes down the other way. And I have to go so bad that I just jump down the first flight of stairs. And then I jump down the second flight of stairs. My socks hit the tile floor, slide out. I fall on my back, bang my head, and shit everywhere. Wow.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
I mean, it's like going up my back. It's horrible. And I, I, my head is like ringing and I'm ashamed to say that like I laid there in my shit for like at least 10 seconds because I was sitting there thinking of like all of the opportunities that I had to like, you know, change course and avoid this that are so obvious in retrospect.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And you just sit there and think about like when you're in that situation, like you don't even stop there. You think back on like your entire life and you're like, how did I get here? It's like that record scratch. You're probably wondering how I got into this situation. That's where I was.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
This doesn't have anything to do with the overall point I was making, but the really shameful part of it is I cleaned it all up and you could still kind of, like in the grout and the tiles, I couldn't get it off, so it still kind of smelled shitty. And when my friend got home, I didn't tell him this for years afterwards, when he got home, I blamed it on his dog.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And he yelled at the dog on my behalf. I told him years later. How old were you at the time? Too old to be doing shit like that. I mean, but that's like, you know, that's a funny way of putting it, but like that's history a lot of the times. You know, you're making decisions on the fly that you're not necessarily having time to reflect upon.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And, you know, you get into a situation where you're like... How did we end up here?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
There's also, I think, due to our unique history of kind of having demographic turnover generation after generation more or less since the beginning that if you look at the development of things like the public school system, for example, or a lot of the social welfare programs and other social programs, a lot of those things emerged.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Because there was all of a sudden a huge influx of Irish in the 1830s and 40s. And their parents are both working 14-hour days and the kids are just running the streets and everything else. And there's no public schools. They didn't have any at first. And so it was like a response to this. They're like, we got to do something about this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
We got to take these little hellions and turn them into Americans somehow. And so- You had philanthropists. It was all private at first and then like they were transferred to the city governments and stuff. But there were responses to like demographic crises, right? They were emerging due to like the migrant influxes. And I think that that being the case, it's kind of given Americans like a –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Because, you know, the native population who was already there when that happened, they a lot of they didn't like it. They're like, wait, so these people came over here and now I have to pay to like set up a school system for their kids. Like what? It created like that sort of resistance to, you know, the question of.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Of what we owe each other as members of a society, you know, like the idea of like. I feel like we've kind of take like America is the best country in the world. If you are smart, motivated, you got a great idea and you want to make something of it, go to America. Like America is the place for you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Throughout most of our history, if you were just like a person who, you know, you could turn a wrench or swing a hammer or something. America was not built for you. You know, it was built to create opportunities and push competition for people to participate. compete for the top of the mountain. But the people at the bottom, like throughout a lot of our history, were just kind of forgotten.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
You know, the real question is, in a country that is so geared toward competition at the top, whether that ever would have changed without a real push, you know? And I mean, one of the other things, too, is like when people think about you go back to like in Europe where they were really worried about communism.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
We were never really justifiably too worried about it in terms of having a revolution here or anything like that was never really a danger. But if you go over to like especially after the Soviet Union came around from basically Germany eastward, you know, communism, like it was a very real possibility like in the 1920s.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
That the German Communist Party, which was the largest political party in Germany and was taking its marching orders directly from Moscow, that they were going to win and they were going to take over. And you were now going to be like what's going on over in Russia and Ukraine. Like that was a real thing that could have happened to them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And when people hear that, they think that – again, they try to put it in the context of like a modern left-wing person or something like that. But it's like when people are working under these conditions – And the socialists, the communists are like literally the only political movement that's even vying for their support. Nobody else is even really even courting them or asking for it, you know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And when you add to that, like this whole idea of like the working class, like this isn't something that has existed forever. Like this was something that was emerging in different times in different places. But like really in that like.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
In some developed countries, you started to see it in like the 18th century, but it's like a 19th century phenomenon where all of a sudden – so you think you go back to feudal times and you've got the aristocracy, you've got the church, and you've got the peasantry.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And then you have like another group of people who kind of serves a unique function but kind of a uniform function across Europe in the Jews. They would very often be like – They played a very kind of critical role in feudal Europe because they were the only ones who had a network that kind of stretched across the whole place.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And so a lot of times like the rulers would have Jews working for them who – they were basically like your diplomatic channels kind of. You need to like talk to people over there or if you needed to raise money for something – They had large capital networks that could help you raise money for it, things like that. But they weren't serfs or peasants. They weren't the aristocracy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
They weren't the church, obviously. They were kind of their separate thing. And most of the time, they were allowed to sort of abide by their own laws, like run their own little societies like how they wanted. But this was at a time when It was just taken for granted that different classes of people had different privileges and different rights. It was just – everybody took that for granted.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
It wasn't even something that was imposed. A peasant or a serf would have believed that as much as the king did. It was only when you start to get up into the Industrial Revolution that all of a sudden you start to see these cities just teeming with people who have no land. You know, they don't have any means of like immediate self-sufficiency.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
What they have is their back and their shoulders and their hands. And, you know, they trade that for the means to survive. And, you know, this happened very rapidly in a lot of countries so that you have this whole new kind of politically awakening demographic, you know, because that's kind of the key to it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
At first, you know, it took some time for them to sort of have a political awakening where they recognize that, wait, I'm not just a worker. I'm a member of the working class. And we have, you know, whatever our differences, the working class has common interests that are in opposition to the interests of these other classes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And we're going to start to, you know, organize and act politically differently. to extend those interests and to achieve them. That was something that was very new.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And so people were kind of figuring out again on the fly, like how to deal with this, like what, you know, the idea that just regular poor people who, you know, that they should have any say in like how the state is run, how the economy is working. It was just completely foreign idea, like everywhere on the planet, basically until, you know, 200 years ago or so.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Yeah. And, you know, and it was a world where, you know, the husband breaks his back. You know, you better hope that you're a member in good standing of the nearby parish church because there's nothing else for you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
There's no I mean, there might be some charity or something that, you know, some rich lady set up or whatever. But like that was not going to save everybody. I mean, there was nothing. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah. You know, I mean, the Tucker interview was I could have been clearer in what I was saying.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Yeah. The history of organized crime is actually like for people who really want to understand America in the late 19th and throughout the 20th century, like reading a few books on the history of organized crime is a good window into that. It's going to give you a perspective like from the bottom up rather than sort of from the top down, you know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
So when you read history, I mean, the further back you go, the more true this is. And it's something you really have to stay humble about. You consider the fact that like today, like things that are happening today, right? We can't seem to agree on things that are – Just extensively documented and there's like in newspapers and video, whatever else.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
We can't agree about what's going on or what, you know, the president's motivations are, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you go back further in history and you're dealing with like scraps of information a lot of times. And the further back you go, the worse it gets.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
You know, the idea that it's you should really like be careful when you really feel like you start to understand people, you know, from a from a time long ago. Because it's I mean, for one thing, I mean, even if you I mentioned I was like, look, you're first of all, you're dealing with sources, written sources.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Which automatically means you're getting your information from the very, very, very few people in that society who knew how to write, right? Just like just that. And even in more recent days when – if you go back just into more recent history – You have like diaries and stuff, right? It's like even then, you're talking about like the kind of person who would keep a diary. That's not everybody.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Yeah, that's how it originally came up. Because Jocko's wife's English, right? So Churchill's like a sacred figure in their pantheon. And so I said that, you know, maybe I'm being a little provocative here. I like to provoke Jocko with my Churchill takes or whatever. But that's only part of it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
You're talking about a certain kind of people. And this is still something that like really affects the way we – like the news is reported about places around the world all the time, right? You'll remember back during the Arab Spring when things were jumping off in Egypt and – They were interviewing – it was like CNN or one of them. I don't know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Interviewing their correspondent who was like there in Cairo on the ground like talking to the people or whatever. And according to her, these are just – these are all a bunch of liberal people who want freedom and they want democracy and like da-da-da-da-da-da-da. And, you know, people people see stuff like that. And maybe sometimes there is like an aspect of this to it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
But people see that and they're like, oh, this is propaganda. This is bullshit. And she knows it's not true. And CNN knows it's not true. But they're trying to sell this to us. A lot of times it's like, no, man, look, you have this lady who works for CNN and New York Times or whatever it is who goes to Cairo. Who do you think she's going to talk to?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Like how would she even know how to find like your raggedy person like living in the slums or something or how to communicate with that person in their own terms? She's going to go to the people she knows there who are all going to be educated people, middle class or higher, and say, hey, can you put me in touch with people I can talk to? And who do they know? You know what I mean?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And that kind of – this same thing is true in Russia. With Russia – You know, there's a faction of people. There's always been a faction of people in Russia who are not fans of Vladimir Putin. And interestingly, it's sort of the same social class. that really doesn't like Donald Trump in the United States.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
A lot of the civil servants and bureaucrats, a lot of the professional urban people, those are the ones who don't like them. Well, if you're a Russia correspondent for one of these major media organizations, these are just the people that are going to be around you and who are going to be influencing the way you think
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And so a lot of times that makes it over into our news is like the people are ready for a revolution. The people are ready to get Putin out of there. He's actually hated and everything. And it's just a distortion of reality based on the sourcing, you know. Right. Like going on Blue Sky, talking about Trump. And I mean, this is sort of postmodernism 101. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
I mean, I'm very critical of Churchill's role, in my opinion, in turning the German invasion of Poland into the Second World War, basically. You know, that, you know, it's... As I get older – I posted something on X today that somebody had posted a video. A drone is going toward a Ukrainian or a Russian truck or something and it hits it and it doesn't blow up. And it's like boom, boom.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
the useful side of postmodernism, you know, the unpoliticized useful side is going back through and, you know, reading the texts we have and looking at the information we have and sort of doing an archaeology on it, you know, and understanding that, um,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
You know, like you could I would say like an early example of like that type of postmodernism is Euripides play in ancient Greece, the Trojan women, because like what he was doing is like, you know, everybody knew the Iliad. They knew the story of the conquest of Troy and all that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
But he wrote the story from the perspective of the women who actually lived in Troy and went through the, you know, the conquest. And it's like, you know, you have to remember that like almost everything – and again, I sound like some hippie blue-haired college student when I say stuff like this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
But you really have to keep in mind that, you know, when you're reading history that is written exclusively by men, exclusively by adults, exclusively by the upper class and the small cast of people who are actually literate and writing things down, and for even leaving aside like the –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
The political circumstances, they were putting constraints on the way that they could describe and write about things. Just the class bias that's introduced. You're getting a very, very narrow perspective. It would be like coming over to the United States and asking a random person on the street, hey – you know, who's this Donald Trump guy? Like, what's he about? You're an alien.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
You don't know anything. And they say he's a fascist dictator who, you know, is going to ruin the country and destroy the country. And then going home and being like, yeah, the Americans hate this guy. He's a fascist dictator and like he's going to destroy the country, you know. And if you think about it like that and then imagine that
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
you know, those people or people who are on the other side, whatever, but one side are the only ones that are writing anything down. A lot of times our understanding of history is very much based on like that kind of a narrow view. You know what I mean?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Yeah. And the bias perspective is there's one that I can't avoid. I mean, I guess I could with, you know, enough work, but is that I only speak and read English. So just that by itself, like if I when I was doing that story specifically, like the early history of Zionism and that conflict.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
I'm reading English sources, which especially if you get back before, you know, the last couple decades are almost always telling you the perspective of the Zionists to a large extent just because, you know, there's not a lot of – there weren't a lot of Arabs in Britain and America and stuff writing books about what was happening. And so you have that bias by itself.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And, you know, the thing that – somebody asked me on X the other day. I was doing a Q&A and they said, how do you – you know, how can we – What do we have to do? What are some of the steps we have to take or whatever things we have to take into account to make sure like we're getting an objective view of history?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And I told him, like, I don't think that's a viable goal when you're doing this stuff. Like, you know, the goal should be understanding, you know, on a human level. And just you have to just maintain a sense of humility.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And a sense of the limitations of your own ability to really understand what's going on and just constantly keep in the front of your mind that these are human beings making human decisions based on human motivations, you know. And if you do that, you know, maybe you won't have like a perfect picture of the events that took place because, again, we're just limited, you know. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
It's a lot of like there's a lot of like huge historical figures, somebody like Alexander the Great or something like what we know about them is based on extremely small stack of papers, you know. And like and so, yeah, that that that that sort of humility, which was kind of imposed on me at the very beginning because the Israel Palestine series was the first one I did. And I, you know, I I.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
was reading and after I had read maybe like six books or so, something like that, I was like, okay, I kind of get this. I'm ready to start writing this first episode and plotting it out. And so I do that and it takes me a while. I'm still working my day job at the time. So it takes me a few months to kind of get it to the end of it. And by then I've read 20 books or 30 books or something.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And I went back and went through like the notes and the plot and everything that I had laid out. And it was amazing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
embarrassingly bad I mean it wasn't just like you got this wrong or that wrong it's just like whole sections of the story that I am so far off base that it's not even you can't even call it wrong and I thought about that I was like and I had read six books about this topic you know how many topics there are that I've read one book on that I will just pontificate about for hours unless you stop me and so like it kind of it kind of forced that that that sense of humility on me a little bit you know it made me realize that
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And it tries to – it doesn't blow up. It doesn't blow up. And as I was watching that thing, I felt like when it didn't blow up and the video ended, I felt like this –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Even if you're well-educated in a subject – and this is one of the reasons too. I'm convinced anyway that one of the reasons my Tucker interview got as much of a response as it did is Tucker obviously is very clever about courting controversy. He knows what he's doing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And at the very beginning, he, you know, he introduced me as like the best and most important, you know, contemporary historian in America today or something like that. Right. And I know the guys like, you know, the historians that came after me afterwards were just inflamed by that. And I'm sure that was Tucker's, you know, goal.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
But I've always, you know, I say the same thing Dan Carlin always says. I'm not a historian. You know, I... Read the books and the papers and the other things that historians write. And then I tell a story about them. You know, the historians are learning the languages, going into the archives, interviewing survivors. It's that I'm not that's that's a historian.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
You know, I'm a I'm a storyteller who uses historical stories to try to, you know, to tell my stories. But like, yeah. Yeah. It was funny, too, because the night before he was kind of saying that and because we were having dinner the night before and I was telling him this spiel, you know, I'm not a historian. Historians do important work.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
really strong sense of relief that it didn't blow up you know and i what i reposted it and i said i think you know as i get older like i just don't have the stomach for this kind of stuff anymore and i see something like that and like i don't care who's in the truck i don't care if it's russians i don't care if it's north koreans or ukrainians human beings i just like i'm just glad that they're okay like that's what i actually felt at the time you know
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And he's like, yeah, well, I'm going to say that on the show tomorrow. So don't fight it. I was like, OK.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
My favorite emails to get from listeners. Right. Or while my favorite email, my favorite two emails probably had to do with the Israeli Palestinian thing. You know, one of them was from an active duty IDF soldier who was serving in the West Bank who said that he listened to the podcast and that it actually altered the way he deals with Palestinians on a daily basis in his job.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And then I got another one from this 20-year-old girl who lives in the West Bank, but she'd only been there for about two years. She'd gotten permission to move there from the Israelis. Her whole family was in Gaza. And she wrote me about two or three months after the war kicked off, after October 7th. And she heard the podcast and she said, you could tell, I mean, for sure, there was a lot of
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Like the way the Israelis were conducting the war and the way they treat Palestinians and all that very justified anger. But, you know, she said she listened to the podcast and it made her realize that the Jews are just like her and that the you know, they say Jews over there and they mean Israelis. But like it's just they use the word Jews because that's what they are.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
You know, they that's how they understand it. And she said, you know, there's probably a Jewish girl who lives in Tel Aviv who's just like me. She loves Harry Styles and da-da-da. Anyway, those are amazing emails to get. But my other favorite, and this one I've gotten probably 100 times, is... It'll be from somebody who will tell me – kind of tell me their story a little bit.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
They'll say, you know, I was always kind of the kid who sat in the back of class. Like I was not one of the smart kids, you know. Maybe not one of the dumb kids, but I wasn't one of the smart kids. And reading things like history books, that's what smart kids do. And I'm not one of those people. And so I just never even – Never even shifted into that gear or anything.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
He's like, but I heard your podcast on Jim Jones or whatever because my friend sent it to me. And now, you know, that was a year and a half ago. Now check it out. This is my bookshelf. I've read all these books. And what, you know, and the best part about it is you find that that experience like changed the way they think about themselves.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
That really like opened up their own like human possibilities in certain ways. You know, and I don't want to take, I'm not taking credit for that. They're doing it. But I really feel like You know, we can think of kids like we all know a million of these people like back in school where, you know, that's the dumb kid. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
He's just like gets sees if he's lucky and he's not any good at math or whatever. But then you get him talking about cars, you know, and he's like and he will break down. I mean, everything about a Honda Civic engine that you can possibly. I mean, and you realize really quick, like, oh, this is actually a really smart guy. He's just nobody's been able to engage him on these topics before.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And so he thinks that those aren't for him and he's not engaged in them. But you get him on something he's really engaged with. This dude's super smart. If you could give him an IQ test that like purely drew from like him when he's talking about cars, he would be above average. And that's like almost everybody. You know, it's a matter of just like being able to get people engaged.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And that's my favorite thing to do with the with the podcast is, you know, when people who didn't think they were into this kind of stuff realize that. You know, you pull them in with a good story and a good presentation, but then they kind of take it from there themselves. It's really great.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And as I get older, like that's just how I feel more and more about these things, like whether any any conflict is like it's not it's not like a young man's thought, I guess. But like I'm just I'm happy when they're over and they need like I mean, the damage that they do to people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Dude, my grandmother, my uncle's mom, but she babysat me all the time as a kid. We all call her grandma. Sheila, Maana and Sheila in there, was her sister-in-law. Oh, my God. She was hiding out. I didn't know this until after I saw Wild, Wild Country. I was like, have you guys seen this? Just casually dropping that. They're like- Oh, yeah. You don't know about Sheila?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And like she used to stay in when she was hiding out before she fled the country. She was like being hidden in my uncle's bedroom.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And not only to the people who were in it fighting, but that it does to the societies and cultures that are involved in these things. It does real damage to our spirit. You should go back to 2004 when the Abu Ghraib expose came out. Americans were horrified by that, rightly so. They saw those pictures.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
That's crazy. That's crazy. But, you know, to answer your question, though, as far as how people get sucked into it, the thing that the thing that, you know, is just shines through again and again, no matter what you're talking about, whether it's it's any of the stories I've talked about. is that very often,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
People get sucked into it because – not because of like some latent evil in their heart but because their virtues get hijacked. Hitler is a good example. That is somebody who can say whatever you want about him. He loved the German people and he cared about the German people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
But that love, I mean it's very – I mean it's like the – I was reading an article a while back about the neurochemical oxytocin. And it's the chemical that basically makes sure that a mammal mother doesn't eat her baby when she gets hungry. In us, it takes the form of increasing trust and empathy and so forth.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
But they've also done research and found that it increases trust and empathy and all those things for your in-group. But because you're more protective of them, like feeling that way, it actually increases distrust toward anybody considered like in the out group. And so it's like – it makes you love your child more and makes you hate like the foreigner more or something like that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And a lot of things are like that where it's really your virtues that get hijacked. I mean if you think of – I mean, yeah, you were talking about Jonestown. I mean, that story sucked me in so much. Part of the reason for that is because I just got obsessed with it. But part of it is that the U.S.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
authorities found like 1,000 hours of recordings at the Jonestown site after the massacre, and they're all available online. And it's like sermons of his. It's them just having meetings in the middle of the night. It's just all kinds of different things. Well, for like three or four months, I had that in my headphones for like –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
At the time, I was working overseas when I worked for the Department of Defense and I was working by myself overseas. And so I'd be working and I'd have my headphones on eight hours a day. I'm listening to Jim Jones. Oh, my God. I was dreaming about him for real.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
But through that experience, what I found is I and even to this day, like I say, I will still say it even after I'm separated from it's all over is I. I really sympathize with those people. The same way I sympathize with like – and I get into this in the series too.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Like the radical movements that emerged out of the civil rights struggle, the Black Panthers and whatnot who – they went down a dark road. But when you put yourself in their shoes – Because say what you want about – like if Jim Jones – just like for people out there who don't know. I mean go listen to the podcast.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
But Jim Jones was a guy who in like 19 – I think 53 is when he started his first church in Indianapolis. And it's a totally open like mixed-race church in Indianapolis. And he and his congregation are going out. And getting – putting pressure on businesses to like start serving – to desegregate and start serving African-American customers and stuff.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
This is a couple of years before Martin Luther King in Birmingham or whatever. He was like out front on this, right? And he was – he would – his wife would – They adopted the first – they were the first white family to adopt an African-American child in the state of Indiana.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
His wife would walk down the street with their adopted child and she'd get spit on, called an N-word lover, all these kind of things. I mean he was getting death threats from like the American Nazi Party, from the KKK, which was very strong in Indiana back in the day. And he was – but he was still doing all this. He's gotten hit by a bus in 1962.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
But the thing that was interesting is that they were horrified, yeah, partly because, like, look how awful this is that they're doing to these people or something. But, you know, for all they knew, they knew these people were in prison. They might have thought they were terrorists or something. What people were really, like, feeling at the time was, what are we doing to our people? Like, what is –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
He would 100 percent be remembered today as like an early hero of the civil rights movement. Like he really would. And when you say like, how did people get sucked into it? Like you think of somebody like one of the first things you notice if you all you know about the Jonestown story is don't drink the Kool-Aid. You know, you've heard that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
The first thing stands out to you when you pick up a book about it is that 75 percent of the people who died out there were black. And, you know, as soon as I had been doing another project about the great migration of African-Americans out of the South around that time. And so I thought about it. I was like.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Man, these are all like first generation people out in San Francisco where the Jonestown cult was based because, I mean, you didn't really have the big migration out to the West Coast until the Second World War and after the Second World War. And so, you know, you take just like as one example, there was one of the women that died out there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
She was like 70, 72 years old or something in 1978 when they all died. So she was born in 1906 in Alabama. And she's this black woman, right? And so she goes through, lives the first 40 years of her life under Jim Crow in Alabama, going through that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And then her and her husband decide to, you know, they get up the gumption to, you know, get on a train or get in a car or whatever and go out to California. And this is, again, back when... You know, the world was a lot bigger for people back then. You were going off to California. It was goodbye for the most part, you know. And so they were going.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
They didn't know what they were going to find out there, but they were going to go give it, you know, give it a try. And so they get out there and her husband's working on the Oakland docks and they live kind of in that Oakland docks area that today is, you know, so rundown. He dies early just from overwork and like everything else.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And she's there now in her in her little stoop, you know, front porch house, street side house, living by herself in a neighborhood that is just completely falling apart. You got drugs and you got gangs and like she gets killed. You know, harassed when she walks down the steps and all these kind of things. And so this is her life now.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
It's like arguably I mean, not I wouldn't even say arguably like other than just the the indignity of being told you can't drink out of that drinking fountain or something. Her life was actually more comfortable in Alabama under Jim Crow than it's become in this Oakland ghetto. You know, she's safer. She lives at least over there. She lived in a place that was a community.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
It was, you know, a group of people that knew her since she was a kid and she lived among them. Over here, she's completely alone. You know, she has nobody. Her whole experience of her whole life with white Americans has been virtually unanimously negative. At the very least, like, you know, if not if not abusive or something, it's been like condescending, you know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And somebody tells her, somebody that she knows from somewhere says, hey, you got to come check out this new church that I'm going to. It's called the People's Temple. Come on down. There's this guy, Jim Jones. He's amazing. And so she goes down there and what she finds is a group of people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
You know, what are we putting them through that our people are being reduced to this? And, you know, kind of the sad thing now is like, I don't know if we would have the same reaction today. I think the war on terror has sort of desensitized us to a lot and hardened our hearts in ways that are not good for us.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
It was not – their like – their sense of like real equality between people, not just racial but just across the board, that was not a game. They were 100 percent serious about it. So she shows up to this place and she's not treated like in a condescending sort of social justice way where it's like, oh, let us help you or anything like that. They're like family.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
These people were a family and like it's the first thing to understand about – The Jonestown incident is that these people loved each other. They cared about each other. And this woman comes in after her whole life experience being alone now in Oakland and just everything else came before that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And now she's like babysitting the white lady's kids and they're calling her grandma and sitting on her lap. And she's not treated like she's a charity case. She's treated like a member of the family. And so you get those people who feel – who have had that experience, that side of things, right? That's going to bind you together in really significant ways.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And they end up going down because of the – just the temper of the times. This is a civil rights organization. If you look at what happened with really like both threads of the protest movement in the 1960s, you see this thing happen where it – It starts to build up in the 1960s, and you have like the campus anti-war kind of hippie-type protest side, and then you've got the civil rights side.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And both of those are kind of within – the energy is being channeled into – You know, into into outlets that are they're not antisocial. You know what I mean? Like you got Martin Luther King, like leading a movement, telling the people basically like it's an American civil rights movement. It's not a he's telling them we're not getting our.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
The rights we deserve as Americans and that's what we want. You guys like Malcolm X who didn't think of it that way. They thought we're an African diaspora and we're a people and we need to like focus on that. But as long as Martin Luther King was alive, he had the moral weight within the movement to sort of fend off the emerging black power elements and stuff that were coming in.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
On the other side, like the campus, the anti-war left. If you go up to like 1968, the year of the big riot at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, Eugene McCarthy was a senator running for president. And he was like the only person in the political spectrum who was going to be available for the office of president who was – he wanted to end the Vietnam War.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And when you think about like this is a time, this is not like today we want to end the Iraq war or whatever. It's like, no, like this is a matter of life and death for these protesters.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Like, you know, it's a matter of like, are they going to get drafted and sent over to this jungle to get killed for something that almost everybody at that point, even like the president, the secretary of defense, we have their like backroom dialogues and stuff now knew was a lost war and a point. It was pointless to continue other than for like vague reasons of national honor.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And you're going to have to go do this now. Maybe die, definitely kill and go do – so this is important to these people. It wasn't like a – just an ideological thing. And then the Democratic Party just completely, openly, ridiculously like just steals the nomination from Eugene McCarthy. The Hubert Humphrey who they put in, he didn't win a single primary.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And so when I do my podcast, you know, whether I'm talking about the Israelis and Palestinians, I did a long one on Jonestown, seven episodes, like 35 hours long. And Whoever it is, like my rule is that I don't record anything until I feel like I can put myself in the shoes of the people that I'm going to talk about and really kind of understand how.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
He wasn't even put into the process until way, way – he was just installed. It was a Kamala Harris kind of thing like in the last election where they just decided it. And so you had all these these people who were like they had the clean for gene movement, which is all these hippies, all these like, you know, college radicals and stuff who've been letting their freak flag fly all this time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
They all cut their hair and they shaved and got good and clean cut so they could go door to door to like normie middle class people and talk to him about Eugene McCarthy. In other words, they committed to like they got with the program. They were like, OK, we're going to do it the right way. We're going to do it, you know, through the right channels and institutions. We do that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Civil rights movement was doing that under Martin Luther King. Same year, you have McCarthy gets robbed of the nomination. They try to protest it and they get the living shit kicked out of them by the Chicago police. On the other side, obviously, Martin Luther King gets killed.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And what you saw after that is all that energy that had previously been channeled into these productive and pro-social outlets, it just scattered to the winds. Those things got delegitimized and all of a sudden it just goes in every direction. And that's when like in the – Starting really in 1969, that's when the Weathermen came about.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Weathermen came about after most of the stuff we associate with the 60s. But then into the early 70s, you just see this massive proliferation of cults and violent radical movements. You had an offshoot of the Black Panthers out of New York called the Black Liberation Army, and they were just hunting down cops and killing them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Dozens of cops across the country, they just hunted down and killed people. You had just truly insane groups like the Symbionese Liberation Army. You know, they were – Like just led by a guy who was like legitimately mentally ill, had been in and out of institutions.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And he went to like one of the like bitter clinger like last holdout sort of radical enclaves in Berkeley and found a bunch of lesbians there who were like radical feminist lesbians and got them to follow him. They're the ones that kidnapped Patty Hearst and got her going and everything. And Jonestown, like the reason they're such an interesting –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
story to tell, and this is really the angle I took on it, is they're a microcosm of the whole movement. In the mid-50s, they're idealistic. They're in it for the right reasons. They truly believe in what they're doing. They encounter resistance from political resistance, social resistance, and as that resistance stiffens and then gets really serious when you
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
You've got people coming into the church who worked for a Modesto TV station telling them that, hey, I'm coming to you because I was just approached by the FBI asking me to come spy on you. So I don't know what's up there, but you must be doing something right. So you join them. You got that kind of stuff going on.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And these people get radicalized and then they turn violent and out of paranoia and drugs was a big part of it. They lose their shit. What drugs are they doing? Well, the drugs were not – they were still done sometimes. But like they weren't really technically allowed for like the members themselves.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
But Jim Jones was on – he was basically for the last 10 years of his life, it was amphetamines when you get up, barbiturates to go to sleep. And it was every day for 10 years. Which is not the best for perspective. No, no. And it's like that's the thing with Adolf Hitler too. You keep yourself going that way. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Somebody who – I had read a little bit about the effects because of the Jonestown story. I read a fair amount about the effects of long-term amphetamine use, the paranoia and mania that it can result. And so as I was getting up to the last episode –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
I asked one of my buddies who he was a police officer in SoCal if he had any ways, if he could figure out, get me some like police reports that were incidents where there was like usually like a husband and father who had taken his family hostage. And specifically, if he was like hopped up on methamphetamines that resulted in a murder suicide. And he got me a big stack of these things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
I don't know where he got them or if he was supposed to, but like he got these for me and I was able to read through them. And about half of them, they ended in a murder-suicide. The other half, like some of them, the guy got shot by the cops. Some of them he gave up. But about half of them ended in murder-suicide.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
how their actions made sense to them with the information they had and in the context of their time. You know what I mean? And so when you do something like that with the My Lai Massacre, for example, I did that with that story, the Jonestown one. I mean, Jonestown, you're talking about like this raving lunatic. Who took a bunch of people out into the jungle and they all committed suicide.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And as I just read through these just again and again and again, I mean it became very obvious. Like this is what happened except at a larger scale in Jonestown. You know, it's hard for people to kind of accept when you're talking about somebody like Jim Jones, who was like a raving lunatic by the end. But he loved his people like he actually did.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And people say, well, if he loved them, that's not possible. How could he do that? That's those are people who have never been around like domestic violence before. It's very complicated. You know, you can have husbands who are absolute monsters to their children and their wife. But they still love him. And it's weird.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And like they they have like an emotion, like a serious emotional crisis if they leave or something, you know, and like it's just it's very complicated. And and Jim Jones was like that way. And actually, like, you know, having gone through that process of reading about it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And understanding it in this way, you know, it remains to be seen if I still think this when I finish all of my reading by the time I get up to the end of the World War II series. But I see a lot of that in the Hitler story because, you know, Hitler was like – if people think of him as like a politician, they're missing a big part of what he was about.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Like if anything, he was more like a prophet figure. He saw himself as like almost like a – Not a religious figure in the sense that he was sent by God and anything like that, but that he had this sacred mission to save the German people. And these were not political questions. It's why he never compromised, even when it seemed insane not to compromise.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Like in 1923 when the French invaded Western Germany to take over a lot of their industrial area. All the parties, right, left and center, all came together to like oppose that in Germany. And he stayed out of it. He ordered all of his whole party to stay out of it because he was not going to accept the compromises that were going to come with working with the other groups.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And so, you know, you read about like you read some of the reactions that people would have to him. This is just like Jim Jones, where if his shtick works on you. Man, like you read some of like like Joseph Goebbels is his propaganda minister. You read his diaries of like him describing meeting Hitler and, you know, and going through. And it's like almost homoerotic. He loves him like truly.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And he was not homosexual, but like he loved Adolf Hitler, truly loved him. And that's the effect he had on his followers like across the board. If his stick didn't work on you. You were just like, ugh. How could anybody follow this guy? This guy's crazy. He's vulgar. How is this possible? Same thing with Jim Jones. Well, same thing with all cults. With all cults.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
So, you know, putting your it's very tempting and very easy to just write off any responsibility to understand what was happening there because you're like, well, we know what's happening. These people were nuts, you know. But the thing is, like, if you really think about the consequences of taking the wrong lessons from things like that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Duncan was probably already buying his plane ticket to Oregon. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
I don't know how this works or what it maybe it's just because the cult leader type, like even if he's crazy, is still like an alpha male type. So he attracts, you know, stable, a good looking young ladies or something. But it's like as I was going through reading about all these cults, all of them, there's hot women everywhere.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Talking about the Symbionese Liberation Army, in 74, there was a huge firefight in south-central Los Angeles where they were holed up in a house. It was just 500 cops, thousands of bullets flying, and then the house burned down and they all died inside. And I read this somewhere. I don't have, like, firsthand knowledge of this. I don't know if you've ever heard it before.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
But that Big John McCarthy, his dad was an LAPD cop, too. And he was, like, a major figure in that. He, like, won a medal for valor, like, for, like, doing things during the shootout there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
You know, the response that we that the federal government had to the Waco standoff in the early 90s was very much informed by the way people thought about Jonestown, which is that, you know, we let this go on too long. The problem wasn't that, you know, that maybe we had this this paranoid group of radicals out here that, you know, maybe we shouldn't have done so much to feed into that paranoia.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
I mean, that's something that really happened. that derailed the protest movement, not just in the People's Temple cult, but in general. If you read about, you lived in San Francisco for a while, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
It's around this time. You read about how like everybody thinks about the summer of love and it was all chill or whatever. But like by the time you get up to 67, that's really kind of like in a lot of ways like the end of the flower power like era of the 60s. It's not the beginning of it. Like a lot of people think like the summer of love in 67 kind of kicked the whole thing off. It didn't.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Like by that point, all the people who had been in – they were smoking herb and doing mushrooms and LSD and everything. Things had started to switch over and people were doing speed like crazy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And it changed the culture, you know, of course, because, I mean, a culture that's based around LSD and weed and whatever is totally different than a culture based around speed, you know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Yeah. And it's one of the reasons, like, you know, I know people talk about the beginning of the war on drugs and, you know, that a big part of it was about having a way to, like, get in and prosecute, like, civil rights activists.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And that's all true. At the same time, like, I look back on those people. You know, Richard Nixon, I don't know, maybe he was, like, what was he, like, 50 or 60 or something in 1970. So he was born in 19—this guy born in 1910. You know, we had just closed the frontier, like, a few years before that. And, like, he's born in 1910.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And people are watching, like, the transformations that are taking place in society that already just culturally are so mind-bending in terms of, like— Radical. Radical change. Yeah. And seeing, like, the increase in violence, the— You know, all of the things that are coming with the new drug culture, especially once it started to move away from psychedelics into, you know, street drugs and stuff.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And, you know, thinking that like this is I mean, I think that they had those motivations, like they thought, you know, this is a way to to get at these people. We need to stop. But I also think that they really believe like this is crazy. This is a real problem. We've got to do something about it. I mean, you know, there's one of my episodes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
It's part of the Labor series, but it centers around this teachers union strike that happened in New York City and in Brooklyn in 1968. And it became like a – it turned into a big blowup between – actually expanded even past the city but especially within the city between the black radicals and activists and the Jews in the city.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Because the teachers union in the New York City public schools at the time, the teachers and administrators were like 75 percent Jewish. And in this one particular school where the parents, the kids, everybody are getting radicalized by like the black power ideas that are emerging in the latter half of the 60s, especially in New York because they got Harlem up there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
We need to ease these people out of it and try to deescalate. Instead, we should have – we could have prevented it if only we had gone in hard right at the beginning and taken this guy out. And so then you get Waco. And so there are real-world consequences to taking the wrong lessons from these things and really just kind of forgetting that –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And Harlem was always kind of the fountainhead of that kind of thing. They came into conflict over, you know, how the school was going to be run. But part of it, you know, the way the conflict kind of really started off was the teachers were like going to their union and they were going on strike, not because they wanted like more pay or anything like that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
It was because like teachers were getting raped. They were getting beaten. One of them got set on fire. It was like crazy, like what was going on. And there was in one of the books that I read about it. It wasn't specifically just about that, but they quoted the head of the agency in New York City that dealt with like drug addiction services and stuff. And they said in this one school.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
There were more drug addicts among the students. And they actually said more hardcore drug addicts among the student body than we have at our city agency the resources to deal with. One school. And so it's like that's – those are crazy times. You know what I mean? Jesus. I think about like the 60s are so wild because –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
You know, there were there were pilots in Vietnam who got shot down and taken prisoner in like 1963 and they got released in 1973. And just imagining like they were listening to Buddy Holly or whatever when they came out. And, you know, before they went and they come back and I mean, all the 60s has happened and they're like, what in the hell is going on?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
What fucking happened? You know, your wife, if she stuck around for those 10 years, it's like, you know, she used to be nice and obedient. Now she wants to go out to work and she's not taking your shit. You know, like things have just changed so rapidly. And whenever a society goes through like that kind of a rapid transition.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
You know, there are always going to be just people who fall through the cracks. There's always going to be people who spin off in wild directions. Yeah, always. And this happens like in microcosmic levels too. You know, you think about like my father's side of my family. They all came out from like Kentucky and Alabama during the Dust Bowl, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
They're like crazy Scots-Irish like Appalachian folks who came out to California during the Dust Bowl. And so I know a fair amount about like the Okie migrations and everything and the Appalachian migrations up to the Midwest like a couple of decades later.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
I mean, look, you may have like your Jeffrey Dahmers or something out there that are an exception to this rule, but they are the exception that proves the rule. It doesn't matter who you're talking about. You could be talking about Uday Hussain, Saddam's son, just a sadistic monster of a human being.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And one of the things like people, it's just not a well-known history, is that a lot of the stuff you saw with when African-Americans started moving out of the South and facing resistance, like nobody wants them in their neighborhood and all these other kind of things. The Okies and the Appalachian folks in the Midwest got the same thing. Nobody liked them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
There was an incident when a bunch of Okies were coming into Los Angeles County. And as they were approaching, the authorities found out about it. The sheriffs went and blocked the road. And they're like, nope, you're not coming here. Get out of here. You know, they were not liked. And the thing is, like, you know, part of the part of the reason for that was.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And it wasn't just like straight up bigotry or something. These people were – they had habits and ways of life that were very different than the people – the settled people in California were used to. These are crazy country people. They drank a lot. They fight a lot. They're poor as shit. So there's like a higher – percentage of like the criminal class, like among those people and things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And so people really looked down on them and isolated them, at least for that first generation. And, you know, you see it when like you have these people who, you know, they were farmers. That's why they came out here. They were farmers. The Dust Bowl came. They can't farm anymore. They at least farm workers. So they're rural southerners who are used to working in agriculture.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And now they're they got to go move into like a big city and try to find a job. You know, that's going to be a huge adjustment. A lot of their like the community that they had in the place they're coming from. A lot of times the marriages don't hold up under the strain of like the transition. The communities, they kind of scatter and fall apart.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
You lose that and people just start to fall through the cracks, you know, and you saw that with. The African-American Great Migration, you saw with the Okies, and you see at any time there's like a rapid transition that people have to go through that some people are going to make it, but some people are not going to make it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And very often the unfortunate thing is the people who don't make it through that transition in one piece –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
At least all the early settlers who kind of set the tone for Appalachian culture. They were all Scots, Irish and like North English borderers who were basically right on the other side of the aisle from Ireland there. And these are people like this was like a lawless part of the country.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
But that kid was a three-year-old at one point or that guy was a three-year-old kid at one point who did not – in the spirit world before he was born. And they're like, who wants to be Saddam Hussein's son? And he's like, I do. I do. That's the world he was thrust into, you know, and you see a guy like that. And then you, you know, you're horrified by the things that he does.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
This is a place where the central government was far away and it was infinitely smaller than anything we think of a central government. Now, those people were up there on their own. And so you had you still had clan feuds. You still had like.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And then over in Northern Ireland when the British settled the plantation there, you've got conflict between Protestants and Catholics, between Irish and the Scots that they brought over there. And so these people were from a hardcore culture and even little things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Like people would talk about – they would complain when they came to America about how like these people don't take care of their houses. And the reason for that is that over there, like, your house could get burned down. You got to build another one. Like, they just didn't think of these things as, like, permanent fixtures the same way, like, you here in Boston do or something.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
So it filtered down to just, like, cultural ways that were very off-putting to the people who were already settled here, you know. But those Appalachian folks are – they're tough, man. And they – you know, I mean, you go all the way back to the Revolutionary War and every war ever since then, they've basically been the core of the American, like, combat forces. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
and that continues right up to this day and um you know it's interesting to like it's another one of those things to like you just wrap your head around like who our ancestors are and what they went through you know the puritans like the part of um east anglia that a lot of the puritans came from in england there was this isn't like This is 100 years into like the settlement of America.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
So you're talking like the early 1700s. There were still a couple churches in that part of England that the doors had the human skins of Danish raiders who had come over to like plunder their shit, who they had killed, skinned, and put them on their church doors just as a sign. So it's like – Dude, these people are hard. That's like another species.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Yeah. And like you live in a world like before modern communications or anything. So it's not like over the course of five years, like tensions with the Mongols are increasing. We think there might be a war or anything. It's now a horseman like speeds up to your city panicked and says, there's a huge army over there. They'll be here in 36 hours.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
But then you say, look, man, you know, if the stories are true, at least like Saddam Hussein used to take him and his brother when he was six years old to go watch torture sessions and executions because he needed to harden them for, you know, ruling the country one day.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
I'm 100% certain that eventually down the line, They're going to look at us the way we look at slaveholders because of the way we do factory farming.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And it's like I don't want to pretend like I have the remotest idea of how a kid is supposed to respond to watching torture sessions when he's six years old and coming up in that world. Like what do I know about that? You know what I mean?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Yeah. And it's interesting like the shift to industrial agriculture when you look at the social changes that resulted from it. It reminds me actually a lot of – After Rome conquered Carthage and then the rest of the Mediterranean, you really became like the Roman Empire that we think of even though it was still a republic.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
You had this influx of just hordes and hordes and hordes of slaves that were coming from these conquered places back into Italy. Yeah. And so you had – before that, you had like a Roman republic where each citizen was a soldier. He was like an independent farmer, small farmer, and he was a soldier and a citizen and those were the Roman people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
But all of a sudden you get this huge influx of slaves and the guys with the larger farms start building out industrial – building out economies of scale. So now you have these massive plantations and they're putting the smaller people out of business because –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
They don't care if, you know, if you're off to war, if that means you don't get a full crop this year and you can't pay for next year's crop. Well, there's no welfare program for that. You got to sell it to the guy or take a loan from a guy that then, you know, becomes a whole thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And so all of these independent farmers that were scattered around the countryside got concentrated into a couple just a few like, you know, a handful of gigantic Latifundia farms. And all of those people who used to live in the countryside, they had to go into Rome, looking for work, looking for something to do.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And that's how you got the Roman mob that led to the fall of the Republic and Caesar and all that. And if you think about it in our modern day, we had something similar happen, only it wasn't with an influx of slaves. It was the Industrial Revolution.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
All of a sudden, like, you know, just having a family farm that you could actually like run profitably and sustain yourself on became extraordinarily difficult because prices of things went so far of all like agricultural commodities dropped so far down.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
So I like I try to stay humble as I'm reading about these people, not assume that I'm better than them or different than them and really just try to understand them on human terms.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
I mean, I'm talking like 95 percent, you know, prices took a hit because all of a sudden you're, you know, you've got combines and tractors and shit. So you're putting out so much more food that it becomes just not viable to be a small farmer like making his way back then.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
You know, consolidated into gigantic industrial farms and all the people who used to live in the countryside, which is most people back in the day, they all got herded into the cities to go work in the factories and on the docks and everything. And, you know, it's interesting because. Over here, that process was like sort of ad hoc and semi-voluntary. I say that with qualification.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
If you were a farmer who couldn't pay your debt and you were getting evicted, I mean a sheriff would show up with his gun and be like, get out of here. So I mean there was a little bit of implied force there. But the same thing was happening like if you look at what Stalin was doing in the late 20s and the early 30s.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Over there, they were far behind the level of industrial development in Britain and the United States and Germany, and he wanted to change that. And so you had all these small farmers. These are the kulaks, as people call them, that he targeted. Small farmers who lived out in the countryside and had their communities, but he wanted –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
these to be uh consolidated into efficient industrial farms and he wanted all of those people to get in the cities and work in the in the factories and so over there they did by like brutal violence in a very accelerated period of time like something that we did over a longer period of time that it was more more or less voluntary and uh but you know at the end of the day like the
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
You know, and again, it doesn't when I did that in the in the Tucker interview with regard to the Germans in the Second World War and the series that I'm working on right now, which is the Second World War from the perspective of the Germans. Right. You know, it's people who – it's not just people who are purposely misinterpreting things or anything.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
The social effects were the same. All of those people from the country had to move into the cities and work in industry. And that was – I mean it was inevitable. I mean if like Russia would be speaking German right now if they didn't industrialize and get into a place where they could actually fend off that invasion. I mean you had to do it just to compete. But –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
It creates – I mean if you think about like – I mean just think about like the history of Europe, in feudal Europe where the aristocracy, virtually all the wealth that anybody had was in land. Like you were rich because you were an aristocrat who collected rents from the peasants on your land. That's where – That's where wealth came from. So wealth was like distributed throughout the countryside.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And a lot of times you'd have guys who – a lord who – he would go to court sometimes or whatever. But his power base was out here in the countryside and they were all spread around. And –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
As that started – as the industrial revolution like really kicked into gear, all these guys whose wealth was derived from agriculture and the whole aristocracy, you had like – by the time you get up to the mid to late 1800s, you've got guys who are lords like aristocrats who are completely penniless. Like they have no money.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
They still walk around like – strut around like aristocrats but they don't have any money. Meanwhile – You have a guy who owns a bunch of newspapers in London or whatever who's super rich and, you know, a guy who owns a factory who's super rich.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And it really changed the balance of power between, you know, the aristocracy and this commercial class that really like didn't even exist like a couple hundred years before but now is like ascendant and really like asserting itself politically. And I mean that right there is – and what we talked about earlier, as that's happening, you're also getting, you know, the –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
He's one of those guys like Ryan Hall. It's like, you know, they're on the feet dancing around. It's like, you know, what are we really watching here kind of. But, man, as soon as they hit the ground.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
The former peasants and former small farmers are coming into the cities and becoming the new working class. And all three of these groups are getting politicized, you know. And – These are just – it's why the question of – Dan likes to talk about the debate between the great man theory of history and the trends and forces theory.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Is it like just broad social forces and so forth that just – you could get rid of Hitler. It would have been a guy named Otto who would have started Second World War. It was all just – we're all pawns in the – you know, the grand scheme of history? Or does it take, like, is it based on personality, like somebody who really moves the chains himself?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And it's always a little bit both, but that's something that'll never be really fully resolved because, you know, there are times like that where... Like, take, like, the emergence of slavery in the New World. It's a perfect example, right? If you're a European country, and this is, like, when we started colonizing the New World, the Spanish and Portuguese started colonizing it at first. This is...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Like right on the tail of them finishing up the Reconquista. So they had spent the last 700 years in a state of constant war because this is crazy to think about. But Muslims actually controlled Spain and Portugal for longer periods. period of time than Spanish and Portuguese people have controlled it since then, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
You know, a lot of people who are in good faith, they see something like that and they think you're trying to justify or rationalize what happened, you know, because there is this thing where – I mean, the Jonestown story, this really did kind of happen to me where, you know, when you get past a certain threshold of understanding people – It's you're butting right up against empathizing with them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
So, like, it was hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years, and they're in a constant state of war to push the Muslims back into North Africa. So you have a very, like, Spartan, warlike people, because it's how you had to be. Their whole society was geared toward, like, this conflict that was centuries long.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And so you take those people, and they're the first ones who show up in the new world, right? And so right there, you've got, like... a certain bias in like the relations between these Europeans and the people in the new world. Well, they come over there and this is pretty soon just like 1492 and then just a few decades later, the Protestant Reformation happens.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
So there's religious conflict and religious wars and things – wars between different kingdoms now have a little bit higher stakes because you're not just talking about they're going to take this piece of territory from us or something. It's like, no, they're going to change our religion, really high stakes. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And this is still at a time when Europe politically, like geopolitically, was an anarchic place. I mean people were at war all the time and nobody even thought that war was immoral. It was actually like part of the natural order of things. If you're a stronger neighbor and your weaker neighbor has something, you should have it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
There's nothing really like considered wrong about it like in a moral sense, especially since back then wars were generally fought between the aristocracy themselves, the knights and people. It wasn't like they were rounding up peasants and sending them off as cannon fodder. And so given like the high stakes, once –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
The Spanish and Portuguese came over to the New World and just started extracting so much wealth from there. Almost immediately, you get Charles V, who takes over a huge chunk of Europe, becomes the first Holy Roman emperor, and is just becoming overwhelmingly powerful.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And if you're any other country in Europe at that time, you're looking at it like we got to get in on this new world thing or else we're going to get swallowed up. And so you start getting in on the new world thing. And what you find out really quickly is, oh, we don't have enough people actually to go over there and like do all the mining and all the agriculture and everything else.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
We're going to have to find somebody else, another population to do that. Well, you couldn't take any Europeans as slaves or anything because whoever the – You know, you needed your own people here and the kingdom next door was not going to let you do that, take their people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And so they started resorting to West African slavery, which was sort of served up to the Spanish and Portuguese because the Muslims in Spain and Portugal had been engaged in that for centuries. And so they had been sort of, you know, like the Spanish and Portuguese already knew the trade networks. They were very familiar people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
With African slavery, which had existed in Spain really since the time of the Roman Empire or before. They had a constant history with slavery going all the way back. And so they get over there and they start using slaves to set up their colonies and extract the wealth from those colonies.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And the interesting thing to me about it is that if you were a ruler who said, yeah, well, I don't think slavery is right. So I'm not going to do that. OK, then you will get swallowed up by somebody who has less scruples and is willing to do it. They're going to get richer and more powerful and they're going to take what you've got. And guess what? There's slavery anyway.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
It's just that you're not, you know, around anymore. That's it. And the same like with the West African kingdoms and the rulers and warlords down there who were selling the slaves to the Europeans. You could be a guy who's like, you know, I really don't think we should be selling our fellow Africans to these Europeans to be, you know, taken as slaves. That just seems wrong to me.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Well, OK, that's fine. Your neighbor who is getting gold and guns from the Portuguese or whatever is going to conquer you and take you all as slaves and send you over. And so it almost becomes like a game theory problem. Where there's no overarching authority to tell all the people, hey, we're not doing this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And so each individual actor does it just really as a matter of expedient survival at the time. And when you look at when slavery did – when the slave trade was put to a halt, it only happened after the British Empire became like the real dominant power on the seas. And they were the ones with the anti-slaverships who were going around putting a stop to the trade.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
I mean, it's like that's the you know, that's like the next step. You got to take one more step and you're empathizing with those people. And so people see that, you know, and you're empathizing with evil people, you know, whoever it is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
And that never could have happened until there was like this big overarching authority who could actually make everybody else make this change that they didn't want to make. It's a crazy history.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
Yeah. I don't want to make people stare at my ugly mug for a seven-hour episode. All right. Thank you, Daryl. Bye, everybody. Bye.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2289 - Darryl Cooper
But I really believe that it's it's really good for us, like individually, you know, and as a society to to I think it has a positive effect on us to like when we force ourselves to understand. People we don't like as human beings and just understand that their motivations are really no different than ours.