"They want to win as a [feeding] trough."

Eric Weinstein's reflections on the 2024 presidential election.

Recently my brother sent me a YouTube clip of a cool dogfighting scene from the film Dunkirk in which a couple of Spitfires duke it out with a couple of Messerschmitt Bf-109s over the English Channel. Suddenly I was struck by the question: Where did the Third Reich obtain financing to develop and build its large fleet of Messerschmitt 109s in the 1930s?

I’d long heard rumors that a great deal of financing to rebuild the German war machine in the thirties came from Wall Street banks, but I always reckoned that this was exaggerated. As I was sniffing around, I came across this 2004 report in the UK Guardian headlined How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power. The key point of the report is the following:

While there is no suggestion that Prescott Bush was sympathetic to the Nazi cause, the documents reveal that the firm he worked for Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH), acted as a US base for the German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, who helped finance Hitler in the 1930s before falling out with him at the end of the decade.

Fritz Thyssen was one of greatest industrialists of the 20th century. Many Americans are familiar with his surname from seeing it stamped on the placard in elevators all over the country. I knew that he was a key industrial player in the Third Reich, but I didn’t know that Brown Brothers Harriman was his American banker until I read the Guardian piece.

In recent years the Guardian has suffered from the same trend towards printing propaganda instead of proper reporting, but this report from twenty years ago seems to check out with corroborating sources.

It strikes me as an interesting case study of what’s wrong with our politicians and their buddies in banking and the Military-Industrial Complex. Because they tend to be such inveterate money-grubbers, they don’t think about how their business activities will affect ordinary American citizens. Our political class really is primarily interested in money and power, and it really doesn’t care about the American people.

While pondering these dreary thoughts, I stumbled across a recent conversation between the podcaster Chris Williamson and the mathematician Eric Weinstein, who has long struck me as one of the most fascinating conversationalists around. As Weinstein puts it, both major parties view political power as a [feeding] trough—that is, a means of enriching themselves and their cronies. He further points out that the majority of Americans are sick and tired of troughs and would like to be rid of them.