The following is an edited transcript of a Daily Wire interview with Bill Whittle on his new, in-depth docuseries on the rise of the Soviet Union: &#8220;<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/apollo-11-what-we-saw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">What We Saw: An Empire of Terror</a>.&#8221; 
Daily Wire: Bill, you’ve now produced multiple “What We Saw” documentaries for The Daily Wire: “<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/apollo-11-what-we-saw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Apollo 11</a>” and “<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/apollo-11-what-we-saw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Cold War</a>.” Why did you choose the rise of the Soviet Union as your next project?
Bill: Shortly after the invasion of Ukraine I received a call from Jeremy Boreing at The Daily Wire. I just finished covering a fair amount of Russia with &#8220;The Cold War&#8221; series. Given the research for &#8220;The Cold War,&#8221; and my previous readings, I&#8217;ve always been kind of morbidly fascinated with the mechanisms of the Soviet Union — fascinated and disgusted and appalled and intrigued by governments that have to terrorize their people in order to remain in power, antithetical to the American system. And no matter how bad we think things get here, there&#8217;s nothing that&#8217;s happened or is happening now in this country that even approaches this scale.
DW: Why is it important to remember Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution?
Bill: Several years after World War I, Winston Churchill said that the Germans had transmitted a “Bacillus” into Russia in the form of Lenin. I think he got that exactly right. It (Lenin) was a biological weapon. And it was designed to destroy Russia as a great power in World War I. That&#8217;s why the Germans not only allowed Lenin to travel through Germany during the height of the war, but in fact paid his expenses for many, many years afterwards.
This regime is interesting to me for two reasons: the main reason is how intellectual it was — and I have a very low opinion of intellectuals. Intellectualism is for people who think they are intelligent and are so certain of themselves and so certain of what they believe that they feel the right to enforce their theories on other people.
What fascinated me about this horrific system was the theoretical aspect of everything. There was nothing about the system that was practical. There was nothing based on common sense, experience, reason, kindness, decency — nothing. It was all based on the theory of a German philosopher named Karl Marx. His writings appealed to people looking for some sort of justice, but they also appealed to people who had any sort of envy for the people in power but didn&#8217;t want to do any work in order to achieve it.
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/apollo-11-what-we-saw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: &#8220;An Empire of Terror&#8221; on DailyWire+</a></h4>
The other remarkable quality about all of the Soviet leaders is just how useless they were. Prior to finding themselves in the middle of the system, none of them had jobs. Lenin’s only job was as a failed attorney, very briefly. As a lawyer he lost, I think, 13 out of 14 cases and never really worked a day in his life. Prior to the revolution, he sat around for 16 years, sitting in cafes in safe places like Berlin and Munich and London and Zurich, sipping tea and discussing theory. 
He developed in his massive forehead this idea of how a society should work and there was no real world evidence that would change his mind. If it turned out that there was a difference between the map he had in his head and reality, then the reality had to be well, he would then go about doing whatever he had to do with the lovers of state power to beat reality into line with the theory. And this is why the Soviet state was a terror state. They never had legitimacy. 
The Bolsheviks were a minority every single time they held a so-called “election;” they were a tremendous minority. And you can’t even accuse the Nazis of that.
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DW: In &#8220;An Empire of Terror&#8221; you mention the leader of Russia’s provisional government, Alexander Kerensky. Why wasn’t he able to mount a good defense against the growing Bolshevik threat?
Bill: Someone once wrote that Lenin was “lucky with his enemies.” And that was exactly the case. I have very high regard for Alexander Kerensky’s principles and for what he wanted for the Russian people. But as an actor, Kerensky had two qualities that actors often bring to the world: First, he was spectacularly naive when it came to the real world. And second, he was tremendously vain. These two blind spots led him to believe he was in control when in fact, Lenin was ready to do everything up to and including murder when Kerensky was simply looking out the window at the daisies. He was a good man and history was kind to him but he was no match for Lenin’s ruthlessness. This is the thing about the Soviet state — it&#8217;s designed in such a way that you have to keep the population under control through terror. The people that end up running the machine, by definition, become the most ruthless and terroristic of the bunch.
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DW: What were some of the challenges you faced making this new series?
Bill: All roads lead back to Lenin. When I began to realize the magnitude of the crimes that these people committed, I began to feel a tremendous sense of historical responsibility to the people who disappeared without photographs.
800,000 people were killed in one of the gulags called Kolyma. 800,000 people. That makes it second on the leaderboard from hell: Auschwitz is first, Kolyma is second, and Treblinka is third. So, more than anything, I wanted every single episode to have as many photographs of the faces of individual people. And most importantly, we can never use the same face twice. I just wanted faces because, as Stalin said, “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic.”
So my biggest challenge was to find a way to try and personalize this. Make people understand that this could just as easily be you or your family, and then try to give them some idea of what the size of 20 million people looks like.
For example, about 100,000 people attend the Super Bowl every year. Imagine that everybody had to exit the stadium, single file, through one gate and you had to stand there and look at every single face as they left the stadium. When you were finished, hours and hours and hours later, you would have only 199 more Super Bowls to look at before you reached 20 million and saw the face of every person killed by this “idea.” And if it&#8217;s killed that many people, maybe it&#8217;s not such a good idea.
DW: Did you come across any surprises in your research?
Bill: The most astonishing story in &#8220;An Empire of Terror&#8221; is a true story. I&#8217;ve worked exceedingly hard and long to make sure that not only everything I wrote was true, but that I also had the receipts for everything.
But the most astonishing coincidence in the entire series is this: Lenin and Stalin were both known to be extremely paranoid, and very, very private people. They kept a very tight circle and they were constantly on the lookout for assassination and betrayal. So when Lenin finally arrives in Moscow from St. Petersburg, and eventually gets himself a little mansion, he is living with his sisters, his wife, and two secretaries. He also has four bodyguards and a private cook named Comrade Spiridon.
Comrade Spiridon went from being the only person that lived with Lenin, who was not related to him, to becoming the only person who lived with Stalin. And he lived with Stalin for the duration of Stalin&#8217;s reign in the Soviet Union. The only person who shared the insight into the entire thing — from the rise from agrarian peasantry to nuclear superpower. Comrade Spiridon was the only man who was on the inside. He would serve dinner to people who were the heads of the secret police one night and then the next night they were gone. They&#8217;d been killed and replaced. The genuinely remarkable part of this story is that Comrade Spiridon’s last name was Putin. This was Vladimir Putin&#8217;s grandfather.
Vladimir Putin learned about the Soviet Union on his grandfather&#8217;s knee. And so the perspective Vladimir Putin received of the Soviet Union was the most elevated inside perspective that was possible to obtain. No one else in the entire history of the Soviet Union, ever, got that close to both of those men. And to think that it was possible for Vladimir Putin to turn out any other way is insane.
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DW: In light of the upcoming presidential election, do you see elements of communism at play in our politics?
Bill: Well, the first thing I think that stands out about the upcoming election is the lawfare that&#8217;s being conducted against Donald Trump. If these people who are committing these atrocities against him genuinely believed in democracy, if they genuinely believed that their democratic values were better than Republican values, they wouldn&#8217;t be trying to lock up Trump. They&#8217;d be doing everything they could to get him to keep talking. If you feel like your only way to win an election is by having your opponent put in jail, you are well on your way to this kind of totalitarian empire of terror. That&#8217;s number one.
Number two is cancel culture. The Left is using cancel culture as a strong-arm tactic to get people to shut up. And we all know the way it works: “You&#8217;re racist” or “we&#8217;re going to call your boss” or “we&#8217;re going to boycott your product” or whatever. But the point is that the only people who feel they need to shut up the opposition are people who know that their opposition has a better argument. And if they don&#8217;t shut them up, they&#8217;re going to win. One of my favorite sayings is that liberals want conservatives to shut up and conservatives want liberals to keep talking. And that&#8217;s the essence of the difference between these two parties.
I have seen a concerted effort in America over the last several years to silence people. This whole idea of cancel culture is as close as we&#8217;ve come so far to taking people out to the Gulag and shooting them in the back of the head. But there are people who do want other people silenced. And the one thing I did realize is that there comes a tipping point when too many people are too quiet for too long. The social proof is to be quiet. The longer everybody is quiet, the harder it is to speak up. Eventually, it will lead to a situation like the Soviet Union, or the Nazi state. With &#8220;An Empire of Terror,&#8221; I was determined to do my best to make sure that doesn’t happen.

EOT – Key Art – 16×9 (1)

‘An Empire Of Terror’: Bill Whittle On The Rise Of The Soviet Union

Bill Whittle

Communism

Documentaries

Josef Stalin

Opinion

Readers Pass

Russia

Soviet Union

Vladimir Lenin

On Wednesday’s episode of “The Michael Knowles Show,” Knowles speaks with Bill Whittle about the Apollo 11 moon landing on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the mission. Video and partial transcript below:
We&#8217;re joined by the host Bill Whittle from Esoteric Radio Theatre called “<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/apollo-11-what-we-saw/id1471188269">Apollo 11: What We Saw</a>.&#8221; You&#8217;re a hit. This show goes up for five hours or something and it&#8217;s, and it goes straight to the top three on the all of the iTunes charts.
Bill Whitte: When I was 10 years old, I basically designed the moon landing and set up the Apollo program to be in place so that when I became 60 my podcast would reach stratospheric heights. Thank you for the kind words. I enjoyed writing it. The production work done here is out of the park, and, obviously, the reason people are so interested in this is because of the anniversary.
Michael Knowles: Because of the story. And you know you&#8217;re setting this up when you were five years old is only one of the conspiracies that I want to get to about the moon landing. But first, I actually just did a column on this yesterday. Because of your podcast, I had seen a few rumblings about this, and there is an episode from the moon landing that NASA basically blacked out. They didn&#8217;t want people to know about. They told Buzz Aldrin to shut up about it. You&#8217;ve got the Eagle lunar module that lands finally on the moon itself. And it&#8217;s not like they just hop out. It&#8217;s not like they park their Chevy and they&#8217;re going into the movie theater. They&#8217;re there for a number of hours in between the landing and when they go out and walk around the moon. What happens during those hours?
Whittle: Well, they were going to make the moonwalk about twelve hours after the landing. But for some reason landing on the moon and having all these failures and all this other stuff go down, having the entire planet looking at them and everybody&#8217;s entire attention focused on him, turns out the guys weren&#8217;t that sleepy, after all, you know. So, they moved it up six hours but during that six hours, once they had the LEM secure shutdown. By the way, when Armstrong got onto the surface of the moon, the first thing he did was pick up something called the contingency sample. He pulled out a scoop, picked up some stuff, put it in a patch just in case Buzz says, &#8220;We got to go. We got to go right now!&#8221; So, we would have something with us. But during that time there were still several hours before they start to get into their suits for the moonwalk, which was six hours after landing. And during that time Buzz Aldrin did something that he had asked permission to do.
And it&#8217;s not like NASA covered it up. It&#8217;s not like they denied any existence of it, but it was, needless to say, not publicized. Aldrin had got permission to take with him these two pouches. When he got to the moon, he removed this little silver flask. He opened one of the pouches and he poured a liquid into the flask and he said that in the one-sixth gravity it was amazing how graceful all the little bits of it curling around the thing were. And then he opened the other package and poured the contents of that into his other hand. He radioed mission control and he&#8217;s talking to the Mission Control, but this is not going out to the public, it&#8217;s just for basically for NASA. He said, &#8220;I think at this point I would like to ask everybody to take a moment to give thanks in whatever they find appropriate for this amazing achievement.&#8221; And then since he was an elder at the Presbyterian Church back in Houston, he took a consecrated wafer and he had a sip of wine from the chalice and he had communion on the moon. The first fluid ever poured on another planet was wine.
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Knowles: This is an astounding moment. Especially when you look at it in the context of the Cold War in the space race. You have the first foods and liquids poured prepared on the moon are the consecrated body and blood of Christ. And I believe he read from the Gospel of John too: “I am divine.”
Whittle: I&#8217;m not sure what he read. I&#8217;m sure he read an appropriate short piece of scripture basically to himself. Armstrong didn&#8217;t participate. I don&#8217;t know if Armstrong was worried about the fallout or not, but it&#8217;s pretty clear that he wasn&#8217;t, that this was Buzz’s show. But Buzz, not just this one time risked your life, you&#8217;ve been risking the only life you&#8217;ve got for 10 or 15 years now and 40 years after the landing, so 10 years ago, when Buzz wrote his memoirs. you could tell that 40 years of political correctness was starting to work on him &#8212; look, you know, now maybe I regret it now but at the time I just felt like, you know, how else can you give thanks for this incredible thing that we&#8217;ve pulled off? This was my personal way.
Knowles: Of course. And you&#8217;ve got the God-fearing Americans, basically you&#8217;ve got this: What remains of Western Christendom versus godless atheists. You know we think of the Cold War in economic terms free markets versus collectivism, that was obviously a huge part of it. The other side of it was the atheism of communism. When Pope John Paul II went to Poland, had an open-air mass, the people chanted, &#8220;We want God.&#8221; This is so much an animating facet. And we beat the Soviets, we get on the moon first and Aldrin gives his broadcast. He says everyone give thanks in a private way and then deferring to NASA, deferring to political correctness, he turns off the radio, he reads the scripture to himself, and he takes the communion privately, which is an astounding historical moment.
To learn more about the Apollo 11 mission, subscribe to <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/apollo-11-what-we-saw/id1471188269">“Apollo 11: What We Saw.”</a>
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WATCH: What NASA Kept Quiet About The Moon Landing

Conservatism

Michael Knowles

NASA

Political Correctness

Conservative commentator and political firebrand, Bill Whittle, just released the latest video in his &#8220;Firewall&#8221; series and it&#8217;s one big <a href="http://nme.assets.ipccdn.co.uk/images/SnapGalleries180311.article_x4.jpg" target="_blank">Johnny Cash middle finger</a> to the cry-bully leftists who decry the &#8220;evils of cultural appropriation&#8221; of whatever culture (much like gender) they&#8217;ve decided they identify with that week. Click above for Whittle&#8217;s response, &#8220;APPROPRIATE THIS!&#8221;
The video&#8217;s description reads:
<blockquote>
&#8220;The Social Justice Warriors &#8212; the first warriors to faint at the sight of a penknife &#8212; have a new weapon to show off their unearned moral superiority: CULTURAL APPROPRIATION, where mainstream culture steals from minorities without being &#8220;authentic.&#8221; Surprisingly Bill Whittle agrees with this, and has a list of grievances all his own.&#8221;
</blockquote>
In the video, Whittle shows the clip of a recent altercation at a San Francisco State University where a black female student accosts a white male student <a href="http://www.dailywire.com/news/4514/black-female-student-accosts-white-male-having-chase-stephens">for wearing his hair in dreadlocks</a>, which in her mind was apparently the equivalent of him saying he invented Kwanzaa and then moonwalking away yelling that he invented that too.
Whittle goes on to sarcastically say, &#8220;Listen, I get it. If anybody&#8217;s on their side I am. As a straight white male I see these feminists and students of color appropriating my white male culture every day. When I think of them walking around in blue jeans using electricity to light their dorm rooms or to run their microwave ovens so that they can eat non Anglo-Saxon food, well, frankly it makes me sick.&#8221;
He continues with his impressive list of things white males have invented that these leftists take for granted including: smart phones, the internet, Facebook, Twitter, immunization, pasteurization, antiseptics, antibiotics, laser surgery, MRI scans, artificial ventilators, Polio vaccine, airplanes, and the jet engine.
Whittle tops it off with the fact that hip-hop rhyming is actually called Skeltonic Verse and was invented by a white guy named John Skelton, born in England in 1463.
&#8220;Now if all of this sounds petty, and ridiculous, and racist, and utterly barking mad to you, well, it sounds that way to me too,&#8221; says Whittle, adding, &#8220;But that&#8217;s who these progressive cry-bully tribalists are: insecure fascists who want to tell other people how to wear their hair.&#8221;
Exit thought from this culture-appropriating cat&#8230;
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cat-penguin

Watch Bill Whittle Smack Down SJW’s: ‘Stop Appropriating My White Male Culture!’

Education

Race

Social Justice

PJTV&#8217;s Bill Whittle cuts through the word-vomiting excuse-making crap that is the media&#8217;s coverage of the endless scandal&#8217;s Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has wrought upon herself and the American public. Click the above video to watch him knock it out of the park. Batter up.
If you still have room in your puke bucket after being hit with all that truth, below is a clip of Bill taking aim at Clinton right after her &#8220;What difference does it make&#8221; statement in regards to whether she lied about the origins of the attack in Benghazi. What difference indeed&#8230;

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Luckily for Clinton, she won&#8217;t have to find any more words to obfuscate the truth about what happened that night at our embassy. Director Michael Bay has gone and made a movie, 13 Hours, that tells the story of what our brave life-sacrificing soldiers did in the face of insurmountable odds and leaders that didn&#8217;t want to face the bad headlines of a terrorist attack during the re-election of a President and his appointed Secretary of State who were currently campaigning on the stance that the terrorists had been defeated&#8230;.

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In theaters January 15th.
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Bill Whittle: Hillary Clinton Laughs Her Way Through Treason and Felonies

Hillary Clinton

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Bill Whittle

‘An Empire Of Terror’: Bill Whittle On The Rise Of The Soviet Union

WATCH: What NASA Kept Quiet About The Moon Landing

Watch Bill Whittle Smack Down SJW’s: ‘Stop Appropriating My White Male Culture!’

Bill Whittle: Hillary Clinton Laughs Her Way Through Treason and Felonies