Straight Talk with Bill Frady 8/7/2026 Hour 2 - Bill Frady discusses globalism, left-wing policy failures, Trump's birthright citizenship EOs, and Coca-Cola censorship.

What this episode covers

Transcript [00:00:00 - 00:02:00] Globalism is one of those really politically charged words. 10 or 15 years ago, calling somebody a globalist didn't have a whole lot of effect. Today, it is understood as a pejorative, which highlights whoever you might be talking about, highlights their allegiance to international institutions over those created within, you know, a nation-state. And all the—the term's been used in various academic circles for more than a century. It didn't become part of the political parlance until the anti-establishment conservatives in the United States and Europe found it a useful description of their ideological opponents. But then when you look back at it, it's surprising how long the word remained dormant, hidden away in the context of political speech and debate. During the Cold War, the world was divided between the Soviet Union and the United States, between communism and freedom, between closed economies and open markets. To the extent that nationalism and globalism were distinguished from each other, the academics and the political leaders did so under the umbrella of the Cold War contest between the East and the West to gobble up as many nation-states as possible. Both sides were working with a domino theory, and the partisans of that were playing a game where one nation at a time came to their side, sort of like Red Rover, Red Rover. But there's been a shift from the 1950s since and forward. In newspapers and essays of the 19th and early 20th centuries, nationalism and patriotism meant the same thing. Following World War II, nationalism acquired a negative connotation because this was the proxy word for fascism or Nazism. If this gives you some idea of where where there—all of this linguistic gymnastics that the left does, yeah. In our current age, prominent political and academic leaders speak of nationalism as if it were a form of racism or imperialism and authoritarianism rolled into one big old malevolent joint. And until, you know, in contrast, until recently, patriotism retained a positive meaning, although its Greek roots describe a person's connection to fellow countrymen and the fatherland, which sounds a lot like nationalism. So, if only one of those two words, nationalism or patriotism, were to survive World War II unchanged, a reasonable person might have wagered nationalism seemed more innocent and less problematic. Patriotism with, you know, where the emotional appeal to the fatherland might have appeared more objectionable. Isn't the way it worked out though, is it? Nationalism was eventually demonized for the semantic connection of the Nazi Party, while patriotism was embraced, you know, for us to fight the Soviet Union's communist expansion during the Cold War. And that wasn't an accident. After World War II, there was a concerted effort among political and intellectual leaders in the West to use the destruction from two catastrophic global wars as a way to put forth this moral argument for charting a new course for humanity. And why they didn't understand what I understand is beyond me, but we'll get to that in a minute. Framing the carnage of those years as the natural result of unbridled nationalism, the architects of the post-war world put their faith in international institutions. So we didn't have nationalism or patriotism; we had the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the European Union—they all emerged immediately after World War II, but so did a thousand new international bodies constructed to do everything from standardizing industrial production in factories around the world to regulating the movement of people and goods across borders. This was sold—internationalism was sold as an antidote to war, and it became almost synonymous with peace. And they were able to create a dichotomy between nationalism and internationalism, and it was much easier to advance publicly than a contrast between patriotic love of country and an unpatriotic ha ...

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