We're back with another edition of The Federalist for radio Hour. I'm Emily Joshinsky,
culture editor here at The Federalist. As always, you can email the
show at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr
LST. Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts as well, and
to the premium version of our website. We're actually coming up on the tenth
anniversary of The Federalist. At colleague reminded me today something to keep in mind.
I'm joined today by my colleague, Sam Mangold Lennett, staff editor at
The Federalist, one of the newer members of the team, who's here in
like year nine of the tent, the decade of the Federalist. That's what
this has been, the decade of the Federalists. Sam. I think the
decade really reached its peak once I came on. That's probably true. That's
probably true. You've enlivened the staff chat. Did you read The Federalist before
you work for us? Yeah? Yeah, To be honest, it was
not to know butter up my bosses or anything, but it was one of
the few actual conservative publications I actually read. They're not listening, so go
fair enough. A lot of the discourse online. Well, I mean,
it's one of the few publications that actually has the pulse on what people want
to hear and what's actually going on, whereas a lot of places kind of
come, what's the term caltail, cow tail cowtowl? That's you're an editor.
I don't know. It's it's dumb jargon. I don't know it.
A lot of publications, I think cal tail count whatever it is, it's
about kowtow. I reject the premise A lot a lot of places will like
pander to what they think people want to hear, or to possibly what their
donors want them to say. I legitimately don't think now, I guess I
am biased, but I don't think we do that. I think it's always
just been here's cutting through the noise, here's amplifying the actual truth, here's
what you know. We always say we speak truth into Washington, as opposed
to just trying to in addition to amplying the narrative here for other people.
It's part of the benefit of us having being spread throughout the country is that
we actually get perspectives, and part of one of the good things about having
so many contributors. Is we actually get perspectives that aren't just DC group think,
and I think that with that comes a lot of honesty as well.
For instance, a lot of people would be afraid to walk into the Capitol
Hill Starbucks and order one of surely the first Pumpkins by Slottes they've served all
season. Not Sam. He went. He went for it. He got
the whip cream, he got a frozen it looked like a frappuccino, but
it was in fact of Pumpkins by s Latte, and he had no shame.
It was my daily milkshake. I needed the cloric intake that was fit
for like five people. So yeah, I'm actually drinking of Pumpkins by Slatts.
We speak as well as my first of the season's it's a rainy summer
day here in Washington, DC. Social start of fall is the start of
fall, and Sam, I wanted to ask you, actually, this is
your first year in DC, but we're both Midwesterners, and just as we're
about to turn the page on a new season here, I actually wanted to
ask what you miss most about summer or fall in Cincinnati. Well, Cincinnati
is a super Bowl, so the weather kind of sucks year round, especially
with the humidity. But so the summer's in DC and Cincinnati have been basically
the same. I think DC is well. Live in a pretty hilly area
of DC, so it's about to say the hills aren't as bad, but
walking to work, there's a lot of hills, so you know, kind
of equals out from my perspective. But what I miss I think I'm gonna
missing in the fall because like we were talking earlier, it doesn't really the
temperature doesn't really break until like late September. I think I'm gonna miss like
the crisp, like when you can feel the air really turning in early late
early to mid September, where it's it actually is feeling like you're on the
end of summer, about the fall, literally fall into fall. I don't
know, I've always enjoyed the whimsy of that. I'll respond to my own
question, and what is what are you going toout the season? Changing in
from Wisconsin? You know, living in the city is very strange because I
grew up in the woods. I don't know if I've ever gotten into this
on the podcast before, but I lived in the same house my parents still
live in that house from when they brought me home as a tiny little baby
until I went off to college smack in the middle of the city. My
freshman dorm was about three blocks from the White House. So I must have
been a huge culture shock, very strange. Yes, And actually I realized
just this week is the twelve year anniversary of when I moved to Washington.
Yeah, twelve years anniversary, thank you. The Obama era. And the
city was certainly really bustling then and becoming a lot trendier. And it's you
know, obviously been dramatically affected by COVID, and it's still not nearly the
same as what it was. But all that is to say, living in
the city, you just get you're less kind of inundated by the by nature,
and that means, you know, there are fewer trees, that sounds
obvious, and in certain neighborhoods. You have some very late leafy neighborhoods here
in the district. But when you grow up in the actual woods, like
surrounded by trees, the smells are so much more acute, and that means
the seasons are more acute, and so it's not that you know, you
can tell the difference of course I can tell the difference between winter and summer
in DC, but in general, you know, there's just less change in
terms of the you know, beyond the temperature. It's some of those things
like the smells and the sites. Our colleague Rebecca just sneeze, but that
was an intern sneeze. We'll have to put it on the office sneeze tracker.
But yeah, it's just some of those natural occurrences are a little bit
less acute, and it makes the seasons a little bit less special. I
guess that's an interesting point. The sensory overload is very apparent, at least
for now it is. I'm still I think it's my third month as a
resident in DC, so it's still very overwhelming at times, just how much
is going on all the time. But I never thought about that. Yeah,
I miss it in summer the most because I've never been like a huge
summer lover. But I hate it. Summer's the worst season before. It's
not great here especially, it's very nice, and a lot of parts of
the Midwest all the very sweaty in some other parts. But it's uh,
one thing that makes it really special, I think really is the smells of
the fields and the trees and the flowers, the noises. Yeah, and
just sort of also having a beautiful summer's night where you can, you know,
cure crickets, Cicada's frogs, and then you you kind of get the
smells and in the city you get very different smells in the summer, a
lot of smells. It's a lot of hot urine, just steaming. There's
just constant dog urine. Yeah, it's really hard to myself, but yeah,
it's really gross. But anyway, I was just thinking about that today
because you were you were common on the weather and I thought i'd ask you.
And you know, one of the reasons we wanted to do this podcast
is because I think all summer we didn't stop and focus on a major development
and the right, which a was. It started with Sound of Freedom and
then it went with Oliver Anthony as the summer ended. So this is kind
of book ended the summer at these two events. Actually, so at USA
today make that connection about how there's this sort of conservative, alternative, alternative
economy and entertainment that's that's starting to grow. And of course, one small
point of pride that I have is that I was really the first major national
publication to report on The Chosen. And it wasn't because I was like just
some like pression genius. It's because well, someone brought it to me.
And this was right as COVID was starting, before anybody was really taking it
seriously. I was looking at a spreadsheet from the good folks behind The Chosen
and they were showing me on the spreadsheet where the film had been viewed,
like with VPNs all over the not the film, the series had been viewed
all over the world, and at the time they were like, people are
in lockdown in China and they're watching The Chosen and I saw that on their
spreadsheet. Yeah, it really was. And what got me about that was
the pass it on crowdfunding mechanism and the single app for downloading it. And
I think Sound of Freedom benefit from the exact same sort of structure, and
that's what allowed it to really explode in theaters too, so because they were
able to fundraise and word of mouth kind of grew, and then it became
clear to theaters that they should probably host this movie. So it came in
more and more theaters, and with Oliver Anthony, who is of course the
singer of Richmond, north of Richmond. It's actually his stage name is on
its real name, it's his grandfather's name. Interestingly enough, that a free
press report that's very Wise's publication. They say he actually didn't embrace that until
a few months ago. All kinds of sort of interesting developments the last few
months of Oliver Anthony's life. He says he very recently found his faith,
very recently embraced his faith. And that got started with a YouTube channel picking
it up that covers up and coming artists or maybe underappreciated artists. That's the
West Virginian Radio one right radio WVY. They post it. Someone then puts
that on Twitter and it just explodes. Samuel and I do think these two
things are connected. It's basically saying, listen, the old gatekeepers are not
the only people in charge anymore. And I think it's important to say they're
not the only people in charge because they are still in charge, but they're
not the only people in charge. Right. Well, I've seen some cynical
takes that the might indicate the gatekeepers still are the ones kind of you know,
manufacturing all of this. I think it's all kind of you know,
schizophrenia brainworm stuff, but that had to come somewhere, Like I don't think
it's I think Oliver Anthony thing is very much organic because I think people were
yearning for content like this that was just heartfelt. But if something explodes that
immensely in popularity, that the take is that someone had to help this happen.
This guy just can't come from nowhere using mediocre equipment. Someone has to
be backing him. But I think overwhelming that the narrative has kind of fallen
apart because he himself has taken to YouTube in particular to kind of clear up
a lot of these conspiracies. He seems like a pretty austere and authentic guy.
So he says he's turned down an eight million dollar record deal, which
is insane, but you know that speaks to his integrity. Yeah, he's
it seems believable enough that people to the tune of eight I mean, if
anything, eight million dollars might be underappreciating what he's been able to do.
And I connected that to the Weather conversation weirdly enough, because he's very much
somebody who's speaking to the kind of Charles Murray phenomenon, not to the politics.
And one of the reasons we wanted to talk about. And when I
say Charles Murray, I mean coming apart this idea of the bigger divide in
the country being cultural than it is political, something we talk about a lot
here, and it just you know, he's the video that went so viral.
He's out in the sort of lush summer backdrop, you know, with
his dogs running around in the background, and just a guy, just a
dude, and it feels really resonant. I think it's he's using a resonant
guitar actually in the song, but it feels really resonant for people who live
in places that look just like that. And it reminded me actually of that
because you can kind of as I'm as I was watching it, I was
like, I can smell this, Like it smells like fresh trees, it
smells like summer, and it's really really beautiful, despite the fact that he's
not one of the Richmond North of Richmond, and you know, people who
live here in the DC are so impoverished in so many ways despite being so
rich. They don't have a backtrap like that, they don't have old trucks
and places where their dogs can kind of run free, but they don't realize
it that way. And yeah, I think gradually we're starting to kind of
come to terms with that. But Tam, we were talking in the office
about how the Richmond North of Richmond going super supervival to the point where it's
being mentioned at the Republican debate that happened recently where when Martha McCollum starts the
debate, the first question she asks they play a video. She says,
quote like why is this touch it? Why is the song touching a nerve
with so many people around the country, And it is like, that's why
I think eight million dollars might be underestimating the world. That might be like
lowballing Oliver Anthony for a record deal because I've never seen anything like this.
I mean, the sheer ad revenue on the video alone. Probably gross is
I'm not nearly enough, but probably gross is a decent sum. If he
keeps turning out content like that, he could just be fully independent. It's
insane to be filmed by someone else. Radio WV, so Radio WV came
down to Oliver Anthony. According to The Free Press, their interview with Anthony,
they Radio WV comes down to him in farm Ville, Virginia. He
wasn't finished with Richmond North of Richmond, but he says, you gotta cut
this track. Radio w V says, So he finishes Richmond North of Richmond,
puts it on and everything sort of starts snowballing from there. But the
guy wasn't even done with this song. It's absolutely unheard of. I mean,
like people will point to Justin Bieber a Little nas Sex and when Old
Town Road came out, that was incredible too, that it was just something
some dude had uploaded to SoundCloud that became one of the top songs of the
year, if not the top song of that year, and launched this like
extremely powerful music career for Little nas Sex. World changing definitely for the worst,
but world changed nonetheless. And for Oliver Anthony, he goes from just
a track cut for a YouTube video to the top Billboard artist of the summer
potentially who could be the top Billboard artists of the year if things keep going
on like this. But either way, I mean to rock it to the
point where you don't even have a record out, you're just a YouTube artist
and just explodes like that. It's just one of the craziest things I've ever
seen. I mean, his music keeps having the same success like the iTunes
starts, he keeps climbing up them with each release YouTube similar every video,
every music vide he releases has millions of us. People love his stuff.
Like you said, it resonates deeply well. And this is what we were
talking about in the office. It was really like getting under my skin.
There is now this kind of it's happening both on the left and the right,
because Anthony came out and said, you know, I'm really annoyed by
my song being used by politicians for political purposes, being claimed by any side,
and he said, if anything, that song's more about the right than
about the left. And some conservatives are now being like, yeah, like
these other conservatives just got owned by Oliver Anthony, some on the left or
like yeah, conservatives just got owned Anthony. But to that, I just
say, if you listen to that song and didn't think that it was about
both the right and the left, and if not more about the right than
the left, then what are you thinking. You're crazy? I mean,
the whole point of asking a Republican debate, by the way, is so
that Republican politicians have to confront the question of why that song is resonating given
their policies for the past thirty years. He talks Anthony and this interview talks
particularly about or actually I think it was a video he posted warmongering policies of
conservative politicians over the last thirty years. I think he says, and it's
absolutely true. And if you heard that song and said, wow, what
a win for Republicans, the brainworms are feasting every day in your head.
Hey, y'all, this is Sarah Carter, investigative columnist and host of The
Sarah Carter Show. Thanks for listening to the Federalist. We all have a
heartfelt reason to support our blood pressure. In fact, more than half of
the US population would benefit from blood pressure support. Super Beats heart shoes are
easy and convenient way to support healthy blood pressure and promote heart healthy energy paired
with a healthy lifestyle. The antioxidants and super beats are clinically shown to be
nearly two times more effective at promoting normal blood pressure a healthy lifestyle alone.
I tell you this, I've felt it. I love taking super beats.
Not only are they tasty, they're great to chew, but I love to
know that I'm supporting a healthy heart. It's effective and clinically studied. Super
Beats is the number one pharmacist recommended beat brand for cardiovascular health support. It's
blood precious support you can trust. Get a free thirty day supply of super
Beats Heart shows and fifteen percent off your first order by going to get Superbeats
dot com and use promo code Sarah. That's saar eight Yet Superbeats dot Com
code Sarah to get fifteen percent off your first order Yet Superbeats dot Com promo
code Sarah. And I think like you said, it is a uniparty.
It's a consolidation of just special not special interests necessarily. But both both parties
coalesced that sold out the country. But the right, the Republicans at least
give lip service to people like Oliver Anthony. They say we don't hate you,
and then they turn around to do things that screw them over entirely.
So of course it's going to be more about the right, because the rights
sought him out, whereas the left will just you know, knife him in
the back and tell a smile while they're doing it, or rather the left
will just tell you they hate you. The right will do things that spite
you but tell you that it's for your benefit. Well, I mean,
yeah, and he's he's in the song talking about it's clearly about both the
lesson, right, he talks about welfare, he talks about food, he
talks about obesity, he talks about I mean, all of these things around
and around and around that, like if you're a portioning blame. It's clearly
in both directions, but so much of it rests on the squarely on the
shoulders of Republican politicians, people who promise to fix things but then don't fix
them once they actually get power to fix them. Well, and he talks
about working, what does he say, like a bullshit job? Yeah,
something like that over ten hours bullshit? Yeah right. And you know why
does Tom Cotton have a minimum wage bill on the floor of the Senate.
Why is he introduced that? Well, because even some Republicans are recognizing that
inflation is completely out of control and that there is room like that, there
actually is room for policies that. Like I'm not a huge fan, I
actually think you can debate the benefits of minimum wage laws, state based,
locality based for you know, workers. I think sometimes those those are clearly
problematic policies. But I think the cotton Bill is like a fifteen dollars base
federally, and I mean at this point, fifteen dollars an hour for a
minimum wage. Yeah, I'm not going to argue too hard against that.
I'm really not. Yeah, I mean it's I mean, even with that,
it's probably so going to be not enough to outpace inflation or help people
stay afloat that much. But I think this is kind of where like the
whole populism argument really thrives, where there's a lot of specifically economic issues that
some of the left and some of the right a line on that can actually
alleviate a lot of pain, but nobody wants to actually have that conversation because
of the left duality. Yeah, I mean, I know Anthony has worked
in North Carolina, and because he's from southern Virginia and North Carolina for instance,
speaking of Republicans has been hit really hard, Like their furniture industry in
particular has been hit really really hard by some trade policies, and like there
are a lot of jobs that are gone because of that. And libertarians will
look at these analyzes and some like never Trump type conservators will look at these
analyzes and be like, well, but like in the aggregate, these things
were really good, and it's like maybe, yeah, So first of all,
it's like maybe. Secondly, it's like, okay, fine, but
what did we do for people that are lost in the transition? What did
we do for people who completely squeeze. What we did was let their communities
decay and die without any attention given to them whatsoever. And they're the ones
that are now voting for Donald Trump because you did nothing for them. You
have continued to prop up a corrupt media that is lying to them. And
some of you, by the way, I think they're all bigots for having
different opinions from you, and for talking differently, watching different stuff, eating
different food, not going to college. And some people, by the way,
did go to college and have you know, and graduate within an average
of tens of thousands of dollars, like some thirty thousand dollars in student loan
debt, probably more than that by now, probably closer to forty thousand dollars
or student loan debt. And they aren't able to find jobs that are going
to do what they're promised that that would be this ticket to the middle class,
right. And I think there's also a persistent cultural issue where people don't
really know how to perceive am America's nationhood anymore. It's no longer like we
the people. It's treated just as an economic zone, where it's just balancing
numbers on a spreadsheets on spreadsheets are as opposed to actually advancing the common good
of the people, Like, how are you supposed to advance economic policies that
help people flourish if there's no understanding of what flourishing is. If it's just
the GDP went up by this percent this year and down this quarter. Everything
is just thought of in this balancing act logic. I read a really interesting
study last year, and I'm not gonna like cite it specifically because I'm paraphrasing
it and I'm not like a social scientist obviously, but it was on It
was a like cross survey of the research on indigenous happiness, and one of
the interesting things they found is that people are happy people's Indigenous people's happiness tends
to be high so long as they have they're not lonely, and they have
health, so like they feel safe in their health condition and that they're not
like lonely. They have some social some social aspect, and that's really interesting
to me because from the left perspective, they have this excessive materialism, right
that like everybody needs the government to give them X, Y and Z,
when in fact you can understand sort of from the perspective of actual happiness or
fulfillment, how it's much easier once you hit that baseline of like, yes,
I have security, like I'm not, you know, currently dying,
Like I'm not currently dying. I'm not worried about dying in the future,
and i feel physically good. I feel physically well, and I'm surrounded by
other people, I have, you know, social life. You can see
where as long as you meet that baseline, general happiness is a sort of
easier to obtain. Yeah, And I think that's not to bring everything I
say back to pulling alone rubber Puttnam's thing, but I think that's really you
know, one of the biggest issues that is highlighted in all of Anthony's song
is that the people that really resonate with that song, and this is also
reflected in Tim Carney's Alienat of America, is that the people who would resonate
with that the people who largely became Trump's support that pushed them over in twenty
sixteen, don't have that. There are no shared institutions anymore. They don't
have anywhere to well. I mean they do have, you know, church,
but that's dwindling in attendance. But they don't have you know, is
the Rotary Club, Is that the s or Night's a Columbus or the moose
Loulenge or whatever you want to organization bowling leagues bowling alone. There's no shared
institutions for people to have that sense of community. And you know, with
our declining health rates and backsliding life and life expectancy, it makes sense that
people are going to just have this great lamentation about the state of America.
Well and think about the Anthony song. There's like health in it. Three
pounds, yeah, opioids, all of this comes into play. And when
you think about it, actually health and this is I was when I was
figuring out what to talk about at the National Conservatism Conference last year. It
actually I was in a similar place because it was a similar time of year
too when we were thinking to when the song came out and everything He's when
everything that he's thinking about because I was just thinking to myself, this political
discussion is so especially on the right, where there's this little like hog of
people and I'm looking at you, Sam, who are very online right just
terminally online. It's just so and again like there's we'll get to this and
then I'll put a pin in this because I think it's a lesson for Ronda
Santis too, But like there's a good way to be online and a bad
way to be online, and it's really hard to pull off both, but
or to pull off the good way and not be sucked into the bad way.
And I think you kind of have to take some bad with the good.
But it is just disgusting to me watching these conversations play out and seeing
you know, the panels at conferences, even one like at like Sepack or
whatever it is. And I was trying to think, like, how do
I not do that? And the question that kept coming to my head was
what can the Republican Party do? What can the conservative movement do to positively
affect the lives of everyday Americans, the immediate lives of everyday Americans, so
the daily life, Like what can the Republican Party do that is going to
make the daily life at the everyday American better. And when you think about
what's hurting people right now, they don't need to be multi multi millionaires.
People are really unhealthy and they're really unhappy and having all of these like abstract
conversations about freedom and liberty and like, fine, they're important, but it
is like the big debate about the realignment cannot be that abstracted. It has
to be translated quickly into practical things, and healthcare and food are two of
those areas where it needs to translate into Republican policies and positions in the conservative
movement really really quickly, because people like healthcare. If you look at survey
after survey, it comes up as one of voters like top concerns, and
the only people talking about it are Democrats. It thought has lost my train
of thought, damn it. I would take the pin out of the online
discourse until I remember what I was thinking of. You want to be in
the discourse of the discourse. You don't want to define you like your entire
or worldview, but you want to dabble one it sometimes, yeah, because
it helps you keep informed with what the kids are talking about. Well,
but that's so that I was gonna say about De Santas is that on the
one hand, you know, you have people that are very in touch with
the I don't know, the populist sentiments that are helpfully being litigated on social
media because it doesn't social media doesn't have the same constraints of traditional media,
and you know, people are able to, you know, have these conversations
and you know they're they're much closer to the sort of truth than you know,
what you might hear at a think tank panel or whatever, what you
might see on the accounts of think tanks. At the same time, though,
those circles and social media, you'll have to balance the fact that those
circles are also echo chambers, right, So you have to recognize that both
of these things are echo chambers, and you can take some stuff from the
like abstract, you know, political operative world, and you can take some
stuff from the populist social media world, but without sort of treating one or
the other like it's you know, the godsend and I feel like the or
like it's the proper arena, the righteous cause, and I feel like Ron
de Santis got his team, not him personally. You know, clearly it
was people working on his communications and digital staff got sucked into that world without
saying, you know, on the one hand, it was good, it
was cutting edge. They were sort of talking about his economic policy, his
economic plan for instance that he rolled out in August. Great, he didn't
communicate Kate that in any helpful or like he did a traditional campaign event in
New Hampshire at like on like a factory floor. Why do we keep forgetting
on me to say what is going on today? I think it's because I'm
talking too much, so you're just shoot, well, I think something that
highlight also with you know how everything is just so online now, it is
that the median like a huge portion of Republican voters just simply aren't online or
if they're absolutely, if they are online, they don't care enough to like
participate in the discourse. They don't care what this guy with a you know,
Plato marble bus profile pictures opining about Absolutely it's so too is credit.
I don't fault to Santists for like doing traditional events, because the average Republican
voter probably goes to those more than they engage in Twitter beefs, right,
But I don't know, it's it's I don't really know. Obviously, I'm
not a presidential campaign advisor. I don't know how you keep a foot in
both worlds aside from having you know, staff who are supposed to guide you
through that. But clearly something went awry. Well yeah, here's like when
you're putting pictures of Patrick Bateman interspersed with pictures of your presidential candidate. So
pictures of this fictional serial killer psychopath interperse with pictures of your presidential candidate,
you need to check yourself and realize that you are way, way, way
too far gone to have a hand in the communications strategy of a presidential campaign,
because that is not cute, it's not gonna work, and nobody understands
what you're doing outside of maybe a few dozen people on Twitter, maybe a
few dozen people on Twitter who you can't even tell whether they're ironically interested or
just interested. So the iron you poisoning is like, actually very serious.
To talk about a health condition you've had mercury poisoning, Try irony poison thing.
It will make you miserable for years. It is far more dangerous.
I think there's also something to the effect where and this is going to get
really online, real fast. I apologize with the meme magic, so to
speak, that was so that surrounded the Trump sphere in twenty sixteen and is
largely is resurgent now, certainly after the indictment and the mug shot. But
that energy excited people so much for Donald Trump, at least amongst youth voters,
that that was you know, something they really rallied behind. Well,
it's not like he won the youth vote, no, no, no,
but like it really helped move discourse in a we pokemon went to the polls.
Yeah, it's like that was one of the few times the right was
actually better at being digital than the left was. But you know, since
then, the big tech and deep state up weaponize themselves very much more effectively
against the right, And I think that has something to do with it.
I think that if you tap into these lines of discourse in effective ways,
you do pose a very powerful threat to establish power. Yeah. Actually,
this is this is going to make me sound a little bit too online.
But Bron's age pervert was on red Scare recently and made a really interesting point.
As somebody who sort of trafficked on the forums of about a decade ago.
He kept siting twenty tens, twenty eleven, so that is not a
world that I'm familiar with. But he mentioned, actually the the censorship on
social platforms has really affected the conversation that he was a part of then,
Like it actually seriously did change their ability to communicate, like certain people's ability
to communicate and interest in communicating. And I can kind of see that.
I think Reddit was very, very, very different, you know, more
than ten years ago than it is now. I think there's also a good
degree of I mean, obviously everyone knows about self censorship censorship now because nobody
wants to get canceled or fired from their job for having a wrong opinion.
But along with the digital censorship from the institutions comes people buying into this group
think that they think it's better to self censor than risking their account band permanently
because that account gives them access to one of the few institutions they actually have.
When you go online, you actually go to someplace, at least in
your brain, you're transported to there in that sense of community. So if
you don't self censor, you're gonna get exiled from it. The actually,
the Oliver Anthony thing kind of reminds me of something. I think it was
Jesse Kelly who said, like, conservatives all they have is cheering for a
mug shot talking about Trump's mug shot, like the left is cheering for the
actual arrest, and conservators are like, we got a really good mug shot
out of it. That's another issue. Well, it's funny because it's like,
I actually think the mug shot is very, very powerful in ways the
left may not have anticipated. That's not to say it's all just fine and
dandy, but I do think it's probably very powerful in ways they didn't expect.
On the other hand, it's like, yes, so let me get
this straight. Conservatives are cheering for a song that is gutting the Republican Party
in political casts, and a mug shot that means their preferred candidate is up
by some forty points right now could be imprisoned for political reasons. That's a
low bar. That bar is so low you could not limbo it, especially
not you, because you're like seven feet tall, but a child couldn't get
under that limbo bar. But I think those are kind of the same phenomenon,
though, where Oliver Anthony is limiting the complete not the complete decay,
but the thorough decay of America as a nation. And Republicans are celebrating that
their guy is being indicted and very likely about to be convicted. I think
that is part of the same phenomenon in which people are aware of the fact
that the Republic is fraying or rapidly. Everyone's aware. Everyone is very viscerally
aware, at least if they have have a brain cell, they're viscerally aware
of the fact that our culture is bottomed out and that our institutions thoroughly exist
just to advance this one ideological thing militantly. I think those overlapped perfectly.
Yeah, and it's just like when there were I don't know how much of
this actually happened, but any conservative, that's sort of like owning the Oliver
Anthony's song and saying like, take this, you know this is like this
guy gets it. This is a beautiful expression of you know, average,
the sentiment of the average American who doesn't have a voice in Washington, DC.
I mean, I'm not saying you have to be a sort of populist
economic conservative, because people like our lovely colleague David Harsani have perfectly reasonable arguments
about why his U the office liberal? Yes, why the why? You
know, his preferred sort of policy prescriptions will work just as well, if
not better, So it's entirely reasonable. But it's like, okay, I
mean, what are you doing to make this guy not want to lament the
state of the wealthiest country that has basically ever like that existed at this scale
and the scope of human history? What kind of the ton of tether back
to like the indigenous people thing you're referenced, it shows that, you know,
Americans are kind of the Americans are becoming disenfranchised in their own nation.
Despite being incredibly wealthy, they are utterly disenfranchised by the economic well, I
mean, the America as a concept is incredibly wealthy, but the people are
not able to participate in that wealth redistribution. To use a scary term so
to speak, the people actively cannot like you, like we talked about earlier,
cannot keep up with inflation. Their savings are gone. Most of them
probably don't even have savings at this point. Student loans are eating people away,
medical bills are reading peo. Why, there's just an existential dread.
People just can't really exist without pain anymore. And that goes in different ways.
Some people can easily exist in this country without economic pain, there's no
question about it, and some of the Richmond Richmonds, well, but some
people don't take advantage of that, you know, and I understand that that's
true. I mean, there are all kinds of different ways that you can
enjoy upward mobility in this country, and there are people who, for various
reasons, just don't want to do what it takes to experience that. Maybe
though, it's because they don't want to move out of their beloved small hometown.
Maybe it's because they got hooked on opioids. Maybe it's you know,
because they have a truly incredible amount of student loan debt that makes them nihilistic.
You know, I'm never going to dig out of this hole, so
I might as well. I mean, credit card delinquencies are spiking, Zilo.
I saw this unusual whales one percent down payments. They're offering a program
come mewnership with one percent down payments, is like incredible. I believe car
payment delinquencies are spiking as well, which is another just really exciting piece of
data. And at the same time, though, if you are one of
the many people and this gets to an exchange Mike Pence had with the Vacoramaswami
in the Republican debate, one of the two I think helpful exchanges, or
one of the few helpful exchanges, because that debate was in some ways an
exercise in futility when the forty point leader is not in the room. So
like certain interject it is entirely circumvented. The opening question about Richmond North Richmond,
they just didn't they try to acknowledge it with here's how I'll amnage a
regulatory reform, and just totally avoid the actual ethos of the question. Oliver
Anthony won't need a license to get on YouTube and my administration, the Nicki
Haley administration. No, actually that's funny, But I liked run to Saints
his answer because he looked right into the camera and said, first, America
is in decline, and if you cannot accept that premise, you do not
belong on that stage. Because what Anthony is singing to is actually the same
thing that uh, you know, a wealthy person looking at the fact that
they can't find a school for the child that is not teaching gender ideology or
racism, was thinking to no, I didn't mean that. I meant like,
actually, if you're a wealthy sort of centrist and you're looking around and
you're like, wow, this school was shut down. My kids having learning
problems, and I can't find a single place that's reasonably rice at all or
in the neighborhood that I can send my kid to without them learning gender ideology,
crazy stuff and racism. Like, I can't find it. And if
you're looking around, you'll probably resonate with America's in decline in the same way
that an Oliver Anthony would. But on that note, I was going to
say, actually, one of the more talent exchanges was between Vivek Ramaswami and
Mike Pence when Mike Pence said, basically, you know, the American people
are doing great, they just need a government. And I found that fascinating.
It was so bad, And Vivec had a good response for all of
his flaws, but he had a pretty good response to that one. And
and actually, there are a lot of people for whom America is really great
right now. There it is foolish to deny that. In fact, the
problem the problem as Sam is, we're in the same room, So Sam
is like physically ready to disagree. Even those people in some sense are becoming
miserable because of the effective social media I would say in technology. You know,
so obesity is more concentrated among people who are poorer. So as you
go down the income scale, obesity goes up. Yes, it's true,
but it's still pretty common among people who are wealthy, and that will make
you miserable. There is there. There's still a lot of problems with anxiety
and depression among people who have lots of money, increasing problems with all of
that, and so it's not as though we're all just super happy. But
that is to say, you still can be. And if you are,
you know, a wealthy suburb of let's say Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Washington,
DC, there are people that are doing okay and material conditions so long as
you can mentally balance those material conditions in a way that makes you feel fulfilled,
which is harder and harder than ever. But if you're doing it,
if you have a family, if you're doing the thing, and you still
can in certain places of the country, if that's all that you know,
you're you're kind of interfacing with as a presidential Canada, that's mostly who you're
interfacing with and thinking about, are those suburban moms who just really want you
to u you know, take down the temperature people who voted for Biden's return
to normalcy. Then you're missing you're missing out in the olive Anthony's right,
so he took the win out of my sales. Because I was getting ready
very strongly disagree, which you made a good point, I will say that
I think true many such cases. I think that I mean, clearly all
of Anthony isn't lamenting you know, the upper middle class in the Midwest.
But that's also such a small portion of people in the country. Yeah,
that's probably a couple dozen million. But the issue isn't the I'm trying to
think of how to phrase without sounding two two online, it's it's the professional
managerial class. It's the people who actually run the institutions, the people who
are actively extracting nationhood and wealth from people. Yes, yes, exactly,
Podad. There's people like that that I'm not going to say that are the
enemy of the country, of the enemy of the American people, but kind
of are the enemy of the country and the American people. The people who
like actively erode any sense of anything that's tethering people together. There's the shared
stake in the economy, of the shared benefits of the economy, the shared
cultural heritage. It's the cynical elites that all I think all of Anthony is
Lamenting, that increasingly come to define the nation as well as opposed to an
addition to running it. Look at the book banning question, for instance.
That's a great example that if you're a parent who says I don't want gender
queer and it actually even even as somebody who works in the space and is
like a Christian conservative, sometimes I look at those books and I'll see a
new one that's not genderqueer. This one I referenced most often because pen America
says it's the top target of bands. Quote mans, how often do you
find these new books? And for fun or for work? It's the utility
here. It's an entirely fair question. But I was reading a news story
today and they referenced one of these books like banned books that I hadn't seen
before. I was reading through it and I was like, oh my gosh,
this wasn't a children's section and it was It was just like shocking to
me that it was in a children's section, and this is held up as
that positive by are the people who run the institutions that run the country when
it's worse than that. And that's why I was getting to that. If
you are someone who's like, hey, no, like one of the many
Muslim parents in Dearborn or other parts of the country, that is just like,
let's not do this. This is we can all agree, right,
Like they're looking around, like, right, we're all on the same page,
and the teacher's Union turns around and says, oh, no, you're
a biggot. It's not just like, oh, here's a reasonable disagreement among
people in the same community. It's literally, you're a biggot. So it's
not just that they're saying these books are amazing and important. They're saying,
if you disagree with me, you weren't necessarily a biggot. You were committing
an act of violence. You're a threat to my existence, etcetera, etcetera.
So these sorts of feelings of decline are not just relegated to the working
class. They're widespread. I mean they should be widespread. And if you're
you know, Mike Pence, and that isn't informing the way you talk about
the mood of the people. Then again, like you're really missing out on
something because this is touching absolutely everyone. And the thing that came to mind
for some reason, the weird thing that came to mind. I think I
mentioned this on a podcast with Budford when Mike Penn said that was did you
miss when wapp was like the top song in the country for like weeks?
Like seriously, because if our government is a reflection of our people, if
that's what he wants our government to align more clearly with the people, great,
because we're there. We have the Wapp regime right now. There's also
the fact that the government, the whole point of republic is that it is
insulated from the people. To dare you you are see you were an enemy
of democracy? I mean, yeah, I'm very explicitly anti democracy. I
don't have that from anybody. But we should all be anti democracy in the
literal sense because we have a republican system of government. I mean, can
I just be anti democracy like we're at large? You can be. I'm
not going I'm a proud monarchist Arsani and I will be here on the left
and yeah, we'll keep you in checks. Okay, I will guide us
to the future. How whew is it going with that? Beause that one's
on me. Yes, anding got away from us. It's okay, well
no, but you were talking about like, oh yeah, sorry interjected.
What I wanted to say is fake me to point about how we're in a
He said something like we're in a sort of cold cultural civil war, and
I don't it's rebuttal to makepences what he called the Morning in America speech,
which I thought was an amazing, amazing rebuttal to that, because it's sorry,
Morning in America was in nineteen eighty four. It was not nineteen eighty
it was a re election message. Yeah, and I think part I think
two points. I think one part of the reason the Vaca resonates so deeply
with the people who Trump animated so much in twenty sixteen is because he is
in tune with the fact that everyone else is out of step, like you
have Nikki Hailey Kong for more foreign spending in Ukraine when Americans aren't seeing really
any return on investment in that, and if they are, they don't understand
why. And he's calling for the He's very much saying These people are out
of step. They don't know what they're talking about. They're out of touch
with you and your concerns. But also the one foible I have with that
comment is that it's not even just a cold cultural civil war. It's just
a cultural civil war. Like you said, if you disagree with your kids
take cold yeah, yeah, it's very much. It's very much militarized.
If you disagree with your kids being taught gender theory and schools, you're going
you run the risk of being fired from your job. Yeah, exactly.
People who disagreed in Canada with the truckers, yeah, debank, they were
debang. Yeah. And people keep saying that's never gonna happen here. It
happens here. It's going to happen here. If it I mean people do
get debang t here. I mean, granted that it's far and few in
between, but it's it will come here. If you give the left even
more power, if they consolidate even more power, just by consolidating power as
they do, it's going to happen. They're very explicit about that, and
they hide behind the same rhetoric like oh, nobody's pushing for like full term
abortions when they did it like a month ago, and then now disavow it.
They're gonna say no one's coming for your bank account until you say the
wrong thing again, and then your uncle with weird opinions gets his bank account
taken away. And once again, the biggest problem in the United States is
the corrupt media, because this doesn't happen in a healthy constitutional republic where you
have a functioning fourth estate. And that's not to say it should be.
You know, all this idealized illusion of a neutral Walter Concite delivering the new
delivering the news night after night, that was actually really never real. All
that was much closer to neutral than it is now. We've had partisan press
in this country for as long as we've existed, and that's just fine.
But what we have now is completely dishonest. And if you're not holding power
accountable, if the media is not holding power accountable, they are going to
do whatever the hell they want. And the power is aligned against the cultural
right, and they're aligned in their favor on economic questions, and you know,
just as much as it keeps some sense of social cohesion, right,
like, it's almost at a Gotham point, right, where like if they
almost you know, well, if you live in a major city, you've
been outside today, well yeah, I mean you can probably hear that.
People can probably hear when we record in the office where I'm not going to
dox this. We're not that far from the Capitol, the Capitol building that
is the center of the free world, to the center of power in the
free world. And you can regularly hear people screaming outside the office, probably
on the podcast recording, because they're screaming a very very loudly, and be
because they're mentally unwell when they live on the streets. And it's incredibly tragic,
and it is on a crazy scale. And that is due in some
part to something we haven't even touched on. In large part, it is
due to the fact that we are allowing China to supply Mexican cartels with increasingly
potent, dangerous versions of fentanyl trunk that flows freely across our border because we
can't do the most basic thing of actually securing the entrance into the country,
which secures the people, so that you don't have people from the terrorist watch
list crossing. However, a year, by the dozens, we have Chinese
people crossing, the crossing the border people try to flee, People flee China
to come to America illegally through Mexico. Yeah, that's how. That's how
it's easier to become an illegal immigrant via China than it is to become a
legal immigrant via China. It's just kind of funny. But I mean,
again, like, this is the failure of our This is a failure of
our elite class to perform the most basic functions of a government. Well,
I think it's I think it's I mean, obviously I don't think well,
a lot of people would push back against the idea, but we very clearly
have forfeited the idea of nationhood. There is no there's nothing. The people
who again, the people who run the institutions, who run the country,
hate what the founding ethos was. They've been told it's racist. They've been
taught it's Christian, which is apparently a bad thing. They've been taught us
everything that they share it. They've been toward us the antithesis to everything they
cherish. So they're going to work as hard as they can to undermine that
and implement the new founding. And that's manifesting like the civil rights regime coming
forthright where it's a in the gender ideology, if it's if it's if it
subverts what was established an established truth even ten years ago, it has to
get done away with. A nationhood is one of those things. There was
a clip going viral recently of Hodakopy in twenty twelve. I don't know if
you saw this, confronting the issue of gender transition. I believe she was
talking to an advocate of I shouldn't say gender of sex transition for children,
and she says, it's just crazy to me. This is Hodakopy on NBC
in twenty twelve. According to the video that was circulating Twitter, she says,
it is crazy to me that a thirteen or fourteen year old could be
could make that decision of whether they want to have biological children at that age,
because obviously that can be an issue if you're going through chemical transition.
And it gets to this question of the fentnel flooding our streets, et cetera,
et cetera, because people are zombified, which is why homelessness feels more
visible even in cities where it's actually like the levels of reduced or whatever it
is, it's because of these drugs which zombify people and make them so numb
to the world that they are behaving in ways that feel less stable. Yes,
Sam, well, it was a I'll let you finish your point,
then I'll make a dumb yes and go for it. Without the media covering
any of this, with the a the sort of proportionality that it deserves and
the accuracy it deserves, power will get away with it and people will continue
to suffer because the people that are preventing policies that might help them are not
being held accountable for failing to act or for acting in the line ways.
Are they numb to the world or are we numb to the world? I
would argue Diogenes was more free. We're numb to their numbness, right,
Like yeah, because yeah, it's it's totally true. I mean, when
you can get when you can escape from physical community and too. Obviously it's
absolutely terrible. It's it's devastating on all aspects of like human empathy. It's
it's awful. But yeah, I think there's something to be said about the
fact. I'm not even gonna try and twist this. I was just a
dumb joke. No, I mean, living on the streets is much easier
when you're unfentl Yeah, it's just it's it is, it's different. It's
completely if you said you're zompified, it's it numbs all of your senses of
perception. Yeah, the Trenk stuff is absolutely horrifying. I don't really know
what shrenk is. I know it's just a super powerful drug, very very
potent. But I've seen videos of Philadelphia, which is one of the founding
cities of the nation, one of them used to be an absolutely beautiful city.
It's it looks dystopient. It's just overflown with garbage. With the homeless
encampments aren't even if you go to some if you look at some cities,
homeless encampments sort of have some structure, right like here in parts of the
city, there's homeless encampments and it's like three or four camps and some kind
of shape, some kind of structure, whether it's like whether it's meant to
whether you withstand, whether or like give some sense of privacy, there's some
kind of logic there. In Philadelphia, it's just waste. Everything is just
waste. At these as. These people were just slumped over wander around and
writhe, yeah, it's bizarre. Well, and there's this, I mean
National Review there, this was something very online conservatives were fighting about. National
Review reviewed the Oliver Anthony song. Oh yeah, I was saying basically that
it you definitely remember that he just popped in others in and he so he
The National Review said basically this was one piece of National Review. I'm not
going to describe it to the entire publication because I'm sure that there was internal
descent over it, but published someone saying essentially that Oliver Anthony song doesn't give
enough power to individualism and agency? Right, am I remembering it correctly,
sama. And that's the sort of fundamental It's profoundly silly. It's an unseerious
criticism. Well, first of all, please stop picking a part of song
like it's a manifesto. Like just because some like some people are clinging to
it in a political way and for a cause, does not mean you take
it out on the songwriter for failing to have a perfectly manicured political manifesto when
it's an expression of emotion. This is just a silly thing to do.
And this really makes me mad. It's kind of an aside on that.
But I feel as though, I mean, it's not even I feel as
though it's just a fact the right is culturally illiterate, largely like there's not
really a sense of enough how to interpret art. It's clearly a song.
Songs are meant to express things. It's not meant to, like you said,
be a manifesto. It's just it's just a song. I think that's
the political class that's not so much the right. I mean, if you're
if you're looking at it. That's why I don't mean like I don't mean
like people like in the heartland who really resonate with it. I mean that
people who Afriget who wrote the review, but the knock of the chuckle head
who wrote that review where it's here's why it doesn't Why isn't he praising corporate
tax cuts. That's great for his for the GDP and his IRA. It's
it's people who just want to because this doesn't express my specific views, it
is wrong views. Yeah, yeah, no, I mean I get that.
And also, yes, treating a song as though it's supposed to be
a manifesto or an essay is just obnoxious to another degree. I mean it
is it's a song. It's supposed to be this visceral outburst of emotion.
It's vibes yeah, and it's vibes yes, but that vibe is not quite
accurate. He didn't praise corporate tax cuts. If he did, National Review
would have loved it would have been Song of the Year. Well. I
think there is something to be said for agency and individualism, and I do
think there are still some people that you know, make excuses for X number
of reasons, that have upward mobility at their disposal in the United States of
America in the year of Our Lord twenty twenty three, who are not exercising
that freedom. I'm sure that's true, absolutely, and maybe the New Right
doesn't talk about it enough. But guess what. We also now conduct all
of our business, personal and professional on little devices. It doesn't matter.
It does not matter if you are somebody who works, you know, third
shift at a fast food restaurant, at a waffle house, or you are
a business executive. You are still tied to that device for potential life and
death updates. So you can, at any moment in time, because of
that little box, have the worst or the best news of your life coming
down to you that it will rewire your brain. There's just no question about
it. It has done it to everyone, and it is having deleterious effects
on our mental health. You can have work coming through on that little device
at any given time, with an email asking you to work a different day,
someone's schedule got messed up, someone you know is sick, can you
take this shift, et cetera, et cetera. This can happen at any
time. So it's perfectly rational for somebody to constantly be checking that thing,
to constantly be checking that watch. And this has obviously been deleterious for people's
mental health, and it affects basically every single one of us. It is
the system. It is the social and professional system of life in this country
now. So yeah, it's like, if you want to have that individual
agency when you're likely to live in a community that is not flourishing because of
that, also because of again to bring it back to literally foods that we
eat, the fact that you have huge preponderance of type two diabetes and heart
disease and all of these other problems addiction. Maybe you live in one of
those communities that's not super touched by any of this, you're still really touched
by the phone problem, You're still really touched by all of that, the
fact that you're still really touched by obesity, even if you live in a
wealthy community. That really is war on all fronts. Like nobody can really
escape it. Like you said earlier, it's just it's it's truly unavoidable,
right, And individualism sounds great, I get it, and like it's very
very hard, right, it's it's but that's the thing. No, But
I mean, I mean, there's there is absolutely something to be to be
said for you know, being like having an incredible like Frederick Douglas story,
right, There's there's absolutely something to be said for that, and we are
we have the freedom to do it in this country in ways that have never
existed in human history. And I understand that, absolutely there's something to be
said for that. But that does not take culpability away from all of the
bad actors, powerful bad actors that are making that harder and harder and harder
every single day. It doesn't mean that you have to talk about one at
the expense of the other. It doesn't get the other one off the hook.
Right right to your point about individuality, I'm not sure if this is
a circular point or not, but the fact that the cultural the whole,
the fact that the country is just decaying and falling part of the seems makes
it impossible for anybody to self actualize as an individual. There's no way to
get the solid ground beneath their feet if every single cultural circumstance is just eroding
perpetually, right, like, for instance, it's people are meeting each other
on tender or economics. I was thinking, I wasn't even thinking of dating.
I was thinking, well, that's an economic question though, About like
whether you're able to start a family unit, Well, yeah, for sure,
I'm okay, yeah, I'll see at that point. But you know
you can you can't get to the point where you want to make that family
unit if you're drowning in student loans. Student loan dot is actually one of
the big reasons that people cite for not getting married at certain ages. And
whether or not you believe that it is actually what people cite. Yeah,
also that's my excuse as well, But really that's a completely valid point.
Yeah, student loan debt if your ticket, if you say, the ticket
to the middle classes that you have to filter yourself through this political cultural conditioning
for four years at insane cost that will put you in at least, you
know, thirty forty thousand dollars student loan debt on average. Well, someone
might say, if you are truly a rugged individualist, then you can go
to a trade school, or you can go to start at a community school,
pay a little bit of money, and then transfer to a state school
and get out scott free. And you can do this all while working another
job. And again, like, I think that's true for some people.
There are some people who do have the freedom and ability to do that,
but everywhere in society is telling them to do something else. Everywhere in society
is telling them to go get that humanity's degree, had the liberal arts school,
right, And so when you're eighteen years old and you're making that decision,
I'm sorry, I'm not going to be like m You should have been
that rugged individualist that found the past the path less traveled when your brain wasn't
fully formed, and you wouldn't have had forty thousand dollars dead. Now.
I think there's also something the point that the anti college right really misses is
that we need you know, high I q young conservatives to go into college.
If we need conservative doctors, engineers, engineers we need, we certainly
need competent engineers because our infrastructure is bad, Holy crap. But we know
you need conservative doctors who aren't going to tell a you know, an uncomfortable
with thirteen year old girl that maybe she's a boy. You need. If
we forfeit all of academia, if we tell all of our smart young people
to go become voters. And I'm not saying voters aren't important, because they
clearly are, and they make a crap ton of money. Yeah, we're
just going to forfeit these institutions in perpetuity. There has to be at some
point, there has to be an active attempt at recapture. And in order
to do that, you don't want to lesser the threshold to become skilled in
those things. So you have to be you have to enter the institutions yourself
and just try and take them over. Yeah. Well, and that's it
brings us kind of full circle here, which is to the book ends of
the Summer Sound of Freedom and Oliver Anthony, I did not see Sound of
Freedom. It's just fun, and I mean it's good it's not. I
wouldn't say it's the Fantastic movie. They wanted it to be some kind of
Uncle Tom's Cabin thing, like there was an explicit call at the end and
the post credits scene or along with the credit scene with Jim Caviezel saying,
this could be the next Uncle Tom's Cabin if we get enough people to see
it and wake them up to what's happening with human trafficking. I don't think
it's going to have that effect, just because I don't think there's the political
or cultural will to have that effect. Despite the fact that human trafficking is
a very real issue and people are very passionate about it, there's just not
the organization to do that, and I don't think people perceive it in the
same way they previous you know, black slavery in America. So yeah,
the reason that I didn't see yeah, yeah, And the reason I didn't
see it is because on a story like this, a I'm not a big
movie person in general. I mean that's not true. I do love movies,
but my attention span has been destroyed by reality television, both myself as
an individual and the tech company is. But also I've just I've always preferred
TV since I was a kid, and I also always preferred documentary. So
if you're telling me a true story, I very rarely have the patience for
a fictionalized version of it. I always want the real version so I can
judge it. It's just a weird thing about how my brain works. It
feels like I'm not saying it is a waste of time. It just feels
like a waste of time for me. Some of times I'd rather just get
the facts. That said. The really thing, really important thing to know
about Sound of Freedom is what it was able to do, which is totally
come in with no support from any of the traditional infrastructure in Hollywood, and
it was antagonized infrastructure to be in one of the most popular films of the
summer that was dominated by popular film. I mean, this is last summer
it was Top Gun. Everyone was talking about how Top Gun brought movies back,
and I don't really think anything's going to bring theaters back to where they
ever were, whether it's Top Gun or Barbie or Oppenheimer. But this movie
did just numbers that people can't be expected on a budget that nobody would pair
with that level of success, a budget, lack of media coverage, lack
of institutional power, all of that. And it's interesting what that show is
these sort of alternative paths through the gates people are now learning. I think
they now have the muscle memory, for instance, to figure out, you
know, they'll figure out Oliver Anthony's on Spotify, for instance, and go
check it out. People use YouTube, music or whatever it is they know,
you know, to look in those places instead of in the past.
I think when somebody like Oliver Anthony goes really viral, he's not necessarily able
to get that up on Spotify really quickly, you know what I mean,
Like it would just be on YouTube or just be the clip on Twitter or
something like that. And was sound a freedom I don't know. So,
Like to your point about cancel culture that you made earlier, I do think
some of the incentives are shifting, and I think some of this is playing
a role and shifting those incentives, which is all positive. But at the
same time, if the people in positions of power, let's even say on
the right, which is the only vehicle at this point to like making the
culture better, making the politics better, because it's the only party that's willing
to admit, you know, men or men, women are women, and
we shouldn't kill babies in the third term and etc. Etc. That's sanity.
It's a level of sanity that you need to expect as a baseline,
and if you can't, that's a big problem. But all that is to
say, the incentives are shifting, but if they're still going to be like
Oliver Anthony owned the Libs, then they go on. I think there's also
an issue we have to grapple with in the right is that huge not huge
contentions, but large swaths of it just kind of forfeit these battles, Like
there is a huge again not a huge contention, a considerable portion of nominal
people who will call themselves conservative, who just don't care about the transgender issue
anymore, Like we're tired of hearing about it though, to see the ground
because they want to move on to something that's more pressing, like whether or
not they can afford to feed their kids completely. And yeah, you know,
I can empathize with that, but that is a very existential issue that
strikes at the heart of what it just means to exist. Yes, and
if we lose the will to fight those cultural battles, which I am sad
to say, I think a big portion of people are then that heresy is
going to assert itself as the truth. Yeah, you'll notice Oliver Anthony wasn't
just singing about it, wasn't justest singing about the economy. Yeah, he
was singing about the cross section of the economy and culture, and with a
heavy emphasis and culture. So yeah, I mean it, all of this
stuff absolutely matters. It is a kitchen table issue for families, whether their
school is teaching that, whether Disney World, where they planned this trip and
their kids are dying to go, going to have men dressed as princesses like
these are actually kitchen table issues for people, and it is also, I
think a baseline question of just like sanity and your commitment to truth. It's
not easy to be someone on the left who has heterodox opinions on these.
Even if you're like billionaire JK. Rowling. You're being called all the worst
names of men imaginable in the West, you know, bigot it, you're
being accused of causing suicides. I mean, it's just it is really horrific
stuff, and it has material consequences. There's no question about it. Do
you think the insensives are shifting. I think, you know, the institutions
are learning. For instance, we are not going to get into the Richard
Hannanni debate, but debate, but so far his publisher has stood by him.
And you know what, public intellectuals are not going to be squeaky clean
little uh, you know, perfect perfectionists, like they're going to have horrific
ideas, and well, I don't know about horrific all the time, but
you do have to there has to be some degree of like subversion in order
to be and have to debate. You have to be able to debate,
right, Yeah, that's all I was saying. And I think the insensives
are shifting because and I would have been canceled in thirty seconds. And like
sincerely, I mean, I don't think people on the right should be entertaining
the Nannias situation at all. I think he's proven time and again that he
is not certainly not a friend of the right, and certainly not somebody whose
ideas should be embraced, whose worldview should be embraced. That's not to condemn
every tweet or the parson himself so much as it is some of those ideas
that I think are truly I don't want to debate it on this on the
show because I don't think it's worth it. But some really truly evil Nietzsche
in worldview, parts of his worldview and the sort of nietch and conservatism we
were mentioning BAP on Red Scared just not that long ago. There's an opening
for that, I think right now it's very online. That was the I'd
love to get into the niche and stuff at some point, but that's going
to take a whole other like month of recording. So easy for a nearly
seven foot cis hit white man, tot too long for Nietzsche. No,
I despise Nietzche. That is not offensive. I know I am reviled by
his very correct ideas. Take it back, I retract that. I actually
do think he has a very anti Christian worldview that is very problematic. But
I understand why it resonates with a lot of people online. It makes perfect
suns Yeah, no, no, it's completely understanding. By but why these
sort of ideas are jumping into the cultural vacuum, and by the way it
is counterproductive for elites to continue creating those cultural vacuums because the populism they so
detest, or maybe let's say deplore, is going to get stronger and stronger
more they create those vacuums. They cannot shut it down. And I think
that's an interesting caveat to not caveat. But an interesting sidebar to the Hanania
situation is that if you, you know, take away his book deal and
basically just try to unperson him exactly, that's just going to put a tunnel
windiness sales and just make people want to talk about it more. I agree,
although we were also talking about how that censorship can have real consequences on
the discourse, and I think both it's like both our true. In the
one hand, it makes it like really sexy and seductive to a group of
people it depends. On the other hand, Yeah, that group might not
grow like it would, but it still can get really strong right through more
nefarious means. Sometimes, if you if you suppress people having a free conversation
about these things, they're going to become resentful and bitter and use their ideas
as a weapon, as opposed to a free flowing idea where they might find
a way to delegitimize an otherwise faulty premise. Right, So it's like,
for instance, let's take as we wrap as we wrap up here, let's
take Oliver Anthony and sound a Freedom. When you have National Review or people
saying, well, this song did not talk about individualism and the movie was
Q adjacent, It's like, okay, so let me just grant you that
point. I'll grant you both of that point, both of those points.
Why on earth are you wasting your time talking about this small quibble rather than
the very serious problems that are at the root of all of this, which
would be the fact that you have billionaire Jeffrey Epstein rings or actually, let's
just say that one ring, where's mass mass trafficking? That was you know,
aided and about it by the political class and to some extent the media
for a while. And then the man doesn't find doesn't get justice is connected
to intelligence. You have all this information, and then you have, on
the other hand, like very obvious in real concerns in the Olive Anthony song.
If even you say, not enough focus on individualism, but you would
agree those problems exist, why would you waste your breath talking about some small
downstream thing. It's like when people turn to every conservative in media and say,
well, why aren't you denouncing this one thing Trump did, It's like,
of course, of course Trump did some things wrong. I'm much more
concerned about the fact that the entire political system and Department of Justice is being
weaponized against him in ways that are much worse than what he did. And
you're gonna get more of that if you don't stop this other thing. So
why are you wasting your breath on that? Whenever someone accuses something of being
Q adjacent, it kind of makes me think they're just a pedophile. Like,
why is it an issue for someone to say, hey, it's bad
a traffic children. Yeah, I mean you'd think it would be totally fine.
I think that's a pretty innocuous thing to say. Anyway, Well,
yeah, we can agree on that point. Pedophiles are bad. Pedophiles are
bad. Sam Mangold Lennart, staff editor at The Federalist. Thanks for this
late summer grievance airing. No problem, Always happy to event. All right,
I'm Emily Jasinski, Culture editor the Federalist. You've been listening to another
edition of Federalist Radio Hour. We'll be back soon with more. Until then,
be lovers of freedom and anxious for the frame