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Head on over to Freeman Beyond the Wall dot com,
forward slash support and do it there. Thank you. I
want to welcome everyone back to the Pikingona Show. John
Slaughter's back, Hey, John, how you doing.
Speaker 2: I'm doing good, Pete and joining the holy week. How
are you?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, the uh, I guess this is our week, right,
this is our march madness.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's what's my March madness. I don't watch basketball.
Speaker 1: This is all I got, all right, So man, we're
gonna have to start calling you John Prolific. What is this?
You're released two books in less than a year?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and Bright actually in less than I think
the novel came out January sixth, and this was about
a month and a half after that, so yeah, it
was pretty pretty quick.
Speaker 1: Yeah. You have a full time job and a family,
and I'm and I'm over here like and people tell me, oh,
you know, you work really hard and everything, and then
I'm look, I'm looking at what you do and I'm like,
how do you do that?
Speaker 2: My wife asked me the same thing. One of my
secrets is I have a long commute, So whenever I
want to write essays and things in my mind, I
record myself talking them out, and then I go back
and turn it into the written form. That's my that's
my secret.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I've had an idea for for something long the
form for a while now, and I thought that that's
the way would be the best would be best for
me to do it would be to record it audio
and then uh, and then transcribe it and see how
I can clean it up, or more importantly, I have
somebody who could clean it up for me. So but yeah, no,
it's congratulations, it's uh the first book, Crimson Veil. I
know Thomas covered covered the book very well on his
on his podcast mind Phase or over on his sub stack.
I really enjoyed that conversation a lot. And then you know,
you you're you're like, oh, you know, let me uh,
let me throw out another book because you know, hey,
you know, I'm that smart and I'm that you know,
I have so much to say called Dispatches from the
Old South Repository. So why don't you give an overview
of that and then we'll start jumping into some themes.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So Dispatches Pete is it's a collection of what
I felt were the and and other people other people's
input as well, but I felt were the best essays
I had written over the last three years, and so
I compiled them, you know, into into a collection, and
I kind of separated it into a couple of different
categories because the the the entirety of Dispatches covers a
lot of ground. I mean, there's essays on culture, on religion,
there's some I don't know if I know, I didn't
include any of the film critique, but there's it's it's religion, culture,
there's stuff about the South. There's advice for young men.
There's some historical, uh historical essays on historical figures that
I found interesting. So it's kind of a It just
covers essentially every thing that I find interesting and I
spend my time, you know, writing about or talking about,
and I wanted to compile it all and get it
out there because I know, you know myself, I don't
really enjoy reading stuff online or on my phone or
on my tablet. So I wanted to put in physical
form for anybody who wanted to dive into it. And
then I was kind of shocked when I started putting
it together and I realized there's like almost five hundred
pages worth of worth of stuff in here. So it
was I was almost shocked at how much output I had,
As you were.
Speaker 1: Well, it's good that you frame it that way. I
know some of us are so busy that buying a
five hundred page book and trying to read a five
hundred page book is rough, but if there are single
essays and people can consume it that way, you know,
some of the best books out there are just essays
that are that have been compiled and being able to
read one at a time helps a lot, I think.
So I'm telling I'm saying that to tell people to
go buy the book and not worry about having to
read the whole thing at once. You can. It's sort
of meant to be read as essay upon essay. But
also they all click together for a theme. I mean, what,
what do you know? Maybe you mentioned it already, but
what do you think that theme is?
Speaker 2: Well, I think the overall theme is sort of and
it probably goes with with I think the first essay
is entropy and rebirth, because I was a lot of
what I was focusing and covering was was the path
of America, but but how it has decayed in a
lot of ways, and how it has begun to fall apart.
But also a lot of it leans into what the
building blocks would be for the future, the sort of
things that that you would look for to to start
to start new, whether that's from the ground up or
in preparation for whatever the future is going to look like.
You know, I tend to lean towards at the very
least probably some type of Balkanization or something, and that's
going to come with, you know, downsizing, whether it's economically
or you know, just in your local area being reduced
to your local area. And so I wanted to kind
of bring that part into it too, because it's not
just a matter of like, Okay, these are the problems
and things are falling apart, but what do you do
about that? So so the overall theme is kind of
looking at all of that and combining those together to
kind of give an overview of what's happening and what
we can do possibly or what you can do to
mitigate those things or to improve on in the future.
Speaker 1: Well, you mentioned entropy and rebirth. Let's see, let's dive
into that. It looks like you have some Hegelian and
Spanglarian kind of influenced there, with like the cyclical nature
of civilizations, which isn't history repeats itself, but that there
is a cycle to the things, you know, as I
think Spangler said that once the high culture reaches the
civilization point, that's when things start to go into decline. So,
you know, you talk about how the old Right had
has a nostalgia for pre nineteen sixties America, but the
New Right seems to be accepting its inevitable decline. And
you even mentioned Batman's Batman Begins, which I think is
probably the best movie out of all of them. When
you're if you're looking for philosophy, and how Bruce Wayne
wants to save Gotham, but rajah Gul's vision for rebirth
like really mirrors a little bit more of how a
lot of people on the New Right talk.
Speaker 2: No exactly and that that that is the first essay
which which I had titled The Fall of Gotham the
Fall of America, because I was watching that film, you know,
recent or well when I wrote this, right before I
wrote this, and I realized that the same thing that
you're watching Bruce Wayne, and he is sort of a
stand in for the old Right and sort of the
old guard of America. Not just because he wants to
to save Gotham, right if Gotham's a stand in for America,
but because he's looking at the Gotham that his father,
that his father built, right, all the things his father
did for the city, and the city still obviously he
the city kills him right, and he's hell bent on
on rebuilding or holding on to these things that he
doesn't realize not only killed his father but also have
left Gotham in the state that it is. And on
the on the other end of it, you have rozoh Gull,
who who does represent in many ways sort of the
accelerationist point of view and explicitly from like the League
of Shadows in the film there their philosophy is cyclical history.
The only difference being that they claim that when they
see the decay start to take hold at a certain point,
they decide to sort of to sort of light the
match right to speed things up. And so the real conflict.
The only reason that roz Oogul is seen as a
villain is because instead of taking sort of a passive
approach and noticing that the declient is coming and it's inevitable,
he wants to kickstart it right. And it's that part
that turns them into a villain. But outside of that,
you know, you see this conflict between the two of them,
and they have these conversations, you know, multiple times, and
every time at least in my opinion. You know, Bruce
Wayne's character kind of walks away on the losing end
of it because he doesn't have an answer. His answer
is just like, well, I just want to save it.
I just want to be the good guy. But he
doesn't understand that. You know, the city's run by criminals,
it's a crime infested, drug infested. You know, it's corrupted
to its core, and all he's doing is helping it
stay in that state longer, essentially. And this is the
same thing you see with the with the old, right.
You know, when you talk to a lot of boomers,
you'll notice that they they they see everything with rose
colored glasses, but they also want to hold on to
a pass that doesn't exist anymore. It's kind of like,
if you you know, I've had this conversation where I've
spoken with with older boomers and some older gen xers
about the dating market. Right. I'm married with kids, so
I don't but I do think about it a lot
because my oldest son is eleven, so it won't be
long before he's probably interested in that. And when I
try to explain to them the issues in the dating market,
I get kind of a blank stare and then they
just repeat the same advice they got and they were kids,
because they can't seem to see the situation for what
it is. And I think that's sort of the position
that that Bruce Wayne's character is in. And also the
old Right, they see a world that doesn't exist anymore,
you know, and they can't fathom the idea that something
new has to come or that something has has reached
a point that it is no longer sustainable.
Speaker 1: Right, and the New Right doesn't have to be like
accelerationist to where you're like, oh, I want I want
the money to supply to so you completely to be
destroyed so that people suffer and then we have some
kind of revolution. It could just be like, well, democracy
doesn't work anymore. We need something new, and we can't
fix Washington, DC. You know. For some of us think
that Trump may try, but he's not going to be
able to He's not going to have the will to
do what needs to be done in order to absolutely
tear down what's been built. There don't even know if
that's possible. So accelerationism or the New Right or Rajah
Wool's vision can be anything from like yeah, we want
to see you know, we want to see cities burn too. Well,
we just want to a bunch of us want to
move into the same area, and you have a shared
culture and have that culture influence the politics of the town.
And you know, maybe those of us who want to
go who would prefer having a morality that matches more
the morality of the past, we can influence that on
our own. So it doesn't necessarily have to be accelerationism
to the point where you know, New York City's on
fire or you know the Turner Diaries, but you you
can actually go and do something else, and you know,
then you'll have the people who are the accelerationists or
the ones who want to save everything. We're like, well,
they'll just come and they'll they'll waco you and you know,
so it's it's it's basically a back and forth and
it's a fight, just like you know, Bruce Wayne and
Rajah will have that conversation toward the end of the movie.
Speaker 2: Well yeah, and if you remember there, and I open
the the essay with that quote where where ros Egill
tells he tells Bruce Wayne that you know, when a
force grows too wild to purging fire is inevitable and natural, right,
And I think one way to approach this also is
to understand that the longer that you prolong something, the worse.
The worse the collapse is going to be, right, And
I think that's sort of the motivation behind in the film,
that's sort of the most motivation behind the League of Shadows,
is if we go ahead and do this now, it
is going to alleviate some of the suffering in the
future right now. I don't know that that's necessarily the
best approach, but I do think on an individual level
that probably is is a good approach insofar as you're
looking at it through the lens of this is going
to happen, and what can I to do to prepare
for it, right, like you said, whether that's that's you know,
organizing communities around like minded individuals, or focusing on trying
to shure up power in local politics because you know,
if these things occur, which there's no reason to think
they wouldn't, those local positions are going to become exponentially
more influential and powerful, right, So accelerating sort of your
preparedness for that, I think is a is a positive
way to twist that accelerationsm away from you know, this
sort of chaotic you know version that they have, which
is what we want to accelerate the collapse period. I
think the mindset to approach that with is we know
this is going to happen. The only people who don't
know that are ones who are either wilfully ignorant or
are so ideologically married to you know, the old America
or the America that they grew up in that they
can't see anything else. And so I think accelerating your
preparedness and understanding this is going to happen, and the
more the better you are prepared for, the less it's
going to hurt in the long run.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you want to look at ideological division, all
you have to do is look at Czechoslovakia. They broke
up into the Czech Republic and Slovakia and they did
it peacefully and basically check the Czech Republic is more
humanist and Slovakia is more religious traditional. Now, I know
people are going to be screaming at me because maybe
they've been to a part of either one where that
contradicts it. But on the most part, this is what
this is what the checks wrote at the time why
they were doing it. So you know, leave me, leave
me alone. Please, I don't, I don't. I don't need
any more emails than I already get. So yeah, you know,
but people, you know, people will still go back to well,
you know, this national government that basically the only thing
they can do is violence. But it seems like they've
gotten to the point where it's just targeting individuals. Yeah.
I don't know that they even have the will anymore
to target an area where you know, there's a certain
there's a certain group in Tennessee right now that has
all moved there, and there's some writer in like Nashville
who's reporting on them and trying to take everything they
say and turn it into the new KKK or they're
white nationalists or Christian nationalists and everything. And I want
to thank that person for actually mentioning some of my
banger tweets in his report. But yeah, I mean, that's
all it is is you have some old, some old
liberal who is like, oh, look at what these people
are doing over there, and everyone's like, yeah, we don't care.
Speaker 2: Well, I think you know, this started a long long
time ago. I always cite the Bundy Ranch incident as
sort of the first example of their unwillingness to really enforce,
you know, whether regardless of what people think of Bundy
and the whole situation, the fact that they kind of
stood toe to toe with the federal government and the
federal government back down, right, they didn't have the will then,
and this kind of repeated, even though you know, I
have a lot of issues with Greg Abbott and I
don't really I think it was more of a show.
But still, the fact that the government did not actually
go down there and just force him to do what
they wanted. We've slowly seen that, and that's transpired even
to your point, even into this attempt to cancel people
and go after people, it's even lost its ability to
do that on the individual level largely, and I think
that's mostly due to a shift in people's mentality. There's
so many you know, they've been yelling at us for
a decade now, right, and it just it's now they're
just they're just screaming into the void. Nobody's listening to
them anymore, right, And I think that is definitely a sign,
in my opinion, of their their loss of their will
to actually act and enforce their their edicts. And part
of me thinks that might be because they know that,
you know, if you if you try to enforce a
law and you fail, that's worse than not enforcing it
at all. And I think that's the position they're in now.
Speaker 1: Well, moving on something that you pick up in the
the theme you pick up in the second essay. It
talks about basically technology and societal advancements. And yeah, you'll
even hear some people on the on the new right
talk about how technology is going to help us going forward.
I remember on a gun forum, this is over ten
years ago, people talking about how really the only way
you could have proper governance and like justice is AI
and I got, yeah, who programs that? Okay, sure, but
you know you talk about how technology and societal advancements
and I mean this has some some spangler in it too,
but it also echoes Ilul and Kazynski that you know,
while they've helped us to live and easier life, you know,
it severs us you know, our human size from nature
and even even God.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I so this goes into this that particular essay
I was hesitant to right in the first place, only
because the my view of natural selection, which comes through
their law in an essay is a little I wouldn't
I wouldn't call it heretical, but I guess it's it's
sort of outside of the norm. And I tend to
look at, you know, natural selection as a mechanism by
which God maintains the balance of life, so to speak. Right,
And and the way that I frame it in the
essay is that if you were designing if you were
designing a world and you put life on that world
and you wanted that life to be able to survive
any situation, you you couldn't come up with a more
novel or more ingenious idea than natural selection. So so
a life form that can adapt to any environmental changes, right,
and so and from that I kind of look at
how that applies to people, and that there there's sort
of this equilibrium where you know, when man is at
his most primal, he's he's he's sort of connected to
the more animal, the more instinctual, and as he sort
of grows and technology kind of comes in and you
get agriculture, you move to this point where those abundance
of resources allow for the people who have you know,
high i Q. High intelligence. It creates a division of
labor and then they can focus on other things. And
as that technology expands, you know, you you free people
to do these things. But what you also do at
the same time is you you begin to remove all
the natural selection pressures that that that got the society
there in the first place, all the all the little things,
whether it's you know, you know, and it's difficult to
talk about this a lot of times because people take
this the wrong way, but even little things like infant
mortality rates. When you're when you're dropping those things to zero,
you're creating a situation where you're getting a lot of
bad traits that naturally would have would have been weeded out.
They're they're they're growing exponentially, and the pressure then gets
placed on the you know, if we want to use
like the Preto distribution and look at it like eighty
twenty and say twenty percent of the people are the
ones innovating and creating, the ratio begins to warp because
you're or society becomes overburdened with people that no longer
contribute in any capacity, and the technology only fully only
facilitates this more and more. You think of like medical technology, right,
if we look at This is the example I use
in the essay, which is diabetic medications don't actually reduce
the amount of diabetics. They just allow people who are
diabetic to you know, live longer lives, and that's great
and all. But then they have more children and they
pass on those eating habits, and you know, with more diabetics,
so the problem becomes worse. And I think technology does
this on multiple levels. And what it ends up doing
is it puts the situation, the society in a situation
where it's so unfit to survive that it's unsalvageable. Because
the people can no longer survive on their own, they
become dependent on the technology, whether that's through medicine or
you know, even now if we think of it in
terms of the fact that nobody you know, people can't
grow their own food, they can't provide for themselves. But
it does. It never stops, right because the technology, again,
like with a lull, that technique sort of is self serving, right.
It's not that it's it's neutral, it's ambivalent. It just
wants to survive and it's going to keep going. And
it reaches a point where, you know, you reach sort
of the event horizon where the technological dependence becomes so
great that there's no going back, and everything sort of collapses.
And I think there's even an element of the sort
of the Tower of Babbel element. Right, you begin to
play gods so much by interfering with the natural, natural
processes that society becomes unsustainable.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: And one of the examples also, I use is if
we look at dog breeds. There there's a point where
man is creating dog breeds that are amazing, Right, You're
geting German shepherds, you're getting bloodhounds, You're getting you know, collegues,
border colleagues. But then you get the bulldog, right, the
English bulldog, which reaches a point where it can't even
reproduce on its own because of constant human meddling with technology.
And I think that same analogy applies to what happens
to a society as it becomes more technologically advanced.
Speaker 1: You mentioned Roman France in there. You know, by abandoning
in the natural order, it leads to their cultural decline.
I mean, you know, Roman France, we're talking about pre
industrial revolutions. How does how do you see that working
for those.
Speaker 2: Two Well, I think it's a lot of this is
a byproduct of the way that cities operate, right, And
we know, you know, Spandrel called the IQ shredders. But
if we look at you know, as they become more
technologically advanced, you know this and even for their obviously
technology which is not as advanced as ours, they call
into these cities. They're moved out from from the countryside.
And when they get into these places, it seems to
be a natural occurrence that something like even feminism, right,
and something we think of in modern terms, shows up
in Rome specifically. You know, Cato rails against this at
some point, and you see their birth rates collapse, right,
And it's just it's a product of urbanization. I think
that creates these unnatural situations because what I see it
is is there's there's a certain amount of connection to
the natural world that is necessary for people to understand
how things operate. And the farther the longer they're removed
from that, the less they understand why they do what
they do. And so even something like having children becomes
a question of whether you should or should not, as
opposed to just something that happens. Right, So I think
it's it's it's almost a never as people become disconnected
from nature, that they lose sight of the natural order
of things essentially, and when they do that, they begin
to act in unnatural ways, and they begin to fight
against things that were never questioned in the first place,
like no, you know, even today, you know, you see
that with transgenderism. And I cover this a little bit
in another essay in the book, where I go into
more detail on the collapsing birth rates in Rome that
I believe it was Augustus tried to, you know, he
the alects Julia. He had all these laws that attempted
to to raise the birth rate in Rome, and nothing
was able to do that because once they had reached
that point. You know, he even talks about how towards
the end, almost every single every senator in Rome was
of servile origin, right, they're all because then that the
Romans were no longer having children. They had been living
in the lap of luxury for so long that they
can no longer, they can no longer do the normal
things that they would. They have to go out and
find people that are from a more primitive background to
even facilitate population growth.
Speaker 1: Well, Yaki talks about how whenever a country goes hard
on immigration, native birth rates stop. I think there's a
metaphysical aspect to that, but that'll take us off on
a tangent. But you know basically what it does, it
makes things more expensive. And we're seeing that now. I mean,
people are like, I can't afford a house. Okay, well
we need to deport forty million people, and how this
will be how's it will be cheaper? Well, well, how
does that work? Well, I mean it's simple economics, not
the junk economics that we get fed fed from every direction.
Speaker 2: But the yeah, let's say Pete, Well, you know what's
interesting about that as well is that, you know, there's
a there's a really small book and a lot of
people have read it, and it's called The Decline of Empires.
It's by John Hubbard, I believe, but he talks about
in that that he says that the immigrants and the
outsiders that came into Rome disappeared like water into the sands.
I believe I might be misquoting him, but he points
out that even when they come in that their populations
begin to decline, like they only get a generation and
they immediately fall into the same trap.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think I think a lot of that
has to do with the fact that we're not meant
to be pressed in people be pressed into the same polity,
into these gigantic, huge polities. You know, if you have
people who are spread out, you know, I think, what's
the number, eighty to eighty five percent of the population
of the United States lives within what one hundred miles
of the co of either coast of you know, of
all the borders. If you if you have people spread out,
then you know, especially on the local level, that things
can be a lot cheaper. You know, It's why you
know where you know, where we live, a house is
a hell of a lot cheaper than than you know,
only I live an hour and a half from Atlanta,
and you know, compare the price of houses. But the yeah,
it seems like and you you know, it's something that
Another thing that you mentioned in the essay is urbanization,
and I think it was Spangler again who you know,
mentioned that, like in the ninth in the eighteen hundreds.
In the nineteenth century, when people were pressing into cities,
cities became like military barracks where they just went there
to work. They worked eighteen hours a day, went home
to their to their barracks, slept, and then went back
to work. And you know, things were so dangerous that
there was a good chance they weren't coming home from
work the next day. So you know what kind of
how does the industrial revolution and urbanization take a toll
on us?
Speaker 2: Well? Right? And if you and you consider too that
within that same framework of urbanization, children become not just
say a luxury, but I guess you could frame it
as a luxury, but they become something that is no
longer beneficial.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: And when you're a smaller, more agricultural society or a
rural environment, children are a benefit. Right. You have a
small farm, you have a trade or something that you
that you operate locally. The more children you have, the
more free labor, you know, if you want to look
at it that way, and that that's a net benefit.
But when you live in a city and you're crammed
into these you know, as Spangler called them, like like
worker barracks, right, your children are just an expense. And
again when you're when you're so disconnected from the natural
world that you no longer like you see this, right,
like sex no longer becomes about procreation. It's just a
a physical act of temporal pleasure, right, So they become
so removed from that well having when you're thinking that way,
and then you factor in the children are essentially an
economic burden. Now, when you live in an urban environment,
it's only natural that people are going to stop having children.
And then this is where the technology comes in. You
then apply or then you then give them the ability
to stop having children through contraceptives, which that technology is
only increased in our society, which is only going to
magnify that problem.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, And then you take into consideration that when
you have urbanization, and unfortunately the urban centers have a
tendency to move culture and change culture. Then you have
the mother who, now because everything's become so expensive, has
to work outside the house. And then you have two
transition to a theme of another essay is you have
a masculinity crisis and men aren't seen as the protector
of the hero anymore. So you want to talk a
little bit about that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think this is one of the one of
the key issues sort of of our time in a
lot of ways, is that the men have largely urbanization
and technological advancement allows for men to become optional. Right,
So everything that a man provides in a natural environment
and the way things are intended to be structured, we
could say safety, security, they obviously provide, you know, not
just a physical safety and security, but also economic All
these things that the husband would provide are now replaced
by by the state essentially, which is only facilitated by
a large a government and an urban centers where you
can have things like a police force, you can have
a fire department, you can have you know, you can
have your ambulances, et cetera. And what this allows is
for women to, like you said, they can leave the
home because things become more expensive and they have to work.
But in doing so, they are provided economic freedom, so
they no longer need a man to provide anything for
them economically. But they also no longer need the safety
and security, so they no longer need a man to
protect them to keep them safe. And at first this
is kind of a good thing, right you don't want
you don't want your women to feel uncomfortable when when
they're leaving the home, or feel unsafe, but that same
safety over time that it becomes the illusion of safety
and they forget that they need a man at all,
or they need a husband at all, and then the
purpose of the man completely fades to from well I
need a husband for safety, security, to take care of
me when I'm pregnant, to well, I just want a husband.
I just want to want a man. I want a husband,
And of course that's going to shape the way dating
discourses is going to go because they're no longer going
to seek out the traits that they would normally seek,
so they're gonna seek out the wrong kind of men.
And then this of course leads to you know, you
get problems with the divorce rate is going to go up,
and then the state has to step in and play
the middleman. And once the woman is you know, provided
for on that stage again, she can now leave the
man and the state will take his money and provide
for her. She will then raise those young men in
a situation where shield teach them to be the kind
of man she wants, But the type of man she
wants is warped by the fact that she's never actually
needed a man for anything, and so you create this
sort of negative feedback loop where the women's view of
the male and the masculine is warped, and then they
pass that on to the children, and the boys grow
up with that same exact mentality. All right, And then
the danger of this is, and I'm not sure I
talked about this in a couple of essays, the real
danger of this is, in my opinion, is that we're
seeing with the rise of AI and some of these
these new these new AI AI models that you can
speak to, they're they're very accurate, and what they're going
to do, in my opinion, is they're going to replace
They're going to do the same thing to women that
the urbanization and the you know, this large sort of
over you know, draconian governmn does in replacing the male.
These are going to do that for the female because
these young men will no longer the one thing they're
going to need a woman for that hasn't been replaced
is the emotional support, the partnership there that you get
from your wife. Those are going to replace that, and
you're going to create this situation where neither males or
females need each other to survive, because you're going to
you're gonna give them the basic, the basic things that
they would get from each other. And so they're just
going to completely be alienated. And again, this will just
facilitate the drop in in birth rate even to an
even greater extent.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and to a certain extent, it even basically takes
removes responsibility for any kind of like individual justice that might.
Speaker 2: Be meted out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you're relying so much upon local authorities, police,
the courts or anything like that. You you know, the Marshall ethos,
which I think is a term you used in the essay,
just disappears. And you know, Thomas talks about you know,
when we talk about that there is a certain group
in this country that doesn't the overwhelming majority of the crime.
You know, Thomas is like, well, I don't really have
a problem with that group because they're not Why should I,
and they're not going anywhere. But there was a time
when if people got out of line, you could deal
with it. And I mean that's just gone. You mentioned
that to people, and it's not even like they're like, oh,
I'm scared I'm going to get in trouble with the law.
It's like, well, no, that's not how we do things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's this is ironically, this is a conversation
was having the other day. I have a strange respect
or early nineties gangster apt specifically for this reason, because
I've always seen it as an expression and extremely warped.
It's warped, don't get me wrong on this, but is
an expression of a certain form of marshal ethos and
masculinity that hasn't been completely snuffed out yet. And there's
a certain level of respect and there's a certain level
of that which you need in a society, right, there
has to be a healthy level of the potential for
violence in order to keep to keep things safe. Right.
This is something you see when you'll often hear a
lot of feminists will talk about, you know, spousal abuse
rates and stuff and why no fall divorce and the
legal system is necessary. But what they don't understand is that,
you know, prior to this, again going back to living
in smaller environments, if you were to be the type
of man that would beat his wife, you had to
worry about the fact that her brother, her father, her
cousins were all going to retaliate.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: You couldn't just get away with this freely, and that
was understood, and that's that keeps people in line. And
as as warped as that might be coming out of
sort of like those urban communities. It exists for a reason,
it's just a bad expression of it. The problem, to
large degree is that we as a group have completely
lost that because we have sort of become over domesticated.
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, yeah, I know a mutual of ours. I
won't mention who it is, but you know, they were
in public and there were you know, two scholars, you know,
being dangerous. It could have hurt somebody, and you know,
our friend went to the went to the little There
were police at this event, and the police wouldn't do anything.
Uh maybe he'll correct me if I'm wrong, but I
think they were Indians, and he suck it into his
own hands. Well it turns out that they were underage,
and yeah, now this person's in trouble.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's you know, well it's gonna say they it's
ironic that they you know, that they can behave in
such a way. And then the minute that it's revealed
that they're you know, underage, that they're their adolescents, their children,
however they want to frame it, they treat them, they
treat them like children. I don't want to go off
on a tangent on this, but this one, you know,
when I was a this is something that dawned on
me when I worked as a cop for three years,
is you know, the specific ethnic group that we see
a lot of the crime from. I realized very quickly,
you know, I would deal with thirty year old men
who had been arrested for for murder, assault, and their
their mothers would call and they my baby, this, my
baby that, And it dawned on me at that moment.
It was the first time I realized, like, these people
have never grown up their children their entire life. There's
no man around to say no, you have to be
held responsible for your actions. They just operate the way
kids do and they get out of they get out
of trouble constantly. But then they become adults and that
sort of mentality and that type of policing just facilitates
that infantilization that allows them, you know, but then you're
treating a fifteen sixteen year old boy like he's like
he's a child. It's not going to go.
Speaker 1: Well, no, never, never, And yeah, you I'm sure you've
seen the meme of they actually believe that they're that
they're innocent because they the past doesn't exist to them.
They're always living in the presence. So at that present moment, yeah,
I'm not I didn't do nothing wrong. But all right,
let's uh, let's talk about solutions, because I mean, this
can get depressing when you go down, when you get
you know, when you get down a spankleran rabbit hole,
it's like, oh boy, one of the I guess solutions
you put in here is always one that I like
to talk about. I used to talk about a lot
back in the libertarian days. But arranged marriages and you
you know, you have you actually call it a strategic pillar.
So why don't we Why don't you go off on
that and we'll see where this goes.
Speaker 2: So with arranged marriage is the first thing people have
to understand, and a lot of people don't when they
when they hear range marriage is their mind immediately goes
to India and they think of somebody picking children out
and pairing them off with no real regard for anything
other than what the parents want. And that is just
one form of arranged marriages. There there's really three different
forms of arranged marriage. You have you have the one
in which you know, we think of in India. You
have another form in which the the parents play. They
basically have veto power. So the child brings a potential
mate in front of them and they they they kind
of say yeah or nay. And then you have the
middle ground, which is what was practiced at least in
the upper you know, the upper echelons of society and
the aristocracy throughout the West, which was basically matchmaking. And
oftentimes the aunt would play this role of matchmaker, and
she would try to find somebody that was, you know,
that that would benefit the family and benefit the person,
whether it was the you know, looking for a wife
or looking for a husband. They would find a partner
that that that matched up well personality wise and brought
benefits to them. Right. And this was the way that
most marriages were because it is a very fool thing
to allow teenagers to pick, or young adults to pick
just based on emotion, who they want to marry. Right.
And the reason that I describe it as a strategic
pillar is because we should we should think of picking
a spouse as not only somebody who benefits you know, us,
but that will bring something to the table for our family.
Uh at sort of writ large, right, And this is
the way that this form of arranged marriage worked, it was, Okay,
you live in a small town. You know. You let's
say your family owns some land. You own, you know,
have a fairly large farm. There's a family down the
road that owns, you know, a handful of shops, I
own some property. If you and they have a daughter
that's you know, ready to get married, you have a
son that's ready to get married. By pairing them together,
you know, obviously taking into some consideration their personality and everything,
but pairing them together, you only you only serve to
strengthen both families, right, and that allows for for you
to build the building blocks of an empire essentially, right,
it starts small. This is essentially the same thing you
see again in the you know, the royal families. It's
you're married. You're marrying for the purpose of building something,
not just for the two of you, but for beyond that.
And so I think one of the ways that people
can prepare for the future and build something is you
can build a dynasty. If you approach marriage through the
lens of what benefit is this going to have for
our family and and the other family as well, we
can merge you know, Uh, if we're both wealthy, you're
simply merging that wealth. If you just have power, both
families have power, you're merging that power. You're creating the
building blocks of something bigger. And I think that's something
that people have lost sight of because we've treated marriage
just as like, well, I like you, you like me, you know,
you make me feel good, let's get married, and not
considering the broader implications of that marriage. And specifically for parents,
it's important to start thinking this way because you should
view the potential partner of your child not just for
what they bring to your child, but like, how does
this benefit us? Right, We're going to get old one day,
We're going to need things one day. By pushing your
children or pushing your children in a direction towards, you know,
getting married to somebody who comes from a good family
that has you know, has has means is only going
to further strengthen that. And I think that's the way
we can start from the bottom, you know, especially for
families that are you know, your middle class. You know,
well what one really quick way to move up generationally
is to say, hey, look you know and and I've
talked with other guys about this, like you know you
you I have boys, right, and I'm like, you know,
your daughters close to close to my son's agent. When
they get to be looking around to get married, it
only seems logical to try to pair them up together.
We are like minded, we share similar values, we we
go to the same church. Right, We're only going to
combine what we've already built by doing that, and that
can create a lot of power in a very short
period of time. And not just financial power. I mean,
you're again you're talking about combining. You know, if you
have land, you're just you can double that, triple that,
whatever the case may be. But you can really exponentially
increase you know, your your family's influence, and that only
that will allow you to sort of dictate the way
the future goes, especially if you live in a small
a small town.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I'll be the I'll be at more liberal
voice on this. I mean, if you have a church
like that, it doesn't even have to be like one
fam like your daughter, your son doesn't even have to
have one like one choice. There could be three, four
or five. It's just like, well, you're picking what's going
to be one of these three four or five, you know,
and got no.
Speaker 2: I was gonna say, you know, I was. I've joked
before I don't have daughters, but I've always said if
I had daughters, the first thing I would do, and
I wouldn't tell her to go to college. I would
get her job. I would try to get her job
at the country club is like a caddy, and she'd
marry an optometrist in six months. You know, Like you
have to approach it with sort of that mentality I think,
and obviously it's a little tongue in cheek, but that's
the way forward for that, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've you know, as somebody who doesn't have kids,
I don't take advice from me, you know, maybe use
maybe use me as a you know, as a warning.
But it would seem to me that it would just
make sense.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: I know people who you know, believe what we do
and have a worldview that we have, and they're like
letting their kids just go at like eighteen and nineteen
and do and do whatever they want. And it just
really tells me just how deep like Enlightenment thinking and
progressive thinking and classical liberal thinking have just taken hold
even in people who you know, would essensibly believe agree
with pretty much everything we're saying.
Speaker 2: Well, and I yah, it's absolutely right, because I have
gotten When I've expressed this idea publicly to people that
aren't in our spheres, I get a lot of pushback,
a lot of pearl clutching like the idea that I
would because I'm pretty open it. I've told my oldest
son was like, you know, if I don't approve of
who you decide to marry, Like if if me and
your mom say, look, we we don't like her, and
you go and do that anyways, you forfeit your your inheritance, right,
That's the way I approach it, like, look, there's certain,
there's certain I'm not saying we're going to force you
to marry somebody this person, but we're going to at
least approve of that person, and we're going to push
you in that direction. People don't like that because they think, well,
you should be free to choose, And the way I
always explain to them that you have to remember that
if you have a young son, right when he's nineteen
twenty twenty one years old and he's dating or you're
just letting him date, however he wants. He's only going
to go after the things that a nineteen and twenty
year old boy want, and that's an attractive woman at
the base level, right, He's not thinking about what makes
her a good wife, what makes her a good mother.
Those traits aren't really in his head. That's the job
of the parents to do. The parents have to be
the ones from the outside to look in on that
and say, look, I know she's attractive, but she's crazy,
Or I know this girl isn't as attractive, but she's kind.
She comes from a good family, they have money, she'll
make a good mom. Like those things are not there
in the forefront of the mind of the child, and
that's the job of the parent to come in and
do that. And when you don't do that and then
you act shocked when your kid gets divorced after four years, well,
i mean, what did you think was going to happen
when you got married specifically on the basis of well,
she's hot, you.
Speaker 1: Know well, And it's the exact reverse of what we've
seen now where parents aren't raising their kids to choose
a good mate, and then that they're not raising their
kids to have lived historically be you know, be loyal
to the family and and what the family wants, and
you know, you can see that in you know, I
mean there is a whole like industry of bumper stickers
where I'm spending my kids inheritance and you know you
look at yeah, you look at that and you're like, okay, well,
I mean I have to assume you you raised your
kids in a progressive mindset, in a classical liberal mindset,
in a grastinated mindset, or maybe not. Maybe your kid
turned out good, turned out well, you know, despite you.
But still it's like that kind of I mean, you
could see raising a kid to be like, Okay, this
is what you're going to be, this is what you're
going to do. And if you defy us, if you
defy our wishes, you know, we're going to cut you off.
You're not going you're you know you're going to You're
you're going to be at this on your own. I
mean that makes sense raising a kid too, not when
without that attitude, and then you know at the end
being like, oh, you know, well, I mean it was
all about us all along. So you know we're going
to be going on cruises while you you know, go
from women's a woman and everything. Yeah, I mean it's
just it's modernity just in everything.
Speaker 2: Well, And I think I think the positive note in
this is that with the decline, it's gonna it's going
to facilitate a necessity for reliance on family, and so
a lot of that is going to, in my opinion,
a lot of that it's going to naturally start to
reverse as people no longer have the ability, they no
longer afford the economic freedom they once had and mobility. Right,
It's something I've talked about extensively with with with my
with my parents and other family members, Like I fully
expect my sons to live with me, for I don't
expect to kick them out at eighteen, I guess is
my point, right, because I know where things are head,
I know how expensive things are, right, and I'm not
gonna let them sit around and do nothing. Right, They're
going to be building something because I want when they
do get old enough and they've established themselves to get married,
I want them to bring something to the table, which
only increases their mate prospect. Right. But I think this
is going to naturally start to happen for most families
as that economic mobility goes away. You're gonna have to
rely on them, and with that reliance will will facilitate
the ability for the father to to to warrant that
same respect and loyalty again, because they're gonna have to
at a base level, right, they won't have the ability
to just say, I don't care that I'm leaving. I'm
gonna do whatever I want. And that's gonna, I think
make it's going to strengthen family bonds in the long term.
And again, you know, if the families that go out
of their way to do things like practice some form
of arranged marriage to set their kids up, they're they're
gonna benefit from that in the long run. Right. You know,
look at how a certain ethnic group has benefited from
in group preference through and they do this through marriage
as well. That's what they've done. How how do certain
industries get taken over because they're passed down through families
and that starts with this this you know, these building
blocks that we're talking about now.
Speaker 1: All right, I appreciate that. That was Uh, that was
a good talk. Tell everybody. Tell everybody a little bit
about the your first book, Crimson Veil, and then tell
them how they can find both of your books.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Crimson Veil is uh. It's my first, my first novel.
It is uh. It is a Southern noir that borders
on it's it borders on more of a literary fiction.
So it's very character driven and it explores a sort
of disillusioned private eye in a in a corrupt Southern town,
dealing with the Dixie mafia and the death of his father,
and exploring the themes of of rebirth, of returning home
and what sacrifice really means that that's that's the general
theme of the book. It's been out for about two months.
It's gotten nothing but great reviews. I've done two podcasts
with Thomas on it. So if you're if even if
you're not into fiction, there's enough of a philosophical bend
in there. I think it's it's definitely worth your time.
So if you're if you're interested in that, that can
be found. It's the pin tweet on my on my
Twitter and it's also you know, uh it links to
my Amazon which also has my collection of essays the
Dispatches from the Old South Repository as well.
Speaker 1: Thank you, I appreciate it and I look forward to
seeing you in about a month. At the OGC conference,
if not before.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I will be there, and I have thirty copies
of my novel that i'll be willing to sign, so
if anybody's going and wants to pick one up, I'll
have them with me.
Speaker 1: Awesome, all right man, Thank you, take care, Thanks Pete,