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do it there. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone
back to the Pekingana Show. Josh Neil is back after
a long hiatus. What's happening, Josh?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's good to be back. I appreciate the invitation.
As I was saying to you before we went live,
this is live, I think.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well now we're we're recording, we're just hanging out
you and Nick.
Speaker 2: However, as I was saying before, I had to what's
the saying, I had to get my ducks in a row,
and I did and it was good because it helped
me put a lot of things into focus. And I
feel like a lot of my energy in this space,
this community has gotten like laser focused, much narrower, much
more refined. Like I'm so much happier with my writing,
and that's obviously what we're here to talk about. So, yeah,
thanks for asking me on.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely so. I've done as much as I can
to stay away from this topic in my in my
episodes in my sub stack, I bring it up here
and there. But the thing I liked about and we're
talking about the woke, right, something that it looks like
James Lindsay might have came up with, and you know,
and then a bunch of other midwits are running with
like Constantine Kissing and people like that. And the reason
I decided I wanted to talk about it is because
after I read your substack about it that UNS picked up.
I was, you come at it from a completely different
angle than most people. Most people are like here, you're
coming at it from actually a historical angle and comparing
it to something that's happened in the past. So what
was what was your reaction the first time you heard
the term woke right?
Speaker 2: Well, it made me think of and I wrote this
in the essay, but it made me think of when
people started using SJW against Trump people back in the day.
I mean, I was, I'm you know, we're both not
spring chickens per se. We were both like fully formed
adults ten years ago, so we have a really good
memory of like who the players were, what ideas were at,
where the culture was moving. And you know, I wasn't
alt right or nationalist or anything until after basically Election
Day twenty sixteen, but I was online and I followed
all the memes. I followed all the stuff that kind
of trickled upwards to YouTube and like Stefan Molyneux and
people like that and or Scott Adams, and so I
remember the anti SJW moment. I guess some people who
were plugged into gamor Gate would say, you know, it
had something to do with that too, And so I remember,
like for a couple of years like twenty ten to
twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, like social JUSTICEE, social justice stat
social justice Warrior. And then the moment that there was
the Trump Right came in and was starting to really
be effective pushing back against all of the crazy late
Obama era politics, suddenly that got turned around on people
like me who were just like, you know, I thought
I was just being like a rational, normal person, like
enormy with like head on a swivel. But now suddenly
it's like, oh, now we're going to turn this rhetoric
back around on you, because now we've got to control you,
like like we've scapegoaded all these people who are now
out and now you're the problem, and so we're gonna
throw it at you. So it made me think of
when SJW was turned on the right wing, and so
my first thought after that, or my second thought, I guess,
was just like, Okay, this is just a slur, like
this is very obviously a smear to again kind of
go after the harder wing of the Trump right, but
also to go after like real nationalists, real identitarians, or
real conservatives, real Christians basically people with a spine and
a backbone who are willing to call a spade a spade.
And I'm not going to play euphemistic word games and
step around the thorny issues. So those are my first thoughts.
And then I also kind of thought it wouldn't stick.
But he but James Lindsay has like really like a
dog with a bone, he just keeps He's kept putting
it back out there to the point where he started
building like a coalition with that the trigonometry people. And
then when that I guess this would have been a
week ago, maybe a week and a day when that
clip went on Twitter, like there's a light bulb moment,
I was like, Oh, this is because he actually explained
what he meant by woke, right. He gave this whole
sort of counter narrative against our worldview. And I was like, oh,
I know what you're doing now, Like you're actually trying
to put forth this other worldview and this this is familiar.
I've seen this movie before.
Speaker 1: What I thought is most interesting about it was it
was coming from somebody and then adopted by other people
who were I didn't leave the left. The left left
meet people, and you normally when something like this happens,
it's usually the quote unquote right wing that's doing it.
You know, Joanah Goldberg putting out liberal fascism or something
like that, so he can accuse anybody who's you know,
to the right of eleanor Roosevelt of being a fascist.
And yeah, that's what I saw. It's like, okay, so
this is like IDW adjacent you know, intellectual dork web
people adjacent who And the first thing I thought was, lindsay,
he's just grasping because he's kind of irrelevant. He's blown
his load on what he does. Okay, you explain to
a bunch of people who are too you know, are
too offended by Paul Gottfried to go read what he
wrote twenty five years ago where he could tell you
exactly what this whole woke stuff is. And he was
a prophet back then, and he's writing two right wingers.
But you know, right wingers always want the approval of
the left. They don't want the approval of anybody to
their right, because you know that those are just Nazis.
But yeah, that was the thing that it was these
the those left. The left left me people. You cannot
entertain them, you cannot give them the time of day,
you cannot platform them. They will always stab you in
the back. I don't how the fuck people don't know this.
I did that with somebody with like one specific person
in the past, one specific person I did that with
in my libertarian days, and I learned, deleted all those episodes, repented,
and it's like, it's not gonna happen if I have
a leftist on, it's going to be a leftist who's
not here to talk about leftism or rightism. They're an
expert on like Ukraine or something like that. You know, So,
isn't it weird? Isn't it weird that it's the left
life the left left us? Guys?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was thinking about that last night, and the
thing that I guess there's two things that makes that suspect. One,
these are not people with agency, so it's not like
they that's it's it's in the phrase the left. I
didn't leave the left. The left left me. In other words,
you were totally fine with the way everything was happening,
the direction the country was going, in the way your
own party operated, but actually your party wasn't happy with it.
Your party was like, we don't need you anymore. So
these are not agency. These are not people with agency.
Like they didn't come to this Eureka moment where they
suddenly realized that that they were, you know, on the
wrong side of history or whatever. So and they also
like don't have any self reflective ability either. They just
they think that they were always in the right and
you know, they were always morally correct, not politically right,
and that the left just got too wacky. But really
what happened was the left, you know, left progressive liberalism,
had somewhere else that wanted to go, had scheduled to
keep up with we got to get to the next stop.
We have to wage the next battle in the culture war.
And and now you know, the left left me. Those
people are now just they're the latest scapegoats. And that's
kind of what like the same thing with the SJW thing.
It's like, Okay, clearly Trump comes in, the political culture
is different. We need somebody to hold the bag for us,
and we'll dump it on BuzzFeed, We'll dump it on Vox,
will dump it on blue haired crazies we'll dump it
on people that are not useful to us anymore. And
that's the same thing with Woke. It's like, okays, as
people are saying on Twitter, you know, Woke was defeated
at the ballot box. I don't asterisk as risk. I
don't totally condone that statement, but just for the sake
of conversation, you know, things are different and some people
have to go. The regime has to kind of cut
some dead weight in order to pivot whatever is going
to happen over the next four years. It has to
do something different, and that means getting rid of things
that don't work anymore. And so this Woke Left thing
is just it's now a scapegoat that lots of people
in the establishment are, whether cynically or honestly or whatever,
are willing to dispose of and maybe even look at
a little bit critically so they can sacrifice that. Now
you can call the new enemies, which is people like us,
people who put Trump in office, people who liked Project
twenty twenty five, so on and so forth, people who
are supporting Daniel Penny. By the way, he just beat
another count today. So we need to be dealt with
and they've got this convenient. Just as a final thought
is I kind of admire the way that the system
really can repurpose everything that happens, Like they can turn
a bad thing into a good thing. So like Woke
was this horse that they rode into or rode in,
you know, rode into power on and then it became
something that was not feasible for them anymore or problematic,
but it still has a use for them. It's still
so it's still a cudgel they can beat us with.
So I just I think there's something kind of darkly
funny about that. But yeah, those are my thoughts.
Speaker 1: Something you said there about how there was a it
was a train there. You know, Leftism is this train
and it's moving and it took a direction. It went
in a direction that they they didn't want to follow,
where they had to get off. Yeah. I've been reading
this book The Demon and Democracy by Raizard Labutko, and
he talks about this. He's he basically says, if you
have a political ideology that is a path that it's
you're going somewhere with it, if it's not like you're
seizing power and saying stop, this is who we are.
We we're t we're tradcath we're you know right, we're
right wingers, we're national socialists. Where whatever the fuck it is,
if you're not if you're not taking power to say
this is where, if you're looking at a path going forward,
you're a liberal. You're trying, you're trying to move in
a direction to make things better and better and better. No,
there's already some that's not the goal of politics. That
should be like your personal life. That should be your
church life. Maybe your church wants to has goals, but
your politics can't have goals. Your politics have to be
something that stays in one place and protects you so
that you and it's not trying to move you anywhere.
Because if it's trying to move view somewhere, you have
to go with it. If you don't go with it,
if you decide to go with it, now you're on
the path of it going left or right or everywhere,
and you're basically screwed.
Speaker 2: Yeah I agree, Yeah, So all right.
Speaker 1: In the article, and here's the thing that I think
you brought up that really no one else has brought up.
You had a heading called the New Paranoid Style, and
you bring up Richard Hofstetter. Why don't you get into
exactly why you bring up Hovstetter and how you relate
it to this wook right thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so, I this is a kind of a convenient
thing for me because I've been reading up on the
post war consensus the last couple of years for a
lot of my writing, and it started with Carl Popper.
Last time we spoke, I think, which was back in February,
was just before my new book. My most recent book
came out called Understanding Conspiracy Theories, and it was very
much based on the idea that a big part of
contemporary conspiratorial culture has to do with the development of
the post war consensus. And James Lindsay on his recent
Trigonometry appearance, and this I considered to be a major
own goal, like a crazy faux pas. He went ahead
and he basically spilled the beans on our worldview, and
he said it in half the time it takes us
to say it. He said it, maybe more articulately than
a lot of us can say it. He named a
lot of the players involved. I mean, he showed all
of the receipts. It was really kind of impressive. It's
like if you wanted the elevator pitch for the radical
right or the nationalist right, like you could clip out
that section. And he talks about how well the woke
right believes in this thing called the post the kooky
post war consensus, this crazy the idea of a post
war consensus. And I had been reading about Richard Hofstadter,
who was a celebrated historian throughout the forties and fifties.
He's a New Yorker like me. He's from Buffalo, ethnically Jewish,
but American, and he was an avowed American liberal. In
his youth, he was a Marxist. Like a lot of
people at that time, he was a Marxist. I believe
he may have even been affiliated with the American Communist Party.
And like a lot of people of his ilk at
that time, when communism in Russia changed moved in a
more Stalinist direction, people like Hofstatter said, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa,
this is the left leaving me kind of thing like
WHOA pumped the brakes, dude, we don't want to do this.
And you know, my suspicion, which I think is born
out historically, has a lot to do with the fact
that Stalin moved Russia into a more kind of ethnic,
sort of nationalistic, sort of traditional culture due to moving
into a wartime footing, due to all kinds of things
that were happening, and so it wasn't Bolshevism anymore. It
wasn't Leninism anymore. It wasn't what the kinds of things
that people like cough stat Are saw in it. It
wasn't that intensely liberalizing political force that it was early on,
because when Lenin came in, and I'm not a historian,
I don't really have the greatest understanding of Soviet Russia,
but you know, some of the things that Lenin and
the Bolsheviks did when they first came in was liberalize
a lot of things abortion, marriage laws, you know, sexuality,
sexual ethics, things that look a lot like what liberalism
has done here and around the world is what happened there.
And so obviously people like hof Status sought that and
they said, hey, that's great. Stalin comes in, changes the
direction of things more religious, more ethnic, more chauvinistic, more
chest thumping. You know, he's a Georgian bank robber Stalin,
so he's a he's a strong man, and that didn't
appeal to people like cop Statter, so Opstatter pivots, disavows
his Communists past and disavows his history, his historic material
history history. I forget what the phrase is, the Marxist
kind of genealogical method, historical materialism.
Speaker 1: He disavows dict dialectical materialism.
Speaker 2: Thank you, thank you, and he starts moving in this
direction of what's called consensus history now at the time
in the United States, consensus history. Again, this has been
thirties forties roundabout. There was how a lot of historians
viewed history. That's how they did a lot of their
history writing. Charles A. Beard being a good example of this.
Charles A Beard basically kind of put forth his own,
if you want to say, like I say this, very
very loosely, sort of his own American spin on what
people might think of as a kind of Marxist historiography.
Because he emphasized economic class conflict, not using Marxist language,
not on Marxist terms, not without other Marxist baggage, he's
often been confused or interpreted as a Marxist historian. As
far as I can tell, that's not the case. But anyway,
Hofstadter comes in and he makes some alterations, adjustments to
this beard and hypothesis, and as a result, he's kind
of given he's branded as the new face of consensus history.
And he's looking at things like educational reform over the
course of American history. He's looking at things like the
emergence of populist parties over the course of American history.
He's looking at things like gun rights, the gun culture
in the United States, and as is relevant to this essay,
in the nineteen sixties, he's looking at what he called
pseudo conservatism, which would have been at that time, the
Barry Goldwater presidential candidacy, the John Birch Society, it would
have been McCarthy and the Red Scares. And he's calling
this pseudo conservatism. It's his way of sort of smearing
the most populist wing of the American right at his time,
in the same way that James Lindsay is doing today
with this idea of the woke right. And he's basically
saying that, well, you have this group of people who
are engaging in a sort of analysis of power relations,
but they're doing it because they're parochial, backwoods yokels who
are paranoid and mentally ill. And that was the essay
Paranoid Style and American Politics, talking about the John Birch Society,
talking about Barry Goldwater, talking about all this kind of
aggressive conservative energy that was developing at that time, which
of course they needed to do something with. They didn't
want that to become hegemonic in the United States. When
I say they, I mean the progressive liberals, other factions
in the United States at that time. So that eventually
got published a year later in a collection of essays,
and I just it just looks that there's a couple
of things in the way that Hofstadter presented his case
that was just very similar to me as to how
James Lindsay presented his picture of the woke right. In
both cases, they're they're they're presenting the narrative from the
point of view of their opposition. In the case of
James Lindsay, he's walking us through the development of the
post war consensus, is walking us through Bill Buckley in
the National Review, kicking out the real conservatives. He's he's
he's name dropping all of these intellectuals who are blacklisted
from kind of academia and the popular culture, like Karl Schmidt.
But then at the very end of it, after basically
laying out all the facts and laying out all the receipts,
he just says, but it's woke. But all of this
truth okay, okay, okay, okay, but it's woke. Now forget
about it, which is basically what Hofsteddter did. He's talking
about the ethnic replacement of German Irish Catholics and Anglo
Saxon Protestants. He's talking about well, he's talking about the
John Birch Society and the resistance against communists. He's talking
about Robert Welch in the Birch Society, he's talking about McCarthy,
and he's laying out these facts. And then at the
very end of it, when we have at the pivotal
moment where you have to either say, like, they're right,
we should do X as a result of the he says,
but they're paranoid, and so we can swipe it under
the rug and it's illegitimate and it doesn't matter. And
they're all crazy kooks, and they're all parochial. They've got
their their pitchforks and their torches, and they don't really
know anything. And there's some really really remarkable things. He
says in the book, Like he uses the example, I
don't know if you're one of these people that gets
into this kind of stuff, but he brings up floride
in the water supply. I'm just like, I'm just familiar
with yeh. So he says. There's one passage where he says,
and this is very Lakanian. Lacan Is a French was
a French psychoanalyst. There's a famous quote attributed to him. Uh,
if your wife is cheating on you, if you if
you fear that, even if you let me walk it back,
if you fear that your wife is cheating on you
and she is, you're still paranoid for worrying about it.
Like so to chew on that for a second, Like
that's a crazy kind of statement to make. Hofstetter does
the same thing. He's like, even if the government put
fluoride in the water supply as a form of social control,
political control, and they were doing it to buttress a
larger socialist agenda, you would be crazy for thinking that.
And now you read that in twenty twenty four, and
it's like we've for like twenty years or more, we're
reading all of these reports about well, that's what happened,
and that's why it happened. It's like, not only did
they put fluoride in the water supply, but they did
it for this kind of biopolitical demographic control along the
way towards rolling out this comprehensive socialist agenda. It's just
like that's really really crazy to read after the fact.
But yeah, so in addition to this kind of comprehensive
narrative and the use of a pejorative, I just think
that there's a I lay out some of arguments in
the essay two. I don't know if you want to
get to them, but those are just the most remarkable
things that allowed me to draw that comparison.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, we get to the other arguments. I
just wanted to say. It's what's funny is as Lindsay
is listing all of these things which are historical facts,
painting that them as conspiracy theory, these things.
Speaker 2: For a second. Yeah, you wrote it out pretty badly.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let me let me start that again. So
one of the things Lindsay did that just was he's
listing all these things, and he's listing all these people
and he's trying to present it as a conspiracy theory.
Yet like all the people he's mentioning are writing that
they're doing these things, are right, think these that these
things have happened, are saying there is a postwar consensus,
are bragging about the fact that they've changed the the
social and political habits of the American public, and that
I think the thing with Lindsay is is that he
realizes he's losing and that and that his classical liberalism.
I remember he had this tweet and I think it's
the tweet that got me blocked because he said, the
only thing that can defeat the left, the woke on
the left, is classical liberalism, and classical liberalism hasn't even
gotten started yet. And my comment was, so what you're
saying is real. Classical liberalism has never been tried. And
you know, and this was at a time when he
was attacking Paul Gottfried as woke and Paul Gottfried said
on my show, and like, people didn't hear it. People said, no,
Paul said this. I'm like, go back and listen to
what he said. Paul Godfrey said, the only thing that
is going to defeat this left authoritarianism is right wing authoritarianism.
And I agree with him that that is the only
thing that reverses the post war consensus is to the
one thing that actually that they were actually fighting against,
that the whole war had good, the whole world had
to go war against. You know, back back in time
when the post war consensus was in the in the
in the in the the mid war years between the wars,
when it was starting to formulate and people were literally
fighting back. I mean, you had new political movements rising
to fight against it. And I think Lindsey just realizes it.
I think he's in a panic. I think he's in
a complete panic that he knows that people are just
falling away that Like, say what you want about maga people.
I think maga people right now at this point want
change and they don't care how did they get it.
They don't care if you Trump has to become an
article to president. They just want change. And I think
that's what scares the crap out of these people, is
they know that eventually this is coming for them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the if you were a libertarian in the previous life,
I was a libertarian in a previous life. I remember
reading Thomas d. Lorenzo, like Abraham Lincoln is the American dictator.
It's like these were the kinds of concerns people had seven, ten,
twelve years ago, and if you talk to your average conservative,
they don't care at all, especially post COVID once things,
you know, stopped heating up in the COVID era and
you're able to go out and do things again. I
did a lot of going out. I think probably a
lot of people did, like let me get some era
and just talking to pe people, business owners, whether it's
like local bars, restaurants, whatever, people who had to close businesses,
people who kept their businesses open but at extreme cost
to them and their families and their financial security and
things like that. And to a person, everyone is saying
things like, well, I won't repeat what they said on air,
but they were saying things like I don't care what
has to happen. I do not care what has to happen,
but it has to happen. These are the kinds of
things that they were saying. And just to your point,
like we've almost I say this again with a little
bit of an asterisk, we've almost been able to have
kind of any other political option presented to us, but
something like a strong conservative executive. We've had all these
flavors of right liberalism, libertarianism, paleo libertarianism, conservatism, paleo military
or minoritarianism, whatever, all his flavors on the left, of
different brands of socialist, communist, light communist, you know, diet communism, communism,
thunder whatever, like mango communism, like boiler plate neil liberalism.
We have had every kind of personality, every flavor, every color,
but the one thing we haven't been able to have,
and it's also the one thing that we had to
fight a ten year culture war, almost ten decade long
culture war just to be able to get is something
like right wing authoritarianism. So yeah, the thing like getting
on Paul Gottfried's case and calling him woke, it's like
he's probably like one of the best bridges from like
the genesis of woke to us that exists. Like he
studied under Herbert Marcuse, you know, he was thrown out
by these old school communist left wing, anti anti family types,
anti capitalist, PPEs, anti you know, anti everything good effectively,
and he's documenting it for decades and decades he's documenting it.
So just yeah, James Lendsy is definitely shitting his pants.
The thing that I the thing I've also kind of
come to realize about his whole position is and it
makes me think he's I guess there's two. You can
always play this game of does he know what he's
doing or does he not know what he's doing? I'm
you know, I'm not going to put on my mind
reader hat, but just taking what he says at face value.
His worldview only makes sense if you don't interrogate it,
if you don't think about it, if you don't really
ask any questions, then it sort of works. But the
moment you start picking pulling it threads, it really doesn't
make any sense at all. So there's the definition that
James Lendsay gives for woke. I'm actually, uh, I'm going
to read it from my essay. Yeah, what woke mean
woke up to a structural politics that marginalizes people like me,
and we need to band together in solidarity in order
to be able to create a powerful enough oppressed coalition
to flip over the power structure by putting ourselves at
the center and clanning power for ourselves. So what he's
saying is that what it means, Actually there was there
was an even better quote, actually, to awaken a critical
consciousness of the power structure. So that's that's actually the
I tweeted that at him and then he blocked me.
So woke is to come to a critical consciousness of
the power structure you. That is such a thin or
or kind of like widely applicable definition as to fundamentally
not have any real meaning. And it's why he's waging
this like weeks long jihad with people, like what are
you even talking about? How can you call these people woke?
Because if you think about some thing, you're being critical,
and everything has the structure, so you're becoming aware of
the structure. So one like he's he's basically saying, you
have to be unconscious. You have to not think about things.
We want this like illiterate unconscious liberalism where we just
float around in the world and we don't really pay
attention to what's going on, nineties liberalism. Basically, he wants
to go back to a time where things are kind
of like you're like embryotic, like you're in your mom's
belly and things are warm and gushy, and you feel
good and you don't have to worry about anything. One
that's not the world we live in anymore. Two that's
not a good world to live in at all. Like
imagine being this like brilliant academic mathematician. You've got all
these prizes and awards, and you're telling people that you
want them to not be critical thinkers. Like that's not
even that doesn't even follow from the kind of nineties
liberalism that we lived through that I grew up in,
where it's like be a critical thinker, like you know,
baby Josh elementary school, Like grow up to be a
critical thinker. Like everyone saying critical thinking is good, build
your critical thinking skills. And now here here's James lindsay,
like critical thinking is bad, don't do it. It's like
that's kind of ridiculous. But also like by that on
definition coming to a critical consciousness of power structures, like
he is woke by his own definition. How can you
reverse engineer this Marxist revolution without coming to a critical
consciousness of the power structures that produced woke Marxism? Right,
he wants to talk about Franz Finon and all of
these other people, like you have to think and deliberate
and research and work and and be critically. You have
to critique the power structure. You have to come to
an awareness of the institutions and networks that created this.
So this is one of the reasons why I say
that is that it's predominantly a smear. It's what I
called regime polemics, because he's basically working for the system
to come up with a larger bat to to beat
us with.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, and one of the other things that
he ascribes to Woke is he's like, oh, they're studying
Carl Schmidt. The friend and enemy distinction When you call
someone woke, right, what are you doing? Are you not
practicing friend? Enemy? And it's the This just goes to
show how retarded classical liberals are. And I'm not talking
about like historically classical liberals. If it's twenty twenty four
and you're still a classical liberal and you're not just
I don't know, you don't really have anything. You can't
join the discussion. You're not in the discussion anymore. Classical
liberalism has been so i mean just marginalized, and it's
just so dead in the water that the people who
are arguing for it, they justin arguing for it, they
contradict their own their own assertions about other groups, and
it's you're he's some great intellectual because he wrote a
bunch of fake papers and and got them. I mean,
come on, come on. And then you then you completely
rewrote the Communist Manifesto. The only thing you left in
there that that would jump out at anybody was something
about a specter, and I can that's the way I write,
where I'll I'll borrow a really famous kind of line
from somewhere and rearrange it to make it. And and
if I'm reading that, I'm just like, oh, okay, So
because I read that thing, and I'm like, if I
didn't know this was supposed to be the Communist Manifesto,
I wouldn't have known it. I've read the Communist Manifesto
many times. I didn't see it in that. All I
saw was him using some kind of device where he's
picking the most famous line out of it and then
using it, which is a device I use, but I
don't use it to fool people. I use it because
it's like, oh look how smart I am.
Speaker 2: Basically, how many times have you seen somebody say once
as tragedy again as farce. Like I've written that phrase
everybody uses. It's like just part of it's part of
a vocabulary, right, but it's it's it. It does remind
me of Frankly, I was gonna say ten years ago,
but really at any point in the last ten years.
It sounds like a blue haired comie who says you
uttered the magic words. It's just like Hitler that therefore
your bad, right, Like it's it's it's the same type
of psychology. It's the same type of like way logical,
you know, way of analyzing this that whole episode. By
the way, I'm glad you brought it up, because I
had kind of forgotten about it. Tell me if you
had this feeling. There were two real problems I had
with that. It was the Christian Reformer. Who's that the
name of the website.
Speaker 1: That published this? Oh god, I can't remember. The American Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: So there's two things about that that stuck out to
me right away. One the American he was He kept
calling it the leading woke Christian national. It's like they
have less than twenty thousands subscribers on Twitter.
Speaker 1: I didn't even know that. I don't even know who
they are. Never heard of that, you know, and I'm
a Christian, I have no idea who they are. And
I'm someone who reads interviewed Christian nationalists and I had
no clue who they are because it's like, yeah, yeah,
it's very arbitrary.
Speaker 2: Again, this is a kind of thing that's common in
regime polemics. Is because you're working on behalf of the establishment.
When you select something, it becomes significant, right, Like it
has the the importance and the meaning that you imbue
it with.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: So if James lindsay, as a representative of you know,
big gay you know, big gay liberalism, and he says, well,
this is the institution, this is the Christian nationalist woke
paper of record. Well, him with his half a million
Twitter subscribers and his network of academics and his sec
of fans are now that's it. It's that's that that
perception has been created, that becomes part of the discourse.
You now are kind of pushing up against this brick
wall even trying to refute that.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: So that's like this sort of polemical power he has
as as a member, and he complains, by the way,
as a brief aside, he complains all the time, Like
he doesn't get the star appointments and he's kind of
left out of all the cool hip soares so like,
obviously he's not the same thing as like Ibram x
Kendy was, you know.
Speaker 1: And even though and even though he is, he's bankrolled
by somebody I'm not going to name because this person
is very litigious, but he's bankrolled by a e by
a big time evangelical who has ties to big J money.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm not surprised to hear that. So there's this
arbitrariness to selecting The American Reformer as the woke right
paper of record. But also, I mean again, you and
I we've written things, We've published things, We've tried to
get things published at places for you know, whether it
was libertarian paper or a conservative or whatever, or even
like maybe your town, your local newspaper in your hometown.
Like I kind of know, like I have some idea
of how things get published and like what that review
process is like and how extensive it is, Like does
it really prove that they like that by publishing this
kind of mishmashed paper that it actually reflects like they
actually are co signed, Like the act of publishing obviously
is a sort of endorsement. But knowing that, like it's
the Internet, things move fast and quick. It's a shoe
string operation. They don't have all this. They don't have
a whole team of editors. They don't have people who
it is their job to just do that forty to
fifty hours a week. They see something, it comes through
in their email, they probably look at it real quick
and they say, okay, we'll publish it on Wednesday at
three pm, thanks for your submission. Like, does that prove
that they are secret Marxists or does it prove that
in a fast moving technological economy where you are part
of the alternative media and there's maybe I don't want
to say anything bad about the American Reformer, I don't
know them, but just as an example, like maybe you
don't have the most strenuous submission review process. Maybe there's
a couple of things you look for and then you
just publish it. It's like, actually, all you've really done
is demonstrate that the economy around publishing is probably not
as rigorous as it ought to be. Right, Like, this
is not an actually ideological point that you're making. This
is like sort of like a banal business failure of
the business world in the Internet age. Like there's so
many things that were goofy about it, and like it's
just funny to me. Like every time he's tried to
slam the you know, big comical acme hammer down on us,
it's like it bounces back and hits him in the face.
Like you know, it's like wildly Coyote and the road Runner.
It's like he he runs into the tunnel, painted onto
the brick wall and bounces off of it. He's just
it's it's just to your point, and I'll even hear
what I'm done. It does really reek of a guy
who's and like kind of shooting his pants and in
a full blown panic.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, he's worried. He's he's seeing his meal ticket disappear.
That that's what it is. And he knows that his
meal ticket right now is going into Milk Toasts event
events with milk toast evangelicals who love Israel and who
hate the woke. And he goes in there and tells
him some stories about how all of this came from
Karl Marx and it's all Marxism, so you better be scared,
and because you know, that's really dangerous stuff and everything,
even though it's you know, it's like it I mean,
it is in practice and it is in thought, but
it's like, I mean, he's never going to talk about
the fact that liberalism has no gatekeeping mechanisms that allows
anything to come you know, Oh, well, you're just going
to have the marketplace of ideas and you're going to
come in there. And if you have the marketplace idea
is and you're a classical liberal, well, classical liberals are
not about Schmidtian you know, Schmidian exceptions and Schmidian friend enemy.
So I don't care if a communist gets a job
at the local university and then another one, and then
another one and then another one. I mean, he knows
that this is that liberalism has as much to do
with the takeover, with this postliberal you know, this post
war conceens, I mean the post wark and sens. This
is liberal. It is liberalism in its final form. And well,
I mean maybe not its final form. I mean it
could get worse. So he gets a left pure left
wing authoritarianism. But what we're seeing now is is liberalism.
It is we're going down this path and we're there's
an endpoint. There's an endpoint, but we just can't get there.
We can't. We just took we took a rite. We
got to get back on the path. What do we
gotta do? Pat, And then all these other things just
sneak in. He just he knows, he knows. I'm convinced
that he just knows that this classical liberalism that he
totes because he can't call it what he really wants
to is, which he's a leftist. He has said that
he would rather the woke left wind than than like
the West become tradcaf Again he's actually oh yeah, oh
yeah he said that. Yeah, I can, I can pull
up the screenshots of it. Yeah, yeah, he would rather
the woke left wind, like someone said, well you know
what if it was become tradcath he goes that, we're not.
I don't want that. I would rather the left one. Yeah,
he's he's not a friend to right wingers. But right
wingers are such fucking pussies that they like, they have
no problem. They're reaching left, well, reaching left and punching right.
And that's what they've been trained to do by the
post war consensus. And that's exactly what that's what he's
he does, and he's taught a bunch of people to do.
And unfortunately, a lot of Evangelical Christianity has just rischa.
A lot of Evangelical Christianity is quote quote we lose
down here quote which means we can't do anything love
our enemies. Never says anywhere to love God's enemies. And
these are the kind of people who in nineteen thirty
six in Spain, while and while priests and nuns are
being executed in the streets, people would say, no, that's
the way it's supposed to be, because you know, I mean,
we can't, we can't fight back. We have to love
our enemies.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's funny. Again, just one final comment
on the whole American reformer situation. All kinds of people
that I didn't really think would line up alongside. It's
literally like the stone toss meme of like you know,
the two play the tug over War and then you
look to your left, who's behind me? It's like a
sudden Ashley Saint Clair and Mike Cernovich, You're behind you, Like,
what the hell is going on? Like all these people
who either are really not part of that conversation or
their message is not really a hyper illiterate message, like
in the case of Ashley Saint Clair, are like, but like,
don't you think like some of this is like worth considering,
like the most milk toast, tepid thing. Like I think
Mike either Saargon or Mike Cernovich were both like, yes,
but his criticisms of capitalism were accurate, okay, which is
one line of rebuttal that you could take. And I
think Ashley Saint Clair was like, yeah, but don't you
think there's any room at all to criticize the system
that we're in. It's like you won't even allow for
the possibility of self reflection. That's how you know you're
the bad guy, dude, Like you won't look like Jack Cool,
you won't look into the mirror. That's how we know
you're the bad guy. You have no reflection, We know
you're the bad guy. I'm inclined to think and this
is maybe armchair psychoanalyzing, and just because of these are
things I've seen pop up on Twitter in the last
few days, I'm inclined to think that he gets you know, nobody,
nobody blow up my DMS or send me an affidavit
or anything. I'm inclined to think he gets up to
some weird perp stuff. You know, somebody posted a picture
of him taking a selfie, like in the nude, with
like a potted plant precariously positioned where his genitals are.
It's like, so you put that on the internet, man,
like there is something wrong with you. And the thing
about like even his social media personality, it says something
to me like this is kind of a dysfunctional person
because he's on triggernometry and he starts off, you know,
Constantine kiss and asks him what is the woke right,
and James Lindsay starts kind of apologetically like, gee, you know,
maybe I've used woke to liberally. It might not be
the best word. So he's like a kind of human
being a little bit at the start of that interview.
And then you watch him on Twitter and he posts
like he's a fourteen year old and everything is really yeah,
it's like this is not an actually mature adult man. Uh.
And that's the type of person that the establishment has left,
Like these like they're reserve troops. This is like calling
in I don't know, the National Guard, and it's like
the fat guy from the bar with like terrible diabetes
and his legs are all swollen up. It's like they
they're not sending their best. Okay, they're not sending their best.
Speaker 1: Well, you know What's what else is interesting about the
post war consensus is that it's while they are sneaking
in a lot of like social Marxism. If you if
you use any kind of crit or if you agree
at all with Marx or Lenin or anybody of that ilk,
if you say, oh, well, you know, they made a
really good point here about industrial society and capitalism. I
saw this today. They were talking about this kid, an
Italian anarchist who's assassinating people in the streets. Again, what
year is this. The they were saying, Oh, well, he's
like really into like Ted Kaczinski and everything like that.
I'm like, and they're like, oh, that means he's a leftist.
That's what the jewess from Libs of TikTok said, So,
oh that means he's a leftist. I'm like, you read
Ted Kazinski. The whole first thirty seven parts of that
is him completely shitting on the left. And then he
explains why technological society, why what it's done to our
psyche and what is done to us and what has
done to our nature, and to argue against that, you're retarded.
So it's like, you can what the post war consensus
says is, oh, we're gonna sneak all this Marxism in here,
in this socialism here, and basically you know, and Marxism
in a way, we're going to strip away family. We're
gonna we want you to become the liberal the post
war consensus man and woman and everything. But if you
agree at all where you say, well, I think marx
and the German ideology made some really good points about
what's happening to society, well then you're a Marxist. It's like,
wait a minute, but you're promoting you're promoting shit that's
almost almost literally Marxist, and we have it in our
society and we've pointed it out. And what now. So
you can't even win with these people because it's like
you can't. You they can have it one way, but
they can have it both ways.
Speaker 2: You can't. That's the power of That's again, it's the
power of being a regime polemicist. You said, the rules,
you established, the you determine what pieces are in play,
what pieces aren't in play, what's hypocritical, what isn't. Just
to kind of go back to the parallel between Hofstadter
and James Lindsay, between woke right and the paranoid style,
you know, one of these other things, and I think
it's exempt. It demonstrates what you're just talking about is
the way things that there's kind of self evidently farcical
or hypocritical are used in this polemical, pejorative way. So
one of the key arguments that Lindsay puts forward is
that the woke right behaves just like the woke left,
Like this is kind of like this is one half
of his entire argument. He says that there's an ideological component.
He says that there's a practical component, and the practical
component is how we behave. We behave the same as
the woke left. We use social media the same way,
we believe in an oppressed oppressor dialectic, the same way.
I'm gonna actually try to pull up some of the
examples he uses here. Sure so yeah. He says that
they create an illusion that there's support for one thing
and distaste for another. He says that you know, both
are highly invested in identity politics, and he says that ultimately,
what what what else can you call this but woke?
And so therefore there's this complete you know, what he's
what he thinks he's done is eliminated any difference between
Pete Kenonas and Josh Neil versus I don't know Slava,
Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Okazio, Cortes, uh Man Jail, whether he's
anarchist or not or whatever, like, actually there's still are
there still are fundamental differences even if you can point
to superficial similarities. So this is another thing that there's
a very telling passage in the paranoid style of in
American politics where to dispel the to kind of like
defang this what he calls pseudo conservatism. He points to
the rivalries of right wing conspiratorial groups and shows how
that they are identical to their opposition. So he talks
about the KKK and he says, well, you know, they
wore priestly uniforms just like the Catholics, and they had
this strict hierarchical structure just like the Catholics. So actually
their rivalry is kind of like this petty envy and
it is totally illegitimate and they're just paranoid. Never mind
the fact that the KKK were made up of a
specific group of people from a specific place, operating under
a specific political pretext, with a very particular set of
goals for themselves. And you know, the Catholic Church is
is the Catholic Church like not the same thing? Right?
Or that? He uses the example of the John Birch
Society versus you know, this communist spook, and he says,
isn't it really remarkable that they both fight a zero
sum ideological war. It's like, okay, so they're both really
committed to the ideas that they have. Therefore, there's no
difference at all between you know, a mom and pop
from down the street who give their one hundred dollars
every month to the John Birch Society and communist organizers
who are like burning down houses and whatever. He also
gives the example of Christians Christian anti communists versus communists
and the exact phrase here, just let me pull it up.
It's so goofy one second, okay, So he says, you know,
Christian anti communists were intellectually and spiritually vigorous like their
communist foes. They admired the vigor of their communist opponents
and they tried to emulate it. And that's how we
know that there's no actual rivalry here, that the right
wingers are just parented by the way, there's never any
actual kind of antagonization or examination of the left wing
people on that side of the Communists are just like
kind of unimpeachable to Richard Houckaughlin.
Speaker 1: And Justice Stalin same person.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's common. It's you would even think that a
guy who had formally disavowed his Communism and like shredded
up his Communist party, you know, uh credit card or whatever,
might have like an interest in publishing even just to
say face publishing, like even tepidly communist critiques, just to
distance himself and the public perception he's created. But no,
he dies. He's the same thing with Karl Popper, not
to get off on a tangent, although I guess with
Carl Popper later on in his career he did become
more critical of communism. But Carl Popper is another again
architect of the post war consensus. Literally, the Open Society
Foundation is based on the title of his book, and
he was a mentor of George Soros was not even.
Speaker 1: Didn't he come up with the term conspiracy theorist.
Speaker 2: He wrote an essay called the Conspiracy Theory of Society, right.
I don't though if he coined these, But that's a
great essay, by the way, very very ridiculous stuff that
he puts in it. But another guy who, like in
a previous life, was a communist. And when he does
his big brained intellectual defense of liberalism, really only has
time to talk about how bad fascists are, how bad
nativists are, how bad Nazis are, how bad populists are,
how bad nationalists are. It's like, guy, you were with
the communists and you almost got killed by them, and
you can't even give me a sentence about how bad
that is. And again I'm being a little bit hyperbolic
because he does talk about Marx in The Open Society
and his enemies, but most of that book is spent
slagging nativism. It's spent slagging the closed society, which would be,
you know, a nation that protects his borders and has
law and order and has a you know, vaguely authoritarian,
hierarchical political structure. So I mean, these guys just telling
themselves it's remarkable.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and there's really I think at this point to
argue with them is you're giving them legitimacy because I
don't know that. Yeah, if you look at how many
followers he has on Twitter, and people say, oh, Twitter
isn't real life. People said that like eight nine years ago,
Well Twitter has become real life because it really is
the public square. So you know, you look at how
many followers he has. You look at if he posts something,
if he posts something about classical liberalism, he's lucky to
get like the amount of likes. He's lucky to get
ten percent of the likes of like a meme account
just posting a meme. But when he posts about stuff
like this, he may get like double that. And all
that tells you is that no one's buying this. The
only people who are really going along with it are
people who are so bought into his worldview. And you know,
let's face it. Yeah, I was talking about this with
a friend of mine on his show this afternoon. Is
that a lot of people who get into a quote
unquote movement, they're just looking for God, They're looking for
their God. And if somebody is like really into you know, oh,
classical liberalism and and he woke, James Lindsay can become
their God really quick if you're if you're really into
like free market economics, Ludwig von Mises can become your
your got really quickly. And that's just basically what we're seeing.
I mean, I don't know really if you had to guess,
do you think James Lindsay has any kind of influence
on the incoming Trump regime?
Speaker 2: None at all, I would assume. Then he complain that
like they literally didn't even ask me, Like I think
he said something to that effect on Twitter, like no
one's calling me, why.
Speaker 1: Would Why what are you going to tell them? What
are you going to advise them on? What I mean,
if you're if your goal? Trump has said, Look, I
think most people are at the point where it's like,
just get rid of all the get rid of all
the the illegal immigrants. If he got rid of, you know,
half of the illegal immorrants in this country at this point,
that would just be a win. Because I mean, no
one's expecting and no one's really expecting success. No one
who's realistic, no one who understands how the administrative state works,
how the post war consensus works. Is really expecting an
insane amount of success. But I mean, is he going
to be for that? How does he help that? How
does he help like say Doze say this Doge outfit
does start dismantling the managerial estate, managerial state. That's what
he's fighting for. So why is he complaining about what?
Is he expecting them to invite them in there so
he can tell them everything that they're doing wrong because
we have to keep doing We just have to go
back to the nineties. Bro I heard was so Amari?
And which one is? So Habo Mari? He's the one?
Is he Claremont?
Speaker 2: What I think he's Is he an editor for Compact?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Who's the Who's like? Is he associated with Claremont?
I can't remember, but I think yeah. So. And he
was talking to Dave Rubin and this was three or
four years ago, and when I was just listening to
everything and now I just can't listen to everything. And
they were talking about how they we need to go
back ten years. This all started falling apart ten years ago,
and I'm like, who's asking who listens to that? And
takes that seriously. Who says, in like in twenty twenty one,
that we just need to go back to twenty eleven,
what we need to go back to the ending of
Barack Obama's first term. But these people are retarded, and
I'm fully convinced. I become convinced of this more than
I the longer I do this. These people are just
trying to keep a job. There's just they're just saying
the things that they need to stay in their job.
If they were to deviate one bit, they'd get fired,
they'd have to go somewhere else, they'd have to Why
would you change your opinions on Why would you all
of a sudden become a Carl Schmidt fan? You know
when you've been when you've been a John Locke, when
you've been promoting Lockey in philosophy your whole life, especially
if you're making your living off of it, you're cutting
your income off. That's why Lindsay, that's why Lindsay's acting
the way he is is because he's his income. He's
seeing his potential downfall and more than that, not being
invited to be on the stage anymore. And he's one
of those people who can't take that.
Speaker 2: All this. I was thinking theses you were saying as
you were saying them, which is that a big part
of getting involved for this in this scene for me
has been realizing some of us are fighting for ideals
and outcomes and some of us are fighting for paychecks.
So that's very astute, totally co signed that. As far
as Sorabamari is concerned, I do believe he's connected with Claremont.
He was the editor of Compact and Commentary. He is
the editor of Compact now, and he was previously the
editor of Commentary, and I do think he was like
a Claremont fellow or something. But yeah, I mean, yeah,
it's not surprising that these people would want to go
back to like the period when their sinecure first opened up,
Like yeah, I want to go back to ten years
ago when you opened the floodgates and gave me, you know,
a lifetime job at gay Boy inco or whatever, you know,
like publishing bullshit dot com, Like yes, please, I want
to go back to that time so that I can
have that job. I don't know that I have anything
else to say on that point other than when you asked,
like what influence would James Lendsay have on the incoming
Trump administration. I immediately thought of that really weird anti
Saint Michael bit he was on, like, so imagine you're
Donald Trump, Like you can't even get a tweet out
the front door with that. James Lindsay, like, excuse me,
this is really a big problem and you need to
stop doing it. It's like, Okay, this guy is trying
to like kick forty million people out the front door,
and you're raising a stink over a tweet, like yeah,
you don't actually have a place here, and uh and
don't let the door hit you on the way out.
Speaker 1: He was wrong about Arn McIntyre being the guy behind that.
I'm the one with the saint. I'm the one with
the Saint Michael coyn right next to me when I
when I podcast, it was you, it was you all along,
ha ha. Tell everybody about your book on conspiracy theories.
In the Conspiracy Theories.
Speaker 2: Yes, so yeah, last time we were on, we talked
about American extremist Imperium Press the chapter on individualism and
socialism or sociopathy rather. Yeah, my book came out in
February of this year. It's actually part one of two,
and the new book is coming out early next year.
But understanding conspiracy theories, I had worked on it for
like five years. It's half of everything I have to
say about the subject matter. But yeah, I came into
nationalism through the conspiracy content. If you want to stay online,
you know, I read all the Jim Mars books I read.
You know. I listened to Alex Jones. I watched his
documentaries on the police State. I listened to Coast to
Coast I watched I was a young person, a very
young person, when loose change and Zeitgeist were like the
thing on the internets, and it was really harrowing, honestly
to like develop a con like to become a man
hormonally and like mentally, at the same time you're being
hit with this incredible technology called the Internet and all
of the information we have available to the human species.
So you know, I'm and of course I grew up
with nine to eleven. Like I remember the day the
Towers hit. I was sitting in my sophomore biology class
with the cute redhead teacher at my Catholic high school
and being pulled out of the classroom, thinking that my
father was dead, you know, So like these are all
deeply like and there's hundreds of thousands of people, millions
of people with the story just like that. So it's
not my pity story that I'm saying to your audience.
Lots of people have stories like that. I Yeah, I
grew up in New York City. That was the formation
of my consciousness. I remember when you could go on
an airplane and it was nice. And I remember a
couple of years later when you went on an airplane
and a morbidly obese Haitian person grabbed your balls. Like
I lived through that. Okay, So the Patriot Act and
everything that followed from that. So the idea of of
and now we're living in this moment where conspiracy theories
are kind of like a thing you can cash in on.
It's like a career. You can be an all media
guy with a TikTok account doing the whole you know,
your blurry face in front of like a text scroll
going isn't this look at this and this kind of
and here and here. It's like you can do that
as a career. And fifteen years ago, twenty years ago,
if you did that, you were a pariah. You were medicated,
you were kicked out of polite society. So it took
me coming into this nationalist community learning a few new
things that mainstream conspiracy culture from ten years ago didn't
let you in on people like Michael Collins Piper. Like
if I had known about Michael Collins Piper fifteen years ago,
it would have saved me a lot of trouble. I
didn't learn about him until like two and a half
years ago, and it's like, oh, well, this guy. It's
not like the skeleton key that literally unlocks everything, but
it clears up a lot of stuff. So I think
the thing that's really that at my selling point for
the book is the there's a neutral way to think
about conspiracy theories because we're now in this point where
people of a certain age like that is who their
identity is. It's like, I just am a conspiracy theorist, right,
And there's it's very difficult to think clearly because there's
there's sort of this heuristic in the conspiracy theory community.
Speaker 3: Where because you had this skepticism about things that happened
in the past, you have this sort of like gnostic
pure knowledge of everything that's happening now and conspiracy.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's this is a false flag. Just like what
I saw ten years ago. There are heuristics that work,
and then they are heuristics that don't work. And so
like what I was trying to do with this book
was try to establish, Okay, really, what is a conspiracy theory?
How does it work? Why is everyone today in this
hyper vigilant, paranoid, neurotic mindset where there is a conspiracy
lurking or I should say an illegitimate conspiracy lurking behind
every door. Ten years ago, if you're a liberal Democrat,
the big bad and it actually has been the same
conspiracy theory for the last ten years. The big conspiracy
was Russia, Russian bots, Russian hacking. Coutin Donald Trump got
urinated on a prostitute in a Russian hotel, and that's
the blackmail they've got. Sorry to be lewde with you
and your audience, but you know, maybe if you've got
young people in your audience, they didn't know that that happened.
If you were going through the first Trump campaign like
that was the October surprise and we're all just sitting
here like are you kidding me? So the basic punchline
here is, you know, a conspiracy theory effectively is a
folk account of history. It's you and me trying to
figure out what's actually happening, without the benefit of a PhD,
without the benefit of a Walter Cronkite, without the benefit
of some expert or authority, a regime a James Lindsay,
a regime approved personality who can disseminate a coherent narrative
to us so that we can go back to sleep
and then go to work and then pet you know,
a little Pete Junior on the head and send them
off to soccer practice, you know, the things that make
our day to day life livable. So what you really
have are is that this folk history and then regime history,
and there's this tension between the two. So I talk
a lot about that. I bring in a lot of
Marshall mccleughan to talk about how the Internet has created
this unique paranoid culture. That gentleman he was on Joe Rogan,
he popularized the phrase mass formation psychosis. You know that
that's been one of these phrases to explain kind of
why everyone is so crazy and why everyone is so
distrusting of the things that they see and the people
that they live around. I don't think we actually need
novel language. I don't think we need, if anything, this
book does very similarly what my first book did, which
was like take the psychology out of it, take the
psychiatry out of it, because, as I make the point
with the you know, Jim Lindsay and Hofstad are the
psychology that's been used to make sense of our political
life has made it worse because it isn't a psychological problem.
Intrinsically it's a political problem. It's a social, cultural, civilizational,
historical problem. We're dealing with real things, not just artifacts
of the mind, and we need to be able to
treat it that way. So that was probably a little incoherent.
But it's a great book, and I hope your audience
loves it.
Speaker 1: No anything I promote anything from Imperium Press. I send
people there all the time and they just get lost
in it. Thank you for mentioning Coast to Coast, though
it reminds me I haven't listened to keep it on
my phone to listen to every once in a while.
His nineteen ninety six interview with William Luther Pierce about that, Yeah,
and it was one of the only episodes that you'll
ever hear Art Bell like going at the guests, like
attacking the guests. It's wild. But the thing I love
about it is Peerce is just so even I'm here
to tell here to tell my story. I'm here to
you know, answer all these ridiculous claims that have been
made and everything. But yeah, there's some there's some good
stuff out there, and yeah, Turner Diaries and Hunter, those
are good books to check out, you know, I mean,
some compelling writing, to say the least.
Speaker 2: There not to slam Alex Jones, because he's sort of
a folk hero for a lot of people, even to me,
but it's like, yeah, Coast coasted that in the nineties,
and it took Alex Jones until like twenty seventeen to
have David Duke on. And he came at David Duke
the same way that William Luther Peerscott treated. So it's
the same kind of tension in the right wing. And
this is one of the hypotheses of my book and
my new book. It goes back to the John Birch
Society in effect, where you have or between Buckley and
the National Review and the Real Rights, or between Buchanan
and the Conservative inc. There's this tension between the mainstream
post war consensus right and then the more principled hardline nationalists,
and that has always existed. This is why there was
an alt right. This is why James Lindsay complains in
that interview with Constantine Kissing, Well, they don't even actually
attack the left, who supposes the real enemy. All they
ever do is attack the conservatives because Conservative inc. Is
a proximately our biggest threat, because our message. We have
to squeeze our message through this very narrow funnel to
get half or a quarter or a third of our
ideas out in this very domesticated way, because Conservative inc.
Is the problem. What did Nixon say, right a thousand times?
The media is the enemy. Conservative inc. Is the enemy.
So that's you know, that says it all right there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it wasn't the Clintons that got Thatt, Sam Francis
cantiled and fired from his job. Yeah, it was the
quote unquote right wingers. Yeah, all right, Josh, I appreciate it,
thank you, and let's do it again.
Speaker 2: Sim appreciate it absolutely