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Speaker 2: All right, hey everyone, this is another retrospective. I've done
a couple of these now or I go back to
episodes I recorded a long time ago, remaster them, get
the audio a little bit better. And this is a
compilation of my two first ever conversations with George Bagby.
These are about four years old now and at the
time there's a big debate going on about American identity. Right,
is America the great Satan? Is there something to be saved?
And George and I went through and discussed that in
two conversations totally about three hours. So I think i'd
put these back out. Obviously, that debate continues to rage,
and I think even though it's been a while, these
conversations hold up a lot of you haven't seen them.
I was a very small channel. And if you've enjoyed
my conversations with Bagbee and wondered how we got started,
well this is the answer to that question. So hope
you guys enjoy. Be back with a more regular episode soon.
But people tend to like these. It's a good way
to hear the old content in one place and in
much hopefully much much better audio I used to have. Anyway,
guys appreciate it. Be back soon. Thanks. All right, I'm
really excited for this. This is a big guest for me.
You guys may not know them, but George Bagbey is
a long term friend and mentor of mine, and before
before I introduce him directly, you wanted to be actually
asked to come on to speak about America. So obviously
there's been a lot of dialogue recently, mostly between AA
but also you know previous guy the show Pall Fahrenheit,
Ryan turnip Seed and some other people about essentially the
nature of America. You know, the global American Empire is
a phrase that has been popularized in our circles and
essentially is there some type of I guess is the
global American Empire and American culture? Are those the same things?
So obviously a lot of you know, digital ink has
been spilled on that. And while there are a lot
of you know, well written articles, I wasn't you alwaysn't
quite satisfied with that. You know, I didn't feel like
my position got expressed, and so I was really happy
to hear when you know, George Bagby reached out to
me and essentially asked to come on my show. So, George,
could you introduce yourself and then we can head straight
into it.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, greetings. I call myself George Bagbee. I'm an American
history teacher. I also teach ancient literature. I'm particularly interested
in historiography. Historiography is a favorite subject of mine. Everyone's
eyes always popped out when I start talking about historygraphy, Well,
what is what is that? Exactly? It's it's about people
talking about the subject of history, like what is history
supposed to be? What are we doing when we're studying
history talking about history? What's its purpose? And I guess
that was my initial interest in this subject of America.
It's a perennial subject among Americans. We all were frequently
talking about America. What is America? What should America be?
We've got a lot of ideologies on this subject, but
it's certainly the matter with the American question, as we
might term it, what what AA and Paul Fahrenheit have
been talking about lately. It occurs to me AA said
something that I thought went to the heart of the matter.
I would like to I'd like to clarify I have.
I have great respect for AA. He's he's truly an aristocrat.
He's a man who's whose opinions matter and influence many
of us. But AA said said something that struck me.
He said, everyone knows what American culture is. Everyone knows
what we're talking about when American culture. What American culture is,
he says, it's homogeneous. He said, the outright denial of
the very thing the United States has known for the
world over is astounding to watch. And I guess I
fit into that category. I am what he's talking about
right there, because when I think America, I'm not thinking
of McDonald's. I'm not thinking of Walmart. I'm not I'm
not thinking of Major League Baseball. I'm thinking of a
weird little town in Maine. I'm thinking of whatever Utah
is supposed to be, which I'm not at all clear of,
by the way, But I think it's weird and I
think it's it's also great. It's like very American. Whatever
they're doing out there.
Speaker 2: Well, I fully agree with you. And it's interesting you
bring up a little town in Maine because, for you know, reasons,
we don't have to get into I essentially, in about
twenty one days went from the the you know, the
southern tip of Louisiana to the northern tip of Maine.
And and look, I get it right, Like there's a
target in both talents. You know, there's a burger king
in both talents. Yeah, the idea that those cultures are
the same, although I will say there is an odd
amount of Acadian French in both that that is an
odd but that's not what we're specifically talking about. The
idea that those two places are the same, that the
people who live there are the same is it is.
To me, it's flagrantly untrue. And I think that before
we get into this, there's something we should separate, which
is there are kind of two claims being made. Which is,
one like, the global American Empire is horrible and evil
and we should oppose it, you know, almost at all costs.
I agree with that. I think both of us are
firmly anti empire, absolutely, But the other one is that
American culture is deeply and irreparably flawed. You know, it's
this kind of like immense force for evil that nothing
good has ever come from American culture, And those are
kind of equivocated. You know that you when you well,
if you don't agree with one, you disagree with both.
And to me, I would put myself very much in
support of the first position and very much against the second.
Speaker 5: Indeed, I agree with what you're saying here. America is
homogeneous in some sense. We speak English, or most of
us do. The predominant culture does the elites do. We
get a lot of stuff. We got to get a
lot of cheap Chinese stuff from Walmart. We eat bad
food from the fast food chains. We all know what
that stuff tastes like. Coca Cola is ubiquitous. Right, There's
that America. And I'm not denying that. We almost all
of us drive cars. We can't imagine our lives without them.
Our landscape is marred by the highways and exit ramps
and everything that that involves, the parking lots we have.
We have a degeneracy that we're exporting to the world. Yes, yes,
I know what what America's opponents are talking about when
they say these things. If that is all America is
then we're sunk. I mean, why not kill ourselves or something.
There's there's nothing really worth worth dying for when it
comes to McDonald's food, for heaven's sake, and no one
ever said there was. We've got degenerously, we've got no borders,
we've got debt our people are sterilizing themselves. I get
that times are bad, we don't deny that. But what
is America? And why would anyone love it? I happen
to believe America is worth loving. I happen to believe
that there is an awful lot of interest here that
hundreds of years of settlements have built up distinctive, valuable
things in this land, things that I happen to love.
I feel kind of like like Robert Oppenheimer. Do you
ever hear that story about Oppenheimer? He had some Communist
ties early in his life. He was a member of
some kind of communist organization, and it came out during
the Cold War and there was some congressional investigation. Do
you know about this?
Speaker 2: I know about Oppenheimer, but not about this connection to
carry on.
Speaker 5: Oh, it's a heartbreak, king and sweet story. It's actually
a very good story. George Kanan his friend, the diplomat,
was talking to him about it. Someone, someone suggested to
Oppenheimer that he should just leave. He should go to
Europe or some or somewhere where he would be appreciated.
He shouldn't put up with American communist witch hunts, he
shouldn't put up with with Congress disrespecting him. And he
kind of teared up. Allah Jordan Peterson, if you will,
and he said, God, damn it, I happen to love
this country. And I kind of feel I kind of
feel like that with with all the put downs that
we hear about American now. But we have something else
to go on here. And this is important. In the
midst of all of the lockdown hysteria, in the midst
of all of the vaccine mandates, in the midst of
the gay the global American empire really lashing out, the
deep State trying to manipulate US and trying to manipulate Europe,
Americans have arguably done the most to resist those things.
They have organized by the tens of millions. These efforts
have not always been well spent, admittedly, but as far
as the dissident right goes, a huge number of US
A disproportionate number of US are American. So my contention
is there must be something constructive here. You cannot damn
all of these people to hell. You can't say they
have no place in the movement because they happen to
like America, because they happen to be Americans, because it
may not be right for them to be anywhere else,
to go and expend their efforts anywhere else. This is
actually where we belong. This is our patrie right, this
is our homeland, and we should be allowed to be
patriotic about it. And I want to qualify that, to
be patriotic about the United States, I'm not I'm not
being a nationalist chauvinist when I say that. I'm not
saying raw rah rah USA. We've got to be the biggest.
We've got to be the best. We've got to be
the strongest. We've got to We've got to, as the
Bush administration official said, we've got to pick up a
shitty little country every once in a while and throw
it against the wall, just to show the world that
we mean business. That's what a Bush administration official was
quoted as saying on one occasion. That is not what
I mean that's not my America. As Bill Kaufman said.
Speaker 2: So one of the core conventions in all of this
is that the gay was always the destiny of America.
This is always how it was going to be. And look,
I realized that, you know, from my confessional heritage is
a hardcore Calvinist. That might be a little bit, you know,
a touchy subject for me, right, But do you think
that that's true, that this was always the way America
was going to go, the only way it could have happened.
Speaker 5: I will concede the point that you can you can
see the roots of these imperial ambitions very early, and
you could see those those imperial roots even with the
likes of Thomas Jefferson, which seems unlikely though you can
kind of quote Jefferson to say almost anything. He's all
over the place. But even even Thomas Jefferson shares a
lot with the likes of the Jacobins, for instance. Well, right,
he's always very radical. But but even.
Speaker 2: So, Columbia, right, is always shown wearing the that what's
the name of the She's always shown wearing the beret, isn't.
Speaker 5: She, right, Yeah, it's like the garb of the French Revolution,
and it's and it's the Republican Garb. Indeed, so carry on.
Speaker 2: You were talking about talking about Jefferson.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you can see these, these roots of imperial ambitions
and and you know, global influence. You can see those
early and you can see them in many places. But
this isn't the only thing. This isn't the only vision
of what America could be or what America means. In fact,
there were a great many of these we in history.
We frequently call these things narratives, you know, stories that
we tell to make sense of the world that we
live in. A myth, if you will, Okay, it's a
myth that makes sense of our government, a myth that
makes sense of our policy goals. But here's my point.
AA says, the gay is an American myth, the gay
is an American ideal. We can see this in our history.
I agree, but I contend strongly it is not the
only myth, and we have a number of constructive things
that are alternatives to this. Myths come and go in
our history, and myths are forgotten, myths are shelved, we
move on to something else. We have many exams bolts
of that in our history. But now maybe the perfect
time for my thesis statement. Although the Gays is every
bit as bad as AA says it is, I'm willing
to make that concession, all right. And I'm not on
board with the American Empire. I don't like it his thesis.
AA's thesis that this was the destiny of America is
incorrect and demoralizing, and it's incorrect and it's demoralizing to
his American allies. And we want to be allied with
the dissident sphere. I certainly do. The United States was
colonized by British people, and it became an empire, and
it became an empire for a time, not so very
unlike the British Empire. Americans have created good and bad
political formulas to justify their powers. And these narratives must
be a place where Americans can find inspiration and not
to spare it. This is my contention. We have to
have some constructive vision based on our shared experience in history.
Speaker 2: So this this does bring up you highlight the British connection,
you know, to the early American settlers, And obviously I
have a good amount of British ancestry. I think that
my earliest ancestors roughly sixteen twenty as an indentured servant
coming from a proud line of starving dirt farmers. Indeed,
but there is something to be said for the fact that,
all right, so fair enough, I agree that we have
a you know, a strong especially in the early you know,
like the founding stock Americans were British. But where do
you kind of, I guess, to a certain degree, like
draw the line of who is you know, truly American, right,
because on one hand, right, you have the you know,
the the Irish, the Germans, you know, the Italians, you know,
the Swedes, Lithuanians, pollocks, everyone, right, And obviously there were
waves of that and maybe fair enough the lines about
nineteen sixty four plus or minus, and that would be
maybe a better one than others. But it does seem
to be to be a certain extent kind of an
arbitrary distinction, because there are fundamentally different types of Americans
with a different conception of what that nation is.
Speaker 5: Indeed, and I think that that is important. One of
the things I do with my history classes is I
distribute packets and I have my students give presentations about
different ethnic groups in American history, and I think that
these stories, these narratives do bring important things to the
American experience. No American could imagine America without hamburgers and
hot dogs, for instance, and those come from the German influx.
No American can imagine America without pizza. Who in the
world could imagine America without pizza? And that comes from
the Italians, right, And for that matter, the Chinese food,
you know, the inevitable American Chinese restaurant, which isn't even Chinese,
you know, but it's what we call Chinese food. But
this is the matter, this is where it all comes together.
We're all speaking English, and if we are to understand
our own American story, if we're going to understand the
war for Independence, if we're going to understand our own constitution,
if we're going to understand the Declaration of Independence, we
have to be plugged in to the British culture that
gave all of that birth. So it's not just very
Anglo Americans like me, and I'm very thoroughly British in
my heritage, unusually, so both sides. It's my family or
very Anglo. It's not just me that have the blood
ties here. It is the third generation Italian American that
has no cultural memory vitaly at all, has has no
connection with the language they're speaking English, They've inherited, they've assimilated,
and now their story is wrapped up in British Americans.
Speaker 2: So how do you distinguish that from kind of like
the the Shapiro style civic nationalist or civic nationalism.
Speaker 5: Well, there you got me. I don't really pay attention
to what then Shapiro has to say.
Speaker 2: So that would be the idea that essentially, because America
is you know, propositional, essentially like by coming here essentially
you know, either being born on the magic dirt, you know,
or essentially like saying the pledge of allegiance once you
know you're magically an American. And I realized that's a
thoroughly uncharitable way of summarizing this argument. But you know,
it'll it's close enough for government work. I guess.
Speaker 5: It matters tremendously how people will identify themselves with this heritage,
if they see it as their birthright, if they if
they see like English, the English language, the English heritage,
the English literature, all all of which are so closely
wrapped up in the founding stock, the American heritage stock
if you will, uh, there there are those who will
be you know, alienated foreign nationals on American soil, and
and say because they they've got the citizenship that makes them,
it gives them, it gives them the background knowledge to
be just as American as anyone else. But that isn't
actually how it works. Someone who has knowledge of the
English Civil War and cares about the sides that that
fought in it, have a deeper knowledge of what's going
on in American history. Those that know the difference between
an Anglican and a Baptist and a Puritan, they're going
to have a much deeper knowledge. Now maybe they are,
you know, by legacy, by inheritance, they're Greek Orthodox or
Italian Catholic or something like that, they still have to
understand those English issues in order to understand America. And
that may sound particularist. It's harder for some than others.
You and I, our ancestors go back to the early
sixteen hundreds. Our ancestors were colonial Americans. For us, I
really don't think it's all that hard, and I honestly
do and I know this is a controversial. Take the
easiest way to explain this is that it is a
legacy of the blood that's passed down from generation to generation.
Of course, you can explain it that it's partly contact
with parents and grandparents who talk about things, who have
ways of explaining things, who have a kind of oral
heritage that they pass down. Of course, that's part of it.
But is it not also in the blood of men,
as Donald Davidson said, is it something put in a
book only or also passed down that's actually part of
our flesh. I think it makes sense to think of
it that way to some degree, but it doesn't mean.
It doesn't mean that people with other heritage, bloodlines, people
with different ancestry, people whose ancestors spoke another language up
until this generation perhaps cannot claim some some place in
this society in the United States. It has meant that
I'm thinking of African American Christians, for instance, all right,
who up until the Civil War would worship with their
white neighbors. That that is a very interesting story, and
it's the story of assimilation. How did African Americans become Christian?
How did they learn to speak English? And we can
tell that story about about any any group potentially that
has joined American society to some degree. There there are
those that identify, there are those that have assimilated. There
are those that obey the laws, those that act like citizens.
There are those that know the backstory to some degree,
and there are those that don't. And of course that's
not a good description of citizenship, but we see both
in America, is is my general point. I'm not trying
to be contentious.
Speaker 2: No, not at all. So one of the things that
I think is it's interesting. And obviously Paul is a
a friend of both of ours. We've met him in
real life, and you know, I like him a good bit,
but there is I think a fundamental disagreement among Americans
essentially on the nature of the empire, right, And this
really comes down to as kind of everything does in
American history, right to some degree or another, the Civil War.
And to me, again, I like paulic a bit, but
he strikes me as someone and I feel like he
would probably agree with this, who's essentially pro American empire, right,
like we will use the American empire to essentially create
like a pan European imperium, you know, to be to
lead into the stars. You know, I don't know if
that's one hundred percent right. But I've talked to him
fairly recently and that seems like his point, and so
that is definitely one part of it. But to me,
the the kind of American tradition that you and I
are a part of is very firmly anti empire and
very firmly I guess, localist and decentralized. So can you
go into that distinction a little bit, kind of that
that you know the on one hand, the kind of
like you know, Lincoln Wilson tradition that you know Paul
to a certain degree is a part of, and then
maybe where you and I come from.
Speaker 5: Indeed, yes, I'd be happy to yes with respect to Paul,
because I know about the heritage that he speaks of.
I understand where he's coming from. I identify with with
his antagonists in history. I think part of what we're
describing here is the conflict between Hamilton and Jefferson. And
this this began even before the Washington administration, but it
really blew up during the Washington administration. Hamilton worshiped bigness.
He loved things to be big, he loved things to
be dynamic. He wanted big banks. He wanted big business,
he wanted big cities. He wanted American ports open to
the world, he wanted American influence overseas. Hamilton's model was
the British Empire, and I love, I love to remind
my students on this point. It's a good thing to
look at what works in history and to try to
imitate it, and Hamilton was no fool. I also like
to tell my students about Hamilton's views of debt. He's
he said, a national debt for us, if not excessive,
will be a national blessing. And I like to remind them,
you know, Hamilton is no dumb cop here. He actually
knows something about what he's talking about, and he would
be absolutely appalled to see our levels of debt today.
But just the same, Jefferson was his antagonist, and I
really I like to see a little Englander in Jefferson.
These these are the English dissenters of the imperial project
of the British Empire, if you will, the ones that
are content with a with an isolated agrarian Britain, who
don't know what what the British army is doing in India.
You know that they they like what they have and
they want to keep it back in England. When I'm
looking back at the American legacy, I like to see
that in Jefferson. I am aware that's not entirely what
he's after, but just the same, Jefferson did more than
anyone to advance that vision of American affairs. Jefferson wanted
an agrarian state. He believed that Americans will care about
politics only if they own property in this land. He
did not think that a proletarian class could be effective citizens,
or even citizens at all. Herbert Agar, who is a
Pulitzer Prize winning Jeffersonian an American historian, Herbert Agar said
Jefferson believed all men should have the vote because all
men should have property, and for him, those things are
closely connected. Jefferson's vision of the United States was not
a United States of big cities, not a United States
of big factories, not a United States with any corporations
at all, and he started a political heritage of small
property owners that still resonates with Americans today. We have
we have a Jefferson Monument in Washington, d C. For
whatever that's worth it, just if nothing else, it shows
us that vision is something that survived in America to
a very late date. I think the Jefferson Memorial ironically
was commissioned by FDR.
Speaker 7: Well.
Speaker 2: And when you think about it, even among our circles, right,
like many of us are to a certain degree or
an other kind of like kulux, right, you know, middle class,
you know, kind of by virtue of the fact that
we are dissidents, right, and we do kind of dissent
from the prevailing prevailing culture. And I think that so
much of what we've seen over the pandemic is essentially
a move to essentially muscle that to essentially crush that group, right,
to essentially incentivize everyone to be tied into the state,
to the system, and to me right, this kind of
like tradition of you know, independent small hold you know,
when either it comes to literally farmers, right, or ranchers
or friend tiersman you know, or kind of like the
you know, like the Roman you know, kind of like
farmer warriors or that you know, the actual English yeomen Right,
that's a deep tradition in the West. And I think
that kind of fosters the type of kind of like
truly like manful independence that is kind of central to
so much of I guess like I guess like the
Western project more broadly.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, and this is one of Richard Weaver's great points.
Richard Weaver, who was who was a Southerner, a rhetorician,
he was an academic. He wrote a famous book called
Ideas Have Consequences, and this is one of my favorite chapters.
In that particular book, he said, the small property owner
has political independence, and small property is distinctly different than
this modern innovation of owning shares in some operation that
you've never seen and getting dividends from it or something.
Actually having property is a way to have an unpopular
opinion in the modern world. And this is something that
has captured the American imagination. This is a really powerful
point in our heritage that we relate to very strongly.
Most Americans lived on farms up until World War Two.
This d NATed city dwelling, proletarian American is a recent phenomenon.
And the American independence of living in the country, having
one's own business, even farming as a hobby. To remember
that way of life is something that many Americans aspire
to deeply desire. We talk about fleeing the rat race
in the cities Practically everyone I speak to says, oh,
I don't want to live in the city. I want
to live in the country. I want to be connected
to the land. I hear that from my acquaintance as often.
Perhaps I know I'm hanging out with certain people, But
it's a mainstream idea in America just the same. And
this is the thing I wanted to reiterate this. Our
elites are telling us that America is just an idea.
America is nothing organic. America is not something your ancestors
left to. You know, your ancestors were wicked. Our elites
are telling us always that America's mission is to spread
transsexual rights in Romania, all right, and they send ambassadors
to for that specific purpose. I understand Americans resist this instinctually,
maybe even forgetting the other narratives that can explain their
position and that they can relate to. And what I
don't understand is some of our British friends, who who
I love very much. I think of myself unironically as
a colonial. I'm a child of the British Empire in
a way. But them embracing this ideological, degenerate mission as
as America's some purpose, and uh that that explains everything
we need to know about Americans, or America or all
that America could be. They're they're joining with our worst
enemies in saying that. They couldn't possibly mean to do that.
They couldn't possibly mean to demoralize their own American allies
by saying that. Which is why I want to be
diplomatic and reach out to them and offer them on alternative.
This this narrative that we just that we just talked
about the narrative of Jefferson and Hamilton, Hamilton the imperialist booster,
the big business guy, versus Jefferson, who has this small
vision of an agrarian America. It's a it's a more
a more humble vision, certainly more independent, right, independent Americans
who are not dependent on on a big government to
regulate their lives, not dependent on a big business to
employ them. They aren't paying monthly payments to the banks
for you know, capital that they've got on loan out.
That's Jefferson's vision and independent America, and that's a compelling
vision for us. It's one of our biggest alternative visions
to what we have right now, and it's one that's
still alive. Another vision I wanted to bring up was
that of the imperialists of the turn of the century
and the anti imperialists. Have you done much reading on
this subject? Do you know these guys?
Speaker 2: You remember the very broadest strokes. I know a few names,
but not enough to be, you know, conversant.
Speaker 5: They they really only got started, well, the anti imperialists
really only got started after the Spanish American War, which
blindsided them, Like Americans really had no idea what was
going on. They were, they were dumbfounded by the media.
It was like a syop of the media of the time.
Remember the main they blamed the Spanish for blowing up
the battleship Maine in the harbor of Havana, Cuba, when
in fact the Spanish didn't have anything to do with it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, suspicious explosions leading to a military intervention is a
time honored American tradition, it.
Speaker 5: Seems, indeed, and in this case it's perhaps the most
successful instance of that, because it meant suddenly the United
States had a global empire. This is how we got
Puerto Rico, This is how we started our long and
dreadful relationship with the Caribbean States and the Central American
states where we're just knocking over their governments year after year,
sending the Marines to run the custom house in Haiti
and the Miminican Republic and Cuba and other places. These
these countries are not sovereign in any sense, but so
so on the one side, you've got you've got the
imperialist camp, which includes people like Woodrow Wilson. Woodrow Wilson said,
the idea of America is to serve humanity. And and
it's like, oh, well, that's awful big and sounds so nice,
but in fact it involves like sending the Marines to
do the dirty work of big American banks who've loaned
Haiti a bunch of money and they're going to get
it back with interest. William McKinley, the president at the
time of the Spanish American War, he said the conquest
was for humanity's sake. He said that we wanted to
uplift and civilize and christianize these these uh lesser people's
around the world, especially the Filipinos. No one bothered to
tell McKinley that they were Roman Catholic or mostly Roman
Catholic at the time, but that may not have mattered
to McKinley. He was, he was speaking to a very
Protestant audience.
Speaker 2: What's interesting to me because obviously there were a lot
of nine eleven retrospectives and what kind of came across
because I don't remember nine to eleven I was really young.
Is that kind of the face of the War on
Terror changed, But throughout the whole thing it was clad
in very much this kind of like high handed, like
moralistic tone the entire time, you know, much the same
way that you know, the the initial like wars of
the American Empire were about, you know, christianizing the savages.
You know, at first it was you know, our they
hate our freedom, you know, kind of like all the
endless like George Bushism's you know, and then currently, right,
we're still in the same wards. But now it's about
you know, ensuring that that girls can read. You know.
So the state religion, you know, as it is, has
changed very much, but the core impulse is not.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I agree, it's a spreading cultural values sort of thing.
It was in McKinley's day and it is now. But
I brought it up not because we can see the correspondents,
but because it always had an opposition, and the opposition
included a lot of unlikely people. There were a bunch
of Civil War era Republicans who came out against this,
which is really interesting because these are the people running
reconstruction in the American South. One of them was George
Horror of Massachusetts, who was a senator from Massachusetts, and
yes his name was Horror, just Hoar, I believe. But
he was an anti imperialist. He got and made several
speeches against the colonization of the Philippines, said the Filipinos
should be following the declaration of independence, the Filipinos should
be allowed to choose their own destiny. But another of
Mark Twain, is another one of the famous anti imperialists,
and he was maybe the most eloquent of the bunch.
He gave us a famous version of the Battle Hymn
of the Republic, which you ought to look up. It's
one of the most amusing things he wrote on the
anti imperialist vein. But my favorite is General Smedley Butler
of the United States Marine Corps, who won the Medal
of Honor twice, and he came out strongly against these
imperialist projects in Central America and elsewhere. He said it
was a racket. He said, famously, war is a rat backet.
And he claimed that he was sent on all the
campaigns he went on. He went to China during the
Boxer Rebellion, for instance, he went to the Philippines, he
went to Nicaragua, he went to Haiti and Cuba. And
he claimed that most of his missions involved securing the
collateral of Wall Street banks and collecting their profits.
Speaker 2: So it's interesting you bring that up because much is
made of Eisenhower's farewell address, right, and look, it's a
good speech, it's you know, it's important, and I think
it's to a certain degree he's onto something. But you
gave me a book last time. I saw you North
against South. Yes, and it's quite good as someone who's
you know, as kind of a very rudimentary understanding of
the Civil War. But what I found especially interesting in
it is that that I guess, like the amount of
sway that the financial industry has had as it relates
to kind of like US military endeavors, has always been there.
So a large section of the book, which is well
worth your time. It's you know, a little bit rare,
but not too hard to find for anyone in Chatty
is interested essentially deals with the immense amount of corruption
in the in the Lincoln government, and I mean all
the way down to you know, much like the same
system of government contractors. You know, we kind of like
know and loved today that was very much alive that
And so it's odd because on one hand you kind
of have this the same like urge to you know,
private enterprise, which is in many ways kind of like
essential to I guess kind of like the yeoman you know,
the yeoman farmer, the you know, the homesteader, that archetype
that we spoke about earlier. In a certain degree, you know,
they're kind of the same thing that doomed us. You know,
it's like we almost we formed that, we forged the
change for our own risks, if you see what I mean.
Speaker 5: Yes, yeah, And and that is something that the Hamiltonian administrations,
like Lincoln's, have always had as a major mark against them.
Whenever the government is handing out huge contracts for patronage,
it attracts a stupendous amount of corruption. And it was
following the Lincoln administration, the reconstruction governments like the Grant administration,
it was from that time that we spawned the term
lobbyist for the people that were looking for government contracts,
the people that were willing to stuff the pockets of
congressmen who were willing to pass them those government contracts.
They were waiting in the lobbies, waiting to give the
congressman rich gifts and take them off to dinner. That's
what lobbyists do to get the ears of the congressmen
and to get some of that sweet government money.
Speaker 2: So I'm curious, and I realized this might be I
don't mean to, you know, put you in a tough
spot here, but I think we pretty much share the
you know, the diagnosis of America and American culture right
like it's looking a bit grim, you know, both on
the empire frontier and also just like I mean, yeah,
I think all of us look at you know, Lezo
paying James Madison's flute, and kind of we feel the
same feelings. So what is the Is there some kind
of like positive vision out of this? Is there some
way that we get out of this or is this
all just kind of like some golden past we can
kind of fondly look back on.
Speaker 5: I think there is a positive vision. And I realized
that this is one of AA's regular talking points as well.
He does not like the positive vision. He prefers to
unite around clearing them all out.
Speaker 1: Well.
Speaker 5: I I agree that is a point on which we
can unite. But being an American, I need a constructive
story about my country. And as Ryan turnip Seed said recently,
if we don't have any idea what comes next, what
comes next could very well be worse. I can think
of a great many examples of this. The Russian regime
was doing very badly and it seemed like things couldn't
go on, and eventually they didn't go on, and they
got the Bolsheviks. You could look at the ancient regime
in France and things were going badly, and what did
they get? They got Rospierre, you know. And I don't
want to see reigns of terror in my country. So
I need a positive vision. Americans do need a positive vision,
and that is essentially my point in my thesis. We
have to look back on our history and we have
to see things worth believing it. We have to see
things worth loving. This land is not going to get
any better if someone doesn't love it. Now, I will contend,
and this is where I want to make another concession.
I would be very happy to see Washington d c emptied.
I would be very happy to see this continent balkanized.
I think that would be the best thing to happen
to it. Rather like our British friends say, they hope
that American influence in Europe will subside and allow the
nations of Europe to find themselves and govern themselves once again,
to find their own independent voices once again. That is
my hope for the peoples of this big continent over here.
We have a great many regions and distinctive peoples over here.
They have also been the targets of the violence and
the social engineering of the gay and this this arguably
started before the Civil War. The the hymn of the Gay,
you could, you could say, the song that you can
well imagine them singing is the battle Hymn of the Republic,
which is a Civil war song. It it imagines the
armies of the Federal Union as the armies of God himself,
and they are out to to h stamp out the
grapes of wrath on the earth. They are out to
do away with evil. They are going to bring up
men before the judgment seat This is all very apocalyptic imagery.
And of course the chorus is glory, glory, hallelujah. Our
God is marching on. But what God is that? It's
the American government that has taken the place of God.
The actions of the American government are now a pseudo religion,
a false religion. The alternative I see to that is
also a song, and it's Dixie. It's a love of
the land that you belong to. And what does Dixie say?
This is one of the most famous songs to come
from America, and it's not a song. It's not a
vision that should threaten anyone, least of all Americans. This
should be a song Americans love and know. I happen
to have a summer job. I was a Civil War
tour guide on a bus and I had had lots
of Boomers from all over the country, and I liked
them very much, and they're the sorts of people that
can still appreciate this sort of thing. I would sing
the Battle Hymn the Republic to them in the midst
of my Civil War tour, and I also would sing
Dixie to them, and I talked to them a bit
about both, and they loved them. Both, and that was
so reassuring to see. When I sing Dixie for my students,
they think I'm being controversial, and that shouldn't be the case.
What is Dixie. Dixie is like the country music that
is so famous as a as an export from the
United States. Some of it's better than others, admittedly, But
Dixie is a song about loving your home because it's yours.
It's where we live and die in Dixie Land, where
I was born. Early on one frosty morning, look Away,
look Away, look Away, Dixie Land. I wish I was
in Dixie to live and die in Dixie. It's about
human life, right. We're born in a place, we belong
to that place, that place belongs to us. We love
it because it's ours, not because it's perfect, not because
it's big, not because it's wealthy, not because Starbucks is
better than whatever other coffee you might drink. That's not
why we love America. We love America because it's ours,
and we need to have a positive vision of it.
We need to have a vision of its health, we
need to have a vision of its happiness. We need
to embody that vision in our own lives and ambitions.
That's my contention here. That's ultimately the point of my thesis,
and I'd be happy to see Americans realize that vision
one hundred different ways without the gay forcing their own
corrupt degeneracy on us.
Speaker 2: It's interesting because to a certain degree, right there is
this this tension kind of running through America, right because
at one hand, right America is both you know, hearth
and home, you know what, like my ancestors when they
got off the boat, it was what two hundred miles
from where I live now, you know, and fair enough
there's a little bit of French mixed in too, but
you know, there's a whole lot of me that's been
here forever. And I get that, and that's very much
quinet essentially America. But as we were talking before, there
is something kind of certain cultures have almost like potemic symbols,
right like the for the Chinese, it's the wall, for
the Russians, it's the open plane. And I think that
there's something to be said for there's kind of a
a wanderlust to being America, right, like it's the open road.
And I live that out myself, like I'm both very
much a particularist and I get it, like I love,
I love where I live, but also like I get
the get this kind of just urge to drive, you know,
And I've driven, you know, a thousand miles to your place,
you know, once or twice already. And how do you
kind of square that circle of that kind of like
almost baseline kind of like contradiction in the American spirit.
Speaker 5: I think that it's undeniably part of us, the urge
to wander, the urge to go west. As Robert Penwarren
says in Jack Burden's novel, right west is where we
all go someday. It's where we go when we hear
there's gold in them, they're hills. It's where we go
to grow up with the country. It's where we go
in our old age, or or it's just where we go. Right.
That's a very American thing. And I feel that that
as well, Like I really want to go, I really
want to go and see. I want to get up
and I want to drive. And I wonder if the
car is the American symbol in Spingler sense. It wouldn't
be a bad choice for that, I think, And that's
both both good and bad for us, I think. But
this is also part of my point these narratives that
I've been talking about, the Hamiltonians and Jefersonians, the Lincolnites
and the Southerners, the imperialists and anti imperialists. There's good
and bad in these things, Like none of them are
all that we want them to be, but all of
them are us, all right. They're part of our legacy
when we think about America and what America has been,
and what America has stood for and aspired to and
things like that, and in some abstract sense, it's all
of those things in a really spooky way. America is
Rosie O'Donnell and Jerry Folwell, and I know this is
just just preposterous. America is Trump and Biden. This is
really strange, and you know, it kind of shows how
far we've come. Henry Adams said, if you look at
the progression of presidents from Washington to Grant, then it's
enough to disprove Darwin's theory of evolution. This is a
really wild thing to say. How many people would include
Lincoln in that lineup? Imagine Lincoln is in that lineup.
Henry Adams certainly did put Lincoln in that lineup. But
just the same we have good and bad narratives. Some
of them are better, some of them are worse. But
it's us that is our legacy. We need to be
okay with that. It's kind of looking like looking in
the mirror and seeing an ugly worn out phase, but
you know it's yours right well, And.
Speaker 2: This is something that I think that the South Africans
get so conscious. Carocle and Robert Diagen, we're both on
Pete quanonas recently they've been on Kashoota. Their coshudo appearance
is good. They're just solid all around guys. I can't
recommend it enough, but but they speak often about this
essentially like well, okay, like let's say what you will
about America, but it's better than South Africa, you know,
like we don't have And I don't mean to put
them down. I just mean that the level of problems
that they have are fundamentally different than ours. You know,
it's kind of like Baser levels of the hierarchy of needs.
But in the or you get essentially that there is
there is something to a place being yours. You know,
in a place does it become lovely, It doesn't become
kind of like worth dying for unless someone is essentially
willing to kind of put in the blood, sweat and tears,
you know. And I think that the negative side of that,
like oh well, just hit the open road. You know,
things got rough, let's go out, let's head out of town,
is essentially this like idea of always kind of like
eternally searching for a greener pasture. You know, in the
moment that something kind of like comes into your hometown,
and you know, it makes things a little bit inconvenient.
It's like, all right, well, we're headed off to Austin,
or we're headed off to Atlanta, or we're headed off
to you know, whatever the next big city is to,
you know, make it big and look like obviously. There's
a certain amount of time when, you know, when God says, hey, Abraham,
you've been living in your dad's proverbial basement your entire life. Leave.
You know, there's a time when you know, Jesus and
his family had had to flee to Egypt. I'm not
denying that, right, there's a time to pick up your
bedroll and go. But I think that there is a
negative side of that in America, which leaves this kind
of like disposable everything. Everything is just you know, designed
to be essentially like packed into a suitcase, and then
all of a sudden you're a you know, a new
man in a new city.
Speaker 5: The waste of it is deeply disturbing. There are entire
cities that are literally built to be thrown away in
this country. And that's one of the things that that
strikes us so strongly about visiting Italy, say, or Germany.
We see these old, old towns that have been there
for so long, and they are not built to be
thrown away. The buildings, many of them, you know, the
older the older generations of buildings, just because those people
have been there for so long, are built to last
for hundreds of years. And you can still find that
in America today, in the older cores of cities where
the houses are still worth renovating. Right. But I agree
with what you're saying very much. Americans. Americans were diagnosed
by Wendelberry at one point. Wendeleberry, the essayist and poet.
He said that Americans fall into two categories. They are
movers or stickers, or that he might have said boomers
in the sense that they go from boom to boom,
or they or they stick around no matter what the
fortunes are from the place. And we see that with
the major American cities these days, where, in particular, to
be to be quite frank about it, the white populations
have abandoned their institutions. They've abandoned their old churches, their
ancestral materies, they've abandoned their family homes, they've abandoned the
businesses that they've built in those old legacy American cities,
and they've abandoned them to the underclass, or they've abandoned
them to the recent immigrants, and they've gone on, they've
gone away to the suburbs. Right. I can think of
so many dichotomies of the old city that you've heard
about and then the wealthy, overwhelmingly white suburb that you've
never heard about. And that's where the core of that
old city moved to. Right. They're still adjacent to where
they're from, but they didn't stick around. And you know,
the phenomenon of white flight is a good one to examine,
and ultimately it seems to me to just be a
lack of courage. But we know the institutions are all
set against them. We know the government itself has set
very much against them, and that's a story to tell.
But the American way is frequently to leave the troubles
and go somewhere else. I also relate very much to
what you're talking about with our South African friends, who
I also enjoy very much listening to. And this is
another point in which I suppose I'll differ from Paul
Fahrenheit at least what I know about Paul's position, which
I want to be clear, I'm not entirely clear about,
and I'm sure that he could clarify it.
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Speaker 5: I see the future of European descended peoples here in
the United States, White Americans as a dwindling one demographically,
with the southern border wide open the way that it
is two million people in the last couple of years,
we are being deluded out of our own inheritance extremely
quickly at this point. And I'm saying it with I'm
trying to embrace the kind of realism with that admission,
I imagine we have an awful lot to learn from
our South African friends about how to in an increasingly
dysfunctional society. But as I said before, being the heritage
peoples of the United States means that we have a
lot of insider knowledge, and we have the examples of
so many other oppressed minorities, specifically targeted minorities in history,
that nevertheless were disproportionately prosperous in their countries. I'm thinking
of the Christian minorities and the Ottoman Empire, for instance,
who in like nineteen hundred they owned like over seventy
five percent of the property in Constantinople, you know, and
they were a small part of the population, but they
did extremely well. And this was in spite of the
special taxes that only Christian Greeks had to pay. This
was in spite of the Janis saries like take king
away their eldest male sons from them as a form
of taxing. They still did ridiculously well in the Ottoman Empire,
and they lived rather peaceably. That's an interesting story to tell,
and perhaps eventually we'll end up telling stories like that
to ourselves, will be like the Greeks of the Byzantine Empire,
you know, telling stories about ourselves under the authority of
the Ottoman sultans.
Speaker 2: That's that's an interesting future you describe, and it's actually
one I've kind of thought about that I almost and
this has I don't mean this to be misconstrued. I
almost wonder if I almost wonder if minority status would
this is delicate, I almost wonder if it would be better,
just because it kind of it forces a type of
a group awareness that I think it is all too
easy to easy to kind of take, all too easy
to sorry, And this is I'm being a little bit
delicate here, for both the sakes of YouTube and to
say explicitly what I mean. I think that for kind
of legacy Americans, it has been all too easy to
kind of just naively assume that while everyone thinks about
things the way we do, you know, when we were
ninety eighty seventy percent of America, but I think that
when that becomes, you know, twenty or thirty percent, you
have to act much more deliberately. And that might not
be the worst thing about it.
Speaker 5: It would give us a tragic sense of hard limits,
and that is certainly going to be painful. Realizing one's
limits in Greek tragedy is always a painful experience. But
we need to be worthy of that kind of experience.
We need to be noble, We need to endure that
a great number of white Americans in particular are not
enduring it. Well. We know what's going on, especially in
rural white America. We read about this, and it's really devastating.
The drug abuse is extremely high, the rates of suicide
are climbing. This is very disturbing stuff, and I cannot
help but relate that to the decline of legacy America. Generally,
these people also see it. It causes many to despair,
and once again I return to my point, this can
be part of our conclusion. We've been going on for
an hour.
Speaker 2: I suppose.
Speaker 5: My point is that we need stories that are not despairing,
telling people that the project of their ancestors is culminating
and giving it all away to transsexual activists, and whoever
happens to cross the Rio Grande is despair and it's
not true. Also, it's not true. Let's wait. We can
seek information on this point, but let's find it in
the preamble of the constitution. We're establishing the government with
the Philadelphia Constitution, and the federalists said, we're doing this
for ourselves and our posterity. There's nothing in there about immigrants. Now,
that ended up being part of the American story, and
that's a complex story of how immigration became so deeply
wrapped up in our idea of America. It's another narrative,
and it has an awful lot to do with John F. Kennedy.
All Right, Kennedy is the origin of our aligned nation
of immigrants. He popularized that term. Kennedy is recent. All right.
Our ideas about the American people are much older than Kennedy,
and there's no reason why Kennedy should win that narrative
be the only thing we think about when we think
about what who constitutes the American nation. We have other
ideas to go with that are not despairing to us.
When Kennedy reformed the immigration policy. It was it was
something like eighty three percent of the United States was
descended from Europe in settlers. That's not very long ago, folks.
A lot has changed since then. I get that. But
what I'm saying is that we have other stories that
we tell. Now, why is the gay so emphatic to
identify and destroy anything that it recognizes as white supremacy?
What is the code for that? It's about European Americans,
It's about white Americans. Anything that white Americans built, anything
that white Americans value, is we know on the chopping
block to be canceled for being racist or exclusionary or something.
Look at what happens to white institutions in South Africa.
We know that's coming for institutions we value generally in
this country. But we need, we do need stories to
tell our own people that does not leaving, does not
leave them thinking, oh, I must be a racist, I
need to die. Okay, that that doesn't help us. It
hurts us. And Americans have something valuable to offer. We
have something valuable to offer North America. We should give
it to our own. We have a duty there. But
and I say this and I'm conscious conscientious here. I
do not want to sound like I'm wanting to export
imperial ideologies. That's the last thing I want to do.
But America has had a role as being a kind
of beacon or source of hope for other peoples who
are struggling in the world, and it's been so many
things to so many people. I'm not I'm not talking
specifically about the myth of the Shining City on the Hill,
but that that has been a powerful sort of image
for this If we Americans can can get some of
our shit here together to be frank, if we can
if we can have functional institutions, if we can be
faithful Christians, if we can build functional families and raise
our children and teach them effectively, and they can pass
this on to theirs, and we can love this land
a little bit. This this this land that's been horribly
abused and wasted, if we can give it some love
and adornment. We can encourage our friends in other countries
just by that example. I think we have something to offer.
I really do, and I love this country. I want
to be realistic about the problems we're facing, though right
they're they're very significant and things aren't looking good right now.
But that doesn't mean that we throw out all of
our fond, fear of feelings about America. If we do that,
we might as well. I don't know what people who
throw out all all of their fond feelings about America,
what do they do? Do they go to West Virginia
and take meth I don't know, but I don't think
it's going to be very good. Why not? Why not
join the enemy? Right? Why not push transgender ideology? If
that is all America is going to be? Why not
join the state Department? Why not push this stuff? I
don't agree that, but I don't agree with that because
I don't believe that's what America is. My America is small,
My America's regional, My America's mine.
Speaker 2: Well, I think that's a it's a pretty good way
to wrap things up. We discussed before. You don't have
anything you want to plug, at least for now, so
as we wrap things up. Obviously, thank you so much
for coming on. That was a great, a great recording.
I'm really pleased with it, and hopefully we can get
you on again.
Speaker 5: I'm glad for that. I'm certainly interested in coming back
on I don't have anything to plug right now, though
I am going to be recording audiobooks eventually i'll plug those.
Don't have a YouTube channel yet though I'm thinking about that.
But I'm really pleased to have the opportunity burden. It's
a real pleasure to be on here, and I give
my respects to to all of our friends in the sphere.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much, and you have an open invitation
anytime you want to come back on as far as
as far as my stuff, obviously, my links will be
down in the description. We have one super chat from
Oh this is from Smear. I think this is when
we were talking about South Africa where he said there's
no one left, there's nowhere left to run, and I
think that's something we can all all agree with to
one degree or another. Right Obviously, the show is available
on YouTube. Also, it will be correctly up on any
podcatcher you know, Apple, Spotify. However, you guys listen to podcasts.
We got an exciting episode coming up Normal Son on Thursday,
Thomas seven seven and I are going to be talking
about the middle class, so be sure to catch that one,
and remember, guys, keep your head up well. I can't
last forever. Good night everyone, Good night. All right, George Bagby,
welcome back to the show.
Speaker 5: How you doing. I'm doing well. Thanks a lot for
having me back.
Speaker 2: Well great, And before we launch into it, just a
couple of housekeeping things. I won't bore you guys with
the you know, with the gory details, but I will say,
I'm I'm I'm pretty sick, so I'm going to be
a little bit, a little bit more reserved than normal,
you know, so don't expect you know, me in top forms,
so to speak. But that said, the reason I invited
you back, Bagby is because obviously our last show, which
is one that I really enjoyed, was kind of on
the nature of you know, America and American culture, and
that was kind of looking forward to a debate, a discussion,
whatever you want to call it on Academic Agent's Channel,
you know, between he Furious, pertinax Y Is and Paul
you know who are all you know, one degree and
other friends of the channel. And I think all of us,
you know, been kind of aware of the discourse around
you know, America, you know, the global American empire, American culture.
And I think that you and I both were you know,
not particularly happy with how that discussion. And obviously, before
we get into this, this is in no way a
personal slight on any of these guys, is you know,
I like all of them. They're all you know, friendly
to me, and you know, by virtue of the fact
that they're not here, this is going to be an
abstract view of their opinions. You know, we might get
some things wrong, but all the same, I think that
we wanted to have a discussion about that.
Speaker 5: Absolutely. You remember I got in touch with you about
interviewing on your show because of this issue originally, and
I'm still very interested in it. We have a common duty.
All people have a basic duty to honor their heritage.
In some sense, I think we could call this a
virtue of patriotism. That really is a kind of responsibility.
It's a basic thing that people need. And if we
hate where we came from from, if we hate our
own ancestors, it destroys us. There's a writer who I
really love, a Russian dissident, a Christian historian named Burdaiev
Nikolai Burdaiev, and he was exiled by the Bolsheviks and such.
He's a very interesting fellow and I've done a lot
of work on him. But he said something very succinct
about this. He said, without the love of country, a
man is unable to create. And it does not seem
coincidental to me that in this stage of the history
of the West, family formation is falling apart. People are
walking away from any sense of responsibility to raise the
next generation, people are voluntarily sterilizing themselves and numbers. All
of these things really are connected, and it is based
in an attitude and a kind of loyalty to the patree, right,
the native land patree. We can translate that from the
French as fatherland if you will. The words are related,
you know, patrimony, paternity, All of these things are all
connected linguistically. People feel alienated from their homes. People feel
separated from their ancestors. People have antipathy towards their ancestors
and their homes. And this is not just an American phenomenon.
We remember a couple of summers ago, the phenomenon of
mobs taking to the streets and pulling down the statues
and the rest of it. And that has not stopped.
You know, that was only the opening movement of a
broader campaign but this is going on across the West.
It's not just Americans. I remember meeting German college students
back when I was in graduate school and talking with
them about their heritage, because I knew enough to know
that Germany was a substantial place that was deserving of
respect and love. And yet my German college age peers
could only dunk on their heritage. That was all they
could say about it. And these chickens are coming home
to roost. If you will, you know that a society
that does not honor their fathers and their mothers, a
society that actively hates their own ancestors, is a society
without a future. So I'm deeply invested in this issue.
I think it's a basic responsibility of a humanities teacher,
which which is what I am, to cultivate these kinds
of loyalties. And it's an uphill battle these days. But
this is the discussion AA's cigar Stream Academic Agents cigar
Stream just recently was about the question, and I wanted
to return to that once again kind of kind of
to go through the talking points of that and see
what we can make of it. I'm going to say
something potentially very unpopular here, once academic Agent had a
chance to clarify some of his more controversial choices in wording.
Let's say he did publish a series of syllogisms outlining
his argument for the cigar stream. Found that distillation of
his basic argument theory illuminating. And it wasn't the cigar
stream itself which had its problems. It was his syllogisms
that and his clarifications, I must say, and have left
me in a peculiar situation with some qualifications. And I
would want to clarify, and I'd want some disclaimers along
the way. I will announce myself in agreement with academic
agents argument.
Speaker 2: I think I find myself in a similar position to you.
And I've said multiple times that I felt I felt
kind of unsatisfied with what I felt was kind of
a modern Bailey move, you know. And maybe these are
unrelated conversations that got pulled into one another because I
feel like at first there was kind of the discussion
about American culture, you know, which I felt a certain
degree kind of baited by, and that was things that
I obviously all of us on these side of things agree,
kind of the debase nature of culture across the West,
you know, Jersey Shore, and you know and and Lizzo
and you know other kind of like things of that
of that nature, and so it was frustrating, kind of
feeling like you were getting blamed for something you obviously
don't support. And so I think that got a lot
of people's hackles up, and I made a lot of
people angry, and it caused a lot of people to
kind of reactively, you know, say things they probably didn't mean,
or disagree with things that they ordinarily would because honestly,
and I've said multiple times, you know, even talking to
the Norwegian guys you know over at Longhouse, that I
can't help but kind of agree with European anti americanism,
you know, I do. I find myself in agreement with
AA's written arguments, not necessarily kind of like the ones
you put up on Twitter or t Gram.
Speaker 5: Indeed, and when we talk about American cultural influence over Europe,
we are usually talking about the cultural exports of the
degeneracy that we are at such pains to combat and
counteract here on our own shores. We don't like American
cultural influence on Europe. We do not like American cultural
imperialism in Europe. And I don't really know how this works,
how the American political influence or military occupation of Europe
has to do with the cultural export to Europe. But
this is this is one of those points that I
wonder why would we contend on that issue? As an American,
I have nothing in vest did in the garrisons captain Europe.
I think that the American Empire is wasteful and presumptuous.
The United States government does not have any mandate to
police the world. The United States government has no mandate
to occupy Europe or tell Europe what to do. And
I'm I'm willing to take the argument from our British friends.
Tell me is furious pertinacts British because I don't actually
know he's Australian.
Speaker 2: I believe, okay, I thought I was, which is an
odd mix.
Speaker 5: I thought that I was getting better at distinguishing the
Australian accent, and it turns out that I'm not so
much love and respect to you folks. I love the
way that you talk, but I can't distinguish one from
the other. Well, with respect to our British friends when
they say that the the American garrisons in Europe are
forcing the British and the Germans and whoever else to
do things against their political interests. I agree they're doing
things against their political interests. They are likely to be
experiencing blackouts in the middle of the winter. They're unlikely
to be able to heat their homes this winter because
they are so obviously acting against their essential interests as
sovereign countries, as traditional nations who supposedly have governments representing
their interests. I don't know how else to explain that,
other than they're obviously under the control of their enemies.
Our British friends would like to blame DC on the
same grounds that DC hates the likes of US and
wants to destroy US culture as well, wants to destroy
our religious adherents, wants to corrupt our children. They are
they speak openly on these things. I don't know, And
with respect to our American friends in this in this argument,
I don't know why they would be unwilling to admit
that and to make concessions and declare a kind of
common cause. The DC regime is the enemy of the
dissident right. They did openly declare themselves to be so,
and it seems to me that AA's assertion that we
should have a common cause to clear them out, which
in our case means wanting the dissolution of the regime
in Washington d c ought to be something we can
agree on, American or not. Now we Americans have taken
exception to academic agents rhetoric in his choice of words.
AA keeps saying America is cancer, and America has no culture,
and America is a made up nation and things like that. Okay,
he has since qualified himself. I think he said those
things disturb things up, and my goodness, didn't he It
was very successful disturb things up and to tick us off.
Rile is up. But he has since qualified himself. He
says that at best, the United States is a collection
of peoples. Well, I happen to be in the habit
of referring to the American nations or American peoples, which
may end up being some kind of regional phenomenon. So
it's uh, it's not a It's still not going to
be like European ethnicities, and I'm not claiming that it is.
But let's let's have that discussion later. Okay, Let's let's.
Speaker 2: Show you that do you want to get in first
by essentially kind of summarizing or just actually reading out
right the syllogisms that he kind of started the discussion with.
Speaker 5: Absolutely that that's a great idea. Shall I do that?
I have that here?
Speaker 2: Sure, yes, thank you.
Speaker 5: Okay, so I've got AA's argument. Syllogism number one, All
true nations are built on ethnos. The United States is
a propositional nation. Therefore, the United States is not a
true nation. I have just clarified my position on that.
Perhaps we can move on from that one. I'm in
agreement with him the United States. When we talk about
the American nation, we're talking about a propositional nation. The
modern conception, which is very commonly accepted now, it's not
the historic conception. At one point in our history, we
would have talked about the American people, and we would
have meant white Anglo Saxon Protestants who were running things right,
who conquered the country, named the country, created the laws
of the country, so on and so forth. Up until
the nineteen sixties, they still constituted over eighty percent of citizens.
So people could speak that way and it made more sense.
And that wasn't very long ago. Paul Fahrenheit has talked
about this, and kudos to him, give him credit where
it's due. I think he's correct on this point. But
the idea that the United States or that Americans just
believe a proposition and that's what makes them Americans, that
has become mainstream. I accept that. I agree that that's
a mainstream idea. I don't blame anyone who assumes that
that's what Americans have always meant. You kind of have
to get into the history to know otherwise. I was
talking in our last stream about different narratives of American history,
and that was part of my point. The propositional nation
is a narrative of American history. Then the next syllogism,
propositions spread like viruses, mutating and replicating themselves on other hosts.
Syllogism a the United States is not a true nation,
it's a propositional one third point of the syllogism, the
United States is a virus that always seeks to replicate
even as it mutates. So the United States, in other words,
is imperial in its basic composition. The third syllogism, liberalism
is moral syphilis. The United States sees it as its
divine mission to spread liberalism around the world. Therefore, the
United States is moral syphilis. This is AA's syllogism. So
he's saying that the United States and its central composition
is a liberal internationalist project. At a certain point, it
certainly becomes a liberal internationalist project. I do not deny
that that becomes the ruling regime in Washington, d c.
Arguably in eighteen ninety eight with the Spanish American War,
where the out and out imperialist party dominates the actions
and foreign policy of the federal government. Now at that
point in our history, we actually still have a lot
of high quality dissenters. They are elites. These are not
people that are excluded from positions of power. These are
not non political people. They are very political people. They
are members of the old ruling class. They have a
lot of clout, They have money. They begin a famous committee,
the Anti Imperialist League, They have publications, they have famous
spokesmen like Mark Twain and such. And the anti war
tradition in the United States is still around. We still
have groups like anti war dot Com, which has really
been keeping the light alive all of these years through
the War on Terror. We have people like Ron Paul
who really did strike a strike a chord with his
presidential runs, his campaigns, and of course he's still around.
He did take a lot of those campaign contributions, and
he's set up a media enterprise, so he's he's still
with us, and his people are still making a difference
that the anti imperialist tradition in the American story is
still something that's alive. It's still something that's vital. And
I but I also I don't deny AA's point here.
I just want to qualify myself. Is any one of
the opinion that there is a dissenting group of elites
in power in Washington, DC that does not favor the
American empire that's trying to bring at all home. I'm
under no illusions about this. Donald Trump did not run
on an anti imperialist platform. If anything, it was just
an old fashioned imperialist platform. I don't know if you
remember when he had an interview was it with George
Stephanopoulos where Trump said, we we should have made the
war in Iraq to our profit. We should have taken
their oil.
Speaker 2: I do remember that, which I hate to say is
a is a position that I'm not I don't morally
agree with, but at least it's like, well, if we're
going to have an empire, and you might as well
get some benefit from it, that's right, Versus this this
system now, which I think that you know a lot
of the anti Americans have have you know, pretty successfully
pointed out, does not benefit Americans. You know, the American
Empire is essentially run for the outgroup, and.
Speaker 5: So that's why it is moral syphilis, and it's like
a virus seeking other countries to replicate itself.
Speaker 2: In yeah, when I also am just confused the instinctual,
I guess, the instinctual like urge to protect the American
Empire because I mean, I feel like the project, especially
post Bush and very much in kind of like the
post Obama era, it's been very clear that the empire
is not for people like you and me. You know,
we're I mean, we're even seeing now, you know, specifically
with the armed forces, you know, kind of shedding. It's
kind of like Scotch Irish Anglo core. You know. It's
that the people who made the empire for for good
or ill, you know, initially are no longer the beneficiaries
of it.
Speaker 5: Indeed, and it doesn't make any kind of physical sense.
I've I've seen the the impure real projects of the
United States as grossly immoral and a tremendous financial waste
and a squandering of the goodwill, the the morale, and
the and the blood of one of our greatest assets,
which is young people, young men willing to fight for it,
willing to defend the flag for for what it's worth.
Those those people should should be treated as a sacred charge.
They should never be sent into some some nation building
project that's been that's been concocted in the Pentagon or
the State Department, that is immoral. And I have believed
that my entire adult life. I I fully realize I'm
in a minority on this. Americans are are usually imperialists
and take it for granted. They don't, they don't call
themselves imperialists. But tell an American, let's bring the troops home.
We can't police the world. Why are Americans in practically
every country in the world there is there is some
American presence, some American military presence. We readily can list
off the ones where the American military does have no troops. Russia,
North Korea, China, Iran, countries like that where we have
no troops on the ground, also completely dysfunctional countries like
Somalia right where if we were there, we would be
running the place.
Speaker 2: There's really no alternative, I will say, And this is
largely aside. There's a and this is actually a lot
of the work from the anti anti war dot com people,
But essentially the reason Somalia is the hellhole it is
is also largely are fault. You know, that's fairly non controversial.
But I think that's probably outside the share of this
or outside the scope of this discussion.
Speaker 5: Indeed, I mean the United States government and thanks to
their insistence on this for the last one hundred years,
regular Americans assume that we have to have a position
on every conflict on the globe, and that we have
some obligation to take sides. And this is preposterous. So
what comes along with the with the exceptional or with
the propositional nation thesis is the exceptional nation thesis. We
are not a traditional nation. We are special. We have
a divine mission, as AA put it in his syllogism,
some divine mandate to police the world, to resolve differences,
to establish peace among the heathen or something like that,
and that is that's also preposterous. That's also unlimited commitment,
and it's it's not responsible. I mean, I don't really
need to say all of this, But the United States
is an empire. The United States is made of many peoples.
That's one of the definitions of empire. The United States
has this global presence. The United States has this presumption
that it can insert itself in itself into the sovereign
affairs of any country in the world and tell them
what to do. Thankfully, some of the stuff is breaking down.
Americans will learn real limits. But I see no reason
why this regime deserves to survive. AA's argument that it
ought to be dissolved. For these given reasons, I am
in agreement with them, with some qualification. I would like
to see, as I said on the last stream, I'd
like to see the Union dissolved. I think that that
would be a good thing for everyone involved. I think
we've gone enough through AA's argument here for me to
properly qualify myself. But we return again to this question
of patriotism. So patriotism does not mean that you're boosting
all the actions of your government. It doesn't mean raw
raw raw. We want DC to win whenever they get
into a fight. Patriotism means love of your place, love
of the people that put you there, some affirmation of
your heritage. You see something redeeming about where you came
from what you are. And this is very important because
we very seldom transcend that Homer said, the son is
seldom better than his father. I think we can look
at experience to bear that out. If we want to
know what we can be, we look at our parents.
That's the first place that we look. What are our characteristics?
What can we do with our lives? Our parents give
us the primary image of those things, which is one
of the reasons why we're commanded in scripture to love
our father and mother, the first command given with a
promise that our days may be long on the land
the Lord, our God has given us. So we need
to take into account our circumstances so that we can
see what does it mean to love this country and
what should we do under these circumstances. A writer that
I love on this point, who is popular in our circles,
A guy that you really ought to go and read
if you haven't already. Thanks to Imperium Press he is
once again readily accessible. We have an awful lot to
be thankful for. There at Imperium Press, they've started republishing
the works of Joseph de Maistro. So go and get
your copy. If you haven't already, you need to read him.
He's the ultimate.
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Speaker 5: Traditional monarchist guy. He's the Roman Catholic answer to Edmund Burke,
and I love Burke. But Joseph to Mestra said that
the constitution is the work of circumstances. And I'll just
read a quote to on this point. Demestra said, what
is a constitution? Is it not merely the solution to
the following problem. Given the population, the mores, the religion,
the geographic situation, the political circumstances, the wealth, the good
and bad qualities of a particular nation. To find the
laws that suit it, we need to know what our
situation is. And I regret that we were in serious
decline culturally. We are not well suited to be governed
by the Philadelphia Constitution anymore. It's not that we've outgrown it,
it's that we've grown too small for it. We've become
morally stunted. Think of what President John Adams said that
the Constitution is fit for a religious people only. It's
wholly unsuited for an irreligious people. We still have a
lot more religious adherents than Europe, and of course that's
partly a regional phenomenon. Some parts of the country are
far more religious than others. And I truly love my history.
I do deeply love this country, and it does not
please me to say it. But the Constitution is not
limiting our government. The Constitution has failed to limit our government,
and the Constitution is no longer the fit framework to
rule a people such as us. And I will return
back to AA's point, the Union would be best to
be dissolved. Now I realized that could mean civil war
once again. What happened last the last time the Union
was declared dissolved, and I don't want war. I'm a
reluctant radical in this sense. I'm just saying what we
have doesn't work and holding on to it out of
a misplaced loyalty to our heritage and past one I'm
a mistake I'm very likely to make. By the way,
I have a lot of sympathy for those in those
circumstances that feel a loyalty to the old Republic. My
contention is that it's gone. It was dissolved in several revolutions,
the Civil War, the New Deal, the Wilson administration. Maybe
these things should not have happened, and we can talk
about that in an academic setting, but still they have happened.
Their fade a complete, and we need to measure our circumstances. Now,
what is fit to rule us? Now? On your telegram
channel a couple of days ago, I wrote a series
of resolutions with this in mind, just to get just
to get some feedback from our crowd on on your
private chat. One of one of the things that I
wrote was resolved the veneration of the Constitution at this
late hour of our history has done more to paralyze
than hell help our political allies, and thus the Constitution
ought to be called a failed attempt to limit the government.
And I also asked, I guess more out of curiosity.
I have my own opinions about this, but we need
to ask questions about what comes afterwards. Ryan turnip Seed
has been insightful on this point. I'm not sure he's
written at length on it, but he's at least made
comments on this point that we have to have a
positive vision so that we know we aren't jumping from
the frying pan into the fire. We obviously don't want
things to get worse. I'm not sure that the Constitution
is really helping us at this point. It is. It's
clay in the hands of the judges, right. But another
resolution that I shared with your group, and I'd be
very curious for feedback here. By the way, resolved the
end of the union could lead to non republican forms
of government.
Speaker 2: I think it's interesting because and Paul has made this point,
and I think it's a good one that essentially you're
kind of stuck with the political baggage of your system.
You're stuck with the symbols kind of regardless of what
the system becomes. And so at least to me, right,
I agree with you. You know, I don't think that
whatever comes next will be what the you know, what
the constitutionalists and the boomer counts want. But it's hard
for me to imagine a world in which it isn't
kind of at least wearing the symbols of what has
kind of come before it. So recently, obviously, like I
said before, I've been ill. And so what I do
when I get ill is I essentially go through the
Distributis backlog and there's kind of like a big playlist
as I kind of like sit there.
Speaker 5: Oh, now that's a wholesome thing to do.
Speaker 2: It is, and he has a series of streams and
I missed this that wasn't in the scene at the time,
but talking essentially about you know, propertarianism, which was a
you know now defunct, you know, micro ideology of you know,
essentially like constitutional libertarianism. But he essentially he uses this
analogy of essentially calling it a you know, a ghost dance, right,
which was something that the Plains Indians did, you know,
as kind of the US US military kind of like
drove them from their lands, which is they essentially were like,
all right, well, well what did we do when we
were great? And what did we do when we were powerful? Well,
we did ghost dances, you know, we did these elaborate
religious ceremonies, you know, kind of doing something that is
it's almost it's comforting to do. You know, it's something
that's kind of embedded in the cultural memory, and it
is something associated you know, at a time in which
you were you were great, right, but that's not necessarily
the reason you were great. There were other things and
merely kind of like aping that won't won't bring it back,
you know, it won't make it won't make the cowbalry
go away. And so to me, a lot of I
feel like constitution worship is very much the same thing.
You know, it's like, oh, well, if we just do
the constitution more, do the constitution harder, we can essentially
like stave it back. And I think that you know,
at Domeister's point, it stands right that essentially like a constitution,
And I realized this kind of flies in the face
of a lot of you know, like our history, especially
when it comes to kind of judicial history, right, that
there is really something to be said that kind of
like a constitution is made for a people at a
certain time.
Speaker 5: And are so much of the contention and the Supreme
Court has to do with the circumstances, which ironically it
makes the leftist tradition in the Supreme Court or along
the lines of De Maestra.
Speaker 2: Then, yes, it's an odd position to find yourself in.
Speaker 5: Yes, I go through if we cut ourselves off from
the the ties to the Constitution, we have no idea
where we would end up. And this is partly Edmund
Burke's great point. It's a very skeptical point. We might
as well hold on to what we've got because if
we cast loose, we could be destroyed by far worse
monsters than the ones we have here with us now.
And and that's a fair point. But I'm I I
contend that we can't continue on this way much longer.
There is some polling organization or some social research organization.
I just cited their name, c SPI. I'm not sure
who they are, what that stands for, but they just
recently published some sort of survey of American college students
and according to their survey, forty percent are identifying as LGBTQ.
And of course that does not mean that forty percent
are getting sterilized, but we do know that those numbers
are rising very sharply, and there is a serious social
contagion there. The generation that we see coming into adulthood
is not going to successfully reproduce itself. That in itself,
that's really catastrophic. All the talk right now is about inflation.
We have very serious deflation on the horizon as well,
and maybe maybe our lords and masters know that, which
is why they have inflated right now. I don't know.
That's all speculation, and I have a bad track record
of making those kinds of bets. But still we're in
a really bad situation. People, Americans in particular, will be
seriously disillusioned with our institutions are already. Institutional trust is
at record lows across the board. COVID did a lot
to undermine trust in the police, trust in the medical institutions,
Congress has been you know, rated in the single digits
for a long time, for ten years or more. You
know what institutions do Americans really trust anymore? These things
really could collapse. And here's here's where I think that
I'm actually I could actually be accused of being too optimistic,
all right. I think that in my hopeful proposal to
divide the Union in any way, Okay, I'm not really
particular about that at all. All it would take would
be one state or one region to try to do it,
and that would set off the other regions and states.
A lot of people would get the idea as soon
as anyone tried it, just like in eighteen sixty. By
the way, but that actually gives us a chance to
preserve something. I am not at all of the opinion
that we can realistically ah that we that we could
dream or plan to seize the institutions of power in
this society today. Call it the populist delusion, if you will.
I don't. I don't think that it works, and if
it got any traction, it would be fortified. Call me
a black pillar, okay, but let's be realistic about our situation.
I don't put stock in that I think. I think
that we either wait for it to begin to collapse
and then we act, and by doing so we can
we can preserve the things, some of the things that
we love. We can reconstitute some institutions. I think that
universities should be dissolved and reconstituted from scratch. Maybe I
don't know. We would want to give them the same
names they had before, but you know, the physical plant
is worth something. But you'd have to have very stringent
interviews to hire back any faculty or staff. Compared to
the universities we have now, the universities we have now
turned people into transsexual socialists. Let's be clear, and that's
what they're meant to do at this stage. If they
aren't doing that, they are failing in their mission statements.
Let's not delude ourselves. The same for the public school system, right,
in no sense, our school boards run by parents or
members of the community in touch or or in charge
with what goes on in the public schools, and the
kind of propaganda and subversion that is pitched to the students,
and it's wrecking them, is rendering them not just incapable
of loving their country or relating to their ancestors in
a meaningful way, but it is alienating them from their
parents and faith. As a teacher, I've been with public
school teachers. I have heard public school teachers tell me, frankly,
they understood their goals as teachers to separate children from
the faith and teaching of their parents and churches. A
public school teacher has formulated that clearly for me, I
don't want to save those institutions. I'm not a conservative.
I think I spent most of my adult life calling
myself a conservative. I'm a radical. I'm not trying to
save those institutions. Let them go to hell. But I
love my country. I suppose i'm I suppose I'm I
really am opening myself up to a charge of treason,
and I am taking that seriously. But I do not
want to be ruled by DC. The constitution no longer
suits us. Our institutions are thoroughly corrupt, and I suppose
I could take a quietest approach and hope that we
can survive like Amish communities on the fringes of society.
But I would rather rather see conservative red states, if
you will, strike out on their own, and obviously, if
blue states did and founded socialist dictatorships or you know,
radical people's republics or something. I would actually cheer that
on as well, because it would at least get us
thinking about how to survive. AA had an interesting point
in that stream. He said the communist experiments had a
funny result and that they shored up social institutions because
communism is such a bad system, the only way they
could possibly survive was to shore up social institutions, which
is a fair point. I mean, it's I'm not I'm
not endorsing that, but it is a fair point.
Speaker 2: No, I see what you're getting. And to me, that
is I think the real like dividing line. It's really
kind of important between kind of like the Americans in
this scene, you know, where essentially and I think that
this really is, you know, what we can describe as
the lines between the either the radicals and the conservatives
or the radicals and the reactionaries, you know, and if
the idea is essentially and this is what I think
you see with kind of like the softer edge of
our movement, is the idea that well, well, the problem
is just you know, we essentially went wrong somewhere in
the past, you know, fifty one hundred years, you know,
and it all would have been fine if we had
just kind of stuck to those you know, original principles.
And I have a certain degree of sympathy for that.
But the idea that you can essentially just go back upstream,
you know, a decade or two at a time, and
then just freeze it there, you know, that you can
just be like, all right, well we can go back
to you know, kind of like two thousand, or go
back to you know, nineteen fifty five. I'm just not convinced.
And I'm honestly, I'm a little bit confused how you
can and maybe you don't think that directly, but how
you can think that in effect and still out in
these circles. And I don't know.
Speaker 5: I also have a lot of sympathy. I've got a
lot of sympathy for what you're talking about.
Speaker 2: Go ahead, no, And so I, to a certain degree
have have some sympathy for that, like you and I
obviously you know, you were a large intellectual influence on me.
Like I grew up on Burke. I read a lot
of Burke in high school, you know, when we were
when we were in class together, And so I really
like absorbed that, you know, reflections on the revolution in France.
That's that's sitting on my shelf, you know, behind you know,
where I record this. But to me, there's something to
be said for the fact that like that is you know,
much like a constitution that is an idea kind of
serted suited for a situation. You know, that is an
idea that you know, realistically right, like a conservative tact
made sense, you know, in the nineteenth century, made sense
in the seventeenth century. But now it's almost like and
this is not a you know, a particularly original point,
but it's like, well, what is there what is there
left to conserve? You know, this actually like the post
seventies economic system of US just you know, bullying everyone
around with the petro dollar, you know. And it's hard
because I share your kind of like love for you know,
your love for my country. It just is is kind
of and so I find myself in an odd spot,
like you said, kind of like dancing around this kind
of like trees and this idea, and I very much
find myself, you know, in agreement with you. And it's
not something that I take likely and it's not something
that I am I guess comfortable with in the sense
that I think in a different time, I would, you know,
be very much a patriot, but now I can't. It's
hard to describe myself as such.
Speaker 5: Well, I I'm calling myself a patriot. And it's funny.
I have studied and talked about the patriots of seventeen
seventy six, you know, the Patriot Party in the American Revolution,
War for Independence, and I go through, I go through
phases or cycles, and it kind of it has told
me something about myself over the years. Sometimes my sympathies
are very much with the Tories, the loyalists, and I
really understand where they're coming from, and I like to
imagine I would be in their number if I was
facing these things. And other times like now, it was
the year of the lockdowns and such, and I remember
having the conversation several times that we are nothing like
those men. Now there is no Samuel Adams among us.
If there was, there would have been more resistance to
the destruction of those years. In one sense, I remember,
I remember my reflection those the years of the COVID
stuff was from Julius Caesar. Cassius says Rome, thou hast
lost the breed of noble bloods, and he says Caesar
would not be a wolf if the Romans were not cheap.
I remember reflecting on hl Mincoln's reflections or hl Mincin's
quotes about Americans being sheep led to the slaughter, Americans
being meek followers of malicious demagogues, And we ought to
know that about ourselves. We ought to know our limitations,
our weaknesses. But I love this country. I contend I
love it. It's mine. There are perhaps other countries more lovable,
more lovely, but this is mine, and I belong to it,
and it belongs to me, and my destiny is tied
up in it. But I think that we we can
think of ourselves as more traditional nations, and we can
we can imagine other political destinies for ourselves. The Constitution
should not be a suicide pact, and we ought to
be able to think of our destiny outside of it.
We have something to fall back on, ready made for us.
That's part of our historical inheritance, and that is the
states themselves. The states themselves are are still political units.
They do not command much loyalty from their citizens anymore.
Their citizen and don't necessarily identify themselves with through states anymore.
They may have this ideological national conception. They may live,
they may just think of themselves as Americans. They don't
think of themselves in relation to their native state. But
regional and state identities still do exist, and that is
something that we may fall back on eventually. I hope
we do well.
Speaker 2: And that's something that I I want to discuss because
you and I mentioned that, you know, before we went live,
that there's kind of this and it's an understanding. It's
an understandable mistake. You know, I probably do it myself
quite often, but kind of conflating nation as in you know,
he's a biblic for example, right like the nation of
Judah or as it's probably triggered the chap, you know
what I mean. A nation is in like a you know,
an identifiable ethnos and then nation state and those are
are two very different things, you know, And you've said
before on the stream, right the idea of kind of
the peoples of America. You know that there are you know,
multiple kind of like independent cultures that really are and
obviously they haven't essentially you know really since you know,
the last one hundred years speaven before that they haven't
really been treated as such, but they really are kind
of irreconcilable differences between people who live here, you know,
and that is I think become more and more apparent.
And it is frustrating, right when you see from your
friends the kind of like Linconian and wilson Esk like
rhetoric that you, ordinarily they would kind of disagree with.
You know, when someone punches them in the nose, they
you know, they flash red and turn into Abraham Lincoln again.
Speaker 5: Yes, yeah, I certainly did see that with the whole
American question in AA's sphere, as this has kind of
been churning on social media. Yeah, it uh, it really
does interest me that Americans have instinctively identified with the
propositional nation thesis in solidarity. They were they were feeling
defensive and and we we certainly saw that on the
Cigar stream with a A. But you do know this
about me, that definition of nation is a big pet
peeve of mine. And I know that I am in
the minority here. Most Americans will will make nation a
synonym for government. That is our accepted usage. I do
not deny that, but I say that it clouds clear
thinking on the subject. Now, this is this is actually
one of the things that made people will really upset
with AA when he was saying America must be destroyed
and things like that just disturb people up when we
think that the destruction of DC, well just regular Americans
would think the destruction of the regime in DC means
the destruction of us as a people. We took it
to be an existential taunt or an existential threat or something,
and that's not actually what he meant. And he did
clarify himself on that. He said he has nothing against
regular Americans, right, He did say that clearly and several times,
and he said his beef is with the American regime,
which he would remind us is our cultural enemy. They're
avowedly so, right, And electing Trump didn't do anything about that.
By the way, A just back to my point, what
is a nation? A nation is a distinct group of people. Again,
this Russian guy that I like so much, Burdayev, he
said that a nation isn't made of one blood kindred,
it's not made of one language, it's not made of
one religion or one geographical region. Nations don't have all
of these things align for them. A nation can be
dispersed over several countries, jurisdictions. A nation can have more
than one language, a nation can have more than one religion.
But he said, the thing that does unite a nation
is a beautiful thought. He said, a oneness of historical fate.
That's what unites a nation. And I suppose with that
definition we could talk about an American nation to a degree.
But as you said, the ethnic tension, the ethnic element
remains a very distinct division in America today, in our
political discourse, in our demographics, in our geographic distribution. Many
different reasons why it remains a major issue still today.
And I would like to suggest, once again, kind of
going along my point previously, I think that there is
some kind of solution to be found in a regional
a regional reorganization or I don't think it's going to
follow state lines exactly, but at least state governments give
us a way to organize ourselves politically past the shelf
life of the union the federal government. Well, and we
might we might have some kind of national identity based
in place and shared destiny in that place. That really
is something to build on. I no one can imagine
the South without its ethnic mixture, if I can be
clear on that, this is why the ku Klux Klan
is ultimately a ultimately an ideological uh dream or something.
It's and it's not even very southern. And that's the
first or second, the second and third the second, and
I suppose the one that still exists, I suppose as
some some arm of the BiH.
Speaker 2: But no, no, carry on, I want I want to
hear you explain that.
Speaker 5: Oh about the KKK or something else. So why is
it an ideological project? Because it is an obsession with
one racial mixture in the southern region, well with the second,
with the second KKK. It it really was a white
nationalist organization, and it was stronger in the North and
the West than it was in the South, strangely enough,
and it seemed to be much more concerned about Catholics
and Jews than it was about black people because there
were hardly any blacks and Oregon, for instance, but that
was where the KKK took over the state government. I
don't think that it's a coincidence that Oregon is a
center of wokeness today when it was a KKK bastion
in the nineteen twenties. I think the ideological politics is
is a virus to follow the metaphor that academic agent
gave us, and I think it may have worked itself
out in anti fa today where it was you know,
KKK terrorism back in the twenties or something. It's funny
the second iteration of the ku klux Lan never took
over a southern state government. Well, that's over several northern ones.
Speaker 2: Well that's always the thing that I found so odd,
you know, is that and this is a you know,
a digression, but you know, people always assume it, you know,
very much like they associate it, you know with like Alabama, Mississippi,
you know, largely because it's you know, the first KKK
you know, the reconstruction erae. But if you look at
I think I think the largest percentage of population involved
in the Klan was Connecticut, you know, which is alappable
when you say it, you know, you think of Connecticut now, right,
and it's like mystic Pizza and you know kind of
like New York and communities and then imagining you know,
like and I'm a firmly you know, anti Tarantino person,
but uh, you can imagine you know Django Unchained taking
place in Connecticut, and it's a completely comical idea.
Speaker 5: Indeed, it is very ironic. So is there anything else
you want to say? As we kind of reach time
about you know, the stream, are more things you want
to address? Well, I guess, I guess I did want
to say one other thing, and.
Speaker 2: If if you have time, I can go longer. I
realize you have real responsibilities, but I can, well, yeah,
say a little bit later.
Speaker 5: I did want to talk a bit in detail about
things that were actually said during the Cigar stream, and
I want to give everyone their due. Obviously, it's like
a three and a half hour stream, so we aren't
going to go very far on that, but let's start
with one with one issue, and we can we can
just consider it for a moment. The question of the
British Empire came up. Obviously, this was a debate between
Americans a Britisher. If we can call AA a British er,
please AA, don't don't take me to being for being
condescending or something. Oh, I'm just mentioning your origin, you know,
I'm I don't know if British er is is taken
to be condescending or not, but sometimes we call you that.
Here in the South. The question of the British Empire
was debated. AA said that the British Empire left ethnic
hierarchies in place when it went around the world, and
he said that was in contrast to the American Empire,
which was always subverting hierarchies and filling people with liberal
ideology and such. But I did want to offer a
retort to that. I agree that post eighteen ninety eight,
after the American Empire is kind of informally declared with
the Spanish American War, there was a previous tradition to that,
and that was one that was actually more imperial along
British lines. It was things like the Indian Reservations out west,
which had a way of preserving distinct national groups, and
we still call them, well, we still call them the
nations today, the Indian Reservations. We still colloquially refer to
these areas as the nations, which I think is a
good little clue in our common usage in America's day
of actually the true meaning of that word nation a
distinct ethnic group. But anyway, that question of the British
Empire is an interesting one. I think Clossington is going
to have a stream about that soon, about whether or
not the British Empire was a progressive enterprise. Did you
see something about that?
Speaker 2: I did. I this is someone embarrassing. I was not
involved in these fears when Classington kind of disappeared the
first time around, so I didn't realize that he was
an active producer until very recently. But I've been catching
up on his work and I'm very excited for that
stream and looking forward to it.
Speaker 5: Well, I am too, because I hear people talking about him,
but like you, I never really I never really caught
him on streams or anything, so I don't really know
what he stands for. But I read some of his
content and I like it, so I'm interested. To our friend,
Charlemagne opined about the Cigar stream and said that the
argument between the Americans and the Britishers on the American
presence in Europe in particular was pitiful. He said, believe
that's the word that he used. Charlemagne sided with our
American friends. Paul Fahrenheit, for instance, in this exchange with
aa AA, was blaming the American presence in Europe for
various specific troubles that Europe is having right now. Specifically,
I suppose foreign policy choice that are not favoring the
populations of Europe. I say, fair enough, why not be conciliatory,
Why not make concessions? After all, Europe really is in
for some serious suffering in the near term. Why not
make concessions on this point. But I'm not condemning Paul.
Paul had a very spirited position, and Paul came back saying,
those Europeans really love those American subsidies. Europe has not
had to defend itself since the end of World War Two.
European armies are jokes. Basically, they have not been investing
in technology or human resources for a couple of generations now,
and those Europeans just want to take advantage of Americans.
And if they had, if the Americans or no, no, no,
if the Europeans had decided to re arm and actually
reconstitute their armed forces, there would be little the Americans
could do to stop it. Our friend Charlemagne seconded Paul
on that is what I understand. He said that if
if the if Germany was to assert its foreign policy,
if Germany was to rebuild an army, the United States
couldn't do anything about that. Well, maybe maybe so, And
I'm I'm very frustrated with countries like Germany right now.
It doesn't seem to me that they deserve to be
called a representative government in any sense. They seem to
have been hijacked, maybe by American funded enterprises, maybe by
subversion from the State Department. Why not? The State Department
has been running things in Europe for quite a while
so far as I can tell. But my point is,
why why not give our Europeans some concessions on these points?
Do we Americans on the dissident right actually want the
American military in Europe? Do we want the American military
or the State Department making policy in Europe?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 5: Do we want American cultural exports like why even dignify
to name them? No, we don't. We don't want Europeans
drinking more Coca Cola, Let them drink beer. We don't
want them eating Dunkin Donuts. Let them eat their cake,
which is far better.
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Speaker 5: Everything to make a play on words.
Speaker 2: No, I agree, and it's actually a big part of
the reason I've been talking a lot with the you know,
with the Norwegian guys about this, where it's like there
is and this is like the idea behind globalhomo, right,
like there is a homogenization, you know, an americanization, and
that's both negatively affected us. You know, you know where
I live, right and you can see the difference in
essentially pre and post Empire architecture. You know, post Empire
architecture is horrible. You know, maybe you can say that
the FDR era stuff had a certain amount of sould
to it, but almost immediately after you know, kind of
like the War of World Conquest that just you know,
I went to Hell and you see that kind of
like forced on everyone else, this kind of you know,
like horrible, shapeless, you know, modern and postmodern architecture. So
I very much see what you're getting at. And I
I don't know, it's why I say, like I'm if
I were a European, I would be anti American and
proudly so well.
Speaker 5: I wonder if we could make a comparison between the
gay the global American Empire as we like to call it,
or the Empire of Lies, which really is a very
good term for it. I'm in full agreement with that term.
I wonder if we could make any comparison between that
and the Empires of Europe at the cusp of World
War One. One historian call them the sleepwalkers. Was that
Clark Carlton? Is that his name?
Speaker 2: I'm not sure, but carry on.
Speaker 5: It's a it's a big book about World War One
that I want to read and I haven't, but it's
a it's a popular thesis that the Empires of Europe
were somnambulant giants that walked into conflict with one another.
Maybe the gay is also a sleepwalking empire. Maybe it
is a malicious zombie empire. You know what they have
in common, they do not have a operating mind. They're brainless.
Speaker 2: We little at anologies for this. I stole from someone
in kind of the more libertarian sphere, which is they
essentially described, you know, the US government as a you know,
one hundred foot tall baby with a chainsaw, and the
idea is that it's not smart. It's not it's not stable.
You know, it's going to come over. It's going to
fall over eventually. But if it catches you and it
grabs you in its hands, you're done, you know. And
there's no you know, like hive mind of you know,
like hyper intelligent you know, room and a man in
a back room, you know, smoking cigarettes, planning it all out.
It's just kind of a like incredibly powerful and incredibly
poorly directed force. But carry on, it's.
Speaker 5: Horrific, it's incredibly immoral. And if the American people not
to not to be too populist about it, but Americans
are horribly informed about these things. They do not get
good information about the actions of the empire, and they
have no historical awareness of what their military has done
around the world in their name. And they're absolutely mystified
when they hear that Americans are unpopular in various places
around the world. They have no idea why. And yes,
call them infantile and call them irresponsible for not taking
the trouble to learn right. Mark Twain, the anti imperialist,
he said God made war to teach Americans geography, and
that's a very good point. Americans really rarely know what
their country is doing around the world. And occasionally they
read about a war and they find a country on
a map and they go, oh, oh, that's where Ukraine is.
But it's really dreadful to reflect about what the American
Empire has done over the years, what they did in Iraq.
You know, Iraq was destabilized. A civil war broke out
because the United States abolished the government and military of
the country of Iraq. Though the country had done nothing
aggressive towards the United States. It had not attacked the
United States, it had not threatened the United States, and
as a result of the abolition of the government and
military of Iraq, the country was plunged into a civil
war that lasted over ten years. Arguably it's still going
on now. The country was partially partitioned, you know, it
hasn't been formally partitioned, but it's not operating as a
unitary state anymore. And I believe it. I want to
say it's the United Nations estimate. I can tell you
that the number is not overblown. The number is not controversial.
To my knowledge, this number is not controversial. Over a
million civilians died in the course of the Iraqi Civil War.
The United States Empire is responsible for that. Americans don't
know the first thing about it. There aren't any Christians
in Iraq anymore. Before two thousand and three, ten percent
of the country was. The Foreign Minister of Iraq was
a Christian. His name was Tariq Azase. He was an
Assyrian Christian. I believe Roman Catholic, that would make him.
It is a terrible injustice what the United States has
done with these countries. And they have done it out
of an absence of mind. They have done it because
they have their head in the clouds, full of ideological
dreams about remaking the world in their image. And there's
a price to pay for these things. I am really
I am mble for my country when I think of
these things. Americans will suffer for these for these horrible,
unethical actions, and I don't want them to suffer for it.
And for Heaven's sake, they had no idea and they
didn't come up with the plan. It was our criminal
elites who seem to be, you know, some combination of
criminal and insane, all all too obvious now where we
actually have, you know, a demented old man in the
white House who cannot string sentences together, and the same
goes for his most unfortunate selection for the vice presidency.
These people do not have much awareness of what's going
on themselves. The United States does not elect its leadership.
We ought to know this about ourselves. We don't have
a representative government. The people that we that we supposedly
elect in the most fortified, secure elections are not actually
the people that go run the country. There is a
permanent elite that does not get switched out, and when
Trump is elected, they actively subvert him. We know this
to be true. We ought to all know this to
be true. Now we don't actually have the government that
we claim to have. But going back, I did say
I was going to read some of some of the
actual interactions on the cigar stream. Here's well, I think
we may have covered this. I think I did just
cover that. Let me let me go further back. I apologize,
okay aa. On one occasion he said European empires were
not anti European. I've got a response to that. That
was so at least until they collapsed, and then those
sophisticated Brits were supporting, you know, Indian terrorist actions against
imperial outposts in India after World War Two and like
cheering on Gandhi and stuff like that. AA likes to
blame Americans for that. He likes to say, well, that's
American cultural rot that's being exported into into Great Britain.
I'm not totally convinced of that. Do you have any
opinion on that, Like the collapse of European empires, do
you think that when when they're their own people were
cheering on anti colonial dissolution of their of their own
old imperial patrimony, do you think that that was an
American thing or do you think that that was homegrown?
Speaker 2: Well, I mean it's hard because and I realized I'm
not I'm not a historian, you know, I'm less knowledgeable
than you are. But the the opinion I've kind of
formed is essentially that the empire kind of fell into
America's lap, so to speak. You know, if you look
at kind of the First World War as essentially this
massively destructed it, like essentially in intergroup conflict, you know,
we're essentially like the last remnants of the Empires of Europe,
which were, let's be honest, like they were to a
certain degree they were already starting to you know, show
where it the seems essentially blew themselves up, you know,
all of them, you know the obviously you know, the
Russian Empire, you know really that, you know, the Royal
House of Germany, you know, the Ottomans. Everyone kind of
essentially like demolished their entire stock of you know, treasure,
their their best and brightest. And so to me that
that seems to be largely unrelated to America. Obviously, America
entered the war, but at least from my perspective, we
didn't really have to do much with it starting, you know,
and so obviously the rot posts that you know, you
can say a lot of it is our fault, and
I don't disagree with that, you know, especially post World
War Two. It seems largely incontrovertible. But we we can't
deny that essentially like we you know, as the West,
you know, put ourselves here, you know, we're the ones
who essentially spent all of our in our entire patrimony
in one hundred years of of what you know, and
I realized that obviously, like we can't, we can't give
the the usg you know, too much cover, Like there
was there's act of evil in that, you know, like
you quote it, yeah, and I'll get it right Madeline,
all right, not Madison, but you know, essentially saying like, oh,
it was worth it, you know, the six hundred thousand
children who died, it was it was worth it. I'm
not I'm not in any way trying to justify that.
But we got ourselves here, all of us got ourselves here,
you know. And there's a certain amount where it's like,
I don't mean to, by any means excuse the the
US government. No, we need to look at what they've done,
you know, soberly and rationally. But also there's another part
where it's like, at what point is looking for a
culprit like kind of excuse, you know, excuse people who
kind of actively made things worse, you know, before that,
do you see what I mean?
Speaker 5: Indeed, and we have this this very scary sort of
political formula in which we claim to be responsible for
the actions of our government. And that's I think think
as good a reason as any to disavow the political
process at this point. I don't think that I don't
think our government is capable of making choices that we
can morally countenance and I don't. I really do not
want to be held responsible. I don't want to be
I don't want to face judgment day and answer for
the actions of my government. One is I want to
register myself as a very profound dissident. I was against it,
but my goodness, you know what I mean, what can
you do to prove that you're against and still live
in this country. It's a It's a real shame. I mean,
does does this mean that Republican voters that elected George W.
Bush should be judged for Guantanamo for Abu Grabe? The
implications are are are really serious, and I take them seriously.
Speaker 2: And I'm I'm comfortable recognizing that there are acts which
are necessary for state craft that would not be justifiable
if you or I did them right, I understand that,
But there is something there's just a profound like wastefulness
to it, you know, like say what you will about
you know kind of and obviously these are these are
true to a lesser greater excent, you know, like look
like Caesar are killed an awful lot of goals, but
in doing that he did to a certain degree kind
of bring you know, glory and riches back home, and
I realized that that obviously I doubt that was you know,
motivated by a sense of kind of like you know, charity,
and that obviously wasn't necessarily the best thing for Rome
in the long term. But it's kind of like this massive,
you know, this incredibly destructive, evil empire is being run,
you know, kind of like a counter you know, in
opposition to the people it allegedly was was founded by.
It's like, it's incredibly perverse. And this actually goes back
to the first ever episode of this show, episode zero,
with Paul Fahrenheit, you know, where we essentially talked about
kind of the you know, the the American you know,
Southern you know, white man as more or less like
the janissary class of the empire. You know, we were
the and obviously not me personally, you know, I was
never involved, but a lot of people your age you
know a lot of my friends are in your age group,
you know, who were kind of in you know, in
high school plus or minus when when nine to eleven happened,
essentially got kind of chewed up and spit out by this,
Like there are multiple people I know who were you know,
in college when I was in grade school. You know,
who are either you know, veterans coming back on g
I Bill or you know, we're about to go out.
And a lot of those guys who I'm still friends with,
you know, if they made it through, are incredibly broken
and really like for what. And it's hard not to
look at that. And I realized, like there's a human
cost to any war, you know, there's no denying that,
but the cost versus the benefit is just it's not
even close.
Speaker 5: You know. I never thought that I would relate to
the decadent Brits who were cheering for the collapse of
the British Empire after World War Two, you know, watching
the Garrisons withdrawn from India, for instance, and praising the
likes of Gandhi. I thought of them as pitiful until
the collapse in Afghanistan, and then I felt like I
understood those Brits for the very first time. And I
guess I would. I really wish that we had the
wherewithal to use our will to assert our destiny under
these circumstances. But in the meantime, I guess I take
some heart in signs of collapse because we don't believe
lies as much. After we see them fail and no
one can deny it, and it would it ought to
deprive the Empire of energy and assent. It discredits them.
Things like Afghanistan discredit them. And it's not that I
am cheering on the Taliban, Okay, It's not that I
want to give them energy, your strength, or power or
anything else. But I don't. I don't want the Empire
to have that kind of legitimacy. I thought, based on
what you just shared, that I'd go through one series
of conversation from AA's Cigar stream, and perhaps we can
exchange some opinions about that and then wrap things up.
This had to do with something that you were mentioning.
You and I were both reflecting about how the rot
in the American tradition really does seem to start after
World War Two. There was broad consensus on that point
on the Cigar Stream, with both the Britishers and the
Americans in agreement. It seems to me so AA said
the rot sets in around nineteen fifty. Yiz then said
that this distracts from her point. She was speaking of
a certain intellectual minority group, which she credits for a
lot of a lot of the harm in the American project,
especially the anti whiteness. And she said that in Annabellum
America we had many distinct groups of people, and that
is quite true. The whole propositional nation thesis does not
get started until Lincoln's rhetorical flourish in the Gettysburg address.
Americans did not talk of themselves that way. They spoke
of themselves as natives of their states. So AA then response,
and he said, so the United States is not a
true nation then, and Yiz agreed and said, yes, correct,
there are many nations. She said, we were functional up
until eighteen sixty. Then she goes back to the anti
whiteness thesis again. She says anti whites are the virus,
not the empire or DC. So academic agent then goes
back to the ethnic thesis once more, and he says, well,
who cares about the fake nation of the USA? In
that case, if you say it was something that was
made up, that the propositional thesis is incorrect. At this point,
Paul Fahrenheit interjected and said he must disagree. He said,
in the early Republic we were more like Europe, and
you could say that we had traditional ethnic groups up
until the Civil War, though there was talk of some
kind of national collective identity in this I think Paul
is correct. I would like to clarify. Then Paul comes
out with a more controversial thesis. He said secession and
the whole attempt for the South to stablish itself as
another country was suicidal like World War One for Americans,
and that secession today would create worse entropy and it
would impoverish us materially. I agree it would impoverish us materially,
but I insist that there are far more valuable things
we stand to preserve by political breakup, political cultural, economic breakup. Yes,
we would lose our standard of living, but I say
we're losing it any way.
Speaker 2: Well, right, And a common refrain in these circles is,
you know, essentially we want to cease treating our homes
as economic zones.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 2: Essentially, all that America or all that Britain means is
a essentially like a a square plot of land with
a certain tax code. But we've got to realize that
if we if we intend to reject that, if we
intend to reject you know, globalism and kind of like
line go up economics, that's not a free that that
costs you something and to a certain degree, like a
lot of us have kind of and I speak even
myself right sitting on a desk I ordered from Amazon,
I have gotten addicted to kind of like the comforts
of that. And look, I agree with you that if
we if we want to decouple ourselves from that, if
we want to break down you know this, this unwieldy
empire into smaller units like that will come with that
will come with a decrease in complexity and a decrease
and essentially like consumer purchasing power. To put it in
a very blunt way.
Speaker 5: I I really do believe our quality of life is
set to take a us serious hit. But we ought
to respond to that with the character to develop spiritual strength.
Now now is the time to develop spiritual virtues. We
need that more than ever. We have been relying on
materialism and lifestyles that we can purchase off the shelf
to fill spiritual voids for far too long, and the
price has been tremendous. We're facing many of the consequences
of those addictions at this point, but we do not
We don't need economic prosperity, We do not need GDP growth.
Measuring progress by GDP is. Here's other controversial thesis for you.
I say that that's part of the imperial system that's
ultimately based on a lie things. We aren't constantly measuring
the consumption of our citizenry as a substitute for their
actual happiness. That that's just false, that's that's not how
it works. Other things that that actually make life worth living.
The culture that that actually makes life worth living is
is based on things like loyalties, faith, your your comfortableness
in your own skin, which evidently is something that more
and more Americans simply cannot live with. They need they
need surgeons and and hormones and such to change these things.
Not not to mention, you know, all all the other
sorts of mind altering drugs that that we hear so
much about these days. We're very uncomfortable these days, and
it's a sign of our spiritual unhealthiness. We don't feel
comfortable in our land, we don't feel comfortable with our people,
with our own families. We need a spiritual comfortableness, and
we don't need more money for that. I think more
money has made it worse. More conveniences, more luxuries may
make it all worse. Our ancestors did not need very
much in order to keep families together, in order to
raise children, in order to educate them. Go read their newspapers,
for heaven's sake. These people could read and write far
better than we can typically, and they raise the standard.
They were not constantly dumbing it all down. There was
a time when the entropy was was not visible in
in things that people actually wrote, whereas now things like
texting and such have done such a number on our
ability to communicate clearly and effectively and even even to
spell our own language anymore. So my my contention, we
don't We don't need more money, we don't need more
prosperity and economics. We we we need spiritual revival at
this point in our history. But I'm afraid we are
going to go through a season of serious despair before then.
I think I think the despair will be made of
those who really believe in the empire. They they see
their ideals all round, wound up in it somehow. And
a lot of these people are people that I have
so much affection for, flag waving people right, people who
sing country songs, people that go and tailgate and say
I'm proud to be an American where at least I
know I'm free. Kind of right, it's a very pitiful slogan,
it seems to me.
Speaker 2: At least I know I'm free, it is, I mean,
especially now, and it's never a comforting realization that there
there isn't really a you know, a realistic past. You know,
they're a realistic path forward where we essentially get to
keep all of the things that we like, you know,
we have to give up something and you know, look
like that's probably it's probably good for us.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 2: It's just that what's good for you isn't always pleasant.
And so I don't mean to come across as is
too black built. You know, I'm not saying to say
it's all pointless, you know, just neck yourself. But I
think that if we can kind of draw a conclusion
from it, it's that, well, things are probably going to
get better before they get worse, but hopefully they will
eventually get better. Indeed, Well, anyway, Bagbie, I'm sorry, I'm
reaching the end of my endurance. Like I said earlier,
I'm feeling a little bit under the weather. Is there
anything you want to say before we wrap things up?
Speaker 5: Just that patriotism is a duty, and again we should
reflect that without love of country, a man is unable
to create. I think that is profoundly true. I'm not
hating on America. I love America that the parts of
it that I know. Oh, I don't belong anywhere else.
What am I supposed to do? I mean to go
to Costa Rica or something would be utterly alienating. No
one should want Americans to be alienated from their own patrimony.
To do so is to geld them. Okay, they would
be worth nothing if they are to be alienated. We
have to find something heure, and I think there's a
lot to love. By the way, I'm not saying that
it's difficult. Just just find some good teachers. Okay, don't
get teachers that hate it. There are plenty of those.
Distinguish all right, But love where you are, learn the
story of your people, learn the story of your place,
and love it. That goes for you Australians out there, wherever,
whatever strange place you might live in. We have a
basic duty to do that. And my initial beef with
AA was that it seemed to me he wanted Americans
to be alienated. I know better than that. Now that's
not what he was talking about, and he did clarify himself,
and I want to give him credit for that, but
that that is a basic duty for us, and if
we have any hope for our beliefs, it must include
a patriotism. So that's my team this evening. I really
appreciate coming on and I we do. Hope you feel better.
Speaker 2: Jay, Oh, it's all right, I'll be. I'm going to
the doctor tomorrow, so i'll be. I'll be better one
way or another. It was my determination never go to
the doctor. Lasted exactly forty eight hours.
Speaker 5: Oh well, my goodness. I hope you do feel better
than that.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I'll be fine. Guys, obviously you know this.
This episode is going up on YouTube right now, but
it will you know, very soon be on anywhere you
listen to audio only shows, So Apple, Spotify. I'm trying
out a new scheme to essentially to monetize this show
by having the shows always be free on my YouTube,
and the first the most recent ten episodes will always
be free on Apple and Spotify anywhere you listen to
audio shows. And then after they kind of fall out
of the top ten, they go behind a you know,
a simple five dollars a month paywall at my sub stack,
and that's obviously that's not a huge benefit, but it
is a you know, a nice way to you know,
access the backlog, a whay you're out away from your computer.
And then other than that, I should be recording with
with Liz soon with with Todd Lewis, and you know,
sooner or later. And now we said, I don't want
to spoil it, I might be on on Thomas just
so mind phaser. So we got a lot coming up.
And thank you guys for coming out, and keep your
head up, guys like it last forever. Good Night,