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